I cannot understand why Hughes and the other providers would refuse to spend the relatively few dollars necessary to develop a couple of device drivers and glue libraries. Time after time, the vendors have said, 'it's coming,' but it never does, and the promise eventually goes away.
Now you know how I felt when Apple kept postponning the Windows version of the Newton development kit. Drastically increasing the pool of Newton developers probably wouldn't have saved the product, but you never know. It certainly would have done more to increase the customer base than Hughes would by adding Mac support.
The difference is in market share and policy. Apple doesn't dominate any markets. And the AirPort is standard-compliant, so nobody's forced to buy Apple hardware just because they already have an Apple base station.
Microsoft has both the ability and the will to force competitors out of any market they enter. And they have a history of breaking standards -- even their own! This has as much to do with wanting to "improve" everything they touch ("sure it's not compliant or backward compatible, but it sure is cool!") as with a desire to lock out competitors, but the effect is the same. So when MS enters a product market, existing vendors get nervous, as do their customers. And with good reason.
Quite correct. When I search the web for technical content, about 70% of the time I find what I'm looking for in somebody's lecture notes.
But MIT is doing two things that are real steps forward. First, they're settings standards: instructors are expected to post certain kinds of information in a standard format. Existing course web sites are just online alternatives to photocopied class handouts, and it's up the individual instructors exactly what they bother to put online and how they present it.
But what's really staggering is MIT's attitude towards public use of this material. Most course web sites are created specifically for the students taking the course -- public access is an accidental side effect, and probably wouldn't happen at all if University web sites secured their networks properly. They'd probably be taken down or hidden behind a firewall if public access started taxing the servers. Which is completely different from what MIT is doing: investing in servers and bandwidth for no other purpose than to enable public access to their content.
All the reasons you cite are good reasons for doing this. But most have to do with sharing information within MIT. Whereas the school has not only put this stuff out on the public web, they've made a lot of noise encouraging non-MIT people to come and use it.
Damnit, this is not just a good idea. This level of self-description should be mandatory for all universities. It's the first serious proof I've ever seen that the institution is actually doing something with all that tuition and grant money. Plus it provides a more solid basis for choosing a school than campus tours and the quality of the football team.
Naw, most of the industry is a little scummy. Lindows just doesn't seem to understand that you can only BS so long before people stop listening to you.
You do have a point, but I'd be reluctant to emphasize these concepts to people using Word as the first word processor. The problem is that Word actively works against C/P separation. Yes, it has styles, but the mechanisms for applying them are weird, complicated and inconsistent. And if you want to do serious style usage, you have to do some serious customization. Because the default paragraph style is "Normal" a style totally inadequate for serious document preparation, and there's built-in way to change this. Because when you click on a bullet paragaph button, you don't get one of the pre-defined bullet styles, you get your current style modified to include a bullet. (Well not quite true, there's some weird "I know what you really mean" mechanism that makes this change under circumstance I've never figured out.) I could go on.
I have a co-worker is quite aware of the C/P concept. In fact, we hired him for his XML expertise! But when he uses Word, he still makes all the mistakes you describe, because he has better things to do with his time than fight with Word's obscure and poorly documented feature set.
Remember, Content-Presentation separation isn't an end in itself. It has various purposes, but the one that matters to Word users is making large documents maintainable. And the way to teach newbie Word users about maintainability is to introduce them to formatting, then show them how encapsulating formatting in styles makes a document more maintainable. That's something they can see and understand. If you lecture them about content management abstractions like Content-Presentation separation, they'll have no context in which to place these concepts, and they simply won't retain them.
Of course, Content-Presentation separation serves other purposes, like making large technical document bases maintainable and delivering content in multiple formats (HTML, PDF, etc.). But if these purposes are important to your project, you shouldn't be using a word processor at all.
This is the wrong pace for Content Mangement slogans. Beginning word processers just aren't going to get any benefit from having abstract CM ideas thrown at them.
I'm not saying the idea C/P separation is bogus (though many Slashdotters would). In point of fact, I work in technical communication, where the C/P separation is essential. (I'm also getting an object lesson in the consquences of ignoring the issue: I'm helping XMLify a huge RTF document base that should have been converted to markup a decade ago.) But not every letter, term paper, or personal web page needs such an elaborate approach. Especially when the student is working with Microsoft Word, which does a particularly lousy job of helping separate presentation from content.
Three days isn't a lot of time at 50 minutes a day, and they started out REALLY hating this. But they have discovered that they can figure out new programs on their own, and have started to enjoy it.
I applaud your teaching style. And it's absolutely the right way to teach any technical subject -- in a high school.
