How about this. Do a full fedora install to a bootable DVD disk for each computer. Leave the DVD in the drive, and let it boot off that clean image every morning. Give them USB thumbdrives to plug in to save their personal email to, and use firefox/thunderbird for web and email. If they need to access MS word, excel, etc, and open office doesn't cut it for them, let them RDP over to a machine running windows with your apps installed. Then you have 1 machine to maintain with the windoze nonsense, and a bunch of pretty much untouchable linux boxes throughout the office. There is no network overhead to boot, only to use RDP to access the central apps.
--
http://californiasunhotels.com/ - in case you thought vacation was a mythical greek beast.
You mean, so they don't have to do their job any more? What the heck's wrong with spelling tests? How about vocab flash cards? Maybe we should just take away skill saws from carpenters because they mess up too many beams by not learning how to measure. Tools do not create handicaps, poor teaching does. And by the way, here is the link to how to properly spell handicap... http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=handicap
The thing that separates man from beast is the ability to create, use, and adapt tools.
Here is the main idea that helps me know when to dump html into my code:
When I am generating html dynamically, (nested tables, dynamic rowspan and colspans, converting a data structure into a specific view, keeping track of open-close tags, etc) I embed the html snippets into the code.
When I am displaying or presenting something (multiple rows, looping over elements) I have an html template, and embed php that echos out data elements.
In the end how does it boil down? About 98% of the html I write is in templates. I set up a standard data structure, then my templates echo the data out of those standard locations. It makes it easy to switch to XML, CSV, plain text, or whatever... Only about 2% of html I write is ever in a file stored as a string or something.
Out of all the reasons to do things this way, here is my favorite one: A wise man once told me that the more lines of code you can see on the screen at once, the more productive you can be. So why clutter your code all up with HTML?
The mythical man month states that when you add developers to a project they are all working on, the returns diminish due to overhead training and integrating a new team member. In an open source project, the users may train themselves, and train others without the main devs even knowing they exist. Plus there are thousands of users contributing, each adding incrementally.
I can explain leverage very easily to you. It comes from the idea of using a tool to make a small amount of effort on your part produce a result you would have had found difficult or impossible to achieve without using the tool. This comes from the idea of a lever, because levers have been used for ages to lift and move rocks that people don't have the individual strength to move.
In the traditional physics sense, leverage does not increase the amount of work done, as a matter of fact the net work done on your target is equal to (or even less than) the amount of work you exert.
Want a simple example? The apache web server is a great one. It provides "leverage" because you focus your efforts only on developing a web page, and use the tool to serve it out to millions of people. You improve the tool (apache) by contributing small code bits, tweaks, bug fixes, feedback, and possibly even cold hard cash. You leverage all the other open source developers out there (and they also leverage you). The net result is you move a big stone (serving web pages with a full featured web server) with a small amount of effort, and over a longer period of time.
Here is an example of how I personally "leverage" many technologies, and businesses. I sell travel products (hotels and tickets ) through the web at http://reservations.californiasunhotels.com/. I dedicate my efforts to serving customers needs and providing them with the product they are looking for, but I use another company to contract the hotels, gather the inventory, and provide much of the technology powering our sales. I could do all this stuff myself which would be a herculean task, but instead, I pay a portion of my profits to them, and have a smaller effort on my part to get all that product out to customers.
I don't "magically" make more money because I use them, it actually costs me more per product. But it does allow me to specialize, and that makes me more efficient, and does allow me to get more done, and since I can sell more, my cost per item goes down. My customers get better prices (really, check the site for hotels and tickets, it's true), I get more sales for having better prices, and the company I pay gets more money. This defines another business concept some techs find hard to understand, "Win-Win-Win" scenarios.
I'm a techie and I used to feel that "business stuff" was evil and lying. I've found that view to really be a matter of culture, and that everyone is happy when you are honest, and provide good products at fair prices, and using fair practices. I held my original view from dealing with all the disreputable and inhuman corparations that I've interacted with my whole life. Now I feel I have a more accurate view that "business" isn't evil, but that evil is evil, and it is institutionalized and promulgated by those who are evil. Business is just another lever.
