How long does the data have to be retained? No one seems to know how long CDRs will reliably store data. There seems to be a large gap between user experience with unabused CDRs... sometimes unreadable after only a year or two... and manufacturer estimates of many decades.
It's possible to put a usable -- at least usable by most people -- keyboard on portable computer about this size. Compaq did it in the early 1990s with the Contura-Aeros. there were things wrong with them. For example, the built in trackball was just awful. But the keyboard was OK for most people. I don't think QWERTY keyboards can get much smaller than the Contura's roughly 9x4 inches (24*10cm) without usability issues.
*** I wonder what a direct Linux implementation would do***
A perfectly reasonable question, but the answer may well be "about the same". The NE in wiNE istands for "Not an Emulator". In a sense, WINE *IS* a native Linux graphics implementation albeit aided or hindered by using the Windows API interfaces. If I recall the WINE documentation correctly it says that WINE is sometimes faster than Windows on the same hardware and application and sometimes slower.
I don't know about anyone else, but we have a bunch of cars around here. We need one car with hundreds of miles of range, but most of our travel is only a few miles. I'd probably buy an electric car if it had a range of say 25 miles, some provision for heating the cabin, was road legal, could travel at least the minimum speed on Interstates (45mph I believe) and was CHEAP.
Why Interstates? Because sometimes they are the shortest route between where I am and where I want to be even if it is only 5 miles away.
Anyway, this is not the car I want. Economically, it makes a lot more sense to spend a few hundred dollars a year for parts and 30 hours or so a year installing them and keeping our ancient Dodge Neon on the road. Tain't much of a car. But it doesn't have to be.
Why not a bicycle? Because I'm nearly 70, this is not flat country, and I've always hated riding bicycles up hill. Aside from which, there are days when it is raining hard, snowing hard, or way too cold or hot for non-masochists to contemplate using a bicycle.
***I wouldn't mind a 7"-screen laptop if the entire thing were only 7" diagonal (example, something like the Psion Series 7), but a 7" screen in a case that's built for 10" would just annoy me.***
The article criticises the keys as being too small. A narrower PC will make that even worse. If you don't put a substantial bezel around the 7 inch diagonal screen, you are going to end up with a keyboard that can't be used by adults without extreme frustration.
***Really....wouldn't an intern who is 22 years old and possibly an CS major know well enough to not leave data tapes in his car overnight?***
An intern who is smart enough to suspect that stashing tapes in the car overnight might be a bad idea would probably also be smart enough to shut up and do what he or she is told. I don't know about you, but in places where I've worked, mentioning to your boss that his/her data backup/retention procedures sound really stupid is not likely to be a step on the path to a permanent job. Amazing as it may sound, a lot of bosses do not take criticism well.
A small company that struggles to make payroll every pay period may be looking for expertise at $10.50 an hour. A large organization is looking for willing hands and no backtalk at that price.
Assuming the story is accurate, the data compromise (if any) probably is not the kid's fault.
***The vast majority of people run LCD monitors these days.***
The vast majority of your friends may run LCD monitors, but it's unlikely that LCD monitors have replaced even half the CRTs in the general user population. Techies are prone to overestimate the rate of adoption of new technology.
For that matter, they are still selling CRTs -- and they are cheaper to buy if not to operate -- than LCDs. Check the ads in your Sunday paper and look at what sort of monitor is on the low-end, loss-leader, offering.
Perfectly usable used CRT monitors are only a few bucks. I'm going to put one out front in the next few days with a FREE sticker on it and see if it goes away.
Ken Olsen may or may not have been a problem, but the real problem with DEC became clear the day the IBM PC rolled out. DEC's market niche was relatively low cost computers and the PC was a $2000 (give or take a bit) box that was going to take over that niche with substantially lower costs and margins. I suppose that DEC could have become Microsoft or Dell, but it would not have been the same company. The company it was simply was not going to have a marketplace to sell in after about a decade.
Not only is DEC gone, but its competitors like SEL are gone as well. Whether DEC was mismanaged is irrelevant. Its business model died and there was no realistic alternative.
