Apple's developer agreement specifically says that they will not accept an application that contains a code interpreter. So that means they will not accept a web browser because it would necessarily have its own JavaScript engine.Opera Mini may get by because the script execution happens on the server side, not the device.
I had to use the same thing for my college wellness class. The heart monitor just measures your heart rate and transmits it to a stopwatch you wear on your wrist. When you're done, it gives you some basic statistics. If you go more than a few feet away from the monitor, the watch doesn't even pick up the signal any more. They're probably teaching the kids, like me, about how heart rate affects the kind of workout you get. Nothing nefarious here, folks. Move along.
By the way, the strap is made of stretchy material that holds sweat like nobody's business. It's a good thing each student has to buy their own. Even mine was gross by the end of the semester, and I washed it every week.
I bought a new car about the same time as my city finally joined the 21st century and got 3G service. Now, I drive around streaming high-quality music from Pandora -- which I can skip when I don't like it -- on my iPhone.
I've never been able to find a channel I actually like on the XM radio in my car, so I'm not going to be paying for a subscription when the trial is up.
Office is Microsoft's biggest-selling product by revenue, even more than Windows. Since governments are mandating open formats, Microsoft has no choice but to implement ODF if they want to keep selling those lucrative enterprise agreements. Getting OOXML approved as a standard format was a huge win for them to be sure, but governments could (and will) just as easily standardize on ODF, especially given all the problems with OOXML. Microsoft used to rely on file format lock-in as a sales tool, but it seems now compatibility and (gasp) quality are Microsoft's selling points for Office. They're doing what it takes to maintain those huge sales.
One of the reasons why UNIX succeeded where Multics failed was because Multics was written for specific hardware. The UNIX guys knew that their operating system had to be portable to other platforms, which is why Kernighan and Ritchie invented C as a platform-agnostic alternative to existing languages. That way, they only had to implement a small number of machine-specific routines in assembly while most of the operating system could be compiled for any platform.
So it's not a matter of MULTICS being too complex for modern hardware or vice versa. Rather, modern hardware is just different from the hardware MULTICS was written for. Almost forty years later you could, with some ingenuity, write the necessary low-level components for any version of UNIX and get it running on just about any imaginable piece of modern hardware.
I'll agree with that. Before I lost quite a bit of weight a few years ago I was hot all the time. I started exercising in March and by November, I was freezing all the time. Even now, I'm usually cold. In fact, right this moment my feet are freezing and it's a fairly comfortable temperature otherwise here.
Also, I've found that it takes a lot more activity before I even start breathing hard. Back in my fat days, climbing a few flights of stairs left me completely out of breath. Now, it's several minutes into my daily run before I notice that I'm breathing any harder.
The implementation is also so cool. Apple added a new API called FSEvents (file system events) that notifies Time Machine whenever any file changes. That way, Time Machine always knows what files to back up. They also augmented the file system to allow "multi-hard links". So, think of a hard link in Linux, then imagine adding a reference-counting scheme to it so every file knows how many hard links it has, then imagine adding the ability to hard link entire directories, too. All of this is part of the POSIX specification, but hardly anyone ever implements it. But it does allow for space-efficient incremental backups without resorting to any additional jiggerypokery in Time Machine to make it all work. For the most part, it's difficult to implement and not very useful outside of an application like Time Machine.
Here's a point of comparison. I live in West Des Moines, IA but work near the State Capitol which is east of downtown Des Moines. Around here, you can't really get anywhere except in a car. I drive about 10 miles to work, a couple of miles to lunch and back, and 10 miles back home every day. (And yes, even in a city the size of Des Moines we have some traffic congestion, despite the $429 million they just spent to expand the 14 mile I-235 through town, although it's still 100% better than it used to be) Yesterday, I paid $2.64 for gas, which is a total bargain -- but not quite as good as the $2.54 I paid last week. Insurance costs nearly $100 a month -- I'm 24, so hopefully it will get cheaper next year -- and my car payment runs about $250 a month. I usually buy a full tank of gas every 10-14 days for ~$45. That's 2 1/2 tanks per month. My total monthly costs are roughly $450 a month to drive a car, or about $15 a day.
To put these numbers in perspective, I live in a pretty nice apartment for $835 a month. So, it costs me more than half a month's rent just to get around town. Like just about anything else, public transportation is a trade-off.
