- Obama: Racist, AIPAC-bootlicker, Corrupted to the bone Chicago style and a Traitor to the US Constitution and a Liar who can't even produce a valid birth certificate (which is not a certificate of live birth)
Minor nitpick: a birth certificate is, in fact, the same thing as a certificate of live birth. In most states, including Hawaii, the latter is the legal term for the former.
Honestly, I'd go more for embezzlement here. Willful misappropriation of funds and all that. Fine them at least the money that would have been paid out as bonuses, or just fine them their entire share of the stimulus package and let them rot.
I think it would be a lot better than the current idea of abusing the government's power to tax. This would at least allow some due process, and without creating an incredibly dangerous precedent that would effectively allow arbitrary taxation for just about any purpose.
If you've stopped visiting Slashdot, then how did you post?
Or can this be taken as an expression of free will, that in an act of BAWWWWW you decided not to visit Slashdot, and then did it anyway just to prove that you can in fact countermand even your own decisions?
As the submission points out, it's really a lot simpler than the people who want so desperately to make snide insults and accusations of hypocrisy are making it.
1) Pulling the plug is, essentially, a form of suicide. 2) Many religions believe suicide to be a serious sin, and thus a thing to be avoided. 3) Therefore, people who believe in these faiths do not pull the plug.
It's very simple, and has very little if anything to do with hypocrisy or fear. It's just a matter of not giving up: not always the most pleasant of tasks, but avoiding wrongdoing however you define it is a worthy goal, is it not?
Just because it does not have an MDI it doesn't mean the GUI is bad.
This is true as far as it goes. MDI is a blight on UI design that belongs in the dustbin of history. However...
Gimp's interface follows a common pattern amongst *nix software -- or what they used to look like....just because it follows patterns established on systems that were never designed for GUIs in the first place and never really "got" the concept for years even after the introduction of X11 doesn't mean the UI is good. GIMP has made great strides in usability since 1.0, but it still has quite a long way to go. There's a reason it was, and still is to some degree, the poster child for bad GUIs on Linux.
Sony can't afford a price cut. Frankly, they can't even afford the current price, as evidenced by their having squandered almost all of the profits from both the PS1 and PS2 just keeping this train wreck afloat. That's the problem with predatory tactics like loss-leader hardware: sometimes you get burned by the risk, and Sony has gotten burned big time.
Ultimately, the core problem is that people won't pay $600 for a game console. Truth be told, they don't really even tolerate $400 at launch, if the 360's sales are any indication (for all that we -rightly- speak of the PS3 as a failure, it still consistently outdoes the 360 at corresponding points in its lifetime). This is because people understand that the value of a console derives not from what the devs put into it, but from what the gamers get out of it, and that there is really only a small section of the market that can actually be swayed by "better value through bloat" marketing Kool-Aid. The proper response, therefore, is to make sure that you can afford to release your console at a price people are willing to pay for it en masse -$300 at launch seems to be the limit- and if you can't do this, then you need to scale your technology back until you can. Sony failed to do that with the PS3, and their current situation is nothing but a natural consequence of that.
Truth be told, the 360 really isn't faring too much better. Neither market is large enough to sustain third parties on its own anymore, thus the glut of cross-platform games: the increased sales from being on both platforms can be just enough to eke out a profit despite the additional cost of porting. If anything, the real benefit of Microsoft's year-long headstart may be that it hasn't benefited from the marketing fallout of its failure due to there being no real basis for comparison. The PS3 has faced that in full measure.
But the real problem that faces both consoles, really, is that the self-described "hardcore market" is dying (and no, Netcraft has not confirmed it). This fanbase's obsessive pwn-the-n00bs mentality and fetish for gratuitous complexity have between them driven away most of the new gamers who might otherwise be interested, ensuring that there a healthy influx of new players. Meanwhile, many of the existing gamers in that market have frankly grown up, and in the process have either gotten bored with gaming altogether or started wanting more from their games than the generic "hardcore" formula; these have sought greener pastures and found them elsewhere.
But then, the attitude of the so-called "hardcore" has never been a gamer attitude anyway; it was a domination fantasy and nothing more. They've poisoned this market for far too long, and as a gamer I'm frankly relieved to see them being pushed back to the margins. If the 80s and early 90s were gaming's golden age, then let this generation be the start of a renaissance of gaming for everyone. The market will be so much healthier.
You, and other parental figures in the child's life, are the best filter. There are no acceptable technological substitutes, and there probably never will be.
I'd say it's less a matter of not needing those skills and more of not practicing those skills quite so much. Except in a very few career fields, it's hard to practice pattern-recognition and learning as often as back in school when they were being drilled into your head for several hours a day.
