Kebiasaan Optimis Dalam Belajar

Hampir semua kenakalan remaja terjadi karena mereka merasa kurang diperhatikan dan disayangi oleh orang tua mereka. (Syahril Syam)

Apa yang menyebabkan kebanyakan siswa tidak menyukai belajar? Atau tidak menyukai mata pelajaran tertentu, bahkan semua mata pelajaran? Jika pertanyaan ini kita tanyakan kembali pada orang-orang tua, sewaktu mereka masih belajar dulu, apakah masih pantas? Dengan kata lain, kebanyakan orang-orang tua pun tidak menyukai belajar, bukan hanya semasa sekolah dulu, mungkin masih sampai sekarang.

Lantas, apa yang menjadi penyebabnya? Peter Kline mengemukakan sebuah pernyataan menarik: Belajar Akan Efektif Jika Dilakukan Dalam Suasana Menyenangkan. Ini berarti, kegiatan belajar-mengajar akan membosankan dan tidak menarik, kalau tidak tercipta suasana yang menyenangkan. Dari sini dapat kita telusuri lagi dengan sebuah pertanyaan: Kenapa suasana belajar tersebut tidak menyenangkan? Atau kenapa sebuah mata pelajaran bahkan semua itu tidak menarik dan tidak menyenangkan? Buckminster Fuller memberikan jawabannya. Kata beliau, “Setiap anak terlahir jenius, tetapi kita memupuskan kejeniusan mereka dalam enam bulan pertama.” Lho, kok bisa demikian? Bukankah setiap orang tua menginginkan anaknya itu jenius. Lantas apa sebabnya?
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(De)sain Masa Depan

Desain suatu produk atau layanan adalah penentu yang memengaruhi ragam dan tingkatan kesejahteraan masyarakat di masa depan melalui berbagai cara. Desain berpengaruh dan beredar secara kompetitif, seolah “senjata” yang melekat pada strategi bisnis. Desain menjadi juga semacam jembatan antara perusahaan dan konsumen dalam format interaksi interpersonal seperti: pertemanan, kepercayaan, keterandalan, bahkan pengakuan.

Di sisi lain, kepekaan menangkap efektivitas sebuah desain sangat bergantung pada tingkat kecerdasan interpersonal seseorang, salah satu komponen kecerdasan yang memampukan sang penanggap mempersepsi tingkat kritikalitas suatu kebutuhan, keinginan, gelagat, dan hasrat orang lain dalam rentang waktu tertentu. Makin tak pasti dan makin penting pemenuhan suatu kebutuhan, makin kritis kebutuhan, dan makin tinggi bobot desain yang berkenaan dengan pemenuhan kebutuhan itu.

Jadi, desain yang futuristik adalah yang mampu menjawab kebutuhan kritis: kebutuhan yang sangat penting sekaligus sangat tak pasti sebagaimana saya sentilkan melalui cerita berikut.

Bubur Telanjur Kala mengulang membaca buku “Catatan Seorang Demonstran”, yang tak lain adalah catatan harian mendiang Soe Hok Gie, adik Arief Budiman; saya teringat kejadian sekitar 26 tahun silam. Salah seorang sobat saya, yang juga pendaki gunung seperti Soe Hok Gie, meninggal secara misterius di saat mendaki gunung Sumbing, Jawa Tengah.

Seingat saya, ia berangkat mendaki gunung
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Rintihan Lidah

Semua orang memilikiku. Manusia dan hewanpun memilikinya. Bahkan, tanamanpun sama. Hanya saja berbeda nama. Ada dua cara untuk menggunakanku. Cara pertama, aku selalu di pakai orang untuk mengecap sesuatu. Dan itu, itu membuatku sangat bahagia untuk menjadi benda sepertiku. Walau terkadang manusia mengecap sesuatu yang tak suka bagiku atau tak halal, tapi aku tak terlalu kecewa. Namun, cara keduaku, aku sangat banyak merasa kecewa. Aku dimiliki oleh seorang wanita yang mungkin, bukan seperti keinginanku. Dia selalu menggunakanku untuk membicarakan sesuatu yang buruk. Mungkin, jika berhubungan dengan pembicaraan, kalian sudah tahu siapa sebenarnya aku? Ya, aku adalah lidah. Aku termasuk ke dalam panca indera. Setiap hari, aku selalu diperintahkan majikanku untuk mengucapkan kata. Walaupun kadang aku tak mau mengucapkannya, tapi, semuanya terucap seketika.

