Before we blame the IT staff, let me give this some perspective. (I have nine years experience as a teacher & tech director in a public K-12 US school.)
First, I'm reasonably confident in saying that, if proper Group Policy was implemented and user restrictions put in place, this never would have happened. Second, this is a HUGE school district with over 50 schools. They can certainly afford a public liaison (who was speaking on behalf of the district in the local broadcast), and I'm sure they have a large IT staff...I'm guessing in the neighborhood of 20-30 employees. Though public school districts would pay less than Microsoft right next door, given the sheer numbers there must be at least a few people on that staff that know how to accomplish this and as well of its value in preventing this sort of mess from happening.
With that in mind, here's what I've concluded: There is likely someone with leadership authority who told IT staff to let students manage their own laptops and have admin privileges. Given the size of the district, the directive either came from the district technology committee, or directly from the superintendent, school board, or both. All it would take is a number of parents to ignorantly complain to a "friend on the board" that "Johnny's laptop is broken - he can't install the programs he needs to do his homework" for the school board to direct the superintendent to "fix the issue." Likely this was a top-down order; I simply cannot imagine a tech staff that large to be that incompetent on their own.
What bothers me about this is how they're going about trying to fix the problem. If I had a worst-case mass-deployment of a virus at my school, I would just recall all the equipment, reimage everything, and redeploy a week later. I would issue a directive to all the staff that the equipment is down for one week to be cleaned, and make due without it. It's either one week of downtime or months of unreliability. If teachers would know that they have the option of either the problem being fixed in a week or the problem being "managed" over months, they would all take the week's downtime in a heartbeat.
One other question I have for those here: have you ever encountered a Windows virus that, as they claim, just "spreads on the network" without user initiation of the virus by clicking on an executable, script, or loading an infected webpage? I think the much more likely scenario is that this virus is being spread through usb flash disks, but I'm not sure whether that explanation was too technical for staff to understand.
All the recommendations of sci-fi or dystopian novels and whatnot by most of the slashdot crowd...they're good books, but I wouldn't say they have much impact on life. It's the touching stories that have impact.
The Last Lecture is good. But go with great: read The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (English translation). It'll only take you about an hour to read, and it will impact your life. There's good reason for it being the 2nd best-selling book throughout the world (excluding any books of faith).
1) I just spent two years testing Windows 7 deployment in our environment, learning the different behaviors of the OS, getting all the group policies & registry settings set exactly the way I want them, and familiarizing myself with the environment enough so that I can see in my head the system and its menus so that I can navigate myself and others through the system w/o hiccups. I don't make that kind of investment in my time to a new OS w/o wanting to wait at least three years before having to make a new change to our systems.
2) Windows is doing a near-complete overhaul to their OS. Last time this happened, we got Vista. Enough said.
3) Even when Windows 7 came about, I still waited a year before deploying it in our environment. SP1's for Windows OS's have had a good track record thus far.
Build it specifically to make up for all or most of the shortcomings of the iPad, which are:
1) No data ports - Want to plug in a keyboard? Want to plug in a thumb drive? Want to plug in a printer or peripheral of any sort? Fugetaboutit.
2) Content creation is horrible - Typing a document or entering formulas into a spreadsheet requires a keyboard. That'll cost you an extra $60. And it takes about twice as long to navigate the word processor or spreadsheet software to do what needs to be done. Even after you've created the files, you then need to email them to your computer or use a 3rd party data service if you don't have a Mac.
3) Terrible to administer in the enterprise - iPads sync to only one computer. iPad storage cannot be backed up & mirrored. Apps and iOS updates must be done one-at-a-time. Apps / software must be Apple-approved and Apple-distributed. iPads were not built for the enterprise, and the enterprise has had to bend over backwards for Apple just to make the iPad work for their business.
Surface has a USB port. Surface has an included keyboard. Surface has Windows & Active Directory & a platform supported by the vast majority of software companies. I think Microsoft is trying to do what the iPad wasn't built to do: work for business.
While I'm not saying that NewEgg's failing to provide the customer service they've been known for, the following does need to be made clear: Installing Linux in no way voids the manufacturer's warranty. If you RTFA, you'll clearly see in the NewEgg letter the following sentence:
"If you are still unsatisfied with this product or experience further issues, we recommend contacting the manufacturer directly for support."
Clearly the hardware failed. Clearly the owner can have the laptop repaired / replaced by contacting Lenovo. NewEgg's just not willing to facilitate the process.
When I first got into teaching, I got in towards the late-end of a district's adoption into an all "leftist" exploratory K-12 math curriculum. I'm sure most of you are familiar with at least one series that falls into this category. We had "Math Investigations" in grades K-5, "CMP" 6-8, and Core-Plus 9-12. The core concept of this series was that teachers were not supposed to teach rote-learning of math facts. Calculators would supplant that "old-fashioned" method of learning. Kids grew up learning how to "explore" math, rather than memorize addition & multiplication tables, practice procedures repeatedly, and churn out page after page of "drill n' kill" problems.
I got these kids in high school. When we ended Core Plus and reverted back to a traditional textbook, they couldn't do 40% of what you would find in an Algebra I textbook, because they did not have these basic math facts. They couldn't divide, so they couldn't factor. They couldn't calculate powers, so they couldn't understand square roots. They could not see patterns in numbers, because they had never learned to calculate. When they let the calculator do all the calculations, their brain never stopped to watch the patterns that were emerging.
