"4 percent of the recipients have bought something advertised through spam within the past year"
And there you have it. The source of the problem. I wish those 4% would realize that THEY are directly responsible for most of the spam in circulation. If no one bought anything from spammers, the problem would go away (since filters, education and laws don't seem to be helping).
Surprise, surprise... Microsoft has built yet another page that is totally broken in anything but Internet Explorer. They seem to be the only major company in the world that makes no effort to display cleanly in other browsers (even Opera's website comes up beautifully in Firefox).
They just don't get it. And because of this, I don't think Google has much to worry about.
You're missing the whole point of Firefox! Simplicity man! No bloat. Nothing installed that doesn't have to be installed. Everytime I install Firefox somewhere, I also install the Adblock and flashblock extensions - yet I'd never want Adblock integrated into the base product - many people don't use it, and if you don't use it, it just adds options to the interface, potentially confusing less technical people (who are exactly the people that should benefit the most from converting to a simple and secure browser).
My Dad can easily change the configuration of Firefox if he has to (adding allowed pop-ups for example) - something he could never have managed when he was using IE (I know, I'm his tech support). The reason? Firefox is simple - there aren't a million options. Firefox is written for non-technical users, with extensions available to render it more useful to those who want more functionality.
I work in a cubicle with people sneaking up behind me all day. Another great thing that text-based browsers do is allow a person to surf occasionally with relative privacy. No one who sees an open terminal window on my desktop would ever suspect that I'm using links (or lynx) to check the news on CNN.
Now what's stopping them from releasing specs for cards which no longer ship (let's say graphics cards that are older than one year)? The problem is really that video cards supported by open source drivers are all 3+ years old (ie. obsolete). The performance gap between competitors is not 3 years; keeping specs secret after the performance gap has evaporated does not protect a company's lead.
Closed-source drivers do not allow for easy debugging/tuning, making the cards themselves useless if the manufacturer abandons support for the driver.
Having met my current girlfriend (of a year now) on-line (via lavalife, and then about a billion e-mails before meeting), I definitely agree with your assessment of some of the strengths of the medium. But I think you missed the aspects that were most important to me: spelling, grammar, organization of thoughts, etc. By "screening" e-mail, I was able to save a lot of time, and find someone who pays attention to details, literate, and well organized.
The real advantage of meeting someone on-line is that you are forced to assess intelligence before looks (whereas I have a definite tendency to do the inverse in real-life). I think the written word is highly underrated in the digital age.
He's trying to make a point that this food is unhealthy. In this, he fails miserably. The food is not unhealthy. His behavior in eating nothing but that food is unhealthy. If he wanted to prove that any particular chain was unhealthy, he should have tried to eat a balanced diet using only foods from that chain. They have a big menu for a friggin' reason. They do offer salads.
I have to disagree with a few of your statements. There are many, many studies showing that a mixture of about 45-65% calories from carbs, 15-30% calories from fat, 15-30% calories from protein is the right mix of food. With a cap on simple carbs (sugars) and sodium (say 2000-2500mg). Although not specifically spelled out, the movie makes the point that it is (was?) simply not possible to eat a healthy diet within those guidelines at McDonalds (which advertises that it can be part of a healthy lifestyle). You are right in saying his food selection was awful - but I would put forth that had the experiment been extended to 6 months, even consuming the healthiest diet possible at McD's would have led to the same results (throw in life-threatening high blood pressure too). Simply put, your argument that the food is not unhealthy is incorrect. Even their healthiest choices contain much too much salt. Throw in the chain's highly questionable approach to food safety (see "Fast Food Nation" by Schloesser), and you've got a very unhealthy place to eat.
The experiment (eating only McDonald's food for an extended amount of time) is dangerous no matter what the diet itself consists of (although admittedly it could be made less dangerous by selecting a better variety of food). I thought the movie was at least as reasonable/fair an argument against eating fast food often as the fast food industry's advertising touting the health benefits of eating in their restaurants (for a good example, consider KFC's carb-conscious advertising which features bodybuilders eating a bucket of chicken).
