It may be the case that there are other problems; the system may not have the ability to change salaries en masse, and they may not have enough operators to change them manually in any reasonable amount of time. It may also be the case that they need to preserve the data of the current salaries while setting a temporary salary so they can restore the original salary later, and the system may not have any features for doing that. My guess would be it is a combination of these problems and probably others.
I think your last remark is something of an insult: I usually *am* the translator between client and programmers, and I'm very good at it, and my employers consistently cite it as being one of my best skills and extremely valuable to them. With 20 years of experience, I'd better have learned to be good at it by now.
My experience with asking clients what they want in a UI is that they tend to treat it not as the question "what do you think you would like", but rather, "please make me your slave and beat me until I deliver exactly what you have demanded." They get the grip of death on whatever they come up with, irrevocably convinced that their way is the best way and the only way and that any other way is wrong and bad and can not be accepted or even tried. By not asking them what they want to see in UI, and not showing them anything until I've worked out something workable that's very close to what can be delivered, I help them to keep an open mind until they can see something realistic, at which time they can provide feedback which is usually minimal.
That *is* a way of managing expectations; to help the client not to settle on detailed expectations until it's in their best interest to do so.
I am a programmer, and would like to offer my opinion.
DO NOT ASK THE USERS. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DO NOT ASK THE USERS.
Users don't have a damned clue about software design, and will always ask for something stupid. They might ask for something that seems simple to them but is hideously complex or impossible to implement (I once had a user calmly demand I should replace the entire complex app with a box where they could simply specify in english what they want and push the button and it would magically figure out what they said and do it) or they'll ask for something that sounds smart to them in theory but is actually really annoying to use and will make their life much harder if you deliver it.
A competent software engineer or UI design artist can reliably come up with something simpler and better organized and more implementable, every time.
Users should be asked what functionality they want the software to accomplish, not what it should look like.
Absolutely, this person's problem is not lack of software, it's too many people. Good UI comes from small groups of no more than two or three people (I try to pair an artist and a programmer), or one true visionary. Big groups with lots of people reviewing it tend to come up with nonsense like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kU9YeOQm3Y0
Or the idea of clicking a button labeled "Start" to shut down the computer.
The article says that the law would require institutions to verify that the person who did the work is the person who gets the degree. It does NOT in fact say that the law would require cameras in people's homes. That is merely one potential method which is presented, along with fingerprints and other techniques.
Having the person show up live to do their work and tests at a local institution would also presumably count.
You're right, but that flies in the face of contemporary management theory.
The way companies do it now is they "buy" the skills they want: they demand outrageous skill combinations, and don't settle until they get them. Then they offer the person the bare minimum they think they'll take, and plan to never promote them. At a management job I had a few years ago, I got told by senior management that my staff would never get promotions, because that would cost money, and that the employer didn't care if they left because of it, because we'd just replace them. (I started looking for a new job the next day. I didn't want a promotion, but I figured if they're that stupid I didn't want to be there.) I told them I preferred to hire junior people, who were cheaper and more malleable, train them up and them promote them to mid-level. They basically told me I was amusing.
Meanwhile, these employers who don't care if their people leave and will lay them off at the drop of a poor earnings report are the first to complain about "lack of company loyalty" among their employees. I've reached the point that if an employer complains to me about lack of company loyalty, I tell them outright that I have no more loyalty to them than they have to me, and explain to them that I base that assessment on how I've seen them treat their other people, and give examples.
Surprisingly, they've actually tried to keep me after that.
I wish I'd met you in some of my job interviews. I've found that in general, admitting to an employer that I don't already know everything about the language and have 20 Fortune 500 sites to show for it is the kiss of death.
When I hire technical people, I look for them to have some knowledge relationship to what we're doing (for example, when I was hiring a DBA to manage a sybase system, I didn't care if we got Oracle applicants, as long as they knew a little SQL), and I look for relatively junior people. I find when I hire senior people they tend to tell me everything will be fine, but then when they actually start work they want to throw out all my work so they can redo it with their pet technologies, while junior people will let me train them up to do it my way. And my way works for me. And junior people cost less.