I'm guessing that, even at $2 you rarely spend more than $15 a day to get everywhere you want to go. Adjusted for the cost of living, my $15/day probably works out to be more like $30/day in NYC. I would love to live in a city that has decent public transportation so I don't have to own a car. Midwestern cities are usually so spread out, though, that buses are the only reasonable public transportation, and it usually takes a long time to get where you're going.
"No Child Left Behind" does nothing *but* leave children behind. By withholding funding from the schools that need it the most, it creates a downward spiral that no school -- especially inner city, poor and rural schools -- can break free from.
It's even true in the suburbs. I used to live in Cedar Falls, Iowa. As you might know, Iowa has one of the best education systems in the US, and the Cedar Falls schools were also very good. They were threatened with losing a big chunk of their federal funding because they weren't making enough progress on the standardized tests. This is mostly because their test scores were pretty good already.
Now Waterloo, which runs right into Cedar Falls -- like a much less glamorous Minneapolis/St. Paul -- has always struggled with education. Waterloo is a more working-class city and they have a larger immigrant population, so it's not surprising that they have less of their own money for education and their test scores are lower. They've been threatened with losing their federal funding as well.
So schools with capable students lose federal funding, which would pay for teachers to maintain that level of achievement. And schools that need the money even more are losing their funding too. Basically, the not-to-hidden agenda of No Child Left Behind is to drastically cut federal education spending while giving a facade of "accountability".
Hey now, I've lived in Iowa my whole life and there are those of us who know that the farm bill is a big joke. (It also might not surprise you to know that I do not live on a farm or farm-adjacent) Come to Iowa and see how many obese people there are here. Yeah, Americans are fat, but Iowans take it to a whole new level.
You're absolutely right. Corn subsidies not only encourage us to eat a 100% corn diet, but it's also ruining the land here. IIRC, Iowa has the greatest proportion of land devoted to agriculture of any state. And it's destroying our environment here, to say nothing of the pesticides that end up in our drinking water and similar, more immediate problems.
So we're eating a diet that's killing us and we're poisoning the land around us just in case the corn doesn't get the job done. And I'm supposed to feel sorry for poor farmers here why? So Hillary, Barack, John and the rest of the gang, if you want my vote, promise me less corn. I'll love you forever.
Haha. That's what Microsoft meant when they said they were happy to help out underprivileged schools, right? You don't get any more underprivileged than Valley. Next they're going to be donating to Waukee schools.
And it's five degrees Fahrenheit in West Des Moines (otherwise known as "outside") right now. At least I might get some Microsoft coupons! That makes me feel warmer already
True, true, true. I went to Catholic school as a young lad, and there was a priest who visited our biology class one day to tell us that both he and the Catholic church think that "creationism is absolute crap." He also said one of the only insightful things I've ever heard a priest say: "evolution is so simple but so incomprehensibly nuanced that it's just the sort of thing God would do."
There are still human beings in this country who don't enjoy equal civil rights. I think we're getting ahead of ourselves worrying about civil rights for robots.
For some reason, I really think the brown one looks like an (American) football. I really don't know why, but it just seems like something you'd want to throw, spike, tackle and so on.
Education is very important to me. And it's for that reason that I hold such a dim view of the American educational system. Growing up, every day I saw peers who weren't learning very much and not performing well. But neither they nor their teachers particularly cared. Instead, they handed out A's and B's like candy instead of giving them the D's and F's they deserved. They did that so that the kids' self esteem wouldn't be injured. But all the self esteem in the world won't help you do the arithmetic that crops up everywhere in daily life or write a coherent sentence. The result was a lot of arrogant kids who thought they were just the best, in spite of being unable to do simple arithmetic or communicate according to anything resembling the rules of the English language. Since having a poor education makes it difficult for a person to do any job well -- take writing an email or memo to your boss, for example -- I would imagine that they end up ultimately less happy. So the whole self esteem thing just doesn't work in the long run.
Here's another example of how our system is broken. One of my best friends became a high school art teacher. But most of her students wouldn't do their homework, they wouldn't write the three page art history essay her class required, and many wouldn't make the effort to get a camera for her photography class. Her first semester, she averaged her students' grades and gave anyone with an average below 65% an F. Then the barrage of threatening calls and emails began. "Why did you give my little precious a 'D'?! He's getting A's in the rest of his classes! What's your problem, lady?" The principal told her that she would be fired unless she started grading on a curve. So, if half of her class did their work regularly and the other half didn't, a big portion of those who didn't do their work ended up with C's instead of the F's they deserved. It also meant that, in a class of 35, she had to give exactly five A's. That means that there have been times when students deserving an A have gotten a B instead, and vice-versa. The grades became meaningless, since they were more of a rough ranking of each student relative to the other students in the class rather than an honest evaluation of each students' work.
