I think there may be too much of a tendency by professors to reuse educational materials. This may lead to a degree of standardization and uniformity of the educational experience that could harm progress.
One of the big problems facing the developers of online course materials is just the opposite, that professors are unwilling to use materials developped by someone else. Most have their own strong opinions on how a course should be taught, and so the chances of a prefessor just grabbing someone else's course notes and using them instead of developping thier own are pretty small.
No, I think this is a really good idea and a great effort, for the reasons that others have covered here.
I don't think it matters. If Slash.dot ever was to start reeking of corporate control, someone will simply download the source code and create another community that was more in line with what the members wanted. That is one of the strengths of opensource: if you're not happy with the product being offered, grab the source and roll your own. I'm sure the people at VA understand that.
In short, I don't think this is an issue that we need to worry about. As long as there are people that care about this community, there will always be a slash.dot in some form or another.
>>Only the price difference in the base OS can be passed along.
This could only work if the price of the base OS included not only the licencing costs, but also the total costs to the vendor to install, support, etc a given OS. That would for the OS suppliers to focus on reducing the costs of every aspect of the OS (if they wanted to compete on price, that is).
What we're more likely to see is MS develop their own window manager that runs all Win32 apps. If they could do it for DOS, I'm sure they could do it for Linux. MS has the resources, and I'm sure there is no shortage of developers at Redmond who would be interested. I'd be interested in hearing from the more technically inclined readers as to the feasability of doing this.
Slashdot Mirror
I think there may be too much of a tendency by professors to reuse educational materials. This may lead to a degree of standardization and uniformity of the educational experience that could harm progress.
One of the big problems facing the developers of online course materials is just the opposite, that professors are unwilling to use materials developped by someone else. Most have their own strong opinions on how a course should be taught, and so the chances of a prefessor just grabbing someone else's course notes and using them instead of developping thier own are pretty small.
No, I think this is a really good idea and a great effort, for the reasons that others have covered here.
This is the first trailer. How in God' sname did this post get moderated up?
I don't think it matters. If Slash.dot ever was to start reeking of corporate control, someone will simply download the source code and create another community that was more in line with what the members wanted. That is one of the strengths of opensource: if you're not happy with the product being offered, grab the source and roll your own. I'm sure the people at VA understand that.
In short, I don't think this is an issue that we need to worry about. As long as there are people that care about this community, there will always be a slash.dot in some form or another.
Ed
>>Only the price difference in the base OS can be passed along.
This could only work if the price of the base OS included not only the licencing costs, but also the total costs to the vendor to install, support, etc a given OS. That would for the OS suppliers to focus on reducing the costs of every aspect of the OS (if they wanted to compete on price, that is).
Ed
What we're more likely to see is MS develop their own window manager that runs all Win32 apps. If they could do it for DOS, I'm sure they could do it for Linux. MS has the resources, and I'm sure there is no shortage of developers at Redmond who would be interested. I'd be interested in hearing from the more technically inclined readers as to the feasability of doing this.