My school system (not in California) does not have any such claims in their employment contract, but does include such language in their Acceptable Use Policy for the computers and the school network - they claim anything stored on the school network is theirs. This has made me much more reluctant to put anything I create onto the network, but the part I find funny (and amazing) is that there is plenty of commercial stuff stored on our network servers for use by the teachers - videos from educational companies, Advanced Placement test materials, etc. I'm pretty sure the Educational Testing Service would object to my school claiming ownership over an AP test they have copyright to, and I'm sure the video companies would for their materials. This is the ridiculous level the f--ing lawyers and our copyright laws have brought us too - Orwellian newspeak meanings to our language (WE own it ALL!), OR, everyone is guilty, period (of course, the whole point of Orwellian newspeak was that everyone was, indeed, guilty, unless OK'd by Big Brother).
Firefox without Adblock very shortly after starting use with even a moderate number of commercial pages open will make some attempt to race a CPU core, and will eventually max it out (even with 3.5.2) and become fairly unresponsive (I unfortunately find the same situation with Opera, except that it seems able to remain responsive to the user). Firefox then begins to expand its use of memory (I've had it go nearly all the way to 8 GB) for . . . . what? - there were only a dozen or 15 tabs open. There is nothing that races my CPU (and then fan) as much, or as pointlessly, as the browsers, not video, not heavy I/O. Maybe the devs never run Firefox without Adblock so they see no reason to in any way curtail what the Flash/JavaScript/whatever does after it has done it once. It definitely increases my electricity use, and would therefore run through what a battery is able to provide.
We'll buy it if matches what we have watched our own system monitors show us about what the browsers are doing with CPU utilization and RAM use over years of using Firefox and Opera.
I might add that, as with any experiment, if the "unknown dude" presents the steps he or she took to do the experiment, and they are reproducible, one can then check to see if the same results are obtained. I'll admit I'm not going to do the experiment, but from a quick skim of the webpage, it looks like enough information is given to copy the experiment. What's your problem? Do you only accept a finding if it's done by a "celebrity", rather than by looking at what was done?
I hadn't thought it through clearly, but you're dead right. Since the rise of all three technologies in these browsers, I've wanted a way to renice (or kill), individually, JavaScript, Flash, swf across the browser or by particular page. THAT would make a nice extension.
You must be using your browser very gently. Have many tabs/windows open, don't control when your JavaScript and/or Flash/Shockwave are running, don't pay attention when a CPU maxes out, and the browsers crash (and race) a lot.
(I also agree with your other responder, as I don't like what the FF developers are or have been doing with location bar, bookmarks, etc. - I don't use them much now, either.)
I'm not disagreeing with the main point of your comment, but
Crash to Desktops are pretty rare these days, and performance isn't actually all that terrible.
What browser are you using? Crashes are common - say once a week at a minimum. Firefox (along with Opera, and sometimes multimedia players and Java) is an application that in my experience actually makes Linux less stable than modern Windows, because it and the other programs I mention somehow get some hook into X, and when they go, X is badly affected as well. (At its worst, I've had it bring the Linux kernel to a grinding halt - a reproducible and infuriating bug two or three Ubuntus back.)
Performance has improved tremendously from FF 3 to 3.5, and over the last few releases of Opera - but it's still nowhere as good as it should be - open a bunch of tabs, and after a bit you'll be maxing out at least one core.
Sorry, I've used Opera with many tabs open as well, and it develops pretty much the same problems as Firefox (and I have no idea what its threading/process structure is) - it freezes frequently, doesn't seem to then accept a process STOP, but only KILL (Linux), and uses huge amounts of RAM. While Opera 10 may have improved, if you think the older ones were better than Firefox, then you weren't (from the perspective of my experience with it) using it heavily.
Hmm.... I wonder how many watt/h of energy Flash is wasting in total over the world, CPU's going up to max when could be in low power mode, forcing us to buy a faster CPU with multi cores just to browse the web. I think Adobe should pay some sort of energy tax;)
And you can take the;) off the end of the sentence. They really do measurably raise my electric bill.