***Another issue is the community, which in many places is hostile to newbies. I've been insulted on more Linux support forums for asking question than I've ever been on Windows support forums. There are places to get good support for Linux, but there are a lot of really hostile ones too. Windows may have some hostile ones, but I just run into it far less frequently.***
Amen. I think that things are much better now than they used to be, but there is something about Unix that seems to attract jerks sort of like the celebrity criminal d'jour attracts photographers and camera crews. It used to require a fairly thick skin and a zero-tolerance attitude toward bullying in order to get answers to perfectly reasonable questions.
***Nothing to do with existing applications that WINE can't handle.***
Nothing against WINE. I am, in fact, typing this on a lightweight Windows browser running with only minor problems under WINE. It run well enough that I am using it instead to the more or less OK Linux alternatives -- Firefox, Konqueror, Lynx in framebuffer video mode. But the truth of the matter is that there are LOTS of Windows applications that do not run acceptably under WINE. Maybe virtualization will solve the problem of running mission critical Windows applications under a PC Unix. The technical problems look to be largely tractable. I'm not so sure about the licensing issues.
***FYI, Britanicca[sic] is not a collection of popular culture or slang terms. It is an encyclopedia.***
As is Wikipedia. They both have their strengths and weaknesses. I'd expect Britannica on average to have very good articles on art, history, and similar 'classical' subjects. OTOH, for anything modern or dynamic, Britannica is likely to be a weak source, and Wikipedia is likely to be better. Maybe much better.
If I wanted to know about the reign of Ethelred the Unread (means poorly advised incidentally) I'd guess that Britannica would have a better article. On the other hand, if I want to know about Blackhole Routing or Fluorescent lights, I'd likely do better with Wikipedia. This is not to say that every article in Wikipedia about technology is wonderful -- just that the interests of Wikipedia authors are broad, and that the update/edit process is rapid. Material on recent developments is well represented.
****Finally, 40 billion dollars US does seem like a lot of money. But considering the FAAs historic phenomenal mind-bogglingly beyond-grossly-incompetent record at managing system deployments...***
Well, yeah -- it's the FAA's unimpressive record that worries me. I'm sure these guys understand ATC better than I and other/. readers do. But do they really know what they are doing?
No reason why it wouldn't show altitude. GPS altitudes generally aren't as accurate as ground positions (it's a geometry thing -- you'd need a satellite high overhead, which you rarely have, to get good altitude). But they should be good enough. Besides which, the pilot isn't usually concerned so much about his own altitude. He generally knows that. He's worried about the altitude of other aircraft in his neighborhood.
***Fox news definately has some perspective issues - but WMD's isn't one of them. Even CLINTON believed they were there. Not trying to start a war - I am just sick of hearing about WMD's, when we all thought they were there. ***
This is utter and completely unmitigated nonsense. 'We' most certainly did NOT all know that Iraq had WMDs. In fact most of the people in the world except those systematically misinformed by the American Media were pretty sure Iraq did not have such weapons. That's why (unlike Afghanistan) the US was largely unable to cajole, extort, intimidate, bribe, or con any major country except Britain into strongly supporting the invasion of Iraq. The 'Coalition" had less than 50 members. Many of them have no meaningful presence and the majority of them are places like Palau and Moldova with GDPs smaller than South Dakota. For example, officially Turkey is a member of the coalition. But in fact, Turkdy turned down a whopping bribe to participate meaningfully in the fiasco. Even Canada -- which usually sticks with the US -- passed on this one.
There were UN inspectors on the ground from November 2002 on until they were directed to leave for their own safety just before the US invasion in March 2003. Their efforts were not being impeded. They found no sign of nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons or of programs to make them (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/03/17/iraq/ma in544280.shtml )
You should be asking why you did not know in early 2003 what most of the world knew. If you were getting your news from Fox News, that would explain part of the problem. (Surely you are not still listening to those clowns?). But that's only part of the problem.
