I'm not sure why the review had gripes about the stability of the device - I never have any issues with mine at all. It plays damn near anything, the built-in SMB client for attached storage is wonderful, the web browser works well enough (albeit slowly).
It did have a pretty rocky start, but things are good now.
The problem with Rhee's "plan" was that it was all based on test scores.
This is a problem. It forces the teachers' hands, making them concentrate only on passing the standardized tests. While this may make sense for some subjects - like Math - it doesn't make a lot of sense for subjects like history or sociology which are extremely broad.
A teacher may teach the history of World War II very well, but not stress the importance of particular battles or dates; therefore the kids, which may actually have learned quite a bit, have a good chance of failing the test.
I had a history teacher like that - she didn't really stress dates. She was far more concerned that we understood the process of history, the causes of certain events and how that affected events that followed. I can't tell you exactly when the Pullman Trials happened without looking it up on Wikipedia, but I can tell you why it happened and the effects it had on organized labor. I can't tell you exactly when William Bradford in Plymouth decided to move from the communist model to a more free market model, but I can tell you why, and I can tell you what the result was.
What is more important? Memorizing the The Battle of X was on January Y, the year of Z? Or why that battle happened in the first place and why it mattered?
And yet, my memory of the standardized tests are dates. Dates, dates, and more dates.
These tests are broken. They're not helpful.
--
I understand the need to have some kind of metric, something measurable so that teachers could be anonymously and fairly evaluated, but a lot of what makes a Good teacher isn't something that can be put onto a test. And yet, we have to measure something.
Can you explain to me why a hardware dongle is a good form of DRM? It seems to me that the portion of the code that checks for the dongle presence can be circumvented like non-hardware copy protection. Or, it seems that it would be possible to write some software that simulates the dongle in some way (though it may be difficult to do). Or do the dongles tend to have the program's software on them in some form that make copying the original executable difficult?
And government-run health care is also based directly on the government's ability to pay.
What happens when the government money set aside for - as an example - hip replacements runs out? I'll tell you what happens, because it happens a lot where I live. People from Canada will cross the border and drive down into the United States where they can get the surgery done instead of having to wait 4-6 months for the funding to become available.
Living near Cleveland, I frequently see Canadian license plates going to the hospitals in this area. They're not doing this out of convenience.
I'm not certain that a DDoS on the MPAA's website would have the effect of embarrassment. It seems more like a victory; "Look, our measures are effective, otherwise they wouldn't be so upset."
I spent a lot of time on second edition, but I greatly enjoyed the release of 3.5 - with some house modifications for ease of play and consistency (like all groups). It removes a lot of the weirdness and balance issues in 2nd (variable XP tables, Bend Bars, Lift Gates, 9 levels of spells for wizards and 7 for clerics, racial limitations on class/level, THAC0, etc.) which I found particularly helpful.
But, like you, I don't feel a need to move from that edition of D&D for a good gaming experience. It fits my needs when running a classic fantasy setting game. 4th Edition didn't have that big of an improvement in the crunch experience (actually, it was a step back in my mind) to warrant bothering with it at all.
And, there's some other very cool systems out there... These days I am far, far more likely to move to a different system entirely if I don't feel the 3.5 ruleset is appropriate for the type of game I'm running. I like the World of Darkness stuff if I'd like to focus more on story yet still have characters statted out well, and for a quick, loose game, Fudge is fantastic.
I'd love to try the Spirit of the Century rule system at some point - it looks very, very cool.
Although in theory you can run any kind of game with any rules system, certain rules systems work better for certain kinds of games.
I, unfortunately, have had the same issues with Eclipse. I find it to be incredibly slow, bulky, and difficult to use for even standard tasks.
I do a lot of PHP work. I used to use the old, pre-Eclipse version of Zend Studio which was pretty good. When they moved to the Eclipse platform, it ended being a terrible product. I thought that, perhaps, the Zend people just didn't do a great job building on top of Eclipse and I decided to go to Eclipse directly. What a mistake - even the "easy installers" with all of the pre-installed, pre-configured PHP-specific plugins were a nightmare and rarely worked.
These days, I currently use a simple editor with syntax highlighting. The big, bulky IDEs are just too much, are a pain in the rear to work with, and force you to work within a very specific paradigm. It is their way or the highway. And, many of them don't support simple things like SFTP.
Every year or so I poke around and see if anything new has come along, and I might try a new product or two, but I always end up going back to "simple syntax highlighting text editor".
I am of the same mindset. I don't like big government programs - they cost a gigantic pile of money that I could otherwise keep, invest, and retire on later in life. But, since I'm currently being forced to pay into the bureaucratic monster, I might as well get a bit of it back. You know, getting back some of the money that I would have had if I wasn't forced to pay these high taxes.