This guy got it right. And not to brag, but I know because I got it right too. You would almost never know that my site http://reservations.californiasunhotels.com/ is just one template running off a business backend that powers many sites. And just because I have a template to provide main navigation and headers across all pages doesn't mean I have to use the html to stylize them. By virtue of using templates, I have eased the pain of providing standard items across multiple pages 1000 fold.
The guy who mentions that templates are a bad idea because you should be controlling display with css seems to forget that css won't put the elements you want there to display in the first place. That is why you have templates. To provide different data chunks where appropriate in a consistent easily reproducible format. Use the css to lay them out however you want, but drop them on the page using a template for easiest maintenance. Css will *never* get you another column of new data, but a template can push it across as many pages as you want!
Re:Is Opera Google's doorway to beating Microsoft?
on
Google to Buy Opera?
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· Score: 1, Informative
Umm you're almost exactly wrong on that. I for one make good use of google maps on my travel site http://reservations.californiasunhotels.com/ . I use it to show the location of a hotel overlaid on street maps so my customers are able to easily see the hotel's location in relation to nearby landmarks and features.
For instance, here http://reservations.californiasunhotels.com/681_ho tel-location-info_h4404.html you can see just how close the Mammoth Mountain Inn is to Mammoth Mountain, and the ski lifts. This is something my customers use *every day* . Google's "toy technology" is helping my customers make more informed decisions on where they want to stay, and i say Thanks Google for providing this cool "toy" that helps me help my customers.
Umm yeah so "in almost every case" a windows license is cheaper than a box running RH9 or Fedora core, Apache, and a tomcat server. Sweet, I wish I could figure out how to bend numbers to my reality like that. And darn, that pesky hibernate sure costs me TONS of money for enterprise quality object persistence. Darn, I guess i'll just give up contributing to these bogus, overhyped, and expensive open source projects that are tearing at the soul of quality software development, and jump head first into a big Fat Microsoft solution.
Well, it seems based on this guys letter, that he wasn't just trying to point out that there is an argument against creationism, he's trying to smear anyone who believes in creationism as an idiot by calling their beliefs "mythology". Furthermore, he's doing it at a University in a state that is pretty Christian. It seems like he was *trying* to make people angry, and it looks like he succeeded. A University might be a place where people *can* stand on soap boxes, but it shouldn't be a place where people *teach* from soap boxes. This guy was basically abusing the trust of the people who decided to give him the priviledge of introducing their children into the world of critical thinking and reasoning. Instead through his actions, he was setting the example of conniving, cunning, political maneuvering, to use rhetoric and emotionally loaded language to convince people of whatever truth you want them to believe. Seems like he should have been a poly sci professer instead of a religious studies prof.
I understand the idea behind what this guy *might* be trying to say, in other words, that there is strong evidence that the biblical creation stories are man's metaphor for how we came to be as a race, and not "The way things really happened" TM. Moreover, I think a lot of atheists, agnostics, Christians, Jews, Muslims, and probably the Dali Lama himself would agree, Genesis is a cool religious "story" or "metaphor" and based on the fact that it DID come from our history, it is HISTORICAL. Now that doesn't mean it's a documentary, or that it's a scientific explanation of what happened. But similarly to how the Epic of Gilgamesh closely mirrors the story of Noah, and many other biblical stories, there is also strong evidence that some of the Genesis' many fantastic "stories" are a history of sorts, and that are corroborated from other sources. As scientists and historians, we should use biblical texts to get a better understanding of how we really did come to be. I think it is very interesting how the concept of God started, and has changed. Think about this: if Adam and Eve really existed, and God spoke to Adam, then before God spoke or was seen by Adam, Adam had no concept of God. Don't you find it interesting that the Bible tells us that "man" was introduced to the concept of God? History is cool.
Any code can be written in a spaghetti like fashion including PHP, java, perl, C++, etc...