An excellent point to consider. I routinely have 2 to 3 times as many tabs and windows open as that, and JavaScript and Shockwave often bring one processor to 100% if not watched. I now have to as a regular thing have a system monitor open to watch the CPU usage for Firefox (and Opera and any other browser I have open). There's even something else in Firefox that runs on and on, as I've recently have a few webpages max out one core using Firefox 3.5 on 64-bit Linux, where Shockwave ads supposedly won't run, with the JavaScript off and yet it races. The couple times I've tried Chrome I've watched it use more and more of the machine over time.
I'm all for Firefox going to multi-process, but they really need to work on something that limits the browser processing - if I'm not looking at a page that page should basically be "off", not doing anything until I come back to that tab, as is the case with a text processor or even an audio or video player when it's paused. How can a browser be the OS when it cannot control its CPU usage or match such to the tasks the user is doing actively? Pages not being looked at must go into the background as far as CPU utilization is concerned unless a job is specifically being run by the user.
As noted elsewhere in the comments, who cares about getting ON? How about the airlines work on getting us OFF their damn planes faster? They couldn't open another door (even if it is down a stairs, or uses the food-loading ramp)? WTF??
And you'd think they'd care. They don't make any money from having the people stand on the plane, and the 10 extra minutes they don't have people standing on their plane is 10 extra minutes they could be cleaning, reloading, or getting some passengers to their connecting flights, which they need, since the damn flight arrived late anyway.
Crap. The number of times it's pouring out as a plane disembarks is small compared to the number of planes that unload. Why don't they have a light-weight roll-out awning that could go over a back stairs for those who would actually like to get out of the plane instead of standing in the aisle for ten minutes making cell phone calls?
They've never done any of this because real customer service has, statistically, never been the airlines' goal.
Texas has already passed a law creating a criminal database run by the Texas Education Agency for every teacher, and indeed every employee and volunteer in any public school. They're going to fingerprint EVERYONE in those groups and do criminal background checks (which will pull in pretty much anything anyone has on record about each individual), and keep it. They're not even a law-enforcement agency. Of course I'm sure the innocent have nothing to fear (other than paying for the fingerprinting, perhaps).
Anyone care to bet how many seconds after it goes online Homeland Security, or whomever, will be in there making copies?
First, anyone who answers that they believe in creationism, under whatever name, IS someone who, in the current climate, is likely to want to ram their belief system down your throat.
Second, if they believe in creationism, they probably also believe in the Second Coming, and most who believe in THAT believe that Armageddon will precede it. They believe the war of Armageddon will take place in the Middle East. Do you seriously want someone who is even unconsciously a little sympathetic to war in the Middle East, because it might be the one signaling Christ's return to Earth, making foreign policy for the United States?
Third, a belief in this dogma IS a type of intellectual training, just not the one we want. It encourages two-choice only, black-and-white thinking (see the actually biologists who say: "I can't think of how this flagella mechanism could have come about, so it must have been God!" as though there were no other possible answers. How stupid is that? We don't want such people making gov't policy because when dealing with people, there are nothing but shades of gray - there are no black and white, God or the Devil, answers.
In addition, in the present Bush and Republican administrations, based on these ideologies, they have been cutting research money for all types of basic science research. When the head of the University of Houston physics department tells me they are cutting funding for basic astronomical cosmology research because some politician is afraid it will put in further doubt creationism, I know we're in trouble. Basic research monies in real dollars have declined (a lot) during the Bush administration.
For anyone posing such questions of a politician, if politicians answer that they do believe in creationism, or don't "believe" in evolution, the follow-up question should be whether they also therefore don't "believe" (using this word in either context is the basic mistake, actually) in modern medicine, or for that matter in computers, or airplanes, or television, for all come from the same basic problem-solving approach to certain kinds of questions. Ask them, if they are believers, if they are therefore willing to give up using all the modern technologies that come with this mode of thought that they reject.
The answer that immediately came to my mind as well.
