Back in the day most usability people were saying that putting graphics on web pages would mean that the load time would be too slow and people would leave. This was true, to an extent. Web pages that had too much stuff on it were probably abandoned more frequently. And we have been used to faster and faster loads.
But the reality is that page loads have become slower, not only due to large number of ads, but a non responsive and evidently critically maimed Google Analytics. Yet despite these issues, user still go to web pages and wait.
So my question is what is really going on here and why do we care. If these video delays are not going to effect advertising, probably no one cares, just like no one cares that google analytics regularly cause web pages to hang. And a site is not advertising, then what is the issue if a random user bails.
Speed and reliability is a part of the design compromise. Certainly those who want to sell bandwidth and speed are going to say that those are most important, but they really aren't.
The only reason this is getting traction is because Romney and his supporters spent $2 billion, mostly from large donors who were promised tax cuts and other favors, and Romney lost. It's like when you owe money to a loan shark. You try to make it somebody else's fault. We have seen this. Obama bribed the populous, which he did with a promis of employment and health care not controlled by corporate death panels. Then he blames voter turn out. Somehow the populous were not as afraid to vote as he hoped, this is, after all, supposed to be some third world country where the peasant fear for their safety. Then he blamed his technical staff for breaking his computer(remember the congressman who did the same thing when his staff accidentally broke his computer). Now he is blaming superior technical abilities, because obviously, he, as an expert manager with the same $2 billion dollars Obama had, and with a campaign that has running at least as long as Obama has, could not develop such advance technology. And don't forget that he is so fragile, that a single governor can single handedly destroy his entire campaign with a single hug.
We will be seeing more of this as time goes on. Look on this as life lesson, children. When you take money from a Las Vegas Boss, you better deliver.
There are many games that, as she gets older, will make increasing sense to her and teach her basic physics concepts, mostly mechanics. Gravity is one of them, and it is very good, but I don't know if a three year old can play it.
Games like No, Human, Tesla toy, and even angry birds, might provide the immediate feedback and simply play to encourage a three year old. Angry Birds Space is especially interesting.
When she becomes older, Osmos and SimplePhysics is very interesting.
this reminds of the recycling kick, which was reduce, reuse, recycle. It has always been known the reduction was the key, and reuse and recycle were just short term kludges that we use to get to the reduction.
In the US it seems that free energy is a right, or at a least such a sign of prosperity that no one is willing to give it up, the new chicken in every pot. Now we focus on cheap electricity, and cheap gas, not making efficient use of the resources we have.
Take christmas. When I was a kid we would hang a few stands of light outside, a few on the tree, and turn them on for a few hours a night. Now we have suburbs where part of the deed restrictions appears to be hanging dozens of lights, and leaving them on all night. Now, if these households can afford it, that is fine. But given that these are the same people who are complaining that gas prices are too high, I think that the nation is subsidizing low energy prices so that people who need to appear wealthy can have lights on all night.
I don't know how much energy can actually be conserved, but what I do know is that we are not even trying. CFL are being given a bad name simply because they will save electricity. When I was a kid people laughed at out small zippy car, but I have never had to fill up more than once or twice a week, sometimes once every two weeks, which means I was never one of those people who did not have gas. People laughed at my expensive computer, but I was pulling 60 watts when everyone else was pulling almost 200. I know that none of these are justified in terms of electricity saving, but sometimes reduction and conservatism is it's own reward.
Why we all know organism yawn and have feeling. Cats yawn and cry if you kill them. But I have to with any rand on this one. Fetuses, like cats, have no rights
You live in a fantasy land. If you ask hundred people if they work where they would like to work, and under the conditions they would like work, and they pay they would like to work, how many would say they didi? Yes, hypothetically, if you don't like a job you can go somewhere else or live on public assistance, but that is not reality.
In fact this kid is being given an education. For free. At taxpayer expense. In this case the choice the student and the parent are making are real choices. they have other real choices. They can move to another district. They can enroll in a charter school. They can home school. The can enroll in distance classes. Sure, none of these will simple, might require travel of the parents to actually make an effort instead of just complaining that others are not meeting their needs, but these choices are much more real than quitting a job because you are not given donuts every day, then magically finding a better paying job with donuts.
One thing about being an adult is choosing fights. For instance, having a driver license or identification is good. Having to carry it around all the time is maybe not so good. I don't necessarily agree with ID, but I know it is common in the workplace, and provides is somewhat justifiable from a security point of view.
Here is the hypothetical question I would ask the parent. The badges are there to minimize the possibility of an intruder on campus. I am sure the school follows the standard protocol of scanning visitors IDs and printing a visitor pass, so even visitors are known. Teachers are supposed to stop anyone without ID, and I know they do. Now, if their kid were assaulted by an unknown visitor, would the parent hold the school harmless, or would they sue? Would they put that in writing that if their kid were dead, they would only hold them selves liable.