Conversely code written in any language can also be well documented, structured, and cleanly written. PHP can produce quite functional, stable, robust sites. It just so happens that lots of people get into writing code with php because it's easy to use, and they haven't necessarily had the training or experience to be able to understand good coding practices. It seems to me that lots of the features of php and perl including weak typing that make them easy to use, also provide a good opportunity to create hard to read code. Lots of comments make up for this, as do good variable names, but never knowing for certain what kind of a thing you have in your hands does make code hard(er) to debug, and read when there are problems. The ease of not having to understand typing and type casting does draw a lot of newb programmers to php and perl. And you can pay newb programmers less than expensive computer scientists. It's just a matter of getting what you pay for. A highly experienced php programmer is going to get paid more, and is going to be able to create the high traffic web applications like Yahoo. Just don't expect it from a newb programmer who doesn't understand an array from a vector.
I guess standardization, unilateralism and competition apply here, so it's time for me to rant.
Thinking intelligently about iraq
UN security council resolution 1441 mandated the use of force against Iraq should Iraq refuse to comply with the terms of UN weapons inspectors to disarm Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. This resolution has been treated as a mandate to squirm around by Iraq. Sadaam Huesein has tried to wriggle out from under the boot of the mandate and only as the boot was applied more firmly has he begun to comply with the orders of UN weapons inspectors.
President Bush is now requesting a new resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq. He has stated that Sadaam's wriggling is not compliance with 1441 and that we should now initiate a regime change to remove the threat of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. In the meantime the other notions in the UN have argued that the pressure the United States has applied to Iraq has prevented Iraq from wriggling out of the sanctions of 1441, and that there is now no need for a regime change or war in Iraq. This finally brings me to my point.
At the cost of billions of dollars, the United States has effectively begun forcing Baghdad to comply with 1441 by threatening a full invasion and overthrow of the Iraqi government. It is undeniable that Iraq has begun complying with the demands of weapons inspectors, destroying Al Samoud missles, and granting unrestricted interviews with scientists and civilians the weapons inspectors meet with. However, the only reason Iraq is complying, is as an Iraqi student interviewed in Time magazine says, "there is a gun against the back of our heads."
So put a gun against the back of Baghdad's head and they will do what you tell them to. Who wouldn't? But what happens when you remove the gun? France, Germany, Russia, and China have argued against invading Iraq. But they have not suggested how to continue enforcing resolution 1441 without continuing to hold the gun against the back of Sadaam's head. And why should they? They are not paying the billions of dollars it costs to support a technilogically advanced invasion force of over 200,000 troops in a hostile environment. President Bush's answer is to pull the trigger, and help the people of Iraq form a new democratic government.
Pulling the trigger has not historically been the most effective solution unless it has been well thought out. The United States has been fairly reluctant to do so unless directly attacked. The bay of pigs, and Vietnam remind us why pulling the trigger deserves lots of foresight. And it doesn't seem to me that much foresight has been applied to pulling the trigger in this case. But while everyone is saying, "hey we should think about this and let the inspectors do thier job", the United States is footing the bill. And it gets VERY expensive very quickly.
This brings me to my suggestion. The United States is pissed, and we don't want to spend all our money wrangling with a slippery dangerous alligator, so lets have the rest of the UN pay for it! We want to get in, get the dangerous regime out of power in Iraq, get out, and help to build a stable democratic government where people can live in a free environment. Other governments have issues(problems) with our plan. Fine, propose a sensible way to change the regime in Iraq. But footing the bill while we wait with a loaded gun against Baghdad's head will light a bit more of a fire under thier ass i'm sure!
