"So, they idea is: if a leak makes the US government look bad then it must be the real deal, but if it may serve the US government in some way then we have to suspect that it has been planted? "
I never said any of the leaks were the real deal. I also never said that I thought they were false. A speculation popped into my head and it seemed interesting enough to share. Relax, man.
I am actually wondering if all of this wikileaks stuff was intentionally leaked to manipulate people.
For example, the revelation that China is growing tired of North Korea. This may be true, but it may also be a lie designed to build popular support with the US for action against NK.
Maybe I've seen too many movies, but if this guy really had something that was truly damaging, he'd be sleeping with the fishes by now.
" When the mac came out, Apple made an equal atrocity. Underserving people were able to do complex tasks because of the WIMP interface. No longer did users have to muck about in the computer and install overly complex device drivers, because the clean interfaces meant that the machine was much more plug and play. Of couse, this meant that more underserving people had access to a comptuer. " [sic]
I feel the same way about air. If you don't understand cellular respiration on a molecular level, then you don't deserve to breathe it.
Pat yourself on the back for catching me forgetting to delete some text from my post before hitting submit. I typed both and googled which is under OSX so I could delete the incorrect one. Why did I have to google it? Why do I not just know that? Because practically speaking THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE TWO ARE MINUSCULE. So you gotta rmdir instead of rm -rF. BFD.
true. I have a 2000 nissan and do most of the work on it myself. I find that with so many parts on modern cars like mine, they have to cram lot in a small space. Some do better than others. My car is no fun to work on because there are a lot of tight spaces, but there's nothing like what you describe. I can do just about anything to that car short of pulling the oil pan or crankshaft (which I hope to never do) with the engine in the car. Had a mid 80's ford that to replace the starter, you had to lift the engine out of the car. Asinine.
Next time I go car shopping, part of my criteria will be based on the assumption that I will be doing work on it myself at some point. But that's just because for some things, I do like knowing the internals. Computers, not so much.
having messed with a decent amount of pc hardware, I agree. The point is that with a mac, you shouldn't have to do much of that. Otherwise, what would be the point? I am not liking the mac because of the so-called cool factor or steve jobs or whatever. I like it cause I don't have to mess with it. It's a reliable tool.
when I switched to mac I did miss the task bar. After almost a year, not anymore. I never missed the mouse buttons. Two finger tap on the trackpad does the same thing. Keyboard shorts are actually better IMO but they are different. They are generally speaking, more ergonomic.
Worst part about MBP is the sharp edge around the perimeter of the thing. That drives me nuts.
I use my mac to make a living. I like cheap too, but I'd rather have a quality tool for the job. If I were using a table saw all day every day, the $150 ryobi I have would never work. If I drilled holes all day, a $30 black & decker drill would not suffice. In the realm of tools, I learned from experience to never buy cheap tools (but since I cannot afford a $1500 table saw, the cheap one has to do for me). That applies well to computers.
I recently saw someone with a nice looking vaio. Obviously judging by the case only, but it looked comparable to a macbook. I figure if someone is going to make a nice case rather than the crappy glued together plastic then maybe they had the sense to put good components in there. Probably costs similarly too but then you get stuck with crappy windows unless you want linux. You get what you pay for in most cases.
you are right about fuel, lubricants, and filters improving over time. But it's not as though that's the only thing that has improved. Engine design has also improved. How many engines use pushrods anymore? How many engines are fuel injected today? Even things like plugs. Today, you get platinum tipped plugs which can go 30k - 60k miles without a change. Hardened valve seats means no more leaded gas. That means cleaner emissions. Engine tech has improved.
It is pretty unremarkable for a 4 cylinder engine to get 170 hp/150ft-lbs of torque and get 30 mpg on the highway. Those old engines would get about 15mpg and make 50% less hp/torque.
I said that you had to take your car to a mechanic every year or two. Coolant flush, plugs, fuel filter, tranny flush, etc. All required maintenance. But you don't have to really know about that stuff. Personally, I do and perform my own maintenance. But you don't have to be so hands on.
