So radio stations can avoid doing business with SoundExchange, but copyright holders shouldn't, since they don't have control over whether radio stations will use the statutory license. Right, but SoundExchange forbid their members from negotiating separate licenses, so once you sign up with SoundExchange you're stuck -- the radio stations can't avoid doing business with SoundExchange if they want to play your music. This basically lets SoundExchange wedge themselves between artist and broadcaster and play one off against the other to bootstrap themselves into a virtual monopoly. The only way to break this is for a decently sized co-operative of artists and broadcasters that haven't yet polluted themselves with soundExhange agreements to get together and agree to work with one another, and that sort of co-ordination isn't that easy. It's not unstoppale, but it is going to require a lot of people waking up and working hard to stop it.
Probably, I have no idea how Windows does it since I don't use Windows. The fact that GNOME does it well does not preclude other systems doing it well also.
What happens if the user isn't paying attention and they hit the delete key to remove a string of text, but actually where clicked on an important document? Then the document ends up in the "Recycle Bin"/"Trash"/Whatever-you-call-it and the user can easily recover the file. I actually think GNOME handles this quite nicely. If you hit delete it simply gets sent to the Trash, and you can quickly recover it when you spot your mistake. There is also a modifier key version (shift-delete) which lets you by pass the Trash and permanently delete a file -- the brings up a warning dialog about permanent deletion of course. Seems to elegantly combine the best of both approaches to me.
Fortress won't be hitting prime-time anytime soon. They are still working with a demo implementation for testing purposes (it doesn't even have all the features from the spec working -- contracts weren't available yet last time I played with it). Still, the language design looks pretty solid, and when they eventually come to building a final product I think it will be well wort investing time in if you do much numerical work. That means it may be worth investing a little time now familiarising yourself with what will be available.
I think you'll find that the Unicode character set is the one that gets commented on the most because that's the only feature you can glean from a supreficial skim of the quite long and detailed spec. If, on the other hand, you actually read the spec you'll find a lot of other very nice features, good concurrency control, software transactional memory, a very nice component system, an interesting parametric polymorphism system, some good functional programming primitives, and more. It is worth actually reading the spec.
I think the telling point in the article is when the author says that GIMPs interface shortcomings can be fixed by GimpShop -- which really says that she never really used either. Why do I say that? Because GimpShop doesn't change the GUI much at all; all it does is re-organize the menus a little so they are more similar in layout to Photoshop. I suspect she didn't actually try using either program and simply took someones word for it that GIMP was hard (the 2.2 version is actually quite nice with the palettes all docked together and each image window having a menu bar so right clicking is not required at all), and also that GimpShop somehow magically makes it better (when really it is no more and no less user friendly than GIMP unless you're a dvout Photoshop user, and need your menus structured the same way).
What I find funny is when people laugh and say it's indicative of a failure when Dell et al. start selling systems with XP again instead of Vista. Um, hello? So far as I know, XP is from Microsoft too. The failure I'm looking for is when Dell and such start selling systems with something not made by MS. Well with WinXP not being licensed next year, anyone wanting to not have Vista will have to go with a Mac, or buy Vista and them install over the top of it -- unless Dell actually offers something with Linux on it. I suspect that with continued demand for XP, and MS saying they won't be selling it anymore, Dell is seriously looking at that option. My guess is they'll sign some sort of deal with Canonical letting them handle support. Next year could be interesting.
To be fair, when it came to Windows ME there was an alternative available in the form of Win2k. Once MS stops licensing WinXP your options will be Vista Home, Vista Professional, or Vista Ultimate (or whatever the hell they call the different "versions"). Choosing to go with Mac or Linux instead of Vista is a much bigger leap than choosing to go with Win2k instead on Win ME.
Picking a couple of points isn't the most robust measure, especially with things as potentially volaile as currency. If you look at the five year trend, it doesn't look so good. The US dollar rallied a little in late 05, early 06, but generally it's steadily sinking down. The Grandparent post is radically overstating things, but the picture isn't as rosy as you want to make out either.
I have to admit I'm not familiar with that series. I'll take your word for it that I would be appalled. I am appalled by most of the modern math textbooks I've looked at to be honest.
Microsoft is a giant behemoth with a monopoly that is insurmountable in the short term. They are not invulnerable, and they can indeed make mistakes. Given their current position, however, it will take a long time for significant erosion of their monopoly, and a lot of legacy MS cruft will remain locked into the IT industry for even longer. Thus, despite their ability to fail, eventually, on their own, it makes some sense to demand (as the EU have) the opening of protocols to help avoid artificial lock in and allow competition on a more even playing field. Sure, it seems Vista is not selling well, but the reality is that at the end of 2007 MS will end XP licensing and all new computers will come with Vista. As badly as Vista seems to be doing, it will only be a setback and will still sell fairly well -- it might tarnish MS's image for a bit, and help promote alternatives, but MS can still ride their effective monopoly status to get it sold.
