A friend of mine recently mentioned Reggio kindergartens (since she only mentioned them, it's just a wild-ass guess at the spelling) which encourage children to practically build their own play area and discover and learn quite a lot in the process; supposedly pre-school children can have the grasp of physics of a 14-year-old. I haven't read into it much yet, and I doubt I'll be able to find or pay for one when I have kids, but you never know...
Anyway, to me it proves that while talent does exist, our education systems - from kindergarten on - are definitely misusing it. If they even succeed in recognizing it.
As a future educator, I could cry at the sight of all the talent wasted in the outdated education systems. And with the nearly-global trend of democracy in schools and school systems, with everyone and their dog giving opinions on what children should and - more pointedly - should not learn, I don't see much chance for improvement.
Let me try to be a bit radical here:
Maths is simple. Chess is trivial. The complexity of rocket science itself is next to nothing compared to the complexity of language.
The evidence supports this claim: you can learn to play chess and do maths later in your life, and it takes quite a few years to master rocket science... but once you pass the age you were supposed to master at least one language in, you're done; if you haven't learned a language until then, you never will.
Our brains come prepared for certain cognitive functions, one of which is language. Language acquisition itself only begins after certain other cognitive functions are developed enough. It is evolutionary; I'll even say language is what makes us human in the first place - without language, none of the civilisations would have existed, we would be just some kind of hairless apes. We've developed for thousands of years before we got language, and we continue developing. Chess and mathematics have both come much later, much later, yet we seem to be doing rather well.
Of course, the radical claim I've made will be proven false if, for instance, 20k years from now human calculators become common or even predominant. But at least I feel confident in claiming that we haven't had chess or mathematics long enough to have well-prepared areas of the brain just for that purpose. There do seem to exist certain racial or national preferences towards some things, but they still seem to be more in the 'talent' area than in the 'given' area. I really wouldn't dare hypothesize whether it's nature, nurture or both.
This is why I don't like comparing things to language in the way parent poster did; I know of nothing else that cannot be learned later in life, and learned well.
no, it would never happen. It would require that email readers have the ability to execute code passed to them, and nobody would be stupid enough to write a mail program that would do that.
So what have we learned, kids?
Every time you hear a bell, an angel gets his wings.
Every time you say you don't believe in fairies, one fairy dies.
If you light a cigarette on a candle flame, a sailor dies.
And - most importantly - whenever someone says nobody would be stupid enough to do something, a programmer in Microsoft gets an idea.
Now, who knows what one has to say or do for a Microsoft programmer to die?
The idea that there is anyone out there - anyone at all - who considers this "reasonable" (presumably at least one lawyer does) convinces me that the person in question must have had their soul surgically removed shortly after birth.
As it goes, you have read into my words things I haven't said. Read my original post again.
Communism as such never existed in practice; hence the quotation marks in my second post.
Since it never existed in practice, Marx's views on communism are currently irrelevant (although I have noticed that many educated Americans hold certain personal views very akin to communism, which does remind me of Marx's claim that communism will originate in developed countries). What I'm commenting on is what would roughly be translated to English as "workers' self-management", which was the basis of all businesses in my country. One of our few still-successful companies (for the war - or, to be more precise, people who benefited from the war ruined most of our economy) is still holding on to that model; the only difference is that now they own stocks as well.
And in that system, workers were mostly satisfied with their jobs; they had 8 working hours per day, job security, a decent health care system... we were poor then, but in many respects we are poorer now. And it is no wonder many people regret the onslaught of capitalism where many workers have virtually no rights at all, with working hours so severe some people hardly ever see their families... we are becoming more like you, working all day long to earn money you'll never enjoy spending...
You don't have to point out the deficiencies in that system (which was socialist, not communist, by the way); there were many and they'd made our economy uncompetitive. But the average person doesn't want to care about the big picture. The average worker doesn't want to learn more and move on... they just want to work their shift, and go home to their families. And they wanted - at the time - to work with as few disturbances as possible. So they pushed the incompetent workers, who got in the way, to management, and then to politics. Which is how we got our politicians. And what is your excuse?
Apart from living in a former "communist" country, with my parents' and grandparents' generations telling me how things worked in those days, no, I am not very familiar with communism.
You, OTOH, can't seem to grasp that industry was different in those days, as well as the term "job security", which is very important to the mediocre.
Check the Gauss' bell-curve; most people do fall into that category.
I suppose there are certain things hardware virtualisation does better.
The trick is, I'd guess, to find out which works better in which circumstances.
You see that people suspect this white paper because of its origin; they are right in doing so at least because only one type of test has been performed; surely not all computing tasks perform the same way as a kernel compile.