***People predicted that offices would go paperless, and that cars would fly too. But the reality is, if you don't need the portability, why spend the extra money to get a laptop?***
Smaller footprint. Take up less counter space in the kitchen, living room, etc. There are desktop configurations that are reasonably compact nowadays, but you have to look fairly hard to find them. I looked around Best Buy the other day when I stopped by to pick up an LCD monitor they had on sale. Out of maybe 25 desktop systems they had set up, exactly one -- count them -- one -- was a reduced form factor PC.
Personally, I think that laptops will be dominant in the future, but 25-35% of PCs will stay desktops for a variety of reasons. The two big ones. Laptops are fragile. And laptops are entirely too portable for most business and public sector situations.
The problem is NOT the W3C. At least not entirely, and probably not mostly. The W3c has perfectly OK free HTML, CSS etc validators on line ( http://validator.w3.org/ ). They are not hard to use. Don't like W3C? There are other validators available on-line (Google 'HTML validators'). A fair number of sites on the Internet actually are validated.
The problem seems to be that a significant percentage of web site developers lack the discipline or interest to follow rules. And, of course browsers don't necessary work with 'correct' documents. IE7 is said to still be out of compliance -- at least wrt CSS. Microsoft has the resources to make its browser standards compliant. Why haven't they? Beats me.
My take is that browsers should work with 'correct' HTML. I don't have any problem with non-compliant pages as long as the folks who generate them can make them work acceptably with real browsers. the latter is a lot of work, but some folks (e.g. Google) do pull it off.
***Far too little is done to accelerate and unleash the potential of the best and brightest.***
Y'know what, That wasn't true in the 1950s when schools had to deal with the baby boom that caused huge classes and a relative shortage of classrooms and teachers and it's not true now in a lot of schools. I've actually worked recently in a rural school (K-8 -- 300 students). Yes, a lot of effort is expended on the low end. But the really exceptional kids on the high end aren't ignored. They get guidance, special tutoring, access to advanced materials etc. The kid that had real acting talent ended up at one of the top musical theatre schools. The kid who was good with computers got special tutoring, administrator access, and a recommendation to the IT folks at the high school (He's come in first and second in two annual statewide tech support contests since he got to the HS). A lot of that is informal and wouldn't show up if you looked at statistics. But I really don't think the really top flight kids are ignored. I'm not so sure about the merely pretty good. They indeed may be being shortchanged.
I do think there may be a problem in the US with the culture rather than the schools. It's hard not to agree with Bob Parr (Mr Incredible) "They keep finding new ways to celebrate mediocrity," We don't seem to care much about superior performance except in athletics.
***With idiotic programs like "No child left behind"... ***
With that I couldn't agree more. NCLB may help with the really awful schools... for a while. But it's going to be a disaster for the schools that were doing pretty well and that'll get worse. For a while teaching kids to pass tests will help to show annual improvement. But it won't be long before the requirement to show improvement every one of a dozen or three category/age group combos one year out of two will result in good schools being ranked as failing. (At least that's the way I'm pretty sure that's how NCLB works).
***I'd be in favor of getting the Federal government out of the public education system entirely. We should eliminate the Dept.of Education and distribute the entire department budget as block grants to the states for the next couple of years.***
Amen Brother!!! I'm a liberal in modern terms, but I don't think the central government has much place in either education or law enforcement. Yeah, some states and local governments may not be much good at either, but at least we'll have some decent schools and police forces in some places and people can still vote with their feet. In education in particular, there is a tendency for large organizations to create monumental bureaucracies that devote an inordinate amount of effort to creating and 'evaluating' piles of incomprehensible, jargon laden, basically silly documentation. Bad idea overall. I submit that any organization that can't (or won't) communicate in simple English should be phased out... sooner rather than later.
