> But there's been a write-enabled NTFS driver in the 2.6 line of kernels for at least the past year and a half, as part of the core kernel source distribution, and that runs in kernel space.
The write-enabled kernel NTFS driver is a joke and is almost entirely useless. The/only/ write operation it supports is overwriting a file with another file of EXACTLY THE SAME SIZE as the original. So, to use it for anything, you would have to first boot Windows and create a file of the proper size, and then boot Linux and overwrite it with another file of the proper size.
It's dubious at best that any M$ NTFS write implementation patents would cover something so primitive as the Linux kernel's NTFS write support. And you still have the interoperability and antitrust defenses if they do.
> Because we're not returning to an un-firewalled world.
Returning? I'm already in one. Why would I want to firewall my machine? If I'm running a service, then it automatically has an open port and I need access to it from the outside, so I'd have to punch a hole through the firewall. If it doesn't have an open port, then the port is closed and therefore secure.
Firewalling it would be stupid; it would be just one more thing that can fail to work. No way in hell am I firewalling anything.
> John Siracusa? He's a longtime Mac user, and that makes him statistically likely to be smarter than you.
No, according to the link it makes him statistically more likely to be a participant in the "Web 2.0" phenomenon. That is, statistically more likely to be wasting his time reading blogs and whining in his own when a smart person would instead be getting work done:)/me thinks: don't notice my website. don't notice my website. don't notice my website...
> A "platform" is a particular combination of hardware and software, in the current case a processor and operating system. Change either and you have changed platforms. Software being "cross platform" means it runs on platforms that differ in a non-trivial way, i.e. OS or hardware.
Nope, it means that it's independent of the low-level OS API. Correctly written application software in a high-level language should run on any processor -- you get that for free. Making software cross-platform often involves creating an abstraction layer around the OS API, or using one that already exists (such as Java or the POSIX standards).
Sorry my earlier post wasn't able to clear up your confusion. I hope this helps, but unfortunately I don't have time to discuss this further with you. However, if you're still confused as to the difference between platform and ISA, I'd suggest reading some encyclopedia articles on the topic. Reading the sites you linked to above might help, and I'll also give you some places to start for more information:
> BTW running on two different processor architectures is called "cross-platform". Changing the architectures makes for a different platform just the same way changing the OS makes for a different platform.
No, it makes for a different processor. What you're thinking of is "processor-independent". For something to be "cross-platform", it would have to be written in such a way that it could run on operating systems with materially different architectures and APIs.
> Computer science is 50% automata theory, 20% algorithms, and 30% softer sciences, like HCI and cognitive science.
Maybe at your college. There's a lot of debate as to what's CS and what's in other fields.
I think that software engineering should probably be considered part of CS, and you don't. I think HCI is its own field, which incidentally is mostly BS anyway, and doesn't even overlap much with CS. You don't. The (top 10) college I'm attending has exactly one required class on Automata Theory, called "Automata Theory". If AT was 50% of CS, I think they'd require more classes in it.
Don't act like you/know/ what CS is. It's unfortunately a very vague term. About the only thing we should do is shout to people who aren't in it that "it's NOT JUST PROGRAMMING!", because we all agree on that.
> I thought that when the RIAA comes calling, what happens is that you get a notice saying you've already lost a court case some out-of-state court, because the judge rubberstamped their claim that this IP address is you, and now it's up to you to either a) pay a lawyer, go to court, and try to prove your innocence, or b) pay the nice RIAA their reasonable thirty-five-hundred dollars and get on with your life.
You're 100% wrong. You can't just "get a notice that you're already lost a court case in some out-of-state court". Our legal system requires that one who has been sued be served with notice of the lawsuit so that the sued person can prepare a defense. And then, unless the parties mutually agree on a settlement, there is a trial, where the two parties argue their cases, almost always through lawyers.
The $3500 you refer to is the/settlement/ price the RIAA offers; that is, they offer to drop their lawsuit against against you if you pay them that amount in damages. You could fight them, and possibly recover court costs and lawyers' fees if you won, depending on the jurisdiction. Most people just don't because they're guilty and didn't cover their tracks well, so probably wouldn't win. Another unfortunate factor leading towards settlement is that hiring lawyers and fighting a lawsuit costs money and time, so paying $3500 looks like an easy way out of the hassle.
