I think the problem here is that such a system seeks to evaluate teachers as if they were line workers, cogs in the machine. In reality, teachers operate more like managers. As anyone who has been involved in management or management education should be able to attest, getting a good read on exactly what makes good managers so good (and bad managers so bad) is a lot harder. The metrics are a lot fuzzier, and there tends to be a lot of different ways to get good (or bad) results. In many cases, two people doing things that look on the outside to be very similar can lead to wildly divergent results.
Go to any random business school and take a look at their various case studies on managers. It's usually quite difficult to find any common thread in any of them, other than "this guy's company was successful, therefore what he did is the right way to do it." Of course, in every one of those studies, the manager did things differently than the other managers. The upshot of it is that the best managers are unique snowflakes who follow their own rules and are successful, while the worst managers are unique snowflakes who follow their own rules and aren't successful
In short, why does Bill Gates think business can help evaluate teachers (leaders of students) when business isn't even very good at evaluating their own managers (leaders of corporations)?
So, are they porting Solaris functionality to OEL as a precursor to phasing out Solaris entirely? It would suck to see Solaris go from a nostalgia point of view, but it never made much sense to me why one company would continue to develop two Unix-like operating systems.
Exactly. Generally speaking, it's better to retain the people you have rather than to find ways to replace them when they leave. Simplifying editing may or may not help replace the people you lose, but addressing the reasons why you're losing so many people is going to be more effective at keeping quality high. When I hear people talk about why they no longer edit Wikipedia, they never talk about the complicated editing process, but they almost always talk about the unreasonable and unaccountable admins.
TFA says its being built on the outskirts of Jeddah, so depending on how far out they mean by "outskirts", the light pollution may be manageable.
The bigger issue, I think, is that this is basically a giant vanity project that will probably end up like the Burj Khalifa: Deep in debt with rapidly falling rents and tons of empty space. Jeddah is right next to Mecca, so they probably won't have a lot of trouble filling it with rich foreign Muslims during the Hajj, but it seems like it would be a bit of a challenge during other parts of the year. I guess the Saudis have enough money to burn on crap like this, but it seems they could find a more intelligent way to invest in their own country other than building giant luxury hotels.
Give them a break. In the early days of the space program, in the 50s and 60s, their advice was to use the solvent in place of milk in children's breakfast cereals. The recommendation to pour it on the ground away from populated areas was a huge win for environmentalists.
I agree that there are serious technical hurdles to get over before these could possibly be revolutionary to the average person, and those hurdles might never be overcome.
However, I feel it's worth mentioning that your entire post could have been written about computers at any point from the 1940s until the mid-1980s, and they turned out to be kind of a big deal after all.
They fund the project by "catching" these people "doin the nasty" and selling the resulting videos. This is why they require potential recipients of these Netbooks to submit 3 photographs of themselves and their partner, at least one of which must be nude.
There are lots of reasons to want to go to Africa. I'd love to go to Africa, because there are lots of interesting things to see and the culture is so very different from my own.
To answer the original question, I would say go over and do what's needed, which is probably not computer stuff for the most part (unless you want to volunteer some place that already has somewhat functioning infrastructure). Digging ditches for sewage systems, installing toilets, or digging wells would probably be more useful. Sure, it isn't glamorous work, but it's necessary work, and I'm sure there's some sense of gratification in helping people not die of dysentery.
I can convert BTC into $ faster, easier, and with lower fees than any other currency.
Sure, as long as you can find someone to buy it from you. This works for small amounts, but the small number of people (relatively) actively trading in bitcoin means exchanging significant amounts would be difficult, and you could actually impact the price just by trying it. With a more established fiat currency, you could exchange millions of dollars and have no trouble finding a buyer, and not even impact the value of the currency in any appreciable way.
It is absolutely insane that its cheaper, faster, and easier to convert digital money into paper money dollars than convert coins into paper money.
If you sort and wrap the coins yourself, it's completely free to go into any bank and exchange it for paper money. You're not paying CoinStar to convert the money, you're paying them to sort and count it so you don't have to. In other words, you're not paying for the exchange, you're paying for the service of making the exchange more convenient to you. Sort of like how bitcoin exchanges charge transaction fees for the service of matching you up with a buyer when you want to sell your bitcoins.
