You are conflating cache contention in early dual-core CPUs (Pentium Ds in particular) with thread-safe code being inherently slow. The speed loss from locking is two instructions, generally, and a library being "thread-safe" isn't going to murder performance.
I don't think you understand what locking is for if you worry about the OS's thread/process scheduler makes a damn bit of difference with regards to the need for locking. I repeat, locking is not why you were seeing crappy performance on multithreaded applications. Realistically, things have been multithreaded for a long time in STA containers, pthreads, and a million other implementations, because it's almost impossible to properly implement asynchronous calls or event handlers in single-threaded code.
Honestly, the newer cores were always faster than older cores "even at the same clockspeed" (especially at the same clockspeed), with the notable exception of Netburst's super-long pipeline.
While true to a point, pinning it to one core generally resolves that. It's a fairly accurate generalization to say that any one core of an AM2 Athlon64 or Core2 will beat the hell out of a P4 even on single threaded performance (and due to improved cache coherency, pinning isn't strictly necessary).
Most games should be able to benefit more, yes, large projects aren't quite so easy to synchronize, and they aren't that parallelizable (you've got AI, physics, and...?).
Yeah! Most instructions per clock, better branch prediction, a shorter pipeline, and fewer cache misses are for suckers!
Seriously, I take it you haven't actually looked at Task Manager on a dual core (quad-core is, admittedly not that useful for games) system playing anything Source based/etc. Just check anything on this. It's a little outdated, but so is your CPU.
Nothing wrong with a P4 for a lot of tasks, but you're deluding yourself if you think it performs better than new CPUs.
The 25 year "average lifespan" is a massive canard, since it includes deaths from the (many) wars, death during childhood from diseases, etc. Back to ancient times, people were living to be quite old (Seneca, Pliny the Elder, Aristotle, Plato, etc).
I don't think you use Nexenta or Solaris with any kind of regularity. Solaris Express (both SXCE and Indiana) have the GNU toolchain and GNU libc present. Even on "GNU/OpenSolaris" (Nexenta), mutt, fetchmail, puppet, and other basic utilities fail to compile without tweaking the Makefile even when the necessary libraries are in the path. I also don't think you use kFreeBSD. Look at this and tell me how it's "trivial."
People in branded zones won't be able to tell they're not on Linux as long as they don't try to load a kernel module, or check the uname, or do anything even remotely complicated with the network (branded zones don't have a real network interface, as far as the zone can tell, and Crossbow/ip-type=exclusive doesn't work for lx brands yet -- it may never, but to differences in the network driver code). The Linux ABI module on FreeBSD/kFreeBSD, Nexenta, and branded zones on Solaris all fail to create the/proc filesystem the way some Linux utilities expect it (htop being one of those).
The complaint about ugly GNU-isms is about lazy developers (which includes the FSF, see: gcc) who can't be arsed to even try./configure on another system because running on Linux is "good enough." Also you, apparently, because you're talking out of your ass.
If you think it's trivial, you haven't tried recently. I mean, sure, the Solaris linker is pretty spartan, but bootstrapping gcc on OpenSolaris is a nightmare. Autotools can't figure out proper ABIs on Solaris (you have to pass it to configure an awful lot), set -R and -L, etc. Compiling ghc (Haskell) is a bigger adventure, as the GNU autotools are pathetic on systems other than Linux.
Frankly, the GNU-isms running rampant make it really goddamn difficult to compile software that's supposed to be portable without building the entire GNU toolchain (and even then, autotools often doesn't work properly). The sooner LLVM blows away GCC, the better. This is not at all reasonable, and that's assuming you're not trying to use some dirty compiler like Sun Studio.
Until the developers bother with some basic portability which doesn't involve setting environment variables which shouldn't need to be set, you can keep your "GNU/" off the front of my OpenSolaris/BSD.
I never said it was the superlative language for every task. I said that, in its own domain (embedded systems, operating systems, and some core game code), nothing has ever truly replaced it.
I wasn't actually putting those words in your mouth specifically, just a general statement. The fact that nothing has truly replaced it doesn't mean it's the best possible language for the task. Operating systems? Embedded systems? CUDA? M'kay. It's well-tested, suitably low level, , etc. Core game code, though? I can't tell you the last time I saw a game which was CPU bound, or played to C's other strengths (other than graphics frameworks, but OpenGL/DirectX bindings are available for a lot of languages these days).
It's an indictment of the style of programming that garbage collection enables: "create it, use it, forget it". You can say that the object allocation or destructors were sloppy, but from my perspective it seemed as though the game should know what resources it needs to free when going from graphics level 4 to 3 and free them using whatever the game's language had instead of a C++ delete operator. Any small bits that leaked out would be caught by the GC eventually, but the majority of the resources (the part that actually affected program performance) would be immediately freed and performance would immediately improve.
That's not the style of programming GC enables. The operator you're looking for is generally dispose() to call the destructor. The "style of programming" you refer to would lead to explicit memory leaks in C++/C (which are obviously not any better), and any profiler should make it very easy to find. Sloppy coding != language flaw, and I'd wager that bug would have presented itself regardless of the language. Shouldn't have happened in the first place, and I really can't see how you conflate a logic problem in the code (frankly, whoever didn't dispose of the object in a managed languge wouldn't have in C++ either) with a problem with garbage collection.
The GC hate was deserved 20 years ago when you could see the system pause on a GC pass. However, the algorithms backing said garbage collectors have improved significantly, we have more granular marking of objects, and clock rates have gone up. The cost/benefit ratio just isn't worth it most of the time (see: rise of Java/.NET).
Thing is, C++, D, and Lisp work by putting a layer of runtime between themselves and the hardware. They can't replace C because they define and build themselves in such a way as to push them out of C's problem domain.
Funny, I wasn't aware that compiled D or Lisp ran against a VM. Objects or not, the bytecode pushed out from a ML compiler and a C compiler is very similar. D lags behind a little bit due to the relative youth of the language. C's problem domain is systems engineering, but that also goes for Prolog, Forth, D, C++, and a number of other languages.
I hear this argument a lot, but I've not seen it borne out in reality.
While the game you were tuning clearly had problems with the generational garbage collector (more to do with sloppy object allocation and destructors than the GC implementation itself, probably), I can't see how that is a point-blank indictment of garbage collection. If your argument is portability, then yes, C wins. However, it's the proverbial chicken and the egg. A C compiler exists for pretty much every architecture known to man. On the other hand, so does a BASIC compiler.
Somebody is porting those compilers, just as they port them for other languages. The extra effort involved in moving, say, the CL garbage collector as opposed to the CL compiler is trivial. It is not an effective argument against it.
What C offers over Erlang, ML, Ada, and other languages is a massive developer base and familiar paradigms. If you want to program embedded systems (Erlang is still a good use case here) or operating systems, by all means, use C. For a game, though? You're going to have libc, be dealing with the OS's memory allocator, etc. In these instances, Haskell, ML, D, and other languages are competitive in speed and memory usage.