In an ideal world, this would always be the right way. Thinking skills and adaptability is more important than having a nice set of technical buzzwords on your resume. At least that's what I look for when my boss asks me to interview a job candidate.
Unfortunately, we're not talking about a high school, where the teachers have a captive audience and a mandate to develop their students' intellectual skills. We're talking about a computer lab where unemployable people come to grab the skills that will make them employable. Which means the buzzword-resume factor is important, even vital. Because most interviewers are a lot more buzzword-oriented than I am. And because the students are people who have to carefully allocate their learning time.
So thinking skills have to take a back-seat to buzzword compliance. If you can sneak them in, fine. But you can't make them the thrust of your teaching, or you'll lose your students.
Word processing as such is not that hard. There are few general concepts that are application independent (what's a document? what's formatting? what's a style?), but you can learn those in maybe 30 minutes. Most of the training people need for a particular word processor is coaching in how to cope with its idiosyncracies and design flaws.
In any case, you don't learn to use a word processor by reading a book. You learn by writing documents. A good text supports this activity, and thus has to refer to a specific WP.
If you really want your students to be vendor-agnostic you should train them to do similar tasks on a variety of word processors. But I suspect that your students will rebel at this approach. They'll want skills that look good on a resume. And what looks good on a resume is experience with specific apps, not generalized skills.
That's not a good thing, of course. It means that well-entrenched but badly-designed apps like Word and FrameMaker will continue to dominate. And it also means that employers will tend to prefer rote learners for jobs that probably require a degree of adapability and creativity. But you're not going to change these things just by insisting that your students learn WPs they'll never get a chance to use.
Your post points up the fact that not all popups represent attempts to spam your desktop. On the other hand, most "legitimate" popups are just lazy web design, as this page demonstrates.
Be that as it may, there are times when I need to allow popups in order to get full use out of a site. What's needed is a simple popup policy engine, something like the cookies privacy engine in IE. In particular, I'd like to impose a global limit on popup frequency, so a site can't force me to accept all their crap just to get single popup window that I want to see. The simplistic "no popups" option in Mozilla is not useful for most of us.
$5K sounds like a lot, but I'd say you've earned it. Thing is, you live in a state with strong anti-spam laws. Before we can follow your lead, most of us are going to have to campaign to get similar laws enacted in our own states. In CA, where I live, that probably would mean a ballot initiative -- I can't see the legislature flouting the direct marketing industry. And getting an initiative on the ballot is expensive.
How is it that the most legitimate source is ridiculous? Ads in the paper...
The submitter didn't say anything about "ads in the paper". He just said "ads". I think he was referring to the postings on job sites that really are nothing but ads for recruiting firms. And ploughing through the same "ads" over and over, wherever they are, really is ridiculous.
What about touch? I mean when you pick up a proton... oh wait.
It's funny how little bits of misinformation become "common knowledge". The solar system model of atomic structure was shot down almost a century ago, but the picture of a bunch of electrons orbiting a clump of protons and neutrons is still the picture most people conjur up when you say "atom". Other examples: "Columbus proved the earth was round" (astronomers did this centuries before, and even measured the diameter of the planet, of which data Columbus was quite ignorant); "Lindbergh was the first pilot to fly solo accross the Atlantic" (technically true, but it's sad that people think an aviation pioneer is famous simply for going without sleep for 36 hours). Etc., etc.
The big problem with DICE, aside from stale listings, is that it allows headhunters to post freely, and doesn't provide a way for users to separate headhunter offers from direct offers. Any job board that does this is not going to be able to match applicants with jobs, because most headhunters use the listings dishonestly. They don't want to find applicants for the specific jobs they list -- they just want to add names to their rosters.
The job placement industry is, alas, dominated by moral and technical morons. Yes, there are serious, ethical headhunters who actually try to meet the needs of employers and workers. But they are few and far between. Most are depressingly similar to spam advertisers. They don't care how much of other people's time they waste with cold calls, resume flooding, and sending people to interview on jobs they have no hope of getting. Just as long as they place enough people to meet the rent.
Last time I tried to find a job through techies.com, they allowed you to restrict your search to jobs offered directly. But that was 3 years ago, and they seem to have droped that feature. Cut too much into their revenue stream, I guess.
You simply have to connect directly with the employers. Google is indispensible for this purpose. Every day, do a search on your title and qualifications, and throw in a few keywords that companies tend to use on their jop openings pages, like (duh!) "opening" and "careers".
You should also troll local company sites directly. Make a list of likely employers in your area, and go to their web sites every day. That's how I got my current job.
You tell that to the people who have a +1 posting bonus, or to those who can only post twice a day.