***For Linux I try to stick to Postscript printers. They just seem to work better and there usually aren't any driver problems when all you need is a ppd file.***
I've had nothing but bad experiences in my limited experience with Postscript. Used to be slow. Still is for all I know. Hangs sometimes. Not available on inexpensive printers that users prefer because they don't want to walk down the hall to get their small printouts. I know that it's heresy, but I think PCL works as well on high end printers and is the only game in town for low end.... Maybe for serious graphics and publishing Postscript is superior, but for home and most office use, Postscript looks to me to be a slowly dying option. I looked for recent market share data for PCL vs Postscript vs both, but couldn't find any. It was 3:1 PCL a decade ago. I'd think it would be worse now thanks to the ubiquitous PCL only HP Deskjets.
In any case it's probably a moot point. I don't think there is an inexpensive color laser printer that comes with Postscript. Our CLP-300 is (we hope) a final solution to struggling with #$@)$ ink cartridges for occasional color printouts. Invariably when we wanted to do a color printout, one or more color jets on every inkjet printer in the house would be plugged. Colors from the CLP-300 aren't as vivid as inkjets, but anything that means that I never have to try to resuscitate a nearly new inkjet cartridge again is a winner in my book.
***There is a howto somewhere in the web how to NOP out this crap from the binary. And never use a vendor-installer of course..***
In the case of Samsung color laser printers, you have to use the vendor -installer because if it runs, it sets up a/etc/linuxprint.cfg that is needed by the Samsung filter ppmtosplc. AFAICS, the format of linuxprint.cfg isn't documented. (either).
OTOH, at least with the CLP-300 you can use foo2splc instead of the Samsung drivers. And I believe that some of the other models work with splix.
This may not be that big a problem -- at least for the Samsung color laser printers. Why not? Because the Linux installer for those printers seems to be unusable on many new Linuxes. The installer is dynamically linked to libraries that are no longer used and it apparently doesn't install properly when newer versions of the libraries are linked. It took me a number of days to get a CLP-300N printer working with the Samsung drivers. There is an alternate open source driver called foo2qpdl that does work.
My somewhat rambling notes on this subject are on the internet at http://donaldkenney.110mb.com/LPRINTER.HTM. I plan to clean them up and correct the consistent misspelling of kubuntu... someday. I posted the notes because I couldn't find any explanation anywhere of the Samsung message 'unable to find a suitable printer' or any thoughts on what to do about it other than to return the printer to the store.
Not necessarily NUTS. I believe from what I read that if you don't use much time, Tracfone and T-Mobile cost about the same. I can't tell for sure because -- unlike Tracfone -- T-Mobile doesn't seem to reveal the details of its prepaid cost structure on its web site. At least I can't find it. That may just be lousy web site design or my incompetence. But I don't trust companies that aren't up front about costs.
I also think that Tracfone has better coverage. I know that used to be the case. Again, I can't tell for sure because T-Mobile's coverage map is down this morning. Historically, T-Mobile coverage in Vermont where I live has been -- I'm told -- even worse than the other providers. Since cell phone coverage in Vermont beyond the city limits of Burlington is notoriously iffy even with the best providers, T-Mobile's coverage up here would be a real issue. I'd guess that is true in other boondockish regions as well.
On the plus side, adding minutes to a T-Mobile prepaid phone almost certainly is easier than adding time to a Tracfone. I don't see how it could be harder unless the phones contain a genie that you have to wrestle to the ground before you get your minutes.
If your mom will only use the phone a few times a month, you can get a Tracfone for about $20 or $30 at Radio Shack or just about any drugstore. Airtime is expensive 20-40 cents a minute (twice that when roaming). Coverage seems good. I've raised a signal in some really remote parts of the Great Basin. Adding time is a royal PITA, (you have to enter code into the phone) but it was easier the last time I tried it than it used to be. You need to add time occasionally to keep the phone active. My cost works out to about $10 a month. I only use it on occasional trips, and it's fine for that.
***I have to say, the quality of service has never sucked so long as my Internet connection is working right.***
That's the issue, now isn't it? My Verizon DSL connection slows to a crawl from time to time, and drops me completely several times a week. I can download huge files -- Slackware CDs, VMs, etc. And I can surf the net. But I can't hold an Internet Radio connection open for more than an hour or two. Rebooting the DSL modem is a regular occurence around here. My son's Comcast connection in Seattle wasn't any better. He used Vonage because he didn't really care if he lost some calls. Worked fine when it was up. Wasn't always up.
