Since I teach a course that includes XHTML and CSS, publishers often send me every web-related book they can think of, in the hopes I will adopt one as a text. Most are horrible. The number of vaidation errors in example code is astounding. I had always assumed that those who wrote books took some time to actually learn the material first. Apparently not.
The Head First book is the first one I have ever seen that treats the whole subject the "right" way, rather than adding in a few words about CSS as an afterthought to the 3rd edition.
Very good book. Highly recommended to anyone who wants to learn how to make web pages. The reviewer is correct, it's not a reference/professional book, but an excellent tutorial.
We have recently started using Python in our first programming/CS course in the first-year of University.
Feedback from students has been quite good. The biggest complaint now is when we switch to Java in the next course: "Why do we have to use Java? Everything so so much harder."
From my point of view, Python is well structured and has all of the language features I'd ever want while introducing programming (and arguably, all I'd ever want period). Students seem to pick up relatively good habits (of course, some will find ugly ways to do things no matter what the language encourages).
More importantly, students can spend more time thinking about their program, and less time fighting with the language. Python seems to do its thing and get out of the way. More "serious" languages tend to be more complex--that complexity adds more overhead for the students, which means more to learn before they can actually get much done.
For example, in Java you have to learn about classes, methods, references, and related stuff earlier in your journey. In Python, a lot of this can be ignored and introduced later. All the same concepts are there, but you can hold off and introduce them on your own terms, not because they're needed to write the next program.
If you are interested in teaching Python, I have some course materials I can share--both mine, and collections of other resources that I point students to.
I have a hard time understanding why this is such a big deal. The book is written. It's published. It's largely distributed.
I can't fathom why anyone would think these are the first 15 copies that have been taken.
These books are sitting in the back of thousands of stores across the world. Does anybody seriously believe that not a single stockboy managed to get into the box? No bookstore owners or managers thought they'd get a head start on the book?
Yeah, I know steps were taken, but come on. Nothing described there was magic.
My tablet has an Intel Extreme Graphics chip (HP/Compaq TC4200), integrated into the 845 chipset. Its uses the i810 driver under Xfree86.
I've had many student laptops of all descriptions behave badly on a projector. These are often the lower-end brands. A wide-format screen is certain death, but will often work if you first set a 4:3 aqspect ratio. An old laptop with a nothing-special driver and hardware will work every time.
I must agree with the sibling post: I think all of the IBM laptops I've seen have worked just fine.
I suspect this has a lot more to do with Windows video drivers than anything.
I spend a good chunk of time dealing with laptops and projectors and I can tell you wil certainty that display drivers are getting harder and harder to get working with projectors.
There was a time when you could press fn-F4 and flip to the external display. Now, there's a control panel on the system dock (or whatever that thing with all the icons is called). You might get an extended desktop, you might have to go through four dialogs to find a setting, you might never find it. Mercy on your soul if you have a wide-screen display.
My new tablet refuses to drive the external display at resolution >800x600, even though the built-in display and projector both have a native resolution of 1024x768. Even that takes multiple-clicks to get turned on. It works exactly right under Linux (fn-F4 and Bob's your uncle at 1024x768), but the Windows drivers get in the way.
My guess is the presenter had a new laptop with such a display driver. OO-guy had an older laptop, or had this stuff stored out already.
The prefered variant is based on the product of the relevant qualities on either side (IIRC). With these qualities, Firefox should prefer the SVG since it has a total quality of 1.0x0.5 = 0.5, as opposed to 0.4*0.8 = 0.36 for PNG.
... at least, I think. I'm never sure about these things until I experiment.
The Canadian one, at least, is a fast online credit-card donation. You can print out your tax receipt right away. (hey, before midnight gets it in for this tax year, right?)
I'd like to see a C++ implementation of the Halting Problem that's faster than a Java implementation, please, thank you.
I hate to be pedantic*, but the halting problem is a problem, not an algorithm. If you hand me a correct algorithm for the halting problem, I'm sure it could be coded in C++ so it ran faster than in Java. Of course, that has nothing to do with the languages, I'm also sure 0 would be equal to 1.