This is the kind of student that wastes taxpayer money and is the worst case. He is geting a good free education, but that is not enough. He has to waste everyones time as well.
Management wants the common person to believe they are supreme deities so they can justify the huge compensation, but in reality they are just people who are usually overpaid. Being overpaid is not a big thing, it is what most of us aspire to, but being not especially competent is.
Some sales are made because current owners or management does not have the ability to deal with current situation or take advantage of current opportunities, but I think most purchases are like buying a used car, it is being sold because there is something wrong with it. We have too many cases where lately where these unreliable firms have been sold for huge amounts, showing that the sellers had an ability to bullshit, or bribe, that exceeded the larger corporation intelligence ability.
So no, it never surprises me when due diligence fails. What surprises me is when the purchasing firm cannot take responsibility for their failure. After all, if we failed to choose the right printer, and maintain it properly, HP would not give us a new one, even if we went to court.
Most of us don't want an aggressive upgrade cycle. We want an OS that works, and then minor upgrades. MS, OTOH, needs to push product, justify the existence of the MSCE army, and the training costs associated with it.
Windows started as reaction to Mac OS. As such it was crap until Windows 3.11 workgroups in the early 90's. We dealt with Windows, but it was a kludge.
There was a lot of happiness with 3.11, and much happiness with WIndows 95. It was 32 bit and was really the first modern OS that MS had.
But then Windows 98 killed the streak MS was having, along with using IE to integrate the various products instead of creating a consistent undercarriage. NT was a mish mash at first, but by the time WIndows 98 came out it was a superior product, which meant MS was in the current situation of pushing inferior OS to users that perfectly happy with, for them, the superior NT. That was me.
Windows 2000 and XP, the sucessor of NT, finally made the Windows platform whole again, but then MS started getting into the infinite SKU look within a product, and really messed us up again. But really for a long time XP was it.
But Apple was getting aggressive again, and MS got jittery and made Vista, which no one would leave XP for. I finally upgraded from XP to Windows 7, which I must admit was a adult and rational product. It runs nice.
So here we are again, with Windows 8. Evidently a innovative product, but for me, someone who uses Windows only to do certain technical work, am I going to care enough to upgrade, especially since I have to pay full price since I run as virtual. Absolutely not. In fact, I recently bought some PCs for some other people and was consistently told that sales were up as people desperately wanted W7 machines.
It is the upgrade cycle. We get used to working in an OS, then MS every couple years expects us to change our habits to satisfy their needs for sales. It did not happen in the 90's and it s not going to happen now. When MS just develops good software, they are fantastic company. But when they are trying be overly creative or reacting to Apple, they produce crap.
Whine Whine. It is so much like the entitled to whine because they cannot have their people come in and tell the peasants how horrible we are. Nothing changes. The christian conservatives feel they have the responsibility to tell us we are all going to hell if we don't believe they way they do, to tell us that we can't have sex with whom we want when we want, to tell us that we can't buy drinks on Sundays, or that we have to sit and listen respectfully while they pray, but when we want one thing we are being 'emotional'.
To make matters worse, if someone wanted to show that being gay was a normal productive life choice, they would say it violated their religious liberties. But if they want to bring in a women who condones murder,compares liberals with murders, and has called for the assassination of the president, they say we are being intolerant and politically correct.
Really, when I was back is school it was the Christian conservatives, those fragile flowers that would faint if a poem had the word fuck in it, or if they saw a couple guys kissing, or had the leave the classroom when we discussed classic american literature because it was the devils work, these were the people who create censorship on americans campus. They would bring in the child molesting priests to cry foul. They would bring in the ministers to deny women proper care and choice because the only way they could hope to get a wife was to knock her up and make her dependent. It was sad.
And I am sure the comments are going to prove my point, because I am not hating any one here. Everyone has a right to express their opinion and try to have a life that fits with their values. But it was never the liberal groups who were trying to cut funding for the legal conservative groups. And it was never the liberal groups trying to foce everyone to pray, or waste their time listening to others pray. We held our events and if you did not want to go, then don't.
Here is how screwed up these people were. We were in a conservative state in a somewhat conservative city, but a city that was diverse so people pretty much let everyone do what they do. These wingnuts were so extreme that created their own campus newspaper because they couldn't stand to be in the same room with liberals. And I disagreed with most of the official newspaper, it was conservative. But if these people could not get thier way they did not know how to compromise, so they took their toys, found a sugar daddy, and built their own compound where they would not have to deal with anyone who was different. And evidently that is what they still do, crying when someone calls them on their hypocristy.
So, how much does this effect things overall? There has often been specific tags that can cause a problem. For instance, there is HTML editing interfaces that only work fully in firefox, but works ok on everything else.