It is not really much of a proof, though it is an involved problem. Just setup a coordinate system and use it define unit vectors for the relevant sides. Then show that the dot product of the unit vectors is 0. The problem would take some time, but it is not that hard. It takes some work because the base of the prism is not square, so getting coordinates for B (or D, or both, depending on where you choose to center the origin) actually takes some work -- which hs to go into your proof.
It might be less obvious, but the math is basically the same.
The mathematical facts you need to know are the same, however the reasoning and logic skills you need to bring to bear to solve the problems are utterly different. That is the key point. Math is not just facts, and testing your skill at math should involve more than just checking which facts you have memorized. The Chinese question does that, while the UK question does not.
The difference is that the Chinese question actually requires you to chain together a sequence of logical reasoning -- and to present that reasoning clearly. I'm not suggesting its an ideal question (I didn't write it), but it is asking for something more than the UK question, which requires little more than mindless regurgitation of fact. The Chinese questions expects you to think and reason and to communicate that reasoning. Ultimately that's what mathematics is. Thus the Chinese question is actually asking you to do some math, while blind recollection of fact that will be forgotten soon after is enough to get you through the UK question.
The focus on facts and details in math education is deeply worrying to me. I've written on the topic, and I have to say that I find many of the comments here worrying because the continue to perpetuate the confusion. It is as if we were teaching history by simply getting students to memorise names and dates (which, sadly, is all to common in many schools), or assuming that teaching art history is about getting students to be able to tell you what colours are used in famous paintings, or expecting an education in music to result in nothing more than being able to rattle off names of symphonies, who composed them, when, and in what key. High school algebra is not (or at least, should not be) about making you memorise the quadratic formula, it is (or should be) about teaching you how to use formal reasoning, such as algebra, to arrive at complex results (such as the quadratic formula).
For anyone interested in different perspectives on mathematics, I keep a blog on the subject which provides a wider view of the subject which ought to supplement the details and skills that are currently the focus of so much math education.
But if people get what they want out of life without using these "very useful" skills, then I'd say that's the very definition of "useless". The opposite of "necessary" is not "useless". Just because people can get what they want without these skills doesn't mean they couldn't find use for those skills to get want they want more easily or efficiently. You don't need to know how to play an instrument or read music to be able to write a symphony, but it sure does help. You don't need math to do a wide variety of things, but it sure can help. An MBA can get by without understanding operations research and the math required for it, but it sure could help. A composer doesn't need to now any math, but a good knowledge of it can be awfully helpful in analysing and improving his work. Something doesn't have to be necessary to be useful.
The UK test is "a test used in a "well known and respected" English university - the society is not naming it - to assess the strength of incoming science undergraduates' maths skills." while the Chinese test is "a sample question from [a] Chinese university entrance test". They aren't, obviously, directly comparable, but I think the difference in requirement for actually understanding and reasoning about a problem is quite stark: the Chinese questions requires you to do significant logical deduction, and to actully present that reasoning clearly. The UK test requires absolutely nothing beyond regurgitation of facts.
The Chinese test is actually very similar to the UK one; it's based on a similar triangle (1/rt3/2 instead of 3/4/5). The trig is virtually identical, they're asking for mostly the same angles, and you don't need that much more knowledge to answer it. The difference is that the Chinese version requires you to now simply know (and be able to mindlessly regurgitate) a few facts about mathematics, it requires you to analyse a problem, reason about it, chain together a sequence of logical deductions, and present that reasoning in a clear way. That is, the Chinese question actually asks you to do mathematics, as opposed to reciting facts about it.
Here's an analogy: Two history questions: one asks you to write a short essay discussing the rise to power of Queen Elizabeth I, and the cultural impacts those events had, both at the time, and through history; the other asks you to list dates associated with Queen Elizabeth I, and the names of some famous people alive at that time. One of those is actually testing your grasp of history, and the other is mindless regurgitation of facts that will probably soon be forgotten. The difference between those questions is very similar to the difference between the math questions. Both questions require you to know the same "facts" (names and dates), but only one actualy asks you do any history.
Mathematics is more than just facts, it is about logic, and reasoning and abstraction; just as history is not just names and dates, it a is about how those people events tie together and influence each other, and how they influence us. Don't confuse mathematics with facts about mathematics.
