I'd also like to see creeping transparency into the classroom. If you throw back the curtains all at once the shock would be too great, but there's some seriously messed up stuff that goes on in the classroom that wouldn't if the scene were available for recall on YouTube.
Yep, one of the few take-home lessons I got from High School is that "we'll be doing it our way, because we're in charge."
There were a lot of teachers who looked at the authoritarian jerks and shrugged with a message like, "well, some people are like that, you better learn how to deal with them," and there were a few that clearly got off on ruining kids' days.
I hope you have achieved enough enlightenment by now to know that your "crime" was frightening the authorities. Quite a few US citizens have enjoyed a protracted holiday in Cuba recently for doing the same. When you've got them worried, it's not about right or wrong, it's about what "the man" can get away with. Right and wrong _usually_ come back into the picture before anybody gets killed, but sometimes it can take years.
There are all kinds - you only meet a few on your way through the system, how cool they are is mostly a matter of luck, until you get to University and learn to prof. shop.
Our son is in a small (5 students) special needs class. The teacher can't be bothered to give 30 seconds of pertinent information to our son's aide before sending him out for 3 hours of inclusion, you know, little things like whether he's going to P.E. or Art.... She's got 5 students and can't manage to communicate this little thing to a substitute aide before sending him out for half the school day? It's a jungle in there, God help them when transparency hits the classroom.
Just like bad cops - they are out there - most aren't bad, most are noble and pure of heart and intention (more or less), but it doesn't take too many bad ones to really screw things up in some big and impressive ways.
My HS CompSci teacher was pretty cool about the fact that he had almost no idea what he was doing - he openly acknowledged that there were about a dozen students who could run rings around him on any computer. He still managed to teach the class and not mess the plebes up too much.
The world needs more people like him and a lot fewer who equate their position of authority with superiority.
Yes..... and no. CFLs are putting mercury in the home, yes a wet-bulb mercury switch has a billion times more elemental mercury in it, but they don't put those in new products for the home much, and the mercury in CFLs is in vapor form, virtually impossible to clean up, and much more likely to react into something nasty.
If you do have traditional flourescent tubes in your house, they have lots more Hg vapor then the CFLs, but not everyone has (or wants) those tubes in their home. Some countries have talked about mandating CFLs.
Personally, I use CFLs, though I've had 3 out of the 8 I installed go bad within the first 2 years of use and still haven't found the time to "properly" dispose of them.
So I bought a 3 pack of LED lights that were supposed to be the equivalent of 40 watt bulbs...
A 25 watt incandescent bulb is about 10 times brighter. I was pissed. Might keep me from stumbling in the dark, but it doesn't really illuminate a damn thing.
I was so hopeful.
What they are quoting is the illumination in the teeny little focused bright spot - the "normal" ligtbulbs illuminate more or less spherically.
Yeah, they're currently not good for much, hope this innovation enables them to be better. I do like my LED nightlights, though.
Either one is too hard for most casual users - if you're not a casual user, you can learn either. If you're paying for the software, there's a clear winner. I don't think the feature sets are far enough off between the latest versions to really matter.
I put lots of server things on OS-X when I worked in a Mac friendly (fanatical, actually) company, then I switched to a more pragmatic place and put the same things on a Debian box. Everything worked on both platforms, but the Debian install took about 15% of the effort, did in a day things that took a week to get sorted in OS-X, and much less research and trial and error to get it going. Both are stable once running, we shut down the Debian box to swap a UPS and had something like 450 continuous days uptime at that point.
One obscure plugin (graphviz under trac) works better on OS-X due to the font handling, otherwise performance has been identical.
The matte display in my 2006 15" MBP is crap. The backlight is weak, and the ATI graphics chip driving it has random lockups at least once every 10 hours, more often if it gets warm. Yeah, I know about the "excessive heat sink compound" issue, clearly an Apple build quality problem - and by design, you have to take apart about a dozen of those fiddly internal connections inside the notebook to expose the chip and heatsink, I'm still afraid of worse collateral damage during the repair, even if it's done at a "Genius Bar".
On the other hand, Apple does know how to make a good display, the 2006 30" desktops were sweet, made me not care at all what the notebook screen looked like.
New MBPs are Centrino 2 chipsets, pretty much state of the art unless you have a, ahem, chip on your shoulder against Intel.
I used to shop by dollars per Gigaflop, but lately I'm factoring in cost of running the thing too, and AMD still makes a compelling chipset - for desktops that do 24/7 number crunching. In a notebook it's more about burst performance, and Intel seems to be ahead at the moment.