Now we want to give iPads to kindergartners. Has anyone stopped to think about what basic skill sets we'll be depriving these children of that we adults take for granted? The ones we take them for granted because we grew up w/o iPads to impede learning basic skills...skills like social interaction, self regulation, dialog and public speaking... Forgive me, it's been a while since I've studied child psychology, but there's a significant amount of neurological development that occurs in elementary school and continues on though middle and high school. Has anyone really stopped to examine and consider the long-term effects of significant exposure to this technology, especially at such young ages?
I may have grown up with a computer, as well as most slashdot readers out there. But it's mere empirical evidence to say, "Look at me, I turned out fine." (Besides, your concept of "fine" may include living in your parent's basement at the age of 35.) Are there any real studies (rather than some questionable poll) that have examined this subject?
As a math teacher, I'm tired of every Joe Millionaire stepping up and saying that education needs to be fixed. Education isn't the problem. For the millionaires who don't understand yet...public education is not about raising test scores. Public education is about civilizing our citizens. Without public education, the public will not understand civility en mass. As a teacher in a high-poverty rural school district, and I've seen how uncivil kids and adults can be even when they're educated. If we don't force parents to educate their kids, they'll run free, they'll run wild, and they'll be a plague on our populace.
That being said, if you want to raise test scores, there is one variable that has more correlation than all the others combined. Poverty. And I have the numbers to back it up. Using my home state of Minnesota as an example, look at the state test results hosted by the Star Tribune. Run a correlation study between percent proficiency on either test, and the % of test takers that are low-income. (Remove the districts w/ the small samples of less than 10 -- they're specialized cooperatives & magnet schools whose sample of students taking the test do not follow the same sampling as with general Independent School Districts.) Even better, run it on just the Minneapolis / St. Paul Metro Area districts.
I haven't calculated the results for 2011 yet, but I ran it for 2010 in the metro area. Metro-wide, the correlation coefficient between % proficient and low-income for math was -0.91 and -0.93 for reading. That's insane. You almost never get correlation coefficients that good anywhere in statistics, but it's happening here. Forget teachers. Forget schools. The single biggest factor impacting education is poverty and low-income. (And for those who want to chant, "correlation is not causation," I challenge you to walk into any inner-city school district and witness the behavior yourself. I promise you, there's more than just correlation there.)
If millionaires really wanted to fix schools, they'd have a much greater impact on education (and our society at large) if they gave away their money to the poor. Better yet, set up a stipend program like Brazil and other countries have.
What these business men are saying without saying it is that there's nothing "new" they can come up with for the PC. It's established technology. Sure, the graphics keep getting better, the windows look shinier, and the processors keep getting faster (while the OS's get slower), but there's nothing new they can invent for the PC. It does what it's supposed to do, and we just don't expect it to do anything more.
The PC market is saturated. No one who doesn't have one will feel motivated to buy one anymore, because everyone who wants one already has one. Sure, PC owners will upgrade. They'll fix. The market for PC won't shrink, but it won't grow either.
Businessmen want new. New sells. But new has to be different. New and different sells, because new and different means that, even if someone already has a PC, they'll still spend MORE money on what's new and different. New and different means that there's a new revenue stream that businessmen can tap into. New and different means more profit. That's what businessmen want.
So, to motivate consumers to spend money on the iPad, they must be manipulated into thinking that the PC is new and different. We must believe that the PC is not enough. We must seek more than the PC. We must buy iPad. What better way to do that than to think the PC is going the way of the dodo bird?
Two academics write in a recent article decrying that a third of Australian universities now offer courses in such subjects as homeopathy and traditional Chinese medicine, which undermines science-based medicine.
I think that academic scrutiny and study are exactly what these areas of medicine need. While I would definitely argue that there are many areas of these medicines that are placebos at best, I have heard and witnessed accounts of individual remedies, scrutinized by science, which nevertheless empirically appear to be effective. I would hate to through the baby out with the bathwater by dismissing either subject entirely.
I don't want to feel that it's merely conspiracy theory to believe that "the man" / "big pharma" is trying to squeeze out all alternative medicine because it competes with their company. But, in the same sense, I don't want people acquiring argyria en mass just because they keep hearing about colloidal silver on the internet. Presently, US law outright forbids scientific study of these remedies. I believe they need to be studied so that there's conclusive evidence of what works and what doesn't work. And what we discover does work should be allowed in practice. The world of academia can help tremendously with that.
If you're seriously thinking that you need to go through that much trouble to hide your "bad work habits," the problem really is you. You appear to be aware of your less-than-exceptional work habits. Reading between the lines, it almost appears as though you lost another previous job because of your self-distractions during work.
Rather than try and hide your browsing history, why not try working for a change? They are paying you to work, after all. And on periods of downtime, bring your own laptop.
First, create a nice, succinct list of issues and consequences that will take you ~5 min to read off. Prepare it so that it's as simple and as concentrated as possible. You have legitimate concerns that NEED to be expressed.
Then, assert your concerns to your director. If he doesn't listen, assert your concerns to his boss. If she doesn't listen, assert your concerns to the superintendent. If he doesn't listen, assert your concerns to the school board.
You have every right to tell the asst sup that she needs to delete emails. If she chooses to order you around like some slave, tell her very plainly that IT policy has limits of 5 Gb, and that's the limit because Joe Taxpayer pays your district so that everyone can use the tech resources provided, not just one email hog. The school parking lot is fairly segmented so that everyone has a place to park. Each student has the same size locker so that everyone has an equal storage space. She's not exempt from school board policy, and she's not exempt from IT policy.
