Since this is a closed environment for a scientific study, it would make sense for them to use viruses which spread via exploits that they know are present.
It's not all that difficult to set up a system where you log in, click on a course to launch it, and the course communicates with the LMS. That's only one small part of the LMS though, there are a lot of managerial things to set up also.
I've worked for the same company for the past 7 years, the core business of the company is producing online training courses but when I started we did have an LMS also that we built. At the time it was on version 5, and had started as a research project for Intel in 1998. It was written in ASP/VBScript, and used a SQL Server database. Through 5 versions it had never had a formal design document, every single feature was just added in somewhere when a customer asked for it. One of my first big LMS projects here was working on version 6, which was the first version to support SCORM in addition to AICC. After a while I finally got my boss to agree to let me redesign and rewrite the LMS from the ground up, and we finally got a customer who was willing to help fund it. So, about 3000 man-hours later, we've got version 7 (7.1.8 at this point) which runs on PHP/MySQL and uses the ExtJS framework for the interface, which I actually did create a design document and database structure for before beginning development.
The course launching and tracking parts didn't take that long to develop. SCORM takes a little while to set up, but AICC is pretty quick. But logging into the main admin area gives you a menu with these items:
Users - see all users (students, instructors, user group admins, sub-admins, main admins), add/edit/delete users, assign users to content, assign users to user groups.
Registration fields - custom user demographic fields, 30 total, each can be a text field, number field, date field, or dropdown list, with basic validation and various options for whether the students can fill them out or change them, only admins can, if they can be used to sort in the user list, etc.
User Groups - users are divided into groups, each user can be a member of 0 or more groups, groups are nested in a tree structure, you can manually assign users or user group admins to a group, specify which content or content groups a user group has access to, specify rules to automatically assign users to groups based on the custom registration fields. Autoassignments are a big part, if you have a user register and they put in maybe a certain country for one of their fields, you can set up a rule to automatically assign them to a certain user group that gives them access to certain content without the admin needing to assign it to them manually.
Content - add/edit/remove online training, online tests (the LMS has a test creator for creating T/F, multiple choice, or essay tests), classroom training, or other online resources. Content is grouped into categories in a folder structure, there are various "wizards" to upload or edit the content.
Content groups - similar content can be grouped together, making it easier to assign entire courses of study to a user or user group.
Classrooms - set up physical locations for classroom training.
Classroom sessions - set up a session for a certain classroom course to be taught at a certain location with a certain instructor at a certain date/time. Students can register for and drop out of class sessions, emails get sent to give them information about the waiting list, location, etc.
Record Entry - admins can manually enter training records for students.
News & Updates - admins can set up news stories announcing new courses or whatever, news stories can apply to user groups so that when a user logs in they see news from their groups.
Reports - many, many reports for the admins.
General settings - various options, split up into 6 categories (Login, Passwords, Users, Email, General Admin, User Group Admin).
Admin Tools - "advanced" tools to do things like upload LMS interface graphics, check on what a user has access to and how they got access to it, delete records, etc.
If you're seriously considering replacement options, I'm the designer and developer for another LMS that is AICC/SCORM compatible (single-SCO courses at this time) and includes registration and tracking for classroom-based courses in addition to the online stuff. Communication is pretty much one-way though, the students don't have a way to submit materials to instructors. The feature set is purely customer-driven, every feature the LMS has is there because someone asked for it. Anyway, I'm currently adding features to version 7 of the LMS, which I redesigned and rewrote from the previous versions to run on a PHP/MySQL platform and make use of the ExtJS framework for the interface (so it's heavy on Javascript). Our largest client installation has just over 70,000 total users and about 54,000 active students, with 350,000 training records representing 177,000 hours of tracked training. So, if you're in a position to make recommendations, you can find our website at tracorp.com. The website is being redesigned and focuses almost entirely on courseware production as opposed to the LMS software, but you can contact us through the site if you want to schedule an LMS demo.
Clearly. FYI, but not everybody lives in the middle of the continent. The vast majority of the population lives on the two coasts, not in the middle. Kansas specifically has a relatively sparse population. A better location would be somewhere in North Dakota, where you've got the smallest population density in the continental US and the cold would also help alleviate any spread.
The little island off the NY coast is a -good- place.
Maybe so, if you ignore the fact that it's next door to the largest population center in North America.
But hey, I'm "flamebait" for suggesting that this kind of stunning stupidity is BUSINESS AS USUAL
No, you're flamebait for suggesting that any single political party, and all of its constituents, is to blame for the general stupidity coming out of the government. Not to mention that you assume the constituents of any party actually want to see stupidity from the government. That's why you're flamebait.