In practical terms, the Atom notebooks are "good enough" for most things, I wish AMD would get it in gear and come out with a more compelling Atom alternative. Their latest stuff is still a little weak.
The other problem with the notebook market is that you can't really "roll your own," so choices are constrained by what the market has chosen to cobble together for you - undeniably more choice in the Intel notebook camp at the moment.
I'm glad I got my MBP before Apple's hardware team went crazy. The latest models are so far from being a compelling upgrade that I'd rather ditch OS X than buy a new Mac at the moment.
I felt that way until a few weeks ago when someone asked me what notebook I would buy if I had a $3000 budget... my answer came up 17" MBP. Now, if it were my $3000, I'd buy a $300 netbook and invest the $2700 for future upgrades as necessary, but if it's use it or lose it money, the MBP is the way to go at the moment.
ala Niven, if you can melt it and then inflate it, a 10m solid sphere can become (4/3 pi r^3) a hollow sphere roughly 10m in diameter and 50cm in thickness - which sounds like a pretty nice little living space, made of material you didn't have to lift from the surface. It's not big enough for a city or anything, but you'd want to practice on small asteroids first.
Yeah, so the machine had Win 95/98 on it before that, we upgraded the OS, but not Office. Just "upgraded" the machine to an eeeBox a couple of months ago and decided to give OO a try instead of trying to dig up the CDs, a USB CD drive, the product keys, etc.
I transitioned my home office to OO3 on XP from Office95 on XP which had been installed for the last 10 years. No real complaints yet. We don't have a massive legacy of old documents to open, and very little powerpoint to deal with, but in general powerpoint has worked for us on OO3.
I bet if management would give employees a $100 or $200 bonus to learn OO3, there'd be very few complaints.
Classic risk vs reward: highly rewarded, but at risk of getting nothing in a downturn. I take the same route myself, as opposed to a job with meager pay and low benefits where you can easily find another job if your present one has a problem. The thing I really don't like about the widely available low skill low risk jobs is that they tend to push for tons and tons of hours, so your pay is still sucky, maybe less sucky than standard hours, but any quality of life enhancement you might have had is out the window because of the work hour demands.
I know ISPs are considerably more complex and technically advanced today than in 1997, but my first inside knowledge of an ISP was a tech sales guy who installed a modem bank in his garage. He had some inkling of how to wire it all together and he could read the help files on the server software and keep it up 99% of the time, but beyond that he didn't really have deep understanding of anything he was doing. He certainly wasn't about to launch any theory based investigations to solve problems he saw for his customers, he just applied vendor supplied patches faithfully as they were issued, occasionally breaking pages hosted on his servers with MS "functionality improvements" to their hosting software. I think he _might_ have issued some problem reports to Microsoft, but usually that's a waste of time since so many other people are reporting the same stuff anyway.
So, scale that up to a "big" ISP today, if you get too big the whole thing is about to sink under its un-competitive bureaucratic overhead, they certainly don't have anything leftover for more than token R&D. Small ISPs haven't changed much from the tech sales guy's garage. There's probably a sweet-spot midrange ISP that has the technical savvy and resources to tackle a problem like this, but where's their motivation?
The problem is that most people tolerate a certain amount of crap in their life. They don't clean the windshield for a single bug-strike, they don't pump up a tire that is a little low, and they don't care about computer virus problems if they haven't been hurt by them lately.
In simple economic terms, it currently costs the average computer user more time and effort to protect against virus problems than they (personally) perceive themselves to suffer from them. They'd rather throw $60 at the problem and install an "anti-virus solution" than expend any time and effort to learn how to protect themselves. If you consider how long it would take the average computer user to come up to speed on protecting themselves, $60 is quite a bargain.
Should OS vendors be better about protecting against malware by design? Absolutely. The current auto-patching system seems like trying to keep a fleet of ships afloat by patching paper thin hulls at sea, why not fit them with thicker hulls before leaving port? Oh, yeah, because that Aero interface (paint) is more important to sales than any invisible security (thick hull) that actually costs much more to build - and 80% of the market doesn't really have a choice in vendor selection anyway, and of the 20% who do, 19.9% of them are clueless about inherent security.
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I'd also like to see creeping transparency into the classroom. If you throw back the curtains all at once the shock would be too great, but there's some seriously messed up stuff that goes on in the classroom that wouldn't if the scene were available for recall on YouTube.
Fucking school administrators. Piss on them.
Yep, one of the few take-home lessons I got from High School is that "we'll be doing it our way, because we're in charge."