I have a 1080p TV. I use Netflix streaming all the time, and I've had the same Netflix DVD out for about 6 months now. I switched my plan to the streaming only plan just recently, and as soon as I find where I put that DVD, I'll mail it back in.
It's really a matter of convenience and immediacy. With streaming, I can choose from a pretty good selection of movies and TV shows as soon as I decide I want to watch one. I don't have to try to predict what I'll be in the mood to watch 3 days from now, and I don't have to sift through the smoldering ruins of a video store or deal with the tiny selection of a Redbox.
Yes, the streaming quality is worse than, say, blu ray, but it's still perfectly adequate for most movies. Hell, I grew up on VHS, and the streaming is much better than that.
So why do I have the HDTV at all? Because certain movies really benefit from it, and those movies I'll usually rent on DVD or blu ray from a Redbox (or the locally-owned kiosk that has better movies, probably because they buy the "not for rental" copies of movies and rent them out anyway), or buy them on blu ray. Also, televised sports are better on HD (although they're not full 1080p of course).
Cheap CD-R drives and the ability in basically every BIOS to boot directly from a CD completely killed any advantage the floppy had. Apple's decision to stop putting floppy drives in their computers was a response to the already-obvious obsolescence of the technology. They didn't kill the floppy, it was already dead by that point. PC makers kept including floppy drives in their machines for a while after that because some PC buyers wanted them for some reason and they were so cheap as to be practically free for OEMs.
It's not that big of a concern, and that's the real reason any alternate DNS system is doomed to fail. Vixie's concerns with copycatting and whatnot may be justified, but the simple fact is the current system isn't painful enough for most people, even most network admins, to go to the trouble to switch to something different. Hell, IPv6 has been a standard for 15 years, and hardly anyone uses it. Sure, we'll all switch eventually when the pain of staying with IPv4 is greater than the pain of switching to IPv6. Similarly, if the pain of staying with the current whois system ever gets great enough to contemplate switching, people will do so. I don't see that happening in the foreseeable future, though.
He also wrote BIND, which had one of the most breathtakingly awful security records of any single piece of software for many years (the years during which he was the primary author, oddly enough). For a while there, it seemed CERT was issuing advisories for some new vulnerability in BIND that would grant root access to your entire network on a daily basis.
It hasn't been backed up by other experiments because conducting such experiments violates modern standards of ethics (and in fact arguably violated the standards at that time as well). Similar effects have been observed in the field however, most famously at Abu Ghraib. Obviously those aren't properly controlled experiments, but until we decide as a society that subjecting people to lasting mental and physical harm in psychological studies is okay again, it's the closest we're likely to get.
Commercial space flight has no vision beyond sending tourists to LEO and throwing more satellites into higher orbits. It's never going to move beyond that on its own because the economics don't work for entities incapable of thinking that long term. Every possible monetary benefit from leaving earth orbit is so far away that no commercial entity will take it on. This is why the government needs to remain heavily involved in space exploration: if it doesn't, no one else (other than foreign governments) will.
Retiring the shuttle program is good in some ways because it frees up resources to go for more ambitious goals like Mars and beyond. It's bad, though, in that it takes away NASA's primary method of staying in the public eye. People get excited about humans going into space. Most people don't get excited about sending robots into space. This sort of thing is important to an organization whose funding is subject to the changing political winds.
The projects NASA has in the works sound really exciting, but with cutting cost being the name of the game in Washington these days, NASA needs all the public support it can get to keep all of its plans from dying on the vine as its budget gets eviscerated. Removing the one thing that got it on TV on a regular basis isn't a good thing in these circumstances.
Cutting this project will do basically nothing to help the deficit situation. Until they start seriously talking about slashing defense spending, drastically reforming Medicare and Social Security, AND raising taxes, it's obvious they're just playing politics with no intention of doing anything to fix the problem. They could cut this and everything else in the discretionary non-defense budget and still run a huge deficit.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the problem here is that such a system seeks to evaluate teachers as if they were line workers, cogs in the machine. In reality, teachers operate more like managers. As anyone who has been involved in management or management education should be able to attest, getting a good read on exactly what makes good managers so good (and bad managers so bad) is a lot harder. The metrics are a lot fuzzier, and there tends to be a lot of different ways to get good (or bad) results. In many cases, two people doing things that look on the outside to be very similar can lead to wildly divergent results.
