Often parents team up to help cover subjects they don't know much about. Perhaps you're not a math expert but you might have an english degree and know a lot about composition. You could teach your and your friend's children english lit, while another parent maybe with a degree in Mathematics of Physics could teach a science class.

Almost everyone I knew when I was homeschooling did something like this. In fact you can end up with teachers who know a lot more about the subject than the "real" teacher in the local public school. I'd rather take my math class from my parents friend with a PhD in Mathematics, than that person with an Education degree who might lack any "real" math background. (Not that there aren't good Math teachers in public schools, but it's hit and miss.)

I was homeschooled during highschool and I'm familiar with the whole "unschooling" movement. Traditional homeschooling tends to revolve around having a curriculum that mirrors what's taught in public school, but taught in a 1-1 or small group environment by parents. Some of the benefits of homeschooling vs just learning in the regular classroom is that you can usually move at a pace which fits the student (often faster), and avoid disruptions from people who have no interest in learning.

Unschooling was/is a movement within the larger homeschool movement. It's not a new idea and I remember people first talking about it 10+ years ago. The difference in unschooling vs homeschooling is that instead of having classes in particular subjects like math, english, biology, social studies, physics etc. the student directs the studies and these subjects get incorporated into things which interest the student. This can be a very successful way to learn since everything you learn is related in some way to your interests.

For example if you really wanted to design computer games your english/writing work could be incorporated into doing a design doc/writing a story/dialog for your game. Your math/science work would be incorporated into the project as well since you'll probably want to know physics/chemistry so you can make your game realistic, and you'll probably need math all over the place to design various game systems. The big trick with unschooling is that you and/or your parents have to see how to incorporate your interests into everything you're learning.

On unschooling story I remember was someone who wanted to breed championship race horses so they learned a ton of biology, enough math to manage a farm, and spent lots of time hanging out with their horses. Personally the few people I knew who did unschooling where really into theater and so focused their studies around acting, and skills which would help them get a career in theater. So rather than have someone take an math class with just "boring" numbers they'd have to learn about the costs of putting on a theater production, balance books, selling tickets, figuring out dimensions to build sets, and other theater related math areas. Sure these people didn't do calculus, but then again most people don't do calc in highschool (not needed unless your into science). Basically, the unschooling philosophy was let you kid do what they want and drive them toward learning what their passionate about. This is very similar to the environment one encounters in graduate school while doing Masters or PhD research. But not everyone can succeed in such a free learning environment.

The challenge with unschooling is that it only really works with a special sort of person who's HIGHLY motivated. These people are the types who tend to succeed wherever they are. If they weren't unschooled they'd probably be doing this stuff in their spare time (possibly flunky some classes they found "boring"). For every person I met who was really unschooling and learning real skills which would help them out, there was someone else who was unschooled because that sounded better than "staying home and playing video games". I always felt when I met an unschooler/homeschooler who's parents didn't push them or weren't encouraging learning did a big disservice to their kid. But I also met many people who learned a lot outside the regular school system and turned out to be productive members of society. The people who don't push and help their students thrive and claim they are unschooling by having their kids play video games all day just give a bad name to all the people who really benefit from such an open learning environment.

I hope you're joking since the TCP/IP and UDP protocols have the concept of "host order" and network order. All packets should be translated to network order before sending them over the network.

Plus both systems run PowerPC based chips which run big endian so even if they didn't bother doing the host to network order translation you that won't be the cause of your networking failure.

As many people point out RAID isn't backup which is something I've taken to heart. But what I haven't been able to find is a good solution to do cross platform backup.

I have three machines which I'd like to utilize in a backup scheme. One machine is a linux box with a large SW RAID5 setup I'd like to back up to. The other two machines are my clients one is running WIndows, the other Mac OSX.

Are there any cross platform backup solutions which will allow me to back up files to the Linux machine from my Windows or OS X machines? I've considered using rsync with the directories which I want to backup, but that will hose files if something gets corrupted on the client box. I'm pretty sure rsync will happily sync my backups to the corrupted file. Plus I don't really have any history as rsync will keep the two directories up to date, but won't generate snapshots. (Well not directly).