The funny thing is that MS pushed this type of non standard HTML by convincing web developers that it was more important to HTML to create consistant application interfaces rather than flexible content delivery and sales interface technology. So they pushed the idea of fixed screen sizes, fixed elements, and the like that only IE could, at the time, deliver. CSS and HTML5 depreciated the IE technology, but the damage was done. A generation of web developers were trained to look at web pages as fixed entities, not flexible markups. Even today I have to use some web pages that will only on IE because MS has convinced the MBAs that this is the most efficient way to do things.
So now we are at a place where Webkit and Gecko rule the world. Designers are writing web pages to work well on Chrome, Firefox, and Android, which fortunately for apple will make it work on Mac and iOS as well. MS, being the entitled rich kid, is whining that consumers are ignoring IE. Of course IE is being ignored. It is doesn't run on anything that consumers choose to use. The only people who use IE are corporate types that are forced to use IE. If I have a new social app, am I going to cate that it does not run on IE. No, I am going to care that it does not run Android. If MS wants it to run on IE, they have the resources to add the functionality to IE. Otherwise who cares?
Compared to Google, drop box is a rip off. I don't know why anyone would use it. It is like a drug. They give you a small amount for free, then charge when you get a usable amount. Google gives you a lot for free.
But, like other have said, the cost of salesforce is not just storage. It is reliable storage, and bandwidth. There has been many times when I have not been able to get to Google reliably. Sometimes even their servers get bogged down. I presume that if this happened with salesforce there would be repercussions. Likewise, Google, and i suppose even dropbox, is not going to do much if the data is gone. Sure they have redundant facilities, but that in no way guarantees that every bit of data will be restored, or it will be restored quickly. I have been in situations where a full restore has taken a couple days. Not a huge deal for me, but for what happens if one comes in monday and can make not sales calls?
Honestly each regeneration of the Doctor has lead to a new series. Hartnel was basically history for kids. When he left they didn't want to end the show, so they came up with regeneration and put Traughten in with a more action style. some time an arbitrary limit was set. That limit was broken, I believe, with the master and the Keeper of Traken.
Pertwee was a gadget guy and no longer roamed the universe. He went around saving earth from all manner of dangers. I think this is when we really got the Doctor as the defender of earth. It goes on. Baker of course is well known, he formalized the idea that a female assistant attract the teen and older men by wearing little. Of course we did see Sarah Jane in bathing costume on one of her early appearances. Davidson got rid of the gadets and his episodes, with a unusual size of entourage, tended to be very emotional.
Then we had the Colin Baker fiasco where instead of real episodes we got a season of clip shows and elevator episodes.
I like daring of McCoy and ace. I think it was the best of everything that came before.
Which is to say that the current stuff is like the old stuff, in which the show pretty much does what it wants to. No one can say the Gallifry episodes were all that good, so having the doctor be alone instead of having a country is good thing. If a series is going to last as long as the doctor, it can't get bogged down in details.
In Texas the legislature may just put into law that Critical thinking is bad because it makes children disobey their parents.
For years we were told that milk would make us strong. Milk is still served as the sole diary, even though many kids are intolerant of it. For a time yogurt was served instead of milk. Cheese is also good, but children are taught processed cheese is just like real cheese.
There is a fight against distinguishing the various forms of sugars, but children are taught that animal protein is superior to vegetable protien, and that a McDonalds hambuger is a superior meal to quinoe pilaf, or that the cheap sausage that so many kids eat is superior to a bowl of oatmeal with an egg.
Even worse, schools and the media hardly every talk about the difference between a complex and simple carbohydrate. Most will equate eating candy with eating a whole grain. Somehow a baked potato is inferior to a barbqued ribs with the sauce full of simple carbohydrate.
I am sure this is going to make all those indignant meat eaters faint from the nerve of those people who disagree with them, but get over it. Not everyone believes that meat is neccesary, and much of the world is very healthy with minimum or no meat. Not all economies are built on selling junk to kids. Some economies fund health care fully, so there is no advantage to making people sick so that MBAs can get rich by taking a cut of inflated health care costs.
And all countries tell little white lies to push people in the direction they want them to go. Like kissing causes pregnancy. Or condoms don't protect against STDs. Or meat is needed to be healthy. Or eating the occasional junk, or smoking, or anyother of silly things, is going to cause no harm.
I thought android was OSS and as such the code was available. What is to keep people from using the old libraries, developing them as they wish, and then just interfacing with what other tools they need?
For about half the states, the nearest MS store is in another state. For those in Hawaii, the means a looong plane ride. One reason this works for Apple is they have been very aggressive in opening stores. I have my choice of three. I will also complain how much the MS search sucks compared to the Apple search for stores. MS can only give a zip code, while at apple you can type in the name of your town or a zip code, in the same box mind you, and a nice map pops up. Reminds me when you had to reboot the MS computer to change a screen resolution.