And you have every right to tell everyone who has ears that, if the IT department does not have the right to manage IT, then IT will slowly fail, which will contribute to unreliable technology in the district, which will disrupt the learning environment, lower the moral of the students and staff, which contributes to declining enrollment. Declining enrollment is dollars walking out the door.
But seriously, assert yourself. And if nobody chooses to listen, find another school or position.
Unfortunately, IT is currently under the 'asst. superintendent of curriculum and instruction,' who has no useful understanding of maintaining and acquiring IT resources and lets others make poor IT purchasing decisions, by bypassing the IT department, and dips into IT funds when their pet project budgets run low. How can this be reversed when you get commands like 'make it work' and the budget is effectively $0?"
Grow a pair.
Seriously. You're not asserting yourself. You're letting your assistant sup do whatever they want with your budget. And he/she's probably doing it because you're not putting your foot down.
I work in a small rural school as a tech coordinator, so from my experience, let me gather a few facts from your post. First thing's first: if you have an assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction, your district's not small, as in small-small. Practically any district that's less than 2,000 students K-12 won't have any assistant superintendents. Maybe you're not LAUSD, but you're not small. Given those numbers, you are probably not the only guy in your IT department, either. I'd give a rough estimate of somewhere between 500 to 1,500 machines in your district. Long story short, your district has money. Maybe it's not flowing to your department, but your district has money.
Now, those machines need support, or they fail. Support costs money, both in parts and in human resources. You can easily communicate to your asst sup the poor return on investment he/she will get if they continue to underfund your department. If you want to illustrate the point more clearly, grab a faulty power supply out of your storage room (not one that fails outright, but one that has some inconsistent rails and a good heaping of dust bunnies to cause overheating), break into your sup's office and swap power supplies. When he/she calls you back the next day to complain, explain how you don't have any funding to repair the computer.
But that's the passive-aggressive approach. What you really should do is get in there and assert to the ignoramus that poor purchasing decisions and lack of funding are diminishing the quality of the tech equipment in the building. If you want to be professional about it, cite observations you've made about increased demands on the computer resources over the last few years and increasing complaints from teachers and staff about how current tech is not meeting those needs. Explain the financial angle of how failure to comply with software licensing issues can be very detrimental long-term. Explain how buying equipment incompatible with the current infrastructure is a waste of money and human resources.
And if he/she doesn't listen, go to the superintendent directly. If he/she doesn't listen, go to the school board. And if they don't listen, go to a different school.
I hope they have a huge successful IPO. I hope the share price takes off like a rocket. I hope the Koch brothers and every other Gordon Gekko pumps their "hard-earned money" into the stock.
And then I hope that it tanks harder than MySpace in the hands of Rupert Murdoch.
Superintendent Luna is quoted as saying, the computer 'becomes the textbook for every class, the research device, the advanced math calculator, the word processor and the portal to a world of information.'
Here's the only question that matters: What research-based evidence supports this view that a computer is a better and more effective medium for accessing this information than the present status quo of books, the library, the handheld calculator, and a desktop computer?
Because, to put it in terms of business, if there isn't a decent Return-On-Investment with buying all this tech, than no citizen or politician should put money up to invest.
First, they cite the wrong exam. This school board member was not complaining about the National Assessment of Educational Progress test, but rather the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, or FCAT. (The NAEP test adjusts the skill level of its questions on the fly as you're taking the exam, and returns a score that is percentile-based. I'd actually like to see what this board member scores on the NAEP...it's a very good metric that can be used to measure one's skill level, and is not biased or corrupted by political influence.)
Second, the sample questions are misleading. Not only are they "4th grade" & "8th grade" leveled questions (not the 10th grade exam that this board member was complaining about), but even those questions are not as difficult as you will commonly find on a state exam. If you want to see the types of questions on the FCAT, you can look at the item sampler here.
I work in Education up in Minnesota. As you can see on page 13 of this report, there is a downward trend across grade levels in "percent proficiency." While the average joe might conclude that most 3rd grade teachers are fantastic while most 11th grade math teachers need to be fired, the skeptic while (rightfully) question the validity of the test. For example, on that table, you'll see that all the 2011 results are about 10-12% lower than their previous years (except the 11th grade). That's because, in 3rd - 8th grade that year, the state moved to a newer, more difficult exam which emphasizes heavier Algebraic understanding (with completion of Algebra I by 8th grade). Because the standards became more difficult, scores dropped. But the uninformed Joe would just conclude that teachers are getting lazier and use these results as a way to blame schools for not doing their job. (These changes to the standards have not affected the 11th grade yet, but will in two more years.)
I personally coached students for and administered the 11th grade exam last year at my school. The questions on the exam are not simple. Rather than throw traditional skill-based questions at you, the questions are worded in a very complex manner, requiring a deep level of understanding of the skills required to solve the problem in order to recognize which skills are required to solve the problem, much like that FCAT exam I linked to above. This test is not a valid metric of what students know or don't know; I saw one student personally who had no problems with the worksheets I provided him during our coaching sessions, but bombed the exam, not because he was stupid, but because he gets severe test anxiety. Other students told me that they just didn't understand what many of the questions were asking them to calculate.
