You want a language where it's possible to start producing results with very little initial effort. That precludes anything which uses or requires an IDE - just learning to navigate that is a morning of classes with nothing to show for the effort - a definite demotivator. You also want a language that has a printable form - so they can have something tangible to work with - not merely a bunch of files.
If these children really are the gifted ones you say, they'll already have the basic concepts of an editor: create, change, save, so they can start creating programs much sooner.
You also want them to become familiar with the basic syntax od computer languages - most of which are quite similar and look a lot like Perl's syntax.
Perl also gives those who wish, the ability to develop further, after the classes finish.The large amount of freely available documentation and examples on the internet will help then learn from properly written code from other people.
You have said yourself that almost every person in almost every school has little or no IT experience.
Consider what would happen, therefore if you plopped them into a Linux environment - where support means reading the source code. They'd be absolutely helpless. In fact, by saving them money and changing them to "free" software, you'd in fact make all their IT unusable, as they would not have the skills to use it, nor the experience (to say nothing of the time) to find out how. It would be a completely inappropriate level of technology: not better or worse, just wrong.
For people in this situation, who just want to get things done, Microsoft and a support team - from a 3rd party or easily recruited staff are more important than the cost of the kit.
Maybe the secret is to step back from the bits and bytes of the technical aspects and consider that what they really need is ubiquitous, seamless computing that allows that to teach their children, without messin' around with installs, upgrades and reconfigurations.
This is a case of the education system failing. Most teachers, especially in any subject that involves the slightest amount of science or technology, are so badly trained and resourced[1] that they're typically a page or two in front of the kids when it comes to dispensing knowledge. Fortunately, most of them stick to the syllabus - otherwise they'd go off, spouting their opinions as "fact" and screwing up countless lives. However, they have such a limited knowledge of science or tech. from the real world, that anything they haven't come across before will seem wrong. Since most of them will have heard of piracy, porn and viruses it is natural for them to assume, in the absence of any hard practical knowledge they have themselves, that everything they don't explicitly teach is wrong, or bad.
Rather than being saracstic in his reply, this guy should've offered to educate the teachers into what other options are out there. Instead he's just turned them off and made them more hostile to alternatives.
Since succeeding in the education system requires children to give the answer the examiners expect - rather than the one that is correct, by closing this teacher's mind to other possibilities the Linux guy has made sure that the teacher will not admit coursework or answers that involve non-MS products. A good opportunity to expand some horizons has been wasted.
[1] yes, yes, I know: yours was inspirational and a credit to the profession. Congratulations, you're in the top 0.5%.
Surely a mobile phone is not a vital part of a terrorist operation - otherwise there would have been no atrocities before 1985.
Once the baddies get wise to the fact that they can still disrupt our lives without the need to talk to each other, then how will we track them?
Of course, if the government thought that mobiles were vital to carrying out terror, they'd just start jamming them within the operational zone. It seems to me that both sides benefit from being able to talk to each other - or do we just live in such a soft world, that the possibility of being out of touch with our compadres, even for a short time, is inconceivable?
Putting aside the small matter that no-one, ever has fired a missile at the US if there was ever a WMD threat to america it's much less likely to come hurtling in from space than to arrive by any other means.
The one lesson we (should) have learned from the past 20 years is assymetric warfare. Just because a country has all the shiny new, high-tech toys doesn't mean that an adversary will oblige by using the methods they've spent trillions on defending against.
This trinket is much more a victory for the defence companies who suckered a gullible government into paying for them to develop what they wanted, rather than what a defensive system needed. Still I suppose it's all they deserve.
This image of principled individuals with high levels of integrity diligently uncovering sleaze, wrong-doings and corruption looks good in films. However in real-life, most journalists write sensationalised, shrill, bloat that is verging on the libellous - merely to sell their articles as freelancers or to desperately try to boost the ratings of whichever rag was dumb enough to employ them.
Given the overwhelming proportion of trash that is churned out: both online and wasting newsprint, on a daily basis - getting more of these people off the streets and out of our lives would be a public service. If that involves jailing them, well too bad.
