When people in general begin to become aware of the encroachment of tyranny, and when it becomes unbearable enough to sacrifice comfort in pursuit of liberty.
Well, I don't know about the whole site, which looks to be a fairly straightforward application of template-based content, the math pages (all I've looked at so far) make extensive use of Webmathematica.
What I gather from reading some of the intro material is that MIT plans to release the content-creation framework; see goals; goal #2:
"2. Create an efficient, standards-based model that other universities may emulate to publish their own course materials."
My reading of the roadmap leads me to believe that the current incarnation relies on "manually coded HTML", with "standalone course sites", and this approach is expected to change dramatically in the coming years (Or until they decide it was a mistake to go online with it, due to the slashdot effect:-)
There are plenty of folks out there with degrees who haven't had a single semester of Calculus, let alone DiffEq or Advanced Linear.
But these are bundled with the people who make asinine statements like the original poster's "education is overrated." Liberal arts, humanities, social science, and so on might be overrated, but hardcore programs in the sciences, with the intense focus on calculus and physics required, are not even considered by people who say such things. They hear "education" and they think "MBA", and the face on that is generally some boss who has no technical inclination (let alone, understanding of number theory or quantuum mechanics!)
To the OP's credit, though, I must say that whether your differential calc is self-taught or you've done it in a university, you still will have largely taught it to yourself. Sure, you get some of the knowledge from lectures, but the bulk of the learning comes from doing problem sets in books, and researching various sources of information, including, yes, the Internet.
As long as there are people with BS's and MS's working for $50K/year, the OP does have a point.
While I agree with your sentiment, I must say you chose a poor example. Are you by chance struggling with upper calc right now yourself?
Having your users accustomed to "undelete" just makes it that much more harsh when they learn that something delete from a remote filesystem is irretrievable. "Undelete" creates bad habits.
I'm paying $40.00 a month for my 768K DSL line, $100/month for internet service [including domain hosting, static IP's, no BS from the ISP], $3600/year for tuition, close to that for books, I'm working 8-10 hours a day, doing calculus homework 3 hours a day or more and it's very damned hard to have any sympathy for the poster's bandwidth problems.
Is the email header even admissible in court in your state? If "CEO" has no evidence that a judge will consider, you'll never even have a hearing.
There are two motivations here. One is the defense against the false accusation. Have the FBI acted on the complaint? If so, then it is both a civil AND a criminal matter.
The second motivation is if the poster would enjoy seeing "CEO" lose his business, pay a whopping huge settlement to the poster (to avoid paying an even more whopping huge fine to the State), or go to jail. For this, you'd need a strong slander and or libel case.
None of this is going to happen though. The first round of correspondents between lawyers will either end it, or escalate it to the point where it becomes interesting enough for e.g., the EFF to get a precedent.
The problem with the desktop is that it is perceived as an Entertainment device on top of
whatever it was supposed to be before the focus
on entertainment. And implementation here is not
just a technical challenge, but also a legal and political one. Linux is ready for MY desktop,
but the kind of *work* I do on my desktop involves
writing mathematics papers, creating 2-d graphs
on polar coordinates, writing correspondence, and
lately, writing a research paper in French for a lit class.
For math papers, OpenOffice works *better* than the MS equivalent, and for many tasks, makes more sense than using Maple or Mathematica. And Open Office is wonderful for writing in French, or any other Western language.
When other people say "The Desktop" they're not talking about work, they're talking about Entertainment. And there are real shackles, very high barriers to entry in that arena, that have nothing to do with one piece of free software versus another, and everything to do with the hostility of hardware makers and industry associations!
But that's the "desktop" as an entertainment venue, and not as a workplace. Because of the current state of affairs where we are willing to accept (1) unnecessary expenses and (2) distractions from functions that apply to work tasks, we seem to find things like "windows" and "osx", or even "gnome" or "kde" to be reasonable items to have in a workplace -- because those are the things we are accustomed to.
Why is the Windows Solitaire program considered a tolerable standard feature on a business machine?