People have given though to replacing C (D, C++), and some of those developments are quite old (Lisp). It's hard to convince some developers that with increased hardware capabilities and higher-level development, plus well established utility libraries, "bare metal" access isn't needed anymore. In truth, re-inventing the wheel in every new project to handle strings easily (as one example) without being kneecapped wastes an astronomical amount of development time.
There's nothing wrong with C, and the newer standards offer a lot, but the notion that it's the superlative language for every task has got to go.
Seriously?
OCaml, Haskell, D, Lisp, Forth, FORTRAN, COBOL, Delphi/Pascal, Ada? These languages don't exist?
Depending on the use case, they're faster than C (OCaml/Forth in particular), also.
You claimed I was wrong when I said they don't have all the information. And yes they are biased- they take biased stands all the time. They write articles on foreign policy for think tanks and influence foreign policy. There is an implied bias right there, as soon as they support or refute something, bias is present.
Ah, no. I said that they get a lot of information declassified through FOIA requests, not that they "have all the information". I wasn't aware that publishing declassified information (which is what their articles are) constituted bias. Being used as a reference by a think tank != writing for a think tank. Beyond which, the very fact that they publish declassified information years after the fact prevents them from "influencing foreign policy" (unlike Project for a New American Century). Some of their "newest" documents are about Kissinger, and nuclear response teams from 1974-1996. <sarcasm>Those must have a huge influence.</sarcasm>
Who fucking cares about your you're. Grammar erros don't make my points invalid and you know it. I'm surprised you didn't go after the Do instead of So as if it actually meant something. And no, they are fighting against providing them right now...Not 12 years from now. If they have the twelve years, shut up until they aren't there because otherwise, they don't need to produce them right now. Even for FOIA requests, technical issues is grounds to deny them so even for the FOIA stand that you want to conflate is dead. If they have the 12 years, then wait until the time is up. If they don't then admit you were wrong.
So, you're suggesting that we essentially wait until the statute of limitations is up before we ask that they comply with the law? The Reagan admin didn't have any trouble complying (even though Oliver North destroyed emails during Iran-Contra, they were recovered). The Clinton admin didn't have any trouble (campaign finance inquiry in 2000, emails from the Office of the VP were missing). I don't need to wait 12 years to say that they're never going to do it, and your argument thus far as been that it's impossible for them to do so after they leave office. Contradicting yourself is fun.
I can't believe your really this fucking stupid. Listen very carefully and if you must, ask an adult to explain this to you. In order for a law to have a punishment, it either directly has to prescribe one in it's wording or have another law encompass it. Nothing in title 18 nor the PRA provides punishment for not following the PRA. I asked you to show where it was in case I missed it and all you can do is claim that title 18 applies to everyone. Well, that is true but if title 18 doesn't prescribe any punishment for violating the PRA, then there is still NO FUCKING PUNISHMENT. What part of that do you not understand? If you know something I don't know, show it and be specific. Pointing to a title with thousands of sections in it doesn't prove you found anything, give the exact section or shut up about it. BTW, I know you can't find it so you can save some time and give up now.
This from the person who can't interpret two fucking sentences in the Constitution (15th Amendment. "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude" has no bearing on legal rights to marry, nor inter-racial marriage, and it never did. Ever. Not in a single federal court case)? Yes, Title 18 applies to everyone. It's where every punishment in the US Code is detailed (they are not listed under the laws). Just because it doesn't explicitly say "for violation of the Presidential Records Act" doesn't mean it's not applicable, unless you expect them to update for every fucking act of Congress. I'm not going to give you the exact section because you can fucking Google it from the quote. The entire US Code is up at Cornell's website.
Ohh.. their Wikipedia page, wait a minute, I'll change that. Anyways, they are not a government agency and do no, I repeat "do not" have access to any more information then any of us do through freedom of information requests and public sources. In other words, they don't have the full story and because they are a 503c company or whatever doesn't change that. Nonprofit status says nothing about biased, look at moveon dotorg's nonprofit status. There are plenty of biased nonprofit charities and so on.
Where did I say they have access to more information than the rest of us? Nowhere. I said that it's their mission to obtain as much foreign policy information as possible through FOIA requests. As a Journalism/PoliSci school, they have no reason to be biased (unlike Democracy Now, the American Enterprise Institute, and some other nonprofits). Don't conflate nonprofit with partisan hacks.
DO your saying that as long as bush provides the emails before the ten year limit is up for the presidential library then the missing emails at this point pose no problem? Right? I mean why are we talking about the presidential records act when he doesn't have to have them separated or turned over until 12 years later? You see, you don't even believe that to be true because your sitting here bitching about it. If it was possible for the libraries to continue the work then it wouldn't matter until after that time had expired. Not being able to find them now because of the circumstances that we know of doesn't mean they will be missing in 12 years when the library withholding terms end. Your really grasping for straws here.
You have comprehension problems (also, FFS, "YOU'RE" is not "YOUR"). I'm bitching about it because they are not going to have the records in 12 years. They are fighting against even attempting to recover some of the millions of emails that they lost through gross incompetence. If it were about waiting another ten years for FOIA requests or something, that'd be one thing. This is the administration saying "we don't have them, and we never will." Not the same thing.
actually your wrong. Nothing in the PRA gives punishment prescribed in title 18 and nothing in 18 refers directly to the presidential record. At best, you can manipulate the destruction of documents connected to a case or investigation but a FIOA request is neither and the lawsuit ordering the production of the record happened well after the deed. You simply cannot show in a convincing way anyplace where there is a civil or criminal punishment for not following the PRA.
Again, you fail. The PRA does not prescribe specific punishments, but Title 18 applies to every US citizen.
Whoever knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States or any case filed under title 11, or in relation to or contemplation of any such matter or case, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.
Hmm...
Whoever, by threats or force, willfully prevents, obstructs, impedes, or interferes with, or willfully attempts to prevent, obstruct, impede, or interfere with, the due exercise of rights or the performance of duties under any order, judgment, or decree of a court of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.
No injunctive or other civil relief against the conduct made criminal by this section shall be denied on the ground that such conduct is a crime.
Hmmm.....
Whoever feloniously steals, takes away, alters, falsifies, or otherwise avoids any record, writ, process, or other proceeding
Yep, I was thinking the national archives which is a government site. This site is a private third party site dedicated to pushing a viewpoint with publicly availible information. As I said, it is biased and it isn't the entire story. This means while I got the site confused with another, my point is still valid, this is not a government website and their is no assurance of accuracy.
Uh, it's a registered non-governmental nonprofit at the leading foreign policy institution in the US. Read their Wikipedia page. The reason a lot of the information you refer to is publicly available is because the National Security Archive fights with FOIA requests to get it out there. Their funding comes from journalistic organizations which want access to the information, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, et al. You claim they're "biased"? Uh-huh.
And what you fail to realize is that the administration would be gone and no one would be there to mark items classified or person to be excluded from public view. What part of that concept is difficult for you to handle? When the administration is gone, it is gone... They don't stick around for another 12 years finishing what they started.
