as a middle/high school music teacher who uses all available technologies to teach music, this could really be a good thing.
why? simple. the goal, or _a_ goal of music education is to bring a meaningful experience of music to a student. this program might help with that.
and i'm just speaking of formal music education. for someone on their own, they can use the program to get a start and then learn more/deeper as they progress.
just because it might use 'standard' chord progressions doesnt meant a person cant have a meaningful experience of music - especially an inexperienced person. again, they can always learn more later.
for those of you who negatively (and, i daresay, often uselessly) criticized up above, remember that not everyone is in the same place, musically. if only one person becomes more musical because of this then it's served its purpose, no?
although this is a story about blackboard's patents, most folks are writing about how crappy blackboard is. our school switched from blackboard and firstclass to just firstclass. that's.. a poorly written program as well.
but back to the patents - im stunned that polymorphism (or whatever you want to call it) is patentable. does anyone know the law on this? how is that possible? its such a basic idea.. can they patent variables? and OOP? holey camoley.. id think that an appeal high enough will eliminate this patent. im SURE that the meaning of the law cant be to create monopolies such as this. if blackboard can only exist because of a patent, well then its time to go..
btw, ive taken the approach of writing my own. got a teacher in my school using it super-beta. heck, maybe i'll get my act together, write some docs, get it to 1.0 and publish it..
as a high school teacher who is constantly thinking of ways to improve the educational system, this is huge. how many thousands of hours and millions of dollars of different resources are used up just so students can write a papers to/for teachers?
sure, the idea is that by writing something for the 'expert' teacher (naturally, not always the case), the student will learn how to write. but besides the cyclical waste -- paper written > printed (usually) > graded > looked at > thrown out (or put away somewhere forever) -- it is so damn inefficient. basically, one of the problems with the current predominant education system is that so much of it is pedagogical and only pedagogical and has no 'real world' meaning.
at the least, this is a step in the right direction.
back in the day i ran IT for a company that, sadly, has gone the way of many many software companies. so it goes.
anyway, we used something by these folks:
http://www.missioncriticallinux.com/
called 'convolo' but the technology is called 'kimberlite'. it worked quite well - as we were working for some big name movie houses we needed full availability. our testing was quite intense and it worked fantastic.
its GPL - mission critical provides service, if i'm not mistaken.
you'll need to go a bit nuts with the hardware, of course...
i wish i could give yall better links but if you search google for "brazil government linux" you'll find quite a bit about how the brazilian government. it was also mentioned here, here:
Slashdot Mirror
is all I can think of.
it's just not that big a deal, as an analysis of Society's Use Of Yelp (and others) would have determined.
and as some folks have said.. ain't that yelp's problem? are they gonna police online resume sites too?
I'd suggest that "severely limiting the whole point of running free software" might be a touch of an exaggeration. A huge touch.
as a middle/high school music teacher who uses all available technologies to teach music, this could really be a good thing.
why? simple. the goal, or _a_ goal of music education is to bring a meaningful experience of music to a student. this program might help with that.
and i'm just speaking of formal music education. for someone on their own, they can use the program to get a start and then learn more/deeper as they progress.
just because it might use 'standard' chord progressions doesnt meant a person cant have a meaningful experience of music - especially an inexperienced person. again, they can always learn more later.
for those of you who negatively (and, i daresay, often uselessly) criticized up above, remember that not everyone is in the same place, musically. if only one person becomes more musical because of this then it's served its purpose, no?
although this is a story about blackboard's patents, most folks are writing about how crappy blackboard is. our school switched from blackboard and firstclass to just firstclass. that's .. a poorly written program as well.
but back to the patents - im stunned that polymorphism (or whatever you want to call it) is patentable. does anyone know the law on this? how is that possible? its such a basic idea.. can they patent variables? and OOP? holey camoley.. id think that an appeal high enough will eliminate this patent. im SURE that the meaning of the law cant be to create monopolies such as this. if blackboard can only exist because of a patent, well then its time to go..
btw, ive taken the approach of writing my own. got a teacher in my school using it super-beta. heck, maybe i'll get my act together, write some docs, get it to 1.0 and publish it..
as a high school teacher who is constantly thinking of ways to improve the educational system, this is huge. how many thousands of hours and millions of dollars of different resources are used up just so students can write a papers to/for teachers?
sure, the idea is that by writing something for the 'expert' teacher (naturally, not always the case), the student will learn how to write. but besides the cyclical waste -- paper written > printed (usually) > graded > looked at > thrown out (or put away somewhere forever) -- it is so damn inefficient. basically, one of the problems with the current predominant education system is that so much of it is pedagogical and only pedagogical and has no 'real world' meaning.
at the least, this is a step in the right direction.
now i gotta run to class..
back in the day i ran IT for a company that, sadly, has gone the way of many many software companies. so it goes.
anyway, we used something by these folks:
http://www.missioncriticallinux.com/
called 'convolo' but the technology is called 'kimberlite'. it worked quite well - as we were working for some big name movie houses we needed full availability. our testing was quite intense and it worked fantastic.
its GPL - mission critical provides service, if i'm not mistaken.
you'll need to go a bit nuts with the hardware, of course...
enjoy!
i wish i could give yall better links but if you search google for "brazil government linux" you'll find quite a bit about how the brazilian government. it was also mentioned here, here:
2 21 2
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/06/14/142
we'll see how thing go down in LulaLand goes....