Aku memang tak bisa menolak apa yang majikanku ucapkan. Dia selalu tak bisa mengendalikan aku dengan benar. Padahal, Tuhan menciptakanku agar manusia bertasbih kepada-Nya, dan memuji-Nya. Juga untuk membicarakan hal yang baik. Namun, aku tak tahu mengapa, manusia memang sombong. Dia tak peduli apa dampak yang akan terjadi jika mereka berucap seperti itu. Mereka sekarang
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10 Kekuatan Manusia

“He who stops being better stops being good. – Siapa yang tidak menjadi lebih baik berarti ia berhenti menjadi baik.” Oliver Cromwell, Politikus Inggris (1599-1658) Tak cukup hanya menjadi baik, karena kita harus berusaha untuk selalu lebih baik dari sebelumnya. Terus belajar dan segera menjalankan langkah-langkah perbaikan adalah cara untuk selalu lebih baik. Belajar tak harus selalu dari bangku sekolah elit atau buku-buku mahal, melainkan belajar dari kehidupan sehari-hari, pengalaman diri sendiri maupun orang lain, dan lain sebagainya.

Saya senang belajar dari buku, entah buku kuno ataupun terbitan baru, karena dari sanalah saya memetik banyak pelajaran hidup berharga. Salah satu falsafah hidup yang memperluas wawasan hidup saya adalah catatan surat-surat, konon ditulis oleh Zhuge Liang (181-234) untuk anaknya. Zhuge Liang adalah seorang pakar perang dan kemiliteran ternama pada masa San Guo (Sam Kok) di jaman Tiongkok Purba.

Zhuge Liang alias Kong Ming gemar membaca, dan menguasai bermacam ilmu pengetahuan diantaranya ilmu geologi, sejarah, sampai strategi perang. Di usia 27 tahun ia diangkat Raja Shu (Liu Bei) sebagai penasehat kerajaan. Selama menjadi penasehat, Zhuge Liang pernah menulis sebuah surat kepada anaknya. Isi surat yang ditulis 1.800 tahun yang lalu itu sarat dengan dengan kebijakan yang tak lekang oleh waktu dan peruba
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Bolehkah Aku Membenci Ayah?

Orangtua merupakan tumpuan bagi setiap anak, memiliki orangtua yang lengkap adalah keinginan setiap anak di muka bumi ini, tak terkecuali dengan ku. Namun, takdir berkata lain bagiku. Lah Peristiwa 16 tahun yang silam telah merubah kehidupan menjadi sosok anak yang tumbuh tanpa peranan seorang Ayah. Memang semua terbayang sangatlah berat namun kini telah ku lalui semua hingga aku tumbuh menjadi seorang remaja yang kuat dan tegar dalam menghadapi persoalan hidup. Tanpa kehadiran sosok ayah yang mendampingi ku tentu ada sosok lain yang menggantikannya tidak lain dan tidak bukan adalah ibu. Ibu bagi ku adalah sosok luar biasa yang memiliki peran ganda oleh keadaan, ia menjadi sosok ibu yang penuh kasih sayang dalam merawat anaknya hingga menjadi sosok perkasa mencari nafkah untuk membiayai kehidupan kedua anaknya.

Mengingat kembali memori 16 tahun yang lalu saat kisah getir itu terjadi pada diriku dan keluargaku sudah tentu berdampak pada psikologis ku. Sering terlintas di bayang ku saat pertengkaran itu, hal ini sering membuat ku
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How Start Bitcoins

A Beginner's Guide to Mining for Bitcoins

Bitcoins are a new "alternative" digital currency used all over the world to pay for all kinds of goods and services. Bitcoin ownership is not tracked not be a single entity, like a bank or a stock exchange, but by a peer-to-peer network kept up by ordinary people all over the world. By loaning your computer's unused processing power to this network, you can earn bitcoins on the side in a process called "mining." This guide will teach you how to get started.

Please note that this guide is oriented mainly towards Windows users. Guides for Linux and Mac OS users are forthcoming.

1) Figure out whether you have an integrated or dedicated GPU.