That said, if the RIAA sued me, I'd fight it. I know what my behavior online is, so I know that they cannot have valid evidence that I have downloaded copyrighted music. And I'd definitely have the opportunity to fight it: our legal system may be broken, but it's not so broken that you can lose lawsuits without knowing about them. I don't know where you got that idea.
> Such hacked (and probably illegal in some countries) method would probably work for geek systems in their parents basements. But who cares.
The geeks who run Linux systems at home. As in, a significant portion of the Linux community, and of this website's readers. I don't live in my parents' basement, not do I think most other Linux hobbyists do. Lose the stereotyping.
> Lack of support for such technologies (if f.e. Linux was lacking PDF support) effectively stops Linux adoption in companies and such.
Yes, because companies/really/ want their employees to be able to watch stupid YouTube videos all day instead of getting to work.
> And for such using hacked/illegal software is not an option. It has to be legal and supported.
BWA HA HA. Yeah, right. I guess corporate software piracy doesn't exist in your world, either.
> A couple of years ago, I was shifting some stuff around and I needed to clean off my main desktop machine, an x86 box. I installed the same linux distro on a G4 mac and just copied my home directory over. Everything was exactly the same -- my browser bookmarks and stored passwords, my email, my office docs, etc.
Heh... I did similar except that I moved from x86 to SPARC, and my Linux distro (Slackware), supported SPARC only in the form of an out-of-date unofficial port called Splack.
I put the hard drive from the x86 into the Ultra 10 and installed the base Splack system over Slackware, without reformatting. This worked for a while, but then I decided I wanted more recent software, so installed Emerde, which takes a Slackware system and converts it to Gentoo.
So now, I have a part-Slackware, part-Splack, mostly-Gentoo SPARC system, which still gets "cannot execute binary file" errors once in a while because x86 binaries are still lying around.
Could I have just moved the home directory and installed Ubuntu SPARC Server or something? I guess, but that would have taken all the fun out:)
> Actually the encoding is VERY efficient where it matters most, cache density and limiting the number of calls to main memory.
The x86 has 8 registers, which means more calls to main memory. The cache density argument is also fallacious: x86 crap is such a burden that the Pentium 4 went to the point of storing the already-decoded micro-ops in the cache.
Try GIMPShop. It's a wrapper to make the GIMP have a user interface similar to Photoshop, specifically so that people with Photoshop experience can use an interface with which they are familiar.
I like Konqueror too, and still use it on my laptop.
I switched to Opera on my Ultra 10 partly because of speed: Konqueror is certainly usable and faster than Firefox, but it's still annoyingly slow to render a few relatively complicated sites I frequent, such as Slashdot:)
Another reason is that Konqueror sometimes crashes too, and when it does I lose all my open tabs. On my laptop, I usually don't care about this, but I do on my desktop. Opera will restore the tabs when you reopen it after it crashes, which is worse than not crashing at all but better than nothing. Firefox incorporated this feature in Firefox 2, and I think Konqueror should consider implementing it as well; it's very nice to have.
> You know, if you had the source code, you could have fixed it by now.
I doubt that. By all signs this would be a pretty hard bug to fix. It happens inconsistently and everything I've seen points to this being related to multithreaded race conditions. To fix it myself, I would have to familiarize myself with the Opera codebase, then successfully reproduce the bug enough times to figure out where it fails, then figure out why it's failing, and then fix it. Multithreaded debugging is/hard/, which is why I avoid multithreaded programming when possible. But sometimes, like with Opera, the speed increase is worth the inevitable bugginess that results.
It would be easier to switch back to Konqueror than to try to fix this bug myself, even though I probably would have the ability to fix it had I the source code for Opera.
> Anyway it crashed opera wich is something that hasn't happened in a LONG time. Good job MS. Even on Linux/Opera you can still give me a IE experience.
This is offtopic and should be modded as such, but I can't resist:
I'm running the latest version of Opera (with User Agent Opera/9.10 (X11; Linux sparc64; U; en) ) on a Linux-running Ultra 10. The processor is a 440MHz UltraSPARC IIi.
Opera is awesome on this machine, I love it, it makes my Ultra 10 as fast for web browsing as my x86 laptop, and all of that, BUT...
IT CRASHES LIKE WINDOWS ME ON AN EMACHINES WITH BUGGY RAM!!!