A fair statement, but one of the inspirations for the movie was MacDonald's "part of a healthy lifestyle" advertising. The fast food industry spends millions a year on advertising to send out any message that will increase sales. Many people are very susceptible to advertising that is constantly repeated. Hearing the same message over and over tends to eventually convince people. "Fast Food Nation" in particular does an awesome job of showing how low the industry will sink to protect their sales. Lobbying for reduced safety inspections was particularly appalling to me in light of all the food scares in recent years.
Incidentally, witness the recent spate of Atkins-related/carb-reduced advertising. How a company can advertise that melted cheese and bacon wraps are a healthy meal is beyond me. These people are scum who prey on ignorance to make a buck. I disagree with your statement about parents knowing better - they don't anymore, people "learn" too much about nutrition from advertising, parents and children both.
While I applaud the conviction, I wonder if this will really serve as a deterrent to other spammers given that he wasn't convicted for spamming, but rather for identity theft - or is spamming always tied to identity theft (vs. using a fictitious identity)?
I suppose that if all spammers are also guilty of identity theft, then this is good news (although wouldn't a fraud conviction carry a greater sentence though?).
You'd be wary of Tannenbaum's assertion that Linus wrote Linux? Did you read his statements at all, or did you simply comment in a rush to be one of the first posters?
I'm sure that the lists of e-mail addresses that they send you will include a few dummy accounts that will be checked to ensure that the spam is actually flowing, make the/dev/null approach useless.
Don't try to cheat the cheats, ignore them, sue them, do anything except sink to their level. Dishonest people are always going to be better at scamming honest people than vice-versa.
Chances are pretty good that the average cable-modem user will have their account shut down after about 10-12 hours of spamming. So you lose your internet connection for $4-5 (assuming mr. spamking is honest and sends you the check), how is this a good thing?
Agreed. We are using Gentoo 1.4 on most of our production systems. Using stage 3 install (pre-compiled base environments optimized for the processor) which is significantly faster than most Linux distros I've played with in the past (Redhat, Debian, and Corel ages ago) at the console.
After the base is installed (takes about 20-30 minutes using stage 3 tarballs), we do from source installs of MySQL, Tomcat, tcpdump, etc. Gentoo's fantastic because it allows you to tweak almost everything, but if you stay close to the generic install (stage 3), it's rock solid. Lots of fun in an R&D environment where performance and reliability are absolutely critical.
Plus it's a lot of fun to tweak and benchmark to extract performance; in the last two months, we've looked at migrating to 2.6.3, the performance impacts of NPTL, as well as the low latency and preemptive patches. Support is also really good (on their forums) - keep an eye on this distro, it may end up being one of the most popular soon (although I don't see it overtaking Mandrake, Redhat, or Debian in the near future).
I disagree. Someone who lets down his shareholder by not fully researching an expense like this ahead of time does not deserve anyone's respect.
Furthermore, odds are that he is he is now saying he made a mistake to try to cut down on the backlash against his company, not because he genuinely thinks he made a mistake.
EV1 is guilty of trying to piggyback on the SCO case to build marketshare - marketshare that would come from other similarly-uninformed companies. The only reason they are sorry now is the backlash, when really, they should be apologizing for ethical reasons.
Well stated. I do not disagree with your assertion that there are many ways to solve a problem, and that optimal algorithm for me is not necessarily the same as it is for you. I think I'm being misunderstood though, my basic point being that many of the skills upon which we supposedly build are being forgotten. Using a calculator to add two numbers is fine if it is simply a faster solution - using a calculator to add two numbers because that is the only way a person knows how strikes me as revealing a severe problem in the way people are now being taught.
The fundamental disagreement here actually seems to be related to how to measure intelligence. I seem to be stating that some of the measures that could be used to roughly estimate intelligence would be basic math skills, language skills, etc. Let's call it an IQ test or SAT approach. You seem to be saying that measuring basic intelligence is more complex - which I tend to disagree with. You are surely correct in saying that to quantify intelligence, and battery of factors need to be considered. I'm saying that to get a rough idea (let's say 90% confidence level), a few basic factors could be considered.
