It is illegal to post signs in public space. This includes things like stapling notices to telephone poles or putting signs with metal stakes on public property(bandit signs). These have prominent phone numbers and the city should be able to simply prosecute the firms advertising using the signs, but for some reason the problem persist and no one is held accountable. Why is this?
Probably because the firms contract out to independent workers(read transient workers) to place these signs. They probably have written or verbal instructions not to place signs in any public space, which the firms then use to avoid prosecution. The people being paid some fraction of a dollar sign will be liable to the prosecution. But then how do we get them, and how do they pay?
The yellow pages are certainly the same way. The contractors have to deliver to every house. They are probably spot checked. If I put a sign saying that anything placed on my lawn will be subject to a $500 clean up fee will I be able to collect? Probably not from the yellow pages, even if the small claims court would allow such a thing. No I would have to hire someone to track down the transient worker, maybe put a lein against the truck that was used in the crime, and then what. Not much.
They way to stop the telephone directory waste is to stop using them. If it was not still a relevant advertising model, then firms would not be paying to advertise in it. Firms must be getting leads from these directories, otherwise why would they pay to advertise. It will be a problem that corrects itself in the next generation.
Is it can be forked. But then we have the question of whether Android, the open source part, is really enough to build a phone or if only basic elements are open source, while key elements are closed or so severely controlled that they might as well be closed.
Of course the Chinese might be able to fork some of it, and the Apache licensee lets them do this without giving back. But then, given that 50% Android phones pay a tribute to MS, the Chinese government might get into trouble for being a pirate nation, unless of course they pay tribute to MS>
I think the thing many firms do not undertand about social media is it is much harder to be in control of the message. So while Facebook and Twitter try to convince advertisers that they provide a useful service worth lots of money, without a very clear understanding of the channel it will backfire. MacDonald's seems to be particularly inept.
We have also seen thins again with Ann Romney going about blaming the media for all her problems. It is not so much the media as it that average people know have the opportunity to respond to silly statements.
Objective analysis is not always the best. It does, however, provide an opinion that is unavailable on advertiser supported review publications where the writers depends on the firms who product they review for revenue, if not kickbacks and straight out bribes. Something like this indicates a level of credibility.
If only the same decision was made when consumer reports told us that the Suzuki was unsafe to drive. Gain, an objective but not necessarily unbiased publication that stated the test methods and results. If only the courts did not believe tests results bought by Suzuki. While at the time all SUVs were dangerous, and people were not yet used to driving them, I cannot tell you how many SUVs I used to see toppled over on the side of the street where they were turning too fast into a driveway, Of course at the end of last year, after many people died in unsafe Suzuki's, they filed for bankruptcy in the US.
There is no reason that companies should not be allowed to make unsafe or subpar products, or that people should not be allowed to buy them, but we at least need to have the right to state that products are not up to par, and why we think so.
The problem with biometric security is that it is not really more secure than a password. This is because I can change my password, but i can't change my biometrics. For most of us this is not a problem. Matching biometrics to a account for a random person is difficult. However, suppose someone wanted into my HP Computer which has a fingerprint detector. One they figured out how to match my fingerprint, that form of security is forever corrupted.
Lets say that a website knows who I am by the way I type. A man in the middle attack can get those statistics, duplicate it, and I am forever compromised.
I think biometric falls on the convenience side of the security issue, at least for now. I am not convinced that it could fall as easily as a dictionary attack for a password.
Sometimes I wonder if I am on a technical board or just a place where average people are oblivious about coding.
The article says what it does, and up until now I really haven't been that interested. It brings a general mobile operating system down to a truly mobile scale, and maybe even sell for a low price. iOS, which was for phones, is going to put into a package the size of, really, a Nano. This is interesting technologically, as interesting as MS putting WIndows into an ARM Tablet. Not all the functionality i there, but they are sharing a code base. A code base that is more significant than the sharing between Mac OS and iOS.
This is whole point of the microcomputer craze. Putting more power into smaller packages. Sure, VAX VMS is a hugely superior operating system, but it could not run on anything the size of an Apple ][, and could not run Visicalc.
I know that some people on see technology as a means to bring cool stuff to under the $100 price point, but it really is about putting powerful tools, be it a pencil or the H2G2 into an every increasing percentage of the population. This watch could be a step in that direction.
If a high school graduate is being hired for his or her first job and did not work, then yes, the high school record may be checked. And yes, if the student has not worked, has not learned to get to school on time and complete tasks, then it is a reasonable assumption that this kid would be a worse employee that someone who did manage to wake up every morning, get to work, and do a reasonable amount of work.