There are relatively few programmers (or, for that matter, managers) who understand that a good programmer can just pick up the required technologies and deal with it, rather than having to hire specialists for every stupid language and format.
I've long since understood that the way to make money as a web developer is to get certified on the latest drivel that comes out of Microsoft, no matter how bad it is, and get jobs doing it. If you instead determine what is the best technology for each client/employer and use it, you'll get marginalized.
You're obviously joking, but I've had it happen to me. I actually had an incident in which the employer was requesting, for a mid level position, 2 years more experience in Java than were possible except for its creators: the JDK had been out for about 4 years at the time and they were asking for 6. I decided it was a simple error on their part and applied anyway. To my shock, I got an angry call from their HR department, who were actually calling to chew me out for applying even though I was "unqualified" for not having the required 6 years of experience. At first I thought it was a joke and laughed, but it became clear they were serious. I tried to explain to them that there were perhaps 7 people on earth with what they were asking for because the JDK had only been out for 4 years, but they were having none of it, and with some parting insults, hung up on me.
In all I'm glad I don't work for them, any company that stupid and unprofessional would not be good for my reputation to have on my resume.
There are always IT jobs. They suck, which is why they have such high turnover, which is why they're always available, but if you don't mind the work, and don't mind periodically changing employers, IT is a career path.
You could try studying database programming and get an entry-level DBA job. Frankly, SQL is not that hard as programming goes; you don't really construct big "programs", just little snippets of code to grab data from tables. You might find it easier than the programming you studied in college, and it can pay very well once you move up the ranks.
If you have an eye for business, you could try to become a project manager. Again, try to take a certificate class on it and look for an entry level job. Again, pay can be pretty good once you move up the ranks.
You could go into release management: basically the position takes code others have written and preps it for release, usually wrapping it with an installer, etc. You have to learn about how to configure particular installer products. It's technical, but not heavy in programming. It's also a relatively rare specialty, so it can pay very well. On the other hand, it's boring. But you might not care if the rest of your life is fulfilling.
And finally, you might just want to get a programming job and try it. College programming tends to be about "let's throw complicated tasks at the students to make them struggle and see how they cope." Real world programming tends to be a bit more simplistic and repetitive a lot of the time, you might find it easier than you think - especially in an entry-level job. You'd have a few years to get used to the level of programming in an entry-level position before you'd be able to move up to mid-level and get more complex tasks which you may or may not want. And, it wouldn't hurt your ability to transition into IT or QA or something like that later if you like.
YMMV. Apple tends to use very fast ram, and it's sometimes expensive. When planning a memory upgrade to my work laptop, I checked out what kind of ram apple was using and priced identical ram, and determined that the cost of me buying ram and installing it myself was only $15 less than the cost of paying Apple for the RAM and installation. So I paid Apple, because that way if anything goes wrong they can't just blame the ram and refuse to fix the problem. (Which I'd had happen in the past with third party ram.)
Yes, I could have bought cheaper ram. Yes, it might have worked. But, I wanted to ensure that the ram I bought was 100% up to Apple specs, and within those bounds, Apple wasn't expensive.
Why is it that people who have a little money never give a damn about people who don't?
YEAH YOU MORON WE F***ING KNOW WE"RE NOT AS VALUABLE NOW AS WE USED TO BE. DID IT EVER OCCUR TO YOU THAT WE STILL HAVE TO PAY THE BILLS AND FEED OUR FAMILIES?
When you have no job and the unemployment office says there's 98% unemployment in your field and you are facing eviction and maybe you have a kid to feed and an employer offers you a job but it comes with a non-compete that could *theoretically* put you out of work for 18 months someday in the future, YOU F***ING SIGN IT BECAUSE YOU HAVE NO CHOICE. DON'T WHINE AT US ABOUT SUPPLY AND DEMAND AND TELL US IT'S OUR FAULT.
First, your friend's compensation priced in this non-compete. If your friend didn't like it, he should have asked for more.
You obviously are too rich to have a clue.