But my basic point about intelligence was never about the fact that "we are somehow getting dumber" - I believe quite the opposite in fact. My belief is that the divide between relative intelligence levels is widening. I knew exactly what you were referring to when you used words like tautology and scaling - but those are words I would never use in conversation, because I believe that the vocabulary of the bottom half of the population (intelligence-wise, however you wish to measure it) is not sufficiently large enough understand what I was saying.
To move off-topic though, what do you think of the idea of information overload, and dulled sensitivity? I'm starting to wonder if perhaps (what I perceive to be) falling math and vocabulary skills wouldn't be better attributed to (what I perceive to be) to quickened pace of life that most people live. As I get older, I'm definitely noticing that my own capacity to focus on things is diminishing - I sometimes wonder if it's because of the number of tasks that I attempt to manage at the same time... (He says while running a compile in the background, listening to music and a conversation, surfing/posting on Slashdot and checking his e-mail...:)
Didn't it take something like 6 months for the X-Box to be properly hacked? I'd argue that MS expected it to happen, and that they'll learn from it. Subsequent generations of DRM will likely simply be tougher and tougher to crack. Their goal is probably not to lock out 100% of people using hacks - they'd likely be quite happy with 95%.
It's true that all of these protection schemes get hacked, but what percentage of the products have the hacks applied to them? If only 5% of all X-Boxes are hacked to run Linux or unsigned copies of games or whatever - Microsoft is winning. If they can get that number down to 3% for X-Box2, they'll likely be even happier.
I'm not a big MS fan myself, but they are actually quite good at achieving their goals. Restricted computing is coming; and while its protection might get cracked, most people will never know that the crack exists, or why they should apply it. Considering that modifying equipment/software that you own is slowly becoming illegal (DMCA), corporations like MS will be able to impose DRM on most people using technology, and the rest can be prosecuted under the law (most likely the authors of the cracks themselves will be the targets, not the end users).
Touche... Although I'd like to at least argue in my defense that slashdot strips out paragraph spacing if you don't use line break tags (which your comment forced me to examine).
You're making/repeating excuses for a relatively new phenomena. For example, the problem of making change is just not something that existed even 20 years ago - it's simple subtraction! If you hand me a $20 bill for a $16.22 purchase, all I have to do is subtract 1622 from 2000 and put the decimals back in! The problem is that at some point schools started allowing students to solve elementary problems with calculators. I've taken advanced university physics courses where students were using calculators to for everything from calculating very complicated formulas to adding numbers like 16 and 43. Just weird...
>Especially English spelling, which is hardly a normalized language; being a good English speller requires a fair amount of sheer memorization.
Okay, then why is the average 50 year old with a high school education a much better English speller than the average 25 year old graduate student? You're using faulty logic. English has always been English - we're just worse at it using it now (incidentally, English is an absolute breeze compared to French - which we have to learn simultaneously up here in Quebec, Canada). The problem is that mediocrity is now tolerated, and so the bar is constantly being lowered.
Funny, as a teenager I always thought of myself as being a lot more intelligent than the average adult (much to their chagrin) - and up until now (as I approach 30) I haven't seen much evidence showing I was wrong. I'm constantly running into cashiers who cannot make change without their cash register, salespeople who have no clue about the products they are selling, people who can barely spell (a visit to nearly any chat board is enough to turn my stomach). Seems like despite all the progress we seem to be making, the bottom half (two-thirds?) of our population seems to be regressing further and further. My Grandfather (who had to quit school in grade two to help his Dad on the farm) has writing and math skills that make him look like a scholar relative to the average McDonald's cashier with a high school diploma.
I think our approach to designing products aimed at the lowest common denominator might actually be responsible for all of this. Think about it the next time you pick up a cup of coffee with a warning on it stating that coffee is hot. If a paralegal (a "research expert" if you will) can be fooled by a smart 14-year old, what does that say about our society?
> Why does free and web-based correlate with static? > It's actually a lot easier to change a digital
> book than it is to change a printed book.
Agreed. Static topic = topic in which the subject matter doesn't really change very often, calculus being the perfect example. Agreed that the question sets themselves can evolve, but the subject matter probably won't (much). My point is that if the text is free (as in freedom), so is the solution guide - ergo, it's of no value to profs who like to assign problems from a text.
