1) Web apps are worse. Yes you are right they are. You take a definite hit on quality. The hope is that it doesn't matter too much.
2) Web apps are harder to deploy. That is simply false. Getting an app deployed in an enterprise can be tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Getting it deployed in a half dozen + home systems + laptops can be a million easy. I can easily pay for a few help desk people to work through the remaining issues with networking.
As one of those dweebs the reasons were simple. Cost of deployment. If you have a large potential user base with few actual repeat users (which is a very large group of apps) deployment costs per user can be intense.
For example take 1m potential users and 200 daily (or weekly) users with 50 of them ever repeating within any given year. Do you deploy a million or do 150 deploys per day to essentially random desktops?
Not at all. There are are all sorts of very standard issues which render differently with AJAX based apps. Why do you think even the largest web app vendors like google and yahoo support certain features on say IE and firefox and not on Safari?
First off you convince people the system is seriously under performing and radical action is needed. One of the great accomplishments of no child left behind is that for the first time parents can get accurate information about the relative quality of their schools. I used to joke that 50% of all schools were in the top 10% and 90% in the top 50%, that's changed.
There are a large number of parents and non parents who are interested in school reform, right now they lack anyway to participate. Fix that problem. I'd say something like 80% would like a major overhaul of the system. The problem is that they often have conflicting programs to achieve this reform. For example the "more funding for the public schools" vs. "more funding for vouchers" debate. Fixing this requires dialogue.
You as a teacher can create dialogue in your local community. Do the parents want higher NCLB scores at the expense of worse education? Once you have convinced them that is the choice the pressure for doing well on the NCLB state exams might lessen considerably.
You're right the system has the same bias. But it got the bias because of a desire for standardization and quality. I've also seen the tests, those are learnable using a high quality curriculum. As a district the teachers could very easily have their kids do pretty well on those tests and at the same time teach well.
As I pointed out in an Education class once, "So we're not supposed to teach to the test, but our performance is judged based on the results of the test? Do you not see how illogical that statement is?"
Obviously if performance is judged individually based on the tests people teach to the test. Period, that's it the test writers control the curriculum. So education reform needs to start either with: -- the administrators who set up those rules (which goes all the way up to congress) -- the test writers to make the tests harder to teach to
I don't disagree the problems are not evil teachers. But that is the situation is most bureaucracies. Bureaucrats quite often don't like all the rules. Hold a learn in on education policy one day a year for the parents and start dialoging on why the current system sucks and what to do about it. Change the system.
I agree that is worth discussing but this particular post focused on Karen. As for the incompetence of teachers with respect to IT; they are equally bad in math, history, science.... The general problem is much broader than Linux and needs to be addressed more fundamentally.
I agree people like Karen exist. In what ways are they like or unlike Karen? When we start to discuss where there ideas come from how close are they to Karen's? How similar would their actions have been to Karen's?
We can't have any meaningful discussion about Karen because all we know at best is a 3rd hand news and at worst a story made up pretending to be 3rd hand news.
B.S. The user forms for most open source software packages are far nicer and more helpful than those for commercial software. The open source community does a good job of support around products. Open source developers are much more accessible to resolve problems than commercial developers. But you shouldn't be talking to the developer (as opposed to say a forum) about something that is in the manual. Escalation should be reasonable.
Unless you are paying for an expensive support contract you quite often do far better with open source.
Setting parental expectations is something that schools need to do. Parents need to know what their part of education is. And maybe someone should talk to the "little darling" and find out why they dislike school so much: too easy, too hard, wrong subject matter. I don't think it is unreasonable to expect a school to try and engage a student.
I agree. It was one thing when this story was first discussed because it was an interesting case in point. But at this point "Karen" has been discussed enough that either she should come forward, the kid should come forward some witnesses should come forward or we should stop treating this as anything more than a questionable tale.
We donated the cord for research usage which at least at the time was a standard option. If something develops quickly there is a matching cord if not you did some good for everyone.
That's really not true. For most books the reviews are quite good. This problem is still limited, though as Amazon seems like it is facing the same problem google did a decade ago. Their reviews are getting influential enough that people game the system. Amazon is going to need to start protecting itself and punishing people who try to game the system.
Absolutely. If you want to allow authors to publish poorly documented things you need peer review and that is where nupedia came in. There are encyclopedias that do that but they most certainly don't have liberal editing policies.