I do this with some other programs. There is generally a breadcrumb trail that tells you what the student has done. For instance in Autodesk there is a tree that lists everything the student has done. Typically if this trail exactly matches another student, or the benchmark, there is copying.
What i do, however, is have the students create a unique product for any assessment. This is really the only way to assess that the student understands the process. Even if he or she creates a final product from the book, does that mean they understand the process or just how to follow instructions. Clearly following instructions is important, but the minmimum one should expect for learning is the ability to tweak. After all, that is what many software developers do. Take a bit of code and modify it to do the specific task. In this case, for instance, start with a personal photo and then practice whatever skills are needed on it. This makes grading harder, but maybe not.
What we need to realize is that these standardized tests are simply a instrument used to survey what is becoming an increasingly diverse population. If I went out a did a survey of a population and did not control for the different backgrounds, SES, etc in the population, I would be laughed out science. If I just went out onto the street and asked 50 americans to differentiate a polynomial, then reported that no one in America knew calculus, many people would believe the study, but those who actually know science would know the reports are invalid. Likewise, the majority of the US pundits, who are trained in other things than science and statistics, are completely unaware of the assumptions and methods used in reporting this data that is meaningless without understanding these assumption and methods.
The first issue here is diversity. One can imagine that 50 years the number of non-whites taking a standardized test were few, and really the only ones who did so were the ones that wanted to. I mean in 1960 people were still fighting school integration. So now, two generations later, with the introduction of universal high stakes testing, what do we really know about dealing with students that are not at school willing, of a diverse background, and honestly have no reason to really care about passing these tests. I mean what are schools going to do? Hold a kid in second grade until 18? Not let a kid graduate. There are real and imposed penalties for both.
Second is that a test is an instrument that must be created to meet certain goals. The first is develop a set of questions that if answers indicate some mastery of a subject or set of skills. These questions then are assessed by given them to a population and seeing how the population does on them, If too many people do well, then maybe the question is thrown out. If the wrong people do well, then maybe the question is thrown out. One assumption that is often made is that some people should get the question correct, and if they don't it is a bad test. Now, this judgement is often made based on how the test taker answered other questions on the test, so is not directly making a judgement based on preconceived biases. However this does lead to a situation where questions can be biased to test taking skills and cultural knowledge, not content or real skill.
Which is to say that one might criticize this policy for painting with a broad brush or making wild assumptions, but something is going to have to be done if these tests are going to taken seriously as legitimate instruments as opposed to busy work used to cover the ass of lazy educational administrators. It is hard to take these things seriously. For instance, iIn my state is has appeared that there was a time or two when the thresholds may have been altered to insure that the suburban, mostly white, schools do well. It seems that it is politically complicated to let all of their students fail, so the standard is lowered a few question, but lowering it an additional question or two to accomodate urban schools is just too much to ask.
These calculators are present only for exams. They do enough that a some complex problems can be given, but not enough so the calculator can do the problems.
Strictly speaking they are not necessary. A test can be written to allow a student to do without the calculator, rather than the current situation in which there are convolutions so that certain problems cannot be easily done with a calculator.
A phone simply is too uncontrolled. Questions can be specially written to counteract the capabilities of the TI calculator. It would be impossible to do so with a phone.
For real work, calculators are hardly needed. There are RPN apps for every device. The only reason that TI still makes these calculators, and tax dollars are spent on them, is that some think teaching the calculator is a good thing.
This is the most lame privacy concern ever. Anyone who can't explain the could not sleep and went for a run a 1 in the morning either deserves or wants to get caught. So yes if you like to have sex with several different people without one knowing about the other, this is a bad device to have. But really, it does track location, take pictures, or lets you input incriminating text, like "1am, left gf house, picked up a random person, took home, and achieved real satisfaction.", just as a for instance.
You what is a real privacy and relationship killer. The pager. Can't tell you how many people have gotten into trouble because a partner read a page. Or mail. Can't tell you what receiving a postcard from a friend asking you to join on the next vacation does to a marriage. Or the phone. You never know when a spouse is going to answer by mistake. Or, seriously people, credit card bills. I mean many don't think about it, but credit card bills and receipts have gotten me into trouble on more than one occasion. Also, remember that every cell phone call you make, and Skype call for that matter, is listed in detail for anyone to see. Exactly., When. How long. Who. This is trouble in the making and no one should it. Everyone should be using a burner phone.
After New Orleans was hit, the population dropped and has now stabilized at less than 400,000 people, down form half a million. In 1900 Galveston was hit, killing as many as 10,000 people, out a population of 40,000. Most packed up, moved inland to Houston, and built the ship channel. The city is built to flood. New York, if it stays, is going to have to built to flood, built to be rebuilt. Have flood insurance, have replaceable components, if NYC is going to stay. Which is has to be because it establishes and protect the minuscule sea access it has.,
So is this a joke or for real. While most of his contemporaries are billionaires, he merely has a quarter. His success in the olympics was his contact in the government who funneled federal dollars to the event. And the most important job for a bussinesssman is knowing when to let someone else take the meeting because you would flub it. The problem is that,like Bush, Romney just wanted to play president so he could provide some kickbacks to his friends, maybe make a few contacts so he could make the billion he never did. He failed because voter suppression is not as easy as it once was, and because he pissed of the women. There are some significant voter suppression efforts currently under way, so maybe a sane republican can win next time, but that would mean the psycho wing of the tea party would have to be eliminated.