I've never met a professor yet who was eager for more work (at least at the undergrad-level), and authoring their own assignments, and solving them is undoubtedly a lot of work.
For relatively static topics like elementary mathematics, physics, chemistry, history, English, etc. there really is no reason to change a textbook more often than say, every 10 years (and really only so that the application sections remain relevant).
I think that one of the big issues with going to a free web-based, static course text is the homework problems. See if you follow my logic: Profs are basically lazy (when it comes to teaching undergrad courses that is), and love to assign questions from the textbook - if the textbook itself is static, they have to make up their own questions, and solve them (otherwise the answers to all questions would become common knowledge after a semester or two).
I took a discrete mathematics course a few years ago where I literally was able to search the web using the exact question to get answers to questions I wasn't sure of - the prof was so lazy that he was plagiarizing other assignments!
Don't discount the fact that a lot of book publishers bribe profs with expensive lunches, publishing offers, etc. It wouldn't surpise me to know that less ethical profs are also taking kickbacks based on volume (which decrases significantly when used books come into play).
The solution? Some profs are sympathetic to the plight of the poor student. I've e-mailed this article to two of my college professors, maybe it will cause someone to at least think about it, but I'm not hopeful. Surely a community developped, open, free (as in beer!), free (as in freedom!) textbook is superior to something written by one or two authors and reviewed by only a handful of others.
We've tried this here at work for use in our embedded devices. The performance hit is awful, throughput is about 10% of 5400rpm IDE using an IDE-to-CF adapter (http://adis.ca/store/cfdisk.php). Using PIO3 (no DMA I'm afraid), hdparm -t reports speeds up to 4MB/s vs ~40MB/s for 7200RPM IDE.
CF sectors also have the limitation of "wearing out" after about 10000 writes or so, so this is not a good solution for read-write partitions, although it will work great for read-only, or very infrequently written-to data (think binaries, libraries, config, etc). CF is optimized to do wear-levelling so that sectors are written to evenly (in theory, once the card begins to fail, it is failing across the board, not just a few sectors).
Slashdot Mirror
"4 percent of the recipients have bought something advertised through spam within the past year"
And there you have it. The source of the problem. I wish those 4% would realize that THEY are directly responsible for most of the spam in circulation. If no one bought anything from spammers, the problem would go away (since filters, education and laws don't seem to be helping).
Surprise, surprise... Microsoft has built yet another page that is totally broken in anything but Internet Explorer. They seem to be the only major company in the world that makes no effort to display cleanly in other browsers (even Opera's website comes up beautifully in Firefox).
They just don't get it. And because of this, I don't think Google has much to worry about.
You're missing the whole point of Firefox! Simplicity man! No bloat. Nothing installed that doesn't have to be installed. Everytime I install Firefox somewhere, I also install the Adblock and flashblock extensions - yet I'd never want Adblock integrated into the base product - many people don't use it, and if you don't use it, it just adds options to the interface, potentially confusing less technical people (who are exactly the people that should benefit the most from converting to a simple and secure browser).
My Dad can easily change the configuration of Firefox if he has to (adding allowed pop-ups for example) - something he could never have managed when he was using IE (I know, I'm his tech support). The reason? Firefox is simple - there aren't a million options. Firefox is written for non-technical users, with extensions available to render it more useful to those who want more functionality.
I work in a cubicle with people sneaking up behind me all day. Another great thing that text-based browsers do is allow a person to surf occasionally with relative privacy. No one who sees an open terminal window on my desktop would ever suspect that I'm using links (or lynx) to check the news on CNN.
Okay, for the sake of argument, I'll agree.
Now what's stopping them from releasing specs for cards which no longer ship (let's say graphics cards that are older than one year)? The problem is really that video cards supported by open source drivers are all 3+ years old (ie. obsolete). The performance gap between competitors is not 3 years; keeping specs secret after the performance gap has evaporated does not protect a company's lead.
Closed-source drivers do not allow for easy debugging/tuning, making the cards themselves useless if the manufacturer abandons support for the driver.