I take it you consider these bonuses and penalties wrong. That's less than obvious to me.
Also, moderation should only ever be done at -1, oldest first. With no influence from the friends and foes crap, and if at all possible, anonymously. If a comment is going to be moderated up or down, let it be done so, soley on its content, not the author.
Do you have a point? None of this is news. It's all in the mod guideliness, though not as concisely worded.
There's been some discussion in the U.S. about whether analog phone calls are "private" in a legal sense. Prosecuters have argued that they can use evidence they've gathered by listening in, while defense attorneys have argued that there's an "expectation of privacy", which means that the Fourth Amendment applies. There was a minor political scandal a few years back when an off-air recording of a conference call was published. Don't know if anybody was ever prosecuted for that -- but private wiretaps, even when they are conspicuously illegal, often go unpunnished.
But it's all kind of beside the point. You can argue all kinds of analogies and parallels. Public information is free to those who find it; an unsecured access point is like an open door; putting data on an unsecured network is like having a conversation in public; etc., etc. The bottom line is that the U.S. courts have never been tolerant of unauthorized access to systems and their data, no matter how careless the owners of that data have been.
He gets away with this because...
on
Lego Addictions
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· Score: 2
Honestly, if they want to make that crap,,, all the power to them.
But please!! Keep making the old stuff. I can't even walk to walmart or target or shopko anymore and buy a tub... I'm stuck with online sales only now.
Can't have it both ways. Shelf space is finite, and there's a lot of competition for it. If Lego decides to push a new item, they probably have to pull another item to make room for it.
...the "they did that because they were stupid/we don't do that because we're smart" theory of history. It's kind of out of fashion, but that doesn't make it wrong!
This is reminiscent of those driverless cars we were supposed to have in the 21st century (that's about now, right?). And the robots, and the other technolgies that were supposed to make most humans redundant. As always, it's not absolutely impossible, but it's a lot harder than people seem to think it is.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft has both the ability and the will to force competitors out of any market they enter. And they have a history of breaking standards -- even their own! This has as much to do with wanting to "improve" everything they touch ("sure it's not compliant or backward compatible, but it sure is cool!") as with a desire to lock out competitors, but the effect is the same. So when MS enters a product market, existing vendors get nervous, as do their customers. And with good reason.
Legally and morally, facilitating a crime is a crime itself. Sometimes it's a lesser crime, but not always, and it's never a much lesser crime.
But MIT is doing two things that are real steps forward. First, they're settings standards: instructors are expected to post certain kinds of information in a standard format. Existing course web sites are just online alternatives to photocopied class handouts, and it's up the individual instructors exactly what they bother to put online and how they present it.
But what's really staggering is MIT's attitude towards public use of this material. Most course web sites are created specifically for the students taking the course -- public access is an accidental side effect, and probably wouldn't happen at all if University web sites secured their networks properly. They'd probably be taken down or hidden behind a firewall if public access started taxing the servers. Which is completely different from what MIT is doing: investing in servers and bandwidth for no other purpose than to enable public access to their content.
All the reasons you cite are good reasons for doing this. But most have to do with sharing information within MIT. Whereas the school has not only put this stuff out on the public web, they've made a lot of noise encouraging non-MIT people to come and use it.
Damnit, this is not just a good idea. This level of self-description should be mandatory for all universities. It's the first serious proof I've ever seen that the institution is actually doing something with all that tuition and grant money. Plus it provides a more solid basis for choosing a school than campus tours and the quality of the football team.
Naw, most of the industry is a little scummy. Lindows just doesn't seem to understand that you can only BS so long before people stop listening to you.
I have a co-worker is quite aware of the C/P concept. In fact, we hired him for his XML expertise! But when he uses Word, he still makes all the mistakes you describe, because he has better things to do with his time than fight with Word's obscure and poorly documented feature set.
Remember, Content-Presentation separation isn't an end in itself. It has various purposes, but the one that matters to Word users is making large documents maintainable. And the way to teach newbie Word users about maintainability is to introduce them to formatting, then show them how encapsulating formatting in styles makes a document more maintainable. That's something they can see and understand. If you lecture them about content management abstractions like Content-Presentation separation, they'll have no context in which to place these concepts, and they simply won't retain them.
Of course, Content-Presentation separation serves other purposes, like making large technical document bases maintainable and delivering content in multiple formats (HTML, PDF, etc.). But if these purposes are important to your project, you shouldn't be using a word processor at all.