Our analog phone service OTOH is fine.
I'm going to put my phone on the digital connection? I think not. My spouse wants a reliable phone connection. I'll confess to being cheap. But I'm not crazy. No Phone over IP here until one of the local ISPs is able to keep a line up reliably.
***Can some one explain it to me In plain English with a little bit of background.***
Probably not.
This looks to me like the type of jargon that is used to try to obscure a total lack of anything meaningful to say.
Stricktly speaking, it might say that ODF is fine but some people may want to use Open XML because it does more. The argument -- I believe -- is over whether the capabilities of Open XML are things that any sane person wants in a document standard.
Personally, I think the world would be a better place if Microsoft were forced to comply with an open document standard -- any document standard -- that they did not produce. When it comes to document formats, their constant, uncontrolled, (and largely unecessary?) format changes have cost users a fortune. Past time for their users to bring them to heel.
Well, excess calories certainly are a problem. But Fructose in large doses has the peculiar (and unintuitive) property that much of it is converted more or less directly to fat rather than energy in the liver. Glucose OTOH is metabolized throughout the body. The body seems to be designed to work with a carbohydrate mix that consists of mostly of glucose derived from starch and sugar plus a bit of fructose from fruit and sugar, as well as (for infants and those of European ancestry) a bit of galactose from dairy products.
The body can convert fructose to glucose and burn it. But only in modest doses. When the fructose level gets high, the bod stashes the excess for future consumption... as fat.
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How long does the data have to be retained? No one seems to know how long CDRs will reliably store data. There seems to be a large gap between user experience with unabused CDRs ... sometimes unreadable after only a year or two ... and manufacturer estimates of many decades.
It's possible to put a usable -- at least usable by most people -- keyboard on portable computer about this size. Compaq did it in the early 1990s with the Contura-Aeros. there were things wrong with them. For example, the built in trackball was just awful. But the keyboard was OK for most people. I don't think QWERTY keyboards can get much smaller than the Contura's roughly 9x4 inches (24*10cm) without usability issues.
A perfectly reasonable question, but the answer may well be "about the same". The NE in wiNE istands for "Not an Emulator". In a sense, WINE *IS* a native Linux graphics implementation albeit aided or hindered by using the Windows API interfaces. If I recall the WINE documentation correctly it says that WINE is sometimes faster than Windows on the same hardware and application and sometimes slower.
Here's a link http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com/2006/02/wine-vs-wind ows-xp-benchmarks.html that seems to say roughly the same thing.
Why Interstates? Because sometimes they are the shortest route between where I am and where I want to be even if it is only 5 miles away.
Anyway, this is not the car I want. Economically, it makes a lot more sense to spend a few hundred dollars a year for parts and 30 hours or so a year installing them and keeping our ancient Dodge Neon on the road. Tain't much of a car. But it doesn't have to be.
Why not a bicycle? Because I'm nearly 70, this is not flat country, and I've always hated riding bicycles up hill. Aside from which, there are days when it is raining hard, snowing hard, or way too cold or hot for non-masochists to contemplate using a bicycle.
The article criticises the keys as being too small. A narrower PC will make that even worse. If you don't put a substantial bezel around the 7 inch diagonal screen, you are going to end up with a keyboard that can't be used by adults without extreme frustration.
An intern who is smart enough to suspect that stashing tapes in the car overnight might be a bad idea would probably also be smart enough to shut up and do what he or she is told. I don't know about you, but in places where I've worked, mentioning to your boss that his/her data backup/retention procedures sound really stupid is not likely to be a step on the path to a permanent job. Amazing as it may sound, a lot of bosses do not take criticism well.
A small company that struggles to make payroll every pay period may be looking for expertise at $10.50 an hour. A large organization is looking for willing hands and no backtalk at that price.
Assuming the story is accurate, the data compromise (if any) probably is not the kid's fault.