Having met my current girlfriend (of a year now) on-line (via lavalife, and then about a billion e-mails before meeting), I definitely agree with your assessment of some of the strengths of the medium. But I think you missed the aspects that were most important to me: spelling, grammar, organization of thoughts, etc. By "screening" e-mail, I was able to save a lot of time, and find someone who pays attention to details, literate, and well organized.
The real advantage of meeting someone on-line is that you are forced to assess intelligence before looks (whereas I have a definite tendency to do the inverse in real-life). I think the written word is highly underrated in the digital age.
I have to disagree with a few of your statements. There are many, many studies showing that a mixture of about 45-65% calories from carbs, 15-30% calories from fat, 15-30% calories from protein is the right mix of food. With a cap on simple carbs (sugars) and sodium (say 2000-2500mg). Although not specifically spelled out, the movie makes the point that it is (was?) simply not possible to eat a healthy diet within those guidelines at McDonalds (which advertises that it can be part of a healthy lifestyle). You are right in saying his food selection was awful - but I would put forth that had the experiment been extended to 6 months, even consuming the healthiest diet possible at McD's would have led to the same results (throw in life-threatening high blood pressure too). Simply put, your argument that the food is not unhealthy is incorrect. Even their healthiest choices contain much too much salt. Throw in the chain's highly questionable approach to food safety (see "Fast Food Nation" by Schloesser), and you've got a very unhealthy place to eat.
The experiment (eating only McDonald's food for an extended amount of time) is dangerous no matter what the diet itself consists of (although admittedly it could be made less dangerous by selecting a better variety of food). I thought the movie was at least as reasonable/fair an argument against eating fast food often as the fast food industry's advertising touting the health benefits of eating in their restaurants (for a good example, consider KFC's carb-conscious advertising which features bodybuilders eating a bucket of chicken).
A fair statement, but one of the inspirations for the movie was MacDonald's "part of a healthy lifestyle" advertising. The fast food industry spends millions a year on advertising to send out any message that will increase sales. Many people are very susceptible to advertising that is constantly repeated. Hearing the same message over and over tends to eventually convince people. "Fast Food Nation" in particular does an awesome job of showing how low the industry will sink to protect their sales. Lobbying for reduced safety inspections was particularly appalling to me in light of all the food scares in recent years. Incidentally, witness the recent spate of Atkins-related/carb-reduced advertising. How a company can advertise that melted cheese and bacon wraps are a healthy meal is beyond me. These people are scum who prey on ignorance to make a buck. I disagree with your statement about parents knowing better - they don't anymore, people "learn" too much about nutrition from advertising, parents and children both.
While I applaud the conviction, I wonder if this will really serve as a deterrent to other spammers given that he wasn't convicted for spamming, but rather for identity theft - or is spamming always tied to identity theft (vs. using a fictitious identity)?
I suppose that if all spammers are also guilty of identity theft, then this is good news (although wouldn't a fraud conviction carry a greater sentence though?).
You'd be wary of Tannenbaum's assertion that Linus wrote Linux? Did you read his statements at all, or did you simply comment in a rush to be one of the first posters?
I'm sure that the lists of e-mail addresses that they send you will include a few dummy accounts that will be checked to ensure that the spam is actually flowing, make the /dev/null approach useless.
Don't try to cheat the cheats, ignore them, sue them, do anything except sink to their level. Dishonest people are always going to be better at scamming honest people than vice-versa.
Chances are pretty good that the average cable-modem user will have their account shut down after about 10-12 hours of spamming. So you lose your internet connection for $4-5 (assuming mr. spamking is honest and sends you the check), how is this a good thing?
Agreed. We are using Gentoo 1.4 on most of our production systems. Using stage 3 install (pre-compiled base environments optimized for the processor) which is significantly faster than most Linux distros I've played with in the past (Redhat, Debian, and Corel ages ago) at the console.
After the base is installed (takes about 20-30 minutes using stage 3 tarballs), we do from source installs of MySQL, Tomcat, tcpdump, etc. Gentoo's fantastic because it allows you to tweak almost everything, but if you stay close to the generic install (stage 3), it's rock solid. Lots of fun in an R&D environment where performance and reliability are absolutely critical.