There have been a number of times in the last couple decades when unemployment for geeks in Massachusetts was so high that you darned well took whatever job was offered to you because the alternative was starving. And if they said "sign this", you asked for a pen, not more money, because you damn well knew that the employer knew that there were 500 people desperate for the job you just got who would be delighted to sign if you wouldn't.
I had several periods of being unemployed for 18 months. I had one in which I lost my home and had to live on a friend's couch for six months. When I finally got a job, my employer advertised an open position for my staff, paying 1/4 of what the "market rate" for that job was, and they got 2000 applications.
Turning down a job over a non-compete is something people can do when times are great. For techies in Massachusetts, that hasn't always been an option lately.
I'm really surprised by this, because in 18 years of working in Massachusetts I've only ever been asked to sign a noncompete once, and it was only for three months, and I showed it to a lawyer and they advised me to go ahead and sign it on the grounds that it was not enforceable unless I quit. (The company ended up laying me off, and the boss threatened to sue me if I went to any of their competitors, but I told him what the lawyer said and left, and that was that.)
I also talk with many of my former colleagues, and they tell me hardly anyone asks for a non-compete here, and NDAs are usually verbal.
Non-competes may be *enforceable* here, but in practice I think hardly anyone actually uses them here.
I have a variety of photos etc that I care about a great deal and want to make sure they stay around.
I keep them on a hard disk, because I've had too many failures with optical media. (Fortunately, I kept backups of the optical media, and was able to recover my files, but sometimes the backups had failures too and I was just lucky that I was able to retrieve some files from the original and others from the backup.)
I then have a backup of the hard disk, on a duplicate hard disk. This backup occurs every other day by default, and I make it happen immediately after I add anything important to the primary. The backup disk is sometimes left off when not actively backing up, to try to give the two drives differing lifespans. Ultimately, I intend to replace this arrangement with a RAID 5 array, but I haven't had both time and money to put together my desired server.
Once a year, or as often as I feel like, my father and I meet and exchange backups of our photos so there is offsite storage. This is the cheap method, but it doesn't account for photos which have occurred since our last exchange. We may change to an online storage solution, after I get time to investigate services and pricing. (With about 50 gigs of photos each and growing rapidly, not counting home videos, it could get expensive.)
I don't know where *you* went to school, but in my school it didn't matter how you acted about your academic achievements, if you were a brain and not a jock you got beat up.
That means the few guys who were brains AND jocks were fine, but those who were brains who were quiet about it still got beat up.
The problem was not that the kids were smart, the problem was that we weren't part of the drug smoking, football playing, towel snapping crowd, and BECAUSE we were smart we had better (and more interesting) things to do than smoking drugs, playing football, and snapping towels so we weren't about to start. So we didn't fit in.
But you put a bunch of the brains together, and they fit in with each other.
I went through high school at a time when they didn't offer enough "advanced" level classes to keep me in them all day, so I got somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 "advanced" classes, all filled with brainiacs, and the rest "average" level classes.
What I can say is that in four years of it, 100% of the fights which occurred in my "advanced" classes consisted of harsh words, while a number of the fights in the other classes were physically violent. Frankly I don't think any of the smart kids would have considered actually having a fist fight with me. I never felt unsafe around them, like I did with everyone else. It was really night and day: I'd have a nice civilized lesson in calculus, then I'd walk to another classroom where a teacher tried in vain to teach about literature while a bunch of wild chimpanzees wearing reeboks and sitting at desks did everything but literally fling poo. (And if you'd mentioned it in front of them, I'm sure it would have been literal.) In some cases I ended up blowing up at my fellow "students", explaining to them that if they didn't shut up and let the teacher talk so I could learn the material before I had to take the test on it I'd beat them up - outbursts which the teachers quietly ignored. In other cases I gave up trying to deal with my "peers" and blew up directly at the teachers for not disciplining the animals and consequently allowing them to dominate the class and prevent all learning. While I expected to get sent to the office, I was surprised that it successfully shamed the teachers into kicking out some problem students who were in fact intolerable.