Why is it that even in environments demanding hardcore accountability, strict adherence to schedule, and zero loss, we find any such systems? What stopped there being a "next level" in workplace equipment?
There are plenty of people who, if they could, would keep a video library of every NFL game ever filmed. They'd be able to tell you from memory who played what position in which game, what team they were from before that one, their contract details, what college they went to, and on and on.
I know a whole bunch of these folks; and I have no doubt at all that there are boxing fans who would be just as obsessive about it, and would watch their recorded matches like deadheads listen to their concert tapes; they'd trade them like baseball fans trade their cards.
I even know guys who would (and some who *do*) do this with *golf*. Now, I don't understand why one would watch golf, let alone watch it on TV, and the thought of recording such a thing would never occur to me... but it is done.
"This show bugged me because they dole out hard information so sparingly."
Watch TV much? Fox is the *master* of this technique! The whole point is to keep you excited so you see the commercials, period.
"Why make us wait so long to see the CGI tour of the pyramids?"
Do you really not get it? The advertisers believe that a significant number of people will buy a certain product (car?) after seeing it advertised on the show repeatedly. What bothers me is I think they're right.
"when the average American was still thinking in terms of pinching pennies to buy his first used car. "
Are you saying the average American has so much surplus money that a car isn't a major expense, or even a difficult or unreachable one for most.
This is the *average* American, not the mythical middle class that the media pushes. Average American lives in a flat, barely paid for, paycheck to paycheck. $250/week take home is way above average. He's pinching pennies to *EAT*.
>>Or maybe not. I'm sure there's always >>another "Korn" willing to sign their lives away >>for fame.
Maybe. Or maybe the whole generation is becoming savvy. But consider that, from the artist's perspective, the FAME IS THE PRODUCT. Selling records and getting concerts promoted is a means to the end. Maybe for some, it does not seem so unfair.
For every journalist getting the throw-away walkman, there are 200 radio station PO Boxes that get a copy of the CD. What happens to the CD (in the case of Tori who only gets played on college stations and maybe NPR), is it gets thrown either in the trash, or sold in bulk with all the other CD's they throw away every day.
Somebody down the road gets a CD from a used record store that says "promotional copy not for sale" and they think they're elite.
By that logic, you should not be allowed to fix your own car, because you are not a professional mechanic.
But, this logic is also going to discourage you from hiring a professional mechanic, because any law that "protects" you from working on your car, will also "protect" the mechanic from working on your car for hire or trade.
So what you're suggesting is that not only should the carmaker have some legal basis to prevent you from working on your own car, but that you would also support them preventing you from hiring someone to do it. And if the manufacturer won't or can't fix it, that you're fine with just leaving it broken, and being forced to get a new one.
You have not even considered that many people develop and modify software for a living. Or maybe you're willing to have one law for Microsoft and another law for everyone else.
"The web will become largely text only for people without a new machine and windows."
If it turns out that there are a LOT more of those people than conventional wisdom seems to think, then this might actually turn out to be a good thing -- a return to sanity.
It bothers me that people want a short cut to Physics. I wonder why they think everybody else has to get through three semesters of calculus before even touching this stuff, yet that there must be a way to spoon feed it to them on a 3 minute attention span.
It's bound to be more expensive to manufacture the same product to a high tolerance, and again to a lower one... I'd guess the difference is in the QA. If you're tooled up to make a chip to high tolerances, why would you make a whole separate set of tools and processes to create the same product at a lower quality?
Back in the day, this was Novell's gimmick at trade shows. You'd watch the secretary typing away at a terminal, an a giant weight dramatically crushes the server, while the backup server gracefully fails-over. Secretary keeps typing, unfazed by the big noise/surprised audience/etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Why must everything be framed in terms of commerce and profit? Where does this leave a free OpenSSL mirror (not selling anything)?
"When will it end?"
When people in general begin to become aware of the encroachment of tyranny, and when it becomes unbearable enough to sacrifice comfort in pursuit of liberty.
Not before then.
I'm familiar with LaTeX, thank you.
