It is taken for granted in this industry (and many others) that more experience == good. There has been some recent research in this area, specifically in engineering management, and the management of innovation, that suggests that when working in innovative, rapidly evolving areas, trying to come up with novel solutions and build novel systems, experience can be/detrimental/ as it acts as a ball and chain to the way things used to be done, and hampers an innovative mindset that tries to figure out a better way to do things.
See, for example, "Innovators' Insights - Which Schools of Experience Should Your Executives Attend?". Anthony, S. D., & Christensen, C.M. Nov 2004. Harvard Management Update. Harvard Business Publishing
Describe the work you are hiring the person for, and ask them why their experience would be an asset and not a detriment to the work you are doing. Ask them to explain their thoughts about learning new skills, using new methodologies, vs doing what they have always done for the past x years over again.
It is my firm opinion that an ability to grow and learn and evolve is the single most useful skill for any employee.
And if you're suggesting it's easy, bear in mind my current draft is pushing 150 pages. This is a properly controlled empirical study, vetted by the university's ethics committee. There's nothing pedestrian about it.
If you're curious, you can read more about the program at the program's webpage.
Somewhat, but with more of a focus on the consumer marketing approach. Think customer preference between Pepsi and Coke. Less technical focus. Less objective.
This approach recognizes that often the decisions of consumers are not based on logic, or on the best features, performance, price, etc. There are other factors that matter to them, that they rationalize in their heads that have a real world impact. I'm trying to quantify these factors for this specific case. The results should be the best estimation of real-world barriers between the two. Most current assessments simply compare the technical features, which, while useful for some classes of users, doesn't speak to a larger class of users who are more affected by other factors.
when it comes to a choice between almost identical software (e.g. Microsoft Office and OpenOffice), price is the determining factor.
Actually, I'm currently doing my Master's thesis on this exact topic, namely the switching barriers between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org. I'll post a summary of the full empirically assessed results to Slashdot when the study is complete. Currently, however, it looks like that Apathy is a much stronger factor than price. In fact, the author of the article hints at this:
In the past, it's always been included on my computers which is fine
Another important factor which I have hypothesized (and the literature suggests is accurate) trumps price is user inconvenience. Most users will pay to avoid hassle of any sorts. Further, most users will pay to avoid PERCEIVED inconvenience, even if, in reality, there would be no inconvenience. The FEAR of inconvenience is enough to make them continue to pay.
If you would like more details about my empirical research on this subject, feel free to contact me. A paper on the subject will be published by the Open Source Business Resource in the spring.
"NVidia is currently in the midst of a $200M recall of bad GPUs"
Last I checked, they reserved $200M on their financial sheets in case they needed to deal with the chips. I've heard nothing about an official recall? Only thing I can find is a lot of angry resellers who are demanding a recall.
You may want to escalate the matter to a different law enforcement agency, such as the FBI. They should be more responsive to this sort of thing, especially if you describe it as data theft, rather than property theft, as surely your company's computers that were stolen were loaded with company data.
If you live in a small county with elected/appointed law enforcement agents, perhaps you should raise this issue the next time they're up for re-election. If you live in a larger city, perhaps you should contact your city councilor about the issue and request that your city's police force be modernized for the 21st century.
You should avoid doing anything yourself, as you can land yourself in legal trouble. If you insist on doing something yourself, get legal advice first to ensure you aren't going to cause more trouble for yourself in the process.
No matter what side of this issue you are on, the dissenting opinions are worth a careful read. They highlight and document in detail the errors made in the Majority decision, the most blatant of which being a complete misquote of a supreme court precedent used to support their opinion:
Majority, page 47: "We (the supreme court, in 1876, in United States v. Cruikshank) describe the right protected by the Second Amendment as 'bearing arms for a lawful purpose'."
The actual precedent set in 1876 was in fact the/exact opposite/:
Stevens, J., Dissent, page 39: "The Court wrote, as to counts 2 and 10 of respondents' indictment: 'The right there specified (in the indictment that they were overturning) is that of "bearing arms for a lawful purpose" This is NOT (emphasis added) a right granted by the Constitution.'... 'This is one of the amendments that has no other effect than to restrict the powers of the NATIONAL (emphasis added) government.'"
Justice Stevens continues: "The Cruikshank Court explained that the defective indictment contained such language, but the court did not itself describe the right, or endorse the indictment's description of the right."