I could just occasionally tar/bzip up all my files, but I don't really want to have to manage gigabytes of tar files. Especially as it would be nice to be able to easily recover a particular version of a file without hunting through tons of archive files. Plus tar.bz2'ed files don't really support accessing a single document in the file.

I've also considered just putting all my files in source control with svn, git, or perforce (free for 2 users) then mirror the repo but that doesn't seem to be the best solution either. I'm not sure what the overhead of the various source control systems but at least a few of them support binary diff, and they have versioning built in. But I would like to avoid having to check out, and check in files on the client. This solution also doesn't lend itself to making backups very automatic.

So is anyone aware of a cross platform backup solution (Windows/Linux/OS X)? Which would allow me to mirror/store the backup files on any of the systems that doesn't have the overhead of making a TAR file per day?

Optimally I'd like a solution where I can configure specific directories to get backed up, and have backups occur as some sort of timed cron job. I also would like a way to browse/recover past files without having to mess with manually extracting files from an archive. An open source solution would be nice so that I don't have to worry about losing access to my data in the future, but I have no problem paying for such a backup program.

That's annoying. I guess it looks like it's mostly just newer stuff up on there so far, and even not all their shipping products are supported.

I'll have the keep that in mind next time I go laptop shopping.

The 9400 and 9300 are pretty much the same but I think the 9300 has 16 shader cores, and the 9400 has 32. I'm not sure if that affects HD decode much. It does make a decent amount of difference for gaming, and CUDA apps I think.

You didn't just write the above did you? You show your ignorance. A long time ago they did just compositing, but that was back in the VGA controller days.

Then they evolved to do fixed function rasterization, but those days are over (unless you're Intel doing integrated stuff).

GPUs are MUCH more programmable, and getting more so with each generation. You can do pretty much any floating point math function you want now. Go look up CUDA, and OpenCL they let you basically write C code for the GPU.

Sure the GPUs might not do so well when it comes to brancing, but you'll see that GPU's are being used to do more than just rasterization. Sure razterization would be an important target for NVIDIA/ATI but that doesn't mean it can only draw triangles.

If you look at the paper I linked (which you obviously didn't) it describes how they wrote a ray tracer using NVIDIA CUDA and EXISTING GPUs. If stuff gets more programmable as NVIDIA seems to be targeting, then it will only get easier to write ray tracers which run on the GPU.

If you want proof GPUs do more than rasterization go check out how NVIDIA's GPU tech is now in the Tsubame super computer.

Even Intel is getting into the GPU business with Larrabee, I bet they plan to write a ray tracer for that.

There's more to GPU acceleration than gaming.

What does your wife do? Does she just send e-mail? Then beyond some UI improvements there's not much for her (but those UI improvements could be cool).

Does she encode music or video's for an iPod? That can be enhanced with the GPU. You can encode movies in faster than realtime on current GPUs. Something you can't do with current CPUs.

Does she watch YouTube? I saw a demo of a program that runs some fancy filters using the GPU on low quality YouTube like video, and spits out something that looks pretty good. It was something that couldn't be done in real time on a CPU but a mid to low range GPU could do.

Does she do graphic design? Features like the new Photoshop allow the program to be much more responsive when editing images, large filters also complete in fractions of a second.

In the simplest cases a better GPU might increase UI responsiveness, and make the experience "smoother". But long term changes will likely change WHAT you do with the GPU.

NVIDIA at least is trying to change it so GPU acceleration isn't just about gaming. They want the GPU to be a massively parallel processor that your desktop uses when it needs more processing power.

It's not just about games, there are business uses for GPU acceleration. Presentation software could use the GPU to be more dynamic, and render complicated graphs more smoothly. Some complicated PowerPoint presentations get slow, why not use a GPU to accelerate this?

Perhaps Excel or Matlab could use a GPU to crunch numbers to speed up calculations. Or even use the GPU to make the charts more interactive.