The upper-level state exams are engineered to fail students, so that schools can be labeled failures. Particular politicians want schools to appear as though they are not doing a good job, to validate the privatization of our educational system. While you hear the expression "raising the bar," what they are really doing is increasing the failure rate. It's absurd what kids are being asked to accomplish; cognitive science has shown that what kindergartners and 1st grade students really should be doing is playing and reading, and we're trying to sit them down and teach them Algebra skills. (If you don't believe me, ask a 1st grade teacher in the state of Minnesota...even 1st grade standards now are engineered to incorporate "Algebraic thinking".) It's downright ludicrous, and it's all a political game.
MIT’s chip — all 400 transistors (pictured below) — is dedicated to modeling every biological caveat in a single synapse. “We now have a way to capture each and every ionic process that’s going on in a neuron,” says Chi-Sang Poon, an MIT researcher who worked on the project.
Just because you finally can recognize the letters of the alphabet doesn't mean you can speak the language.
The average annual tuition for for-profit schools this year is about $14,000. Public four-year colleges charge, on average, $7,605 per year in tuition and fees for in-state students. What's worse is this: The default rate on student loans from for-profit institutions is 15%, while the default rate at public universities is only 7.2 percent (same source).
For-profit schools are milking the American taxpayer for money. Just walk into any one of these schools, tell them you want to be a nurse / chef / accountant / whatever, and they'll lay down a student loan form for you to sign before you could even say "Herbie Hancock." Because, at least with the present law, once a for-profit school gets their money from Uncle Sam, it's theirs, no strings attached. I'd almost call it fraud, except those students who enroll in a for-profit school actually do get something in return, even if it is a sorry-excuse of a half-ass education. (PBS did an excellent documentary a year back on for-profit schools, particularly exposing the "value" of a diploma one gets from these crooks. You can watch it here.)
What's sad is that there's a really simple solution to all this: require a for-profit school to assume some of the risk. If we required a for-profit school to pay back even just 50% of the loan that was defaulted on, you'd see the default rate decrease overnight.
Windows trying to release Windows 8 with its tablet shell interface on a mainstream PC makes about as much sense as Apple release iPads with a command line shell. Here's what I mean; watch this video (starting at minutes 15) where the presenter tries to show how Windows 8 is just as easy to use on a laptop as it is on a tablet. It makes no sense for any user to have to move the mouse around that much just to get to the object they want to select. Microsoft needs to stop taking this silly "one-size-fits-all" approach with its OS. Make one OS for the enterprise, another for laptops (primary PC machine purchased nowadays by home consumers), and another for tablets. Tailor the shell to fit the machine, not force the machine to fit into the shell.
Now, while I still have my administrative gripes about Windows 7 (bloated size of WinSxS directory, unable to easily unlock a workstation locked by a user, behavior of & driver support for legacy devices, etc.), but I would still recommend that Windows keep selling Windows 7 for the enterprise rather than try to force us to swallow Windows 8. We want something newer, and a lot of these gripes could be fixed w/ SP2. Stop with the one-size-fits-all crap. Market Windows 7 for the enterprise and tailor it for the enterprise. Let Windows 8 start and develop on tablets. If Windows 8 turns out to be a good OS on tablets, I would predict in a very short amount of time, laptops will start to ship w/ touch-screen interfaces to take advantage of the Windows 8 shell.
A question & follow-up
on
Ask Kevin Mitnick
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· Score: 3, Interesting
What is the primary purpose of hacking? Has this purpose remained constant over the decades, or has it changed from your rise as a hacker up to today?
Hedrick, the industrial minerals expert, says... switching to thorium-driven cars would make the U.S. energy self-sufficient, and carbon emissions would plummet. “It would eliminate the major need for oil,” he says. “The main (remaining) demand would be for asphalt for roadways, natural gas, plastics and lubricants.”
Almost 50% of crude oil is unleaded gasoline. If we still refine crude for asphalt, plastics, etc., what do we do with all that unnecessary gasoline?
As I've read before on slashdot (and it bears repeating), portable devices are excellent content viewers, but terrible content creators. Good luck trying to do any of the following on a phone / tablet: edit the fine details of an image in PhotoShop (let alone find such a device powerful enough to even run PhotoShop), type up a report (attachable keyboards don't count, because then you may as well have a lightweight notebook), edit a spreadsheet, tweak the pixels in a bitmap file, program and debug code, edit video, etc.
Now, that's not to say that there isn't any room for evolution of the PC. I believe there's a good chance that PC mini-towers will go the way of the antique soon. I'd love to see manufacturers make mini-ITX the new case standard, use 2.5" disk drives instead of 3.5", use 35W processors over 65W or 95W, and cut the overall power requirements of a standard PC in half. (For those of you who would argue that that's not powerful enough, then how come notebooks, which have even lower performance and lower power requirements, have grown to nearly half the PC market?) Anyone wanting better video performance can always have a half-height PCIe video card added, and for the 10% or 20% that need something more powerful, they can always resort to a larger case.
Yet just to clarify (and speculate)
on
Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 4, Interesting
An agreement has been reached, but it hasn't been passed by either the house or senate yet. (It's almost certain to pass the senate, as that's where the compromise originated. The house, on the other hand...well, we'll see.)
Yet, in the back of my mind, there was a part of me wondering whether an agreement would ever be reached. The conspiracy theory in me kept saying that there were enough rich fat cats who were paying off key congressmen to sabotage the process and make sure that no agreement was ever reached. Why? Because billions of dollars had been invested in credit-default swaps against the United States debt.
Slashdot Mirror
Before we blame the IT staff, let me give this some perspective. (I have nine years experience as a teacher & tech director in a public K-12 US school.)