There are many other such contradictions in the ruling that merit serious reading. No matter what side of the fence you are on, it seems this ruling is based on very shaky grounds and dubious interpretations of precedents.
The accusations that one should expect more "intellectual honesty from Supreme Court judges", attacking the dissenters are completely unfounded and could only have come from someone who didn't bother to read their well-referenced and well-argued opinions.
While it was often cited as a symbol of the dot-com bubble overspending, I've always sworn by the Herman Miller Aeron chair. I used to sit in it 8 hours a day while programming, and the comfort difference was worth every penny of its expense.
When I visit potential employers while considering job opportunities, I actually look for Aeron chairs. I want to know where I'll be parking my butt for a large portion of the day!
PIPEDA requires that you use any electronically collected personal information (including information sent via email) only for the purpose for which it was given, and you must get explicit consent to use it in any other manner.
As such, companies that receive personal information in an email request asking that they never be contacted may only ever (legally) use that information for the purpose of ensuring that the requesting person is never contacted.
Anything else is a violation of federal privacy law.
Sommeliers train for a long time to understand the entire wine-making process from beginning to end, and all the factors that contribute to a good wine.
A true sommelier isn't someone who nitpicks about whether it is "sweet" or "honeydew" favour in the wine. A true sommelier can tell you how much rain fell in 1968 in a particular region of Western France and how it affected the acidity of the soil in which the grapes grew.
That being said, I agree with the parent that such things will not help "joe average" in the cell phone market and likely have no place.
It's far more likely that this will just result in more used car salesmen-types in the cell phone sales market. The sommelier analogy is almost offensive to real sommeliers. Certified or not. You are not going to get people who truly understand the intricacies of cell phone technology, features, software, services, plans to take a retail sales job. It just doesn't work that way. Sommeliers are a respected profession that requires years of apprenticeship. It is about culture and tradition.
Cell phones have always been about fads and over-hyped widgets. It's all about pushing out the current model and signing people up as fast as possible. The market is too cutthroat to allow for anything else. For this same reason, sommeliers don't stand around selling wine at your local grocery store.
I walked into a supposedly high-end cell phone store a few months back. They had towering signs that said things like "Ask our experts anything! They will help you figure everything out!". I walked up to one of the reps who wore a big badge saying "I'm a cell phone expert, ask me anything!". I asked a simple question: "Which devices do you have that run Symbian OS?". I received a blank stare and "What's a simmian?" in response. Followed by "We have lots of phones with cameras and MP3 players. Do you want one of those?"
I'm not holding my breath that this program will make any difference.
Respectfully, you are mistaken. It has nothing to do with whether or not they would win or lose in court. It has to do with whether or not they actively object to unauthorized uses of their Trademark.
Refer to the half dozen other threads that re-iterate this same point. They have a more comprehensive discussion of this, and a good detailing of how this came to be.
I'm not arguing that this makes any sense, or that it is a good thing. I'm just pointing out that it is the current situation.
You'll note I didn't say they should seek it out - I said Ford should have offered it, instead of trying to restricted them.
I agree that nobody should have to seek out such a thing. It's silly. But that's not what this is about. Nobody (not even ford - read their letter) is suggesting that it makes sense to restrict people from doing what this club is doing. Unfortunately Trademark law (not copyright - this has nothing to do with copyright law) FORCES them to take action here or lose the right in FUTURE CASES where it may indeed be unreasonable use of the trademark, and have nothing to do with users just taking pictures of their cars.
To be fair to Ford, it seems precedents set around the enforcement of Trademarks force them into this situation. IANAL, but if they don't protect their trademark on the look of the car in this innocent application, they are waiving all rights to that trademark when they need to enforce it in cases of malicious use.
That being said, they should have taken the approach that Second Life did in the past (see link below). Instead of just issuing a Cease and Desist letter stating that they did not authorize this use of their trademark, they could have sent a Permit and Proceed letter that explicitly authorized usage by the club. In this manner, they are protecting their trademark for the future, and not pissing off their best customers. Everyone wins. More companies should do this:
I was a guest speaker in a 4th year Engineering Management course earlier this year where I gave an hour long presentation on open source, including its history, the principles of community development, licensing, business models, and a class discussion.
During the presentation, I was discussing the motivations to use open source over proprietary software. I explained that one of the largest drivers was that it was free (as in liberty), and often free (as in beer). Very few of the students were programmers, so only the free as in beer resonated with them.
