Archive 4. December 2003

German School: Six, Sit Down

A fundamental overhaul of the school system would be the logical step. Better training opportunities for teachers also result in better-trained teachers – contrary to popular opinion, there are indeed motivated teachers out there (I even got to know a few during my school days). And ultimately, it is the teachers who educate our future – or destroy it.

On the other hand, one can hardly expect that in times when there are calls for schools and universities to be geared even more rigidly toward later use in the economy, that knowledge transfer itself can still be the central focus. Just look at what politicians are calling for at the moment when they present their wonderful education reforms. Shortening the total time in school, earlier enrollment – what is that supposed to achieve? Approaches to problems in the school system must start with teaching methods and personnel. Children want to learn. The older they get, the more motivation needs to come into play – why they should continue learning – after all, learning is not without effort, and no child will sustain it for 10-13 years without motivation. This also includes further education after school – study places and apprenticeships must be available so that kids can see perspectives on where their learning leads. Otherwise, even if the teacher wears a red foam nose ever so often, by middle school no one will take him seriously if he cannot point to a potential future. And this also requires their own concepts – merely parroting concepts from yesterday borrowed from other countries doesn't help either.

Where, for example, are the continuations of the alternative school systems that were examined? What about the promotion of specialized school forms that were supposed to help children with problems in school? Look at the austerity programs of the states; these areas are affected too. Instead of investing precisely here – after all, it is our future – cuts and cancellations are happening here as well. Instead of prospects, concepts include making higher school forms more expensive – as if money were a guarantee of competence.

The fiasco in both the school system and vocational training is a glaring deficiency in our society, one that is no longer willing to build its own future, but instead prefers to smash everything and sell itself out.

I found the original article at TAZ.

Microsoft's FAT charges

Great. Microsoft wants to exploit patents in the area of the clunky FAT file system. When will Microsoft take action against FAT implementations in open systems? The whole thing is absurd. File systems are standards for data exchange; charging licenses for them is completely absurd. Especially since the implementation of FAT is so primitive that even at the time of its invention, the actual inventive achievement couldn't have been particularly high...

At Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com) there's the original article.

rsync over the network vulnerable

Oh man, not a good week.

At heise online news there's the original article.

What The Copywright Law Really Says

If someone is interested in the drivel that Darl McBride is spouting, here's a link to an open letter from SCO. Absurd to the point of ridiculousness, the way he spins things together. In any case, the GPL in this case isn't about some derived higher rights, but about explicit licenses that the authors of software willfully define for their own works. I hardly believe that the US Constitution can be used to interpret an author's copyright in such a way that the author themselves can't decide on the license under which they release their work. That would be too absurd even by American standards, I think.

Quite apart from the fact that SCO itself explicitly used the GPL — they never said that the GPL was illegal and invalid. Because if it really were, under what right would SCO have been allowed to distribute Linux at all?

What's really shocking about this is that this edifice of lies is actually succeeding on the stock market and the SCO stock — which has absolutely no backing in any form in its core business or products — is being kept high. I'm hoping that the stock market will eventually realize what garbage this is and hopefully the stock value will plummet into the abyss before (or even better in the middle of) the proceedings. I'd like to see the faces of the lawyers who at the moment probably still have millions in their eyes, and then suddenly only see blanks.

At XMLMania.com - Google News Search: SCO I found the original article.