One may wonder if Europe and Asia are to follow the U.S.
I don't know about Europe - I doubt they will - but Asia certainly won't. Asia has a terrible animal abuse record, especially in China, where all kinds of animal parts are believed to increase your virility. If you want to really feel sick for a while, check up on "bear bile farming" as an example.
Asia treats its own human population badly enough, what makes one think that they would come close to treating animals with any respect?
Best advice, right there. It's a challenge for certain, but making things better is the best thing you can do - for the company (ha) and, far more importantly, for yourself.
Hang in there!
And although it may feel like the whole place is going to fall apart any moment, it hasn't yet, you're in charge, and it sounds like you're gradually making it all better. Take a deep breath, Don't Panic, it'll be okay.
I don't see where he said that all systems have been reverse engineered and documented in one month; only that he is currently reverse engineering systems and documenting.
And, maybe this guy likes what he is doing, getting his hands dirty with network and phone stuff. And some people really like writing Perl (I don't; I think it's the devil's language). If he finds his work rewarding, who are you to mock him?
For the people who very helpfully tagged my comment as 'troll', I'd like to remind you that the idea of a small, limited government is what this country was founded on.
A federal government that does little more than provide for my safety, prosecutes federal crimes, acts as a unified entity to other countries, and keeps up interstate infrastructure sounds like a dream to me.
People see this as a problem, but I see it as an opportunity for innovation. We can throw up our hands and bemoan how terrible it is or we can work on making the entire process faster, cleaner, and less expensive.
Any idea on which countries will have the most positions lost? The article didn't mention this bit. Really is too bad, this is not a great time to be out of a job.
It is the root of the problem. But if you want votes then that's a good way to ensure you get some.
The problem is that the politicians who can solve the problems won't ever get elected. It's akin to a parent telling a kid he can't have ice cream, but must eat beansprouts instead.
[...] it's quite interesting that President Obama is briefed daily on the latest hot topic tweets and Facebook posts."
Not only interesting, but smart if he wants to get votes. Connecting with the public, and being able to converse on recent hot topics, or insert them into speeches, is a good way to get votes. It helps reduce the perception that he is disconnected from the people, which is an oft-heard complaint about those in Washington.
I interviewed with Amazon a while back and I ran into this issue. If I gave a solution to a problem that was correct - but wasn't the interviewer's correct - then they would get annoyed and huffy, hounding me for the 'real' answer. 85% of the interview process was these "Stupid Code Tricks" that have very little bearing on real development practice. I also found most (not all, but most - two of them were really cool) of the interviewers to be pretty arrogant.
Really a shame - I was offered a position (with great pay and benefits, I might add) but I was so put off by the behavior of the team I would have worked with that I declined.
P.S. I like the police. They keep the peace, and living in a large city, I am grateful for that. But the majority of police officers do not deserve the title - they are frequently loose cannons
I feel sorry for you. In the places I have lived the vast majority of the police have been good people who really do want to do the right thing. Sometimes they screw up, and once in a great while there's the rare bad apple, but on the whole they've always been great.
Maybe that is one of the differences between living in the city and living out in the rural areas.
Eventually we're going to end up a lot like Japan. Japan is a small place with a lot of people. Over time, we'll have small places in which to live, with fewer, more general purpose devices in the home that consume small amounts of energy. We'll eat smaller meals. In general, we'll make do with less because there's a finite supply of resources and a lot more people gobbling them all up.
We have quite a bit of time before that happens in the USA or Russia or China - those places have a LOT of vacant land - but we'll get there eventually.
We'll likely have to rely on growing "super foods" that are very dense with calories and nutrients. Lots of renewable energy sources. I'm betting Solar and Bio will be the big ones, with Biofuels being one of several solutions to the massive amount of human waste (poop). It is possible that more and more countries will start to enact incentives regarding breeding - either something very strict (you can have 1 or 2 kids, then you're sterilized) to something more flexible (you can have 2 kids, but any more and you lose certain benefits).
While food and energy are a concern, so are economies. With technology allowing people to do so much with so few people, what kind of work will people be able to find? Society needs only so many farmers, factory workers, etc., and with technology replacing hundreds and thousands of people... Where will we find work? What to do when a population is so incredibly productive that, say, only 30% of the population is needed to produce and service everyone?
Or, of course, with resources being strained with so many people, eventually People A are going to look at People B and say, "Hm, you know what, we need that fresh water supply more than they do..."
Perhaps we'll solve our population problems on our own and we won't have to worry about extreme population support.