Presidential libraries, heard of them? This is one of the tasks they accomplish. Previous administrations haven't had any trouble abiding by the requirements of the PRA. Why do you think this one is magically exempt?
Ok, so what if they do think that? There is no punishment for violating the PRA and neither their contempt for it nor anyone's desire to honor it negates and real technical issues that may have happened resulting in the loss of the emails. Your simply inferring intent with little to no proof backing it up other then your interpretation of documents provided in response to a lawsuit. And in doing so, your purposely ignoring real issues that happen all around the world in IT.
Contrary to your belief, the PRA falls under Title 44 of the United States Code, and is in effect as statutory law. It's accepted as prima facie evidence in court. In particular, I suggest you look at the US Code Title 18, Chapter 37, and Title 18, Chapter 73.
My interpretation of the documents is not necessary, as the legal briefs are clear and accessible to anybody with a reading level 9th grade or above. The point is that the "real and technical issues" should never have happened, as it was willful negligence.
They got it marked properly because they did not have a 3 to 5 year back log due to a switch in systems. Fuck, what is so hard to understand about that? Are you going to deny that there was a back log when the very site you profess to be authoritative in the subject offers papers declaring that? It has nothing do with being proprietary. It has to do with being able to keep up.
I don't know where you keep getting a "3 to 5 year backlog." The White House clearly stated an 18 month ingestion process which they didn't want to do, even though it would have been completed by the end of his second term, citing concerns over the ability to properly mark things for archival (even though the Office of Administration had certified the system to do exactly that previously).
You brought up the proprietary aspect, not me (as you were somehow ignoring that Lotus is proprietary also). They did, in fact, have the ability to comply (per the White House's own statements), and chose not to. I don't see why that's so hard for you to grok.
If I don't understand what I'm talking about, you must be really fucking lost. To date your argument has been ignore those facts and this is what happened because in 2009 thing are done this way so there is no excuse for whatever happened 5 years ago in 2003. Fuck dude, get a god damn grip on reality. I have enough experience in IT to know you are fucking clueless and your limited experience is just that, limite
FAIL. The National Security Archive is maintained at George Washington University. That ~nsarchiv part? That's because their site is at GWU. They are detailing their efforts to get the information preserved.
Yes, the automated solution wouldn't have finished sorting until well into Bush's last year. You fail to realize, however, that the Presidential Records Act doesn't require them to be released until twelve years after he leaves office. Are you honestly telling me that you don't think they could properly categorize email during that time? The system had an estimated 18 month ingestion time, but remember that it took them five years to even get to that point, with a manual system in the meantime.
It's clear from the White House's response to lawsuits that they simply don't want to try, and think they're somehow above the requirements in the PRA.
Those administrations had the ability to mark it classified because they had a centralized repository of email (and if you think Exchange is somehow more proprietary than Lotus, you don't know what you're talking about, again), and they utilized at least two of the twelve years granted to them under the PRA to ensure correct classification.
I can understand that you don't know what the fuck you're talking about, and you want to view everything through the piss-poor experience you've had in IT, along with an inability to digest clearly presented information. You can put words into my mouth (Bush was "evil"), and scream your political affiliation (hint: "unique" events do not exempt one from the law), and you're not going to be swayed by objective information or realistic thought.
It's is entirely accurate, and you're seriously calling the National Security Archives "baised"? Uhh... right.
It, frankly, doesn't matter if the automated solution distinguished or not. The automated solution complied with the Records Act by capturing all communication, which could be filtered later. After all, they have a few years before they need to actually release the records, and that sort of distinguishing is not hard to do, given that classified emails always have it in the subject line.
Funny how the Clinton admin, George H.W. Bush admin, and Reagan admin didn't have any trouble with not disclosing classified information.
Firstly, let me say that you grossly underestimate the opportunities afforded by education today, probably because of your own experiences. While "reading from the lesson plans and doing the reading and other assignments" is not an option, learning on your own has always been an option, whether or not you're even in school.
I can't say that her method of progress is going to help her any when she makes it to college unless she intends on being a math major, though, as almost everything is structured. Standardized curriculum, at the very least, sets an expectation with the student of a typical manner of teaching/learning. Whether that's a good thing or not is debatable, but it is a consideration later in life.
Why you think children in traditional education can't learn anything from sports, shopping, or $activity is beyond me. That is not endemic to homeschooling, just that you can pretend a vacation teaches something. To be honest, any kind of "learning" vacation you may take, traditional students would get the same thing out of it. Going to DC? Everybody hits the museums.
While you make the claim that skipping a grade "helped you" socially, I would say you're making an argument from ignorance. Truthfully, you have no idea how your social skills would have developed had you not moved up, and I have no idea how mine would have developed if I had moved up. To be sure, there are some "rights of passage" where you would have been behind the curve (alcohol, driver's license, tobacco, whatever), and I'm assuming you weren't involved in many sports (wrestling, football, hockey, and other things where, frankly, size/age matters, or you were stronger than the average).
On the other hand, if you say it purely because you felt you could relate better to kids older than you on an intellectual/maturity level, it may have "helped." You can admit that it plays less of an influence when you get older (still in school) and some kids pretty much stop maturing/etc, though? Nothing precluded you from making friends with the kids older than you without moving up, though friendship based purely on intellectual equality would leave one with very few friends in adulthood.
Yeah, "lol", the SAT was "dumbed down", as if you know when I took it, my relative intelligence level, or how I scored.
I mentioned socializing with other children because, really, spending time with siblings/friends or sports teams (a couple hours a week) is not the same as dealing with people who you don't particularly like for 35 hours a week.
It actually annoys me that the biggest argument homeschoolers can make against traditional education is that they can "do it better", without any valid basis for comparison. Had you sent your oldest through at least a couple years of school in your area, ok. You are, however, making blanket assumptions based on how things were where and when you went through primary education with no idea how things are done now or what options your children have (hint: the Johns Hopkins high-potential youth program is not for high school -- it's for elementary).
You dismiss decades of research to make the spurious claim that your kids are the "best evar!!1!one" when they're not even in their teenage years yet (and which point talents for music/sports/whatever may present themselves, as a LOT of kids do it). You presume that other people will be taking off their garbage and mowing their lawns. You don't think the Bell Curve applies to your progeny?
I'd say you -might- be able to make an honest judgment once they're adults, but probably not even then (since you have no idea what traditional, public education may offer in your area, or even what it offers since you graduated).
The Office of Administration was extant for a couple of decades (1977), while the CIO sprang into existence June 4th, 2001. The OA has six directors, and is not a "political subdivision" of the CIO.
The National Archives, in fact, specifically chastised the Executive Office of the President (EOP) for not capturing them, and the EOP argued that the OA was not subject to FOIA inquiries (successfully, I might add, under the argument that they're an agency when the EOP feels like it [wherein they'd have to comply] and they're not when the EOP doesn't want stuff released). The procedure in place, after the Bush Administration migrated from Lotus to Exchange, was to run use VBScript on a per-workstation basis to archive the.PSTs, with virtually no security logging on the Exchange server, and no sort of audit on the mail. The National Archives brought this to them on multiple occassions because they were not getting any information.