One student put his hand up and asked, "So what's the big deal with Firefox? I already get Internet Explorer 'for free' with Windows. Why would I bother going to the trouble of getting Firefox and using it? The 'free' principle doesn't seem to apply here?"
I thought about his question for a moment and responded with two points.
1) Internet Explorer isn't really free. It's disguised in the price of Windows.
2) The motivation with Firefox is more about preserving open web standards. Here the traditional motivations of using open source are secondary. It's a long term discussion about making sure the Internet doesn't become the Microsoft Net, populated with broken, half-standards.
The students who knew anything about web development (about 3 of the 40) all nodded in agreement. The rest of the class gave me blank stares. It is really important to find a perspective that the listener will relate to.
Suggestions on how to improve my presentation for next term's class would be most welcome.
You are correct in the case of the parent post, and in the general case (though many scholars argue that apostrophes should never have been used as indication of possessiveness in the first place):
You are incorrect in the scope of your statement. The use of apostrophes for plurals is considered universal and acceptable in some cases, such as acronyms:
It's true. I have yet to see/any/ environment that provides the same role play environment that classic muds have to offer.
I started mudding in the BBS days, and still actively play today. The immersion factor is surprising to many people who know roleplaying either only as a table-top thing, with a lot of Mountain Dew, or as something that involves graphics.
[shameless plug] MudConnector (http://www.mudconnect.com/top10.html) currently ranks Dark and Shattered Lands (DSL)(http://www.dsl-mud.org/ - telnet dsl-mud.org port 4000) as the number one roleplaying mud. I've played there for 8 years, and would encourage you to try it out if you're looking for a good roleplaying environment.[/shameless plug]
I've found that after reading this book there are so many insights to be gained and so many applications for Regexes that it's worth the read even if you don't program in PERL or other Regex rich language.
I've had dreams in Regexes after reading this book. You see the world as patterns everywhere, just waiting to be m/atched/.
Mastering Regular Expressions, Third Edition, By Jeffrey E. F. Friedl, ISBN: 0-596-52812-4
There was a bug with Steam near its beginning where a bunch of CD keys got double printed, and hence many legitimite users were unable to validate their keys for a few weeks.
I was one such user, and encountered the same response from their support innitially. I finally got transfered up the chain, and was able to send them a fax of the original CD's and my purchase receipt from Best Buy as proof of purchase. They sent me a new, working key the next day.
I was very very angry also. To be fair to them, they apologised profusely and changed their phone support protocols to account for the error for future people. Obviously this should NOT be happening to legitimite customers.
Since them, I've purchased several other Steam based products and have never had an issue. The content delivery system itself is an excellent means of deployment. Don't give up on them because of one fuckup, big as it was.
Going through the "True or False", section myself, I was quite annoyed at the absolute assumption that all "software" was illegal to copy, and this being beaten into children's minds, amongst other falacies.
Michael Geist (www.michaelgeist.ca) has a great commentary on his legal impressions of the whole thing:
With the ever-changing technologies, the key skill no longer becomes knowing how to use any particular tool, piece of hardware or software, but rather becomes the ability to adapt and effectively learn how to use any tool or environment.
Not to sound too cliché, but Google and the Internet are at the center of this. Much like books eliminated the need for memorization and transmission by oral tradition, Google and the Internet revolutionize how one learns and adapts. Teach your students how to learn and adapt. Teach them skills on ways to search for information, ways to evaluate what information is good, and what is trash, and teach them how to contribute back information for others to learn from their experiences, good or bad.
To evaluate them, give them novel, creative problems and the tools to learn how to adapt to the environment, and search for solutions. Evaluate their ability to use the resources at their disposal to come up with their own solutions to the problems. This is infinitely better than training them to rote memorize solutions to static problems.
I'd like to see a day where a skill that is searched for on a resumé is no longer a specific ability with a specific tool, but simply the line "Fast and adaptive learner" or "Excel at creative solution design in novel environments." That's what I'd be looking for in an employee, and for future generations of technology users.
Slashdot Mirror
It is taken for granted in this industry (and many others) that more experience == good. There has been some recent research in this area, specifically in engineering management, and the management of innovation, that suggests that when working in innovative, rapidly evolving areas, trying to come up with novel solutions and build novel systems, experience can be /detrimental/ as it acts as a ball and chain to the way things used to be done, and hampers an innovative mindset that tries to figure out a better way to do things.