First, I'm reasonably confident in saying that, if proper Group Policy was implemented and user restrictions put in place, this never would have happened. Second, this is a HUGE school district with over 50 schools. They can certainly afford a public liaison (who was speaking on behalf of the district in the local broadcast), and I'm sure they have a large IT staff...I'm guessing in the neighborhood of 20-30 employees. Though public school districts would pay less than Microsoft right next door, given the sheer numbers there must be at least a few people on that staff that know how to accomplish this and as well of its value in preventing this sort of mess from happening.
With that in mind, here's what I've concluded: There is likely someone with leadership authority who told IT staff to let students manage their own laptops and have admin privileges. Given the size of the district, the directive either came from the district technology committee, or directly from the superintendent, school board, or both. All it would take is a number of parents to ignorantly complain to a "friend on the board" that "Johnny's laptop is broken - he can't install the programs he needs to do his homework" for the school board to direct the superintendent to "fix the issue." Likely this was a top-down order; I simply cannot imagine a tech staff that large to be that incompetent on their own.
What bothers me about this is how they're going about trying to fix the problem. If I had a worst-case mass-deployment of a virus at my school, I would just recall all the equipment, reimage everything, and redeploy a week later. I would issue a directive to all the staff that the equipment is down for one week to be cleaned, and make due without it. It's either one week of downtime or months of unreliability. If teachers would know that they have the option of either the problem being fixed in a week or the problem being "managed" over months, they would all take the week's downtime in a heartbeat.
One other question I have for those here: have you ever encountered a Windows virus that, as they claim, just "spreads on the network" without user initiation of the virus by clicking on an executable, script, or loading an infected webpage? I think the much more likely scenario is that this virus is being spread through usb flash disks, but I'm not sure whether that explanation was too technical for staff to understand.
I know I'm too late for mod points. Who cares.
All the recommendations of sci-fi or dystopian novels and whatnot by most of the slashdot crowd...they're good books, but I wouldn't say they have much impact on life. It's the touching stories that have impact.
The Last Lecture is good. But go with great: read The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (English translation). It'll only take you about an hour to read, and it will impact your life. There's good reason for it being the 2nd best-selling book throughout the world (excluding any books of faith).
1) I just spent two years testing Windows 7 deployment in our environment, learning the different behaviors of the OS, getting all the group policies & registry settings set exactly the way I want them, and familiarizing myself with the environment enough so that I can see in my head the system and its menus so that I can navigate myself and others through the system w/o hiccups. I don't make that kind of investment in my time to a new OS w/o wanting to wait at least three years before having to make a new change to our systems.
2) Windows is doing a near-complete overhaul to their OS. Last time this happened, we got Vista. Enough said.
3) Even when Windows 7 came about, I still waited a year before deploying it in our environment. SP1's for Windows OS's have had a good track record thus far.
Mars One plan to obtain the necessary funding is straightforward: create a media spectacle, and monetize it through advertising.
Why is it in humanity's best interest to let this initiative be led and run by business interests rather than by a government space program?
Build it specifically to make up for all or most of the shortcomings of the iPad, which are:
1) No data ports - Want to plug in a keyboard? Want to plug in a thumb drive? Want to plug in a printer or peripheral of any sort? Fugetaboutit.
2) Content creation is horrible - Typing a document or entering formulas into a spreadsheet requires a keyboard. That'll cost you an extra $60. And it takes about twice as long to navigate the word processor or spreadsheet software to do what needs to be done. Even after you've created the files, you then need to email them to your computer or use a 3rd party data service if you don't have a Mac.
3) Terrible to administer in the enterprise - iPads sync to only one computer. iPad storage cannot be backed up & mirrored. Apps and iOS updates must be done one-at-a-time. Apps / software must be Apple-approved and Apple-distributed. iPads were not built for the enterprise, and the enterprise has had to bend over backwards for Apple just to make the iPad work for their business.
Surface has a USB port. Surface has an included keyboard. Surface has Windows & Active Directory & a platform supported by the vast majority of software companies. I think Microsoft is trying to do what the iPad wasn't built to do: work for business.
While I'm not saying that NewEgg's failing to provide the customer service they've been known for, the following does need to be made clear: Installing Linux in no way voids the manufacturer's warranty. If you RTFA, you'll clearly see in the NewEgg letter the following sentence:
"If you are still unsatisfied with this product or experience further issues, we recommend contacting the manufacturer directly for support."
Clearly the hardware failed. Clearly the owner can have the laptop repaired / replaced by contacting Lenovo. NewEgg's just not willing to facilitate the process.
When I first got into teaching, I got in towards the late-end of a district's adoption into an all "leftist" exploratory K-12 math curriculum. I'm sure most of you are familiar with at least one series that falls into this category. We had "Math Investigations" in grades K-5, "CMP" 6-8, and Core-Plus 9-12. The core concept of this series was that teachers were not supposed to teach rote-learning of math facts. Calculators would supplant that "old-fashioned" method of learning. Kids grew up learning how to "explore" math, rather than memorize addition & multiplication tables, practice procedures repeatedly, and churn out page after page of "drill n' kill" problems.
I got these kids in high school. When we ended Core Plus and reverted back to a traditional textbook, they couldn't do 40% of what you would find in an Algebra I textbook, because they did not have these basic math facts. They couldn't divide, so they couldn't factor. They couldn't calculate powers, so they couldn't understand square roots. They could not see patterns in numbers, because they had never learned to calculate. When they let the calculator do all the calculations, their brain never stopped to watch the patterns that were emerging.
