Rhywden,

I have to reply to you because I feel you really don't get it. I understand, you're probably a grade-school teacher. And that's a hard job. And I think if the qualifications are set high, that's fine, they should be. After all, you are entrusted with the official education of, as you say, +20 kids. I don't mean to trivialize this.

You mentioned that I am trying to "retract my statement" by narrowing it down to lower grades. I'm not though, my argument isn't about college or high school. I know there's a time to learn some hard facts, and I wouldn't want someone that didn't have a firm grasp on chemistry teaching chemistry. My argument is that you don't have to be an "intellectual" to educate. There may be situations that call for it, yes, but we're in a thread here about Reading Rainbow. This isn't about taking Chem 101. This is about inspiring children to learn and create. That's what Reading Rainbow did.

It's a story I can relate to too. I found school completely boring. While the teacher was babbling on about grammar or how to look at nutrition labels, I was making notes about circuits I wanted to try out when I got home. In second-grade I designed a motor that used a rather novel placement of permanent magnets as a journal entry. The teacher gave me a zero because it wasn't creative. These motors are now common-place in electric cars.

On the other hand, when I was 5, I had seen how tubas are made on Mr. Rogers. And I saw how a composer uses a digital sampler on Reading Rainbow. I watched "Square One" on PBS and learned about fractions and division. I saw a "computer" on The Bloodhound Gang that could hold several books on a microchip. I watched Nova and learned about blackholes. One of my few memories from fourth grade was a behind the scenes tour of a check processing facility, where I saw enormous IBM mainframes with open-reel tape feeding them instructions. I knew it was outdated at the time, but it made an impression on me. I remember getting to sit in the cockpit of a 747 on a flight from NY to LA. I was only a child, but looking at the radar screens, comm systems, etc, it was awesome. I remember changing spark plugs with my dad, and learning about how combustion engines work. I remember looking at how the guy at the grocery store ground up the beef (specifically, how the motor was connected up to the grinder). I remember watching the recording engineer at a live show checking each microphone. I remember looking at a watermill grind wheat at the Eno in North Carolina. I remember my uncle's distortion and flanger effects on his guitar.

Looking back, of course there were "intellectuals" involved. I'm not writing them off all together. But you can't just write off the cast of Reading Rainbow because your favorite PhD isn't on the board. Look beyond the diplomas. If a TV show can get kids inspired, how about we support it.

Another point, a science teacher in junior high explained to me and a buddy of mine that if we kept goofing off in the back of the class and not doing his homework, we would never become anything. Well guess what... My friend dropped out of high school and started his own engineering company. I took a different path, but I ended up as an engineer at a top national lab. Saw that teacher recently (an intellectual), and you better believe he took back his statement.

Inspire people and they will learn to learn on their own. They will enquire about what they do not understand. This alone is more important than learning about derivatives or electrons. When I was in school they said electrons had "orbits", something we now know is completely wrong. But that never really held me back. When I took "real" chemistry in college, I got the full story. No harm done.

Please do your students a favor. Stop with the powerpoints, the graphs, and the dimensional analysis. Turn off the calculators, shut down the computers. Get the students into a school bus ("field trip") and slam on the breaks in the parking lot at 10 MPH. That's acceleration. Want to teach about Faraday? Maxwell? Stop with the integrals. Build some circuits. Get some walkie-talkies. If you create an interesting situation, the students will naturally want to learn more.

That's all crap any decent sysadmin can accomplish with simple shell scripts and a database.

This kind of thing has been going on since the 70s or possibly even earlier, and it was called "system administrating". When demands became too high for an admin to manually do this sort of work, he or she wrote scripts (or as you would say, "autonomous agnostic software") to balance loads and free up resources automatically. Some of this work was the basis for memory-protected SMP OS designs. On a larger scale, this is how most enterprise systems operate.

So what you call "cloud computing" most people used to just call "getting work done efficiently"

And, velocity is change in location. Each level of "change" is really just a derivative, and going from position to speed to acceleration is a lot easier than doing dy/dt...

But totally irrelevant to the topic. What kids need is inspiration to learn and create rather than being sat in front of the Cartoon Channel or learning how to kill in a video game.

If that means watching shows about science, or making a volcano, or rolling down a hill in a box, I'm all for it! With or without the "intellectuals."

This is where the "anti-intellectualism" comes from. A person on slashdot thinks I am unqualified to teach children if I don't understand that oxidation is loosing electrons. WTF. Can you see just how "out of it" you are?

What on earth does fundamentals of chemistry have to do with my qualifications as part of an educational system for a child? If I were home schooling my kids, and I didn't know what a term meant, I would ask someone that does. Or get a textbook. Or look online. I've never heard such ignorance. I need to be an "intellectual" to educate?

Get your head out of your ass. You have no idea what it means to really raise children. Much less what qualifications a show like Reading Rainbow needs to inspire the Pre-K-3rd grade crowd to read.

Gosh, sure hope Levar Burton remembers his basic chemistry before he reads any more books to my kids! (sarcasm)

How different is that from automated nightly builds with a fricking multi-arch makefile?

You keep defending "the cloud" like it's something new. It's not! People got faster Internet connections so services like google docs, Netflix, AWS, etc got a lot faster and more sophisticated. There is nothing intrinsically new here. The buzz word sounds good to the public and to knowledge-less managers, so it stuck.

It's no different than you calling the cloud "autonomous" or "agnostic". People have considered computers to be "autonomous" to one degree or another for a long time.

How about this definition: The cloud is a marketing buzzword used to describe modern-day implementations of non-local time-sharing services. It is frequently paired with cloud-like icons. Any website that hosts data in any way can claim to be offering a service "in the cloud"

You just blew it. That's the Internet? DNS? Your comment is only one step above folks that think Internet Explorer is the Internet.