I'm a science teacher, and the focus of my school is exactly as described - it is to raise the test scores of marginally achieving populations. There are advanced courses in most subjects, but other than that no extra attention is paid to gifted kids, except at the most minimal level (i.e. the extra efforts of one sponsoring teacher) in some extracurricular clubs. Even the training provided to districts by national consultants such as those of Professional Learning Communities make virtually no mention of gifted kids (I listened very carefully for this at the conference I took part in). They advocate standardizing and homogenizing instruction, to a) increase the teaching skills of poor teachers, and to b) allow all kids to be graded by standardized tests. The implicit and explicit assumption is that a rising tide will raise all boats. Unfortunately, this whole process completely excludes the programs of truly gifted teachers (and they are admittedly too rare), and gifted kids find normal schooling to be incredibly boring a lot of the time.
Exactly. Most CEO's are preeminently salesmen, an activity which definitely has distinct personality characteristics. These are not at all the standout personality characteristics of good CIO's.
Another possible solution to this problem is PLT Scheme - a functional programming language with an 'IDE' that has a marvelous code-stepper, to watch each step of what happens, and which can be set for levels of language skill - beginner, intermediate, etc., whose error-messages are specific to that skill level. Oh, and it has a widely admired training book, How to Design Programs, as well.
Some have noticed, and the rest should - the article was written by David Brin, physicist and writer, author of some of the best science fiction novels of any era, but certainly of his - great stories, acceptable technical extrapolation, containing fascinating intuitive insights.
The pure programmers commenting here in various threads may object to Basic as a useful language, and even as a (beginning) training language, but Brin's viewpoint would not be that of a pure software developer. His background is as a physical scientist - someone with wide curiosity and extensive technical expertise. He believes that tinkering as a child with something like Basic, with its low barrier to entry, will foster general technical curiosity, introduce the idea of programming, and teach something about the plan of the machines on which it is run. Among those of us of a certain age, who has not heard engineers and professors complain about young people nowadays not being able to do general problem-solving because they have never spent extensive time just taking apart and reassembling machines (orignally it was cars - Brin's comments are dead-on there), and later, for some, early computers and other electronics, especially ham radio. My grandfather, a building engineer, took his first car, a Model-T, apart and spread it out all over the lawn before reassembling it, correctly. How many of us have done, or could do, that?
And how many of the programmers who, during the 80's, built the main 'infrastructure' of Unix, the Macintosh, and the Internet got their starts using Basic ten or so years earlier as kids?
How could you trust a corporate software product from someone who writes such appalling grammar...but upon a closer reading of paragraphs 3 and 4, it is clear that they at least were written by a non-English speaker. However, the writing feels East Asian rather than German.
overall experience opposed to recent
was made after it is evident...are to be finished soon
high reliable SCO products
As according to
world Leading companies
should still consider to upgrade to
They have trouble with the small modifications in meaning provided by subtle changes in verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, as these are done differently in East Asian languages, and they virtually always screw up or omit prepositions. European language speakers are very familiar with these kinds of changes, even if they don't always know the right ones.
Already contained code
still outbeat
They also often coin new "shorthand" idioms that are perfectly understandable to native English speakers but would never be made by them.
One might argue experimenters should observe better, but they are often trying to study very subtle stuff (in terms of getting their instrumentation to show them a reliable result), and often, as in medicine, going not for either/or results but for 45, 55% likely, whatever -
--and then it's reviewed by their peers, or new tests are done. Hallelujah, science at work.
(Of course all the other posters' comments about statistics and bought studies apply, too.)
But I'd feel a lot more comfortable that we were getting good interpretive legal opinions 'about' the Constitution if we didn't keep getting these 5-4 splits (either way) out of this court. Someone sure thinks the Constitution is not as clear as everyone used to hope.
You're right accept for the fact that it's not generally going to happen to rich people, only to poor and middle-class ones. The rich are well-connected enough that a local politician won't dare raze that home, plus such economic projects aren't going to be put up in areas where there are a number of rich homes, and they are found clumped together just as are poorer ones. Legally it could affect any American; in reality, it'll be the rich guy bull-dozing the normal person's house whether they agree or not. (If they want the mall that much, why don't they just pony up and pay the hold-out's price - that's what supply and demand is).
Slashdot Mirror
+ Mozilla Archive Format - completely destroyed in the new form, with the "substitute" new extension by someone else a pile of lies (or sales talk);
+ a JavaScript toggle (there is one, but the better one didn't make it across the change);
The lack of the first is a deal-breaker for me, as I save a lot of pages. I'm pretty angry at its loss.