But I'm stunned that you think that how to keep bright people motivated in school is a problem without an obvious solution. YOU GIVE THEM CLASSES AT THEIR LEVEL AND SPEED. And yes, that inherently means they can't be in class with everyone else, they have to be put in classes for bright people. Oh, and one other thing: YOU MAKE SURE THEY DON'T GET BEAT UP. It's hard to stay motivated to do well in school when you get the crap beat out of you on a daily basis and the teachers you're supposed to be trying to please don't give a damn about it.
Oh, grow up. I didn't identify my friend because I don't like name dropping my friends in public - and this one in particular, because she's retired and leads a rather private life.
The poster to whom I replied said the OLPC is "useless" as a computer for a geek. I brought up an example of a geek who finds it useful. I trust her geek cred. There is a geek who uses and likes the OLPC. Argument disproved.
If I wanted to appeal to authority, I would have arranged a phone call with Negroponte and talked to him about it, and then posted the results. I don't need to impress you. You aren't important enough to me for me to want to bother trying to impress you.
It is clearly true, and past supreme court rulings on the subject have been entirely clear. The fact that Mr. Bush doesn't seem to give a damn about what the constitution says is another story. (Presently running on the front page, about guantanimo at the moment.)
I have a friend who is a serious geek, who was once behind some of the major open source projects many of us now use daily, who has an OLPC and loves it. It's not her primary computer, but she never intended it to be, and for the purposes she bought it for, she is very pleased with it.
I agree with you in observing that all the published commentary so far has indicated strongly that children seem very happy with and comfortable with the OLPCs, so the claim that they're too complex for children to use is highly questionable. I have a feeling that "they don't work because the team didn't take input from education professionals" actually translates to "education professionals are rejecting the OLPCs whether or not the computers and software are good because they didn't get to push the development team around."
Remember, contemporary education processes are all about complying with some ideology of how teaching should be done, not about actually successfully teaching kids.
That said, it seems to me that they'd lose their DMCA safe harbor status if they do this, because they are selectively censoring the content they carry.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, it's proof that COBOL has benefits: it's keeping salaries high!
It may be the case that there are other problems; the system may not have the ability to change salaries en masse, and they may not have enough operators to change them manually in any reasonable amount of time. It may also be the case that they need to preserve the data of the current salaries while setting a temporary salary so they can restore the original salary later, and the system may not have any features for doing that. My guess would be it is a combination of these problems and probably others.
I think your last remark is something of an insult: I usually *am* the translator between client and programmers, and I'm very good at it, and my employers consistently cite it as being one of my best skills and extremely valuable to them. With 20 years of experience, I'd better have learned to be good at it by now.
My experience with asking clients what they want in a UI is that they tend to treat it not as the question "what do you think you would like", but rather, "please make me your slave and beat me until I deliver exactly what you have demanded." They get the grip of death on whatever they come up with, irrevocably convinced that their way is the best way and the only way and that any other way is wrong and bad and can not be accepted or even tried. By not asking them what they want to see in UI, and not showing them anything until I've worked out something workable that's very close to what can be delivered, I help them to keep an open mind until they can see something realistic, at which time they can provide feedback which is usually minimal.
That *is* a way of managing expectations; to help the client not to settle on detailed expectations until it's in their best interest to do so.
I am a programmer, and would like to offer my opinion.
DO NOT ASK THE USERS. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DO NOT ASK THE USERS.
Users don't have a damned clue about software design, and will always ask for something stupid. They might ask for something that seems simple to them but is hideously complex or impossible to implement (I once had a user calmly demand I should replace the entire complex app with a box where they could simply specify in english what they want and push the button and it would magically figure out what they said and do it) or they'll ask for something that sounds smart to them in theory but is actually really annoying to use and will make their life much harder if you deliver it.
A competent software engineer or UI design artist can reliably come up with something simpler and better organized and more implementable, every time.
Users should be asked what functionality they want the software to accomplish, not what it should look like.
Absolutely, this person's problem is not lack of software, it's too many people. Good UI comes from small groups of no more than two or three people (I try to pair an artist and a programmer), or one true visionary. Big groups with lots of people reviewing it tend to come up with nonsense like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kU9YeOQm3Y0
Or the idea of clicking a button labeled "Start" to shut down the computer.