Some will say that such a student will magically learn these skills when they are paid to so do, but do you want to be the employer who trains a kid to get to work on time and not spend all day on the phone. These are the kind of skills that are not supposed to be on the job training. No one is going to look at this after a college degree is achieved or when a work record is established. If I were an employer I would be worried of the legal implications on knowing anything from this database.
But it could significantly impact school. The Gates foundation is significantly involved in school reform, and this could be used in two diametrically opposed ways. The positive or negative impact is going to be students who go through school in this system.
The first is is track students between schools, something that is difficult to do now. The advantages are many. It will a more accurate drop out rate. It may minimize the huge problem of schools not being aware of a student's past academics and accommodations, thus possibly accidentally placing them in a duplicate class or not providing maximum accommodations. Comprehensive schools can use it to track students who change schools often due to dangerous behavior
The second is to filter students for charter schools, which the Gates foundation strongly supports, to the point of investing $25 million to encourage districts to promote charter schools, Bill Gates speaking at the Charter School Conference, and $22 million in direct investment in charter schools.
There is nothing inherently wrong with charter schools, except the way they are funded. They are often funded based on the fact that they are cheaper than a comprehensive school. The problem with this is that often the best way to make something cheaper is not to educate. It is a simple fact that some kids are cheaper to educate than other, and this has little to do with race or how much money the family has. What often happens now is that the charter school will filter, either though a difficult application process or arbitrary rules for who gets to stay in the school, to minimize the cost per student. This does not save any money to the taxpayer because the average cost for student increases at the comprehensive schools, but will make politicians look better because they can claim to find innovative ways to educate students.
What this database will allow is for schools to target the preferred students. So someone like Yes can use the database to provide incentives to certain students to leave their schools not because they are not being provided an excellent education, but because YES wants to minimize the cost per student.
I really like this new connector. It seems more rugged and easier to get in. I even bought a knock off connector for $10 and it worked as well. This was not the case for the dock connector.
What I learned doing this was that space always has a surprise. You may think that you understand how thing work away from earth, but all too often predictions fall short.
Or, in other words, order these in terms of prestige: the winner of high school track meet, the winner of the Boston Marathon, or the winner in the 100 meter in the Olympics.
Also, realize that Science and Nature are not really the bottlenecks in the distribution of knowledge. On the iPad Nature is under $50, and a subscription to Science in $100. Almost anyone, in the US at least, who wants these can get them. At worst they have to go to the library. It is just that laziness has set in on the internet and walking over the library has become a chore.
I think it is ok for the publishing authors to pay some of the publishing costs. I do not see why it need to costs thousands for a researcher to read the papers. This mostly effects developing countries and the researchers trying to do work in those countries. It is going to be the small journals from the traditionally exorbitant companies that are going to prevent this research.
It is getting better. When I was younger I knew researchers who paid huge sums just for a little pamphlet that listed the names and abstracts of all the papers published in the previous period. Now this can be done with keyword searches in open databases. I did work copying articles on a piecemeal basis. I imagine that this can be done on a greater scale, probably within the terms of use for a library.
You know dollars are the only thing that matters. If you are willing to buy stuff so the company can make a profit, or even just cover costs, nothing anyone says is going to change anything. The auto industry in the US only changed because no one was buying cars, and has not changed very much because the Ronald Reagan gave them a bunch of free money.
Years ago I was not able to tolerate the copy protection. I wanted to play with a game to see if it was any good, I wanted to play it whatever machine I wanted. I paid for games, just like I paid for all software, but I wanted value.
The micro transaction actually worked for a while in getting me back into gaming. I figure a game is going to cost money, and it doesn't matter to me whether it is all up front. I know that some complain that it ends up costing more, but does it really. How much was spent on Mortal Kombat. If there were micro transaction in the game would it really cost more than four games?
What is clear is that the business model does not work, at least for games where infrastructure is needed behind the scene or where development is very expensive. Not enough people buy stuff. Too many people think games should be free, even though they expect to get paid for their work.
Why would you want to sue MS. MS has created a situation in which cheap hardware is widely available to everyone. Now that they do something that makes sure they are more likely to benefit from that work, everyone freaks. This, after all, are machines that primarily exist because MS has invested marketing money in them.
If one wants a *nix machine, I presume that anyone can go over to newegg and buy whatever parts needed to build a *nix machine. It would probably cost more than the $500 that a Windows 8 dell desktop might run, but it would be much less than a thousand. Or maybe pay the thousand for an Apple Laptop. I have had no problem running *nix, or MS Windows, or Chrome on it.