As has been mention Silver is not a celebrity because his model was the best or even remarkable. He is celebrity because he knows how to communicate, he is promoting himself for a book, and many people who think their model was better said his was bunk.
Notice I did not saw thought, or was, or was not. This is statistics. It is always a mistake to believe statistics will always be your friend. It will not. Relying on math alone is always a mistake. Models have a way of skewing from reality over time. Which is what happened to those that supported Romney and believed their numbers and algorithms predicted reality better.
p.
Nevertheless Silver's is a star created by those who opposed not based on observations or valid maths, but on personal belief. The belief that the non-white vote would disappear. The belief that most white people were fundamentally racist and therefore who vote against the black man when given an aristocratic white man.(while a majority can be shown to be have racist feeling, most now live or spent time in diverse community so they know a non-white can be, on occasion as good or better choice than a randomly selected white). The belief that jobs are the issue, when in fact, historically speaking, the job situation is relatively better for everyone except for the older white male. And ultimately, that a women should enjoy being raped and accept the baby to raise on her own.
The reality is that STEM is hard work, and one has to have a culture of work. Lower tuition is not going to do anything if students see these survey of study time and decide that on an economic basis,they may be better off in marketing.
There are majors where all you need to know is how to read and write, where arriving at a correct solution is nowhere near as important as sounding like you arrive at a correct solution. These are not most STEM majors. If a student has not worked to internalize the math and science in high school or on their own time, free tuition is not going to help them succeed, especially since tuition is often the least expensive component of the overall equation.
Furthermore the last thing I wanted in my college classes were students how were there because it was the path of least resistance. I was all too often that student, and I know how horrible I was. But at least I had an intrest in the subject, and took the classes a little seriously, not just to make a grade, but to learn. One thing I liked about upper level science classes was that all the testing security and micromanagement went away, and we were free to just explore and learn.
Slashdot Mirror
But the reality is that page loads have become slower, not only due to large number of ads, but a non responsive and evidently critically maimed Google Analytics. Yet despite these issues, user still go to web pages and wait.
So my question is what is really going on here and why do we care. If these video delays are not going to effect advertising, probably no one cares, just like no one cares that google analytics regularly cause web pages to hang. And a site is not advertising, then what is the issue if a random user bails.
Speed and reliability is a part of the design compromise. Certainly those who want to sell bandwidth and speed are going to say that those are most important, but they really aren't.
We will be seeing more of this as time goes on. Look on this as life lesson, children. When you take money from a Las Vegas Boss, you better deliver.
Games like No, Human, Tesla toy, and even angry birds, might provide the immediate feedback and simply play to encourage a three year old. Angry Birds Space is especially interesting.
When she becomes older, Osmos and SimplePhysics is very interesting.
In the US it seems that free energy is a right, or at a least such a sign of prosperity that no one is willing to give it up, the new chicken in every pot. Now we focus on cheap electricity, and cheap gas, not making efficient use of the resources we have.
Take christmas. When I was a kid we would hang a few stands of light outside, a few on the tree, and turn them on for a few hours a night. Now we have suburbs where part of the deed restrictions appears to be hanging dozens of lights, and leaving them on all night. Now, if these households can afford it, that is fine. But given that these are the same people who are complaining that gas prices are too high, I think that the nation is subsidizing low energy prices so that people who need to appear wealthy can have lights on all night.
I don't know how much energy can actually be conserved, but what I do know is that we are not even trying. CFL are being given a bad name simply because they will save electricity. When I was a kid people laughed at out small zippy car, but I have never had to fill up more than once or twice a week, sometimes once every two weeks, which means I was never one of those people who did not have gas. People laughed at my expensive computer, but I was pulling 60 watts when everyone else was pulling almost 200. I know that none of these are justified in terms of electricity saving, but sometimes reduction and conservatism is it's own reward.
Why we all know organism yawn and have feeling. Cats yawn and cry if you kill them. But I have to with any rand on this one. Fetuses, like cats, have no rights
Just here to say best WKRP ever. Action offstage but acting makes it work.
Have you tried brining it?
In fact this kid is being given an education. For free. At taxpayer expense. In this case the choice the student and the parent are making are real choices. they have other real choices. They can move to another district. They can enroll in a charter school. They can home school. The can enroll in distance classes. Sure, none of these will simple, might require travel of the parents to actually make an effort instead of just complaining that others are not meeting their needs, but these choices are much more real than quitting a job because you are not given donuts every day, then magically finding a better paying job with donuts.