To be more specific, I have at least one crash per day, usually in the form of a hang. I have to kill it and restart it to get it running again, and that is VERY annoying.
Have you ever had this experience? Is it a SPARC-specific bug? Should I report it? It's not that huge a deal but I'd really like to not have this happen, and since you touted the stability of Opera in your comment I'm thinking I should file a bug report with Opera or something.
> Shakespere would probably fail a modern cour[s]e on "The Meaning of Shakespe[a]re".
Nice one:)
> The issue is who gets paid more for teaching their area of expertise, not a lucky fluke. Sorry, but literature appreciation is a back seat in the realm of social survival compared to the sciences or technologies.
Well, I'm usually the last one to defend liberal arts people, but I'm going to have to take their side here, because they do seem to survive okay. I think that's what you were trying to say, anyway. "Social survival" doesn't make sense, and your whole post doesn't really parse very well. I doubt your meaning is coming across fully. Perhaps you should take an English class and improve your communication skills:)
> 7) "Untested fads by fashionable marxists intellectuals get rolled out into classrooms nationwide without any sort of testing, political correctness runs rampant, etc." - Opinion. While you might have the basis for some sort of legitimate argument here, I'd argue you've got the same thing in most corporations. What's the latest management fad or catchphrase these days?
If it were anywhere near as bad at a company as it was at my high school, the company would go bankrupt in a month. I went to a high school that is rated as, and which I believe is, one of the best in the state.
> 8) "Accountability is almost non existant." Groundless opinion. You have almost no idea what you're speaking of with this one. Read up on NCLB and learn some.
One of my classes had so little teaching in it, I'm going to have agree that there's not much accountability.
> 9) "Unless a teacher gets caught in a politically incorrect belief or having sex with a student their odds of being fired for malpractice isn't measurable." - Opinion, although close to reality. More of the problem with teaching comes from the fact that teaching and administrative jobs are often political in nature, which is the heart of the problem. Most good unions will work with administrators to get bad teachers out of the classroom, but they will insist that the administrators do it the right and legal way. More than a few administrators, though, because they're incompetent political hacks, don't know how to build a case to fire a teacher. Before a teacher receives tenure, he's got little protection, and administrators should do a better job of culling the bad ones sooner.
> 10) "And yet the beauracy is so wretched that no sane person wants to teach even with the fairly good pay (and it IS fairly good pay in most states for the hours worked and the level of education required) in most states and the all but certain job security mentioned above," - Opinion. I'm quite sane. I enjoy teaching. I love my job despite some of the stupidity that goes on. However, I hear similar complaints from friends and relatives in the corporate world, so it's a wash. I will not argue that the pay is bad because it's not. Still who wouldn't want to be paid more for what they do?
I didn't think high school teachers got tenure. Do they?
> 11) "A doctorate in math or science is not good enough to qualify one to teach unless you can first endure a couple of semesters of mind numbing 'teaching' courses designed to both indoctrinate politically correct views and raise an artifical barrier to entry into the profession." - Opinion. Terribly misguided opinion. Just because you know "math" doesn't mean you know how to teach it. Just because you've got a PhD in Molecular Biology doesn't mean you should be in a classroom with special education or ESL students. A few semesters of 'mind-numbing teaching courses' along with some child/adolescent psychology can do wonders for adults who have never worked with children before.
I'll agree that the ability to teach is a skill teachers should have, and that deep knowledge of the subject is not sufficient to be a good teacher. Specifically, a deep knowledge of the subject is necessary but not sufficient.
I'm not so sure good teaching is a skill that can be taught, and even if it can be, the stories I've heard about the education major at my college (lame classes, liberal arts bs out the wazoo (psychology included), requiring students to buy Macs with their own money) makes me want to stay the hell away from that.
What I do know is that I might want to have teaching as a component of my job. I also know that if I do teach as part of my job, it will be as a college professor, not as a high school teacher. The pay is part of it, but it's more because the college intellectual environment is not worlds but universes better than the high school one.
> You've written nothing that petulant high school students haven't written before (all you needed to include was "boring teac
> I bought a crossover site license two years ago. Didn't work - everyone hated it.
Wow, that's interesting. Even running only gold-supported apps? If you tried with a gold-supported version of Office, and it failed, then I concede you're not being silly:), though I'm also intrigued since your experience is so different from mine and every other one of which I'm aware.
