Excellence is very alive and well. Even she said it, "become the best person you can possibly be". I think most people especially of the younger crowd want to seek out ways to learn more and better themselves. Learn more, improve your skills and abilities, and be the best you can be.

The difference on "profit motivation" is money for money's sake is perhaps beginning to disappear from the younger generation. It is more widely recognized that wealth alone does not make everything great, for: what purpose is money if you never get to enjoy it? I for one (and many of my peers would agree) would prefer a smaller check (that is enough to pay bills and save for retirement, of course) and enjoy my hobbies and life with wife and family (or even spend some of that excess time learning more things for the job! always interesting things to learn), than to take a well-paying job that requires 60-80 hrs of work per week with few vacation days. If I am always at work and stressed, what good is the money?

I hope society settles on a nice work-life balance very soon. I personally believe we are started on that path, and the conversation is beginning to be had (as evidenced by this thread).

The overwhelming attitude of technical jobs I have interviewed for lately has been "We expect you to work overtime because we do not want to hire too many people even though we are short-staffed [with a vague implication of we need to increase our profits and satisfy shareholders]". I still cannot understand why the insistence on one person for 60 hrs per week when we could have two working 30 hrs per week. Happier more productive employees and we double the number of available jobs overnight (I know, many people would require some technical training but I'm sure that could be fixed quickly as well with sound educational policies, or maybe simply extra tax breaks for internships).

I misunderstood then. Thanks for the clarification. Well let's hope they keep up the used market into the future, not just for a year or whatever.

My suspicion is that yes it will play used games. Because old console games (developed before this year, let's say) had no way of being identified, you can't tell if the game is used or not. So sure, they will allow that so your old library of games still works. Why give themselves bad press when there's no resolution to it.

But newly developed games? They will come with activation codes that prevent resale. So PS3 used games, ok, but PS4 exclusives will not allow it going into the future.

The summary forgot to include Cinnamon (unless it was removed after the beta? I am in the process of running an upgrade!). I have been pleasantly surprised with Cinnamon. In general seems a nice release, the main gripe was the new installer. Does not seem to allow as much choice in terms of packages to install; seems to be a big list of presets without much customization until after it is already installed. It is a pretty though.

Just throwing in my 2 cents of agreement. I work at a tech school that has essentially laid off nearly all of their full time faculty. This means the adjuncts (i.e., me) have to pick up the slack, and I can't very well say no because (1) they will just find someone else if I do not, and (2) they will consider me "not a team player" and give me less of a workload in the future.

I am doing essentially the same amount of work as a full time faculty because of the course load I have, but do not get any benefits and get paid probably around half as much. I went into teaching because I love to do so, I love helping students learn more and guiding them with my experience and knowledge. But I just can't do it anymore, and I can't keep up anymore. The workload is insane, and is requiring more and more night and weekend classes (in addition to going in during the day for office hours, meetings, professional development, and squeezing in grading and writing recommendation letters); it is especially insane when the pay off is barely keeping up on bills. And I do not have a fancy life by any means. I pretty much just pay bills to live (home, food, health), my one "luxury" is this computer and internet, which isn't even so much of a luxury because my students and bosses expect me to reply and get back to them at pretty much any time of day. I actually had the dean contact me once a while back because a student had gone to him that I did not respond to my email within the 12 hours that he sent me one. The dean was understanding, but even if not a strict requirement, the student sure are demanding and annoying and manage to interrupt your life as much as possible. Which I would not mind if my schedule were less hectic.

Because I am adjunct, I am not guaranteed any particular course load so every semester is a gamble of whether I can make enough to pay my bills (except this past semester, where I got overloaded to make up for all the full-timers that are gone). And I get assigned the classes (last-minute, I might add) that the full-timers don't want, meaning I very often teach a completely different course load each semester, meaning I have to spend much of my "break" preparing for a new class I haven't taught before. This means making assignments and exams, reading, testing out labs, and everything else that makes the course go smoothly. I am up late nearly every night teaching or grading, up early for meetings, and can't even enjoy my weekends because a good chunk of Saturday is gone from teaching and grading the weekend class. Everything is closed on the one day a week that I have a slight amount of free time -- Sunday. So I can't do anything then with family. I miss out on everything.