The United States wants a stable world composed of stable governments. At least, speaking as a United States citizen, I do. We fought the cold war in the belief that democracy is a form of freedom that the people of the world should be allowed to share with us. If the best way to create a safe and organized world to live in is to sit outside Iraq with an invasion force until all of the terms of the weapons inspectors have been met, then i am for that. But I believe that if the world wants to criticize the plans of the United States to protect
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How about this. Do a full fedora install to a bootable DVD disk for each computer. Leave the DVD in the drive, and let it boot off that clean image every morning. Give them USB thumbdrives to plug in to save their personal email to, and use firefox/thunderbird for web and email. If they need to access MS word, excel, etc, and open office doesn't cut it for them, let them RDP over to a machine running windows with your apps installed. Then you have 1 machine to maintain with the windoze nonsense, and a bunch of pretty much untouchable linux boxes throughout the office. There is no network overhead to boot, only to use RDP to access the central apps. -- http://californiasunhotels.com/ - in case you thought vacation was a mythical greek beast.
You mean, so they don't have to do their job any more? What the heck's wrong with spelling tests? How about vocab flash cards? Maybe we should just take away skill saws from carpenters because they mess up too many beams by not learning how to measure. Tools do not create handicaps, poor teaching does. And by the way, here is the link to how to properly spell handicap... http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=handicap The thing that separates man from beast is the ability to create, use, and adapt tools.
Here is the main idea that helps me know when to dump html into my code:
When I am generating html dynamically, (nested tables, dynamic rowspan and colspans, converting a data structure into a specific view, keeping track of open-close tags, etc) I embed the html snippets into the code.
When I am displaying or presenting something (multiple rows, looping over elements) I have an html template, and embed php that echos out data elements.
In the end how does it boil down? About 98% of the html I write is in templates. I set up a standard data structure, then my templates echo the data out of those standard locations. It makes it easy to switch to XML, CSV, plain text, or whatever... Only about 2% of html I write is ever in a file stored as a string or something.
Out of all the reasons to do things this way, here is my favorite one:
A wise man once told me that the more lines of code you can see on the screen at once, the more productive you can be. So why clutter your code all up with HTML?
The mythical man month states that when you add developers to a project they are all working on, the returns diminish due to overhead training and integrating a new team member. In an open source project, the users may train themselves, and train others without the main devs even knowing they exist. Plus there are thousands of users contributing, each adding incrementally.
And I also wanted a little computer AI bot that would make me millions from the stock market off my initial investment of 19.95 http://reservations.californiasunhotels.com/
I can explain leverage very easily to you. It comes from the idea of using a tool to make a small amount of effort on your part produce a result you would have had found difficult or impossible to achieve without using the tool. This comes from the idea of a lever, because levers have been used for ages to lift and move rocks that people don't have the individual strength to move.
In the traditional physics sense, leverage does not increase the amount of work done, as a matter of fact the net work done on your target is equal to (or even less than) the amount of work you exert.
Want a simple example? The apache web server is a great one. It provides "leverage" because you focus your efforts only on developing a web page, and use the tool to serve it out to millions of people. You improve the tool (apache) by contributing small code bits, tweaks, bug fixes, feedback, and possibly even cold hard cash. You leverage all the other open source developers out there (and they also leverage you). The net result is you move a big stone (serving web pages with a full featured web server) with a small amount of effort, and over a longer period of time.
Here is an example of how I personally "leverage" many technologies, and businesses. I sell travel products (hotels and tickets ) through the web at http://reservations.californiasunhotels.com/. I dedicate my efforts to serving customers needs and providing them with the product they are looking for, but I use another company to contract the hotels, gather the inventory, and provide much of the technology powering our sales. I could do all this stuff myself which would be a herculean task, but instead, I pay a portion of my profits to them, and have a smaller effort on my part to get all that product out to customers.
I don't "magically" make more money because I use them, it actually costs me more per product. But it does allow me to specialize, and that makes me more efficient, and does allow me to get more done, and since I can sell more, my cost per item goes down. My customers get better prices (really, check the site for hotels and tickets, it's true), I get more sales for having better prices, and the company I pay gets more money. This defines another business concept some techs find hard to understand, "Win-Win-Win" scenarios.