The bitcoins you can earn with your computer's time depend on the quality of your GPU. GPUs - graphics or video cards - are much more efficient at processing the calculations required by the Bitcoin network than are CPUs, which are what most people think of when they hear the word "processor." The quality of your GPU determines how much you can earn through bitcoin mining.

Unless you have a dedicated gaming computer, your computer unfortunately probably has what's called an "integrated GPU," meaning that your GPU is part of your computer's motherboard. Integrated GPUs are cheaper and less effective than "dedicated" GPUs, which are separate pieces of hardware.

To find out what GPU you have, do this:

In any version of Windows, open the "Run" dialog and type "dxdiag". Click on the "Display" tab. Your GPU will be described in the "Device" box in the upper left-hand corner of the screen.

 

If you see something like this, with the phrase "Intel Chipset Family," you have an integrated GPU, and mining for bitcoins probably isn't a good use of your and your computer's time. While it's possible to mine Bitcoins using just a CPU, you would in most cases be earning the equivalent of a few cents a week. Most people feel that it's not worth it, especially when you take into account the wear and tear on your computer and the cost of electricity.

If you still want to try it out, keep reading.

2) Look up your GPU's efficiency.

In terms of bitcoin mining, not all GPUs are created equal. Even if you have a dedicated GPU, it may not be the right kind to make mining profitable for you.

Your GPU's mining power is measured in megahashes-per-second (Mhash/s), hashes being the "problem" that your GPU is solving for the network. The faster your GPU can work, the more you'll earn by mining.

However, buying a more expensive GPU doesn't necessarily mean you'll be mining faster - sometimes a $100 GPU can be more effective than a $200 one. It can be hard to tell what sort of performance you're going to get out of your card. Fortunately, the bitcoin mining community has come together to make an extremely useful Wiki, and its mining hardware comparison page details the efficiency of all kinds of GPUs.

Here's an example of a laptop computer with an inexpensive dedicated GPU:

This computer's graphics card is an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260M. Now that we know the model name and number, we can look up the card's efficiency.

First, we scroll down to the NVIDIA table.

 

As you can see, the first column is the model of the GPU, and the second is its efficiency. Let's scroll down to find the GTX260M.

Now we know the card's efficiency. But what does it mean?

3) Determining how much you'll actually be earning.

So, the user who tested it got 22.5 hashes per second. Is that good or bad? Fortunately, there's a calculator application to tell you that here. In the hash rate field, type in 22.5. The exchange rate field is the exchange rate of bitcoins to American dollars, and can be found in the upper-right-hand corner of this page.

At 22.5 hashes per second, if you left your miner running for a week, you'd earn slightly less than a dollar. So, that's not very good.

The wiki also has a table of inexpensive GPUs and their rates. Note that these GPUs are ATI Radeons.

So the 5830 gets 302 megashes per second, and the 5850 gets 346.16. What does that work out to in money?

At 302 Mhash/s:

At 346.16 Mhash/s:

So, the 5830 would earn a little more than $12 working for a week straight, and a 5850 a little less than $14. That's not too bad for the cost - given that they're both averaging around $140-$160 on eBay, they ought to be paid off within three months. And you might get a better Skyrim experience. (I could just use the Skyrim reference to date these values, but for the record, these are the prices as of mid-August, 2012.)

4) Before you go out and buy anything, though...

Keep this in mind: Your GPU's earning power will probably go down over time.

You see that box at the top of the mining calculator labelled "Difficulty Factor"?

The difficulty factor determines, basically, how many hashes you have to solve to get a payout. The difficulty rises as bitcoin useage rises - which is what's currently happening - and falls as bitcoin useage falls - which, if it falls hard enough to cause a decrease, will probably mean that bitcoin value is dropping hard, too.

The article I linked to gives a more detailed analysis of why this happens, but what you need to know is this: Your Mhashes/s rate will probably be worth less over time. Blockexplorer.com gives us an estimate that the next rise in difficulty will bring it up from 2190865.9701029 to 2353124.03142649. How does this make a difference in our numbers? Let's run the 5850 again:

 

 

The weekly payout has now dropped by about a dollar USD, which is about a 7% change. That's a lot. And this is only the next rise in difficulty; there'll probably be another one after that. Now, the value of the bitcoin itself may well go up as more people use it, meaning that you break even or better. But do keep in mind, before you put in an order for a new GPU or computer, that what you're doing here is making a risky investment. If all you're interested in is money, buying a share of SPY on ScottTrade might be a better deal.