The vast majority of your friends may run LCD monitors, but it's unlikely that LCD monitors have replaced even half the CRTs in the general user population. Techies are prone to overestimate the rate of adoption of new technology.
For that matter, they are still selling CRTs -- and they are cheaper to buy if not to operate -- than LCDs. Check the ads in your Sunday paper and look at what sort of monitor is on the low-end, loss-leader, offering.
Perfectly usable used CRT monitors are only a few bucks. I'm going to put one out front in the next few days with a FREE sticker on it and see if it goes away.
Not only is DEC gone, but its competitors like SEL are gone as well. Whether DEC was mismanaged is irrelevant. Its business model died and there was no realistic alternative.
Amen. I think that things are much better now than they used to be, but there is something about Unix that seems to attract jerks sort of like the celebrity criminal d'jour attracts photographers and camera crews. It used to require a fairly thick skin and a zero-tolerance attitude toward bullying in order to get answers to perfectly reasonable questions.
Nothing against WINE. I am, in fact, typing this on a lightweight Windows browser running with only minor problems under WINE. It run well enough that I am using it instead to the more or less OK Linux alternatives -- Firefox, Konqueror, Lynx in framebuffer video mode. But the truth of the matter is that there are LOTS of Windows applications that do not run acceptably under WINE. Maybe virtualization will solve the problem of running mission critical Windows applications under a PC Unix. The technical problems look to be largely tractable. I'm not so sure about the licensing issues.
As is Wikipedia. They both have their strengths and weaknesses. I'd expect Britannica on average to have very good articles on art, history, and similar 'classical' subjects. OTOH, for anything modern or dynamic, Britannica is likely to be a weak source, and Wikipedia is likely to be better. Maybe much better.
If I wanted to know about the reign of Ethelred the Unread (means poorly advised incidentally) I'd guess that Britannica would have a better article. On the other hand, if I want to know about Blackhole Routing or Fluorescent lights, I'd likely do better with Wikipedia. This is not to say that every article in Wikipedia about technology is wonderful -- just that the interests of Wikipedia authors are broad, and that the update/edit process is rapid. Material on recent developments is well represented.
Well, yeah -- it's the FAA's unimpressive record that worries me. I'm sure these guys understand ATC better than I and other /. readers do. But do they really know what they are doing?
No reason why it wouldn't show altitude. GPS altitudes generally aren't as accurate as ground positions (it's a geometry thing -- you'd need a satellite high overhead, which you rarely have, to get good altitude). But they should be good enough. Besides which, the pilot isn't usually concerned so much about his own altitude. He generally knows that. He's worried about the altitude of other aircraft in his neighborhood.
This is utter and completely unmitigated nonsense. 'We' most certainly did NOT all know that Iraq had WMDs. In fact most of the people in the world except those systematically misinformed by the American Media were pretty sure Iraq did not have such weapons. That's why (unlike Afghanistan) the US was largely unable to cajole, extort, intimidate, bribe, or con any major country except Britain into strongly supporting the invasion of Iraq. The 'Coalition" had less than 50 members. Many of them have no meaningful presence and the majority of them are places like Palau and Moldova with GDPs smaller than South Dakota. For example, officially Turkey is a member of the coalition. But in fact, Turkdy turned down a whopping bribe to participate meaningfully in the fiasco. Even Canada -- which usually sticks with the US -- passed on this one.
There were UN inspectors on the ground from November 2002 on until they were directed to leave for their own safety just before the US invasion in March 2003. Their efforts were not being impeded. They found no sign of nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons or of programs to make them (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/03/17/iraq/ma in544280.shtml )
You should be asking why you did not know in early 2003 what most of the world knew. If you were getting your news from Fox News, that would explain part of the problem. (Surely you are not still listening to those clowns?). But that's only part of the problem.
Smaller footprint. Take up less counter space in the kitchen, living room, etc. There are desktop configurations that are reasonably compact nowadays, but you have to look fairly hard to find them. I looked around Best Buy the other day when I stopped by to pick up an LCD monitor they had on sale. Out of maybe 25 desktop systems they had set up, exactly one -- count them -- one -- was a reduced form factor PC.