In fact we have seen examples of Groupon developing deals with small businesses that have absolutely no value to the business. The deals are not structured to build long term loyalty, rather to provide a significant increase in sales over a short period of time but a price that does not cover costs.
My question for Groupon is how can they sell a product that essentially costs nothing, with the provider of the coupon taking all the risk, and still not make a profit. It seems to me that they must be an issue with management for them to blow through all that cash.
Also, the 'lossless' 'lossy' thing really kills me. It is like people paying double for Monster cables.
Music is recorded for the type of playback devices that are going to be used. Right now the playback device is an iPod. It used to be tapes or CD. In the long ago it was a turntable with seperate amplifier and huge speakers. Before that is was an integrated unit playing a wax cylinder, the same unit was used to record a bunch of people playing and singing as loud as the could into the microphone/loudspeaker.
Vinyl records were very lossy. Most people played them so much, and the commercial stuff of somewhat low quality, that sooner rather than later the grooves would degrade or they would get scratched. We would deal with it until a greatest hit album came out and we would buy the same music all over again. Or we buy a single and buy the same music all over again.
The industry made money by selling tracks with a limited lifetime repackaged in different forms. So when we talk about the decline of revenue, what we are talking about is selling of tracks that do not degrade over time. They may be 'lossy' in that they are reprocessed once into a computer file, but after that there is no loss incurred in playing the music or transfer the music to different playback devices, as is the case when we recorded Vinyl or CD to tape so it would be more potable.
The death of the music industry has little to do with the internet. It has to do with the way that CDs were sold, as a forever album, and the ability to move music to the computer with almost no generational artifacts. That means tracks were bought once, and likely never again.The only greatest hits albums I have are stuff that I only had on Vinyl. I have a couple live recording from before the Internet, during the CD phase, but that are the only duplicates track I have.
THis is why the music industry is failing. They never really figured out how to make money when most people only buy a track once. The only thing the Internet really did was reduce the number of tracks that most people bought from an album of 10-15 to singles. I don't really see that the reduction of a single fro $3 to $1 is an issue due to efficiencies in recording technology and the retail chain.
I would think that it is more an admission that they are not going to be able to get a real office app totally on the cloud, at least not for a profit. I have been really disappointed at the lack of development in Google docs over the past year. They have clearly become bored with the project, and one again gone off on another tangent. That is the thing with Google. No focus, other than collecting user data and selling it, which is fine, but they used to give us good services in return.
The price point is also confusing. It is $100 more than a MacBook air. I know it comes with an office app, cellular and a touch screen, but OO.org is free, and the Apple office suite is only $60, for all the machines on an account. And a cellular router is only $60, and if you buy it separately you can go with any carrier you want. It is not like this thing is a tablet and you will walking around with it. OTOH, it only comes with 32GB, while that air comes with 128GB. Of course you get 1TB online for 3 years, but we all know how reliable Google is at responding to end user problems. In any case it is a $150 value.
At one company I was with a group of 10 developers. All except one were US citizens,and none was on H1B. It was interesting to see the dynamic. One had to leave pretty quickly because of personality issue, but really because they could not produce a line of code even though they supposedly had many years experience. One of the most highly paid developers really couldn't write code, but was very experienced in other area so quickly was pushed to a management position. One could barely code, but did enough work to justify the existence. One was a HTML art type person who did not have to code very much. One was a database person who did not have to code. One mostly dealt with language interface. This meant that out of 10 people, all hired for their software development skills, 4 were actually able to write production code efficiently
Which is to say, yes, if one is trying to run a profitable company where developers are asking pay far beyond the average for college graduates, finding productive people is hard. They not only have to have the skills, but also the discipline and desire to work. At another firm We would hire anyone who pass a basic math and mechanical skills test, basically what one should have learned in high school if one also took a tech ed class. It was an expensive process. Too many washed out because they could not follow process or did not know the importance of quality. This was not hard work, just setting up machines, letting them run, and then demounting and inspecting. But it did require discipline. Good money that a lot of people did not have the self control to earn. On really smart employee left for fast food in hopes of becoming a manager. Much less money.
Same here. I took my first class in the summer in middle school on a teletype, moving up to a video terminal in high school. It taught me three things.
First, it taught me how to make something work. So many times in school there is inauthentic assessment. The results of your work does not actually result in anything, so it really does not matter if it is right or wrong. In middle school this means kids will just fill in blanks or bubble things in to get finished. Because I was doing something that would be right or wrong for real, I would work to learn how to get the program running. Which meant lining up columns, making sure parenthesis were in the right place, etc. Nowhere else would I put the effort to make it correct, because it did not matter.