(That's not actually true. I like being pedantic. I don't like having to do it in public.)
A couple of other have pointed out that many University Faculty write textbooks. True.
I will also point out that somebody must choose the respect-worthy text for a course. Somebody also creates assignments and exams that will push students to learn the material.
After hanging around the front of lecture halls for a few years, I think creating assignments is the hardest part of the job. Lecturing is easy: put stuff together in a reasonably logical order, throw in some interesting examples, and try to finish it all in fifty minutes. Creating assignments and exams is horrible and endlessly time consuming. Selecting a text is hard becase so many are really, truly bad.
That said, there are, in fact, many University faculty do indeed suck. No argument there, but if you learned something from the course, it wasn't all bad.
Seriously, how is this different? Check off the task and the source code changes. Wouldn't it be easier to just delete the comment since you're already editing the source code?
Several years ago, I bought a bulk pack of string, with 50 or 100 strings. Not much money and I haven't worried about strings since (I'm not a heavy user). Surprisingly, they haven't even formed a horribly knotted mess in the drawer.
It was long enough ago that I don't remember where I got them, which is too bad because they're nice strings. But a couple places that sell bulk string: Yo-yos4U and Infinite Illusions.
All the bastards do is introduce a few new questions at the end of the chapter and call it a new edition.
It's simple--it kills off the current used book pool. A new edition every few years keeps the number of used copies floating around at an acceptable level for the publishers. I have met employees from major publishing houses that are quite explicit about the need to keep the used textbook market in check.
I recently met with a textbook publisher about creating custom materials for a course. They were adament that there be rip-out exercises or something to make the textbook "consumable". Non-reusable means no used copies. Hooray!
Edition churn is also terribly annoying. It's very common to do just enough revising to change the page and section numbers, then release a new edition. It means students can't use older editions unless the instructor is willing to give sets of readings and exercises for each.
I'm sure you'd also be surprised that the utter crap that gets published. The bad textbooks that get as far as being required for a course are the cream of the crop. My bookshelf is sagging with review copies of truly useless texts. I'm sure they all retail for $100+ too.
I suspect publishers are in for a shock over the long term. They are counting on the fact that University faculty members are pretty set in their ways and don't change--they'll keep using the same expensive books. I think sooner or later they'll notice that publishers are leeches on the system and stop using so many required texts. The publishers will then realize that professors are even less likely to change back. (Changing back means admitting you were wrong--they are never wrong.)
I don't suppose you're one of my students, are you? You're certainly qualified. (Sorry. Currently cleaning out my inbox. Most of them are quite bright. Most.)
Assigning domain names to individuals within an organization? I remember working in a University department that did that in 1996. I'm sure they were doing it ever since they got Unix workstations.
I'm pretty sure I remember some people running their own web servers as well, if that's their game.
make sure there's a lot of storage, cause every movie has to be encoded at least in 1080P
There's a rant on the topic of resolution and HDTV in Being Digital. (If you haven't read it, you should.)
The solution he suggested for HDTV was basically: who cares about resolution? It's digital.
Did you have to buy a video card for the specific resolution of your monitor? Of course not.
The first four bytes of the video could easily encode the width and height in pixels of the video. The next few could encode the aspect ratio. A player smart enough to decode this and scale the video to the maximum capibilities of the player and TV would be trivial.
That, coupled with as much capacity as they can squeeze on there and you're as future-proof as you can be.
Oddly enough, I have items from both of these alternate SCOs on my kitchen counter at the moment (a mug and a jug of juice). Noticed that yesterday and thought it was odd.
Would it not be possible for large ISPs to lauch similar suits as class-action? Imagine AOL suing spammers on behalf of all subscribers in Washington, with any judgement distributed among the receivers (minus whatever fees come off a class-action suit).
You'd have people signing up for AOL, just to get the spam.
As someone who oversees a few websites, I can tell you that there is plenty to do already without having to worry about some hacker breaking in to my system.