The way in which we measure educational progress is only one facet of the flawed American educational system. Let's talk dollars and cents. While our president has been waging his religious crusade in the Middle East, the Pell Grant has remained stagnant. Federal college loan programs provide so little money to students now that most have to borrow from banks at much higher interest rates. That means that a lot of deserving kids who ought to be able to get an affordable education can't.
I don't think it's at all "obvious" that I don't take education seriously. Indeed, quite the opposite is true. I can point to specific examples of places where our system fails its students, and thus American society in general. I don't think the "masses" are ignorant, I think they set the bar for "acceptable" educational quality too low. Despite the fact that our country owes much of its success to its well-educated citizens, education is culturally devalued. I don't think most people see, convincingly enough, what effects the deficiencies of their educational system has on their children and on society in general.
Here's what I don't get: we obsess about offshoring and outsourcing. But no one connects the dots between a second-rate education, the attitude of entitlement among Americans, and practices like offshoring. We don't realize that countries like India, while much poorer than the US, still turn out excellent college graduates who are, in many cases, better-educated and more driven than their American counterparts but will work for a fraction of the pay. It shows that, in order for a wealthy country's citizens to maintain their place in the world economy, they have to become better-educated. Since the welfare of our nation depends on it, I do think that education is vitally important.
I would expect the United States to condone poor grammar, but New Zealand? I know they've got some bizarre idioms and slang, but I thought every other country took education much more seriously than mine.
Excerpt from a top-notch paper:
& then marie antoinet was all lol let them eat cake and frenchies were all ur so dead were gonna chop ur head of! cu in hell bitch
People of New Zealand: if you take education seriously, you will do well. If you don't, you end up with a president (prime minister) who will get us stuck in Iraq. Also, you end up with a senator (MP) who leaves out a very important pronoun in a bad joke.
Quick: the current time is 00:30 -- is it morning, midday, or night where I live? If I open my business at 12:00 and close at 22:00, what kind of business do I most likely own: a coffee shop/lunch place, a retail store or a restaurant? If I open at 16:00 and close at 02:00, can you make a sign that (in a non-confusing way) makes it obvious to my customers that, while I open on Monday and stay open continuously until Tuesday, that I'm actually only open for ten hours?
Now what if I tell you it's 6:30 PM local time? I don't even have to tell you where I live, do I? You would know that it's about dinnertime here, regardless of where "here" is.
I live in the states, but the time is 00:30 UTC everywhere right now. If I call my grandma in Australia, is she going to say, "ugh! Why did you call me at 00:30?" or is she going to say, "oh, you picked a perfect time to call." (My grandma does, in fact, talk like that, by the way.)
The point of time zones and "local time" is that it provides *context*. Wednesday is going to turn into Thursday (or already has) in the middle of the night -- for everybody. With UTC, it would be Thursday here in most of the US already. So while it may be a pain to have to adjust for local time in other localities, at least you'll know about what time of day it is there. Unless you happen to live in Greenwich, or maybe one or two time zones in either direction, using UTC would be nothing but a pain in the ass. Do you really think it would make sense for me to leave for work on Sunday "evening" and get home on Monday "morning" -- to say nothing about how lame New Year's Eve parties would be in most of the world. (In Eastern Europe and Asia, you'd enjoy a celebratory cup of joe first thing in the morning. How fun.)
I thought exactly the same thing yesterday when I watched the WWDC webcast. Steve Jobs looked, in my estimation, terrible. I'm pretty sure he's grown out his beard to hide how thin his face looks. And, it's also true that he didn't seem to have his usual blend of piss and organic vinegar that he generally shows off at these things.
(I do think I know where Steve's weight went, though: into Phil Schiller! That guy should take a page from the Steve Jobs cookbook. Man!)
But I thought that there were some great features in the Leopard preview they showed off. For example, Time Machine looks simply astounding. Maybe the sci-fi effects are a little over the top, but being able to look for a lost file by browsing through past versions of the folder in which it's contained is really cool.