No wonder you think "the cloud" is something new.

Unless, of course, all the bridges built by engineers have fallen way below specification.

You don't need a PhD to raise children, even though there are plenty of schools with developmental psychology PhD programs...

You don't have to be a chef to cook great food, not an ASE certified mechanic to change your own transmission. Been there, done that.

In my view, there couldn't be any worse qualification to teach children than a degree, of all things. If you think a wall of diplomas or a long list of publications qualifies you to teach, you're out of your mind and clearly do not understand what this and similar efforts are really about.

I think the title should be "Why You Shouldn't Use Spreadsheets for *Complicated* Work". Just because a job is important doesn't mean the calculation is complex and something that needs to be coded in, for example, matlab.

If my job is to make a pie chart, I can't see why using Excel is a bad idea. On the other hand, if I am examining the variance of several thousand data points and then plotting the residuals from a gaussian fit, then yes, I can see why using something else would be a lot better. It has nothing to do with importance. Only complexity.

So what happens to the decommissioned horses, should this beast be put into production?

This is a great post, mod parent up.

With regards to QT, I love it too. Great IDE, and excellent tools and libraries. First-class debugger and UI designer. But it makes you wish, doesn't it, that there was a successor to C++ that implemented some QT things a little better? Especially the signals and slots, I feel that could be a awesome thing to have without needing qmake to re-write my functions... Still love it though!

I have not found this to be the case.

MATLAB is just fine for simple algorithms that analyze data in a sort of "use once" case. It's great for throwing something together, such as plotting data from a sensor, simulating a design, making nice figures for a publication, that sort of thing.

But MATLAB is not, and should not be thought of, as a general-purpose programming language, like C. Because of some early decisions made by the matlab folks, there are many limitations. Obviously, matlab is not an ideal language for a device driver. And not ideal for any type of network service. So let's ignore those cases. For a GUI app, matlab makes what would be a few lines in QT a nightmare of get_this() and handles_that() calls. It's infuriating. It's also slow and uses a ton of memory. For analyzing any data set over 100 MB, forget it, you'll be using several gigs just to load the set in.

There is a place for matlab, and there are many places for not matlab.

While I'm at it, here are some other things that I despise about matlab:
1) matlab is loosely typed. Ever get this error: "Cannot determine if foo is a variable or a file"
2) function interface operators are the same as matrix operators. You would think that a language that supposedly caters to linear (matrix) math wouldn't have screwed this up. If I do foo(1), this could be a function call or asking for matrix element 1 of matrix foo.
3) no pointers. Enough said.
4) matrix elements start at n=1 rather than n=0. EVEN BASIC doesn't do that. For a mathematical language, this is heresy. They are denying the value of zero. Something as simple as a Maclaurin or Fibonacci series becomes a constant battle of "if n=0 then..." exceptions. Or you offset everything. It's just pure annoyance.
5) doesn't have a good debugger
6) parallel-loop programming takes longer to "spool" the job than it does to just run the darn thing on a single CPU. Oh, and their standard multiprocessor license only covers 8 cores. I have machines with over 40 cores that will never see a matlab parfor statement.... which, I'm obviously ok with...
7) Stupid capital variables in documentation,
8) 1990s-erra save dialog boxes on unix platforms that don't even allow for "favorites". Every time I save or open, I start in the current directory and have to navigate folder-by-folder to where I want to go. I feel like this is something from my CDE days.
9) unix print and pdf export is horribly broken. These functions NEVER format anything correctly. Every time I am presented with cropped cut-off plots. The EPS export works fine, why not PDF and printing?
10) default pathdef depends on what directory you launch matlab from. Just another annoyance.

Anyway, rest in peace matlab, I have moved on.

This "natural typing position" thing has always bothered me.

I tend to shift over to HJKL while editing code, and then shift back to JKL; when writing an email... I think I'd be faster if I could stick with just one.

thoughts?

There is another aspect to this that many here are forgetting.

pico/nano have more stringent terminal support required for their fancy controls. Specifically, arrow keys. If you have ever had to jump down to the world of serial terminals, you know that such keys are not always mapped out properly the first time. I have been in this situation (recovering an SGI box on a serial line using an IBM dumb terminal), and it is indeed what prompted me to learn vi in the first place. All I need is an escape key. Navigation is handled with the standard alpha keys. So for an embedded device where there is likely not a traditional screen, and perhaps not always network support, having a good simple editor that doesn't require arrow keys has an advantage.

Yes, I know termcap files can be fixed to correct these things, but that's not always the quickest option.

I appreciate vim for the same reasons. It's easy to delete entire lines, and I can assign quick keys to short-cut common text (ie, typing class names over and over again).

However, don't forget that many other more-GUI-like editors support drag and drop text and simple clipboard action. You can work pretty fast if you take full advantage of those tools. One of my favorite editors (besides vim/gvim) is part of qt creator. In addition to processing my .vimrc and having a vim mode, it almost always auto-completes code as I am typing it. It has a nice class/member navigation tool, intelligent find and replace, and code refactoring. Yes, vim can do all this too, but this is about as good as it gets for a GUI tool, and it is often faster. Also works different muscles, so it's good for variety on your hands.

With the exception of some "write-once, read-only" backup schemes, this will fail at the $300/disk level.

Meanwhile, go google "1TB USB Flash" and see the $1200 USB flash drives. These will cost a lot less ($100 each in two years I bet) in a few years, just in time for the first of these already-failed optical disks. Plus you don't need anything special to use a USB flash drive...