One thing about being an adult is choosing fights. For instance, having a driver license or identification is good. Having to carry it around all the time is maybe not so good. I don't necessarily agree with ID, but I know it is common in the workplace, and provides is somewhat justifiable from a security point of view.
Here is the hypothetical question I would ask the parent. The badges are there to minimize the possibility of an intruder on campus. I am sure the school follows the standard protocol of scanning visitors IDs and printing a visitor pass, so even visitors are known. Teachers are supposed to stop anyone without ID, and I know they do. Now, if their kid were assaulted by an unknown visitor, would the parent hold the school harmless, or would they sue? Would they put that in writing that if their kid were dead, they would only hold them selves liable.
This is the kind of student that wastes taxpayer money and is the worst case. He is geting a good free education, but that is not enough. He has to waste everyones time as well.
Some sales are made because current owners or management does not have the ability to deal with current situation or take advantage of current opportunities, but I think most purchases are like buying a used car, it is being sold because there is something wrong with it. We have too many cases where lately where these unreliable firms have been sold for huge amounts, showing that the sellers had an ability to bullshit, or bribe, that exceeded the larger corporation intelligence ability.
So no, it never surprises me when due diligence fails. What surprises me is when the purchasing firm cannot take responsibility for their failure. After all, if we failed to choose the right printer, and maintain it properly, HP would not give us a new one, even if we went to court.
Windows started as reaction to Mac OS. As such it was crap until Windows 3.11 workgroups in the early 90's. We dealt with Windows, but it was a kludge.
There was a lot of happiness with 3.11, and much happiness with WIndows 95. It was 32 bit and was really the first modern OS that MS had.
But then Windows 98 killed the streak MS was having, along with using IE to integrate the various products instead of creating a consistent undercarriage. NT was a mish mash at first, but by the time WIndows 98 came out it was a superior product, which meant MS was in the current situation of pushing inferior OS to users that perfectly happy with, for them, the superior NT. That was me.
Windows 2000 and XP, the sucessor of NT, finally made the Windows platform whole again, but then MS started getting into the infinite SKU look within a product, and really messed us up again. But really for a long time XP was it.
But Apple was getting aggressive again, and MS got jittery and made Vista, which no one would leave XP for. I finally upgraded from XP to Windows 7, which I must admit was a adult and rational product. It runs nice.
So here we are again, with Windows 8. Evidently a innovative product, but for me, someone who uses Windows only to do certain technical work, am I going to care enough to upgrade, especially since I have to pay full price since I run as virtual. Absolutely not. In fact, I recently bought some PCs for some other people and was consistently told that sales were up as people desperately wanted W7 machines.
It is the upgrade cycle. We get used to working in an OS, then MS every couple years expects us to change our habits to satisfy their needs for sales. It did not happen in the 90's and it s not going to happen now. When MS just develops good software, they are fantastic company. But when they are trying be overly creative or reacting to Apple, they produce crap.
To make matters worse, if someone wanted to show that being gay was a normal productive life choice, they would say it violated their religious liberties. But if they want to bring in a women who condones murder,compares liberals with murders, and has called for the assassination of the president, they say we are being intolerant and politically correct.
Really, when I was back is school it was the Christian conservatives, those fragile flowers that would faint if a poem had the word fuck in it, or if they saw a couple guys kissing, or had the leave the classroom when we discussed classic american literature because it was the devils work, these were the people who create censorship on americans campus. They would bring in the child molesting priests to cry foul. They would bring in the ministers to deny women proper care and choice because the only way they could hope to get a wife was to knock her up and make her dependent. It was sad.
And I am sure the comments are going to prove my point, because I am not hating any one here. Everyone has a right to express their opinion and try to have a life that fits with their values. But it was never the liberal groups who were trying to cut funding for the legal conservative groups. And it was never the liberal groups trying to foce everyone to pray, or waste their time listening to others pray. We held our events and if you did not want to go, then don't.
Here is how screwed up these people were. We were in a conservative state in a somewhat conservative city, but a city that was diverse so people pretty much let everyone do what they do. These wingnuts were so extreme that created their own campus newspaper because they couldn't stand to be in the same room with liberals. And I disagreed with most of the official newspaper, it was conservative. But if these people could not get thier way they did not know how to compromise, so they took their toys, found a sugar daddy, and built their own compound where they would not have to deal with anyone who was different. And evidently that is what they still do, crying when someone calls them on their hypocristy.
The funny thing is that MS pushed this type of non standard HTML by convincing web developers that it was more important to HTML to create consistant application interfaces rather than flexible content delivery and sales interface technology. So they pushed the idea of fixed screen sizes, fixed elements, and the like that only IE could, at the time, deliver. CSS and HTML5 depreciated the IE technology, but the damage was done. A generation of web developers were trained to look at web pages as fixed entities, not flexible markups. Even today I have to use some web pages that will only on IE because MS has convinced the MBAs that this is the most efficient way to do things.