Personally, I think that laptops will be dominant in the future, but 25-35% of PCs will stay desktops for a variety of reasons. The two big ones. Laptops are fragile. And laptops are entirely too portable for most business and public sector situations.
The problem seems to be that a significant percentage of web site developers lack the discipline or interest to follow rules. And, of course browsers don't necessary work with 'correct' documents. IE7 is said to still be out of compliance -- at least wrt CSS. Microsoft has the resources to make its browser standards compliant. Why haven't they? Beats me.
My take is that browsers should work with 'correct' HTML. I don't have any problem with non-compliant pages as long as the folks who generate them can make them work acceptably with real browsers. the latter is a lot of work, but some folks (e.g. Google) do pull it off.
Y'know what, That wasn't true in the 1950s when schools had to deal with the baby boom that caused huge classes and a relative shortage of classrooms and teachers and it's not true now in a lot of schools. I've actually worked recently in a rural school (K-8 -- 300 students). Yes, a lot of effort is expended on the low end. But the really exceptional kids on the high end aren't ignored. They get guidance, special tutoring, access to advanced materials etc. The kid that had real acting talent ended up at one of the top musical theatre schools. The kid who was good with computers got special tutoring, administrator access, and a recommendation to the IT folks at the high school (He's come in first and second in two annual statewide tech support contests since he got to the HS). A lot of that is informal and wouldn't show up if you looked at statistics. But I really don't think the really top flight kids are ignored. I'm not so sure about the merely pretty good. They indeed may be being shortchanged.
I do think there may be a problem in the US with the culture rather than the schools. It's hard not to agree with Bob Parr (Mr Incredible) "They keep finding new ways to celebrate mediocrity," We don't seem to care much about superior performance except in athletics.
***With idiotic programs like "No child left behind" ... ***
With that I couldn't agree more. NCLB may help with the really awful schools ... for a while. But it's going to be a disaster for the schools that were doing pretty well and that'll get worse. For a while teaching kids to pass tests will help to show annual improvement. But it won't be long before the requirement to show improvement every one of a dozen or three category/age group combos one year out of two will result in good schools being ranked as failing. (At least that's the way I'm pretty sure that's how NCLB works).
***I'd be in favor of getting the Federal government out of the public education system entirely. We should eliminate the Dept.of Education and distribute the entire department budget as block grants to the states for the next couple of years.***
Amen Brother!!! I'm a liberal in modern terms, but I don't think the central government has much place in either education or law enforcement. Yeah, some states and local governments may not be much good at either, but at least we'll have some decent schools and police forces in some places and people can still vote with their feet. In education in particular, there is a tendency for large organizations to create monumental bureaucracies that devote an inordinate amount of effort to creating and 'evaluating' piles of incomprehensible, jargon laden, basically silly documentation. Bad idea overall. I submit that any organization that can't (or won't) communicate in simple English should be phased out ... sooner rather than later.
I've had nothing but bad experiences in my limited experience with Postscript. Used to be slow. Still is for all I know. Hangs sometimes. Not available on inexpensive printers that users prefer because they don't want to walk down the hall to get their small printouts. I know that it's heresy, but I think PCL works as well on high end printers and is the only game in town for low end. ... Maybe for serious graphics and publishing Postscript is superior, but for home and most office use, Postscript looks to me to be a slowly dying option. I looked for recent market share data for PCL vs Postscript vs both, but couldn't find any. It was 3:1 PCL a decade ago. I'd think it would be worse now thanks to the ubiquitous PCL only HP Deskjets.
In any case it's probably a moot point. I don't think there is an inexpensive color laser printer that comes with Postscript. Our CLP-300 is (we hope) a final solution to struggling with #$@)$ ink cartridges for occasional color printouts. Invariably when we wanted to do a color printout, one or more color jets on every inkjet printer in the house would be plugged. Colors from the CLP-300 aren't as vivid as inkjets, but anything that means that I never have to try to resuscitate a nearly new inkjet cartridge again is a winner in my book.