Go to any random business school and take a look at their various case studies on managers. It's usually quite difficult to find any common thread in any of them, other than "this guy's company was successful, therefore what he did is the right way to do it." Of course, in every one of those studies, the manager did things differently than the other managers. The upshot of it is that the best managers are unique snowflakes who follow their own rules and are successful, while the worst managers are unique snowflakes who follow their own rules and aren't successful
In short, why does Bill Gates think business can help evaluate teachers (leaders of students) when business isn't even very good at evaluating their own managers (leaders of corporations)?
How is that not exactly the same thing? In either case, you're manipulating or misrepresenting scientific data in order to achieve political goals.
So, are they porting Solaris functionality to OEL as a precursor to phasing out Solaris entirely? It would suck to see Solaris go from a nostalgia point of view, but it never made much sense to me why one company would continue to develop two Unix-like operating systems.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say they probably didn't campaign on an anti-Bill of Rights platform.
It's really quite simple: We just need to go out there and have a look.
Don't be absurd. Everyone knows CmdrTaco can't code.
Exactly. Generally speaking, it's better to retain the people you have rather than to find ways to replace them when they leave. Simplifying editing may or may not help replace the people you lose, but addressing the reasons why you're losing so many people is going to be more effective at keeping quality high. When I hear people talk about why they no longer edit Wikipedia, they never talk about the complicated editing process, but they almost always talk about the unreasonable and unaccountable admins.
TFA says its being built on the outskirts of Jeddah, so depending on how far out they mean by "outskirts", the light pollution may be manageable.
The bigger issue, I think, is that this is basically a giant vanity project that will probably end up like the Burj Khalifa: Deep in debt with rapidly falling rents and tons of empty space. Jeddah is right next to Mecca, so they probably won't have a lot of trouble filling it with rich foreign Muslims during the Hajj, but it seems like it would be a bit of a challenge during other parts of the year. I guess the Saudis have enough money to burn on crap like this, but it seems they could find a more intelligent way to invest in their own country other than building giant luxury hotels.
Brilliant!
Can you recommend a good baby rental agency?
Give them a break. In the early days of the space program, in the 50s and 60s, their advice was to use the solvent in place of milk in children's breakfast cereals. The recommendation to pour it on the ground away from populated areas was a huge win for environmentalists.
I agree that there are serious technical hurdles to get over before these could possibly be revolutionary to the average person, and those hurdles might never be overcome.
However, I feel it's worth mentioning that your entire post could have been written about computers at any point from the 1940s until the mid-1980s, and they turned out to be kind of a big deal after all.
They fund the project by "catching" these people "doin the nasty" and selling the resulting videos. This is why they require potential recipients of these Netbooks to submit 3 photographs of themselves and their partner, at least one of which must be nude.
There are lots of reasons to want to go to Africa. I'd love to go to Africa, because there are lots of interesting things to see and the culture is so very different from my own.
To answer the original question, I would say go over and do what's needed, which is probably not computer stuff for the most part (unless you want to volunteer some place that already has somewhat functioning infrastructure). Digging ditches for sewage systems, installing toilets, or digging wells would probably be more useful. Sure, it isn't glamorous work, but it's necessary work, and I'm sure there's some sense of gratification in helping people not die of dysentery.
I can convert BTC into $ faster, easier, and with lower fees than any other currency.
Sure, as long as you can find someone to buy it from you. This works for small amounts, but the small number of people (relatively) actively trading in bitcoin means exchanging significant amounts would be difficult, and you could actually impact the price just by trying it. With a more established fiat currency, you could exchange millions of dollars and have no trouble finding a buyer, and not even impact the value of the currency in any appreciable way.
It is absolutely insane that its cheaper, faster, and easier to convert digital money into paper money dollars than convert coins into paper money.
If you sort and wrap the coins yourself, it's completely free to go into any bank and exchange it for paper money. You're not paying CoinStar to convert the money, you're paying them to sort and count it so you don't have to. In other words, you're not paying for the exchange, you're paying for the service of making the exchange more convenient to you. Sort of like how bitcoin exchanges charge transaction fees for the service of matching you up with a buyer when you want to sell your bitcoins.
Isn't that one of the elements of music that we're throwing away? The element of surprise?