However, if you're ready to go ahead:

5) Get a bitcoin wallet.

A bitcoin wallet is basically a randomly-generated address that leads to a public list of bitcoin transactions. Any payment you make or receive at your address is a matter of public record - but because there's no personal information associated with it, no one can see exactly who you are, and who you've been making transactions with. You can have as many addresses as you want, and you can make a new one any time. For example, here's an address I just set up on Instawallet:

1542hU1P3uf4oMV2bZc1yXcVHevoMtSPz6

(You should send some money to it!) To look up transactions an address has engaged in, go to Blockchain.info and paste it into the search box.

To access and use the money, you need to use some sort of client. There are a lot of different wallet clients out there, but I'm going to describe two of the most popular methods:

a) Go to Instawallet.org.

Annnd you have a wallet! Instawallet will automatically generate a random wallet for you and send you to the page for it. You just need to bookmark the page and make sure not to lose the URL. The address you'll use to collect money while mining will be labelled "Bitcoin address for receiving payments into this wallet."

Instawallet is not the most secure way to store your bitcoins. For more security, you should,

b) Download a Bitcoin client.

I listed Instawallet first simply because it's the easiest thing to do. If you want a bit more control over your wallet, you can host it on your own computer using a bitcoin client. Just install a client, wait for it to finishing syncing up, and start using the wallet it creates for you.

There's a list of clients here. I personally prefer Multibit - it's more stable than Electrum and faster than Bitcoin-Qt or Armory.

Now that you have a bitcoin wallet, it's time to start mining.

6) Sign up for a mining pool.

To go a bit deeper into how mining works: When your GPU is working on hashes, what it's actually doing is finding part of a larger unit called a block. When a block is completed, the party who completed it gets 50 bitcoins. To simplify a lot, this means that if 99 people work on one block, then the 100th is the one to complete it, the 100th gets the 50 bitcoins and the first 99 get nothing.

Mining pools are basically groups of people who have agreed to work together and split the 50 bitcoins among themselves by hashes solved. The pool administrator generally keeps back a certain percentage of what the pool earns for maintenance costs and to have a balance to pay out. Most pools pay out whenever someone works their way up to a certain amount of bitcoins, rather than paying out whenever the pool solves a block.

There are a lot of pools to choose from, but you're probably best of starting with a large, stable one. You can spot these pools easily by going to Blockchain.info and looking at the most recent named payors; in general, about half of them will be mining pools. As of the time at which I'm typing this, the mining pools Mt.Red, Bitclockers, BTC Guild, EclipseMC, and Slush are visible on the front page. All of these are large and fairly stable mining pools.

You'll need to sign up for all of these pools on their homepages. They'll provide you with the information you need to input into a miner to get started.

7) Make sure your GPU has the latest drivers.

Your GPU will need drivers with OpenCL support in order to do the processing required for mining. Most recent GPU drivers support OpenCL. For an NVIDIA GPU on a Windows PC, you can download the most recent drivers here, by searching for your specific GPU. For an AMD CPU, go here.

Before installing a new video driver, you should always create a Windows System Restore point; some computers use specialized versions of their GPU's drivers created by the PC manufacturer. If your computer can't use the official NVIDIA or AMD drivers, you want to be able to revert back to the manufacturer ones.

8) Download and configure a miner.

There are a number of miners out there, but for a beginner using Windows, I recommend GUIMiner. It comes preconfigured for many popular pools, including most of the ones I listed above. Download it, extract it to any directory, and open guiminer.exe.

You'll need select the pool that you signed up for from the drop-down box, then type in your miner username and password. Note that your the username and password it wants aren't the ones you use to log in to the pool's website. You'll need to set up a "worker" which has its own username and password on the pool's website; that's what you need to type into the blanks.

When you have your information entered, click "Start mining" at the bottom of the window. If you entered everything correctly, in a moment your mining speed should appear in the lower right-hand corner.

9) Congratulations, you're mining!

Or, un-congratulations, if that's the number you're getting.

If your number is pretty close to the number we looked up in the wiki in step 2, everything is working right. If it's much lower, though, then something may be configured wrong. Try searching the BitcoinTalk boards for information.

You can withdraw bitcoins into most currencies at exchanges like Mt.Gox, or spend them in various places online.