This suggests that VMWare have found the example which supports their claims the best; the question is, of course, whether this is the only such example.
So if we suppose that there are certain types of problems where hardware virtualisation outperforms software virtualisation, hybrid solutions seem to be the right way to go.
P.S. I don't really know what I'm talking about...
The "uplifted communist worker" is stuck in his position.
Maybe, but by choice.
It's a great example of Peter's Principle, really: workers themselves would promote the incompetent so that they wouldn't interfere with the real work.
Of course, the system has a few... glitches, which in turn ruin such systems.
For some reason, it seems that when one uses the term user friendly, they really mean idiot friendly.
I, however, don't.
To (ab)use the ephemeral car analogy once more, people need a certain amount of training before they are allowed to drive.
The only reason computer users haven't needed formal training is because situations where one's ignorance will cause deaths are rather rare and limited; however, as the danger of money loss is greater than any other, some effort is made towards the training of the masses.
In the meantime, however, interfaces have been developed which allow users to master certain basic tasks relatively quickly.
Of course, certain less basic tasks become obfuscated, complicate or impossible. Interfaces beautifully arrange the 20% of capabilities needed by 80% of people, but ignore the other 80% of capabilities. (As a long-time Gnome-user, I have become quite peeved at the direction the project has taken recently.)
If I am to call myself a computer user, I have to be able to use its capabilities. You know, a computer user, not an $OS user. Or a $program user.
Newbies aren't users. They get to become users after a certain learning period.
I do so hope that this fact won't get forgotten.
Now, that doesn't have anything to say about proprietary software, as the GP poster pointed out - often proprietary software is just as difficult to install, maintain, etc. I think OSX has it pretty much right with software installation - drag this "file" into your Applications directory. Done.
Isn't that better than MSI or make/make install?
Well, I don't know... I find "emerge prog_name" very convenient.
And for the most part, I need never fiddle with install CDs.
Slashdot Mirror
A friend of mine recently mentioned Reggio kindergartens (since she only mentioned them, it's just a wild-ass guess at the spelling) which encourage children to practically build their own play area and discover and learn quite a lot in the process; supposedly pre-school children can have the grasp of physics of a 14-year-old. I haven't read into it much yet, and I doubt I'll be able to find or pay for one when I have kids, but you never know...
Anyway, to me it proves that while talent does exist, our education systems - from kindergarten on - are definitely misusing it. If they even succeed in recognizing it.
As a future educator, I could cry at the sight of all the talent wasted in the outdated education systems. And with the nearly-global trend of democracy in schools and school systems, with everyone and their dog giving opinions on what children should and - more pointedly - should not learn, I don't see much chance for improvement.
Let me try to be a bit radical here:
Maths is simple. Chess is trivial. The complexity of rocket science itself is next to nothing compared to the complexity of language.
The evidence supports this claim: you can learn to play chess and do maths later in your life, and it takes quite a few years to master rocket science... but once you pass the age you were supposed to master at least one language in, you're done; if you haven't learned a language until then, you never will.
Our brains come prepared for certain cognitive functions, one of which is language. Language acquisition itself only begins after certain other cognitive functions are developed enough. It is evolutionary; I'll even say language is what makes us human in the first place - without language, none of the civilisations would have existed, we would be just some kind of hairless apes. We've developed for thousands of years before we got language, and we continue developing. Chess and mathematics have both come much later, much later, yet we seem to be doing rather well.
Of course, the radical claim I've made will be proven false if, for instance, 20k years from now human calculators become common or even predominant. But at least I feel confident in claiming that we haven't had chess or mathematics long enough to have well-prepared areas of the brain just for that purpose. There do seem to exist certain racial or national preferences towards some things, but they still seem to be more in the 'talent' area than in the 'given' area. I really wouldn't dare hypothesize whether it's nature, nurture or both.
This is why I don't like comparing things to language in the way parent poster did; I know of nothing else that cannot be learned later in life, and learned well.
Non-proprietary, you mean?
But close enough... the Force is strong with this one.
So what have we learned, kids?
Every time you hear a bell, an angel gets his wings.
Every time you say you don't believe in fairies, one fairy dies.
If you light a cigarette on a candle flame, a sailor dies.
And - most importantly - whenever someone says nobody would be stupid enough to do something, a programmer in Microsoft gets an idea.
Now, who knows what one has to say or do for a Microsoft programmer to die?
What, you wanted them to set the whole field on fire?
These young ones, such destructive personalities...
... what is this? Such a slow day? Whoever let me get the first post? You should be ashamed.