Plus it's a lot of fun to tweak and benchmark to extract performance; in the last two months, we've looked at migrating to 2.6.3, the performance impacts of NPTL, as well as the low latency and preemptive patches. Support is also really good (on their forums) - keep an eye on this distro, it may end up being one of the most popular soon (although I don't see it overtaking Mandrake, Redhat, or Debian in the near future).
Cheers,
Jim
I disagree. Someone who lets down his shareholder by not fully researching an expense like this ahead of time does not deserve anyone's respect.
Furthermore, odds are that he is he is now saying he made a mistake to try to cut down on the backlash against his company, not because he genuinely thinks he made a mistake.
EV1 is guilty of trying to piggyback on the SCO case to build marketshare - marketshare that would come from other similarly-uninformed companies. The only reason they are sorry now is the backlash, when really, they should be apologizing for ethical reasons.
Well stated. I do not disagree with your assertion that there are many ways to solve a problem, and that optimal algorithm for me is not necessarily the same as it is for you. I think I'm being misunderstood though, my basic point being that many of the skills upon which we supposedly build are being forgotten. Using a calculator to add two numbers is fine if it is simply a faster solution - using a calculator to add two numbers because that is the only way a person knows how strikes me as revealing a severe problem in the way people are now being taught.
:)
The fundamental disagreement here actually seems to be related to how to measure intelligence. I seem to be stating that some of the measures that could be used to roughly estimate intelligence would be basic math skills, language skills, etc. Let's call it an IQ test or SAT approach. You seem to be saying that measuring basic intelligence is more complex - which I tend to disagree with. You are surely correct in saying that to quantify intelligence, and battery of factors need to be considered. I'm saying that to get a rough idea (let's say 90% confidence level), a few basic factors could be considered.
But my basic point about intelligence was never about the fact that "we are somehow getting dumber" - I believe quite the opposite in fact. My belief is that the divide between relative intelligence levels is widening. I knew exactly what you were referring to when you used words like tautology and scaling - but those are words I would never use in conversation, because I believe that the vocabulary of the bottom half of the population (intelligence-wise, however you wish to measure it) is not sufficiently large enough understand what I was saying.
To move off-topic though, what do you think of the idea of information overload, and dulled sensitivity? I'm starting to wonder if perhaps (what I perceive to be) falling math and vocabulary skills wouldn't be better attributed to (what I perceive to be) to quickened pace of life that most people live. As I get older, I'm definitely noticing that my own capacity to focus on things is diminishing - I sometimes wonder if it's because of the number of tasks that I attempt to manage at the same time... (He says while running a compile in the background, listening to music and a conversation, surfing/posting on Slashdot and checking his e-mail...
Didn't it take something like 6 months for the X-Box to be properly hacked? I'd argue that MS expected it to happen, and that they'll learn from it. Subsequent generations of DRM will likely simply be tougher and tougher to crack. Their goal is probably not to lock out 100% of people using hacks - they'd likely be quite happy with 95%.
It's true that all of these protection schemes get hacked, but what percentage of the products have the hacks applied to them? If only 5% of all X-Boxes are hacked to run Linux or unsigned copies of games or whatever - Microsoft is winning. If they can get that number down to 3% for X-Box2, they'll likely be even happier.
I'm not a big MS fan myself, but they are actually quite good at achieving their goals. Restricted computing is coming; and while its protection might get cracked, most people will never know that the crack exists, or why they should apply it. Considering that modifying equipment/software that you own is slowly becoming illegal (DMCA), corporations like MS will be able to impose DRM on most people using technology, and the rest can be prosecuted under the law (most likely the authors of the cracks themselves will be the targets, not the end users).
Touche... Although I'd like to at least argue in my defense that slashdot strips out paragraph spacing if you don't use line break tags (which your comment forced me to examine).