Nope, not upgrading.
My school system (not in California) does not have any such claims in their employment contract, but does include such language in their Acceptable Use Policy for the computers and the school network - they claim anything stored on the school network is theirs. This has made me much more reluctant to put anything I create onto the network, but the part I find funny (and amazing) is that there is plenty of commercial stuff stored on our network servers for use by the teachers - videos from educational companies, Advanced Placement test materials, etc. I'm pretty sure the Educational Testing Service would object to my school claiming ownership over an AP test they have copyright to, and I'm sure the video companies would for their materials. This is the ridiculous level the f--ing lawyers and our copyright laws have brought us too - Orwellian newspeak meanings to our language (WE own it ALL!), OR, everyone is guilty, period (of course, the whole point of Orwellian newspeak was that everyone was, indeed, guilty, unless OK'd by Big Brother).
Thank you. That was a good answer.
Firefox without Adblock very shortly after starting use with even a moderate number of commercial pages open will make some attempt to race a CPU core, and will eventually max it out (even with 3.5.2) and become fairly unresponsive (I unfortunately find the same situation with Opera, except that it seems able to remain responsive to the user). Firefox then begins to expand its use of memory (I've had it go nearly all the way to 8 GB) for . . . . what? - there were only a dozen or 15 tabs open. There is nothing that races my CPU (and then fan) as much, or as pointlessly, as the browsers, not video, not heavy I/O. Maybe the devs never run Firefox without Adblock so they see no reason to in any way curtail what the Flash/JavaScript/whatever does after it has done it once. It definitely increases my electricity use, and would therefore run through what a battery is able to provide.
We'll buy it if matches what we have watched our own system monitors show us about what the browsers are doing with CPU utilization and RAM use over years of using Firefox and Opera.
I might add that, as with any experiment, if the "unknown dude" presents the steps he or she took to do the experiment, and they are reproducible, one can then check to see if the same results are obtained. I'll admit I'm not going to do the experiment, but from a quick skim of the webpage, it looks like enough information is given to copy the experiment. What's your problem? Do you only accept a finding if it's done by a "celebrity", rather than by looking at what was done?
I hadn't thought it through clearly, but you're dead right. Since the rise of all three technologies in these browsers, I've wanted a way to renice (or kill), individually, JavaScript, Flash, swf across the browser or by particular page. THAT would make a nice extension.
You must be using your browser very gently. Have many tabs/windows open, don't control when your JavaScript and/or Flash/Shockwave are running, don't pay attention when a CPU maxes out, and the browsers crash (and race) a lot.
(I also agree with your other responder, as I don't like what the FF developers are or have been doing with location bar, bookmarks, etc. - I don't use them much now, either.)
I'm not disagreeing with the main point of your comment, but
Crash to Desktops are pretty rare these days, and performance isn't actually all that terrible.
What browser are you using? Crashes are common - say once a week at a minimum. Firefox (along with Opera, and sometimes multimedia players and Java) is an application that in my experience actually makes Linux less stable than modern Windows, because it and the other programs I mention somehow get some hook into X, and when they go, X is badly affected as well. (At its worst, I've had it bring the Linux kernel to a grinding halt - a reproducible and infuriating bug two or three Ubuntus back.)
Performance has improved tremendously from FF 3 to 3.5, and over the last few releases of Opera - but it's still nowhere as good as it should be - open a bunch of tabs, and after a bit you'll be maxing out at least one core.
Sorry, I've used Opera with many tabs open as well, and it develops pretty much the same problems as Firefox (and I have no idea what its threading/process structure is) - it freezes frequently, doesn't seem to then accept a process STOP, but only KILL (Linux), and uses huge amounts of RAM. While Opera 10 may have improved, if you think the older ones were better than Firefox, then you weren't (from the perspective of my experience with it) using it heavily.
Seriously.
Hmm.... I wonder how many watt/h of energy Flash is wasting in total over the world, CPU's going up to max when could be in low power mode, forcing us to buy a faster CPU with multi cores just to browse the web. I think Adobe should pay some sort of energy tax ;)
And you can take the ;) off the end of the sentence. They really do measurably raise my electric bill.