Yes, which is why the standard calls for someone to shout "BOO" at 5x the maximum allowed volume at a random point in each song.
I have a 1080p TV. I use Netflix streaming all the time, and I've had the same Netflix DVD out for about 6 months now. I switched my plan to the streaming only plan just recently, and as soon as I find where I put that DVD, I'll mail it back in.
It's really a matter of convenience and immediacy. With streaming, I can choose from a pretty good selection of movies and TV shows as soon as I decide I want to watch one. I don't have to try to predict what I'll be in the mood to watch 3 days from now, and I don't have to sift through the smoldering ruins of a video store or deal with the tiny selection of a Redbox.
Yes, the streaming quality is worse than, say, blu ray, but it's still perfectly adequate for most movies. Hell, I grew up on VHS, and the streaming is much better than that.
So why do I have the HDTV at all? Because certain movies really benefit from it, and those movies I'll usually rent on DVD or blu ray from a Redbox (or the locally-owned kiosk that has better movies, probably because they buy the "not for rental" copies of movies and rent them out anyway), or buy them on blu ray. Also, televised sports are better on HD (although they're not full 1080p of course).
Cheap CD-R drives and the ability in basically every BIOS to boot directly from a CD completely killed any advantage the floppy had. Apple's decision to stop putting floppy drives in their computers was a response to the already-obvious obsolescence of the technology. They didn't kill the floppy, it was already dead by that point. PC makers kept including floppy drives in their machines for a while after that because some PC buyers wanted them for some reason and they were so cheap as to be practically free for OEMs.
This story is virtually guaranteed to generate a lot of page hits (and ad impressions), so it's important for Slashdot to cover it.
It's not that big of a concern, and that's the real reason any alternate DNS system is doomed to fail. Vixie's concerns with copycatting and whatnot may be justified, but the simple fact is the current system isn't painful enough for most people, even most network admins, to go to the trouble to switch to something different. Hell, IPv6 has been a standard for 15 years, and hardly anyone uses it. Sure, we'll all switch eventually when the pain of staying with IPv4 is greater than the pain of switching to IPv6. Similarly, if the pain of staying with the current whois system ever gets great enough to contemplate switching, people will do so. I don't see that happening in the foreseeable future, though.
He also wrote BIND, which had one of the most breathtakingly awful security records of any single piece of software for many years (the years during which he was the primary author, oddly enough). For a while there, it seemed CERT was issuing advisories for some new vulnerability in BIND that would grant root access to your entire network on a daily basis.
"It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times?!" You stupid monkey!
It hasn't been backed up by other experiments because conducting such experiments violates modern standards of ethics (and in fact arguably violated the standards at that time as well). Similar effects have been observed in the field however, most famously at Abu Ghraib. Obviously those aren't properly controlled experiments, but until we decide as a society that subjecting people to lasting mental and physical harm in psychological studies is okay again, it's the closest we're likely to get.
Commercial space flight has no vision beyond sending tourists to LEO and throwing more satellites into higher orbits. It's never going to move beyond that on its own because the economics don't work for entities incapable of thinking that long term. Every possible monetary benefit from leaving earth orbit is so far away that no commercial entity will take it on. This is why the government needs to remain heavily involved in space exploration: if it doesn't, no one else (other than foreign governments) will.
Retiring the shuttle program is good in some ways because it frees up resources to go for more ambitious goals like Mars and beyond. It's bad, though, in that it takes away NASA's primary method of staying in the public eye. People get excited about humans going into space. Most people don't get excited about sending robots into space. This sort of thing is important to an organization whose funding is subject to the changing political winds.
The projects NASA has in the works sound really exciting, but with cutting cost being the name of the game in Washington these days, NASA needs all the public support it can get to keep all of its plans from dying on the vine as its budget gets eviscerated. Removing the one thing that got it on TV on a regular basis isn't a good thing in these circumstances.
I don't know how this one made it through the slashdot filters to be published.
You must be new here.
Cutting this project will do basically nothing to help the deficit situation. Until they start seriously talking about slashing defense spending, drastically reforming Medicare and Social Security, AND raising taxes, it's obvious they're just playing politics with no intention of doing anything to fix the problem. They could cut this and everything else in the discretionary non-defense budget and still run a huge deficit.