I'm also really jazzed about the Web Clip service in Safari. I can think of lots of times when that would be handy. And, I will say that I really enjoyed the comparisons between a Windows Vista desktop and a Mac OS X Tiger desktop. Microsoft even stole the "lickable" aqua sphere!
It's entirely possible that Steve might be trying to take a step back from these keynotes. And it's also entirely possible that this was a sort of "test" for these three guys to see which one would have the ability to do these presentations in the future if Steve can't. However, the company itself is still the same as ever. Lines like, "Redmond, start your photocopiers" and "Mac OS X Leopard: Introducing Vista 2.0" are classic.
Let's also not forget that the new Mac Pro is pretty astounding: four cores, standard! And, let's also not forget that Steve did say that the best new features of Leopard are, as the slide said, "Top Secret". I think Apple really felt like they got burned by Microsoft when they copied, feature for feature, everything that was new and exciting about Tiger for Vista. My guess is that, since Leopard is slated for Spring, Apple wants Microsoft to release Vista, which is truly lackluster, and then release Leopard in rapid succession. Those, "I'm a PC, I'm a Mac" ads might take on a whole new antagonistic dimension! For example:
(Cue cutesy music)
PC: I'm a PC
Mac: And I'm a Mac. Hear me roar.
PC: I can search every file on your hard drive instantly.
Mac: I've been doing that for two years now! And, I can search network servers, other Macs, and even tell you that the remote is lost between the second and third cushion on the couch. Take that!
PC: Well, I've got transparent windows!
Mac: Oh yeah, well MY windows are so transparent you can't even see them! Our computers don't even come with displays anymore. I just read your mind and do exactly what you were thinking. Kapow!
PC: Touche
Mac: See, you finally understand what that word means. And why? Because I teach you new words while you're sleeping. Ha!
(Cut to picture of new Mac Book, now without a display!)
I know you meant "Des Moines is just super awesome" as a jab, but it really is a great place to live. Granted, it has terrible weather just like the rest of Iowa, but if you can get past that, it's wonderful. And, I'll have you know, that as of 2004 Des Moines officially employs more people in the insurance industry than any other US city -- Hartford, CT is now the Des Moines of the east. Mind you, that only employs tens of thousands of information technology people, but no worries. Wells Fargo is moving 30,000 jobs here over the next few years. Terrible life for a programmer, I know. Sadly, each year, my salary just keeps going up and up as competition for talented IT people increases.
Really, though, it's a great size (about 400,000 people), has fantastic restaurants for a city its size, great shopping and attracts great entertainment (the Iowa State Fair excepted) Oh, and did I mention that you can get wherever you want to go in a matter of minutes? That's right; the city is spread out enough that traffic is rarely a problem. Well, OK, traffic won't be a problem as soon as they finish the vastly new and improved Intersate 235 through town.
And, if you're smart like me, you live in one of the bigger nearby suburbs (ahem... Ankeny) where the housing is cheap, plentiful, and largely new construction. If that's not your thing, you could live in one of the dozens of new lofts they've built in downtown Des Moines.
It annoys me when people who live on the coasts, and have never lived anywhere else, can't imagine that life in the square states could be anything but hellish. I've got firends and family who live in California, and you couldn't pay me enough to live there. Mind you, there's nowhere else in Iowa where I'd want to live, but Des Moines is, in my estimation, the shiznit. Living in sunny California is not without its problems too. What's that you're paying for gas there? And it takes you how long to get to work? My house has an attached garage, a big yard and is twice the size of your place and you pay three times as much?
Both of the jobs I've had while living in Des Moines have paid quite well relative to the cost of living. I've actually turned down job offers elsewhere -- you know, in the "good" part of the country -- because I simply couldn't live as well there.
But wait! What am I saying? People are going to want to live here and increase the demand for the same supply of housing and then I'll have to pay more! California is the shiznit. Coolest place ever. I'm in Iowa and it's terrible. We have to walk uphill both ways -- in the snow, mind you -- we have blizzards every day. Even in the summer! California's the place. Los Angeles is just super awesome. Off you go!
Slashdot Mirror
Apple's developer agreement specifically says that they will not accept an application that contains a code interpreter. So that means they will not accept a web browser because it would necessarily have its own JavaScript engine.Opera Mini may get by because the script execution happens on the server side, not the device.