I drive a 2000 nissan. 150k miles on it so far and just now recently it developed its first real problem (had to replace fuel pump). If that thing doesn't get at least 250k I'll be wondering what the heck went wrong.
I like cars. It'd be awesome to work on one of those old chevy small blocks. Would love to get my hands on one. If I had the time and money, you can bet I'd drive an old bel-air or impala. But I certainly wouldn't expect to drive it for 150k miles and only have to do only routine maintenance.
"Who cares about the hardware, as long as it looks nice! It is very, very important to developers to know how the hardware works. I'd not want one who does not anywhere near my systems "
Depends on the type of work you need done. If you need someone to write a device driver or program a microcontroller, then sure. If you want someone to develop a website then you'd be a fool to want it tailored to specific hardware. In that case, you want someone who knows how to design a good scalable website, which means that you don't even know what kind of hardware will be running the site because it could change.
When did abstraction become ignorance? Do you know about metallurgy? Yet you are typing on a computer that contains alloys. You don't care about that. You choose what to care about and what isn't worth worrying about. In other words, you are liberated from knowing about or having to care about the chemical composition of your hard drive. This is good, because if you were worried about such trivial details you'd never get to worry about trivial details like what kind of hard drive or motherboard is inside your computer.
"Dumbing down and locking down systems has ALWAYS been what macs are about" 1997 called. They want their OS back. My macbook runs OSX. Which means that beneath the covers it runs a variant of BSD linux. Which, as I said in my original post, allows me to get up close and personal with my file system. I look at OSX as yet another linux desktop env. And it's not an iPhone or an iPad. You would actually have a cogent point were we talking about iPhone OS. But we're not. So, bzzzt.
'This guy is just an 'IT Professional". It's just a job for him. Something he does for a paycheck.'
Uh, no. I do code for a living, but I am very much a programming geek. I'd write code even if I did something else for a living or I'd find a way to get back to doing code for a living. So much so, in fact, that as I get older I should probably from a financial standpoint move into management. But I want to design software, not sit in an office with a door.
I am not a hardware geek. This isn't 1983 anymore. Having a computer that you built that sort of works sometimes is no longer acceptable and it's not really a novelty. If you want to get real work done then you need something that always works. In case you weren't aware, sometime in the last 20 years computers went from being novelties to being tools used to accomplish work.
And/. isn't just for hardware geeks. There are a good number of programmers here.
yup, before the macbook pro I was using ubuntu. Three pain points for me:
1) the wireless networking worked, but it always seemed to forget my password. Annoying.
2) I used two monitors, so every morning I would have to go back in and reconfigure my displays. It got to be really annoying to do every single morning.
3) even with all of the needed codecs installed, sometimes I could play my aac music and sometimes I couldn't. It was weird.
I was running this on a lenovo laptop which was utter crap in every way.
The three pain points are minor things. But that's why I alluded to polish in my original post. Canonical developed an awesome desktop env. I don't know if it's just a side effect of having to support every piece of hardware under the sun, but it seems like ubuntu just still lacks polish. I have been using it since maybe dapper drake and it's really improved over the years. But that last little bit always seems to elude them. If I have to spend five minutes every morning performing some repetitive task, that's a small thing that becomes a big deal over time.
"all the Mac users I know have little understanding about hardware, nor do they care to know about the hardware."
Not having to care is liberating.
I recently happened upon an old Popular Mechanics magazine from the 1950s. It dealt extensively with automotive topics. It struck me how much people had to know about their car's inner workings to properly maintain it. Today, you really don't have to know what kind of spark system your car has, or what kind of plugs it uses, or what kind of fuel delivery system it has. You don't have to clean varnish out of the carbuerator every year, or have the piston rings done at 60k miles. You don't have to replace the plugs and points every 10k miles. Just keep gas in it, make sure you change the oil, and take it somewhere for minor maintenance every year or two. It should go >100k without much in the way of repairs, and get mileage that cars in the 1950's couldn't even get close to.