There were a lot of teachers who looked at the authoritarian jerks and shrugged with a message like, "well, some people are like that, you better learn how to deal with them," and there were a few that clearly got off on ruining kids' days.
I hope you have achieved enough enlightenment by now to know that your "crime" was frightening the authorities. Quite a few US citizens have enjoyed a protracted holiday in Cuba recently for doing the same. When you've got them worried, it's not about right or wrong, it's about what "the man" can get away with. Right and wrong _usually_ come back into the picture before anybody gets killed, but sometimes it can take years.
There are all kinds - you only meet a few on your way through the system, how cool they are is mostly a matter of luck, until you get to University and learn to prof. shop.
Our son is in a small (5 students) special needs class. The teacher can't be bothered to give 30 seconds of pertinent information to our son's aide before sending him out for 3 hours of inclusion, you know, little things like whether he's going to P.E. or Art.... She's got 5 students and can't manage to communicate this little thing to a substitute aide before sending him out for half the school day? It's a jungle in there, God help them when transparency hits the classroom.
Just like bad cops - they are out there - most aren't bad, most are noble and pure of heart and intention (more or less), but it doesn't take too many bad ones to really screw things up in some big and impressive ways.
My HS CompSci teacher was pretty cool about the fact that he had almost no idea what he was doing - he openly acknowledged that there were about a dozen students who could run rings around him on any computer. He still managed to teach the class and not mess the plebes up too much.
The world needs more people like him and a lot fewer who equate their position of authority with superiority.
Please stop spreading the FUD about the amount of mercury in CFLs, which is negligible. The mercury in CFLs constitutes 0.1% of what we dump into the environment annually, and CFLs contribute far less mercury to the environment than incandescent bulbs. http://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/promotions/change_light/downloads/Fact_Sheet_Mercury.pdf
Yes..... and no. CFLs are putting mercury in the home, yes a wet-bulb mercury switch has a billion times more elemental mercury in it, but they don't put those in new products for the home much, and the mercury in CFLs is in vapor form, virtually impossible to clean up, and much more likely to react into something nasty.
If you do have traditional flourescent tubes in your house, they have lots more Hg vapor then the CFLs, but not everyone has (or wants) those tubes in their home. Some countries have talked about mandating CFLs.
Personally, I use CFLs, though I've had 3 out of the 8 I installed go bad within the first 2 years of use and still haven't found the time to "properly" dispose of them.
So I bought a 3 pack of LED lights that were supposed to be the equivalent of 40 watt bulbs...
A 25 watt incandescent bulb is about 10 times brighter. I was pissed. Might keep me from stumbling in the dark, but it doesn't really illuminate a damn thing.
I was so hopeful.
What they are quoting is the illumination in the teeny little focused bright spot - the "normal" ligtbulbs illuminate more or less spherically.
Yeah, they're currently not good for much, hope this innovation enables them to be better. I do like my LED nightlights, though.
Naaaah.... if it weren't sensational it wouldn't have been published.
Either one is too hard for most casual users - if you're not a casual user, you can learn either. If you're paying for the software, there's a clear winner. I don't think the feature sets are far enough off between the latest versions to really matter.
I put lots of server things on OS-X when I worked in a Mac friendly (fanatical, actually) company, then I switched to a more pragmatic place and put the same things on a Debian box. Everything worked on both platforms, but the Debian install took about 15% of the effort, did in a day things that took a week to get sorted in OS-X, and much less research and trial and error to get it going. Both are stable once running, we shut down the Debian box to swap a UPS and had something like 450 continuous days uptime at that point.
One obscure plugin (graphviz under trac) works better on OS-X due to the font handling, otherwise performance has been identical.
The matte display in my 2006 15" MBP is crap. The backlight is weak, and the ATI graphics chip driving it has random lockups at least once every 10 hours, more often if it gets warm. Yeah, I know about the "excessive heat sink compound" issue, clearly an Apple build quality problem - and by design, you have to take apart about a dozen of those fiddly internal connections inside the notebook to expose the chip and heatsink, I'm still afraid of worse collateral damage during the repair, even if it's done at a "Genius Bar".
On the other hand, Apple does know how to make a good display, the 2006 30" desktops were sweet, made me not care at all what the notebook screen looked like.
New MBPs are Centrino 2 chipsets, pretty much state of the art unless you have a, ahem, chip on your shoulder against Intel.
I used to shop by dollars per Gigaflop, but lately I'm factoring in cost of running the thing too, and AMD still makes a compelling chipset - for desktops that do 24/7 number crunching. In a notebook it's more about burst performance, and Intel seems to be ahead at the moment.