Now we want to give iPads to kindergartners. Has anyone stopped to think about what basic skill sets we'll be depriving these children of that we adults take for granted? The ones we take them for granted because we grew up w/o iPads to impede learning basic skills...skills like social interaction, self regulation, dialog and public speaking... Forgive me, it's been a while since I've studied child psychology, but there's a significant amount of neurological development that occurs in elementary school and continues on though middle and high school. Has anyone really stopped to examine and consider the long-term effects of significant exposure to this technology, especially at such young ages?
I may have grown up with a computer, as well as most slashdot readers out there. But it's mere empirical evidence to say, "Look at me, I turned out fine." (Besides, your concept of "fine" may include living in your parent's basement at the age of 35.) Are there any real studies (rather than some questionable poll) that have examined this subject?
As a math teacher, I'm tired of every Joe Millionaire stepping up and saying that education needs to be fixed. Education isn't the problem. For the millionaires who don't understand yet...public education is not about raising test scores. Public education is about civilizing our citizens. Without public education, the public will not understand civility en mass. As a teacher in a high-poverty rural school district, and I've seen how uncivil kids and adults can be even when they're educated. If we don't force parents to educate their kids, they'll run free, they'll run wild, and they'll be a plague on our populace.
That being said, if you want to raise test scores, there is one variable that has more correlation than all the others combined. Poverty. And I have the numbers to back it up. Using my home state of Minnesota as an example, look at the state test results hosted by the Star Tribune. Run a correlation study between percent proficiency on either test, and the % of test takers that are low-income. (Remove the districts w/ the small samples of less than 10 -- they're specialized cooperatives & magnet schools whose sample of students taking the test do not follow the same sampling as with general Independent School Districts.) Even better, run it on just the Minneapolis / St. Paul Metro Area districts.
I haven't calculated the results for 2011 yet, but I ran it for 2010 in the metro area. Metro-wide, the correlation coefficient between % proficient and low-income for math was -0.91 and -0.93 for reading. That's insane. You almost never get correlation coefficients that good anywhere in statistics, but it's happening here. Forget teachers. Forget schools. The single biggest factor impacting education is poverty and low-income. (And for those who want to chant, "correlation is not causation," I challenge you to walk into any inner-city school district and witness the behavior yourself. I promise you, there's more than just correlation there.)
If millionaires really wanted to fix schools, they'd have a much greater impact on education (and our society at large) if they gave away their money to the poor. Better yet, set up a stipend program like Brazil and other countries have.
What these business men are saying without saying it is that there's nothing "new" they can come up with for the PC. It's established technology. Sure, the graphics keep getting better, the windows look shinier, and the processors keep getting faster (while the OS's get slower), but there's nothing new they can invent for the PC. It does what it's supposed to do, and we just don't expect it to do anything more.
The PC market is saturated. No one who doesn't have one will feel motivated to buy one anymore, because everyone who wants one already has one. Sure, PC owners will upgrade. They'll fix. The market for PC won't shrink, but it won't grow either.
Businessmen want new. New sells. But new has to be different. New and different sells, because new and different means that, even if someone already has a PC, they'll still spend MORE money on what's new and different. New and different means that there's a new revenue stream that businessmen can tap into. New and different means more profit. That's what businessmen want.
So, to motivate consumers to spend money on the iPad, they must be manipulated into thinking that the PC is new and different. We must believe that the PC is not enough. We must seek more than the PC. We must buy iPad. What better way to do that than to think the PC is going the way of the dodo bird?
Two academics write in a recent article decrying that a third of Australian universities now offer courses in such subjects as homeopathy and traditional Chinese medicine, which undermines science-based medicine.
I think that academic scrutiny and study are exactly what these areas of medicine need. While I would definitely argue that there are many areas of these medicines that are placebos at best, I have heard and witnessed accounts of individual remedies, scrutinized by science, which nevertheless empirically appear to be effective. I would hate to through the baby out with the bathwater by dismissing either subject entirely.
I don't want to feel that it's merely conspiracy theory to believe that "the man" / "big pharma" is trying to squeeze out all alternative medicine because it competes with their company. But, in the same sense, I don't want people acquiring argyria en mass just because they keep hearing about colloidal silver on the internet. Presently, US law outright forbids scientific study of these remedies. I believe they need to be studied so that there's conclusive evidence of what works and what doesn't work. And what we discover does work should be allowed in practice. The world of academia can help tremendously with that.
If you're seriously thinking that you need to go through that much trouble to hide your "bad work habits," the problem really is you. You appear to be aware of your less-than-exceptional work habits. Reading between the lines, it almost appears as though you lost another previous job because of your self-distractions during work.
Rather than try and hide your browsing history, why not try working for a change? They are paying you to work, after all. And on periods of downtime, bring your own laptop.
Yay, cloud!
First, create a nice, succinct list of issues and consequences that will take you ~5 min to read off. Prepare it so that it's as simple and as concentrated as possible. You have legitimate concerns that NEED to be expressed.
Then, assert your concerns to your director. If he doesn't listen, assert your concerns to his boss. If she doesn't listen, assert your concerns to the superintendent. If he doesn't listen, assert your concerns to the school board.
You have every right to tell the asst sup that she needs to delete emails. If she chooses to order you around like some slave, tell her very plainly that IT policy has limits of 5 Gb, and that's the limit because Joe Taxpayer pays your district so that everyone can use the tech resources provided, not just one email hog. The school parking lot is fairly segmented so that everyone has a place to park. Each student has the same size locker so that everyone has an equal storage space. She's not exempt from school board policy, and she's not exempt from IT policy.