I am a software developer. I use a macbook pro. It's great. I need something that works. I do not want to fuss with the OS, because I gain nothing from doing this and I honestly don't really care about it much. I want a powerful (i.e. *nix) CLI. I'd like to be able to play some music on it while I work. The mac does this and more better than any other computer I have used, regardless of OS. I can use it to accomplish work and not have to always figure out why it's acting weird now like I have had to do with every windows computer I have ever used since the dawn of time. I also don't have to spend time tweaking it out to make it behave like I have had to do with every linux desktop I have had for the last five or so years of using linux.
I don't know what the hardware internals are. All I know is that the display looks great, the aluminum case feels really solid (not some glued together plastic crap), it has crashed only once in a year (and this was due to the square turd known as java), every time I go to open it up it just works, and the trackpad is so awesome I don't even miss a mouse. By comparison, every other trackpad I have used to date has been so far inferior that it might as well have been an old broken NES controller hacked into the USB port, or even a couple of sticks tied together and plugged into the headphone jack. Apple got it right.
I dislike the Apple "cool factor" because it causes people to overlook the fact that Apple is making awesome computers with an OS waaaay superior to Windows because it has a *nix CLI under it and way better than linux distro X because it has the polish you'd expect from commercial software. Most people who dislike Apple, I find, have never actually gotten their hands on any of their products and dislike Apple based on principle. Apple has their flaws (iPhone 4 comes to mind + Jobs denial of said flaws), but let's not pretend that some dell laptop running windows 7 is even on the same level as a macbook pro.
I work at a growing startup (maybe not really even a startup anymore). We have an army of macbooks running OSX or linux. All linux servers hosted at various places (redundancy!). Very little msft/dell stuff at all.
Know what? Our IT guys really have very little to do with regard to hardware problems. That allows them to focus on stuff like making sure everyone backs up regularly, and that we keep our servers lean and mean and able to handle the growing capacity. It works great. Better hardware + good OS = fewer problems. Sure, the upfront costs are greater with the more expensive hardware but I definitely see the IT guys doing less desktop support type-work.
As a developer, it's great. Being able to use good stable hardware and stable OSes (as opposed to the bargain basement desktop/winXP setup still found at many large corporations) leaves me able to focus on development rather than problems.
Sometimes, little things go a long way. Since I've been using the macbook + OSX I don't have to spend time every morning configuring my displays, connecting to the wireless, etc. I just open the thing up and get back to work. Everything is right where I left it, almost like I never went home. It's great, from a productivity perspective, to not have to fuss with the hardware.
Before I started working there I was windows at work, linux at home. Now, I'm a mac (on the desktop) guy. I'd seriously consider going mac/linux.
fair enough. And no diss meant against tradesmen. I like to tinker with electronics, building tube amps and so forth. I use more math for that than I do for programming. So I do understand what you are saying. And some trades are going to be more scientific than others. Working with anything electrical, for example, would certainly require more theory than say a plumber or a laborer.
Advanced math/theory happened to help you, but the other guys who didn't understand that stuff could still do the job. An electrician may want to know ohm's law and watt's law and a few others like that. But if not that's why standards exist, so a guy who doesn't know ohm's law DOES know to use 12-3 romex for a 20A circuit and not 14-3. Engineers come up with the standards and codes, guys doing the work follow them.
And having troubleshot some HVAC issues myself, I'd say that is a much different skill set than wiring up a a new building or installing all of the plumbing fixtures. With HVAC, you are dealing with interconnected systems, almost like an automobile engine. A crew of guys framing up or wiring up a new office building according to standards is a lot different than the guy I call when my furnace stops working in the dead of winter or when my car starts behaving erratically. Again, having attempted many of these things myself, I understand the skill involved.