For example Britannica 14th edition allowed Einstein to publish an original summary on relativity.
I think you are confusing Nupedia with Wikipedia. Nupedia wanted expert commentary but it wanted it going through a peer review process. The problem of course is that with peer review articles had to be written not evolve. Also the review process took over a year. But Wales was concerned from the beginning with the problem of cranks using Nupedia to push odd ball theories.
Certainly within the first year or two that's exactly what happened on wikipedia. Holocaust deniers (who often genuinely are extremely knowledgeable about the holocaust) and "tired light" physicists (physicists that believe that speed of light is not constant and thus much of mainstream cosmology is wrong) were very active on wikipedia. If he had allowed them a free hand the encyclopedia would be very different today.
You would have to be under a real name on the blog. On wikipedia all authors are anonymous, that is every author is treated as if they didn't have access to any private information. But once you publish information publicly any anonymous author including yourself can access it.
So for example if the MUD is still up and there is FAQ then there is 3rd party (relative to wikipedia) information that is publicly available.
The main thing is to think of yourself as two people. The MUD author with private information and an anonymous wikipedia editor who reads what the MUD author writes.
In reading (and responding above) I don't think there is much problem with flagging. What this debate has really turned into is a debate on deletionism. The question is how it is used.
Semi protection was a nice compromise. Flagged versions seems like a nice compromise.
He's not kidding. I ran into this on a disambiguation page, and on a part of an article which was outlining the history of an idea. Factual accuracy is no defense.
I agree and that was the attitude in 2006. What's happened is deletionism has become a religion and good content is getting destroyed. Today trying to have a detailed collection of thousands of pages on Battlestar Galitica would get deleted. You would have to constantly fight over images....
What is obviously a niche sub encyclopedia would be constantly attacked and subject to review by people who just don't want articles to have time to develop.
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Well you have two issues here.
1) Web apps are worse. Yes you are right they are. You take a definite hit on quality. The hope is that it doesn't matter too much.
2) Web apps are harder to deploy. That is simply false. Getting an app deployed in an enterprise can be tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Getting it deployed in a half dozen + home systems + laptops can be a million easy. I can easily pay for a few help desk people to work through the remaining issues with networking.
Your arguing two different things. The GP was arguing the differences don't exist. You are arguing they do exist but don't care.
As one of those dweebs the reasons were simple. Cost of deployment. If you have a large potential user base with few actual repeat users (which is a very large group of apps) deployment costs per user can be intense.
For example take 1m potential users and 200 daily (or weekly) users with 50 of them ever repeating within any given year. Do you deploy a million or do 150 deploys per day to essentially random desktops?
Not at all. There are are all sorts of very standard issues which render differently with AJAX based apps. Why do you think even the largest web app vendors like google and yahoo support certain features on say IE and firefox and not on Safari?
First off you convince people the system is seriously under performing and radical action is needed. One of the great accomplishments of no child left behind is that for the first time parents can get accurate information about the relative quality of their schools. I used to joke that 50% of all schools were in the top 10% and 90% in the top 50%, that's changed.
There are a large number of parents and non parents who are interested in school reform, right now they lack anyway to participate. Fix that problem. I'd say something like 80% would like a major overhaul of the system. The problem is that they often have conflicting programs to achieve this reform. For example the "more funding for the public schools" vs. "more funding for vouchers" debate. Fixing this requires dialogue.
You as a teacher can create dialogue in your local community. Do the parents want higher NCLB scores at the expense of worse education? Once you have convinced them that is the choice the pressure for doing well on the NCLB state exams might lessen considerably.
You're right the system has the same bias. But it got the bias because of a desire for standardization and quality. I've also seen the tests, those are learnable using a high quality curriculum. As a district the teachers could very easily have their kids do pretty well on those tests and at the same time teach well.
As I pointed out in an Education class once, "So we're not supposed to teach to the test, but our performance is judged based on the results of the test? Do you not see how illogical that statement is?"
Obviously if performance is judged individually based on the tests people teach to the test. Period, that's it the test writers control the curriculum. So education reform needs to start either with:
-- the administrators who set up those rules (which goes all the way up to congress)
-- the test writers to make the tests harder to teach to
I don't disagree the problems are not evil teachers. But that is the situation is most bureaucracies. Bureaucrats quite often don't like all the rules. Hold a learn in on education policy one day a year for the parents and start dialoging on why the current system sucks and what to do about it. Change the system.