I love teaching. I love helping students and sharing knowledge. But I refuse to do this any more. My resume is out circulating to get myself back into industry, because teaching is not working out near like I hoped. I feel terrible leaving because I really love teaching, but the environment is toxic. I feel bad for future instructors that will inherit this crappy work load, and feel bad for the future students that are getting sub-par educational experience from overworked, exhausted instructors (not to mention crappy falling-apart lab equipment because the school can't pay for that either).

I refuse to be part of this system any longer, and I hope we all start standing up against it. Professors and instructors need a union. I've heard of a few attempts around here to unionize, but it hasn't materialized yet. Maybe it is coming.

Absolutely. KDE has made many leaps in the past few releases. I fully recommend anyone that has been sitting out for the past couple years to give it a try again.

Unfortunately, the release of 4.0 was a bit botched (rushed out to the public eye in a few distributions) before it was ready for prime time, but the KDE developers laid very good foundations that have been paying off greatly. It looks polished, runs quickly, and I think much of the KDE software is snappier and more useful than its GNOME equivalents.

We have lost a few Mars missions over the years, haven't we? Is this rover in a new place where we can be fairly sure a previous mission didn't smash into the ground and leave debris behind in? (Although does Mars have nasty sandstorms? Perhaps wind could blow small chunks around anyway. I would want to see confirmation of plastic in several areas and from samples rather deep in the ground before I would consider it good proof. I guess the NASA guys would think this thru too though, perhaps it is a hoax).

What I find more fascinating in TFA is that Firefox has added simple support for HTML5 Sandboxes. You can apparently specify whether the data inside the IFRAME is allowed to access outside domains, etc. (if I am reading it correctly; I am not actively involved in web design at the moment and so am a bit behind the curve; does anyone know how good this sandbox function is compared to other software/browsers?).

I could be wrong, but that phrase implies to me that you have not actually used it yet.

Granted, my experience so far is with an early release of Server 2012 that I added the Desktop Experience to. YMMV and all that. Maybe it does not include quite all of the features of Win8 desktop edition and so is unfair. Perhaps someone can enlighten me.

So far, the default theme is very simple. It is not bling or flashy. Yes, I switched it to the default one after I installed Desktop Experience and so I assume it is more or less what Win 8 will have. It is functional and not graphics heavy. I actually kind of like it because things don't glow at me or become randomly transparent and shit all the time.

The desktop behaves exactly as the desktop for Windows 7. If you're ok with 7, then you have no problem here. Taskbar is same way, sys tray is same way, can still put icons on the desktop. The file system layout is the same. The control panel looks the same. The only difference seems to be that the file manager is now ribbonized, which I don't even mind because I rarely used the file menus in the manager anyway. Not much it can do that a right click menu or keyboard shortcut can't. Plus the ribbon offers to do lots of new things. I was pleasantly surprised that when you click on an ISO file, the ribbon changes to show an icon to mount it. It seems to stay out of your way when doing regular tasks but reflect new features of Windows to let you know what it is capable of, so I do not think this is an issue.

As for Metro, all it seems to have done is replaced the start menu with a start screen. The screen is basically just desktop icons as tiles. I really don't see any fuss. It's like they made the start menu full-screen instead of a popup window. That's really about it, just a second desktop, an extra icons screen. Even the Windows key still opens it. I tap the Windows keyboard key, click the icon, and I have what I need.

My point here is that it is WAY less scary and stupid than I was lead to believe by casually reading slashdot a few months ago. From readers on here, repeating how much it was going to be a disaster and is so phone-UI oriented, I was worried with what I would find when I test-drove it. After having it installed on a computer to test out the new server features, and using it basically as a desktop for a few weeks now to test out other new features, I can say it basically is the same as Windows 7, except a little more speed optimized, less flashy (but still with the nice UI improvements like Snap), and with a full screen start menu. That's really it. Nothing overwhelmingly new, but it is not a disaster either. Just steady progress with updates to the core system, .NET, and it certainly seems rock solid so far. This is coming from someone that loves a KDE desktop at home; I have no intention of giving up Linux at home! But I need Windows for work, like to stay on top of new software/technology, and my experience is that Windows 8 does not seem bad at all, and in fact is a small improvement over Windows 7. Which MS probably recognizes, and that's why they're giving Windows 8 upgrades for much cheaper than in the past.

I do not know why so many refer to government as if it is this independent god-like entity running around and maniacally laughing as it forces people to do things against their will.