Second it taught me to break up a problem, think about what steps for each part were, and then put it back together with code. This process analysis and design served me well for the rest of my life.
Third, it encouraged me to develop abstract thinking. Math class was supposed to do this, but really it did not. That was learned in computer classes. I recall the epiphany of realizing that a swap function was needed to exchange values in variable. I understood what a variable was. When I wrote code to graph and swirl the trig functions I understood trigonometry. The act of me writing code to just generate a graph made me understand that process in way that I see many do not.
I will admit we were a specific group of hand selected students. On the other hand we now have the pedagogical techniques to teach these advanced topics to any somewhat motivated group. I have seen high school students use circuit design software to generate a circuit and then program a FPGA. It can be done if the we invest in the right teachers and pay for the equipment.
Which is my only worry. If we are going to do this in the early grades, we need the right people. Without the right people it is just going to devolve into an application design class, which is what too many computer classes are now. Knowing how to use an application is like knowing how to type. It is not going to teach how to program a computer any more than typing teaches you to build a typewriter.
But if done right it would be revolutionary. Asking a student to program a python web pages that solves a generic two step equation when a user inputs the values, performing a sort to calculate the mode and median, interfacing with data collection equipment to gather and analyze data for an expirent, this would provoke understanding in some students beyond what they would otherwise have.
Of course it won't happen because these skills cannot be tested on a standardized test. The skills on this test are those that no one really needs for work. For example the test asks what is the error in this bit of code. I don't know. When I code the compiler gives me an error, then I look at the code and fixes it. That is the way real people code. Ask me about something real!
I would say that this is far from clear. In chrome I was asked for my application specific password, but since I did not know what it was, and could find nothing to tell me, I did not give it or set it up. This really seems a case of bad security through complexity. When I log into Google, i give it my password and a one time code. This seems like simple security. Perhaps someone will tell me otherwise.
Unfortunately this does not work because the people who make us go to war aren't the ones whose families are going to fight. Look at the Bush II. Did he have any experience in the war that killed thousands of americans, many thousands of children, and injured tens of thousand more? No, he was able to pull a duty in that national guard, one he did not even complete according to government documents.
And the one's that did fight are now generals and are worried about budgets and pensions, and whose board they are going to sit on when they retire. Right now the military budget is about 10% above where it was in 2001, inflation adjusted. Some of his is the war on terror, but most of it is really just fighting wars to keep a job.
It depends what large scale deployment means. In many areas the near ground level wind energies are not significant. If we are to harness wind energy, it will have to be at higher altitudes.
Which is really why as we move forward we have to have a much more diverse view of energy. Right now most countries have a majority producer, be it coal or nuclear or natural gas or whatever. This is most likely due to political pressures, rather than rational thought. In large countries like the US there is going to have a realization that certain regions are going to be better with certain generation methods, and allow those regions to develop a local plan. Right now federal subsidies are promoting inefficient programs. For instance corn ethanol provides nearly zero benefit, yet there is still money wasted on corn rather than trying to reintroduce something like sugar cane into the US.
The fundamental belief of Khan Academy is that students should engage with content they need on-demand, at their own pace. We agree that any curriculum that forces all students in a class to follow the same, preordained "watch this video, do this exercise, watch this other video" path isn't using technology in a meaningful way. So we design our product and work with teachers to help students feel ownership of the learning process.
Our classrooms see varying implementations, but the best of them try hard to help students move at their own pace. Some students might never need to listen to Sal say a word. They can master content by experimenting on their own. Absolutely. Fine. By. Us. Others may benefit from rewinding one of Sal's videos over and over and over until a concept clicks. But not every student masters content at the same speed.
It takes a fearless teacher to embrace this controlled chaos in a classroom. I've seen it happen. I have the highest respect in the world for those teachers able to do it. They're simultaneously ready to help mentor a student who's stuck working on fractions and another who may've advanced all the way to trigonometry. They let one student run free on her own while giving another strong encouragement to try the next challenge. Watching these teachers in action is a sight to behold.
Khan Academy exists to give students the freedom to engage with the content they need while giving teachers immediate feedback about who's working on what and where they need help. We think we can help teachers by making this acquisition of core skills a more personalized, efficient process.
[emphasis added]
So lets start with first paragraph. One thing that has become very clear is that students engage with content in differing manners. While by the time a students reach college a students should be able to engage with content through lecture, at earlier grades such expectations are premature. Furthermore it is real clear to most people that lecture does not really give ownership of the process to anyone other than the person lecturing. Also, structure is something that most kids like, even if they rebel against it. Because fractions were mentioned, I will take this down to the elementary school level, where I have seen students excel mostly because the teacher set up a predictable environment where students were able to truly engage with content. It may seem out of fashion, but these students thived on deadlines, just like some student thrive on lecture, because all it involves is copying and mimicking.