I haven't really been properly following WINE for a while. I've sort-of painted myself into a corner with my own installation. I got some programs working, but I can't upgrade because they stop working when I do. There's nothing I need it for anymore, though, so it's mostly just a toy I play around with on those rare occasions when I still use my x86.
I still remember downloading the trial version of CrossOver Office, installing M$ Office, and being blown away by how similar the experience was, though, and then reading some news stories about companies using it to successfully run Office on Linux, and this was more than two years ago. It's a shame it didn't work for you, and I'm curious as to why that might have been. My first guess is that you were trying to run a later version than was gold-listed, but if you weren't, then I really don't know.
> Dude, go with what works. The licensing costs are peanuts compared to staff outlays.
Well, I'd guess that the hardware cost would be more than the licensing cost for your specific migration case.
> Nobody wants to run Office under Linux because we've been there and it sucked.
It worked fine for me when I tried it. That was a number of years ago, but I doubt there have been any major regressions and http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/gr oup/?app_id=17 suggests there haven't been. Making WINE config files by hand is error-prone, and standard WINE eschews short-term hacks to make programs work for long-term codebase maintainability, so if you were using WINE and found it wanting, CrossOver Office would probably have been a better choice.
Seriously, man, Office on Linux has been a solved problem for many years now.
> These people know *exactly* what they're doing. We have Nobel Prize winners here.
Well, since there's no Nobel Prize for computer science, that doesn't mean much as far as computer competence goes. And even Turing Award winners don't necessarily know what they're doing if they're from the theory side:)
> [cut patronizing crap]
And so should you. Nowhere did I suggest you viewed Linux as an end in itself.
Slashdot Mirror
I read that originally as, "HTC unveils a blue-screen mobile device..." :)
More information on the S3TC software patent stupidity:
http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/S3TC
> Humanity has been raising children for thousands of years, and we've done good.
/well/ raising children, you wouldn't be complaining about the state of humanity today with regard to parenting. :p
Obviously not. If humanity had done
> But there's been a write-enabled NTFS driver in the 2.6 line of kernels for at least the past year and a half, as part of the core kernel source distribution, and that runs in kernel space.
/only/ write operation it supports is overwriting a file with another file of EXACTLY THE SAME SIZE as the original. So, to use it for anything, you would have to first boot Windows and create a file of the proper size, and then boot Linux and overwrite it with another file of the proper size.
The write-enabled kernel NTFS driver is a joke and is almost entirely useless. The
It's dubious at best that any M$ NTFS write implementation patents would cover something so primitive as the Linux kernel's NTFS write support. And you still have the interoperability and antitrust defenses if they do.
> Because we're not returning to an un-firewalled world.
Returning? I'm already in one. Why would I want to firewall my machine? If I'm running a service, then it automatically has an open port and I need access to it from the outside, so I'd have to punch a hole through the firewall. If it doesn't have an open port, then the port is closed and therefore secure.
Firewalling it would be stupid; it would be just one more thing that can fail to work. No way in hell am I firewalling anything.
> John Siracusa? He's a longtime Mac user, and that makes him statistically likely to be smarter than you.
:) /me thinks: don't notice my website. don't notice my website. don't notice my website...
No, according to the link it makes him statistically more likely to be a participant in the "Web 2.0" phenomenon. That is, statistically more likely to be wasting his time reading blogs and whining in his own when a smart person would instead be getting work done
He's either a troll or an idiot. Either way, he doesn't deserve your replies.
> A "platform" is a particular combination of hardware and software, in the current case a processor and operating system. Change either and you have changed platforms. Software being "cross platform" means it runs on platforms that differ in a non-trivial way, i.e. OS or hardware.
Nope, it means that it's independent of the low-level OS API. Correctly written application software in a high-level language should run on any processor -- you get that for free. Making software cross-platform often involves creating an abstraction layer around the OS API, or using one that already exists (such as Java or the POSIX standards).
Sorry my earlier post wasn't able to clear up your confusion. I hope this helps, but unfortunately I don't have time to discuss this further with you. However, if you're still confused as to the difference between platform and ISA, I'd suggest reading some encyclopedia articles on the topic. Reading the sites you linked to above might help, and I'll also give you some places to start for more information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instruction_set
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/API
> BTW running on two different processor architectures is called "cross-platform". Changing the architectures makes for a different platform just the same way changing the OS makes for a different platform.