I agree that is worth discussing but this particular post focused on Karen. As for the incompetence of teachers with respect to IT; they are equally bad in math, history, science.... The general problem is much broader than Linux and needs to be addressed more fundamentally.
I agree people like Karen exist. In what ways are they like or unlike Karen? When we start to discuss where there ideas come from how close are they to Karen's? How similar would their actions have been to Karen's?
We can't have any meaningful discussion about Karen because all we know at best is a 3rd hand news and at worst a story made up pretending to be 3rd hand news.
B.S. The user forms for most open source software packages are far nicer and more helpful than those for commercial software. The open source community does a good job of support around products. Open source developers are much more accessible to resolve problems than commercial developers. But you shouldn't be talking to the developer (as opposed to say a forum) about something that is in the manual. Escalation should be reasonable.
Unless you are paying for an expensive support contract you quite often do far better with open source.
Read the original thread on /. This got discussed there.
Teachers are bureaucrats, the right answer is irrelevant. They are verifying you understand the curriculum not what is true.
Setting parental expectations is something that schools need to do. Parents need to know what their part of education is. And maybe someone should talk to the "little darling" and find out why they dislike school so much: too easy, too hard, wrong subject matter. I don't think it is unreasonable to expect a school to try and engage a student.
I agree. It was one thing when this story was first discussed because it was an interesting case in point. But at this point "Karen" has been discussed enough that either she should come forward, the kid should come forward some witnesses should come forward or we should stop treating this as anything more than a questionable tale.
We donated the cord for research usage which at least at the time was a standard option. If something develops quickly there is a matching cord if not you did some good for everyone.
That's really not true. For most books the reviews are quite good. This problem is still limited, though as Amazon seems like it is facing the same problem google did a decade ago. Their reviews are getting influential enough that people game the system. Amazon is going to need to start protecting itself and punishing people who try to game the system.
Absolutely. If you want to allow authors to publish poorly documented things you need peer review and that is where nupedia came in. There are encyclopedias that do that but they most certainly don't have liberal editing policies.
For example Britannica 14th edition allowed Einstein to publish an original summary on relativity.
Wikipedia (ironically enough) has a good article on this topic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nupedia
Wikipedia has a good article on this topic (ironically enough)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nupedia
I think you are confusing Nupedia with Wikipedia. Nupedia wanted expert commentary but it wanted it going through a peer review process. The problem of course is that with peer review articles had to be written not evolve. Also the review process took over a year. But Wales was concerned from the beginning with the problem of cranks using Nupedia to push odd ball theories.
Certainly within the first year or two that's exactly what happened on wikipedia. Holocaust deniers (who often genuinely are extremely knowledgeable about the holocaust) and "tired light" physicists (physicists that believe that speed of light is not constant and thus much of mainstream cosmology is wrong) were very active on wikipedia. If he had allowed them a free hand the encyclopedia would be very different today.
OK if immediacy is an issue then OK. You may be right about recruitment.
As for retention (which is a bigger problem) I think the problem is the community is obnoxious.
You would have to be under a real name on the blog. On wikipedia all authors are anonymous, that is every author is treated as if they didn't have access to any private information. But once you publish information publicly any anonymous author including yourself can access it.
So for example if the MUD is still up and there is FAQ then there is 3rd party (relative to wikipedia) information that is publicly available.
The main thing is to think of yourself as two people. The MUD author with private information and an anonymous wikipedia editor who reads what the MUD author writes.
In reading (and responding above) I don't think there is much problem with flagging. What this debate has really turned into is a debate on deletionism. The question is how it is used.
Semi protection was a nice compromise. Flagged versions seems like a nice compromise.
He's not kidding. I ran into this on a disambiguation page, and on a part of an article which was outlining the history of an idea. Factual accuracy is no defense.
Yes! Exactly! The attitude has become delete it rather than fix it!
I agree and that was the attitude in 2006. What's happened is deletionism has become a religion and good content is getting destroyed. Today trying to have a detailed collection of thousands of pages on Battlestar Galitica would get deleted. You would have to constantly fight over images....
What is obviously a niche sub encyclopedia would be constantly attacked and subject to review by people who just don't want articles to have time to develop.