The article says that the law would require institutions to verify that the person who did the work is the person who gets the degree. It does NOT in fact say that the law would require cameras in people's homes. That is merely one potential method which is presented, along with fingerprints and other techniques.
Having the person show up live to do their work and tests at a local institution would also presumably count.
I call shenanigans on this article.
You're right, but that flies in the face of contemporary management theory.
The way companies do it now is they "buy" the skills they want: they demand outrageous skill combinations, and don't settle until they get them. Then they offer the person the bare minimum they think they'll take, and plan to never promote them. At a management job I had a few years ago, I got told by senior management that my staff would never get promotions, because that would cost money, and that the employer didn't care if they left because of it, because we'd just replace them. (I started looking for a new job the next day. I didn't want a promotion, but I figured if they're that stupid I didn't want to be there.) I told them I preferred to hire junior people, who were cheaper and more malleable, train them up and them promote them to mid-level. They basically told me I was amusing.
Meanwhile, these employers who don't care if their people leave and will lay them off at the drop of a poor earnings report are the first to complain about "lack of company loyalty" among their employees. I've reached the point that if an employer complains to me about lack of company loyalty, I tell them outright that I have no more loyalty to them than they have to me, and explain to them that I base that assessment on how I've seen them treat their other people, and give examples.
Surprisingly, they've actually tried to keep me after that.
I wish I'd met you in some of my job interviews. I've found that in general, admitting to an employer that I don't already know everything about the language and have 20 Fortune 500 sites to show for it is the kiss of death.
When I hire technical people, I look for them to have some knowledge relationship to what we're doing (for example, when I was hiring a DBA to manage a sybase system, I didn't care if we got Oracle applicants, as long as they knew a little SQL), and I look for relatively junior people. I find when I hire senior people they tend to tell me everything will be fine, but then when they actually start work they want to throw out all my work so they can redo it with their pet technologies, while junior people will let me train them up to do it my way. And my way works for me. And junior people cost less.
There are relatively few programmers (or, for that matter, managers) who understand that a good programmer can just pick up the required technologies and deal with it, rather than having to hire specialists for every stupid language and format.
I've long since understood that the way to make money as a web developer is to get certified on the latest drivel that comes out of Microsoft, no matter how bad it is, and get jobs doing it. If you instead determine what is the best technology for each client/employer and use it, you'll get marginalized.
You're obviously joking, but I've had it happen to me. I actually had an incident in which the employer was requesting, for a mid level position, 2 years more experience in Java than were possible except for its creators: the JDK had been out for about 4 years at the time and they were asking for 6. I decided it was a simple error on their part and applied anyway. To my shock, I got an angry call from their HR department, who were actually calling to chew me out for applying even though I was "unqualified" for not having the required 6 years of experience. At first I thought it was a joke and laughed, but it became clear they were serious. I tried to explain to them that there were perhaps 7 people on earth with what they were asking for because the JDK had only been out for 4 years, but they were having none of it, and with some parting insults, hung up on me.
In all I'm glad I don't work for them, any company that stupid and unprofessional would not be good for my reputation to have on my resume.
There are always IT jobs. They suck, which is why they have such high turnover, which is why they're always available, but if you don't mind the work, and don't mind periodically changing employers, IT is a career path.
You could try studying database programming and get an entry-level DBA job. Frankly, SQL is not that hard as programming goes; you don't really construct big "programs", just little snippets of code to grab data from tables. You might find it easier than the programming you studied in college, and it can pay very well once you move up the ranks.
If you have an eye for business, you could try to become a project manager. Again, try to take a certificate class on it and look for an entry level job. Again, pay can be pretty good once you move up the ranks.
You could go into release management: basically the position takes code others have written and preps it for release, usually wrapping it with an installer, etc. You have to learn about how to configure particular installer products. It's technical, but not heavy in programming. It's also a relatively rare specialty, so it can pay very well. On the other hand, it's boring. But you might not care if the rest of your life is fulfilling.