No, it makes for a different processor. What you're thinking of is "processor-independent". For something to be "cross-platform", it would have to be written in such a way that it could run on operating systems with materially different architectures and APIs.
Hope this clears up your confusion.
> Computer science is 50% automata theory, 20% algorithms, and 30% softer sciences, like HCI and cognitive science.
/know/ what CS is. It's unfortunately a very vague term. About the only thing we should do is shout to people who aren't in it that "it's NOT JUST PROGRAMMING!", because we all agree on that.
Maybe at your college. There's a lot of debate as to what's CS and what's in other fields.
I think that software engineering should probably be considered part of CS, and you don't. I think HCI is its own field, which incidentally is mostly BS anyway, and doesn't even overlap much with CS. You don't. The (top 10) college I'm attending has exactly one required class on Automata Theory, called "Automata Theory". If AT was 50% of CS, I think they'd require more classes in it.
Don't act like you
> I thought that when the RIAA comes calling, what happens is that you get a notice saying you've already lost a court case some out-of-state court, because the judge rubberstamped their claim that this IP address is you, and now it's up to you to either a) pay a lawyer, go to court, and try to prove your innocence, or b) pay the nice RIAA their reasonable thirty-five-hundred dollars and get on with your life.
/settlement/ price the RIAA offers; that is, they offer to drop their lawsuit against against you if you pay them that amount in damages. You could fight them, and possibly recover court costs and lawyers' fees if you won, depending on the jurisdiction. Most people just don't because they're guilty and didn't cover their tracks well, so probably wouldn't win. Another unfortunate factor leading towards settlement is that hiring lawyers and fighting a lawsuit costs money and time, so paying $3500 looks like an easy way out of the hassle.
You're 100% wrong. You can't just "get a notice that you're already lost a court case in some out-of-state court". Our legal system requires that one who has been sued be served with notice of the lawsuit so that the sued person can prepare a defense. And then, unless the parties mutually agree on a settlement, there is a trial, where the two parties argue their cases, almost always through lawyers.
The $3500 you refer to is the
That said, if the RIAA sued me, I'd fight it. I know what my behavior online is, so I know that they cannot have valid evidence that I have downloaded copyrighted music. And I'd definitely have the opportunity to fight it: our legal system may be broken, but it's not so broken that you can lose lawsuits without knowing about them. I don't know where you got that idea.
> Such hacked (and probably illegal in some countries) method would probably work for geek systems in their parents basements. But who cares.
/really/ want their employees to be able to watch stupid YouTube videos all day instead of getting to work.
The geeks who run Linux systems at home. As in, a significant portion of the Linux community, and of this website's readers. I don't live in my parents' basement, not do I think most other Linux hobbyists do. Lose the stereotyping.
> Lack of support for such technologies (if f.e. Linux was lacking PDF support) effectively stops Linux adoption in companies and such.
Yes, because companies
> And for such using hacked/illegal software is not an option. It has to be legal and supported.
BWA HA HA. Yeah, right. I guess corporate software piracy doesn't exist in your world, either.
> Assuming the data [hitslink.com] isn't crap...
The data is crap. HitsLink is entirely unreliable.
> A couple of years ago, I was shifting some stuff around and I needed to clean off my main desktop machine, an x86 box. I installed the same linux distro on a G4 mac and just copied my home directory over. Everything was exactly the same -- my browser bookmarks and stored passwords, my email, my office docs, etc.
... I did similar except that I moved from x86 to SPARC, and my Linux distro (Slackware), supported SPARC only in the form of an out-of-date unofficial port called Splack.
:)
Heh
I put the hard drive from the x86 into the Ultra 10 and installed the base Splack system over Slackware, without reformatting. This worked for a while, but then I decided I wanted more recent software, so installed Emerde, which takes a Slackware system and converts it to Gentoo.
So now, I have a part-Slackware, part-Splack, mostly-Gentoo SPARC system, which still gets "cannot execute binary file" errors once in a while because x86 binaries are still lying around.
Could I have just moved the home directory and installed Ubuntu SPARC Server or something? I guess, but that would have taken all the fun out
> Actually the encoding is VERY efficient where it matters most, cache density and limiting the number of calls to main memory.