I had to use the same thing for my college wellness class. The heart monitor just measures your heart rate and transmits it to a stopwatch you wear on your wrist. When you're done, it gives you some basic statistics. If you go more than a few feet away from the monitor, the watch doesn't even pick up the signal any more. They're probably teaching the kids, like me, about how heart rate affects the kind of workout you get. Nothing nefarious here, folks. Move along. By the way, the strap is made of stretchy material that holds sweat like nobody's business. It's a good thing each student has to buy their own. Even mine was gross by the end of the semester, and I washed it every week.
I blame the cold. When it's like 20 below in January, it's too damn cold to do anything. Including murder, I guess.
I bought a new car about the same time as my city finally joined the 21st century and got 3G service. Now, I drive around streaming high-quality music from Pandora -- which I can skip when I don't like it -- on my iPhone. I've never been able to find a channel I actually like on the XM radio in my car, so I'm not going to be paying for a subscription when the trial is up.
Office is Microsoft's biggest-selling product by revenue, even more than Windows. Since governments are mandating open formats, Microsoft has no choice but to implement ODF if they want to keep selling those lucrative enterprise agreements. Getting OOXML approved as a standard format was a huge win for them to be sure, but governments could (and will) just as easily standardize on ODF, especially given all the problems with OOXML. Microsoft used to rely on file format lock-in as a sales tool, but it seems now compatibility and (gasp) quality are Microsoft's selling points for Office. They're doing what it takes to maintain those huge sales.
And Rogue Wave is also a pretty badass band, too. I clicked on this post just to make this comment.
One of the reasons why UNIX succeeded where Multics failed was because Multics was written for specific hardware. The UNIX guys knew that their operating system had to be portable to other platforms, which is why Kernighan and Ritchie invented C as a platform-agnostic alternative to existing languages. That way, they only had to implement a small number of machine-specific routines in assembly while most of the operating system could be compiled for any platform.
So it's not a matter of MULTICS being too complex for modern hardware or vice versa. Rather, modern hardware is just different from the hardware MULTICS was written for. Almost forty years later you could, with some ingenuity, write the necessary low-level components for any version of UNIX and get it running on just about any imaginable piece of modern hardware.
I'll agree with that. Before I lost quite a bit of weight a few years ago I was hot all the time. I started exercising in March and by November, I was freezing all the time. Even now, I'm usually cold. In fact, right this moment my feet are freezing and it's a fairly comfortable temperature otherwise here.
Also, I've found that it takes a lot more activity before I even start breathing hard. Back in my fat days, climbing a few flights of stairs left me completely out of breath. Now, it's several minutes into my daily run before I notice that I'm breathing any harder.
The implementation is also so cool. Apple added a new API called FSEvents (file system events) that notifies Time Machine whenever any file changes. That way, Time Machine always knows what files to back up. They also augmented the file system to allow "multi-hard links". So, think of a hard link in Linux, then imagine adding a reference-counting scheme to it so every file knows how many hard links it has, then imagine adding the ability to hard link entire directories, too. All of this is part of the POSIX specification, but hardly anyone ever implements it. But it does allow for space-efficient incremental backups without resorting to any additional jiggerypokery in Time Machine to make it all work. For the most part, it's difficult to implement and not very useful outside of an application like Time Machine.
AppleInsider did a much better job than me of explaining all of this in their "Road to Leopard" series. Page 2 gives the technical details on Time Machine: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/10/12/road_to_mac_os_x_leopard_time_machine.html&page=2.
Here's a point of comparison. I live in West Des Moines, IA but work near the State Capitol which is east of downtown Des Moines. Around here, you can't really get anywhere except in a car. I drive about 10 miles to work, a couple of miles to lunch and back, and 10 miles back home every day. (And yes, even in a city the size of Des Moines we have some traffic congestion, despite the $429 million they just spent to expand the 14 mile I-235 through town, although it's still 100% better than it used to be) Yesterday, I paid $2.64 for gas, which is a total bargain -- but not quite as good as the $2.54 I paid last week. Insurance costs nearly $100 a month -- I'm 24, so hopefully it will get cheaper next year -- and my car payment runs about $250 a month. I usually buy a full tank of gas every 10-14 days for ~$45. That's 2 1/2 tanks per month. My total monthly costs are roughly $450 a month to drive a car, or about $15 a day.