The government *is* the parents. I went to public high school, and went to a district that mandated school uniforms. This wasn't big government forcing it on me; it was my parents' contemporaries. I remember my parents asking at meetings why we needed uniforms (took out individuality, and was expensive!), but many other parents -- not the government -- responded they liked how clean everyone looked, and it kept gang paraphenalia out of schools. Hell, I knew *students* that claimed to enjoy having uniforms because they did not like having to think about what to wear every day.

My point is, do not blame government -- blame the parents. The parents are the ones pushing the standards, and government officials are trying their best (often times anyway) to appease what they think is the majority opinion. My school district holds votes on certain school policies, and it was what parents wanted.

If you are upset about rejecting authority, you should ask why so many parents are so authoritarian toward their own and other children. It is apparently what they want. Personally, I feel this is a phase because of fear of the future in the current economic and foreign policy climate. The youth are not near as accepting as you think. Growing up in this era has given them much different attitudes than their authoritarian parents. They are biding their time until they know for sure how to go about changing it. I would be a little more optimistic.

While I agree with his idea that hardware should be more open, perhaps it can be turned around as a teachable moment; for example (a little fudged since I am in a rush and cannot RTFA, but hopefully the point gets across):

Teacher: ... ok and let's now try to see how the video works, pull up the software code.

Student: OK! .... Hmm, I can't. What am I doing wrong?

Teacher: Nothing, they just won't allow us to see it and use it, or know what it is doing. This is not a good philosophy to have for education, science, or any learning in general. Everything must be out in the open if we are to take it seriously and build on it with new research or ideas.

The Daily Show the other night had a funny little piece where they talked to republicans and democrats at the national conventions to ask them how to overcome gridlock. It results in an orgy of insults directed at the other party, from both sides, that amused me pretty well.

I know it is a comedy show and perhaps can't be taken too seriously, but having family spread out between both parties, I can say it was fairly accurate in my experience. Both sides want to say that the world would be a magical fairy land if only the other side wasn't made up of complete jackasses that are only out to fuck up the plans of the other party.

In sum: yes, Tea Party has been made fun of it. But how did the Tea Party start? There's a constant bashing of Obama as a socialist and democrats as wanting to propogate a lazy welfare state. O-bum-a, Commrade Obama, I've heard it all. Name calling is on both sides, and is the main problem with our gridlock. There are groups in each party that are so desperately out to smear the other side that we never get a real debate. Personally, I do not agree with much of what the republican platform says this time around, but there is an important difference between not agreeing and going out of my way to insult people of the other party. I am sure that the majority of common people in each party (many politicians excluded) absolutely mean well for the country, and believe their platform really will be best. No secret agenda to give money to lazy welfare queens, or give tax breaks to rich people. The majority of voters aren't thinking that; they are thinking, what plan seems best to get the country going again?

When the everyday people recognize this, that just because the other approximately half of the country doesn't vote the same as you DOES NOT mean they are unpatriotic jackasses out to ruin the country, then perhaps we can get somewhere. But this is going to have to be a team effort from both parties. And I am sad to say that the current older generations of the country seem to prefer the gridlock and blame, or at least are stuck in this idea that "that's the way it is". I hope this will change with the younger generations as they start taking over congressional seats.

Many people are like this, it doesn't mean teachers are useless. A good teacher has the knowledge and experience to help guide your self-study. A good teacher will recommend books or subjects or projects to enhance your learning. Reading is great and all, but sometimes you kind of flail in the dark on your own because you don't know what is important to your topic, and what isn't. You don't as a novice know what has already been done, and what is still unknown. A good teacher is there to bounce ideas off of and get some guidance on how to effectively pursue your interest.

Try to ask questions. I know in my classes I am always open to good questions, and we will routine stop my "lecture plan" and pursue the answer to a question of interest from a student. Participation doesn't need to be boring.

I was not aware Khan had college-level materials, last I checked thought I only saw high school. Thanks for the tip. MIT OCW is nice but rather complete; often cannot find textbook or notes, and cannot put together much of a curriculum from what they have (yet, anyway).

I agree, families need to be fed so doing free would be difficult in some cases, but I am certainly an advocate for cheap textbooks without all the overhead of a publishing company, and their insistence on new editions every year just to keep inflated prices. Electronics isn't exactly my field, but I appreciate the DIY info. I will take a look at it and see what could be done.

Is your press able to contact universities to get them to switch? As I said, one of my biggest concerns is convincing people to switch texts.