Then we get to the idea that some students don't learn simply because the haven't seen the same thing enough. Think back to when you were in school. Did you learn just because the same teacher repeated the same thing over and over again? I didn't. Not even in college. I needed a friend to explain it to me, or I needed to build something, or code it, or sit and think. Just passively watching never did that much.
Then we get to blaming the teacher. Your student aren't learning because you are a scared incompetent person. No, again, students need structure. Teachers build a classroom for the students, not for some external person who theorizes that something might work. Yes students can use these video to understand the content that will engage in school, but no the average student cannot prioritize by themselves in such a way that sufficient time is spent learning all the topics that are necessary on the final exam. Just look at the number of students who fail out of college.
My real issue here is that it seems like everyone is trying to figure out how to educate those that are easy to educate, while so little is being done to think how to educate those that are not going to learn well from lecture, who may need to build something, or the like. The way this response is constructed, it is telling students that they are not able to work in chaos, if they are not able to learn from listening to the lectures, if they listen time and time again, and they do not learn, then they are simply not able to be educated. This is very wrong.
I think there are two reasons why this is right and wrong.
First, this is right because management always has to cut costs, and one way to cut costs is to push for more productivity. This can be done by have employes in house so they can be pushed. Otherwise one is just paying a sum for a fixed amount of work. For instance a sysadmin will do everything they have to do, but aren't going to be pushed to do extra work if not in the office.
OTOH, as has been said, if work can be done remotely it can be done very remotely. That is we do have piecework or assembly in the US. Such work is easy for others to do because you pay by the part, don't pay if you don't like the piece, and even can penalize for bad work. Therefore all the work is done in Asia. Cars are expensive to ship, so the work is done in Mexico or states that might as well be Mexico.
I assume that all business books. I mean it is like a bunch of kids. If one laughs they all laugh. So if a book sells a lot, then other frims thinking there are missing out on something.
I have also seen another effect through team building. Some writes a book, often gibberish, but then consultants use it to market team building or efficiency seminars. Every seminar involves dozens of books, which generate revenue for the author. Of course, if the seminars are going to be successful, the book must have been a best seller. An upfront investment of $100K, and maybe the cost of ghost writer, can generate years of income.
I am going to have replace my camera kit in the next year. MS has shown that it is never happy with just part of the pie, or letting other people have a pie without the approval of MS. Once the claws get in, they never let go.
So even though I have been a Nikon fan for many years, I am afraid my next camera will a Canon.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably because the firms contract out to independent workers(read transient workers) to place these signs. They probably have written or verbal instructions not to place signs in any public space, which the firms then use to avoid prosecution. The people being paid some fraction of a dollar sign will be liable to the prosecution. But then how do we get them, and how do they pay?
The yellow pages are certainly the same way. The contractors have to deliver to every house. They are probably spot checked. If I put a sign saying that anything placed on my lawn will be subject to a $500 clean up fee will I be able to collect? Probably not from the yellow pages, even if the small claims court would allow such a thing. No I would have to hire someone to track down the transient worker, maybe put a lein against the truck that was used in the crime, and then what. Not much.
They way to stop the telephone directory waste is to stop using them. If it was not still a relevant advertising model, then firms would not be paying to advertise in it. Firms must be getting leads from these directories, otherwise why would they pay to advertise. It will be a problem that corrects itself in the next generation.
Of course the Chinese might be able to fork some of it, and the Apache licensee lets them do this without giving back. But then, given that 50% Android phones pay a tribute to MS, the Chinese government might get into trouble for being a pirate nation, unless of course they pay tribute to MS>
We have also seen thins again with Ann Romney going about blaming the media for all her problems. It is not so much the media as it that average people know have the opportunity to respond to silly statements.
If only the same decision was made when consumer reports told us that the Suzuki was unsafe to drive. Gain, an objective but not necessarily unbiased publication that stated the test methods and results. If only the courts did not believe tests results bought by Suzuki. While at the time all SUVs were dangerous, and people were not yet used to driving them, I cannot tell you how many SUVs I used to see toppled over on the side of the street where they were turning too fast into a driveway, Of course at the end of last year, after many people died in unsafe Suzuki's, they filed for bankruptcy in the US.
There is no reason that companies should not be allowed to make unsafe or subpar products, or that people should not be allowed to buy them, but we at least need to have the right to state that products are not up to par, and why we think so.