The x86 has 8 registers, which means more calls to main memory. The cache density argument is also fallacious: x86 crap is such a burden that the Pentium 4 went to the point of storing the already-decoded micro-ops in the cache.
> Don't know how to write multi-threaded code? Sorry, no job.
... so /that's/ why games crash so often and never get fixed.
Heh
Try GIMPShop. It's a wrapper to make the GIMP have a user interface similar to Photoshop, specifically so that people with Photoshop experience can use an interface with which they are familiar.
I like Konqueror too, and still use it on my laptop.
:)
I switched to Opera on my Ultra 10 partly because of speed: Konqueror is certainly usable and faster than Firefox, but it's still annoyingly slow to render a few relatively complicated sites I frequent, such as Slashdot
Another reason is that Konqueror sometimes crashes too, and when it does I lose all my open tabs. On my laptop, I usually don't care about this, but I do on my desktop. Opera will restore the tabs when you reopen it after it crashes, which is worse than not crashing at all but better than nothing. Firefox incorporated this feature in Firefox 2, and I think Konqueror should consider implementing it as well; it's very nice to have.
> You know, if you had the source code, you could have fixed it by now.
/hard/, which is why I avoid multithreaded programming when possible. But sometimes, like with Opera, the speed increase is worth the inevitable bugginess that results.
I doubt that. By all signs this would be a pretty hard bug to fix. It happens inconsistently and everything I've seen points to this being related to multithreaded race conditions. To fix it myself, I would have to familiarize myself with the Opera codebase, then successfully reproduce the bug enough times to figure out where it fails, then figure out why it's failing, and then fix it. Multithreaded debugging is
It would be easier to switch back to Konqueror than to try to fix this bug myself, even though I probably would have the ability to fix it had I the source code for Opera.
> Anyway it crashed opera wich is something that hasn't happened in a LONG time. Good job MS. Even on Linux/Opera you can still give me a IE experience.
This is offtopic and should be modded as such, but I can't resist:
I'm running the latest version of Opera (with User Agent Opera/9.10 (X11; Linux sparc64; U; en) ) on a Linux-running Ultra 10. The processor is a 440MHz UltraSPARC IIi.
Opera is awesome on this machine, I love it, it makes my Ultra 10 as fast for web browsing as my x86 laptop, and all of that, BUT...
IT CRASHES LIKE WINDOWS ME ON AN EMACHINES WITH BUGGY RAM!!!
To be more specific, I have at least one crash per day, usually in the form of a hang. I have to kill it and restart it to get it running again, and that is VERY annoying.
Have you ever had this experience? Is it a SPARC-specific bug? Should I report it? It's not that huge a deal but I'd really like to not have this happen, and since you touted the stability of Opera in your comment I'm thinking I should file a bug report with Opera or something.
Any responses are appreciated.
I've been waiting for this case to die for a long time :) ...first post?
> Shakespere would probably fail a modern cour[s]e on "The Meaning of Shakespe[a]re".
:)
:)
Nice one
> The issue is who gets paid more for teaching their area of expertise, not a lucky fluke. Sorry, but literature appreciation is a back seat in the realm of social survival compared to the sciences or technologies.
Well, I'm usually the last one to defend liberal arts people, but I'm going to have to take their side here, because they do seem to survive okay. I think that's what you were trying to say, anyway. "Social survival" doesn't make sense, and your whole post doesn't really parse very well. I doubt your meaning is coming across fully. Perhaps you should take an English class and improve your communication skills
> 7) "Untested fads by fashionable marxists intellectuals get rolled out into classrooms nationwide without any sort of testing, political correctness runs rampant, etc." - Opinion. While you might have the basis for some sort of legitimate argument here, I'd argue you've got the same thing in most corporations. What's the latest management fad or catchphrase these days?
If it were anywhere near as bad at a company as it was at my high school, the company would go bankrupt in a month. I went to a high school that is rated as, and which I believe is, one of the best in the state.
> 8) "Accountability is almost non existant." Groundless opinion. You have almost no idea what you're speaking of with this one. Read up on NCLB and learn some.
One of my classes had so little teaching in it, I'm going to have agree that there's not much accountability.