But it does make me wonder: would the results be the same if they ran this test on a group of detectives, researchers, doctors, and others whose careers are largely based around exercising these skills?
HTTP 410 is better than HTTP 404 in this case; Uncle Google and the like have a better understanding of what it means.
If you have a version of the feed that covers the whole event from start to finish, you might also want to offer a static version of that for download as an archive (but if you do this, put it on a different URL from where the feed used to be). This isn't strictly necessary, but I can see scenarios where people might appreciate being able to get at the feed's contents again.
The quirky developers tend to be brilliant: it's how they get hired.
Are they dangerous? That depends on a lot of factors. Most, frankly, are not; the quirks are minor, harmless affairs that can and probably should be overlooked, especially if they do not violate any company policies. Happy coders are better coders.
Dangerous coders do exist, however, just like in any other profession, and it sounds like the article's Josh is one of them. It's tough to argue with his code, but his other behaviors are causing a lot of harm and risking even worse. This is a point where stepping in would be appropriate.
As a counterpoint, there are stories like that told in the movie Stand and Deliver. This movie is based on the true story of a teacher who teaches calculus to poor students with phenomenal success. While education depends on both the teacher and the students, it seems crazy not to reward the best teachers.
What you say is quite true, but rewarding the best teachers depends on a fair and objective measurement. That measurement does not exist.
It's easy to recognize a good teacher, but basically impossible to define with any rigor just what that means. Such a process is, and must be, a sine qua non when it comes to merit pay: if you cannot put a process into place, then "merit pay" becomes equivalent to arbitrary bonuses.
Counterpoint: Teachers who do establish stronger ties between them and students - and then subsequently use those ties to increase that student's performance in the classroom - should be rewarded.
If establishing ties were a reliable and repeatable process, in the manner of preparing fast-food recipes, then you might have a point. However, it is not, and so your point is void. No teacher can always establish such ties to all students; this is a simple consequence of human existence as individuals.
By your own logic, a teacher's success is contingent on limiting the external influences on a student as much as possible.
Which can only be achieved by giving teachers a degree of control over the lives of their students that nobody wants to see happen: it would create far worse problems than it solves.
Actually, I didn't say it was hard. I said it was impossible, that any attempt to do so must inherently violate the definition of the concept. Thus, it would be better to focus on areas where there might actually be some chance of having a positive effect, rather than wasting effort on impossible dreams.
Come on! There are always things we can do, and we should do them rather than just accepting any old warm body.
Plenty of higher educational institutions (going back at least 30+ years (from my limited knowledge), especially with technical colleges) have great ways of determining success via core competency tracking of individual students. If the majority of students are not scoring well in their own individual required competencies, then it's a pretty good indicator (along with other tracked metrics and comparisons to other educators teaching the same competencies to other students) that the specific teacher is not performing well.
Ignoring the conditions which make this unworkable doesn't make them go away. Think back to your own professors, and you'll find the best and the worst among them, just as anyone who ever went to college can: the filtering simply hasn't proven effective.
However, even were there some validity to the sort of tracking you mention, the conditions of higher education are still vastly different from those in primary education. We could start with the notion of "individual required competencies," which is either nonexistent or drastically reduced compared to the core in primary education, nor can it really be applied. This adds externalities beyond a primary teacher's control -not the least of which is simple interest or lack thereof in any given subject- which do not exist to the same degree in higher education, where students are more able to choose their own paths.
Also worth noting is that many professors in higher education have additional demands placed on them which are not related to students: research, publishing, and so forth. These are areas where a professor has a significant degree of control, and might be of use in determining merit on that level. However, such requirements are neither practical not particularly reasonable to be placed on teachers in a primary setting, and thus aren't of use there.
You don't look at a single student, you look at a body of students over time.
The problem is that once again, more often than not students are affected both positively and negatively by factors completely beyond a teacher's ability to predict or control. By tracking many students over time, the probability of severe interference by these externalities approaches 100%, rendering it useless for a fair evaluation.
My one problem with the idea of merit pay for teachers is that there isn't really a good way to measure teacher merit. In most jobs, a worker has a very high degree of control over the end product: for example, nothing goes into the source code I write unless I say so. In such
The problem is that teachers don't (and shouldn't) have that kind of control over the end product: namely, their own students. At best they can guide and influence, but even in the best of situations, more often than not students will be affected by things completely beyond the teacher's ability to predict or control. It is thus grossly unfair to use student performance as a measure of teacher performance, simply because the ties between them are much too loose.