See, for example, "Innovators' Insights - Which Schools of Experience Should Your Executives Attend?". Anthony, S. D., & Christensen, C.M. Nov 2004. Harvard Management Update. Harvard Business Publishing
Describe the work you are hiring the person for, and ask them why their experience would be an asset and not a detriment to the work you are doing. Ask them to explain their thoughts about learning new skills, using new methodologies, vs doing what they have always done for the past x years over again.
It is my firm opinion that an ability to grow and learn and evolve is the single most useful skill for any employee.
It's one part of the degree program, yes.
And if you're suggesting it's easy, bear in mind my current draft is pushing 150 pages. This is a properly controlled empirical study, vetted by the university's ethics committee. There's nothing pedestrian about it.
If you're curious, you can read more about the program at the program's webpage.
Sounds like a more formalised version of this comment:
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=219158&cid=17788090 [slashdot.org]
Somewhat, but with more of a focus on the consumer marketing approach. Think customer preference between Pepsi and Coke. Less technical focus. Less objective.
This approach recognizes that often the decisions of consumers are not based on logic, or on the best features, performance, price, etc. There are other factors that matter to them, that they rationalize in their heads that have a real world impact. I'm trying to quantify these factors for this specific case. The results should be the best estimation of real-world barriers between the two. Most current assessments simply compare the technical features, which, while useful for some classes of users, doesn't speak to a larger class of users who are more affected by other factors.
when it comes to a choice between almost identical software (e.g. Microsoft Office and OpenOffice), price is the determining factor.
Actually, I'm currently doing my Master's thesis on this exact topic, namely the switching barriers between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org. I'll post a summary of the full empirically assessed results to Slashdot when the study is complete. Currently, however, it looks like that Apathy is a much stronger factor than price. In fact, the author of the article hints at this:
In the past, it's always been included on my computers which is fine
Another important factor which I have hypothesized (and the literature suggests is accurate) trumps price is user inconvenience. Most users will pay to avoid hassle of any sorts. Further, most users will pay to avoid PERCEIVED inconvenience, even if, in reality, there would be no inconvenience. The FEAR of inconvenience is enough to make them continue to pay.
If you would like more details about my empirical research on this subject, feel free to contact me. A paper on the subject will be published by the Open Source Business Resource in the spring.
"NVidia is currently in the midst of a $200M recall of bad GPUs"
Last I checked, they reserved $200M on their financial sheets in case they needed to deal with the chips. I've heard nothing about an official recall? Only thing I can find is a lot of angry resellers who are demanding a recall.
Correct me if I'm wrong?
The secret service deals with /financial/ fraud and theft, including money laundering, and the equipment (sometimes computers) to assist in such crime.
http://www.ustreas.gov/usss/investigations.shtml
This matter doesn't fall under their domain as there is no evidence of financial crime or fraud.
Respectfully, you are mistaken, or joking.
http://www.fbi.gov/hq.htm
You may want to escalate the matter to a different law enforcement agency, such as the FBI. They should be more responsive to this sort of thing, especially if you describe it as data theft, rather than property theft, as surely your company's computers that were stolen were loaded with company data.
If you live in a small county with elected/appointed law enforcement agents, perhaps you should raise this issue the next time they're up for re-election. If you live in a larger city, perhaps you should contact your city councilor about the issue and request that your city's police force be modernized for the 21st century.
You should avoid doing anything yourself, as you can land yourself in legal trouble. If you insist on doing something yourself, get legal advice first to ensure you aren't going to cause more trouble for yourself in the process.
No matter what side of this issue you are on, the dissenting opinions are worth a careful read. They highlight and document in detail the errors made in the Majority decision, the most blatant of which being a complete misquote of a supreme court precedent used to support their opinion:
Majority, page 47: "We (the supreme court, in 1876, in United States v. Cruikshank) describe the right protected by the Second Amendment as 'bearing arms for a lawful purpose'."
The actual precedent set in 1876 was in fact the /exact opposite/:
Stevens, J., Dissent, page 39: "The Court wrote, as to counts 2 and 10 of respondents' indictment: 'The right there specified (in the indictment that they were overturning) is that of "bearing arms for a lawful purpose" This is NOT (emphasis added) a right granted by the Constitution.' ... 'This is one of the amendments that has no other effect than to restrict the powers of the NATIONAL (emphasis added) government.'"
Justice Stevens continues: "The Cruikshank Court explained that the defective indictment contained such language, but the court did not itself describe the right, or endorse the indictment's description of the right."