Speech 3.0: Fully-hosted, commercial strength SLAs, proven scale and reliability - no CapEx. Scales on demand to 150m capacity
So Speech 3.0 provides 150 meters of service-level agreements with no experience-point cap.
Voice 3.0: Superior and proven range of voice products. We repeatedly deliver great, mass-market experiences with our expertise in marketing and management of all lifecycle stages.
Voice 3.0 takes you from larva, through pupa, all the way to butterfly, and then you die and get eaten.
Business 3.0: Mature yet flexible business models - designed to adapt to the dynamics of service brands we partner with, from on-demand to full lifecycle revenue strategies
Business 3.0 is apparently a flexible business model where they interact with their partners. So that's new I guess, no one has thought of that yet. It's also where people who write marketing buzzwords go to die.
Visible in this context doesn't mean perceptible, it's describing the wavelength, not the intensity. The light is very low intensity that has a wavelength within the visible spectrum.
Actually it's a pretty good analogy. The guy is collecting stolen personal information and then charging people to find out if he has their information. That's pretty equivalent to buying up stolen property and then charging people to find out if you have their stuff. Not real sure how that's spinning anything. Thanks for the vote of confidence though.
No, you don't understand, that's not what this fine ex-cop is doing. It would be equivalent if you went around buying everyone's stolen goods, and then in order to recoup that cost, you charged people for the privilege of knowing whether or not their goods were stolen.
Sorry, if you're 998 hours into a project before you start testing things with various platforms, you've already hosed the project up. Testing happens from the beginning. Like Clairvoyant says, there's no excuse. It's not about context, it's about execution. I've developed several extremely large Javascript/CSS-based applications that work just fine in any browser because I actually bothered to continue testing them as the project was moving forward, instead of waiting until I was out of hours to start testing. That's simply the sign of a lazy, incompetent developer.
Again, like Clairvoyant said, it's not fucking rocket science.
You're right, small companies and organizations are insignificant. Something as pitiful as the Mozilla foundation or the FSF, not even to mention the insignificant likes of GNU, pale in comparison to the might of Microsoft. Yeah, it's all about big, big corporations, the bigger the better right? Right?
You are missing the point. Developers wants their cake and eat it. they want both a cheap way of distributing their apps with low level of piracy and complete freedom to publish whatever they want whenever they want. This is just not compatible.
You're missing my point. Developers want more than that, but they only get what Apple has decided to give them, and nothing else. Many developers want to distribute their own applications, but that's not even an option. Many applications are free where piracy is not a concern. Moreover, it's not expensive to self-publish and distribute things on your own web space.
The point is not that Apple is giving developers a good option for distribution. The point is that Apple is dictating what the single option is, and you can either like it or love it. No other choices, sorry, unless you want to break your phone. It would be a completely different story if the app store was one possible distribution channel instead of the only one, but that's not the type of environment Apple wants to promote. They want themselves to be the single point of distribution for applications.
If you like a comparison, assume that there was a single recognized stock broker for the entire country that everyone who wanted to play the market needed to use. It may be that in the long term people would realize there must be a better way and that changes need to be made but we are not there yet.
How about not needing a store at all? How about visiting the developer's website to download and install their application the exact same way every computer user has been installing applications since the internet came into use? How about not needing to break your phone in order to use it the way you want to use it? It's all well and good that a member of the 4-digit UID club can unlock their phone, but the vast majority of iPhone owners either don't want to risk that, or don't even know it's possible. When you defend the Apple app store, which has quite a few junk applications itself (unless iFart is really your bag of tea), and is missing quite a few innovative applications that don't meet one or more Apple guidelines, by citing another store that has even lower-quality applications available, what exactly are you defending?
What if the subject of the discussion is the reason why it doesn't relate to me? i.e., what if the poorly-conceived App store is the main reason stopping someone from getting an iPhone?
Slashdot Mirror
Since this is a closed environment for a scientific study, it would make sense for them to use viruses which spread via exploits that they know are present.
It's not all that difficult to set up a system where you log in, click on a course to launch it, and the course communicates with the LMS. That's only one small part of the LMS though, there are a lot of managerial things to set up also.
I've worked for the same company for the past 7 years, the core business of the company is producing online training courses but when I started we did have an LMS also that we built. At the time it was on version 5, and had started as a research project for Intel in 1998. It was written in ASP/VBScript, and used a SQL Server database. Through 5 versions it had never had a formal design document, every single feature was just added in somewhere when a customer asked for it. One of my first big LMS projects here was working on version 6, which was the first version to support SCORM in addition to AICC. After a while I finally got my boss to agree to let me redesign and rewrite the LMS from the ground up, and we finally got a customer who was willing to help fund it. So, about 3000 man-hours later, we've got version 7 (7.1.8 at this point) which runs on PHP/MySQL and uses the ExtJS framework for the interface, which I actually did create a design document and database structure for before beginning development.