And finally, you might just want to get a programming job and try it. College programming tends to be about "let's throw complicated tasks at the students to make them struggle and see how they cope." Real world programming tends to be a bit more simplistic and repetitive a lot of the time, you might find it easier than you think - especially in an entry-level job. You'd have a few years to get used to the level of programming in an entry-level position before you'd be able to move up to mid-level and get more complex tasks which you may or may not want. And, it wouldn't hurt your ability to transition into IT or QA or something like that later if you like.
YMMV. Apple tends to use very fast ram, and it's sometimes expensive. When planning a memory upgrade to my work laptop, I checked out what kind of ram apple was using and priced identical ram, and determined that the cost of me buying ram and installing it myself was only $15 less than the cost of paying Apple for the RAM and installation. So I paid Apple, because that way if anything goes wrong they can't just blame the ram and refuse to fix the problem. (Which I'd had happen in the past with third party ram.)
Yes, I could have bought cheaper ram. Yes, it might have worked. But, I wanted to ensure that the ram I bought was 100% up to Apple specs, and within those bounds, Apple wasn't expensive.
Why is it that people who have a little money never give a damn about people who don't?
YEAH YOU MORON WE F***ING KNOW WE"RE NOT AS VALUABLE NOW AS WE USED TO BE. DID IT EVER OCCUR TO YOU THAT WE STILL HAVE TO PAY THE BILLS AND FEED OUR FAMILIES?
When you have no job and the unemployment office says there's 98% unemployment in your field and you are facing eviction and maybe you have a kid to feed and an employer offers you a job but it comes with a non-compete that could *theoretically* put you out of work for 18 months someday in the future, YOU F***ING SIGN IT BECAUSE YOU HAVE NO CHOICE. DON'T WHINE AT US ABOUT SUPPLY AND DEMAND AND TELL US IT'S OUR FAULT.
There have been a number of times in the last couple decades when unemployment for geeks in Massachusetts was so high that you darned well took whatever job was offered to you because the alternative was starving. And if they said "sign this", you asked for a pen, not more money, because you damn well knew that the employer knew that there were 500 people desperate for the job you just got who would be delighted to sign if you wouldn't.
I had several periods of being unemployed for 18 months. I had one in which I lost my home and had to live on a friend's couch for six months. When I finally got a job, my employer advertised an open position for my staff, paying 1/4 of what the "market rate" for that job was, and they got 2000 applications.
Turning down a job over a non-compete is something people can do when times are great. For techies in Massachusetts, that hasn't always been an option lately.
I'm really surprised by this, because in 18 years of working in Massachusetts I've only ever been asked to sign a noncompete once, and it was only for three months, and I showed it to a lawyer and they advised me to go ahead and sign it on the grounds that it was not enforceable unless I quit. (The company ended up laying me off, and the boss threatened to sue me if I went to any of their competitors, but I told him what the lawyer said and left, and that was that.)
I also talk with many of my former colleagues, and they tell me hardly anyone asks for a non-compete here, and NDAs are usually verbal.
Non-competes may be *enforceable* here, but in practice I think hardly anyone actually uses them here.
I have a variety of photos etc that I care about a great deal and want to make sure they stay around.
I keep them on a hard disk, because I've had too many failures with optical media. (Fortunately, I kept backups of the optical media, and was able to recover my files, but sometimes the backups had failures too and I was just lucky that I was able to retrieve some files from the original and others from the backup.)
I then have a backup of the hard disk, on a duplicate hard disk. This backup occurs every other day by default, and I make it happen immediately after I add anything important to the primary. The backup disk is sometimes left off when not actively backing up, to try to give the two drives differing lifespans. Ultimately, I intend to replace this arrangement with a RAID 5 array, but I haven't had both time and money to put together my desired server.
Once a year, or as often as I feel like, my father and I meet and exchange backups of our photos so there is offsite storage. This is the cheap method, but it doesn't account for photos which have occurred since our last exchange. We may change to an online storage solution, after I get time to investigate services and pricing. (With about 50 gigs of photos each and growing rapidly, not counting home videos, it could get expensive.)