I stand by my assessment of OpenOffice Math.
Well, I don't know about the whole site, which looks to be a fairly straightforward application of template-based content, the math pages (all I've looked at so far) make extensive use of Webmathematica.
:-)
What I gather from reading some of the intro material is that MIT plans to release the content-creation framework; see goals; goal #2:
"2. Create an efficient, standards-based model that other universities may emulate to publish their own course materials."
My reading of the roadmap leads me to believe that the current incarnation relies on "manually coded HTML", with "standalone course sites", and this approach is expected to change dramatically in the coming years (Or until they decide it was a mistake to go online with it, due to the slashdot effect
http://ocw.mit.edu/global/about-ocw.html
There are plenty of folks out there with degrees who haven't had a single semester of Calculus, let alone DiffEq or Advanced Linear.
But these are bundled with the people who make asinine statements like the original poster's "education is overrated." Liberal arts, humanities, social science, and so on might be overrated, but hardcore programs in the sciences, with the intense focus on calculus and physics required, are not even considered by people who say such things. They hear "education" and they think "MBA", and the face on that is generally some boss who has no technical inclination (let alone, understanding of number theory or quantuum mechanics!)
To the OP's credit, though, I must say that whether your differential calc is self-taught or you've done it in a university, you still will have largely taught it to yourself. Sure, you get some of the knowledge from lectures, but the bulk of the learning comes from doing problem sets in books, and researching various sources of information, including, yes, the Internet.
As long as there are people with BS's and MS's working for $50K/year, the OP does have a point.
While I agree with your sentiment, I must say you chose a poor example. Are you by chance struggling with upper calc right now yourself?
Having your users accustomed to "undelete"
just makes it that much more harsh when they
learn that something delete from a remote filesystem is irretrievable. "Undelete" creates bad habits.
I'm paying $40.00 a month for my 768K DSL line,
$100/month for internet service [including domain hosting, static IP's, no BS from the ISP], $3600/year for tuition, close to that for books, I'm working 8-10 hours a day, doing calculus homework 3 hours a day or more and it's very damned hard to have any sympathy for the poster's bandwidth problems.
Is the email header even admissible in court in your state? If "CEO" has no evidence that a judge will consider, you'll never even have a hearing.
There are two motivations here. One is the defense against the false accusation. Have the FBI acted on the complaint? If so, then it is both a civil AND a criminal matter.
The second motivation is if the poster would enjoy seeing "CEO" lose his business, pay a whopping huge settlement to the poster (to avoid paying an even more whopping huge fine to the State), or go to jail. For this, you'd need a strong slander and or libel case.
None of this is going to happen though. The first round of correspondents between lawyers will either end it, or escalate it to the point where it becomes interesting enough for e.g., the EFF to get a precedent.
For math papers, OpenOffice works *better* than the MS equivalent, and for many tasks, makes more sense than using Maple or Mathematica. And Open Office is wonderful for writing in French, or any other Western language.
When other people say "The Desktop" they're not talking about work, they're talking about Entertainment. And there are real shackles, very high barriers to entry in that arena, that have nothing to do with one piece of free software versus another, and everything to do with the hostility of hardware makers and industry associations!
But that's the "desktop" as an entertainment venue, and not as a workplace. Because of the current state of affairs where we are willing to accept (1) unnecessary expenses and (2) distractions from functions that apply to work tasks, we seem to find things like "windows" and "osx", or even "gnome" or "kde" to be reasonable items to have in a workplace -- because those are the things we are accustomed to.
Why is the Windows Solitaire program considered a tolerable standard feature on a business machine? Why is it that even in environments demanding hardcore accountability, strict adherence to schedule, and zero loss, we find any such systems? What stopped there being a "next level" in workplace equipment?
Did you buy the PDF Book for $10?
Is this the documentation that you say, sucks?
http://www.jboss.org/docs/
I found it far better than what we got with Weblogic!
This is exactly why it's dangerous that people believe everything was always the way it is today.
AT THE TIME, there was no automatic copyright.