It's not a matter of "improper configuration" or "database corrupt". Why you think a database would be used to hold a list of filenames, I have no idea, and they're certainly not using binary blobs in a database to store them. Databases can (and should be) backed up also, you know.
The earliest date on the tapes for email is October 2003. Tapes were reused by the administration before that (after they scrapped the Clinton Administration's system). However, the tapes only held once-daily snapshots of PSTs. The EOP admitted that they can't even track where the hard drives in the workstations may have gone (which is a flagrant violation of DoD requirements, along with other agencies, and White Knight clearance encompasses TS:SCI).
The tapes did go offsite, and were successfully subpoenaed in May 2008. However, zero records exist from the EOVP around the time of the Plame scandal. Fully 16% of the days Bush was in office, at least one of the offices subject to the recordkeeping act had zero messages.
Sure, the best practices are lax at times, but a 1/8 failure rate is ludicrously bad. Federal government != state government. They have more money, and anything dealing with classified information is strictly regulated.
This doesn't even touch the official emails that went through RNC servers, or anything that may have been on a platform which doesn't run VB or can skirt a program which just archives the PST off your workstation (laptops off the VPN, Blackberries)
You're talking out of your ass. A working system was in place. There was a campaign finance scandal with Gore in 2000 or so, and they successfully recovered the records (7,000 or so were all that were missing for a big Republican uproar, whereas the Bush admin is missing 5 MILLION).
How about this: go read about it. First result on Google (National Security Archives at George Washington University have been fighting this for a long time). When you have a grasp on it without applying your backwater personal experience to all of IT, come back.
Clinton lost ~100,000 emails (a generous estimate based on spurious claims that never held up in court). The Bush Administration lost them for two fucking years. Which administration spied on US citizens (and they've always been able to, but this is nominally the jurisdiction of the FBI)? Which one specifically authorized violating the Geneva Convention (torture, wars of aggression), flaunted the Constitution, and suspended habeas corpus?
Hmm... I wonder why people would want his emails.
Again with the unrealistic view of backups. NOBODY working in enterprise IT thinks that NAS is a long-term backup solution (long term = more than a couple days).
I really don't care about your anecdotal evidence. I'm talking about the industry standards here and the practical limitations to any magnetic media.
Pot, meet kettle.
Multiple backup sets, offsite, controlled environment, never rotated. It's common practice in the financial industry to keep 10+ years. We don't have a problem recovering data if we need to (and if we get an audit, we have to prove that we can). The problem is not as impossible as you make it sound.
Tape safe, heard of them? There goes every argument in your last paragraph. FWIW, when we got rid of our old AViiONs a few years back, we lost nothing from 20 year old reel-to-reels sitting in the open in the server room.
While, yes, tape loaders can screw up through operator error (and other reasons), large scale backup solutions do not work that way. Anything critical is kept on the SAN, with local storage being used for database caches, temp files, and not-so-critical stuff (OS installs, etc). The SAN is set up with fast nearline storage (Fiber Channel, SAS, maybe still U320) being accessed over iSCSI, Fiber Channel fabric, or InfiniBand. The filesystem (Sun's SAM for an example) moves older files and those not used very often to slower (higher capacity) storage, like SATA drives. As it gets older, it's moved off to tape libraries. All of this is transparent (it looks like one filesystem to systems), and you back the entire thing up at intervals (daily, weekly, whatever) to LTO or something similar, and those are taken off-site. Tapes are cheap, why bother rotating them back in?
When you get out of whatever backwater shop you're in, into a large-scale operation run right (which yours clearly is not), you're going to be in for a shock.
First off, let me say that I think you should reconsider starting your child's schooling at 3. The research on the appropriate age to begin education has been done to death. Regardless of how bright you may think your three year old is, he/she is three, and doesn't have the cognitive ability to begin really learning yet.
Secondly, people ask you if you're Catholic? Uhhh... ok. It's not like there are Catholic parochial schools or anything. It's usually the fundies who home-school their children.
I brought up the issue of standardized curriculum because it exposes children to things they don't know they're interested in yet, or don't think they want to do. MIT, UC Berkeley, GA Tech, VA Tech, West Point, USAFA, and other top-notch engineering schools (I'm focusing on them because that's what I'm familiar with, really) still require generalized humanities courses. While I'll freely admit that traditional education tends to focus on the 80% in the middle rather than the 10% on the bottom or the 10% on top, programs certainly exist that do so.
While the name of the program escapes me (and it may not exist anymore, it's been 15 years), the University of Minnesota offered an accelerated math program that ended up with students taking linear algebra/diff eq/multivariable calc in high school. Cost? Zero (to the student or their family). In larger areas/districts, enough high-potential students certainly exist to make offering such a program worthwhile, and it's done (again, the Twin Cities metro area in Minnesota is my comparison, since that's where I went through school). Yes, I was bored during a lot of classes, but that didn't preclude reading things I was interested in while they did other things, and once I got to middle school/high school, there were much better options.
Kids strong in one subject and weak in another aren't arbitrarily confined to a grade level in traditional education systems either. Were that the case, I'd still be in 7th grade art class. I do, however, disagree with the notion of an arbitrary "grade level" by age. While moving up several grades was an option for me, it was declined, as both my parents and the school's psychologist felt that peer socialization was more important than moving up. I wholeheartedly agree (not that I was aware of the option at the time). While I could have graduated high school at 11 or 12, I wouldn't have been able to relate to any of them, and probably would have felt ostracized.
That is not an issue in home schooling, though I fail to see why those who home school their children feel it's paramount to get them through primary education as quickly as possible. Even so, I finished high school done with multivariable and non-Euclidean geometry done, as well as a lot of statistics/science/history/English credits, while still having the time to be on the wrestling team, Quiz Bowl, and a few other extracurriculars (knowledge bowl, academic decathlon, and other programs which may or may not exist outside Minnesota, though IIRC Academic Decathlon is a national program).
Still, I wouldn't have guessed that I'd be working as a UNIX sysadmin/Perl/Python dev, and I think a program which focused on what I thought I wanted to do as a teenager would have left me woefully one-dimensional.
It was my experience that the "smart kids" didn't really give a damn what the rest of the kids thought, as social groups formed around that distinction as well, and nobody treated us like lepers. Maybe we just had thicker skin than you did, but I can't recall a single (one!) instance of being "bullied" because of my intelligence.
Adults being "amazed at the level of sophistication..." is somewhat of a canard. As I alluded to in my previous post, your children are more used to socializing with adults than people in their age group. It doesn't mean they don't have social skills (quite the contrary, as the skills kids use to communicate and the skills adults use to communicate are not transferable, and gen
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You are conflating cache contention in early dual-core CPUs (Pentium Ds in particular) with thread-safe code being inherently slow. The speed loss from locking is two instructions, generally, and a library being "thread-safe" isn't going to murder performance.