I'm not saying the idea C/P separation is bogus (though many Slashdotters would). In point of fact, I work in technical communication, where the C/P separation is essential. (I'm also getting an object lesson in the consquences of ignoring the issue: I'm helping XMLify a huge RTF document base that should have been converted to markup a decade ago.) But not every letter, term paper, or personal web page needs such an elaborate approach. Especially when the student is working with Microsoft Word, which does a particularly lousy job of helping separate presentation from content.
In an ideal world, this would always be the right way. Thinking skills and adaptability is more important than having a nice set of technical buzzwords on your resume. At least that's what I look for when my boss asks me to interview a job candidate.
Unfortunately, we're not talking about a high school, where the teachers have a captive audience and a mandate to develop their students' intellectual skills. We're talking about a computer lab where unemployable people come to grab the skills that will make them employable. Which means the buzzword-resume factor is important, even vital. Because most interviewers are a lot more buzzword-oriented than I am. And because the students are people who have to carefully allocate their learning time.
So thinking skills have to take a back-seat to buzzword compliance. If you can sneak them in, fine. But you can't make them the thrust of your teaching, or you'll lose your students.
In any case, you don't learn to use a word processor by reading a book. You learn by writing documents. A good text supports this activity, and thus has to refer to a specific WP.
If you really want your students to be vendor-agnostic you should train them to do similar tasks on a variety of word processors. But I suspect that your students will rebel at this approach. They'll want skills that look good on a resume. And what looks good on a resume is experience with specific apps, not generalized skills.
That's not a good thing, of course. It means that well-entrenched but badly-designed apps like Word and FrameMaker will continue to dominate. And it also means that employers will tend to prefer rote learners for jobs that probably require a degree of adapability and creativity. But you're not going to change these things just by insisting that your students learn WPs they'll never get a chance to use.
Be that as it may, there are times when I need to allow popups in order to get full use out of a site. What's needed is a simple popup policy engine, something like the cookies privacy engine in IE. In particular, I'd like to impose a global limit on popup frequency, so a site can't force me to accept all their crap just to get single popup window that I want to see. The simplistic "no popups" option in Mozilla is not useful for most of us.
$5K sounds like a lot, but I'd say you've earned it. Thing is, you live in a state with strong anti-spam laws. Before we can follow your lead, most of us are going to have to campaign to get similar laws enacted in our own states. In CA, where I live, that probably would mean a ballot initiative -- I can't see the legislature flouting the direct marketing industry. And getting an initiative on the ballot is expensive.
It's funny how little bits of misinformation become "common knowledge". The solar system model of atomic structure was shot down almost a century ago, but the picture of a bunch of electrons orbiting a clump of protons and neutrons is still the picture most people conjur up when you say "atom". Other examples: "Columbus proved the earth was round" (astronomers did this centuries before, and even measured the diameter of the planet, of which data Columbus was quite ignorant); "Lindbergh was the first pilot to fly solo accross the Atlantic" (technically true, but it's sad that people think an aviation pioneer is famous simply for going without sleep for 36 hours). Etc., etc.
Have you looked at the help wanted ads lately? In technical jobs, they're as bad as the online listings -- full of headhunter spam.
The job placement industry is, alas, dominated by moral and technical morons. Yes, there are serious, ethical headhunters who actually try to meet the needs of employers and workers. But they are few and far between. Most are depressingly similar to spam advertisers. They don't care how much of other people's time they waste with cold calls, resume flooding, and sending people to interview on jobs they have no hope of getting. Just as long as they place enough people to meet the rent.
Last time I tried to find a job through techies.com, they allowed you to restrict your search to jobs offered directly. But that was 3 years ago, and they seem to have droped that feature. Cut too much into their revenue stream, I guess.
You simply have to connect directly with the employers. Google is indispensible for this purpose. Every day, do a search on your title and qualifications, and throw in a few keywords that companies tend to use on their jop openings pages, like (duh!) "opening" and "careers".
You should also troll local company sites directly. Make a list of likely employers in your area, and go to their web sites every day. That's how I got my current job.
But it's all kind of beside the point. You can argue all kinds of analogies and parallels. Public information is free to those who find it; an unsecured access point is like an open door; putting data on an unsecured network is like having a conversation in public; etc., etc. The bottom line is that the U.S. courts have never been tolerant of unauthorized access to systems and their data, no matter how careless the owners of that data have been.
...he's very very good. Feeble excuse!
Can't talk now. Searching for donut cushion...
Bored now.
...the "they did that because they were stupid/we don't do that because we're smart" theory of history. It's kind of out of fashion, but that doesn't make it wrong!
This is reminiscent of those driverless cars we were supposed to have in the 21st century (that's about now, right?). And the robots, and the other technolgies that were supposed to make most humans redundant. As always, it's not absolutely impossible, but it's a lot harder than people seem to think it is.