Those other jobs, business, sales, trades, etc, are not listed there to degrade those jobs. Those are good jobs to have and require a high degree of skill. But trig and calc, they can in most cases do without. Spoken as a casual observer, I guess. I do have several family members who are union tradesmen, though.
You also hit on another thing: many sciences, specifically physics, are little else than applied mathematics, at least at the high school level. It's always easier to learn a thing when you see how it applies. Maybe that would have helped some of those kids who annoyed me by slowing the rest of the class down.
I think my intent behind the above post was that the threat of being forcibly removed from school would be somewhat of a scared-straight thing.
I do not think that a class of uneducated people is a good thing, nor do I think that privatization is the answer. I mean, it is good for some privatized schools to exist to provide some competition to the public schools. But a totally privatized education industry, could you imagine the horror? And you think healthcare is a mess now! It would be another got-you-over-a-barrel industry like health care and oil.
That said, the public school district here is horrid, save for a few magnent schools (where my kids go). It's a very corrupt system, and you have school administrators making a lot of money to do nothing, meanwhile they cut teachers, programs, etc due to lack of funding. Look up St Louis public schools and you'll know what I mean. If the school board's and all other school administrators salary (heck, even 50% of it) were totally contingent on the students meeting some minimum standard of adequacy, I think they'd be motivated to fix the district and make sure kids are educated, even in the inner cities. Not everything is within their power, sure, but there is plenty that is. They can fix a lot, but they choose not to because hell, they're getting paid anyhow and it would just be too much work to do their jobs properly.
I see in my children's school a few students who are victims of absolutely horrid parenting. They send children to school for day care, pretty much. The school district here receives funding based on attendance, too, so the school will do anything to not send the kids home. I think if those kids were sent home and the parents had to miss work for a week or pay for a sitter, the bad behavior would be corrected. All it takes is two or three of these kids to distract the teacher from doing her job, and ALL of the other children suffer for it.
yeah, that's true. I guess that post was half rant. And kicking kids out of school would create some sort of totally uneducated proletariat that would most certainly resort to crime. On the other hand, how is that any different from now?
It's a real dilemma. Fail to educate people and you have people who turn to crime. Offer everyone an education and make it a right, and you have the current situation: people refuse to take advantage of it, but legally must remain in school. So they bully and distract students who are actually trying to get an education and then turn eventually to crime.
My thinking was that if the threat of getting permanently expelled from school were hanging over the heads of some of these children and their parents, they might shape up. And let's be honest: most of these cases are not so much a problem with the child as it is the poor parenting taking place at home. Make the parents pay for their lack of effort at raising a child.
Figured out an algorithm to calculate distances between lat/lng pairs. Yes, I know there are code snippets available online that you can just drop into place, but I wanted to figure it out. I did.
Another time I was asked to make some analog gauges in flash that represented home well a team was doing for the current day. At the time (it was 2003 so this whole story is IIRC) flash only supported radians for such a thing, so I had to take a percentage and express that in terms of radians. Couple that with the fact I had no clue about how to use flash and had never used actionscript, it was a fun task:)
Don't follow my logic further than it was meant to go. I am talking about math, not all other subjects.
You can be an educated citizen without knowing advanced algebra. There are plenty of things that *should* be taught that aren't. Math is akin to computer programming, Chemistry/Physics, etc. Those are topics taught in high school. Great to take if you are interested in them, or would like to someday work in a field dealing with this. A complete waste of time if your post high school plans do not involve anything remotely related.
Slashdot Mirror
'I helps to show how viscous those "pirates" who abuse copyright really are'
Pirates are pretty gooey. They ooze right through the cracks in the legal system.
Microsoft cloud services will be just as awesome as Sharepoint!
egads.
These stories about the "Imminent demise of technology X in Y months" get really old after a while.
People are still using winXP, IE, audiocassettes, automobiles, and even vacuum tubes. The era of the PC isn't ending anytime soon.
Writers should just take the week off if they have nothing valid or interesting to write about.