The other option that has been put forward is to use evaluations, by peers, students, administrators, or other factors. Subjectivity is the problem here: it's far too easy to game such evaluations, or to subject them to office politics. This can have both positive and negative effects on various parties, depending on viewpoint, but in any case it cannot be made fair or reliable as a measure of performance.
What other methods exist? I can see none, and would be interested in hearing possible alternatives. But in their absence, "merit pay" for teachers is nothing more than a comforting myth: the concept is unworkable, and implementations cannot be made to reliably follow the concept. Yes, this is different from many (most?) jobs, but the nature of the job itself -also very different from most- is what creates these conditions.
I was talking about porting the ability to embed ActiveX controls into HTML, more than ActiveX itself. I don't believe Microsoft will want to port that to another engine.
They refused to get rid of it at the risk of having the company broken up. What makes you think they'll get rid of it merely because it's fundamentally insecure and inherently unfixable?
Because I think they'd rather do that then port it to another engine, especially if -as some claim will be the case- that engine is open-source.
Hopefully they'll do the right thing: deprecate it as of IE8's release, so people have plenty of warning, and start releasing tools for those still stuck with it to migrate it something perhaps not quite so fundamentally flawed.
Specs are large and ambiguous, almost by their nature as documents to be written by humans. You can usually argue the nature or degree of your support in many ways, and browser makers have often done exactly this, even in the case of contradictory implementations. Test suites remove this ambiguity: either you pass a test or you do not, and collections of these tests can be scored in a clear and certain manner.
Make no mistake: the future of standards-compliance is not in specifications, but in the test suites based on them. The Acid tests, as existed and in terms of their successors, establish a platform that developers can reasonably depend on, and while this platform does not include the whole of the specifications, it is valuable because it is known and reliable in ways that the specs are not.
This is why the Mozilla team needs to get on the ball and start taking these tests seriously. This is real standards-compliance: not when you can say you've implemented parts X, Y, and Z of a spec, possibly based on creative interpretation, but when someone can put your browser to the test and see for themselves that stuff works.
Slashdot Mirror
- Obama: Racist, AIPAC-bootlicker, Corrupted to the bone Chicago style and a Traitor to the US Constitution and a Liar who can't even produce a valid birth certificate (which is not a certificate of live birth)
Minor nitpick: a birth certificate is, in fact, the same thing as a certificate of live birth. In most states, including Hawaii, the latter is the legal term for the former.
Honestly, I'd go more for embezzlement here. Willful misappropriation of funds and all that. Fine them at least the money that would have been paid out as bonuses, or just fine them their entire share of the stimulus package and let them rot.
I think it would be a lot better than the current idea of abusing the government's power to tax. This would at least allow some due process, and without creating an incredibly dangerous precedent that would effectively allow arbitrary taxation for just about any purpose.
If you've stopped visiting Slashdot, then how did you post?
Or can this be taken as an expression of free will, that in an act of BAWWWWW you decided not to visit Slashdot, and then did it anyway just to prove that you can in fact countermand even your own decisions?
As the submission points out, it's really a lot simpler than the people who want so desperately to make snide insults and accusations of hypocrisy are making it.
1) Pulling the plug is, essentially, a form of suicide.
2) Many religions believe suicide to be a serious sin, and thus a thing to be avoided.
3) Therefore, people who believe in these faiths do not pull the plug.
It's very simple, and has very little if anything to do with hypocrisy or fear. It's just a matter of not giving up: not always the most pleasant of tasks, but avoiding wrongdoing however you define it is a worthy goal, is it not?
That server wouldn't 'voom' 'cause you put four million requests through it! 'E's bleedin' slashdotted!
Just because it does not have an MDI it doesn't mean the GUI is bad.
This is true as far as it goes. MDI is a blight on UI design that belongs in the dustbin of history. However...
Gimp's interface follows a common pattern amongst *nix software -- or what they used to look like. ...just because it follows patterns established on systems that were never designed for GUIs in the first place and never really "got" the concept for years even after the introduction of X11 doesn't mean the UI is good. GIMP has made great strides in usability since 1.0, but it still has quite a long way to go. There's a reason it was, and still is to some degree, the poster child for bad GUIs on Linux.
Sony can't afford a price cut. Frankly, they can't even afford the current price, as evidenced by their having squandered almost all of the profits from both the PS1 and PS2 just keeping this train wreck afloat. That's the problem with predatory tactics like loss-leader hardware: sometimes you get burned by the risk, and Sony has gotten burned big time.