Soon people will believe that it was always as it
is under the DMCA.
There are plenty of people who, if they could, would keep a video library of every NFL game ever filmed. They'd be able to tell you from memory who played what position in which game, what team they were from before that one, their contract details, what college they went to, and on and on.
I know a whole bunch of these folks; and I have no doubt at all that there are boxing fans who would be just as obsessive about it, and would watch their recorded matches like deadheads listen to their concert tapes; they'd trade them
like baseball fans trade their cards.
I even know guys who would (and some who *do*) do this with *golf*. Now, I don't understand why one would watch golf, let alone watch it on TV, and the thought of recording such a thing would never occur to me... but it is done.
And even for some who do not:
$5000+ for two tickets to New Years' Eve?
"This show bugged me because they dole out hard information so sparingly."
Watch TV much? Fox is the *master* of this technique! The whole point is to keep you excited so you see the commercials, period.
"Why make us wait so long to see the CGI tour of the pyramids?"
Do you really not get it? The advertisers believe that a significant number of people will buy a certain product (car?) after seeing it advertised on the show repeatedly. What bothers me is I think they're right.
"when the average American was still thinking in terms of pinching pennies to buy his first used car. "
Are you saying the average American has so much surplus money that a car isn't a major expense, or even a difficult or unreachable one for most.
This is the *average* American, not the mythical middle class that the media pushes. Average American lives in a flat, barely paid for, paycheck to paycheck. $250/week take home is way above average. He's pinching pennies to *EAT*.
>>Or maybe not. I'm sure there's always
>>another "Korn" willing to sign their lives away
>>for fame.
Maybe. Or maybe the whole generation is becoming savvy. But consider that, from the artist's perspective, the FAME IS THE PRODUCT. Selling records and getting concerts promoted is a means to the end. Maybe for some, it does not seem so unfair.
For every journalist getting the throw-away walkman, there are 200 radio station PO Boxes that get a copy of the CD. What happens to the CD (in the case of Tori who only gets played on college stations and maybe NPR), is it gets thrown either in the trash, or sold in bulk with all the other CD's they throw away every day.
Somebody down the road gets a CD from a used record store that says "promotional copy not for sale" and they think they're elite.
Have you missed the entire point of digital audio?
By that logic, you should not be allowed to
fix your own car, because you are not a professional mechanic.
But, this logic is also going to discourage you from hiring a professional mechanic, because any law that "protects" you from working on your car,
will also "protect" the mechanic from working on your car for hire or trade.
So what you're suggesting is that not only should the carmaker have some legal basis to prevent you from working on your own car, but that you would also support them preventing you from hiring someone to do it. And if the manufacturer won't or can't fix it, that you're fine with just leaving it broken, and being forced to get a new one.
You have not even considered that many people develop and modify software for a living. Or maybe you're willing to have one law for Microsoft and another law for everyone else.
"The web will become largely text only for people without a new machine and windows."
If it turns out that there are a LOT more of those people than conventional wisdom seems to think, then this might actually turn out to be a good thing -- a return to sanity.
Oh yeah. 1995-2000 were such REALLY HORRIBLE times for Microsoft, weren't they?
just pathetic numbers, huh?
Amen to what you said.
It bothers me that people want a short cut to
Physics. I wonder why they think everybody else
has to get through three semesters of calculus
before even touching this stuff, yet that there
must be a way to spoon feed it to them on a 3 minute attention span.
It's bound to be more expensive to manufacture
the same product to a high tolerance, and again
to a lower one... I'd guess the difference is
in the QA. If you're tooled up to make a chip to high tolerances, why would you make a whole separate set of tools and processes to create the same product at a lower quality?
"there aren't so many 286's and 68K's available that are certified for flight."
How much of that is bureaucracy at work, and how much is technical?
Back in the day, this was Novell's gimmick at trade shows. You'd watch the secretary typing away at a terminal, an a giant weight dramatically crushes the server, while the backup server gracefully fails-over. Secretary keeps
typing, unfazed by the big noise/surprised audience/etc.