... can I crack pr0n sites with it?
(This would have even been a frosty piss if it weren't for a Slow Down Cowboy!)
Since you obviously refuse to read what I wrote and instead you read what you want me to have written, I doubt I could ever agree with you.
You may twist my words all you like; I'm done explaining. No use talking to someone who won't listen.
How did you think you get lawyers?
As it goes, you have read into my words things I haven't said. Read my original post again.
Communism as such never existed in practice; hence the quotation marks in my second post.
Since it never existed in practice, Marx's views on communism are currently irrelevant (although I have noticed that many educated Americans hold certain personal views very akin to communism, which does remind me of Marx's claim that communism will originate in developed countries). What I'm commenting on is what would roughly be translated to English as "workers' self-management", which was the basis of all businesses in my country. One of our few still-successful companies (for the war - or, to be more precise, people who benefited from the war ruined most of our economy) is still holding on to that model; the only difference is that now they own stocks as well.
And in that system, workers were mostly satisfied with their jobs; they had 8 working hours per day, job security, a decent health care system... we were poor then, but in many respects we are poorer now. And it is no wonder many people regret the onslaught of capitalism where many workers have virtually no rights at all, with working hours so severe some people hardly ever see their families... we are becoming more like you, working all day long to earn money you'll never enjoy spending...
You don't have to point out the deficiencies in that system (which was socialist, not communist, by the way); there were many and they'd made our economy uncompetitive. But the average person doesn't want to care about the big picture. The average worker doesn't want to learn more and move on... they just want to work their shift, and go home to their families. And they wanted - at the time - to work with as few disturbances as possible. So they pushed the incompetent workers, who got in the way, to management, and then to politics. Which is how we got our politicians. And what is your excuse?
Apart from living in a former "communist" country, with my parents' and grandparents' generations telling me how things worked in those days, no, I am not very familiar with communism.
You, OTOH, can't seem to grasp that industry was different in those days, as well as the term "job security", which is very important to the mediocre.
Check the Gauss' bell-curve; most people do fall into that category.
I suppose there are certain things hardware virtualisation does better.
The trick is, I'd guess, to find out which works better in which circumstances.
You see that people suspect this white paper because of its origin; they are right in doing so at least because only one type of test has been performed; surely not all computing tasks perform the same way as a kernel compile.
This suggests that VMWare have found the example which supports their claims the best; the question is, of course, whether this is the only such example.
So if we suppose that there are certain types of problems where hardware virtualisation outperforms software virtualisation, hybrid solutions seem to be the right way to go.
P.S. I don't really know what I'm talking about...
Even so, they may be at least partially right.
Besides, if a hybrid approach is necessary, VMWare will need to adjust as well. Or am I missing something?
Maybe, but by choice.
It's a great example of Peter's Principle, really: workers themselves would promote the incompetent so that they wouldn't interfere with the real work.
Of course, the system has a few... glitches, which in turn ruin such systems.
DRIEDFRORGP1/4LLS
Don't smoke that crap, it'll kill you.
It's like a train station, but for ships.
For some reason, it seems that when one uses the term user friendly, they really mean idiot friendly.
I, however, don't.
To (ab)use the ephemeral car analogy once more, people need a certain amount of training before they are allowed to drive.
The only reason computer users haven't needed formal training is because situations where one's ignorance will cause deaths are rather rare and limited; however, as the danger of money loss is greater than any other, some effort is made towards the training of the masses.
In the meantime, however, interfaces have been developed which allow users to master certain basic tasks relatively quickly.
Of course, certain less basic tasks become obfuscated, complicate or impossible. Interfaces beautifully arrange the 20% of capabilities needed by 80% of people, but ignore the other 80% of capabilities. (As a long-time Gnome-user, I have become quite peeved at the direction the project has taken recently.)
If I am to call myself a computer user, I have to be able to use its capabilities. You know, a computer user, not an $OS user. Or a $program user.
Newbies aren't users. They get to become users after a certain learning period.
I do so hope that this fact won't get forgotten.
What do you think quad core processors are for?
Well, I don't know... I find "emerge prog_name" very convenient.
And for the most part, I need never fiddle with install CDs.
Errr... not quite.
It's Drosophila Melanogaster (black belly), not Megalogaster (great big belly).
Though I suspect Megalogaster would apply to some people here...
Fascinating... The first three books are all I've had the chance to read.
*sigh*
Now if all Anonymous Cowards learned to type their replies in Whitespace...
I can dream, right?
Why does this remind me of Dune?
Dunno... I still have to pay for the Internet connection.