And you have every right to tell everyone who has ears that, if the IT department does not have the right to manage IT, then IT will slowly fail, which will contribute to unreliable technology in the district, which will disrupt the learning environment, lower the moral of the students and staff, which contributes to declining enrollment. Declining enrollment is dollars walking out the door.
But seriously, assert yourself. And if nobody chooses to listen, find another school or position.
Unfortunately, IT is currently under the 'asst. superintendent of curriculum and instruction,' who has no useful understanding of maintaining and acquiring IT resources and lets others make poor IT purchasing decisions, by bypassing the IT department, and dips into IT funds when their pet project budgets run low. How can this be reversed when you get commands like 'make it work' and the budget is effectively $0?"
Grow a pair.
Seriously. You're not asserting yourself. You're letting your assistant sup do whatever they want with your budget. And he/she's probably doing it because you're not putting your foot down.
I work in a small rural school as a tech coordinator, so from my experience, let me gather a few facts from your post. First thing's first: if you have an assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction, your district's not small, as in small-small. Practically any district that's less than 2,000 students K-12 won't have any assistant superintendents. Maybe you're not LAUSD, but you're not small. Given those numbers, you are probably not the only guy in your IT department, either. I'd give a rough estimate of somewhere between 500 to 1,500 machines in your district. Long story short, your district has money. Maybe it's not flowing to your department, but your district has money.
Now, those machines need support, or they fail. Support costs money, both in parts and in human resources. You can easily communicate to your asst sup the poor return on investment he/she will get if they continue to underfund your department. If you want to illustrate the point more clearly, grab a faulty power supply out of your storage room (not one that fails outright, but one that has some inconsistent rails and a good heaping of dust bunnies to cause overheating), break into your sup's office and swap power supplies. When he/she calls you back the next day to complain, explain how you don't have any funding to repair the computer.
But that's the passive-aggressive approach. What you really should do is get in there and assert to the ignoramus that poor purchasing decisions and lack of funding are diminishing the quality of the tech equipment in the building. If you want to be professional about it, cite observations you've made about increased demands on the computer resources over the last few years and increasing complaints from teachers and staff about how current tech is not meeting those needs. Explain the financial angle of how failure to comply with software licensing issues can be very detrimental long-term. Explain how buying equipment incompatible with the current infrastructure is a waste of money and human resources.
And if he/she doesn't listen, go to the superintendent directly. If he/she doesn't listen, go to the school board. And if they don't listen, go to a different school.
But seriously, grow a pair.
I hope they have a huge successful IPO.
I hope the share price takes off like a rocket.
I hope the Koch brothers and every other Gordon Gekko pumps their "hard-earned money" into the stock.
And then I hope that it tanks harder than MySpace in the hands of Rupert Murdoch.
Superintendent Luna is quoted as saying, the computer 'becomes the textbook for every class, the research device, the advanced math calculator, the word processor and the portal to a world of information.'
Here's the only question that matters: What research-based evidence supports this view that a computer is a better and more effective medium for accessing this information than the present status quo of books, the library, the handheld calculator, and a desktop computer?
Because, to put it in terms of business, if there isn't a decent Return-On-Investment with buying all this tech, than no citizen or politician should put money up to invest.
First, they cite the wrong exam. This school board member was not complaining about the National Assessment of Educational Progress test, but rather the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, or FCAT. (The NAEP test adjusts the skill level of its questions on the fly as you're taking the exam, and returns a score that is percentile-based. I'd actually like to see what this board member scores on the NAEP...it's a very good metric that can be used to measure one's skill level, and is not biased or corrupted by political influence.)
Second, the sample questions are misleading. Not only are they "4th grade" & "8th grade" leveled questions (not the 10th grade exam that this board member was complaining about), but even those questions are not as difficult as you will commonly find on a state exam. If you want to see the types of questions on the FCAT, you can look at the item sampler here.
I work in Education up in Minnesota. As you can see on page 13 of this report, there is a downward trend across grade levels in "percent proficiency." While the average joe might conclude that most 3rd grade teachers are fantastic while most 11th grade math teachers need to be fired, the skeptic while (rightfully) question the validity of the test. For example, on that table, you'll see that all the 2011 results are about 10-12% lower than their previous years (except the 11th grade). That's because, in 3rd - 8th grade that year, the state moved to a newer, more difficult exam which emphasizes heavier Algebraic understanding (with completion of Algebra I by 8th grade). Because the standards became more difficult, scores dropped. But the uninformed Joe would just conclude that teachers are getting lazier and use these results as a way to blame schools for not doing their job. (These changes to the standards have not affected the 11th grade yet, but will in two more years.)
I personally coached students for and administered the 11th grade exam last year at my school. The questions on the exam are not simple. Rather than throw traditional skill-based questions at you, the questions are worded in a very complex manner, requiring a deep level of understanding of the skills required to solve the problem in order to recognize which skills are required to solve the problem, much like that FCAT exam I linked to above. This test is not a valid metric of what students know or don't know; I saw one student personally who had no problems with the worksheets I provided him during our coaching sessions, but bombed the exam, not because he was stupid, but because he gets severe test anxiety. Other students told me that they just didn't understand what many of the questions were asking them to calculate.