Lets say that a website knows who I am by the way I type. A man in the middle attack can get those statistics, duplicate it, and I am forever compromised.
I think biometric falls on the convenience side of the security issue, at least for now. I am not convinced that it could fall as easily as a dictionary attack for a password.
The article says what it does, and up until now I really haven't been that interested. It brings a general mobile operating system down to a truly mobile scale, and maybe even sell for a low price. iOS, which was for phones, is going to put into a package the size of, really, a Nano. This is interesting technologically, as interesting as MS putting WIndows into an ARM Tablet. Not all the functionality i there, but they are sharing a code base. A code base that is more significant than the sharing between Mac OS and iOS.
This is whole point of the microcomputer craze. Putting more power into smaller packages. Sure, VAX VMS is a hugely superior operating system, but it could not run on anything the size of an Apple ][, and could not run Visicalc.
I know that some people on see technology as a means to bring cool stuff to under the $100 price point, but it really is about putting powerful tools, be it a pencil or the H2G2 into an every increasing percentage of the population. This watch could be a step in that direction.
Some will say that such a student will magically learn these skills when they are paid to so do, but do you want to be the employer who trains a kid to get to work on time and not spend all day on the phone. These are the kind of skills that are not supposed to be on the job training. No one is going to look at this after a college degree is achieved or when a work record is established. If I were an employer I would be worried of the legal implications on knowing anything from this database.
But it could significantly impact school. The Gates foundation is significantly involved in school reform, and this could be used in two diametrically opposed ways. The positive or negative impact is going to be students who go through school in this system.
The first is is track students between schools, something that is difficult to do now. The advantages are many. It will a more accurate drop out rate. It may minimize the huge problem of schools not being aware of a student's past academics and accommodations, thus possibly accidentally placing them in a duplicate class or not providing maximum accommodations. Comprehensive schools can use it to track students who change schools often due to dangerous behavior
The second is to filter students for charter schools, which the Gates foundation strongly supports, to the point of investing $25 million to encourage districts to promote charter schools, Bill Gates speaking at the Charter School Conference, and $22 million in direct investment in charter schools.
There is nothing inherently wrong with charter schools, except the way they are funded. They are often funded based on the fact that they are cheaper than a comprehensive school. The problem with this is that often the best way to make something cheaper is not to educate. It is a simple fact that some kids are cheaper to educate than other, and this has little to do with race or how much money the family has. What often happens now is that the charter school will filter, either though a difficult application process or arbitrary rules for who gets to stay in the school, to minimize the cost per student. This does not save any money to the taxpayer because the average cost for student increases at the comprehensive schools, but will make politicians look better because they can claim to find innovative ways to educate students.
What this database will allow is for schools to target the preferred students. So someone like Yes can use the database to provide incentives to certain students to leave their schools not because they are not being provided an excellent education, but because YES wants to minimize the cost per student.
I really like this new connector. It seems more rugged and easier to get in. I even bought a knock off connector for $10 and it worked as well. This was not the case for the dock connector.
What I learned doing this was that space always has a surprise. You may think that you understand how thing work away from earth, but all too often predictions fall short.
Also, realize that Science and Nature are not really the bottlenecks in the distribution of knowledge. On the iPad Nature is under $50, and a subscription to Science in $100. Almost anyone, in the US at least, who wants these can get them. At worst they have to go to the library. It is just that laziness has set in on the internet and walking over the library has become a chore.
I think it is ok for the publishing authors to pay some of the publishing costs. I do not see why it need to costs thousands for a researcher to read the papers. This mostly effects developing countries and the researchers trying to do work in those countries. It is going to be the small journals from the traditionally exorbitant companies that are going to prevent this research.
It is getting better. When I was younger I knew researchers who paid huge sums just for a little pamphlet that listed the names and abstracts of all the papers published in the previous period. Now this can be done with keyword searches in open databases. I did work copying articles on a piecemeal basis. I imagine that this can be done on a greater scale, probably within the terms of use for a library.
Years ago I was not able to tolerate the copy protection. I wanted to play with a game to see if it was any good, I wanted to play it whatever machine I wanted. I paid for games, just like I paid for all software, but I wanted value.
The micro transaction actually worked for a while in getting me back into gaming. I figure a game is going to cost money, and it doesn't matter to me whether it is all up front. I know that some complain that it ends up costing more, but does it really. How much was spent on Mortal Kombat. If there were micro transaction in the game would it really cost more than four games?