I don't think you understand what locking is for if you worry about the OS's thread/process scheduler makes a damn bit of difference with regards to the need for locking. I repeat, locking is not why you were seeing crappy performance on multithreaded applications. Realistically, things have been multithreaded for a long time in STA containers, pthreads, and a million other implementations, because it's almost impossible to properly implement asynchronous calls or event handlers in single-threaded code.
Honestly, the newer cores were always faster than older cores "even at the same clockspeed" (especially at the same clockspeed), with the notable exception of Netburst's super-long pipeline.
I'm not seeing anything about those running on Linux, much less Linux on ARM. Am I missing something?
While true to a point, pinning it to one core generally resolves that. It's a fairly accurate generalization to say that any one core of an AM2 Athlon64 or Core2 will beat the hell out of a P4 even on single threaded performance (and due to improved cache coherency, pinning isn't strictly necessary).
Most games should be able to benefit more, yes, large projects aren't quite so easy to synchronize, and they aren't that parallelizable (you've got AI, physics, and...?).
Pin them with processor affinity, unless CoH is mysteriously multithreaded now.
Yeah! Most instructions per clock, better branch prediction, a shorter pipeline, and fewer cache misses are for suckers!
Seriously, I take it you haven't actually looked at Task Manager on a dual core (quad-core is, admittedly not that useful for games) system playing anything Source based/etc. Just check anything on this. It's a little outdated, but so is your CPU.
Nothing wrong with a P4 for a lot of tasks, but you're deluding yourself if you think it performs better than new CPUs.
The 25 year "average lifespan" is a massive canard, since it includes deaths from the (many) wars, death during childhood from diseases, etc. Back to ancient times, people were living to be quite old (Seneca, Pliny the Elder, Aristotle, Plato, etc).
I don't think you use Nexenta or Solaris with any kind of regularity. Solaris Express (both SXCE and Indiana) have the GNU toolchain and GNU libc present. Even on "GNU/OpenSolaris" (Nexenta), mutt, fetchmail, puppet, and other basic utilities fail to compile without tweaking the Makefile even when the necessary libraries are in the path. I also don't think you use kFreeBSD. Look at this and tell me how it's "trivial."
/proc filesystem the way some Linux utilities expect it (htop being one of those).
./configure on another system because running on Linux is "good enough." Also you, apparently, because you're talking out of your ass.
People in branded zones won't be able to tell they're not on Linux as long as they don't try to load a kernel module, or check the uname, or do anything even remotely complicated with the network (branded zones don't have a real network interface, as far as the zone can tell, and Crossbow/ip-type=exclusive doesn't work for lx brands yet -- it may never, but to differences in the network driver code). The Linux ABI module on FreeBSD/kFreeBSD, Nexenta, and branded zones on Solaris all fail to create the
The complaint about ugly GNU-isms is about lazy developers (which includes the FSF, see: gcc) who can't be arsed to even try
If you think it's trivial, you haven't tried recently. I mean, sure, the Solaris linker is pretty spartan, but bootstrapping gcc on OpenSolaris is a nightmare. Autotools can't figure out proper ABIs on Solaris (you have to pass it to configure an awful lot), set -R and -L, etc. Compiling ghc (Haskell) is a bigger adventure, as the GNU autotools are pathetic on systems other than Linux.
Frankly, the GNU-isms running rampant make it really goddamn difficult to compile software that's supposed to be portable without building the entire GNU toolchain (and even then, autotools often doesn't work properly). The sooner LLVM blows away GCC, the better. This is not at all reasonable, and that's assuming you're not trying to use some dirty compiler like Sun Studio.
Until the developers bother with some basic portability which doesn't involve setting environment variables which shouldn't need to be set, you can keep your "GNU/" off the front of my OpenSolaris/BSD.
I suspect that might get a little onerous for people with an assload of achievements.
IIRC, rmdir didn't exist in DOS (rmdir is NT shell, it was deltree, and that didn't show up until DOS 6).
I never said it was the superlative language for every task. I said that, in its own domain (embedded systems, operating systems, and some core game code), nothing has ever truly replaced it.
I wasn't actually putting those words in your mouth specifically, just a general statement. The fact that nothing has truly replaced it doesn't mean it's the best possible language for the task. Operating systems? Embedded systems? CUDA? M'kay. It's well-tested, suitably low level, , etc. Core game code, though? I can't tell you the last time I saw a game which was CPU bound, or played to C's other strengths (other than graphics frameworks, but OpenGL/DirectX bindings are available for a lot of languages these days).
It's an indictment of the style of programming that garbage collection enables: "create it, use it, forget it". You can say that the object allocation or destructors were sloppy, but from my perspective it seemed as though the game should know what resources it needs to free when going from graphics level 4 to 3 and free them using whatever the game's language had instead of a C++ delete operator. Any small bits that leaked out would be caught by the GC eventually, but the majority of the resources (the part that actually affected program performance) would be immediately freed and performance would immediately improve.
That's not the style of programming GC enables. The operator you're looking for is generally dispose() to call the destructor. The "style of programming" you refer to would lead to explicit memory leaks in C++/C (which are obviously not any better), and any profiler should make it very easy to find. Sloppy coding != language flaw, and I'd wager that bug would have presented itself regardless of the language. Shouldn't have happened in the first place, and I really can't see how you conflate a logic problem in the code (frankly, whoever didn't dispose of the object in a managed languge wouldn't have in C++ either) with a problem with garbage collection.
The GC hate was deserved 20 years ago when you could see the system pause on a GC pass. However, the algorithms backing said garbage collectors have improved significantly, we have more granular marking of objects, and clock rates have gone up. The cost/benefit ratio just isn't worth it most of the time (see: rise of Java/.NET).
Thing is, C++, D, and Lisp work by putting a layer of runtime between themselves and the hardware. They can't replace C because they define and build themselves in such a way as to push them out of C's problem domain.
Funny, I wasn't aware that compiled D or Lisp ran against a VM. Objects or not, the bytecode pushed out from a ML compiler and a C compiler is very similar. D lags behind a little bit due to the relative youth of the language. C's problem domain is systems engineering, but that also goes for Prolog, Forth, D, C++, and a number of other languages.
I hear this argument a lot, but I've not seen it borne out in reality.
While the game you were tuning clearly had problems with the generational garbage collector (more to do with sloppy object allocation and destructors than the GC implementation itself, probably), I can't see how that is a point-blank indictment of garbage collection. If your argument is portability, then yes, C wins. However, it's the proverbial chicken and the egg. A C compiler exists for pretty much every architecture known to man. On the other hand, so does a BASIC compiler.
Somebody is porting those compilers, just as they port them for other languages. The extra effort involved in moving, say, the CL garbage collector as opposed to the CL compiler is trivial. It is not an effective argument against it.
What C offers over Erlang, ML, Ada, and other languages is a massive developer base and familiar paradigms. If you want to program embedded systems (Erlang is still a good use case here) or operating systems, by all means, use C. For a game, though? You're going to have libc, be dealing with the OS's memory allocator, etc. In these instances, Haskell, ML, D, and other languages are competitive in speed and memory usage.