So now we are at a place where Webkit and Gecko rule the world. Designers are writing web pages to work well on Chrome, Firefox, and Android, which fortunately for apple will make it work on Mac and iOS as well. MS, being the entitled rich kid, is whining that consumers are ignoring IE. Of course IE is being ignored. It is doesn't run on anything that consumers choose to use. The only people who use IE are corporate types that are forced to use IE. If I have a new social app, am I going to cate that it does not run on IE. No, I am going to care that it does not run Android. If MS wants it to run on IE, they have the resources to add the functionality to IE. Otherwise who cares?
But, like other have said, the cost of salesforce is not just storage. It is reliable storage, and bandwidth. There has been many times when I have not been able to get to Google reliably. Sometimes even their servers get bogged down. I presume that if this happened with salesforce there would be repercussions. Likewise, Google, and i suppose even dropbox, is not going to do much if the data is gone. Sure they have redundant facilities, but that in no way guarantees that every bit of data will be restored, or it will be restored quickly. I have been in situations where a full restore has taken a couple days. Not a huge deal for me, but for what happens if one comes in monday and can make not sales calls?
Pertwee was a gadget guy and no longer roamed the universe. He went around saving earth from all manner of dangers. I think this is when we really got the Doctor as the defender of earth. It goes on. Baker of course is well known, he formalized the idea that a female assistant attract the teen and older men by wearing little. Of course we did see Sarah Jane in bathing costume on one of her early appearances. Davidson got rid of the gadets and his episodes, with a unusual size of entourage, tended to be very emotional.
Then we had the Colin Baker fiasco where instead of real episodes we got a season of clip shows and elevator episodes.
I like daring of McCoy and ace. I think it was the best of everything that came before.
Which is to say that the current stuff is like the old stuff, in which the show pretty much does what it wants to. No one can say the Gallifry episodes were all that good, so having the doctor be alone instead of having a country is good thing. If a series is going to last as long as the doctor, it can't get bogged down in details.
For years we were told that milk would make us strong. Milk is still served as the sole diary, even though many kids are intolerant of it. For a time yogurt was served instead of milk. Cheese is also good, but children are taught processed cheese is just like real cheese.
There is a fight against distinguishing the various forms of sugars, but children are taught that animal protein is superior to vegetable protien, and that a McDonalds hambuger is a superior meal to quinoe pilaf, or that the cheap sausage that so many kids eat is superior to a bowl of oatmeal with an egg.
Even worse, schools and the media hardly every talk about the difference between a complex and simple carbohydrate. Most will equate eating candy with eating a whole grain. Somehow a baked potato is inferior to a barbqued ribs with the sauce full of simple carbohydrate.
I am sure this is going to make all those indignant meat eaters faint from the nerve of those people who disagree with them, but get over it. Not everyone believes that meat is neccesary, and much of the world is very healthy with minimum or no meat. Not all economies are built on selling junk to kids. Some economies fund health care fully, so there is no advantage to making people sick so that MBAs can get rich by taking a cut of inflated health care costs.
And all countries tell little white lies to push people in the direction they want them to go. Like kissing causes pregnancy. Or condoms don't protect against STDs. Or meat is needed to be healthy. Or eating the occasional junk, or smoking, or anyother of silly things, is going to cause no harm.
I thought android was OSS and as such the code was available. What is to keep people from using the old libraries, developing them as they wish, and then just interfacing with what other tools they need?
For about half the states, the nearest MS store is in another state. For those in Hawaii, the means a looong plane ride. One reason this works for Apple is they have been very aggressive in opening stores. I have my choice of three. I will also complain how much the MS search sucks compared to the Apple search for stores. MS can only give a zip code, while at apple you can type in the name of your town or a zip code, in the same box mind you, and a nice map pops up. Reminds me when you had to reboot the MS computer to change a screen resolution.
What i do, however, is have the students create a unique product for any assessment. This is really the only way to assess that the student understands the process. Even if he or she creates a final product from the book, does that mean they understand the process or just how to follow instructions. Clearly following instructions is important, but the minmimum one should expect for learning is the ability to tweak. After all, that is what many software developers do. Take a bit of code and modify it to do the specific task. In this case, for instance, start with a personal photo and then practice whatever skills are needed on it. This makes grading harder, but maybe not.
The first issue here is diversity. One can imagine that 50 years the number of non-whites taking a standardized test were few, and really the only ones who did so were the ones that wanted to. I mean in 1960 people were still fighting school integration. So now, two generations later, with the introduction of universal high stakes testing, what do we really know about dealing with students that are not at school willing, of a diverse background, and honestly have no reason to really care about passing these tests. I mean what are schools going to do? Hold a kid in second grade until 18? Not let a kid graduate. There are real and imposed penalties for both.