What is clear is that the business model does not work, at least for games where infrastructure is needed behind the scene or where development is very expensive. Not enough people buy stuff. Too many people think games should be free, even though they expect to get paid for their work.
If one wants a *nix machine, I presume that anyone can go over to newegg and buy whatever parts needed to build a *nix machine. It would probably cost more than the $500 that a Windows 8 dell desktop might run, but it would be much less than a thousand. Or maybe pay the thousand for an Apple Laptop. I have had no problem running *nix, or MS Windows, or Chrome on it.
My question for Groupon is how can they sell a product that essentially costs nothing, with the provider of the coupon taking all the risk, and still not make a profit. It seems to me that they must be an issue with management for them to blow through all that cash.
Music is recorded for the type of playback devices that are going to be used. Right now the playback device is an iPod. It used to be tapes or CD. In the long ago it was a turntable with seperate amplifier and huge speakers. Before that is was an integrated unit playing a wax cylinder, the same unit was used to record a bunch of people playing and singing as loud as the could into the microphone/loudspeaker.
Vinyl records were very lossy. Most people played them so much, and the commercial stuff of somewhat low quality, that sooner rather than later the grooves would degrade or they would get scratched. We would deal with it until a greatest hit album came out and we would buy the same music all over again. Or we buy a single and buy the same music all over again.
The industry made money by selling tracks with a limited lifetime repackaged in different forms. So when we talk about the decline of revenue, what we are talking about is selling of tracks that do not degrade over time. They may be 'lossy' in that they are reprocessed once into a computer file, but after that there is no loss incurred in playing the music or transfer the music to different playback devices, as is the case when we recorded Vinyl or CD to tape so it would be more potable.
The death of the music industry has little to do with the internet. It has to do with the way that CDs were sold, as a forever album, and the ability to move music to the computer with almost no generational artifacts. That means tracks were bought once, and likely never again.The only greatest hits albums I have are stuff that I only had on Vinyl. I have a couple live recording from before the Internet, during the CD phase, but that are the only duplicates track I have.
THis is why the music industry is failing. They never really figured out how to make money when most people only buy a track once. The only thing the Internet really did was reduce the number of tracks that most people bought from an album of 10-15 to singles. I don't really see that the reduction of a single fro $3 to $1 is an issue due to efficiencies in recording technology and the retail chain.
The price point is also confusing. It is $100 more than a MacBook air. I know it comes with an office app, cellular and a touch screen, but OO.org is free, and the Apple office suite is only $60, for all the machines on an account. And a cellular router is only $60, and if you buy it separately you can go with any carrier you want. It is not like this thing is a tablet and you will walking around with it. OTOH, it only comes with 32GB, while that air comes with 128GB. Of course you get 1TB online for 3 years, but we all know how reliable Google is at responding to end user problems. In any case it is a $150 value.
Which is to say, yes, if one is trying to run a profitable company where developers are asking pay far beyond the average for college graduates, finding productive people is hard. They not only have to have the skills, but also the discipline and desire to work. At another firm We would hire anyone who pass a basic math and mechanical skills test, basically what one should have learned in high school if one also took a tech ed class. It was an expensive process. Too many washed out because they could not follow process or did not know the importance of quality. This was not hard work, just setting up machines, letting them run, and then demounting and inspecting. But it did require discipline. Good money that a lot of people did not have the self control to earn. On really smart employee left for fast food in hopes of becoming a manager. Much less money.
First, it taught me how to make something work. So many times in school there is inauthentic assessment. The results of your work does not actually result in anything, so it really does not matter if it is right or wrong. In middle school this means kids will just fill in blanks or bubble things in to get finished. Because I was doing something that would be right or wrong for real, I would work to learn how to get the program running. Which meant lining up columns, making sure parenthesis were in the right place, etc. Nowhere else would I put the effort to make it correct, because it did not matter.
Second it taught me to break up a problem, think about what steps for each part were, and then put it back together with code. This process analysis and design served me well for the rest of my life.
Third, it encouraged me to develop abstract thinking. Math class was supposed to do this, but really it did not. That was learned in computer classes. I recall the epiphany of realizing that a swap function was needed to exchange values in variable. I understood what a variable was. When I wrote code to graph and swirl the trig functions I understood trigonometry. The act of me writing code to just generate a graph made me understand that process in way that I see many do not.
I will admit we were a specific group of hand selected students. On the other hand we now have the pedagogical techniques to teach these advanced topics to any somewhat motivated group. I have seen high school students use circuit design software to generate a circuit and then program a FPGA. It can be done if the we invest in the right teachers and pay for the equipment.