To put these numbers in perspective, I live in a pretty nice apartment for $835 a month. So, it costs me more than half a month's rent just to get around town. Like just about anything else, public transportation is a trade-off.
I'm guessing that, even at $2 you rarely spend more than $15 a day to get everywhere you want to go. Adjusted for the cost of living, my $15/day probably works out to be more like $30/day in NYC. I would love to live in a city that has decent public transportation so I don't have to own a car. Midwestern cities are usually so spread out, though, that buses are the only reasonable public transportation, and it usually takes a long time to get where you're going.
"No Child Left Behind" does nothing *but* leave children behind. By withholding funding from the schools that need it the most, it creates a downward spiral that no school -- especially inner city, poor and rural schools -- can break free from.
It's even true in the suburbs. I used to live in Cedar Falls, Iowa. As you might know, Iowa has one of the best education systems in the US, and the Cedar Falls schools were also very good. They were threatened with losing a big chunk of their federal funding because they weren't making enough progress on the standardized tests. This is mostly because their test scores were pretty good already.
Now Waterloo, which runs right into Cedar Falls -- like a much less glamorous Minneapolis/St. Paul -- has always struggled with education. Waterloo is a more working-class city and they have a larger immigrant population, so it's not surprising that they have less of their own money for education and their test scores are lower. They've been threatened with losing their federal funding as well.
So schools with capable students lose federal funding, which would pay for teachers to maintain that level of achievement. And schools that need the money even more are losing their funding too. Basically, the not-to-hidden agenda of No Child Left Behind is to drastically cut federal education spending while giving a facade of "accountability".
The six words are, "don't you think she looks tired?"
Hey now, I've lived in Iowa my whole life and there are those of us who know that the farm bill is a big joke. (It also might not surprise you to know that I do not live on a farm or farm-adjacent) Come to Iowa and see how many obese people there are here. Yeah, Americans are fat, but Iowans take it to a whole new level.
You're absolutely right. Corn subsidies not only encourage us to eat a 100% corn diet, but it's also ruining the land here. IIRC, Iowa has the greatest proportion of land devoted to agriculture of any state. And it's destroying our environment here, to say nothing of the pesticides that end up in our drinking water and similar, more immediate problems.
So we're eating a diet that's killing us and we're poisoning the land around us just in case the corn doesn't get the job done. And I'm supposed to feel sorry for poor farmers here why? So Hillary, Barack, John and the rest of the gang, if you want my vote, promise me less corn. I'll love you forever.
Haha. That's what Microsoft meant when they said they were happy to help out underprivileged schools, right? You don't get any more underprivileged than Valley. Next they're going to be donating to Waukee schools.
And it's five degrees Fahrenheit in West Des Moines (otherwise known as "outside") right now. At least I might get some Microsoft coupons! That makes me feel warmer already
True, true, true. I went to Catholic school as a young lad, and there was a priest who visited our biology class one day to tell us that both he and the Catholic church think that "creationism is absolute crap." He also said one of the only insightful things I've ever heard a priest say: "evolution is so simple but so incomprehensibly nuanced that it's just the sort of thing God would do."
There are still human beings in this country who don't enjoy equal civil rights. I think we're getting ahead of ourselves worrying about civil rights for robots.
For some reason, I really think the brown one looks like an (American) football. I really don't know why, but it just seems like something you'd want to throw, spike, tackle and so on.
Education is very important to me. And it's for that reason that I hold such a dim view of the American educational system. Growing up, every day I saw peers who weren't learning very much and not performing well. But neither they nor their teachers particularly cared. Instead, they handed out A's and B's like candy instead of giving them the D's and F's they deserved. They did that so that the kids' self esteem wouldn't be injured. But all the self esteem in the world won't help you do the arithmetic that crops up everywhere in daily life or write a coherent sentence. The result was a lot of arrogant kids who thought they were just the best, in spite of being unable to do simple arithmetic or communicate according to anything resembling the rules of the English language. Since having a poor education makes it difficult for a person to do any job well -- take writing an email or memo to your boss, for example -- I would imagine that they end up ultimately less happy. So the whole self esteem thing just doesn't work in the long run.