Thanks
You're making/repeating excuses for a relatively new phenomena. For example, the problem of making change is just not something that existed even 20 years ago - it's simple subtraction! If you hand me a $20 bill for a $16.22 purchase, all I have to do is subtract 1622 from 2000 and put the decimals back in! The problem is that at some point schools started allowing students to solve elementary problems with calculators. I've taken advanced university physics courses where students were using calculators to for everything from calculating very complicated formulas to adding numbers like 16 and 43. Just weird...
>Especially English spelling, which is hardly a normalized language; being a good English speller requires a fair amount of sheer memorization.
Okay, then why is the average 50 year old with a high school education a much better English speller than the average 25 year old graduate student? You're using faulty logic. English has always been English - we're just worse at it using it now (incidentally, English is an absolute breeze compared to French - which we have to learn simultaneously up here in Quebec, Canada). The problem is that mediocrity is now tolerated, and so the bar is constantly being lowered.
Funny, as a teenager I always thought of myself as being a lot more intelligent than the average adult (much to their chagrin) - and up until now (as I approach 30) I haven't seen much evidence showing I was wrong. I'm constantly running into cashiers who cannot make change without their cash register, salespeople who have no clue about the products they are selling, people who can barely spell (a visit to nearly any chat board is enough to turn my stomach). Seems like despite all the progress we seem to be making, the bottom half (two-thirds?) of our population seems to be regressing further and further. My Grandfather (who had to quit school in grade two to help his Dad on the farm) has writing and math skills that make him look like a scholar relative to the average McDonald's cashier with a high school diploma.
I think our approach to designing products aimed at the lowest common denominator might actually be responsible for all of this. Think about it the next time you pick up a cup of coffee with a warning on it stating that coffee is hot. If a paralegal (a "research expert" if you will) can be fooled by a smart 14-year old, what does that say about our society?
> Why does free and web-based correlate with static? > It's actually a lot easier to change a digital > book than it is to change a printed book. Agreed. Static topic = topic in which the subject matter doesn't really change very often, calculus being the perfect example. Agreed that the question sets themselves can evolve, but the subject matter probably won't (much). My point is that if the text is free (as in freedom), so is the solution guide - ergo, it's of no value to profs who like to assign problems from a text. I've never met a professor yet who was eager for more work (at least at the undergrad-level), and authoring their own assignments, and solving them is undoubtedly a lot of work.
For relatively static topics like elementary mathematics, physics, chemistry, history, English, etc. there really is no reason to change a textbook more often than say, every 10 years (and really only so that the application sections remain relevant). I think that one of the big issues with going to a free web-based, static course text is the homework problems. See if you follow my logic: Profs are basically lazy (when it comes to teaching undergrad courses that is), and love to assign questions from the textbook - if the textbook itself is static, they have to make up their own questions, and solve them (otherwise the answers to all questions would become common knowledge after a semester or two). I took a discrete mathematics course a few years ago where I literally was able to search the web using the exact question to get answers to questions I wasn't sure of - the prof was so lazy that he was plagiarizing other assignments! Don't discount the fact that a lot of book publishers bribe profs with expensive lunches, publishing offers, etc. It wouldn't surpise me to know that less ethical profs are also taking kickbacks based on volume (which decrases significantly when used books come into play). The solution? Some profs are sympathetic to the plight of the poor student. I've e-mailed this article to two of my college professors, maybe it will cause someone to at least think about it, but I'm not hopeful. Surely a community developped, open, free (as in beer!), free (as in freedom!) textbook is superior to something written by one or two authors and reviewed by only a handful of others.
We've tried this here at work for use in our embedded devices. The performance hit is awful, throughput is about 10% of 5400rpm IDE using an IDE-to-CF adapter (http://adis.ca/store/cfdisk.php). Using PIO3 (no DMA I'm afraid), hdparm -t reports speeds up to 4MB/s vs ~40MB/s for 7200RPM IDE. CF sectors also have the limitation of "wearing out" after about 10000 writes or so, so this is not a good solution for read-write partitions, although it will work great for read-only, or very infrequently written-to data (think binaries, libraries, config, etc). CF is optimized to do wear-levelling so that sectors are written to evenly (in theory, once the card begins to fail, it is failing across the board, not just a few sectors).