Which is my only worry. If we are going to do this in the early grades, we need the right people. Without the right people it is just going to devolve into an application design class, which is what too many computer classes are now. Knowing how to use an application is like knowing how to type. It is not going to teach how to program a computer any more than typing teaches you to build a typewriter.
But if done right it would be revolutionary. Asking a student to program a python web pages that solves a generic two step equation when a user inputs the values, performing a sort to calculate the mode and median, interfacing with data collection equipment to gather and analyze data for an expirent, this would provoke understanding in some students beyond what they would otherwise have.
Of course it won't happen because these skills cannot be tested on a standardized test. The skills on this test are those that no one really needs for work. For example the test asks what is the error in this bit of code. I don't know. When I code the compiler gives me an error, then I look at the code and fixes it. That is the way real people code. Ask me about something real!
I would say that this is far from clear. In chrome I was asked for my application specific password, but since I did not know what it was, and could find nothing to tell me, I did not give it or set it up. This really seems a case of bad security through complexity. When I log into Google, i give it my password and a one time code. This seems like simple security. Perhaps someone will tell me otherwise.
And the one's that did fight are now generals and are worried about budgets and pensions, and whose board they are going to sit on when they retire. Right now the military budget is about 10% above where it was in 2001, inflation adjusted. Some of his is the war on terror, but most of it is really just fighting wars to keep a job.
Which is really why as we move forward we have to have a much more diverse view of energy. Right now most countries have a majority producer, be it coal or nuclear or natural gas or whatever. This is most likely due to political pressures, rather than rational thought. In large countries like the US there is going to have a realization that certain regions are going to be better with certain generation methods, and allow those regions to develop a local plan. Right now federal subsidies are promoting inefficient programs. For instance corn ethanol provides nearly zero benefit, yet there is still money wasted on corn rather than trying to reintroduce something like sugar cane into the US.
[emphasis added]
So lets start with first paragraph. One thing that has become very clear is that students engage with content in differing manners. While by the time a students reach college a students should be able to engage with content through lecture, at earlier grades such expectations are premature. Furthermore it is real clear to most people that lecture does not really give ownership of the process to anyone other than the person lecturing. Also, structure is something that most kids like, even if they rebel against it. Because fractions were mentioned, I will take this down to the elementary school level, where I have seen students excel mostly because the teacher set up a predictable environment where students were able to truly engage with content. It may seem out of fashion, but these students thived on deadlines, just like some student thrive on lecture, because all it involves is copying and mimicking.
Then we get to the idea that some students don't learn simply because the haven't seen the same thing enough. Think back to when you were in school. Did you learn just because the same teacher repeated the same thing over and over again? I didn't. Not even in college. I needed a friend to explain it to me, or I needed to build something, or code it, or sit and think. Just passively watching never did that much.
Then we get to blaming the teacher. Your student aren't learning because you are a scared incompetent person. No, again, students need structure. Teachers build a classroom for the students, not for some external person who theorizes that something might work. Yes students can use these video to understand the content that will engage in school, but no the average student cannot prioritize by themselves in such a way that sufficient time is spent learning all the topics that are necessary on the final exam. Just look at the number of students who fail out of college.
My real issue here is that it seems like everyone is trying to figure out how to educate those that are easy to educate, while so little is being done to think how to educate those that are not going to learn well from lecture, who may need to build something, or the like. The way this response is constructed, it is telling students that they are not able to work in chaos, if they are not able to learn from listening to the lectures, if they listen time and time again, and they do not learn, then they are simply not able to be educated. This is very wrong.
First, this is right because management always has to cut costs, and one way to cut costs is to push for more productivity. This can be done by have employes in house so they can be pushed. Otherwise one is just paying a sum for a fixed amount of work. For instance a sysadmin will do everything they have to do, but aren't going to be pushed to do extra work if not in the office.
OTOH, as has been said, if work can be done remotely it can be done very remotely. That is we do have piecework or assembly in the US. Such work is easy for others to do because you pay by the part, don't pay if you don't like the piece, and even can penalize for bad work. Therefore all the work is done in Asia. Cars are expensive to ship, so the work is done in Mexico or states that might as well be Mexico.
I have also seen another effect through team building. Some writes a book, often gibberish, but then consultants use it to market team building or efficiency seminars. Every seminar involves dozens of books, which generate revenue for the author. Of course, if the seminars are going to be successful, the book must have been a best seller. An upfront investment of $100K, and maybe the cost of ghost writer, can generate years of income.
It is lockin. One way to minimize is to buy used kit.
So even though I have been a Nikon fan for many years, I am afraid my next camera will a Canon.