I'm a techie and I used to feel that "business stuff" was evil and lying. I've found that view to really be a matter of culture, and that everyone is happy when you are honest, and provide good products at fair prices, and using fair practices. I held my original view from dealing with all the disreputable and inhuman corparations that I've interacted with my whole life. Now I feel I have a more accurate view that "business" isn't evil, but that evil is evil, and it is institutionalized and promulgated by those who are evil. Business is just another lever.
This guy got it right. And not to brag, but I know because I got it right too. You would almost never know that my site http://reservations.californiasunhotels.com/ is just one template running off a business backend that powers many sites. And just because I have a template to provide main navigation and headers across all pages doesn't mean I have to use the html to stylize them. By virtue of using templates, I have eased the pain of providing standard items across multiple pages 1000 fold.
The guy who mentions that templates are a bad idea because you should be controlling display with css seems to forget that css won't put the elements you want there to display in the first place. That is why you have templates. To provide different data chunks where appropriate in a consistent easily reproducible format. Use the css to lay them out however you want, but drop them on the page using a template for easiest maintenance. Css will *never* get you another column of new data, but a template can push it across as many pages as you want!
Umm you're almost exactly wrong on that. I for one make good use of google maps on my travel site http://reservations.californiasunhotels.com/ . I use it to show the location of a hotel overlaid on street maps so my customers are able to easily see the hotel's location in relation to nearby landmarks and features.
o tel-location-info_h4404.html
For instance, here
http://reservations.californiasunhotels.com/681_h
you can see just how close the Mammoth Mountain Inn is to Mammoth Mountain, and the ski lifts. This is something my customers use *every day* . Google's "toy technology" is helping my customers make more informed decisions on where they want to stay, and i say Thanks Google for providing this cool "toy" that helps me help my customers.
Umm yeah so "in almost every case" a windows license is cheaper than a box running RH9 or Fedora core, Apache, and a tomcat server. Sweet, I wish I could figure out how to bend numbers to my reality like that. And darn, that pesky hibernate sure costs me TONS of money for enterprise quality object persistence. Darn, I guess i'll just give up contributing to these bogus, overhyped, and expensive open source projects that are tearing at the soul of quality software development, and jump head first into a big Fat Microsoft solution.
Well, it seems based on this guys letter, that he wasn't just trying to point out that there is an argument against creationism, he's trying to smear anyone who believes in creationism as an idiot by calling their beliefs "mythology". Furthermore, he's doing it at a University in a state that is pretty Christian. It seems like he was *trying* to make people angry, and it looks like he succeeded. A University might be a place where people *can* stand on soap boxes, but it shouldn't be a place where people *teach* from soap boxes. This guy was basically abusing the trust of the people who decided to give him the priviledge of introducing their children into the world of critical thinking and reasoning. Instead through his actions, he was setting the example of conniving, cunning, political maneuvering, to use rhetoric and emotionally loaded language to convince people of whatever truth you want them to believe. Seems like he should have been a poly sci professer instead of a religious studies prof.
I understand the idea behind what this guy *might* be trying to say, in other words, that there is strong evidence that the biblical creation stories are man's metaphor for how we came to be as a race, and not "The way things really happened" TM. Moreover, I think a lot of atheists, agnostics, Christians, Jews, Muslims, and probably the Dali Lama himself would agree, Genesis is a cool religious "story" or "metaphor" and based on the fact that it DID come from our history, it is HISTORICAL. Now that doesn't mean it's a documentary, or that it's a scientific explanation of what happened. But similarly to how the Epic of Gilgamesh closely mirrors the story of Noah, and many other biblical stories, there is also strong evidence that some of the Genesis' many fantastic "stories" are a history of sorts, and that are corroborated from other sources. As scientists and historians, we should use biblical texts to get a better understanding of how we really did come to be. I think it is very interesting how the concept of God started, and has changed. Think about this: if Adam and Eve really existed, and God spoke to Adam, then before God spoke or was seen by Adam, Adam had no concept of God. Don't you find it interesting that the Bible tells us that "man" was introduced to the concept of God? History is cool.
Any code can be written in a spaghetti like fashion including PHP, java, perl, C++, etc...