In practical terms, the Atom notebooks are "good enough" for most things, I wish AMD would get it in gear and come out with a more compelling Atom alternative. Their latest stuff is still a little weak.
The other problem with the notebook market is that you can't really "roll your own," so choices are constrained by what the market has chosen to cobble together for you - undeniably more choice in the Intel notebook camp at the moment.
I'm glad I got my MBP before Apple's hardware team went crazy. The latest models are so far from being a compelling upgrade that I'd rather ditch OS X than buy a new Mac at the moment.
I felt that way until a few weeks ago when someone asked me what notebook I would buy if I had a $3000 budget... my answer came up 17" MBP. Now, if it were my $3000, I'd buy a $300 netbook and invest the $2700 for future upgrades as necessary, but if it's use it or lose it money, the MBP is the way to go at the moment.
I wonder if they will test the macbook pro 17" which has a $50 matte option?
Not really available at the moment, still 2-3 weeks delivery for the 17" matte MBP.
Damn, diameters and radii, 5m radius solid becomes 10m radius hollow sphere 50cm thick.
ala Niven, if you can melt it and then inflate it, a 10m solid sphere can become (4/3 pi r^3) a hollow sphere roughly 10m in diameter and 50cm in thickness - which sounds like a pretty nice little living space, made of material you didn't have to lift from the surface. It's not big enough for a city or anything, but you'd want to practice on small asteroids first.
You might rather use this if you've got reliable waves.
Yeah, so the machine had Win 95/98 on it before that, we upgraded the OS, but not Office. Just "upgraded" the machine to an eeeBox a couple of months ago and decided to give OO a try instead of trying to dig up the CDs, a USB CD drive, the product keys, etc.
Is there a piece of software that will tell the whiners to STFU?
Maybe the whine activated pink slip generator?
I transitioned my home office to OO3 on XP from Office95 on XP which had been installed for the last 10 years. No real complaints yet. We don't have a massive legacy of old documents to open, and very little powerpoint to deal with, but in general powerpoint has worked for us on OO3.
I bet if management would give employees a $100 or $200 bonus to learn OO3, there'd be very few complaints.
Classic risk vs reward: highly rewarded, but at risk of getting nothing in a downturn. I take the same route myself, as opposed to a job with meager pay and low benefits where you can easily find another job if your present one has a problem. The thing I really don't like about the widely available low skill low risk jobs is that they tend to push for tons and tons of hours, so your pay is still sucky, maybe less sucky than standard hours, but any quality of life enhancement you might have had is out the window because of the work hour demands.
I know ISPs are considerably more complex and technically advanced today than in 1997, but my first inside knowledge of an ISP was a tech sales guy who installed a modem bank in his garage. He had some inkling of how to wire it all together and he could read the help files on the server software and keep it up 99% of the time, but beyond that he didn't really have deep understanding of anything he was doing. He certainly wasn't about to launch any theory based investigations to solve problems he saw for his customers, he just applied vendor supplied patches faithfully as they were issued, occasionally breaking pages hosted on his servers with MS "functionality improvements" to their hosting software. I think he _might_ have issued some problem reports to Microsoft, but usually that's a waste of time since so many other people are reporting the same stuff anyway.
So, scale that up to a "big" ISP today, if you get too big the whole thing is about to sink under its un-competitive bureaucratic overhead, they certainly don't have anything leftover for more than token R&D. Small ISPs haven't changed much from the tech sales guy's garage. There's probably a sweet-spot midrange ISP that has the technical savvy and resources to tackle a problem like this, but where's their motivation?
The problem is that most people tolerate a certain amount of crap in their life. They don't clean the windshield for a single bug-strike, they don't pump up a tire that is a little low, and they don't care about computer virus problems if they haven't been hurt by them lately.
In simple economic terms, it currently costs the average computer user more time and effort to protect against virus problems than they (personally) perceive themselves to suffer from them. They'd rather throw $60 at the problem and install an "anti-virus solution" than expend any time and effort to learn how to protect themselves. If you consider how long it would take the average computer user to come up to speed on protecting themselves, $60 is quite a bargain.
Should OS vendors be better about protecting against malware by design? Absolutely. The current auto-patching system seems like trying to keep a fleet of ships afloat by patching paper thin hulls at sea, why not fit them with thicker hulls before leaving port? Oh, yeah, because that Aero interface (paint) is more important to sales than any invisible security (thick hull) that actually costs much more to build - and 80% of the market doesn't really have a choice in vendor selection anyway, and of the 20% who do, 19.9% of them are clueless about inherent security.