Here's another example of how our system is broken. One of my best friends became a high school art teacher. But most of her students wouldn't do their homework, they wouldn't write the three page art history essay her class required, and many wouldn't make the effort to get a camera for her photography class. Her first semester, she averaged her students' grades and gave anyone with an average below 65% an F. Then the barrage of threatening calls and emails began. "Why did you give my little precious a 'D'?! He's getting A's in the rest of his classes! What's your problem, lady?" The principal told her that she would be fired unless she started grading on a curve. So, if half of her class did their work regularly and the other half didn't, a big portion of those who didn't do their work ended up with C's instead of the F's they deserved. It also meant that, in a class of 35, she had to give exactly five A's. That means that there have been times when students deserving an A have gotten a B instead, and vice-versa. The grades became meaningless, since they were more of a rough ranking of each student relative to the other students in the class rather than an honest evaluation of each students' work.
The way in which we measure educational progress is only one facet of the flawed American educational system. Let's talk dollars and cents. While our president has been waging his religious crusade in the Middle East, the Pell Grant has remained stagnant. Federal college loan programs provide so little money to students now that most have to borrow from banks at much higher interest rates. That means that a lot of deserving kids who ought to be able to get an affordable education can't.
I don't think it's at all "obvious" that I don't take education seriously. Indeed, quite the opposite is true. I can point to specific examples of places where our system fails its students, and thus American society in general. I don't think the "masses" are ignorant, I think they set the bar for "acceptable" educational quality too low. Despite the fact that our country owes much of its success to its well-educated citizens, education is culturally devalued. I don't think most people see, convincingly enough, what effects the deficiencies of their educational system has on their children and on society in general.
Here's what I don't get: we obsess about offshoring and outsourcing. But no one connects the dots between a second-rate education, the attitude of entitlement among Americans, and practices like offshoring. We don't realize that countries like India, while much poorer than the US, still turn out excellent college graduates who are, in many cases, better-educated and more driven than their American counterparts but will work for a fraction of the pay. It shows that, in order for a wealthy country's citizens to maintain their place in the world economy, they have to become better-educated. Since the welfare of our nation depends on it, I do think that education is vitally important.
Look, the only thing that really matters is which party would stay the course and which one would cut and run.
I would expect the United States to condone poor grammar, but New Zealand? I know they've got some bizarre idioms and slang, but I thought every other country took education much more seriously than mine.
Excerpt from a top-notch paper:
People of New Zealand: if you take education seriously, you will do well. If you don't, you end up with a president (prime minister) who will get us stuck in Iraq. Also, you end up with a senator (MP) who leaves out a very important pronoun in a bad joke.
Quick: the current time is 00:30 -- is it morning, midday, or night where I live? If I open my business at 12:00 and close at 22:00, what kind of business do I most likely own: a coffee shop/lunch place, a retail store or a restaurant? If I open at 16:00 and close at 02:00, can you make a sign that (in a non-confusing way) makes it obvious to my customers that, while I open on Monday and stay open continuously until Tuesday, that I'm actually only open for ten hours?
Now what if I tell you it's 6:30 PM local time? I don't even have to tell you where I live, do I? You would know that it's about dinnertime here, regardless of where "here" is.
I live in the states, but the time is 00:30 UTC everywhere right now. If I call my grandma in Australia, is she going to say, "ugh! Why did you call me at 00:30?" or is she going to say, "oh, you picked a perfect time to call." (My grandma does, in fact, talk like that, by the way.)
The point of time zones and "local time" is that it provides *context*. Wednesday is going to turn into Thursday (or already has) in the middle of the night -- for everybody. With UTC, it would be Thursday here in most of the US already. So while it may be a pain to have to adjust for local time in other localities, at least you'll know about what time of day it is there. Unless you happen to live in Greenwich, or maybe one or two time zones in either direction, using UTC would be nothing but a pain in the ass. Do you really think it would make sense for me to leave for work on Sunday "evening" and get home on Monday "morning" -- to say nothing about how lame New Year's Eve parties would be in most of the world. (In Eastern Europe and Asia, you'd enjoy a celebratory cup of joe first thing in the morning. How fun.)
$1.65 billion? What is that, like four shares of Google?
I thought exactly the same thing yesterday when I watched the WWDC webcast. Steve Jobs looked, in my estimation, terrible. I'm pretty sure he's grown out his beard to hide how thin his face looks. And, it's also true that he didn't seem to have his usual blend of piss and organic vinegar that he generally shows off at these things.
(I do think I know where Steve's weight went, though: into Phil Schiller! That guy should take a page from the Steve Jobs cookbook. Man!)