Ultimately, the core problem is that people won't pay $600 for a game console. Truth be told, they don't really even tolerate $400 at launch, if the 360's sales are any indication (for all that we -rightly- speak of the PS3 as a failure, it still consistently outdoes the 360 at corresponding points in its lifetime). This is because people understand that the value of a console derives not from what the devs put into it, but from what the gamers get out of it, and that there is really only a small section of the market that can actually be swayed by "better value through bloat" marketing Kool-Aid. The proper response, therefore, is to make sure that you can afford to release your console at a price people are willing to pay for it en masse -$300 at launch seems to be the limit- and if you can't do this, then you need to scale your technology back until you can. Sony failed to do that with the PS3, and their current situation is nothing but a natural consequence of that.
Truth be told, the 360 really isn't faring too much better. Neither market is large enough to sustain third parties on its own anymore, thus the glut of cross-platform games: the increased sales from being on both platforms can be just enough to eke out a profit despite the additional cost of porting. If anything, the real benefit of Microsoft's year-long headstart may be that it hasn't benefited from the marketing fallout of its failure due to there being no real basis for comparison. The PS3 has faced that in full measure.
But the real problem that faces both consoles, really, is that the self-described "hardcore market" is dying (and no, Netcraft has not confirmed it). This fanbase's obsessive pwn-the-n00bs mentality and fetish for gratuitous complexity have between them driven away most of the new gamers who might otherwise be interested, ensuring that there a healthy influx of new players. Meanwhile, many of the existing gamers in that market have frankly grown up, and in the process have either gotten bored with gaming altogether or started wanting more from their games than the generic "hardcore" formula; these have sought greener pastures and found them elsewhere.
But then, the attitude of the so-called "hardcore" has never been a gamer attitude anyway; it was a domination fantasy and nothing more. They've poisoned this market for far too long, and as a gamer I'm frankly relieved to see them being pushed back to the margins. If the 80s and early 90s were gaming's golden age, then let this generation be the start of a renaissance of gaming for everyone. The market will be so much healthier.
You, and other parental figures in the child's life, are the best filter. There are no acceptable technological substitutes, and there probably never will be.
I'd say it's less a matter of not needing those skills and more of not practicing those skills quite so much. Except in a very few career fields, it's hard to practice pattern-recognition and learning as often as back in school when they were being drilled into your head for several hours a day.
But it does make me wonder: would the results be the same if they ran this test on a group of detectives, researchers, doctors, and others whose careers are largely based around exercising these skills?
HTTP 410 is better than HTTP 404 in this case; Uncle Google and the like have a better understanding of what it means.
If you have a version of the feed that covers the whole event from start to finish, you might also want to offer a static version of that for download as an archive (but if you do this, put it on a different URL from where the feed used to be). This isn't strictly necessary, but I can see scenarios where people might appreciate being able to get at the feed's contents again.
April 1, 2020: Square-Enix announces that Final Fantasy XIII has been delayed again.
...but where are you supposed to keep the sharks?
The quirky developers tend to be brilliant: it's how they get hired.
Are they dangerous? That depends on a lot of factors. Most, frankly, are not; the quirks are minor, harmless affairs that can and probably should be overlooked, especially if they do not violate any company policies. Happy coders are better coders.
Dangerous coders do exist, however, just like in any other profession, and it sounds like the article's Josh is one of them. It's tough to argue with his code, but his other behaviors are causing a lot of harm and risking even worse. This is a point where stepping in would be appropriate.
That depends on what you mean by "moving on." Are you talking about moving to other RP systems, or leaving that aspect of gaming altogether?
As a counterpoint, there are stories like that told in the movie Stand and Deliver. This movie is based on the true story of a teacher who teaches calculus to poor students with phenomenal success. While education depends on both the teacher and the students, it seems crazy not to reward the best teachers.
What you say is quite true, but rewarding the best teachers depends on a fair and objective measurement. That measurement does not exist.
It's easy to recognize a good teacher, but basically impossible to define with any rigor just what that means. Such a process is, and must be, a sine qua non when it comes to merit pay: if you cannot put a process into place, then "merit pay" becomes equivalent to arbitrary bonuses.
Counterpoint: Teachers who do establish stronger ties between them and students - and then subsequently use those ties to increase that student's performance in the classroom - should be rewarded.
If establishing ties were a reliable and repeatable process, in the manner of preparing fast-food recipes, then you might have a point. However, it is not, and so your point is void. No teacher can always establish such ties to all students; this is a simple consequence of human existence as individuals.
By your own logic, a teacher's success is contingent on limiting the external influences on a student as much as possible.
Which can only be achieved by giving teachers a degree of control over the lives of their students that nobody wants to see happen: it would create far worse problems than it solves.