"So, they idea is: if a leak makes the US government look bad then it must be the real deal, but if it may serve the US government in some way then we have to suspect that it has been planted?
"
I never said any of the leaks were the real deal. I also never said that I thought they were false. A speculation popped into my head and it seemed interesting enough to share. Relax, man.
I am actually wondering if all of this wikileaks stuff was intentionally leaked to manipulate people.
For example, the revelation that China is growing tired of North Korea. This may be true, but it may also be a lie designed to build popular support with the US for action against NK.
Maybe I've seen too many movies, but if this guy really had something that was truly damaging, he'd be sleeping with the fishes by now.
"
When the mac came out, Apple made an equal atrocity. Underserving people were able to do complex tasks because of the WIMP interface. No longer did users have to muck about in the computer and install overly complex device drivers, because the clean interfaces meant that the machine was much more plug and play. Of couse, this meant that more underserving people had access to a comptuer.
" [sic]
I feel the same way about air. If you don't understand cellular respiration on a molecular level, then you don't deserve to breathe it.
Pat yourself on the back for catching me forgetting to delete some text from my post before hitting submit. I typed both and googled which is under OSX so I could delete the incorrect one. Why did I have to google it? Why do I not just know that? Because practically speaking THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE TWO ARE MINUSCULE. So you gotta rmdir instead of rm -rF. BFD.
true. I have a 2000 nissan and do most of the work on it myself. I find that with so many parts on modern cars like mine, they have to cram lot in a small space. Some do better than others. My car is no fun to work on because there are a lot of tight spaces, but there's nothing like what you describe. I can do just about anything to that car short of pulling the oil pan or crankshaft (which I hope to never do) with the engine in the car. Had a mid 80's ford that to replace the starter, you had to lift the engine out of the car. Asinine.
Next time I go car shopping, part of my criteria will be based on the assumption that I will be doing work on it myself at some point. But that's just because for some things, I do like knowing the internals. Computers, not so much.
having messed with a decent amount of pc hardware, I agree. The point is that with a mac, you shouldn't have to do much of that. Otherwise, what would be the point? I am not liking the mac because of the so-called cool factor or steve jobs or whatever. I like it cause I don't have to mess with it. It's a reliable tool.
when I switched to mac I did miss the task bar. After almost a year, not anymore. I never missed the mouse buttons. Two finger tap on the trackpad does the same thing. Keyboard shorts are actually better IMO but they are different. They are generally speaking, more ergonomic.
Worst part about MBP is the sharp edge around the perimeter of the thing. That drives me nuts.
I use my mac to make a living. I like cheap too, but I'd rather have a quality tool for the job. If I were using a table saw all day every day, the $150 ryobi I have would never work. If I drilled holes all day, a $30 black & decker drill would not suffice. In the realm of tools, I learned from experience to never buy cheap tools (but since I cannot afford a $1500 table saw, the cheap one has to do for me). That applies well to computers.
I recently saw someone with a nice looking vaio. Obviously judging by the case only, but it looked comparable to a macbook. I figure if someone is going to make a nice case rather than the crappy glued together plastic then maybe they had the sense to put good components in there. Probably costs similarly too but then you get stuck with crappy windows unless you want linux. You get what you pay for in most cases.
you are right about fuel, lubricants, and filters improving over time. But it's not as though that's the only thing that has improved. Engine design has also improved. How many engines use pushrods anymore? How many engines are fuel injected today? Even things like plugs. Today, you get platinum tipped plugs which can go 30k - 60k miles without a change. Hardened valve seats means no more leaded gas. That means cleaner emissions. Engine tech has improved.
It is pretty unremarkable for a 4 cylinder engine to get 170 hp/150ft-lbs of torque and get 30 mpg on the highway. Those old engines would get about 15mpg and make 50% less hp/torque.
http://www.edmunds.com/new/2011/ford/fusion/101325677/specs.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_210#Engines_2
I said that you had to take your car to a mechanic every year or two. Coolant flush, plugs, fuel filter, tranny flush, etc. All required maintenance. But you don't have to really know about that stuff. Personally, I do and perform my own maintenance. But you don't have to be so hands on.