I don't know where *you* went to school, but in my school it didn't matter how you acted about your academic achievements, if you were a brain and not a jock you got beat up.
That means the few guys who were brains AND jocks were fine, but those who were brains who were quiet about it still got beat up.
The problem was not that the kids were smart, the problem was that we weren't part of the drug smoking, football playing, towel snapping crowd, and BECAUSE we were smart we had better (and more interesting) things to do than smoking drugs, playing football, and snapping towels so we weren't about to start. So we didn't fit in.
But you put a bunch of the brains together, and they fit in with each other.
I went through high school at a time when they didn't offer enough "advanced" level classes to keep me in them all day, so I got somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 "advanced" classes, all filled with brainiacs, and the rest "average" level classes.
What I can say is that in four years of it, 100% of the fights which occurred in my "advanced" classes consisted of harsh words, while a number of the fights in the other classes were physically violent. Frankly I don't think any of the smart kids would have considered actually having a fist fight with me. I never felt unsafe around them, like I did with everyone else. It was really night and day: I'd have a nice civilized lesson in calculus, then I'd walk to another classroom where a teacher tried in vain to teach about literature while a bunch of wild chimpanzees wearing reeboks and sitting at desks did everything but literally fling poo. (And if you'd mentioned it in front of them, I'm sure it would have been literal.) In some cases I ended up blowing up at my fellow "students", explaining to them that if they didn't shut up and let the teacher talk so I could learn the material before I had to take the test on it I'd beat them up - outbursts which the teachers quietly ignored. In other cases I gave up trying to deal with my "peers" and blew up directly at the teachers for not disciplining the animals and consequently allowing them to dominate the class and prevent all learning. While I expected to get sent to the office, I was surprised that it successfully shamed the teachers into kicking out some problem students who were in fact intolerable.
But I'm stunned that you think that how to keep bright people motivated in school is a problem without an obvious solution. YOU GIVE THEM CLASSES AT THEIR LEVEL AND SPEED. And yes, that inherently means they can't be in class with everyone else, they have to be put in classes for bright people. Oh, and one other thing: YOU MAKE SURE THEY DON'T GET BEAT UP. It's hard to stay motivated to do well in school when you get the crap beat out of you on a daily basis and the teachers you're supposed to be trying to please don't give a damn about it.
Where are the DNS root servers?
Hint: That's the country where the courts have the final say.
If they knew how to do that, they'd be software developers, not education professonals.
Oh, grow up. I didn't identify my friend because I don't like name dropping my friends in public - and this one in particular, because she's retired and leads a rather private life.
The poster to whom I replied said the OLPC is "useless" as a computer for a geek. I brought up an example of a geek who finds it useful. I trust her geek cred. There is a geek who uses and likes the OLPC. Argument disproved.
If I wanted to appeal to authority, I would have arranged a phone call with Negroponte and talked to him about it, and then posted the results. I don't need to impress you. You aren't important enough to me for me to want to bother trying to impress you.
Thank you for the obvious statement of the day. I hadn't noticed that RMS isn't the only geek on earth. Thanks for pointing this out for me.
It is clearly true, and past supreme court rulings on the subject have been entirely clear. The fact that Mr. Bush doesn't seem to give a damn about what the constitution says is another story. (Presently running on the front page, about guantanimo at the moment.)
I didn't say they did.
I have a friend who is a serious geek, who was once behind some of the major open source projects many of us now use daily, who has an OLPC and loves it. It's not her primary computer, but she never intended it to be, and for the purposes she bought it for, she is very pleased with it.
I agree with you in observing that all the published commentary so far has indicated strongly that children seem very happy with and comfortable with the OLPCs, so the claim that they're too complex for children to use is highly questionable. I have a feeling that "they don't work because the team didn't take input from education professionals" actually translates to "education professionals are rejecting the OLPCs whether or not the computers and software are good because they didn't get to push the development team around."
Remember, contemporary education processes are all about complying with some ideology of how teaching should be done, not about actually successfully teaching kids.
That said, it seems to me that they'd lose their DMCA safe harbor status if they do this, because they are selectively censoring the content they carry.