> 9) "Unless a teacher gets caught in a politically incorrect belief or having sex with a student their odds of being fired for malpractice isn't measurable." - Opinion, although close to reality. More of the problem with teaching comes from the fact that teaching and administrative jobs are often political in nature, which is the heart of the problem. Most good unions will work with administrators to get bad teachers out of the classroom, but they will insist that the administrators do it the right and legal way. More than a few administrators, though, because they're incompetent political hacks, don't know how to build a case to fire a teacher. Before a teacher receives tenure, he's got little protection, and administrators should do a better job of culling the bad ones sooner.
> 10) "And yet the beauracy is so wretched that no sane person wants to teach even with the fairly good pay (and it IS fairly good pay in most states for the hours worked and the level of education required) in most states and the all but certain job security mentioned above," - Opinion. I'm quite sane. I enjoy teaching. I love my job despite some of the stupidity that goes on. However, I hear similar complaints from friends and relatives in the corporate world, so it's a wash. I will not argue that the pay is bad because it's not. Still who wouldn't want to be paid more for what they do?
I didn't think high school teachers got tenure. Do they?
> 11) "A doctorate in math or science is not good enough to qualify one to teach unless you can first endure a couple of semesters of mind numbing 'teaching' courses designed to both indoctrinate politically correct views and raise an artifical barrier to entry into the profession." - Opinion. Terribly misguided opinion. Just because you know "math" doesn't mean you know how to teach it. Just because you've got a PhD in Molecular Biology doesn't mean you should be in a classroom with special education or ESL students. A few semesters of 'mind-numbing teaching courses' along with some child/adolescent psychology can do wonders for adults who have never worked with children before.
I'll agree that the ability to teach is a skill teachers should have, and that deep knowledge of the subject is not sufficient to be a good teacher. Specifically, a deep knowledge of the subject is necessary but not sufficient.
I'm not so sure good teaching is a skill that can be taught, and even if it can be, the stories I've heard about the education major at my college (lame classes, liberal arts bs out the wazoo (psychology included), requiring students to buy Macs with their own money) makes me want to stay the hell away from that.
What I do know is that I might want to have teaching as a component of my job. I also know that if I do teach as part of my job, it will be as a college professor, not as a high school teacher. The pay is part of it, but it's more because the college intellectual environment is not worlds but universes better than the high school one.
> You've written nothing that petulant high school students haven't written before (all you needed to include was "boring teac
> I bought a crossover site license two years ago. Didn't work - everyone hated it.
:), though I'm also intrigued since your experience is so different from mine and every other one of which I'm aware.
Wow, that's interesting. Even running only gold-supported apps? If you tried with a gold-supported version of Office, and it failed, then I concede you're not being silly
I haven't really been properly following WINE for a while. I've sort-of painted myself into a corner with my own installation. I got some programs working, but I can't upgrade because they stop working when I do. There's nothing I need it for anymore, though, so it's mostly just a toy I play around with on those rare occasions when I still use my x86.
I still remember downloading the trial version of CrossOver Office, installing M$ Office, and being blown away by how similar the experience was, though, and then reading some news stories about companies using it to successfully run Office on Linux, and this was more than two years ago. It's a shame it didn't work for you, and I'm curious as to why that might have been. My first guess is that you were trying to run a later version than was gold-listed, but if you weren't, then I really don't know.
> Dude, go with what works. The licensing costs are peanuts compared to staff outlays.
Well, I'd guess that the hardware cost would be more than the licensing cost for your specific migration case.
> Nobody wants to run Office under Linux because we've been there and it sucked.
r oup/?app_id=17 suggests there haven't been. Making WINE config files by hand is error-prone, and standard WINE eschews short-term hacks to make programs work for long-term codebase maintainability, so if you were using WINE and found it wanting, CrossOver Office would probably have been a better choice.
:)
It worked fine for me when I tried it. That was a number of years ago, but I doubt there have been any major regressions and http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/g
Seriously, man, Office on Linux has been a solved problem for many years now.
> These people know *exactly* what they're doing. We have Nobel Prize winners here.
Well, since there's no Nobel Prize for computer science, that doesn't mean much as far as computer competence goes. And even Turing Award winners don't necessarily know what they're doing if they're from the theory side
> [cut patronizing crap]
And so should you. Nowhere did I suggest you viewed Linux as an end in itself.