So, worldwide there are 125 "journalists" in jail. Personally, I'd expect the number of people from any job (I nearly said "profession" - ha ha) who are in jail - across the entire planet to be much, much higher than this. Even if it's for non-job related reasons.
What we actually have is a fall in the numbers from a few years ago - and including pretty much antone who writes a blog as being a journalist is misleading. Further, since pretty much every "paper" journalist gets published online, there is no real differentiation between the two groups.
In short, this article sounds like some guy bleating on and trying to get attention that frankly, neither he nor is line of work deserves.
The list's the same as it was 10 years ago - and will be in 10 years time.
USB barely works. It's OK for mass-storage devices, but sucks hugely for high-bandwidth devices, or anything that's removable - and gets removed.
Video: just as bad. Put these two together and you have a mess of non-functional webcams, video applications which sometimes hold together if you're prepared to spend hours and days hunting down just the rtight combination of codecs, libraries and applications.
However, the worst part of Linux is tha parlous state of the documentation. A morass of different styles:.man.info HOWTOs, html, text-files. Almost none is available in more than one language and hardly any is kept up to date. Even less is declared obsolete, to stop people trying techniques that haven't worked in years - but is still highly-linked to on the web.
Frequently, the best documentation for an application is the string command.
If I was developing a hardened, spherical wireless camera, I'd have many more uses for it than killing people. The entertainment possibilities alone are immense. Hopefully we'll see this deployed on the field of play before the battlefield.
Don't like the way the current govt. is going? Fine, take a copy of the constitution and start writing your own amendments. Or even add patches to the original - after removing it's read-only status, of course.
I'm not too clear what license you'd be able to release it under - suggestions?
The problem with accessible government is that no-one's interested. Even where there are dedicated TV channels (e.g. in the UK) hardly anyone watches them. Why's that? Because the work of government is almost 100% pure tedium. No-one wants to watch what happens in committee meeting - even if that's where the laws are actually made, nor do are they prepared to sit through hours of televised debate.
If by accessible, you mean dumbing down the work of government to cartoon-form, with nothing more than a series of 5-second sound-bites, then good luck. But that's not government in action, it's a soap-opera.
True, provided the all the parameters are known, unambiguous and objectively measurable. However, the larger the population, the greater the number of interpretations of what's being measured, the larger the number of "unknown unknowns" and the wider the spread of subjective evaluations.
In this particular case, there's no information given about the data - was it merely comparing two years, in which case climate variations would swap the claimed discrepancy, was the number of people the same - had the population grown. There's simply not enough information given to draw any conlcusions.
Persoanlly I don't think it's possible to measure anything to do with people (except for their physical attributes) to better than 10% - or if we're talking something completely dependent on feelings or motivations (such as advertising or psychology) by +/- 100%.
So a 1% change in anything is far too close to random to be worth considering.
But you assume all the processes that IT facilitates are worthwhile.
To follow up on your example of handouts for meetings. Would that meeting take place without IT? What would be the consequences (either: (a) people get more real work done, or (b) something important gets missed and the efficiency of the business drops a little).
Same with email: if the IT dept. wasn't there to facilitate it, more paper memos would be sent, but since these take more effort, the number would be fewer than the number of emails - and they would only be sent (a) when really necessary and (b) to those who really needed them.
However, no IT people doesn't mean no IT. Where there was real value, some people would use PCs, printers, spreadsheets and the like. it's just that they'd have to work it all out for themselves and therefore consider if the pain was worth the gain, rather than having some IT minion do all the labourious stuff for them.
What we have with IT is frequently a case of work expanding to consume the resources allocated to it.
Apart from whatever control systems you choose - or are forced into, you can improve the odds by having redundant servers.That way, if your data links are too slow, or suffer an outage your primary will fail-over to the redundant system. Of course, you will need to test the possible failure modes first and assure yourself that you've thought of everything, but if the systems really are highly critical you will be willing to spend the time and money to do this.