So, really, the complaint against the UK test boils down to: it doesn't require 3D thinking and doesn't have a large number of steps. The complaint against the UK test is that it requires nothing more than mindless regurgitation of facts. There is no requirement for logical thought and deduction, nor for being able to present formal reasoning about a problem. The complaint against the UK test is that it doesn't actually require you to do any math.
How many people outside of fields like engineering and other math-specialty careers even need to be able to do much beyond the basic four functions anyway? Sure, you can teach various classes without any math, but that doesn't mean you couldn't teach it better if you could assume that the students did know math. MBAs would be better off if we could assume they know enough math to actually do some proper operations research. Sociologists could likely get some real benefit out of being reasonably well versed in statistics. Music majors might find they benefit from a little advanced math when analysing compositions. Sure, none of those subjects need math, but they can certainly get benefits from it. You can probably (if you try hard enough) teach physics without doing any math too, that doesn't mean you should.
Both the Chinese test and the British test were only testing for elementary trigonometry stuff. The Chinese test required to use, and demonstrate, logical reasoning (that chained together over many steps) about a formally dedfined system. That's mathematics, and what mathematics is really about. The UK test required you to recite some basic facts about mathematics, but not actually do any mathematics.
There seems to be a strange confusion about what mathematics is, with people mistaking facts related to mathematics, for the process of thought and reasoning that underlies mathematics. In saying that it was "elementary trigonometry stuff" that was being tested you are failing to see the forest for the trees, and assuming that knowing facts about trigonometry, rather than using those facts to be able to reason logically about problems, is the point. A person who knows only facts, and possibly a few recipes for how to use them, can only solve the pre-prepared prolems they've been taught to solve. A person who understands the underlying ideas, and how to reason about them can look up whatever facts they needs and develop whatever techniques they require to solve any problem presented.
And I'm missing where the submitter got the whole "Encouraging Students to Drop Mathematics" thing from. The headline and content of the first linked BBC article? You know this one titled " Pupils 'are urged to drop maths'". I freely admit that, ultimately, this is simply a claim being made by the Royal Society of Chemistry, but I am simply rephrasing the headline of the linked article itself.
The maths knowledge required for both tests is the same, the chinese one just merely requires more application know-how No, the difference that matters is that the Chinese question requires you to use the knowledge in a chain of logical deduction (and to reproduce tht chain of reasoning explicitly to answer question), while the UK question simply requires the student to regurgitate facts. In other words, the Chinese question actually requires the student to understand, and do mathematics, while the UK question requires students to be able to recite arbitrary facts about mathematics. One requires some modicum of understanding of mathematics, particularly logical deduction, proof and reasoning. Those are the important skills that math should be teaching.
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Probably, I have no idea how Windows does it since I don't use Windows. The fact that GNOME does it well does not preclude other systems doing it well also.
Fortress won't be hitting prime-time anytime soon. They are still working with a demo implementation for testing purposes (it doesn't even have all the features from the spec working -- contracts weren't available yet last time I played with it). Still, the language design looks pretty solid, and when they eventually come to building a final product I think it will be well wort investing time in if you do much numerical work. That means it may be worth investing a little time now familiarising yourself with what will be available.
I think you'll find that the Unicode character set is the one that gets commented on the most because that's the only feature you can glean from a supreficial skim of the quite long and detailed spec. If, on the other hand, you actually read the spec you'll find a lot of other very nice features, good concurrency control, software transactional memory, a very nice component system, an interesting parametric polymorphism system, some good functional programming primitives, and more. It is worth actually reading the spec.
I think the telling point in the article is when the author says that GIMPs interface shortcomings can be fixed by GimpShop -- which really says that she never really used either. Why do I say that? Because GimpShop doesn't change the GUI much at all; all it does is re-organize the menus a little so they are more similar in layout to Photoshop. I suspect she didn't actually try using either program and simply took someones word for it that GIMP was hard (the 2.2 version is actually quite nice with the palettes all docked together and each image window having a menu bar so right clicking is not required at all), and also that GimpShop somehow magically makes it better (when really it is no more and no less user friendly than GIMP unless you're a dvout Photoshop user, and need your menus structured the same way).
To be fair, when it came to Windows ME there was an alternative available in the form of Win2k. Once MS stops licensing WinXP your options will be Vista Home, Vista Professional, or Vista Ultimate (or whatever the hell they call the different "versions"). Choosing to go with Mac or Linux instead of Vista is a much bigger leap than choosing to go with Win2k instead on Win ME.