Second is that a test is an instrument that must be created to meet certain goals. The first is develop a set of questions that if answers indicate some mastery of a subject or set of skills. These questions then are assessed by given them to a population and seeing how the population does on them, If too many people do well, then maybe the question is thrown out. If the wrong people do well, then maybe the question is thrown out. One assumption that is often made is that some people should get the question correct, and if they don't it is a bad test. Now, this judgement is often made based on how the test taker answered other questions on the test, so is not directly making a judgement based on preconceived biases. However this does lead to a situation where questions can be biased to test taking skills and cultural knowledge, not content or real skill.
Which is to say that one might criticize this policy for painting with a broad brush or making wild assumptions, but something is going to have to be done if these tests are going to taken seriously as legitimate instruments as opposed to busy work used to cover the ass of lazy educational administrators. It is hard to take these things seriously. For instance, iIn my state is has appeared that there was a time or two when the thresholds may have been altered to insure that the suburban, mostly white, schools do well. It seems that it is politically complicated to let all of their students fail, so the standard is lowered a few question, but lowering it an additional question or two to accomodate urban schools is just too much to ask.
Strictly speaking they are not necessary. A test can be written to allow a student to do without the calculator, rather than the current situation in which there are convolutions so that certain problems cannot be easily done with a calculator.
A phone simply is too uncontrolled. Questions can be specially written to counteract the capabilities of the TI calculator. It would be impossible to do so with a phone.
For real work, calculators are hardly needed. There are RPN apps for every device. The only reason that TI still makes these calculators, and tax dollars are spent on them, is that some think teaching the calculator is a good thing.
You what is a real privacy and relationship killer. The pager. Can't tell you how many people have gotten into trouble because a partner read a page. Or mail. Can't tell you what receiving a postcard from a friend asking you to join on the next vacation does to a marriage. Or the phone. You never know when a spouse is going to answer by mistake. Or, seriously people, credit card bills. I mean many don't think about it, but credit card bills and receipts have gotten me into trouble on more than one occasion. Also, remember that every cell phone call you make, and Skype call for that matter, is listed in detail for anyone to see. Exactly., When. How long. Who. This is trouble in the making and no one should it. Everyone should be using a burner phone.
After New Orleans was hit, the population dropped and has now stabilized at less than 400,000 people, down form half a million. In 1900 Galveston was hit, killing as many as 10,000 people, out a population of 40,000. Most packed up, moved inland to Houston, and built the ship channel. The city is built to flood. New York, if it stays, is going to have to built to flood, built to be rebuilt. Have flood insurance, have replaceable components, if NYC is going to stay. Which is has to be because it establishes and protect the minuscule sea access it has.,
So is this a joke or for real. While most of his contemporaries are billionaires, he merely has a quarter. His success in the olympics was his contact in the government who funneled federal dollars to the event. And the most important job for a bussinesssman is knowing when to let someone else take the meeting because you would flub it. The problem is that,like Bush, Romney just wanted to play president so he could provide some kickbacks to his friends, maybe make a few contacts so he could make the billion he never did. He failed because voter suppression is not as easy as it once was, and because he pissed of the women. There are some significant voter suppression efforts currently under way, so maybe a sane republican can win next time, but that would mean the psycho wing of the tea party would have to be eliminated.
Notice I did not saw thought, or was, or was not. This is statistics. It is always a mistake to believe statistics will always be your friend. It will not. Relying on math alone is always a mistake. Models have a way of skewing from reality over time. Which is what happened to those that supported Romney and believed their numbers and algorithms predicted reality better. p. Nevertheless Silver's is a star created by those who opposed not based on observations or valid maths, but on personal belief. The belief that the non-white vote would disappear. The belief that most white people were fundamentally racist and therefore who vote against the black man when given an aristocratic white man.(while a majority can be shown to be have racist feeling, most now live or spent time in diverse community so they know a non-white can be, on occasion as good or better choice than a randomly selected white). The belief that jobs are the issue, when in fact, historically speaking, the job situation is relatively better for everyone except for the older white male. And ultimately, that a women should enjoy being raped and accept the baby to raise on her own.
There are majors where all you need to know is how to read and write, where arriving at a correct solution is nowhere near as important as sounding like you arrive at a correct solution. These are not most STEM majors. If a student has not worked to internalize the math and science in high school or on their own time, free tuition is not going to help them succeed, especially since tuition is often the least expensive component of the overall equation.
Furthermore the last thing I wanted in my college classes were students how were there because it was the path of least resistance. I was all too often that student, and I know how horrible I was. But at least I had an intrest in the subject, and took the classes a little seriously, not just to make a grade, but to learn. One thing I liked about upper level science classes was that all the testing security and micromanagement went away, and we were free to just explore and learn.