The course launching and tracking parts didn't take that long to develop. SCORM takes a little while to set up, but AICC is pretty quick. But logging into the main admin area gives you a menu with these items:
Users - see all users (students, instructors, user group admins, sub-admins, main admins), add/edit/delete users, assign users to content, assign users to user groups.
Registration fields - custom user demographic fields, 30 total, each can be a text field, number field, date field, or dropdown list, with basic validation and various options for whether the students can fill them out or change them, only admins can, if they can be used to sort in the user list, etc.
User Groups - users are divided into groups, each user can be a member of 0 or more groups, groups are nested in a tree structure, you can manually assign users or user group admins to a group, specify which content or content groups a user group has access to, specify rules to automatically assign users to groups based on the custom registration fields. Autoassignments are a big part, if you have a user register and they put in maybe a certain country for one of their fields, you can set up a rule to automatically assign them to a certain user group that gives them access to certain content without the admin needing to assign it to them manually.
Content - add/edit/remove online training, online tests (the LMS has a test creator for creating T/F, multiple choice, or essay tests), classroom training, or other online resources. Content is grouped into categories in a folder structure, there are various "wizards" to upload or edit the content.
Content groups - similar content can be grouped together, making it easier to assign entire courses of study to a user or user group.
Classrooms - set up physical locations for classroom training.
Classroom sessions - set up a session for a certain classroom course to be taught at a certain location with a certain instructor at a certain date/time. Students can register for and drop out of class sessions, emails get sent to give them information about the waiting list, location, etc.
Record Entry - admins can manually enter training records for students.
News & Updates - admins can set up news stories announcing new courses or whatever, news stories can apply to user groups so that when a user logs in they see news from their groups.
Reports - many, many reports for the admins.
General settings - various options, split up into 6 categories (Login, Passwords, Users, Email, General Admin, User Group Admin).
Admin Tools - "advanced" tools to do things like upload LMS interface graphics, check on what a user has access to and how they got access to it, delete records, etc.
Oh yeah: we're also a small company that has no affiliation at all to Blackboard.
If you're seriously considering replacement options, I'm the designer and developer for another LMS that is AICC/SCORM compatible (single-SCO courses at this time) and includes registration and tracking for classroom-based courses in addition to the online stuff. Communication is pretty much one-way though, the students don't have a way to submit materials to instructors. The feature set is purely customer-driven, every feature the LMS has is there because someone asked for it. Anyway, I'm currently adding features to version 7 of the LMS, which I redesigned and rewrote from the previous versions to run on a PHP/MySQL platform and make use of the ExtJS framework for the interface (so it's heavy on Javascript). Our largest client installation has just over 70,000 total users and about 54,000 active students, with 350,000 training records representing 177,000 hours of tracked training. So, if you're in a position to make recommendations, you can find our website at tracorp.com. The website is being redesigned and focuses almost entirely on courseware production as opposed to the LMS software, but you can contact us through the site if you want to schedule an LMS demo.
I'm not even trained
Clearly. FYI, but not everybody lives in the middle of the continent. The vast majority of the population lives on the two coasts, not in the middle. Kansas specifically has a relatively sparse population. A better location would be somewhere in North Dakota, where you've got the smallest population density in the continental US and the cold would also help alleviate any spread.
The little island off the NY coast is a -good- place.
Maybe so, if you ignore the fact that it's next door to the largest population center in North America.
But hey, I'm "flamebait" for suggesting that this kind of stunning stupidity is BUSINESS AS USUAL
No, you're flamebait for suggesting that any single political party, and all of its constituents, is to blame for the general stupidity coming out of the government. Not to mention that you assume the constituents of any party actually want to see stupidity from the government. That's why you're flamebait.
If I wanted to disallow AT&T users into a server, could I order a DDoS attack?
If you "order a DDoS attack" on a server, it's going to block access for a lot more than just AT&T users.
BS. Apple could label it "PREVENTS HACKERS!" and people would flock to the upgrade.
..even the "hackers"? I think that if you're using a Pre, you're not into the whole reality distortion thing in the first place.
Why as a consumer would I be so dumb as to buy a palm if my itunes only worked intermittently or had no assured path forward.
Well you're already dumb enough to use iTunes in the first place, so why not?