But I thought that there were some great features in the Leopard preview they showed off. For example, Time Machine looks simply astounding. Maybe the sci-fi effects are a little over the top, but being able to look for a lost file by browsing through past versions of the folder in which it's contained is really cool.
I'm also really jazzed about the Web Clip service in Safari. I can think of lots of times when that would be handy. And, I will say that I really enjoyed the comparisons between a Windows Vista desktop and a Mac OS X Tiger desktop. Microsoft even stole the "lickable" aqua sphere!
It's entirely possible that Steve might be trying to take a step back from these keynotes. And it's also entirely possible that this was a sort of "test" for these three guys to see which one would have the ability to do these presentations in the future if Steve can't. However, the company itself is still the same as ever. Lines like, "Redmond, start your photocopiers" and "Mac OS X Leopard: Introducing Vista 2.0" are classic.
Let's also not forget that the new Mac Pro is pretty astounding: four cores, standard! And, let's also not forget that Steve did say that the best new features of Leopard are, as the slide said, "Top Secret". I think Apple really felt like they got burned by Microsoft when they copied, feature for feature, everything that was new and exciting about Tiger for Vista. My guess is that, since Leopard is slated for Spring, Apple wants Microsoft to release Vista, which is truly lackluster, and then release Leopard in rapid succession. Those, "I'm a PC, I'm a Mac" ads might take on a whole new antagonistic dimension! For example:
(Cue cutesy music)
PC: I'm a PC
Mac: And I'm a Mac. Hear me roar.
PC: I can search every file on your hard drive instantly.
Mac: I've been doing that for two years now! And, I can search network servers, other Macs, and even tell you that the remote is lost between the second and third cushion on the couch. Take that!
PC: Well, I've got transparent windows!
Mac: Oh yeah, well MY windows are so transparent you can't even see them! Our computers don't even come with displays anymore. I just read your mind and do exactly what you were thinking. Kapow!
PC: Touche
Mac: See, you finally understand what that word means. And why? Because I teach you new words while you're sleeping. Ha!
(Cut to picture of new Mac Book, now without a display!)
I know you meant "Des Moines is just super awesome" as a jab, but it really is a great place to live. Granted, it has terrible weather just like the rest of Iowa, but if you can get past that, it's wonderful. And, I'll have you know, that as of 2004 Des Moines officially employs more people in the insurance industry than any other US city -- Hartford, CT is now the Des Moines of the east. Mind you, that only employs tens of thousands of information technology people, but no worries. Wells Fargo is moving 30,000 jobs here over the next few years. Terrible life for a programmer, I know. Sadly, each year, my salary just keeps going up and up as competition for talented IT people increases.
Really, though, it's a great size (about 400,000 people), has fantastic restaurants for a city its size, great shopping and attracts great entertainment (the Iowa State Fair excepted) Oh, and did I mention that you can get wherever you want to go in a matter of minutes? That's right; the city is spread out enough that traffic is rarely a problem. Well, OK, traffic won't be a problem as soon as they finish the vastly new and improved Intersate 235 through town.
And, if you're smart like me, you live in one of the bigger nearby suburbs (ahem... Ankeny) where the housing is cheap, plentiful, and largely new construction. If that's not your thing, you could live in one of the dozens of new lofts they've built in downtown Des Moines.
It annoys me when people who live on the coasts, and have never lived anywhere else, can't imagine that life in the square states could be anything but hellish. I've got firends and family who live in California, and you couldn't pay me enough to live there. Mind you, there's nowhere else in Iowa where I'd want to live, but Des Moines is, in my estimation, the shiznit. Living in sunny California is not without its problems too. What's that you're paying for gas there? And it takes you how long to get to work? My house has an attached garage, a big yard and is twice the size of your place and you pay three times as much?
Both of the jobs I've had while living in Des Moines have paid quite well relative to the cost of living. I've actually turned down job offers elsewhere -- you know, in the "good" part of the country -- because I simply couldn't live as well there.
But wait! What am I saying? People are going to want to live here and increase the demand for the same supply of housing and then I'll have to pay more! California is the shiznit. Coolest place ever. I'm in Iowa and it's terrible. We have to walk uphill both ways -- in the snow, mind you -- we have blizzards every day. Even in the summer! California's the place. Los Angeles is just super awesome. Off you go!