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Why the Research Paper is Flawed

For one of my classes this semester I have to write an argumentative research paper about any topic I want. As I have been writing it I have come to realize a huge flaw in the process of these kind of assignments. It seems like any time you are asked to write an argumentative research paper you are asked to choose a topic and a side before you do any research.

What is the problem with this? I think it teaches us a backwards way of forming opinions. We are asked to form an opinion and then do research to support our relatively uninformed opinion. This model of argumentative research is completely backwards, why should we form opinions before we throughly know a topic.

I think a better approach is first to ask students for a topic, then give them time to research. After they have gathered information on the topic they should then present a side of the argument to be on. We should not be taught how to spin arguments in one sides favor, but rather how to come to thoughtful conclusions after research is finished.

Update: An Epiphany

I have now been using Epiphany for a little over two weeks and I thought I would just post a few of my thoughts on the browser now. Just as I said I would, I have not used Firefox on my computers at all since I started, and I'm glad I haven't.

Using Epiphany has really opened my eyes, there are other excellent browsers out there besides Firefox. I think I have learned that simplicity is bliss!

Simplicity has to be my favorite feature of Epiphany. There are not many configuration options, and it is a good thing. I had to spend much less time tweaking the browser to my liking than with Firefox and all the basic extensions I wanted (such as ad-blocking) were already included and were extremely easy to setup.

Another great feature of Epiphany is its bookmarking system. In Firefox I rarely used bookmarks, as there is no real convenient way to access them, I would generally just type the URL I wanted in the address bar. In epiphany I still use the address bar all the time, except instead of typing a URL in a type in a word such as 'News'. This will show me all my bookmarks I tagged with the keyword 'News'. This tagging system makes bookmarks extremely quick to access, I bookmark everything now.

Overall I am extremely happy with Epiphany and I will continue using it for months to come. If you haven't tried the browser I would recommend downloading it.

An Epiphany

Firefox is just becoming more and more bloated, and I am starting to get sick of it. Don't get me wrong, its a great browser but I thought it might be time to try something else out. Today I decided I would try going without it for one month. To replace it I will be using Epiphany, the official browser of the GNOME project.

There are several things besides the bloat that appeal to me about Epiphany. It seems to have a much more simple interface with pretty much no clutter. It also has a very easy to use privacy interface, allowing you to manage your cookies and stored passwords.

One of the more impressive features to me is Epiphany's topic-based bookmarking engine, a feature you won't see until Firefox 3.0. It allows you to put a bookmark into several different topics instead of being put into folders. Epiphany also has smart bookmarks that allow you to add one or more arguments to a bookmark for doing things such as search queries. I haven't really played with smart bookmarks yet however.

Epiphany also seems to have a more powerful extension system where extensions are written in C and Python instead of a mash-up of XUL and javascript. Since C and Python are my two favorite languages to code in I will definitely being playing around with it.

So for the next month I will not be using firefox as my browser of choice, though some applications I use, such as Miro depend upon firefox so I cannot remove firefox from my system. So far Epiphany has seemed to be an excellent browser. I will post more on my experiences as I use the browser more.

Obtaining Desktop Freedom

In my never ending quest towards a computer systems run by completely free software I decided I needed somewhat of a fresh start with hardware chosen specifically because of its support for open drivers. In today's day and age this was much easier to do than I anticipated.

First, it was important to see just what hardware I had in my computer that was really hindering this goal. The main things I came up with was my graphics card driver, and to a certain extent, my 'hardware raid' support (see previous post).

My graphics card, being an ATI x1300, was the biggest problem. Sure, I could continue using the VESA driver or try out the new GPL'd avivio (not written by ATI) but both those answers seemed less than desirable. Even those both of those solutions would work it meant limiting the capabilities of my hardware through free drivers.

I had to come up with a solution that fulfilled two simple requirements: a) The driver must be free-software b) the free driver should not limit the capabilities of the hardware. The obvious solution was the Intel integrated graphics. The drivers for Intel graphics cards are licensed under the GPL and are developed by Intel. All of their cards support 3D acceleration (OpenGL, AIGLX) and are known to work well.

Now that I figured out the main component I started to seek out hardware with Intel's integrated graphics. I came up with the Intel DG33FB motherboard. This comes with the G33 onboard graphics and onboard audio, along with 4 SATA connector (no 'hardware raid'), 1 16x PCIE, 4 1x PCIE, and 2 PCI ports. It also has built in firewire and gigabit ethernet (Intel e1000 driver). To me this board just shoots 'Free software support'. To go in my new board I went with the Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600, one of Intel's latest quad core processors and 4GB of DDR2 memory. This would be one rip-roaring free software desktop.

I think this just proves the point, it isn't hard to make a system that is not only cutting edge but also free of proprietary software. Just because you want to be free doesn't mean you have to limit your hardware to do so!

Linux Software RAID vs. NVRAID

So tonight I was setting up a new database server for my job. The server needed RAID1 to ensure that the system was somewhat fault-tolerant so I decided it would be a good job for one of my old motherboards as it has nvraid. I really don't know why I got a motherboard with RAID in the first place, I never used RAID on a desktop before and hadn't ever really planned on it. (Though my new board doesn't have RAID and I felt like i was missing a good feature).

After piecing together the system I enabled RAID in the BIOS and setup a RAID1 with two 80GB disks. I popped in my Debian Etch net install CD and began the setup, all seemed to be going well. Then when it came time to partition the disks I hit a wall, I was seeing two 80GB disks, not one. Doing a few quick searches resulted no obvious solutions so I decided to dig a bit further into the topic.

What I learned was interesting. The RAID that is on most desktop/workstation motherboards are not at all hardware RAID, they are simply software RAID that allows you to set things up in the BIOS. I kind of already knew that but it never really hit me until I read about the software raid linux provides.

The linux software RAID allows you to setup RAID on a partition level, not just a disk level like NVRAID does. This got me pretty excited as it meant I could save two gigabytes or so of space by not having the SWAP partition in a RAID1.

On the partition level I was able to make two 1GB partitions in a RAID0 to act as the swap. Not only is this saving space, RAID0 is also faster than RAID1 or a single disk at reading and writing. The software raid built into linux really lets you customize how your drives are setup and allows for things such as online spares, drives that can be used in case another fails. To my knowledge, the NVRAID driver does not have this functionality.

The only real use I could see for NVRAID would be using a RAID in a dual-boot scenario, where you need your RAID to be available to both operating systems. There are probably other solutions to dealing with that problem however.

Overall it left me with the feeling that RAID controllers on desktop/workstation motherboards were utterly pointless and really just a way to sell the same product at two different price points. Maybe there is an extra chip soldered on somewhere to store the ROM code for NVRAID but all in all a RAID and non-RAID motherboard are exactly the same.

Desktop/Workstation RAID controllers are more of just a non-free binary blob of code you pay an extra amount of money for rather than an actual hardware improvement . My recommendation would be to stay away from them, this is just proprietary software hidden in silicon form, its sold as extra hardware, but in reality its just extra software. This really just gives me a new sense of importance for projects such as LinuxBIOS, our closed BIOS software can actually harm us in this case. After learning about how these RAID controllers really work, I am glad my new motherboard doesn't have one.


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