People have given though to replacing C (D, C++), and some of those developments are quite old (Lisp). It's hard to convince some developers that with increased hardware capabilities and higher-level development, plus well established utility libraries, "bare metal" access isn't needed anymore. In truth, re-inventing the wheel in every new project to handle strings easily (as one example) without being kneecapped wastes an astronomical amount of development time.
There's nothing wrong with C, and the newer standards offer a lot, but the notion that it's the superlative language for every task has got to go.
Seriously? OCaml, Haskell, D, Lisp, Forth, FORTRAN, COBOL, Delphi/Pascal, Ada? These languages don't exist? Depending on the use case, they're faster than C (OCaml/Forth in particular), also.
You claimed I was wrong when I said they don't have all the information. And yes they are biased- they take biased stands all the time. They write articles on foreign policy for think tanks and influence foreign policy. There is an implied bias right there, as soon as they support or refute something, bias is present.
Ah, no. I said that they get a lot of information declassified through FOIA requests, not that they "have all the information". I wasn't aware that publishing declassified information (which is what their articles are) constituted bias. Being used as a reference by a think tank != writing for a think tank. Beyond which, the very fact that they publish declassified information years after the fact prevents them from "influencing foreign policy" (unlike Project for a New American Century). Some of their "newest" documents are about Kissinger, and nuclear response teams from 1974-1996. <sarcasm>Those must have a huge influence.</sarcasm>
Who fucking cares about your you're. Grammar erros don't make my points invalid and you know it. I'm surprised you didn't go after the Do instead of So as if it actually meant something. And no, they are fighting against providing them right now...Not 12 years from now. If they have the twelve years, shut up until they aren't there because otherwise, they don't need to produce them right now. Even for FOIA requests, technical issues is grounds to deny them so even for the FOIA stand that you want to conflate is dead. If they have the 12 years, then wait until the time is up. If they don't then admit you were wrong.
So, you're suggesting that we essentially wait until the statute of limitations is up before we ask that they comply with the law? The Reagan admin didn't have any trouble complying (even though Oliver North destroyed emails during Iran-Contra, they were recovered). The Clinton admin didn't have any trouble (campaign finance inquiry in 2000, emails from the Office of the VP were missing). I don't need to wait 12 years to say that they're never going to do it, and your argument thus far as been that it's impossible for them to do so after they leave office. Contradicting yourself is fun.
I can't believe your really this fucking stupid. Listen very carefully and if you must, ask an adult to explain this to you. In order for a law to have a punishment, it either directly has to prescribe one in it's wording or have another law encompass it. Nothing in title 18 nor the PRA provides punishment for not following the PRA. I asked you to show where it was in case I missed it and all you can do is claim that title 18 applies to everyone. Well, that is true but if title 18 doesn't prescribe any punishment for violating the PRA, then there is still NO FUCKING PUNISHMENT. What part of that do you not understand? If you know something I don't know, show it and be specific. Pointing to a title with thousands of sections in it doesn't prove you found anything, give the exact section or shut up about it. BTW, I know you can't find it so you can save some time and give up now.
This from the person who can't interpret two fucking sentences in the Constitution (15th Amendment. "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude" has no bearing on legal rights to marry, nor inter-racial marriage, and it never did. Ever. Not in a single federal court case)? Yes, Title 18 applies to everyone. It's where every punishment in the US Code is detailed (they are not listed under the laws). Just because it doesn't explicitly say "for violation of the Presidential Records Act" doesn't mean it's not applicable, unless you expect them to update for every fucking act of Congress. I'm not going to give you the exact section because you can fucking Google it from the quote. The entire US Code is up at Cornell's website.
Ohh.. their Wikipedia page, wait a minute, I'll change that. Anyways, they are not a government agency and do no, I repeat "do not" have access to any more information then any of us do through freedom of information requests and public sources. In other words, they don't have the full story and because they are a 503c company or whatever doesn't change that. Nonprofit status says nothing about biased, look at moveon dotorg's nonprofit status. There are plenty of biased nonprofit charities and so on.
Where did I say they have access to more information than the rest of us? Nowhere. I said that it's their mission to obtain as much foreign policy information as possible through FOIA requests. As a Journalism/PoliSci school, they have no reason to be biased (unlike Democracy Now, the American Enterprise Institute, and some other nonprofits). Don't conflate nonprofit with partisan hacks.
DO your saying that as long as bush provides the emails before the ten year limit is up for the presidential library then the missing emails at this point pose no problem? Right? I mean why are we talking about the presidential records act when he doesn't have to have them separated or turned over until 12 years later? You see, you don't even believe that to be true because your sitting here bitching about it. If it was possible for the libraries to continue the work then it wouldn't matter until after that time had expired. Not being able to find them now because of the circumstances that we know of doesn't mean they will be missing in 12 years when the library withholding terms end. Your really grasping for straws here.
You have comprehension problems (also, FFS, "YOU'RE" is not "YOUR"). I'm bitching about it because they are not going to have the records in 12 years. They are fighting against even attempting to recover some of the millions of emails that they lost through gross incompetence. If it were about waiting another ten years for FOIA requests or something, that'd be one thing. This is the administration saying "we don't have them, and we never will." Not the same thing.
actually your wrong. Nothing in the PRA gives punishment prescribed in title 18 and nothing in 18 refers directly to the presidential record. At best, you can manipulate the destruction of documents connected to a case or investigation but a FIOA request is neither and the lawsuit ordering the production of the record happened well after the deed. You simply cannot show in a convincing way anyplace where there is a civil or criminal punishment for not following the PRA.
Again, you fail. The PRA does not prescribe specific punishments, but Title 18 applies to every US citizen.
Whoever knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States or any case filed under title 11, or in relation to or contemplation of any such matter or case, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.
Hmm...
Whoever, by threats or force, willfully prevents, obstructs, impedes, or interferes with, or willfully attempts to prevent, obstruct, impede, or interfere with, the due exercise of rights or the performance of duties under any order, judgment, or decree of a court of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.
No injunctive or other civil relief against the conduct made criminal by this section shall be denied on the ground that such conduct is a crime.
Hmmm.....
Whoever feloniously steals, takes away, alters, falsifies, or otherwise avoids any record, writ, process, or other proceeding
Yep, I was thinking the national archives which is a government site. This site is a private third party site dedicated to pushing a viewpoint with publicly availible information. As I said, it is biased and it isn't the entire story. This means while I got the site confused with another, my point is still valid, this is not a government website and their is no assurance of accuracy.
Uh, it's a registered non-governmental nonprofit at the leading foreign policy institution in the US. Read their Wikipedia page. The reason a lot of the information you refer to is publicly available is because the National Security Archive fights with FOIA requests to get it out there. Their funding comes from journalistic organizations which want access to the information, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, et al. You claim they're "biased"? Uh-huh.
And what you fail to realize is that the administration would be gone and no one would be there to mark items classified or person to be excluded from public view. What part of that concept is difficult for you to handle? When the administration is gone, it is gone... They don't stick around for another 12 years finishing what they started.