Ummm... you should probably be worrying about that anyway.
I'd like to see how *your* computers handle a hacking attack from this guy.
So would I. It's hard to know about the flaws in your system--you pretty much keep things patched, watch the logs and hope. An email from a benevolent hacker that says "You really need to change..." would be appreciated.
all I am paying for is a book, a posted syllabus, and a final exam
Yes. At most institutions I've had contact with, distance/online education is done as a cost-cutting measure. It is forced by administrators with little regard for proper implementation or academic soundness.
The implementation is done by instructors who aren't necessarily sure it's a good idea in the first place and don't have the resources to do it right.
It sure is cheap to do, though. No buildings to maintain; pay the instructors a fraction of a regular course and charge the students the same (plus a "resources fee" in some cases).
Slashdot Mirror
Since I teach a course that includes XHTML and CSS, publishers often send me every web-related book they can think of, in the hopes I will adopt one as a text. Most are horrible. The number of vaidation errors in example code is astounding. I had always assumed that those who wrote books took some time to actually learn the material first. Apparently not.
The Head First book is the first one I have ever seen that treats the whole subject the "right" way, rather than adding in a few words about CSS as an afterthought to the 3rd edition.
Very good book. Highly recommended to anyone who wants to learn how to make web pages. The reviewer is correct, it's not a reference/professional book, but an excellent tutorial.
We have recently started using Python in our first programming/CS course in the first-year of University.
Feedback from students has been quite good. The biggest complaint now is when we switch to Java in the next course: "Why do we have to use Java? Everything so so much harder."
From my point of view, Python is well structured and has all of the language features I'd ever want while introducing programming (and arguably, all I'd ever want period). Students seem to pick up relatively good habits (of course, some will find ugly ways to do things no matter what the language encourages).
More importantly, students can spend more time thinking about their program, and less time fighting with the language. Python seems to do its thing and get out of the way. More "serious" languages tend to be more complex--that complexity adds more overhead for the students, which means more to learn before they can actually get much done.
For example, in Java you have to learn about classes, methods, references, and related stuff earlier in your journey. In Python, a lot of this can be ignored and introduced later. All the same concepts are there, but you can hold off and introduce them on your own terms, not because they're needed to write the next program.
If you are interested in teaching Python, I have some course materials I can share--both mine, and collections of other resources that I point students to.
I can't fathom why anyone would think these are the first 15 copies that have been taken.
These books are sitting in the back of thousands of stores across the world. Does anybody seriously believe that not a single stockboy managed to get into the box? No bookstore owners or managers thought they'd get a head start on the book?
Yeah, I know steps were taken, but come on. Nothing described there was magic.
The site seems to be slowing down, but the coral cache is going strong.
I've had many student laptops of all descriptions behave badly on a projector. These are often the lower-end brands. A wide-format screen is certain death, but will often work if you first set a 4:3 aqspect ratio. An old laptop with a nothing-special driver and hardware will work every time.
I must agree with the sibling post: I think all of the IBM laptops I've seen have worked just fine.
I spend a good chunk of time dealing with laptops and projectors and I can tell you wil certainty that display drivers are getting harder and harder to get working with projectors.
There was a time when you could press fn-F4 and flip to the external display. Now, there's a control panel on the system dock (or whatever that thing with all the icons is called). You might get an extended desktop, you might have to go through four dialogs to find a setting, you might never find it. Mercy on your soul if you have a wide-screen display.
My new tablet refuses to drive the external display at resolution >800x600, even though the built-in display and projector both have a native resolution of 1024x768. Even that takes multiple-clicks to get turned on. It works exactly right under Linux (fn-F4 and Bob's your uncle at 1024x768), but the Windows drivers get in the way.
My guess is the presenter had a new laptop with such a display driver. OO-guy had an older laptop, or had this stuff stored out already.