The upper-level state exams are engineered to fail students, so that schools can be labeled failures. Particular politicians want schools to appear as though they are not doing a good job, to validate the privatization of our educational system. While you hear the expression "raising the bar," what they are really doing is increasing the failure rate. It's absurd what kids are being asked to accomplish; cognitive science has shown that what kindergartners and 1st grade students really should be doing is playing and reading, and we're trying to sit them down and teach them Algebra skills. (If you don't believe me, ask a 1st grade teacher in the state of Minnesota...even 1st grade standards now are engineered to incorporate "Algebraic thinking".) It's downright ludicrous, and it's all a political game.
MIT’s chip — all 400 transistors (pictured below) — is dedicated to modeling every biological caveat in a single synapse. “We now have a way to capture each and every ionic process that’s going on in a neuron,” says Chi-Sang Poon, an MIT researcher who worked on the project.
Just because you finally can recognize the letters of the alphabet doesn't mean you can speak the language.
As a user:
1) It works. Pretty well.
2) It's supported by 99% of software makers
3) It works. Pretty well.
As an administrator:
1) Active Directory
2) It works. Pretty well.
3) Active Directory
For-profit schools. Shut them down. Period.
The average annual tuition for for-profit schools this year is about $14,000. Public four-year colleges charge, on average, $7,605 per year in tuition and fees for in-state students. What's worse is this: The default rate on student loans from for-profit institutions is 15%, while the default rate at public universities is only 7.2 percent (same source).
For-profit schools are milking the American taxpayer for money. Just walk into any one of these schools, tell them you want to be a nurse / chef / accountant / whatever, and they'll lay down a student loan form for you to sign before you could even say "Herbie Hancock." Because, at least with the present law, once a for-profit school gets their money from Uncle Sam, it's theirs, no strings attached. I'd almost call it fraud, except those students who enroll in a for-profit school actually do get something in return, even if it is a sorry-excuse of a half-ass education. (PBS did an excellent documentary a year back on for-profit schools, particularly exposing the "value" of a diploma one gets from these crooks. You can watch it here.)
What's sad is that there's a really simple solution to all this: require a for-profit school to assume some of the risk. If we required a for-profit school to pay back even just 50% of the loan that was defaulted on, you'd see the default rate decrease overnight.
Windows trying to release Windows 8 with its tablet shell interface on a mainstream PC makes about as much sense as Apple release iPads with a command line shell. Here's what I mean; watch this video (starting at minutes 15) where the presenter tries to show how Windows 8 is just as easy to use on a laptop as it is on a tablet. It makes no sense for any user to have to move the mouse around that much just to get to the object they want to select. Microsoft needs to stop taking this silly "one-size-fits-all" approach with its OS. Make one OS for the enterprise, another for laptops (primary PC machine purchased nowadays by home consumers), and another for tablets. Tailor the shell to fit the machine, not force the machine to fit into the shell.
Now, while I still have my administrative gripes about Windows 7 (bloated size of WinSxS directory, unable to easily unlock a workstation locked by a user, behavior of & driver support for legacy devices, etc.), but I would still recommend that Windows keep selling Windows 7 for the enterprise rather than try to force us to swallow Windows 8. We want something newer, and a lot of these gripes could be fixed w/ SP2. Stop with the one-size-fits-all crap. Market Windows 7 for the enterprise and tailor it for the enterprise. Let Windows 8 start and develop on tablets. If Windows 8 turns out to be a good OS on tablets, I would predict in a very short amount of time, laptops will start to ship w/ touch-screen interfaces to take advantage of the Windows 8 shell.
What is the primary purpose of hacking? Has this purpose remained constant over the decades, or has it changed from your rise as a hacker up to today?
Hedrick, the industrial minerals expert, says ... switching to thorium-driven cars would make the U.S. energy self-sufficient, and carbon emissions would plummet. “It would eliminate the major need for oil,” he says. “The main (remaining) demand would be for asphalt for roadways, natural gas, plastics and lubricants.”
Almost 50% of crude oil is unleaded gasoline. If we still refine crude for asphalt, plastics, etc., what do we do with all that unnecessary gasoline?
As I've read before on slashdot (and it bears repeating), portable devices are excellent content viewers, but terrible content creators. Good luck trying to do any of the following on a phone / tablet: edit the fine details of an image in PhotoShop (let alone find such a device powerful enough to even run PhotoShop), type up a report (attachable keyboards don't count, because then you may as well have a lightweight notebook), edit a spreadsheet, tweak the pixels in a bitmap file, program and debug code, edit video, etc.
Now, that's not to say that there isn't any room for evolution of the PC. I believe there's a good chance that PC mini-towers will go the way of the antique soon. I'd love to see manufacturers make mini-ITX the new case standard, use 2.5" disk drives instead of 3.5", use 35W processors over 65W or 95W, and cut the overall power requirements of a standard PC in half. (For those of you who would argue that that's not powerful enough, then how come notebooks, which have even lower performance and lower power requirements, have grown to nearly half the PC market?) Anyone wanting better video performance can always have a half-height PCIe video card added, and for the 10% or 20% that need something more powerful, they can always resort to a larger case.
An agreement has been reached, but it hasn't been passed by either the house or senate yet. (It's almost certain to pass the senate, as that's where the compromise originated. The house, on the other hand...well, we'll see.)
Yet, in the back of my mind, there was a part of me wondering whether an agreement would ever be reached. The conspiracy theory in me kept saying that there were enough rich fat cats who were paying off key congressmen to sabotage the process and make sure that no agreement was ever reached. Why? Because billions of dollars had been invested in credit-default swaps against the United States debt.