I drive a 2000 nissan. 150k miles on it so far and just now recently it developed its first real problem (had to replace fuel pump). If that thing doesn't get at least 250k I'll be wondering what the heck went wrong.
I like cars. It'd be awesome to work on one of those old chevy small blocks. Would love to get my hands on one. If I had the time and money, you can bet I'd drive an old bel-air or impala. But I certainly wouldn't expect to drive it for 150k miles and only have to do only routine maintenance.
"Who cares about the hardware, as long as it looks nice! It is very, very important to developers to know how the hardware works. I'd not want one who does not anywhere near my systems "
Depends on the type of work you need done. If you need someone to write a device driver or program a microcontroller, then sure. If you want someone to develop a website then you'd be a fool to want it tailored to specific hardware. In that case, you want someone who knows how to design a good scalable website, which means that you don't even know what kind of hardware will be running the site because it could change.
And sharepoint doesn't look nice.
oh my, where to begin?
When did abstraction become ignorance? Do you know about metallurgy? Yet you are typing on a computer that contains alloys. You don't care about that. You choose what to care about and what isn't worth worrying about. In other words, you are liberated from knowing about or having to care about the chemical composition of your hard drive. This is good, because if you were worried about such trivial details you'd never get to worry about trivial details like what kind of hard drive or motherboard is inside your computer.
"Dumbing down and locking down systems has ALWAYS been what macs are about"
1997 called. They want their OS back. My macbook runs OSX. Which means that beneath the covers it runs a variant of BSD linux. Which, as I said in my original post, allows me to get up close and personal with my file system. I look at OSX as yet another linux desktop env. And it's not an iPhone or an iPad. You would actually have a cogent point were we talking about iPhone OS. But we're not. So, bzzzt.
'This guy is just an 'IT Professional". It's just a job for him. Something he does for a paycheck.'
Uh, no. I do code for a living, but I am very much a programming geek. I'd write code even if I did something else for a living or I'd find a way to get back to doing code for a living. So much so, in fact, that as I get older I should probably from a financial standpoint move into management. But I want to design software, not sit in an office with a door.
I am not a hardware geek. This isn't 1983 anymore. Having a computer that you built that sort of works sometimes is no longer acceptable and it's not really a novelty. If you want to get real work done then you need something that always works. In case you weren't aware, sometime in the last 20 years computers went from being novelties to being tools used to accomplish work.
And /. isn't just for hardware geeks. There are a good number of programmers here.
yup, before the macbook pro I was using ubuntu. Three pain points for me:
1) the wireless networking worked, but it always seemed to forget my password. Annoying.
2) I used two monitors, so every morning I would have to go back in and reconfigure my displays. It got to be really annoying to do every single morning.
3) even with all of the needed codecs installed, sometimes I could play my aac music and sometimes I couldn't. It was weird.
I was running this on a lenovo laptop which was utter crap in every way.
The three pain points are minor things. But that's why I alluded to polish in my original post. Canonical developed an awesome desktop env. I don't know if it's just a side effect of having to support every piece of hardware under the sun, but it seems like ubuntu just still lacks polish. I have been using it since maybe dapper drake and it's really improved over the years. But that last little bit always seems to elude them. If I have to spend five minutes every morning performing some repetitive task, that's a small thing that becomes a big deal over time.
"all the Mac users I know have little understanding about hardware, nor do they care to know about the hardware."
Not having to care is liberating.
I recently happened upon an old Popular Mechanics magazine from the 1950s. It dealt extensively with automotive topics. It struck me how much people had to know about their car's inner workings to properly maintain it. Today, you really don't have to know what kind of spark system your car has, or what kind of plugs it uses, or what kind of fuel delivery system it has. You don't have to clean varnish out of the carbuerator every year, or have the piston rings done at 60k miles. You don't have to replace the plugs and points every 10k miles. Just keep gas in it, make sure you change the oil, and take it somewhere for minor maintenance every year or two. It should go >100k without much in the way of repairs, and get mileage that cars in the 1950's couldn't even get close to.