Well, I've read the published paper, and I still don't have a clue what the answer is. I suppose hoping for a cut and dried figure like "1%" was too optimistic, afterall.
If there's going to be a practical use for this (and the conclusions don't say they've calculated "the answer", just that they've developed a framework, gaaah!) then my gut tells me that the answer is "not very much" - somehwere around the rounding-errors of the encoding mechanism.
So, does anyone know how much data can be stuffed, undetectably, into a 700MB AVI file?
The problem with written communication (esp. where the language used is learned later, not one's native language) is that it misses out all the nuances that come from speech. As such, people's forum, email, web, blog entries are often considered rude - when in reality they are just being economical with words, or do not have the vocabulary or cultural background to "hook up" with the reader.
As we all become more experienced with written internet communication, hopefully we'll all become more forgiving of others' expressions.
Personally, when I insult someone on the internet, I make sure there can be no doubt they realise they're being insulted. Maybe we need an HTML tag, just to make sure. If it's not present, then no insult was intended
Check out the daily mail's front (web) page. If you can get past the bile, hate, bias, bitterness and sensationalism, ask youself: does this publication actually have any credibility?
Slashdot Mirror
If these children really are the gifted ones you say, they'll already have the basic concepts of an editor: create, change, save, so they can start creating programs much sooner.
You also want them to become familiar with the basic syntax od computer languages - most of which are quite similar and look a lot like Perl's syntax.
Perl also gives those who wish, the ability to develop further, after the classes finish.The large amount of freely available documentation and examples on the internet will help then learn from properly written code from other people.
You have said yourself that almost every person in almost every school has little or no IT experience.
Consider what would happen, therefore if you plopped them into a Linux environment - where support means reading the source code. They'd be absolutely helpless. In fact, by saving them money and changing them to "free" software, you'd in fact make all their IT unusable, as they would not have the skills to use it, nor the experience (to say nothing of the time) to find out how. It would be a completely inappropriate level of technology: not better or worse, just wrong.
For people in this situation, who just want to get things done, Microsoft and a support team - from a 3rd party or easily recruited staff are more important than the cost of the kit.
Maybe the secret is to step back from the bits and bytes of the technical aspects and consider that what they really need is ubiquitous, seamless computing that allows that to teach their children, without messin' around with installs, upgrades and reconfigurations.
Rather than being saracstic in his reply, this guy should've offered to educate the teachers into what other options are out there. Instead he's just turned them off and made them more hostile to alternatives.
Since succeeding in the education system requires children to give the answer the examiners expect - rather than the one that is correct, by closing this teacher's mind to other possibilities the Linux guy has made sure that the teacher will not admit coursework or answers that involve non-MS products. A good opportunity to expand some horizons has been wasted.
[1] yes, yes, I know: yours was inspirational and a credit to the profession. Congratulations, you're in the top 0.5%.
Once the baddies get wise to the fact that they can still disrupt our lives without the need to talk to each other, then how will we track them?
Of course, if the government thought that mobiles were vital to carrying out terror, they'd just start jamming them within the operational zone. It seems to me that both sides benefit from being able to talk to each other - or do we just live in such a soft world, that the possibility of being out of touch with our compadres, even for a short time, is inconceivable?
but there will always be people who don't like us
OK, here's a test: name any country that "doesn't like" Belgium, or New Zealand or Sweden or ... or (the list goes on).
Maybe the best defence system would be to become more like all these countries that no-one "doesn't like".
That failure of the target missile probably tells you something about the operational state of the ICBM "fleet", too.
The one lesson we (should) have learned from the past 20 years is assymetric warfare. Just because a country has all the shiny new, high-tech toys doesn't mean that an adversary will oblige by using the methods they've spent trillions on defending against.
This trinket is much more a victory for the defence companies who suckered a gullible government into paying for them to develop what they wanted, rather than what a defensive system needed. Still I suppose it's all they deserve.
Given the overwhelming proportion of trash that is churned out: both online and wasting newsprint, on a daily basis - getting more of these people off the streets and out of our lives would be a public service. If that involves jailing them, well too bad.