Presidential libraries, heard of them? This is one of the tasks they accomplish. Previous administrations haven't had any trouble abiding by the requirements of the PRA. Why do you think this one is magically exempt?
Ok, so what if they do think that? There is no punishment for violating the PRA and neither their contempt for it nor anyone's desire to honor it negates and real technical issues that may have happened resulting in the loss of the emails. Your simply inferring intent with little to no proof backing it up other then your interpretation of documents provided in response to a lawsuit. And in doing so, your purposely ignoring real issues that happen all around the world in IT.
Contrary to your belief, the PRA falls under Title 44 of the United States Code, and is in effect as statutory law. It's accepted as prima facie evidence in court. In particular, I suggest you look at the US Code Title 18, Chapter 37, and Title 18, Chapter 73.
My interpretation of the documents is not necessary, as the legal briefs are clear and accessible to anybody with a reading level 9th grade or above. The point is that the "real and technical issues" should never have happened, as it was willful negligence.
They got it marked properly because they did not have a 3 to 5 year back log due to a switch in systems. Fuck, what is so hard to understand about that? Are you going to deny that there was a back log when the very site you profess to be authoritative in the subject offers papers declaring that? It has nothing do with being proprietary. It has to do with being able to keep up.
I don't know where you keep getting a "3 to 5 year backlog." The White House clearly stated an 18 month ingestion process which they didn't want to do, even though it would have been completed by the end of his second term, citing concerns over the ability to properly mark things for archival (even though the Office of Administration had certified the system to do exactly that previously).
You brought up the proprietary aspect, not me (as you were somehow ignoring that Lotus is proprietary also). They did, in fact, have the ability to comply (per the White House's own statements), and chose not to. I don't see why that's so hard for you to grok.
If I don't understand what I'm talking about, you must be really fucking lost. To date your argument has been ignore those facts and this is what happened because in 2009 thing are done this way so there is no excuse for whatever happened 5 years ago in 2003. Fuck dude, get a god damn grip on reality. I have enough experience in IT to know you are fucking clueless and your limited experience is just that, limite
FAIL. The National Security Archive is maintained at George Washington University. That ~nsarchiv part? That's because their site is at GWU. They are detailing their efforts to get the information preserved.
Yes, the automated solution wouldn't have finished sorting until well into Bush's last year. You fail to realize, however, that the Presidential Records Act doesn't require them to be released until twelve years after he leaves office. Are you honestly telling me that you don't think they could properly categorize email during that time? The system had an estimated 18 month ingestion time, but remember that it took them five years to even get to that point, with a manual system in the meantime.
It's clear from the White House's response to lawsuits that they simply don't want to try, and think they're somehow above the requirements in the PRA.
Those administrations had the ability to mark it classified because they had a centralized repository of email (and if you think Exchange is somehow more proprietary than Lotus, you don't know what you're talking about, again), and they utilized at least two of the twelve years granted to them under the PRA to ensure correct classification.
I can understand that you don't know what the fuck you're talking about, and you want to view everything through the piss-poor experience you've had in IT, along with an inability to digest clearly presented information. You can put words into my mouth (Bush was "evil"), and scream your political affiliation (hint: "unique" events do not exempt one from the law), and you're not going to be swayed by objective information or realistic thought.
It's is entirely accurate, and you're seriously calling the National Security Archives "baised"? Uhh... right.
It, frankly, doesn't matter if the automated solution distinguished or not. The automated solution complied with the Records Act by capturing all communication, which could be filtered later. After all, they have a few years before they need to actually release the records, and that sort of distinguishing is not hard to do, given that classified emails always have it in the subject line.
Funny how the Clinton admin, George H.W. Bush admin, and Reagan admin didn't have any trouble with not disclosing classified information.
What agenda could I have? Abiding by the law?
Firstly, let me say that you grossly underestimate the opportunities afforded by education today, probably because of your own experiences. While "reading from the lesson plans and doing the reading and other assignments" is not an option, learning on your own has always been an option, whether or not you're even in school.
I can't say that her method of progress is going to help her any when she makes it to college unless she intends on being a math major, though, as almost everything is structured. Standardized curriculum, at the very least, sets an expectation with the student of a typical manner of teaching/learning. Whether that's a good thing or not is debatable, but it is a consideration later in life.
Why you think children in traditional education can't learn anything from sports, shopping, or $activity is beyond me. That is not endemic to homeschooling, just that you can pretend a vacation teaches something. To be honest, any kind of "learning" vacation you may take, traditional students would get the same thing out of it. Going to DC? Everybody hits the museums.
While you make the claim that skipping a grade "helped you" socially, I would say you're making an argument from ignorance. Truthfully, you have no idea how your social skills would have developed had you not moved up, and I have no idea how mine would have developed if I had moved up. To be sure, there are some "rights of passage" where you would have been behind the curve (alcohol, driver's license, tobacco, whatever), and I'm assuming you weren't involved in many sports (wrestling, football, hockey, and other things where, frankly, size/age matters, or you were stronger than the average).
On the other hand, if you say it purely because you felt you could relate better to kids older than you on an intellectual/maturity level, it may have "helped." You can admit that it plays less of an influence when you get older (still in school) and some kids pretty much stop maturing/etc, though? Nothing precluded you from making friends with the kids older than you without moving up, though friendship based purely on intellectual equality would leave one with very few friends in adulthood.
Yeah, "lol", the SAT was "dumbed down", as if you know when I took it, my relative intelligence level, or how I scored.
I mentioned socializing with other children because, really, spending time with siblings/friends or sports teams (a couple hours a week) is not the same as dealing with people who you don't particularly like for 35 hours a week.
It actually annoys me that the biggest argument homeschoolers can make against traditional education is that they can "do it better", without any valid basis for comparison. Had you sent your oldest through at least a couple years of school in your area, ok. You are, however, making blanket assumptions based on how things were where and when you went through primary education with no idea how things are done now or what options your children have (hint: the Johns Hopkins high-potential youth program is not for high school -- it's for elementary).
You dismiss decades of research to make the spurious claim that your kids are the "best evar!!1!one" when they're not even in their teenage years yet (and which point talents for music/sports/whatever may present themselves, as a LOT of kids do it). You presume that other people will be taking off their garbage and mowing their lawns. You don't think the Bell Curve applies to your progeny?
I'd say you -might- be able to make an honest judgment once they're adults, but probably not even then (since you have no idea what traditional, public education may offer in your area, or even what it offers since you graduated).
Failed analogy. As noted in my other post, read this. Rife with incompetence, destroyed a working solution to rely on manual user intervention, et al.
That is embarrassingly incorrect.
.PSTs, with virtually no security logging on the Exchange server, and no sort of audit on the mail. The National Archives brought this to them on multiple occassions because they were not getting any information.
The Office of Administration was extant for a couple of decades (1977), while the CIO sprang into existence June 4th, 2001. The OA has six directors, and is not a "political subdivision" of the CIO.