I am a software developer. I use a macbook pro. It's great. I need something that works. I do not want to fuss with the OS, because I gain nothing from doing this and I honestly don't really care about it much. I want a powerful (i.e. *nix) CLI. I'd like to be able to play some music on it while I work. The mac does this and more better than any other computer I have used, regardless of OS. I can use it to accomplish work and not have to always figure out why it's acting weird now like I have had to do with every windows computer I have ever used since the dawn of time. I also don't have to spend time tweaking it out to make it behave like I have had to do with every linux desktop I have had for the last five or so years of using linux.
I don't know what the hardware internals are. All I know is that the display looks great, the aluminum case feels really solid (not some glued together plastic crap), it has crashed only once in a year (and this was due to the square turd known as java), every time I go to open it up it just works, and the trackpad is so awesome I don't even miss a mouse. By comparison, every other trackpad I have used to date has been so far inferior that it might as well have been an old broken NES controller hacked into the USB port, or even a couple of sticks tied together and plugged into the headphone jack. Apple got it right.
I dislike the Apple "cool factor" because it causes people to overlook the fact that Apple is making awesome computers with an OS waaaay superior to Windows because it has a *nix CLI under it and way better than linux distro X because it has the polish you'd expect from commercial software. Most people who dislike Apple, I find, have never actually gotten their hands on any of their products and dislike Apple based on principle. Apple has their flaws (iPhone 4 comes to mind + Jobs denial of said flaws), but let's not pretend that some dell laptop running windows 7 is even on the same level as a macbook pro.
I work at a growing startup (maybe not really even a startup anymore). We have an army of macbooks running OSX or linux. All linux servers hosted at various places (redundancy!). Very little msft/dell stuff at all.
Know what? Our IT guys really have very little to do with regard to hardware problems. That allows them to focus on stuff like making sure everyone backs up regularly, and that we keep our servers lean and mean and able to handle the growing capacity. It works great. Better hardware + good OS = fewer problems. Sure, the upfront costs are greater with the more expensive hardware but I definitely see the IT guys doing less desktop support type-work.
As a developer, it's great. Being able to use good stable hardware and stable OSes (as opposed to the bargain basement desktop/winXP setup still found at many large corporations) leaves me able to focus on development rather than problems.
Sometimes, little things go a long way. Since I've been using the macbook + OSX I don't have to spend time every morning configuring my displays, connecting to the wireless, etc. I just open the thing up and get back to work. Everything is right where I left it, almost like I never went home. It's great, from a productivity perspective, to not have to fuss with the hardware.
Before I started working there I was windows at work, linux at home. Now, I'm a mac (on the desktop) guy. I'd seriously consider going mac/linux.
anyone else think that looks like Farpoint?
Or am I so bored by this meeting that I am making nutty observations?
fair enough. And no diss meant against tradesmen. I like to tinker with electronics, building tube amps and so forth. I use more math for that than I do for programming. So I do understand what you are saying. And some trades are going to be more scientific than others. Working with anything electrical, for example, would certainly require more theory than say a plumber or a laborer.
Advanced math/theory happened to help you, but the other guys who didn't understand that stuff could still do the job. An electrician may want to know ohm's law and watt's law and a few others like that. But if not that's why standards exist, so a guy who doesn't know ohm's law DOES know to use 12-3 romex for a 20A circuit and not 14-3. Engineers come up with the standards and codes, guys doing the work follow them.
And having troubleshot some HVAC issues myself, I'd say that is a much different skill set than wiring up a a new building or installing all of the plumbing fixtures. With HVAC, you are dealing with interconnected systems, almost like an automobile engine. A crew of guys framing up or wiring up a new office building according to standards is a lot different than the guy I call when my furnace stops working in the dead of winter or when my car starts behaving erratically. Again, having attempted many of these things myself, I understand the skill involved.