There are many other such contradictions in the ruling that merit serious reading. No matter what side of the fence you are on, it seems this ruling is based on very shaky grounds and dubious interpretations of precedents.
The accusations that one should expect more "intellectual honesty from Supreme Court judges", attacking the dissenters are completely unfounded and could only have come from someone who didn't bother to read their well-referenced and well-argued opinions.
While it was often cited as a symbol of the dot-com bubble overspending, I've always sworn by the Herman Miller Aeron chair. I used to sit in it 8 hours a day while programming, and the comfort difference was worth every penny of its expense.
When I visit potential employers while considering job opportunities, I actually look for Aeron chairs. I want to know where I'll be parking my butt for a large portion of the day!
Details here, and here.
This is Ninja Gaiden II!
Yeesh. Didn't we learn our lesson over decade ago?
You are mistaken. It is a legal issue.
PIPEDA requires that you use any electronically collected personal information (including information sent via email) only for the purpose for which it was given, and you must get explicit consent to use it in any other manner.
As such, companies that receive personal information in an email request asking that they never be contacted may only ever (legally) use that information for the purpose of ensuring that the requesting person is never contacted.
Anything else is a violation of federal privacy law.
Apparently not a very good one. I don't see your specials of the week in your sig.
^_^
To be fair, sommelier != "wine guru".
Sommeliers train for a long time to understand the entire wine-making process from beginning to end, and all the factors that contribute to a good wine.
A true sommelier isn't someone who nitpicks about whether it is "sweet" or "honeydew" favour in the wine. A true sommelier can tell you how much rain fell in 1968 in a particular region of Western France and how it affected the acidity of the soil in which the grapes grew.
That being said, I agree with the parent that such things will not help "joe average" in the cell phone market and likely have no place.
It's far more likely that this will just result in more used car salesmen-types in the cell phone sales market. The sommelier analogy is almost offensive to real sommeliers. Certified or not. You are not going to get people who truly understand the intricacies of cell phone technology, features, software, services, plans to take a retail sales job. It just doesn't work that way. Sommeliers are a respected profession that requires years of apprenticeship. It is about culture and tradition.
Cell phones have always been about fads and over-hyped widgets. It's all about pushing out the current model and signing people up as fast as possible. The market is too cutthroat to allow for anything else. For this same reason, sommeliers don't stand around selling wine at your local grocery store.
I walked into a supposedly high-end cell phone store a few months back. They had towering signs that said things like "Ask our experts anything! They will help you figure everything out!". I walked up to one of the reps who wore a big badge saying "I'm a cell phone expert, ask me anything!". I asked a simple question: "Which devices do you have that run Symbian OS?". I received a blank stare and "What's a simmian?" in response. Followed by "We have lots of phones with cameras and MP3 players. Do you want one of those?"
I'm not holding my breath that this program will make any difference.
Respectfully, you are mistaken. It has nothing to do with whether or not they would win or lose in court. It has to do with whether or not they actively object to unauthorized uses of their Trademark.
Refer to the half dozen other threads that re-iterate this same point. They have a more comprehensive discussion of this, and a good detailing of how this came to be.
I'm not arguing that this makes any sense, or that it is a good thing. I'm just pointing out that it is the current situation.
You'll note I didn't say they should seek it out - I said Ford should have offered it, instead of trying to restricted them.
I agree that nobody should have to seek out such a thing. It's silly. But that's not what this is about. Nobody (not even ford - read their letter) is suggesting that it makes sense to restrict people from doing what this club is doing. Unfortunately Trademark law (not copyright - this has nothing to do with copyright law) FORCES them to take action here or lose the right in FUTURE CASES where it may indeed be unreasonable use of the trademark, and have nothing to do with users just taking pictures of their cars.
That's the point here.
To be fair to Ford, it seems precedents set around the enforcement of Trademarks force them into this situation. IANAL, but if they don't protect their trademark on the look of the car in this innocent application, they are waiving all rights to that trademark when they need to enforce it in cases of malicious use.
That being said, they should have taken the approach that Second Life did in the past (see link below). Instead of just issuing a Cease and Desist letter stating that they did not authorize this use of their trademark, they could have sent a Permit and Proceed letter that explicitly authorized usage by the club. In this manner, they are protecting their trademark for the future, and not pissing off their best customers. Everyone wins. More companies should do this:
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/31/0216258
I was a guest speaker in a 4th year Engineering Management course earlier this year where I gave an hour long presentation on open source, including its history, the principles of community development, licensing, business models, and a class discussion.