Slashdot Mirror
I also love my BoxeeBox.
I'm not sure why the review had gripes about the stability of the device - I never have any issues with mine at all. It plays damn near anything, the built-in SMB client for attached storage is wonderful, the web browser works well enough (albeit slowly).
It did have a pretty rocky start, but things are good now.
Thank you for taking the time to explain a bit more about dongles, I appreciate it!
This is a problem. It forces the teachers' hands, making them concentrate only on passing the standardized tests. While this may make sense for some subjects - like Math - it doesn't make a lot of sense for subjects like history or sociology which are extremely broad.
A teacher may teach the history of World War II very well, but not stress the importance of particular battles or dates; therefore the kids, which may actually have learned quite a bit, have a good chance of failing the test.
I had a history teacher like that - she didn't really stress dates. She was far more concerned that we understood the process of history, the causes of certain events and how that affected events that followed. I can't tell you exactly when the Pullman Trials happened without looking it up on Wikipedia, but I can tell you why it happened and the effects it had on organized labor. I can't tell you exactly when William Bradford in Plymouth decided to move from the communist model to a more free market model, but I can tell you why, and I can tell you what the result was.
What is more important? Memorizing the The Battle of X was on January Y, the year of Z? Or why that battle happened in the first place and why it mattered?
And yet, my memory of the standardized tests are dates. Dates, dates, and more dates.
These tests are broken. They're not helpful.
--
I understand the need to have some kind of metric, something measurable so that teachers could be anonymously and fairly evaluated, but a lot of what makes a Good teacher isn't something that can be put onto a test. And yet, we have to measure something.
Can you explain to me why a hardware dongle is a good form of DRM? It seems to me that the portion of the code that checks for the dongle presence can be circumvented like non-hardware copy protection. Or, it seems that it would be possible to write some software that simulates the dongle in some way (though it may be difficult to do). Or do the dongles tend to have the program's software on them in some form that make copying the original executable difficult?
And government-run health care is also based directly on the government's ability to pay.
What happens when the government money set aside for - as an example - hip replacements runs out? I'll tell you what happens, because it happens a lot where I live. People from Canada will cross the border and drive down into the United States where they can get the surgery done instead of having to wait 4-6 months for the funding to become available.
Living near Cleveland, I frequently see Canadian license plates going to the hospitals in this area. They're not doing this out of convenience.
Please don't encourage them any more...
I'm not certain that a DDoS on the MPAA's website would have the effect of embarrassment. It seems more like a victory; "Look, our measures are effective, otherwise they wouldn't be so upset."
I haven't seen something like this stated so eloquently in a long time. I wish I hadn't used all my mod points earlier today.
I spent a lot of time on second edition, but I greatly enjoyed the release of 3.5 - with some house modifications for ease of play and consistency (like all groups). It removes a lot of the weirdness and balance issues in 2nd (variable XP tables, Bend Bars, Lift Gates, 9 levels of spells for wizards and 7 for clerics, racial limitations on class/level, THAC0, etc.) which I found particularly helpful.
But, like you, I don't feel a need to move from that edition of D&D for a good gaming experience. It fits my needs when running a classic fantasy setting game. 4th Edition didn't have that big of an improvement in the crunch experience (actually, it was a step back in my mind) to warrant bothering with it at all.
And, there's some other very cool systems out there... These days I am far, far more likely to move to a different system entirely if I don't feel the 3.5 ruleset is appropriate for the type of game I'm running. I like the World of Darkness stuff if I'd like to focus more on story yet still have characters statted out well, and for a quick, loose game, Fudge is fantastic.
I'd love to try the Spirit of the Century rule system at some point - it looks very, very cool.
Although in theory you can run any kind of game with any rules system, certain rules systems work better for certain kinds of games.
Ooops, I rambled again. )o:
I, unfortunately, have had the same issues with Eclipse. I find it to be incredibly slow, bulky, and difficult to use for even standard tasks.
I do a lot of PHP work. I used to use the old, pre-Eclipse version of Zend Studio which was pretty good. When they moved to the Eclipse platform, it ended being a terrible product. I thought that, perhaps, the Zend people just didn't do a great job building on top of Eclipse and I decided to go to Eclipse directly. What a mistake - even the "easy installers" with all of the pre-installed, pre-configured PHP-specific plugins were a nightmare and rarely worked.
These days, I currently use a simple editor with syntax highlighting. The big, bulky IDEs are just too much, are a pain in the rear to work with, and force you to work within a very specific paradigm. It is their way or the highway. And, many of them don't support simple things like SFTP.
Every year or so I poke around and see if anything new has come along, and I might try a new product or two, but I always end up going back to "simple syntax highlighting text editor".