What we actually have is a fall in the numbers from a few years ago - and including pretty much antone who writes a blog as being a journalist is misleading. Further, since pretty much every "paper" journalist gets published online, there is no real differentiation between the two groups.
In short, this article sounds like some guy bleating on and trying to get attention that frankly, neither he nor is line of work deserves.
USB barely works. It's OK for mass-storage devices, but sucks hugely for high-bandwidth devices, or anything that's removable - and gets removed.
Video: just as bad. Put these two together and you have a mess of non-functional webcams, video applications which sometimes hold together if you're prepared to spend hours and days hunting down just the rtight combination of codecs, libraries and applications.
However, the worst part of Linux is tha parlous state of the documentation. A morass of different styles: .man .info HOWTOs, html, text-files. Almost none is available in more than one language and hardly any is kept up to date. Even less is declared obsolete, to stop people trying techniques that haven't worked in years - but is still highly-linked to on the web.
Frequently, the best documentation for an application is the string command.
If I was developing a hardened, spherical wireless camera, I'd have many more uses for it than killing people. The entertainment possibilities alone are immense. Hopefully we'll see this deployed on the field of play before the battlefield.
I'm not too clear what license you'd be able to release it under - suggestions?
If by accessible, you mean dumbing down the work of government to cartoon-form, with nothing more than a series of 5-second sound-bites, then good luck. But that's not government in action, it's a soap-opera.
as the title says. if it gets them "off the air" is this a public service or a criminal act (or both)?
In this particular case, there's no information given about the data - was it merely comparing two years, in which case climate variations would swap the claimed discrepancy, was the number of people the same - had the population grown. There's simply not enough information given to draw any conlcusions.
So a 1% change in anything is far too close to random to be worth considering.
To follow up on your example of handouts for meetings. Would that meeting take place without IT? What would be the consequences (either: (a) people get more real work done, or (b) something important gets missed and the efficiency of the business drops a little).
Same with email: if the IT dept. wasn't there to facilitate it, more paper memos would be sent, but since these take more effort, the number would be fewer than the number of emails - and they would only be sent (a) when really necessary and (b) to those who really needed them.
However, no IT people doesn't mean no IT. Where there was real value, some people would use PCs, printers, spreadsheets and the like. it's just that they'd have to work it all out for themselves and therefore consider if the pain was worth the gain, rather than having some IT minion do all the labourious stuff for them.
What we have with IT is frequently a case of work expanding to consume the resources allocated to it.
(don't make the mistake of thinking this is a humourous response - it's not. it's a fact.)
Apart from whatever control systems you choose - or are forced into, you can improve the odds by having redundant servers.That way, if your data links are too slow, or suffer an outage your primary will fail-over to the redundant system. Of course, you will need to test the possible failure modes first and assure yourself that you've thought of everything, but if the systems really are highly critical you will be willing to spend the time and money to do this.
and therefore has all the disadvantages (removing crops from possible consumption) to the supply of food that our current techniques have.
If there's going to be a practical use for this (and the conclusions don't say they've calculated "the answer", just that they've developed a framework, gaaah!) then my gut tells me that the answer is "not very much" - somehwere around the rounding-errors of the encoding mechanism.
So, does anyone know how much data can be stuffed, undetectably, into a 700MB AVI file?
Probably you are an american who has only seen Fox News and read Newyork post all his life
Everything you've assumed about me is completely wrong.
As we all become more experienced with written internet communication, hopefully we'll all become more forgiving of others' expressions.
Personally, when I insult someone on the internet, I make sure there can be no doubt they realise they're being insulted. Maybe we need an HTML tag, just to make sure. If it's not present, then no insult was intended
Check out the daily mail's front (web) page. If you can get past the bile, hate, bias, bitterness and sensationalism, ask youself: does this publication actually have any credibility?
What other industry could thrive so much on failure?
Weather forecasting
The entire healthcare system - who do you know that lives forever?