Yeah, I'm sure they use a pretty sweet algorithm.
can_translate = false;
if (!can_translate) // call Egypt
{
}
It knows when it can't translate it! Which turns out to be always.
Holy crap, that made my eyes cross.
From their PDF:
Speech 3.0: Fully-hosted, commercial strength SLAs, proven scale and reliability - no CapEx. Scales on demand to 150m capacity
So Speech 3.0 provides 150 meters of service-level agreements with no experience-point cap.
Voice 3.0: Superior and proven range of voice products. We repeatedly deliver great, mass-market experiences with our expertise in marketing and management of all lifecycle stages.
Voice 3.0 takes you from larva, through pupa, all the way to butterfly, and then you die and get eaten.
Business 3.0: Mature yet flexible business models - designed to adapt to the dynamics of service brands we partner with, from on-demand to full lifecycle revenue strategies
Business 3.0 is apparently a flexible business model where they interact with their partners. So that's new I guess, no one has thought of that yet. It's also where people who write marketing buzzwords go to die.
But it also knows what it doesn't know and is able to call on human experts for assistance.
http://www.spinvox.com/how_it_works.html
I think vacuum-filled tube spheres are a great idea. Get on that and report back how it goes.
Visible in this context doesn't mean perceptible, it's describing the wavelength, not the intensity. The light is very low intensity that has a wavelength within the visible spectrum.
Actually it's a pretty good analogy. The guy is collecting stolen personal information and then charging people to find out if he has their information. That's pretty equivalent to buying up stolen property and then charging people to find out if you have their stuff. Not real sure how that's spinning anything. Thanks for the vote of confidence though.
Saw Tool last night BTW.
Slashdot: News for Nerds, and also XPeter
No, you don't understand, that's not what this fine ex-cop is doing. It would be equivalent if you went around buying everyone's stolen goods, and then in order to recoup that cost, you charged people for the privilege of knowing whether or not their goods were stolen.
Expand the acronym:
Is your personal identification number number personal?
Sorry, if you're 998 hours into a project before you start testing things with various platforms, you've already hosed the project up. Testing happens from the beginning. Like Clairvoyant says, there's no excuse. It's not about context, it's about execution. I've developed several extremely large Javascript/CSS-based applications that work just fine in any browser because I actually bothered to continue testing them as the project was moving forward, instead of waiting until I was out of hours to start testing. That's simply the sign of a lazy, incompetent developer.
Again, like Clairvoyant said, it's not fucking rocket science.
You're right, small companies and organizations are insignificant. Something as pitiful as the Mozilla foundation or the FSF, not even to mention the insignificant likes of GNU, pale in comparison to the might of Microsoft. Yeah, it's all about big, big corporations, the bigger the better right? Right?
This may come as a shock to you, but when Mozilla orders servers, they don't write the OS themselves.
Oh, they tested it. It works great with IE. But something tells me they didn't understand who their prospective customer was.
You are missing the point. Developers wants their cake and eat it. they want both a cheap way of distributing their apps with low level of piracy and complete freedom to publish whatever they want whenever they want. This is just not compatible.
You're missing my point. Developers want more than that, but they only get what Apple has decided to give them, and nothing else. Many developers want to distribute their own applications, but that's not even an option. Many applications are free where piracy is not a concern. Moreover, it's not expensive to self-publish and distribute things on your own web space.
The point is not that Apple is giving developers a good option for distribution. The point is that Apple is dictating what the single option is, and you can either like it or love it. No other choices, sorry, unless you want to break your phone. It would be a completely different story if the app store was one possible distribution channel instead of the only one, but that's not the type of environment Apple wants to promote. They want themselves to be the single point of distribution for applications.
If you like a comparison, assume that there was a single recognized stock broker for the entire country that everyone who wanted to play the market needed to use. It may be that in the long term people would realize there must be a better way and that changes need to be made but we are not there yet.
How about not needing a store at all? How about visiting the developer's website to download and install their application the exact same way every computer user has been installing applications since the internet came into use? How about not needing to break your phone in order to use it the way you want to use it? It's all well and good that a member of the 4-digit UID club can unlock their phone, but the vast majority of iPhone owners either don't want to risk that, or don't even know it's possible. When you defend the Apple app store, which has quite a few junk applications itself (unless iFart is really your bag of tea), and is missing quite a few innovative applications that don't meet one or more Apple guidelines, by citing another store that has even lower-quality applications available, what exactly are you defending?
What if the subject of the discussion is the reason why it doesn't relate to me? i.e., what if the poorly-conceived App store is the main reason stopping someone from getting an iPhone?