During the presentation, I was discussing the motivations to use open source over proprietary software. I explained that one of the largest drivers was that it was free (as in liberty), and often free (as in beer). Very few of the students were programmers, so only the free as in beer resonated with them.
One student put his hand up and asked, "So what's the big deal with Firefox? I already get Internet Explorer 'for free' with Windows. Why would I bother going to the trouble of getting Firefox and using it? The 'free' principle doesn't seem to apply here?"
I thought about his question for a moment and responded with two points.
1) Internet Explorer isn't really free. It's disguised in the price of Windows.
2) The motivation with Firefox is more about preserving open web standards. Here the traditional motivations of using open source are secondary. It's a long term discussion about making sure the Internet doesn't become the Microsoft Net, populated with broken, half-standards.
The students who knew anything about web development (about 3 of the 40) all nodded in agreement. The rest of the class gave me blank stares. It is really important to find a perspective that the listener will relate to.
Suggestions on how to improve my presentation for next term's class would be most welcome.
You are correct in the case of the parent post, and in the general case (though many scholars argue that apostrophes should never have been used as indication of possessiveness in the first place):
http://wsu.edu/~brians/errors/apostrophes1.html
You are incorrect in the scope of your statement. The use of apostrophes for plurals is considered universal and acceptable in some cases, such as acronyms:
http://wsu.edu/~brians/errors/acronyms.html
It's true. I have yet to see /any/ environment that provides the same role play environment that classic muds have to offer.
I started mudding in the BBS days, and still actively play today. The immersion factor is surprising to many people who know roleplaying either only as a table-top thing, with a lot of Mountain Dew, or as something that involves graphics.
[shameless plug] MudConnector (http://www.mudconnect.com/top10.html) currently ranks Dark and Shattered Lands (DSL)(http://www.dsl-mud.org/ - telnet dsl-mud.org port 4000) as the number one roleplaying mud. I've played there for 8 years, and would encourage you to try it out if you're looking for a good roleplaying environment.[/shameless plug]
I've found that after reading this book there are so many insights to be gained and so many applications for Regexes that it's worth the read even if you don't program in PERL or other Regex rich language.
I've had dreams in Regexes after reading this book. You see the world as patterns everywhere, just waiting to be m/atched/.
Mastering Regular Expressions, Third Edition, By Jeffrey E. F. Friedl, ISBN: 0-596-52812-4
There was a bug with Steam near its beginning where a bunch of CD keys got double printed, and hence many legitimite users were unable to validate their keys for a few weeks.
I was one such user, and encountered the same response from their support innitially. I finally got transfered up the chain, and was able to send them a fax of the original CD's and my purchase receipt from Best Buy as proof of purchase. They sent me a new, working key the next day.
I was very very angry also. To be fair to them, they apologised profusely and changed their phone support protocols to account for the error for future people. Obviously this should NOT be happening to legitimite customers.
Since them, I've purchased several other Steam based products and have never had an issue. The content delivery system itself is an excellent means of deployment. Don't give up on them because of one fuckup, big as it was.
Going through the "True or False", section myself, I was quite annoyed at the absolute assumption that all "software" was illegal to copy, and this being beaten into children's minds, amongst other falacies.
n t/task,view/id,1275/Itemid,85/nsub,/
Michael Geist (www.michaelgeist.ca) has a great commentary on his legal impressions of the whole thing:
http://michaelgeist.ca/component/option,com_conte
With the ever-changing technologies, the key skill no longer becomes knowing how to use any particular tool, piece of hardware or software, but rather becomes the ability to adapt and effectively learn how to use any tool or environment.
Not to sound too cliché, but Google and the Internet are at the center of this. Much like books eliminated the need for memorization and transmission by oral tradition, Google and the Internet revolutionize how one learns and adapts. Teach your students how to learn and adapt. Teach them skills on ways to search for information, ways to evaluate what information is good, and what is trash, and teach them how to contribute back information for others to learn from their experiences, good or bad.
To evaluate them, give them novel, creative problems and the tools to learn how to adapt to the environment, and search for solutions. Evaluate their ability to use the resources at their disposal to come up with their own solutions to the problems. This is infinitely better than training them to rote memorize solutions to static problems.
I'd like to see a day where a skill that is searched for on a resumé is no longer a specific ability with a specific tool, but simply the line "Fast and adaptive learner" or "Excel at creative solution design in novel environments." That's what I'd be looking for in an employee, and for future generations of technology users.