Picking a couple of points isn't the most robust measure, especially with things as potentially volaile as currency. If you look at the five year trend, it doesn't look so good. The US dollar rallied a little in late 05, early 06, but generally it's steadily sinking down. The Grandparent post is radically overstating things, but the picture isn't as rosy as you want to make out either.
I have to admit I'm not familiar with that series. I'll take your word for it that I would be appalled. I am appalled by most of the modern math textbooks I've looked at to be honest.
Microsoft is a giant behemoth with a monopoly that is insurmountable in the short term. They are not invulnerable, and they can indeed make mistakes. Given their current position, however, it will take a long time for significant erosion of their monopoly, and a lot of legacy MS cruft will remain locked into the IT industry for even longer. Thus, despite their ability to fail, eventually, on their own, it makes some sense to demand (as the EU have) the opening of protocols to help avoid artificial lock in and allow competition on a more even playing field. Sure, it seems Vista is not selling well, but the reality is that at the end of 2007 MS will end XP licensing and all new computers will come with Vista. As badly as Vista seems to be doing, it will only be a setback and will still sell fairly well -- it might tarnish MS's image for a bit, and help promote alternatives, but MS can still ride their effective monopoly status to get it sold.
The difference is that the Chinese question actually requires you to chain together a sequence of logical reasoning -- and to present that reasoning clearly. I'm not suggesting its an ideal question (I didn't write it), but it is asking for something more than the UK question, which requires little more than mindless regurgitation of fact. The Chinese questions expects you to think and reason and to communicate that reasoning. Ultimately that's what mathematics is. Thus the Chinese question is actually asking you to do some math, while blind recollection of fact that will be forgotten soon after is enough to get you through the UK question.
It seems we have similar views. I wrote an essay on exactly this subject, and if you're interested I keep a blog on math from a broader perspective.
The focus on facts and details in math education is deeply worrying to me. I've written on the topic, and I have to say that I find many of the comments here worrying because the continue to perpetuate the confusion. It is as if we were teaching history by simply getting students to memorise names and dates (which, sadly, is all to common in many schools), or assuming that teaching art history is about getting students to be able to tell you what colours are used in famous paintings, or expecting an education in music to result in nothing more than being able to rattle off names of symphonies, who composed them, when, and in what key. High school algebra is not (or at least, should not be) about making you memorise the quadratic formula, it is (or should be) about teaching you how to use formal reasoning, such as algebra, to arrive at complex results (such as the quadratic formula).
For anyone interested in different perspectives on mathematics, I keep a blog on the subject which provides a wider view of the subject which ought to supplement the details and skills that are currently the focus of so much math education.
I strongly suspect that this is what is meant and it is a case of poor translation.
The UK test is "a test used in a "well known and respected" English university - the society is not naming it - to assess the strength of incoming science undergraduates' maths skills." while the Chinese test is "a sample question from [a] Chinese university entrance test". They aren't, obviously, directly comparable, but I think the difference in requirement for actually understanding and reasoning about a problem is quite stark: the Chinese questions requires you to do significant logical deduction, and to actully present that reasoning clearly. The UK test requires absolutely nothing beyond regurgitation of facts.
Here's an analogy: Two history questions: one asks you to write a short essay discussing the rise to power of Queen Elizabeth I, and the cultural impacts those events had, both at the time, and through history; the other asks you to list dates associated with Queen Elizabeth I, and the names of some famous people alive at that time. One of those is actually testing your grasp of history, and the other is mindless regurgitation of facts that will probably soon be forgotten. The difference between those questions is very similar to the difference between the math questions. Both questions require you to know the same "facts" (names and dates), but only one actualy asks you do any history.
Mathematics is more than just facts, it is about logic, and reasoning and abstraction; just as history is not just names and dates, it a is about how those people events tie together and influence each other, and how they influence us. Don't confuse mathematics with facts about mathematics.
There seems to be a strange confusion about what mathematics is, with people mistaking facts related to mathematics, for the process of thought and reasoning that underlies mathematics. In saying that it was "elementary trigonometry stuff" that was being tested you are failing to see the forest for the trees, and assuming that knowing facts about trigonometry, rather than using those facts to be able to reason logically about problems, is the point. A person who knows only facts, and possibly a few recipes for how to use them, can only solve the pre-prepared prolems they've been taught to solve. A person who understands the underlying ideas, and how to reason about them can look up whatever facts they needs and develop whatever techniques they require to solve any problem presented.
The belief that mathematics is just the details is very damaging to math education.