An excellent point to consider. I routinely have 2 to 3 times as many tabs and windows open as that, and JavaScript and Shockwave often bring one processor to 100% if not watched. I now have to as a regular thing have a system monitor open to watch the CPU usage for Firefox (and Opera and any other browser I have open). There's even something else in Firefox that runs on and on, as I've recently have a few webpages max out one core using Firefox 3.5 on 64-bit Linux, where Shockwave ads supposedly won't run, with the JavaScript off and yet it races. The couple times I've tried Chrome I've watched it use more and more of the machine over time.
I'm all for Firefox going to multi-process, but they really need to work on something that limits the browser processing - if I'm not looking at a page that page should basically be "off", not doing anything until I come back to that tab, as is the case with a text processor or even an audio or video player when it's paused. How can a browser be the OS when it cannot control its CPU usage or match such to the tasks the user is doing actively? Pages not being looked at must go into the background as far as CPU utilization is concerned unless a job is specifically being run by the user.
As noted elsewhere in the comments, who cares about getting ON? How about the airlines work on getting us OFF their damn planes faster? They couldn't open another door (even if it is down a stairs, or uses the food-loading ramp)? WTF??
And you'd think they'd care. They don't make any money from having the people stand on the plane, and the 10 extra minutes they don't have people standing on their plane is 10 extra minutes they could be cleaning, reloading, or getting some passengers to their connecting flights, which they need, since the damn flight arrived late anyway.
Crap. The number of times it's pouring out as a plane disembarks is small compared to the number of planes that unload. Why don't they have a light-weight roll-out awning that could go over a back stairs for those who would actually like to get out of the plane instead of standing in the aisle for ten minutes making cell phone calls?
They've never done any of this because real customer service has, statistically, never been the airlines' goal.
Texas has already passed a law creating a criminal database run by the Texas Education Agency for every teacher, and indeed every employee and volunteer in any public school. They're going to fingerprint EVERYONE in those groups and do criminal background checks (which will pull in pretty much anything anyone has on record about each individual), and keep it. They're not even a law-enforcement agency. Of course I'm sure the innocent have nothing to fear (other than paying for the fingerprinting, perhaps).
Anyone care to bet how many seconds after it goes online Homeland Security, or whomever, will be in there making copies?
Sorry, you haven't thought it through.
First, anyone who answers that they believe in creationism, under whatever name, IS someone who, in the current climate, is likely to want to ram their belief system down your throat.
Second, if they believe in creationism, they probably also believe in the Second Coming, and most who believe in THAT believe that Armageddon will precede it. They believe the war of Armageddon will take place in the Middle East. Do you seriously want someone who is even unconsciously a little sympathetic to war in the Middle East, because it might be the one signaling Christ's return to Earth, making foreign policy for the United States?
Third, a belief in this dogma IS a type of intellectual training, just not the one we want. It encourages two-choice only, black-and-white thinking (see the actually biologists who say: "I can't think of how this flagella mechanism could have come about, so it must have been God!" as though there were no other possible answers. How stupid is that? We don't want such people making gov't policy because when dealing with people, there are nothing but shades of gray - there are no black and white, God or the Devil, answers.
In addition, in the present Bush and Republican administrations, based on these ideologies, they have been cutting research money for all types of basic science research. When the head of the University of Houston physics department tells me they are cutting funding for basic astronomical cosmology research because some politician is afraid it will put in further doubt creationism, I know we're in trouble. Basic research monies in real dollars have declined (a lot) during the Bush administration.
For anyone posing such questions of a politician, if politicians answer that they do believe in creationism, or don't "believe" in evolution, the follow-up question should be whether they also therefore don't "believe" (using this word in either context is the basic mistake, actually) in modern medicine, or for that matter in computers, or airplanes, or television, for all come from the same basic problem-solving approach to certain kinds of questions. Ask them, if they are believers, if they are therefore willing to give up using all the modern technologies that come with this mode of thought that they reject.
A lot of people, including a lot engineers (and some scientists), seem to have trouble with what the word "theory" actually means in science.