Yep, it's hard. Therefore we shouldn't do it.
Actually, I didn't say it was hard. I said it was impossible, that any attempt to do so must inherently violate the definition of the concept. Thus, it would be better to focus on areas where there might actually be some chance of having a positive effect, rather than wasting effort on impossible dreams.
Come on! There are always things we can do, and we should do them rather than just accepting any old warm body.
That does not happen.
Plenty of higher educational institutions (going back at least 30+ years (from my limited knowledge), especially with technical colleges) have great ways of determining success via core competency tracking of individual students. If the majority of students are not scoring well in their own individual required competencies, then it's a pretty good indicator (along with other tracked metrics and comparisons to other educators teaching the same competencies to other students) that the specific teacher is not performing well.
Ignoring the conditions which make this unworkable doesn't make them go away. Think back to your own professors, and you'll find the best and the worst among them, just as anyone who ever went to college can: the filtering simply hasn't proven effective.
However, even were there some validity to the sort of tracking you mention, the conditions of higher education are still vastly different from those in primary education. We could start with the notion of "individual required competencies," which is either nonexistent or drastically reduced compared to the core in primary education, nor can it really be applied. This adds externalities beyond a primary teacher's control -not the least of which is simple interest or lack thereof in any given subject- which do not exist to the same degree in higher education, where students are more able to choose their own paths.
Also worth noting is that many professors in higher education have additional demands placed on them which are not related to students: research, publishing, and so forth. These are areas where a professor has a significant degree of control, and might be of use in determining merit on that level. However, such requirements are neither practical not particularly reasonable to be placed on teachers in a primary setting, and thus aren't of use there.
You don't look at a single student, you look at a body of students over time.
The problem is that once again, more often than not students are affected both positively and negatively by factors completely beyond a teacher's ability to predict or control. By tracking many students over time, the probability of severe interference by these externalities approaches 100%, rendering it useless for a fair evaluation.
My one problem with the idea of merit pay for teachers is that there isn't really a good way to measure teacher merit. In most jobs, a worker has a very high degree of control over the end product: for example, nothing goes into the source code I write unless I say so. In such
The problem is that teachers don't (and shouldn't) have that kind of control over the end product: namely, their own students. At best they can guide and influence, but even in the best of situations, more often than not students will be affected by things completely beyond the teacher's ability to predict or control. It is thus grossly unfair to use student performance as a measure of teacher performance, simply because the ties between them are much too loose.
The other option that has been put forward is to use evaluations, by peers, students, administrators, or other factors. Subjectivity is the problem here: it's far too easy to game such evaluations, or to subject them to office politics. This can have both positive and negative effects on various parties, depending on viewpoint, but in any case it cannot be made fair or reliable as a measure of performance.
What other methods exist? I can see none, and would be interested in hearing possible alternatives. But in their absence, "merit pay" for teachers is nothing more than a comforting myth: the concept is unworkable, and implementations cannot be made to reliably follow the concept. Yes, this is different from many (most?) jobs, but the nature of the job itself -also very different from most- is what creates these conditions.
I was talking about porting the ability to embed ActiveX controls into HTML, more than ActiveX itself. I don't believe Microsoft will want to port that to another engine.
Oh, please, don't tease me like that.
They refused to get rid of it at the risk of having the company broken up. What makes you think they'll get rid of it merely because it's fundamentally insecure and inherently unfixable?
Because I think they'd rather do that then port it to another engine, especially if -as some claim will be the case- that engine is open-source.
Hopefully they'll do the right thing: deprecate it as of IE8's release, so people have plenty of warning, and start releasing tools for those still stuck with it to migrate it something perhaps not quite so fundamentally flawed.
Specs are large and ambiguous, almost by their nature as documents to be written by humans. You can usually argue the nature or degree of your support in many ways, and browser makers have often done exactly this, even in the case of contradictory implementations. Test suites remove this ambiguity: either you pass a test or you do not, and collections of these tests can be scored in a clear and certain manner.
Make no mistake: the future of standards-compliance is not in specifications, but in the test suites based on them. The Acid tests, as existed and in terms of their successors, establish a platform that developers can reasonably depend on, and while this platform does not include the whole of the specifications, it is valuable because it is known and reliable in ways that the specs are not.
This is why the Mozilla team needs to get on the ball and start taking these tests seriously. This is real standards-compliance: not when you can say you've implemented parts X, Y, and Z of a spec, possibly based on creative interpretation, but when someone can put your browser to the test and see for themselves that stuff works.
And it CAN make you drink!