The National Archives, in fact, specifically chastised the Executive Office of the President (EOP) for not capturing them, and the EOP argued that the OA was not subject to FOIA inquiries (successfully, I might add, under the argument that they're an agency when the EOP feels like it [wherein they'd have to comply] and they're not when the EOP doesn't want stuff released). The procedure in place, after the Bush Administration migrated from Lotus to Exchange, was to run use VBScript on a per-workstation basis to archive the
It's not a matter of "improper configuration" or "database corrupt". Why you think a database would be used to hold a list of filenames, I have no idea, and they're certainly not using binary blobs in a database to store them. Databases can (and should be) backed up also, you know.
The earliest date on the tapes for email is October 2003. Tapes were reused by the administration before that (after they scrapped the Clinton Administration's system). However, the tapes only held once-daily snapshots of PSTs. The EOP admitted that they can't even track where the hard drives in the workstations may have gone (which is a flagrant violation of DoD requirements, along with other agencies, and White Knight clearance encompasses TS:SCI).
The tapes did go offsite, and were successfully subpoenaed in May 2008. However, zero records exist from the EOVP around the time of the Plame scandal. Fully 16% of the days Bush was in office, at least one of the offices subject to the recordkeeping act had zero messages.
Sure, the best practices are lax at times, but a 1/8 failure rate is ludicrously bad. Federal government != state government. They have more money, and anything dealing with classified information is strictly regulated.
This doesn't even touch the official emails that went through RNC servers, or anything that may have been on a platform which doesn't run VB or can skirt a program which just archives the PST off your workstation (laptops off the VPN, Blackberries)
You're talking out of your ass. A working system was in place. There was a campaign finance scandal with Gore in 2000 or so, and they successfully recovered the records (7,000 or so were all that were missing for a big Republican uproar, whereas the Bush admin is missing 5 MILLION).
How about this: go read about it. First result on Google (National Security Archives at George Washington University have been fighting this for a long time). When you have a grasp on it without applying your backwater personal experience to all of IT, come back.
Clinton lost ~100,000 emails (a generous estimate based on spurious claims that never held up in court). The Bush Administration lost them for two fucking years. Which administration spied on US citizens (and they've always been able to, but this is nominally the jurisdiction of the FBI)? Which one specifically authorized violating the Geneva Convention (torture, wars of aggression), flaunted the Constitution, and suspended habeas corpus?
Hmm... I wonder why people would want his emails.
Again with the unrealistic view of backups. NOBODY working in enterprise IT thinks that NAS is a long-term backup solution (long term = more than a couple days).
I really don't care about your anecdotal evidence. I'm talking about the industry standards here and the practical limitations to any magnetic media.
Pot, meet kettle.
Multiple backup sets, offsite, controlled environment, never rotated. It's common practice in the financial industry to keep 10+ years. We don't have a problem recovering data if we need to (and if we get an audit, we have to prove that we can). The problem is not as impossible as you make it sound.
Tape safe, heard of them? There goes every argument in your last paragraph. FWIW, when we got rid of our old AViiONs a few years back, we lost nothing from 20 year old reel-to-reels sitting in the open in the server room.
While, yes, tape loaders can screw up through operator error (and other reasons), large scale backup solutions do not work that way. Anything critical is kept on the SAN, with local storage being used for database caches, temp files, and not-so-critical stuff (OS installs, etc). The SAN is set up with fast nearline storage (Fiber Channel, SAS, maybe still U320) being accessed over iSCSI, Fiber Channel fabric, or InfiniBand. The filesystem (Sun's SAM for an example) moves older files and those not used very often to slower (higher capacity) storage, like SATA drives. As it gets older, it's moved off to tape libraries. All of this is transparent (it looks like one filesystem to systems), and you back the entire thing up at intervals (daily, weekly, whatever) to LTO or something similar, and those are taken off-site. Tapes are cheap, why bother rotating them back in?
When you get out of whatever backwater shop you're in, into a large-scale operation run right (which yours clearly is not), you're going to be in for a shock.
First off, let me say that I think you should reconsider starting your child's schooling at 3. The research on the appropriate age to begin education has been done to death. Regardless of how bright you may think your three year old is, he/she is three, and doesn't have the cognitive ability to begin really learning yet.
Secondly, people ask you if you're Catholic? Uhhh... ok. It's not like there are Catholic parochial schools or anything. It's usually the fundies who home-school their children.
I brought up the issue of standardized curriculum because it exposes children to things they don't know they're interested in yet, or don't think they want to do. MIT, UC Berkeley, GA Tech, VA Tech, West Point, USAFA, and other top-notch engineering schools (I'm focusing on them because that's what I'm familiar with, really) still require generalized humanities courses. While I'll freely admit that traditional education tends to focus on the 80% in the middle rather than the 10% on the bottom or the 10% on top, programs certainly exist that do so.
While the name of the program escapes me (and it may not exist anymore, it's been 15 years), the University of Minnesota offered an accelerated math program that ended up with students taking linear algebra/diff eq/multivariable calc in high school. Cost? Zero (to the student or their family). In larger areas/districts, enough high-potential students certainly exist to make offering such a program worthwhile, and it's done (again, the Twin Cities metro area in Minnesota is my comparison, since that's where I went through school). Yes, I was bored during a lot of classes, but that didn't preclude reading things I was interested in while they did other things, and once I got to middle school/high school, there were much better options.
Kids strong in one subject and weak in another aren't arbitrarily confined to a grade level in traditional education systems either. Were that the case, I'd still be in 7th grade art class. I do, however, disagree with the notion of an arbitrary "grade level" by age. While moving up several grades was an option for me, it was declined, as both my parents and the school's psychologist felt that peer socialization was more important than moving up. I wholeheartedly agree (not that I was aware of the option at the time). While I could have graduated high school at 11 or 12, I wouldn't have been able to relate to any of them, and probably would have felt ostracized.
That is not an issue in home schooling, though I fail to see why those who home school their children feel it's paramount to get them through primary education as quickly as possible. Even so, I finished high school done with multivariable and non-Euclidean geometry done, as well as a lot of statistics/science/history/English credits, while still having the time to be on the wrestling team, Quiz Bowl, and a few other extracurriculars (knowledge bowl, academic decathlon, and other programs which may or may not exist outside Minnesota, though IIRC Academic Decathlon is a national program).
Still, I wouldn't have guessed that I'd be working as a UNIX sysadmin/Perl/Python dev, and I think a program which focused on what I thought I wanted to do as a teenager would have left me woefully one-dimensional.
It was my experience that the "smart kids" didn't really give a damn what the rest of the kids thought, as social groups formed around that distinction as well, and nobody treated us like lepers. Maybe we just had thicker skin than you did, but I can't recall a single (one!) instance of being "bullied" because of my intelligence.
Adults being "amazed at the level of sophistication..." is somewhat of a canard. As I alluded to in my previous post, your children are more used to socializing with adults than people in their age group. It doesn't mean they don't have social skills (quite the contrary, as the skills kids use to communicate and the skills adults use to communicate are not transferable, and gen