Perhaps MS has some overhaul to their display system which would allow it to use the GPU to render Word documents with better anti-aliasing and allow large documents to scroll faster. Adobe Acrobat actually supports some GPU acceleration (not on be default I think) which makes PDFs render faster. I know turning on PDF acceleration actually makes me more productive since I can read documents without having to wait for redraw.

Maybe we can do GPU accelerated vector graphics, for web site and UI rendering. Who knows what could be done to improve the business experience if the option is there.

NVIDIA expects to change the way people USE the GPU so it's NOT just for rendering 3D pictures anymore.

Some improvements to business experience might be small, but still give a small boost in productivity.

All that said, there will always be people who just use a very basic word processor. But these people also don't need Intel's next Core i7 quad mega CPU either. They'll be fine with their P2 running Window 95 if the hardware didn't eventually break down.

The whole point is that NVIDIA wants to innovate on the GPU so that business, and people can use it in new ways to do stuff they couldn't before. Intel wants to do the same, but require you to buy a bigger CPU. Instead you could get a cheap integrated GPU and CPU combo, and get the same productivity boost you were getting by buying just a bigger CPU before.

My statement may have exaggerated a bit, but in general people seeking out Intel don't seem to be aware of NVIDIA or ATI's offerings. Both companies need to do a better job at marketing so people are aware that they have integrated offerings than Intel.

About the only place were NVIDIA fails is in open sourcing their drivers on Linux, but I haven't seen anyone cite this as their reason for choosing Intel yet. At least I can understand the reason someone would choose the more "open" platform even if it's performance is worse.

I can't understand why someone would not choose the product which offers better battery life and more features for about the same cost on closed platforms such as Windows.

But then again the 9400/9300 are pretty new for NVIDIA (previously no integrated graphics), and on the AMD side the 790G is still fairly new. So maybe people just haven't heard about these products.

NVIDIA has their laptop drivers on their website so you no longer have to get outdated ones from your OEM. (Took them long enough.)

As for battery life, have you checked out NVIDIA integrated vs Intel integrated? The discrete systems do suck more power, but I think the integrated chips for NVIDIA/ATI are still better and don't consume more power than Intel integrated.

Apple is picky about battery life, and they recently switched to all NVIDIA on their laptop line, including the Macbook Air.

Don't just assume that because it's NVIDIA it's a power hungry monster. Sure the high end graphics cards need their own power substation, but they can do some nice low power stuff when they need to (9400M, Tegra).

You know real time raytracing isn't something that has to be done on the CPU. There's no reason you can't write a raytracer for a GPU.

In fact NVIDIA already has a fully interactive raytracer. They demoed it last summer at NVISION, and SIGGRAPH '08. I'm sure as they expand CUDA support you'll see more and faster raytracers.

Go check out http://developer.nvidia.com/object/nvision08-IRT.html

That's the way to go in the future. The ION is the NVIDIA 9400M chipset (used by Apple in their laptops) but paired with an low wattage Intel Atom CPU. The entire thing is designed around a tiny pico-itx board, and draws very little power and can be passively cooled.

But due to the use of the NVIDIA ION chipset the package can decode HD video and run Vista Premium (if you wanted to) something you can't do on Intel's stock platform of Atom + 945G for a chipset.

If all AMD wanted was the low end business market they could have passed on ATI, and just licensed a cheapo core from someone like SiS, or they could have even acquired S3.

They probably wanted some of the chipset design expertise of the ATI side to create a "Centrino" like platform. That and they thought that the CPU will want to incorporate some of the parallel features of the GPU (Google their Fusion CPU project).

I didn't say integrated graphics was bad. I was saying INTEL's graphics are bad.

Go check out the 790G chipsets from AMD and the 9300/9400 chipsets from NVIDIA.

Both are integrated mainboards, but have much better 3D and HD decoding than what's offered by Intel, even in Linux. These will work for you in an low profile home theater PC, and do a better job of it :).