Conversely code written in any language can also be well documented, structured, and cleanly written. PHP can produce quite functional, stable, robust sites. It just so happens that lots of people get into writing code with php because it's easy to use, and they haven't necessarily had the training or experience to be able to understand good coding practices. It seems to me that lots of the features of php and perl including weak typing that make them easy to use, also provide a good opportunity to create hard to read code. Lots of comments make up for this, as do good variable names, but never knowing for certain what kind of a thing you have in your hands does make code hard(er) to debug, and read when there are problems. The ease of not having to understand typing and type casting does draw a lot of newb programmers to php and perl. And you can pay newb programmers less than expensive computer scientists. It's just a matter of getting what you pay for. A highly experienced php programmer is going to get paid more, and is going to be able to create the high traffic web applications like Yahoo. Just don't expect it from a newb programmer who doesn't understand an array from a vector.
I guess standardization, unilateralism and competition apply here, so it's time for me to rant.
Thinking intelligently about iraq
UN security council resolution 1441 mandated the use of force against Iraq should Iraq refuse to comply with the terms of UN weapons inspectors to disarm Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. This resolution has been treated as a mandate to squirm around by Iraq. Sadaam Huesein has tried to wriggle out from under the boot of the mandate and only as the boot was applied more firmly has he begun to comply with the orders of UN weapons inspectors.
President Bush is now requesting a new resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq. He has stated that Sadaam's wriggling is not compliance with 1441 and that we should now initiate a regime change to remove the threat of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. In the meantime the other notions in the UN have argued that the pressure the United States has applied to Iraq has prevented Iraq from wriggling out of the sanctions of 1441, and that there is now no need for a regime change or war in Iraq. This finally brings me to my point.
At the cost of billions of dollars, the United States has effectively begun forcing Baghdad to comply with 1441 by threatening a full invasion and overthrow of the Iraqi government. It is undeniable that Iraq has begun complying with the demands of weapons inspectors, destroying Al Samoud missles, and granting unrestricted interviews with scientists and civilians the weapons inspectors meet with. However, the only reason Iraq is complying, is as an Iraqi student interviewed in Time magazine says, "there is a gun against the back of our heads."
So put a gun against the back of Baghdad's head and they will do what you tell them to. Who wouldn't? But what happens when you remove the gun? France, Germany, Russia, and China have argued against invading Iraq. But they have not suggested how to continue enforcing resolution 1441 without continuing to hold the gun against the back of Sadaam's head. And why should they? They are not paying the billions of dollars it costs to support a technilogically advanced invasion force of over 200,000 troops in a hostile environment. President Bush's answer is to pull the trigger, and help the people of Iraq form a new democratic government.
Pulling the trigger has not historically been the most effective solution unless it has been well thought out. The United States has been fairly reluctant to do so unless directly attacked. The bay of pigs, and Vietnam remind us why pulling the trigger deserves lots of foresight. And it doesn't seem to me that much foresight has been applied to pulling the trigger in this case. But while everyone is saying, "hey we should think about this and let the inspectors do thier job", the United States is footing the bill. And it gets VERY expensive very quickly.
This brings me to my suggestion. The United States is pissed, and we don't want to spend all our money wrangling with a slippery dangerous alligator, so lets have the rest of the UN pay for it! We want to get in, get the dangerous regime out of power in Iraq, get out, and help to build a stable democratic government where people can live in a free environment. Other governments have issues(problems) with our plan. Fine, propose a sensible way to change the regime in Iraq. But footing the bill while we wait with a loaded gun against Baghdad's head will light a bit more of a fire under thier ass i'm sure!
The United States wants a stable world composed of stable governments. At least, speaking as a United States citizen, I do. We fought the cold war in the belief that democracy is a form of freedom that the people of the world should be allowed to share with us. If the best way to create a safe and organized world to live in is to sit outside Iraq with an invasion force until all of the terms of the weapons inspectors have been met, then i am for that. But I believe that if the world wants to criticize the plans of the United States to protect