Those other jobs, business, sales, trades, etc, are not listed there to degrade those jobs. Those are good jobs to have and require a high degree of skill. But trig and calc, they can in most cases do without. Spoken as a casual observer, I guess. I do have several family members who are union tradesmen, though.
You also hit on another thing: many sciences, specifically physics, are little else than applied mathematics, at least at the high school level. It's always easier to learn a thing when you see how it applies. Maybe that would have helped some of those kids who annoyed me by slowing the rest of the class down.
I see your point.
I think my intent behind the above post was that the threat of being forcibly removed from school would be somewhat of a scared-straight thing.
I do not think that a class of uneducated people is a good thing, nor do I think that privatization is the answer. I mean, it is good for some privatized schools to exist to provide some competition to the public schools. But a totally privatized education industry, could you imagine the horror? And you think healthcare is a mess now! It would be another got-you-over-a-barrel industry like health care and oil.
That said, the public school district here is horrid, save for a few magnent schools (where my kids go). It's a very corrupt system, and you have school administrators making a lot of money to do nothing, meanwhile they cut teachers, programs, etc due to lack of funding. Look up St Louis public schools and you'll know what I mean. If the school board's and all other school administrators salary (heck, even 50% of it) were totally contingent on the students meeting some minimum standard of adequacy, I think they'd be motivated to fix the district and make sure kids are educated, even in the inner cities. Not everything is within their power, sure, but there is plenty that is. They can fix a lot, but they choose not to because hell, they're getting paid anyhow and it would just be too much work to do their jobs properly.
I see in my children's school a few students who are victims of absolutely horrid parenting. They send children to school for day care, pretty much. The school district here receives funding based on attendance, too, so the school will do anything to not send the kids home. I think if those kids were sent home and the parents had to miss work for a week or pay for a sitter, the bad behavior would be corrected. All it takes is two or three of these kids to distract the teacher from doing her job, and ALL of the other children suffer for it.
yeah, that's true. I guess that post was half rant. And kicking kids out of school would create some sort of totally uneducated proletariat that would most certainly resort to crime. On the other hand, how is that any different from now?
It's a real dilemma. Fail to educate people and you have people who turn to crime. Offer everyone an education and make it a right, and you have the current situation: people refuse to take advantage of it, but legally must remain in school. So they bully and distract students who are actually trying to get an education and then turn eventually to crime.
My thinking was that if the threat of getting permanently expelled from school were hanging over the heads of some of these children and their parents, they might shape up. And let's be honest: most of these cases are not so much a problem with the child as it is the poor parenting taking place at home. Make the parents pay for their lack of effort at raising a child.
Oh, totally agreed. I have used plenty of math for hobby related stuff. Probably more math than I have used for work.
Figured out an algorithm to calculate distances between lat/lng pairs. Yes, I know there are code snippets available online that you can just drop into place, but I wanted to figure it out. I did.
Another time I was asked to make some analog gauges in flash that represented home well a team was doing for the current day. At the time (it was 2003 so this whole story is IIRC) flash only supported radians for such a thing, so I had to take a percentage and express that in terms of radians. Couple that with the fact I had no clue about how to use flash and had never used actionscript, it was a fun task :)
Don't follow my logic further than it was meant to go. I am talking about math, not all other subjects.
You can be an educated citizen without knowing advanced algebra. There are plenty of things that *should* be taught that aren't. Math is akin to computer programming, Chemistry/Physics, etc. Those are topics taught in high school. Great to take if you are interested in them, or would like to someday work in a field dealing with this. A complete waste of time if your post high school plans do not involve anything remotely related.
ny experience in school comprised of both, but fair point.
"So, that means you don't understand political surveys, scientific analyses or false positive rates in medicine."
Yeah, and how many so-called educated people fail to understand these things? An education is no guarantee people will chose to use it.