In the case of Samsung color laser printers, you have to use the vendor -installer because if it runs, it sets up a /etc/linuxprint.cfg that is needed by the Samsung filter ppmtosplc. AFAICS, the format of linuxprint.cfg isn't documented. (either).
OTOH, at least with the CLP-300 you can use foo2splc instead of the Samsung drivers. And I believe that some of the other models work with splix.
My somewhat rambling notes on this subject are on the internet at http://donaldkenney.110mb.com/LPRINTER.HTM. I plan to clean them up and correct the consistent misspelling of kubuntu ... someday. I posted the notes because I couldn't find any explanation anywhere of the Samsung message 'unable to find a suitable printer' or any thoughts on what to do about it other than to return the printer to the store.
I also think that Tracfone has better coverage. I know that used to be the case. Again, I can't tell for sure because T-Mobile's coverage map is down this morning. Historically, T-Mobile coverage in Vermont where I live has been -- I'm told -- even worse than the other providers. Since cell phone coverage in Vermont beyond the city limits of Burlington is notoriously iffy even with the best providers, T-Mobile's coverage up here would be a real issue. I'd guess that is true in other boondockish regions as well.
On the plus side, adding minutes to a T-Mobile prepaid phone almost certainly is easier than adding time to a Tracfone. I don't see how it could be harder unless the phones contain a genie that you have to wrestle to the ground before you get your minutes.
If your mom will only use the phone a few times a month, you can get a Tracfone for about $20 or $30 at Radio Shack or just about any drugstore. Airtime is expensive 20-40 cents a minute (twice that when roaming). Coverage seems good. I've raised a signal in some really remote parts of the Great Basin. Adding time is a royal PITA, (you have to enter code into the phone) but it was easier the last time I tried it than it used to be. You need to add time occasionally to keep the phone active. My cost works out to about $10 a month. I only use it on occasional trips, and it's fine for that.
That's the issue, now isn't it? My Verizon DSL connection slows to a crawl from time to time, and drops me completely several times a week. I can download huge files -- Slackware CDs, VMs, etc. And I can surf the net. But I can't hold an Internet Radio connection open for more than an hour or two. Rebooting the DSL modem is a regular occurence around here. My son's Comcast connection in Seattle wasn't any better. He used Vonage because he didn't really care if he lost some calls. Worked fine when it was up. Wasn't always up.
Our analog phone service OTOH is fine.
I'm going to put my phone on the digital connection? I think not. My spouse wants a reliable phone connection. I'll confess to being cheap. But I'm not crazy. No Phone over IP here until one of the local ISPs is able to keep a line up reliably.
Probably not.
This looks to me like the type of jargon that is used to try to obscure a total lack of anything meaningful to say.
Stricktly speaking, it might say that ODF is fine but some people may want to use Open XML because it does more. The argument -- I believe -- is over whether the capabilities of Open XML are things that any sane person wants in a document standard.
Personally, I think the world would be a better place if Microsoft were forced to comply with an open document standard -- any document standard -- that they did not produce. When it comes to document formats, their constant, uncontrolled, (and largely unecessary?) format changes have cost users a fortune. Past time for their users to bring them to heel.
Well, excess calories certainly are a problem. But Fructose in large doses has the peculiar (and unintuitive) property that much of it is converted more or less directly to fat rather than energy in the liver. Glucose OTOH is metabolized throughout the body. The body seems to be designed to work with a carbohydrate mix that consists of mostly of glucose derived from starch and sugar plus a bit of fructose from fruit and sugar, as well as (for infants and those of European ancestry) a bit of galactose from dairy products.
The body can convert fructose to glucose and burn it. But only in modest doses. When the fructose level gets high, the bod stashes the excess for future consumption ... as fat.
Here's a link to a lengthy article that addresses all this http://www.medbio.info/Horn/Time%201-2/carbohydrat e_metabolism.htm