The answer that immediately came to my mind as well.
I'm a science teacher, and the focus of my school is exactly as described - it is to raise the test scores of marginally achieving populations. There are advanced courses in most subjects, but other than that no extra attention is paid to gifted kids, except at the most minimal level (i.e. the extra efforts of one sponsoring teacher) in some extracurricular clubs. Even the training provided to districts by national consultants such as those of Professional Learning Communities make virtually no mention of gifted kids (I listened very carefully for this at the conference I took part in). They advocate standardizing and homogenizing instruction, to a) increase the teaching skills of poor teachers, and to b) allow all kids to be graded by standardized tests. The implicit and explicit assumption is that a rising tide will raise all boats. Unfortunately, this whole process completely excludes the programs of truly gifted teachers (and they are admittedly too rare), and gifted kids find normal schooling to be incredibly boring a lot of the time.
Exactly. Most CEO's are preeminently salesmen, an activity which definitely has distinct personality characteristics. These are not at all the standout personality characteristics of good CIO's.
Another possible solution to this problem is PLT Scheme - a functional programming language with an 'IDE' that has a marvelous code-stepper, to watch each step of what happens, and which can be set for levels of language skill - beginner, intermediate, etc., whose error-messages are specific to that skill level. Oh, and it has a widely admired training book, How to Design Programs, as well.
Some have noticed, and the rest should - the article was written by David Brin, physicist and writer, author of some of the best science fiction novels of any era, but certainly of his - great stories, acceptable technical extrapolation, containing fascinating intuitive insights.
The pure programmers commenting here in various threads may object to Basic as a useful language, and even as a (beginning) training language, but Brin's viewpoint would not be that of a pure software developer. His background is as a physical scientist - someone with wide curiosity and extensive technical expertise. He believes that tinkering as a child with something like Basic, with its low barrier to entry, will foster general technical curiosity, introduce the idea of programming, and teach something about the plan of the machines on which it is run. Among those of us of a certain age, who has not heard engineers and professors complain about young people nowadays not being able to do general problem-solving because they have never spent extensive time just taking apart and reassembling machines (orignally it was cars - Brin's comments are dead-on there), and later, for some, early computers and other electronics, especially ham radio. My grandfather, a building engineer, took his first car, a Model-T, apart and spread it out all over the lawn before reassembling it, correctly. How many of us have done, or could do, that?
And how many of the programmers who, during the 80's, built the main 'infrastructure' of Unix, the Macintosh, and the Internet got their starts using Basic ten or so years earlier as kids?
- overall experience opposed to recent
- was made after it is evident...are to be finished soon
- high reliable SCO products
- As according to
- world Leading companies
- should still consider to upgrade to
They have trouble with the small modifications in meaning provided by subtle changes in verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, as these are done differently in East Asian languages, and they virtually always screw up or omit prepositions. European language speakers are very familiar with these kinds of changes, even if they don't always know the right ones.- Already contained code
- still outbeat
They also often coin new "shorthand" idioms that are perfectly understandable to native English speakers but would never be made by them.Quite a lot comes with it.
One might argue experimenters should observe better, but they are often trying to study very subtle stuff (in terms of getting their instrumentation to show them a reliable result), and often, as in medicine, going not for either/or results but for 45, 55% likely, whatever -
--and then it's reviewed by their peers, or new tests are done. Hallelujah, science at work.
(Of course all the other posters' comments about statistics and bought studies apply, too.)
Maybe.
But I'd feel a lot more comfortable that we were getting good interpretive legal opinions 'about' the Constitution if we didn't keep getting these 5-4 splits (either way) out of this court. Someone sure thinks the Constitution is not as clear as everyone used to hope.
You're right accept for the fact that it's not generally going to happen to rich people, only to poor and middle-class ones. The rich are well-connected enough that a local politician won't dare raze that home, plus such economic projects aren't going to be put up in areas where there are a number of rich homes, and they are found clumped together just as are poorer ones. Legally it could affect any American; in reality, it'll be the rich guy bull-dozing the normal person's house whether they agree or not. (If they want the mall that much, why don't they just pony up and pay the hold-out's price - that's what supply and demand is).