I am of the same mindset. I don't like big government programs - they cost a gigantic pile of money that I could otherwise keep, invest, and retire on later in life. But, since I'm currently being forced to pay into the bureaucratic monster, I might as well get a bit of it back. You know, getting back some of the money that I would have had if I wasn't forced to pay these high taxes.
I don't know about Europe - I doubt they will - but Asia certainly won't. Asia has a terrible animal abuse record, especially in China, where all kinds of animal parts are believed to increase your virility. If you want to really feel sick for a while, check up on "bear bile farming" as an example.
Asia treats its own human population badly enough, what makes one think that they would come close to treating animals with any respect?
Best advice, right there. It's a challenge for certain, but making things better is the best thing you can do - for the company (ha) and, far more importantly, for yourself.
Hang in there!
And although it may feel like the whole place is going to fall apart any moment, it hasn't yet, you're in charge, and it sounds like you're gradually making it all better. Take a deep breath, Don't Panic, it'll be okay.
I don't see where he said that all systems have been reverse engineered and documented in one month; only that he is currently reverse engineering systems and documenting.
And, maybe this guy likes what he is doing, getting his hands dirty with network and phone stuff. And some people really like writing Perl (I don't; I think it's the devil's language). If he finds his work rewarding, who are you to mock him?
For the people who very helpfully tagged my comment as 'troll', I'd like to remind you that the idea of a small, limited government is what this country was founded on.
Asshats.
A federal government that does little more than provide for my safety, prosecutes federal crimes, acts as a unified entity to other countries, and keeps up interstate infrastructure sounds like a dream to me.
Everything else can be done by the states.
Y'all are responding to a troll post.
People see this as a problem, but I see it as an opportunity for innovation. We can throw up our hands and bemoan how terrible it is or we can work on making the entire process faster, cleaner, and less expensive.
Any idea on which countries will have the most positions lost? The article didn't mention this bit. Really is too bad, this is not a great time to be out of a job.
It is the root of the problem. But if you want votes then that's a good way to ensure you get some.
The problem is that the politicians who can solve the problems won't ever get elected. It's akin to a parent telling a kid he can't have ice cream, but must eat beansprouts instead.
Not only interesting, but smart if he wants to get votes. Connecting with the public, and being able to converse on recent hot topics, or insert them into speeches, is a good way to get votes. It helps reduce the perception that he is disconnected from the people, which is an oft-heard complaint about those in Washington.
I interviewed with Amazon a while back and I ran into this issue. If I gave a solution to a problem that was correct - but wasn't the interviewer's correct - then they would get annoyed and huffy, hounding me for the 'real' answer. 85% of the interview process was these "Stupid Code Tricks" that have very little bearing on real development practice. I also found most (not all, but most - two of them were really cool) of the interviewers to be pretty arrogant.
Really a shame - I was offered a position (with great pay and benefits, I might add) but I was so put off by the behavior of the team I would have worked with that I declined.
I feel sorry for you. In the places I have lived the vast majority of the police have been good people who really do want to do the right thing. Sometimes they screw up, and once in a great while there's the rare bad apple, but on the whole they've always been great.
Maybe that is one of the differences between living in the city and living out in the rural areas.
The money came from a Homeland Security grant.
Eventually we're going to end up a lot like Japan. Japan is a small place with a lot of people. Over time, we'll have small places in which to live, with fewer, more general purpose devices in the home that consume small amounts of energy. We'll eat smaller meals. In general, we'll make do with less because there's a finite supply of resources and a lot more people gobbling them all up.
We have quite a bit of time before that happens in the USA or Russia or China - those places have a LOT of vacant land - but we'll get there eventually.
We'll likely have to rely on growing "super foods" that are very dense with calories and nutrients. Lots of renewable energy sources. I'm betting Solar and Bio will be the big ones, with Biofuels being one of several solutions to the massive amount of human waste (poop). It is possible that more and more countries will start to enact incentives regarding breeding - either something very strict (you can have 1 or 2 kids, then you're sterilized) to something more flexible (you can have 2 kids, but any more and you lose certain benefits).
While food and energy are a concern, so are economies. With technology allowing people to do so much with so few people, what kind of work will people be able to find? Society needs only so many farmers, factory workers, etc., and with technology replacing hundreds and thousands of people... Where will we find work? What to do when a population is so incredibly productive that, say, only 30% of the population is needed to produce and service everyone?
Or, of course, with resources being strained with so many people, eventually People A are going to look at People B and say, "Hm, you know what, we need that fresh water supply more than they do..."
Perhaps we'll solve our population problems on our own and we won't have to worry about extreme population support.