The content negotiation rules are subtle, but very flexible. You should be able to force SVG to negotiate highest like this (in Apache):
The prefered variant is based on the product of the relevant qualities on either side (IIRC). With these qualities, Firefox should prefer the SVG since it has a total quality of 1.0x0.5 = 0.5, as opposed to 0.4*0.8 = 0.36 for PNG.
The Canadian one, at least, is a fast online credit-card donation. You can print out your tax receipt right away. (hey, before midnight gets it in for this tax year, right?)
Or, there are plenty of other organizations that would be happy to receive a donation.
(That's not actually true. I like being pedantic. I don't like having to do it in public.)
I will also point out that somebody must choose the respect-worthy text for a course. Somebody also creates assignments and exams that will push students to learn the material.
After hanging around the front of lecture halls for a few years, I think creating assignments is the hardest part of the job. Lecturing is easy: put stuff together in a reasonably logical order, throw in some interesting examples, and try to finish it all in fifty minutes. Creating assignments and exams is horrible and endlessly time consuming. Selecting a text is hard becase so many are really, truly bad.
That said, there are, in fact, many University faculty do indeed suck. No argument there, but if you learned something from the course, it wasn't all bad.
Seriously, how is this different? Check off the task and the source code changes. Wouldn't it be easier to just delete the comment since you're already editing the source code?
It was long enough ago that I don't remember where I got them, which is too bad because they're nice strings. But a couple places that sell bulk string: Yo-yos4U and Infinite Illusions.
Edition churn is also terribly annoying. It's very common to do just enough revising to change the page and section numbers, then release a new edition. It means students can't use older editions unless the instructor is willing to give sets of readings and exercises for each.
I'm sure you'd also be surprised that the utter crap that gets published. The bad textbooks that get as far as being required for a course are the cream of the crop. My bookshelf is sagging with review copies of truly useless texts. I'm sure they all retail for $100+ too.
I suspect publishers are in for a shock over the long term. They are counting on the fact that University faculty members are pretty set in their ways and don't change--they'll keep using the same expensive books. I think sooner or later they'll notice that publishers are leeches on the system and stop using so many required texts. The publishers will then realize that professors are even less likely to change back. (Changing back means admitting you were wrong--they are never wrong.)
We can all dream.
I don't suppose you're one of my students, are you? You're certainly qualified. (Sorry. Currently cleaning out my inbox. Most of them are quite bright. Most.)
I'm pretty sure I remember some people running their own web servers as well, if that's their game.
The solution he suggested for HDTV was basically: who cares about resolution? It's digital. Did you have to buy a video card for the specific resolution of your monitor? Of course not.
The first four bytes of the video could easily encode the width and height in pixels of the video. The next few could encode the aspect ratio. A player smart enough to decode this and scale the video to the maximum capibilities of the player and TV would be trivial.
That, coupled with as much capacity as they can squeeze on there and you're as future-proof as you can be.
Oddly enough, I have items from both of these alternate SCOs on my kitchen counter at the moment (a mug and a jug of juice). Noticed that yesterday and thought it was odd.
You'd have people signing up for AOL, just to get the spam.
Ummm... you should probably be worrying about that anyway.
I'd like to see how *your* computers handle a hacking attack from this guy.
So would I. It's hard to know about the flaws in your system--you pretty much keep things patched, watch the logs and hope. An email from a benevolent hacker that says "You really need to change..." would be appreciated.
Says who?
Consider piping your PGP output through this:
Is it compressable? Yes. Less secure? No.
Seriously... that can't be good for your hands.
Yes. At most institutions I've had contact with, distance/online education is done as a cost-cutting measure. It is forced by administrators with little regard for proper implementation or academic soundness. The implementation is done by instructors who aren't necessarily sure it's a good idea in the first place and don't have the resources to do it right.
It sure is cheap to do, though. No buildings to maintain; pay the instructors a fraction of a regular course and charge the students the same (plus a "resources fee" in some cases).
Not very well, apparently. :-)
...yeah, and after sitting there for an hour alone, you decide to pop out to get a coffee. You return and there are four students standing there.
There's a clear view of my door from the building's atrium... I think they sit there and wait for me to leave.