"Really, those are your thoughts on this? How have RIAA and MPAA managed to go after users so far? By sharing pixie dust? Unicorn meat?"
The parent post (Arancaytar) explained things pretty clearly.
Since you don't appear to understand anything about the BitTorrent protocol, I'll try to explain.
Clients start by getting a.torrent file or magnet link, which contains a tracker URL and the hash of a torrent (unique ID, computed from the contents). They join a swarm by connecting to a tracker and sending the hash of a torrent. The tracker responds with the IP addresses of the peers, which you then connect to, and exchange data with. As a part of the exchange, peers tell each other exactly which pieces of the torrent they have, so that they can decide which data to exchange.
What this basically means is that when you're in a BitTorrent swarm you have to expose your public IP address, and broadcast exactly your status (i.e. documenting exactly what you're downloading, and offering to upload). And you give out whatever another peer asks for.
From a legal perspective, this gives a media company (or their agent) everything that they need to prove that you're illegally downloading their content. That is: - They can download the torrent, and prove that it's their copyrighted material. - They can join the tracker and get the IP address of all of the peers in the swarm. - They can download data from all of the peers, proving that the peers are serving the data. - They can negotiate with the peers, and document that they're downloading the data. - They can look up the ISPs for each of the IP addresses. - They can go to those ISPs and (by filing a lawsuit) get the customer names and addresses associated with each of the IP addresses.
The math is quite solid. About the only "defense" is that someone else was using your IP address, that some evil software used your computer without your knowledge, or that the ISP reported the wrong customer for the IP address.
The other protocols mentioned (magnet links, DHT, and PEX) are basically accellerators that don't change the fundamentals, so they don't change the fact that BitTorrent was invented to efficiently deliver large files, not hide what you're doing.
Magnet links might help trackers claim that they don't know what they're tracking, since they're just torrent hashes without the file names, etc., but given that all of the tracker sites list all of that info on their web sites, so that people know what they're downloading, that doesn't strike me as a very good defense. But IANAL.
It's still BitTorrent, but using the info encoded in an URL instead of a.torrent file. So yes, it's pretty much copying the eMule magnet link idea, but using the BitTorrent protocol. I bet eMule doesn't sue over it.:-)
Right, but the link URL of a magnet link is basically just a hash, so you can't tell what you're going to download until you start downloading, and then only if you switch to the BitTorrent client and check to see what you're downloading.
They don't operate by making the case waterproof. The showed a demo (I saw it live) and the iPhone 4 was full of water while operating. They're coating everything inside the iPhone, making the microphone, speakers, components, etc., waterproof. Keep in mind that the iPhone's battery is permanently installed, so if the insulate the battery and al of the wires, it should be fine even if covered in water. They did say that you needed to let the phone dry off before charging it again, as the contacts in the charging cable would short.
"who needs a solution that creates more problems?"
What are you talking about? The article describes a process that is applied to electronics to make it waterproof. I saw it demoed, and it appears to work - an iPhone that was not only completely submerged but full of water remained powered on and received a phone call. Which, at CES, was impressive - plenty of cell phones that weren't under water failed to receive phone calls there.:-) Seriously, though, once the device is treated, it feels and acts exactly like it did before treatment. So WTF are you talking about? Do you have some deep understanding of their treatment process and some hidden problems that we don't know about? Do share...
A major reason why all movies cost the same price (at a given theater) is that the theater owners don't want you think think about the price of the ticket, which you would have to do if you got to pick different movies at different prices. Instead, they want you to go to the theatre and pay the price for going to the movies. Yes, they''ll charge extra for 3D, popcorn and drinks. But it's all on top of a fixed ticket price, which you pay because you have no choice, so you don't even think about it. This isn't all bad - the same logic that keeps them from dropping ticket pricess for unpopular movies also prevents them from raising prices on popular movies.
If the movies were different prices, how would it work?
If the most popular movies were cheaper, based on "economies of scale", that would break the movie businesses. Keep in mind that the large majority of movies lose money, so they make a profit based on a small percentage of hits. If they dropped the ticket prices for the big hits, that would eliiminate most of the money that paid for all of the other movies. And, of course, dropping the price of your most popular product doesn't seem like a way to optimize revenue.
You could argue the reverse, that that prices should be higher for the most popular movies, and lower for the unpopular ones. That at least makes sense in that people would be willing to pay more for things that are more popular. Lucikly for us, the movie guys have figured out that raising prices on "hit" movies would irritate viewers more than the potential revenue.
Instead, the way the movie business works, they price the same movie at different prices through different channels over time. First it hits the first run theatres that charge the highest prices. Later it hits second run theatres, who charge less for tickets to people that don't mind waiting (and going to less nice theatres). Then pay-per-view TV, then DVD sales, and TV broadcast. The "hit" movies make more money in theatres, because even though ticket prices are fixed, more people go to see the movie. Later, all of the deals are negotiated - if a network wants to broadcast Avatar in 3D, they'll pay a lot more than broadcasting Plan 9 From Outer Space. And for the "not-hit" movies, they show in fewer theatres, and hope to make a little on PPV, etc.
You're right - I was speaking about professionally constructed testing, which is all field tested, etc. Without that, you're certainly right that you can't be confident that you're measuring what you think you are. For instructor constructed tests, they usually try to do something along the lines of what I described, for the same reasons, but without the rigor.
The school board member was saying that the 4th and 8th grade tests were fine, but that the 10th grade test was too hard, as evidenced by many students who did fine on the 4th and 8th grade tests then failing the 10th grade test. The school board member then took the hard 10th grade test and failed it, which he presented as evidence that the 10th grade test was too hard.
The newspaper then printed examples from the 4th and 8th grade test, which were, as the board member said, appropriate to 4th and 8th graders.
The mistake you're making is not noticing that the questions were not from the 10th grade test, which is the one that the board member said was too hard. By missing that, you're thinking that the board member failed a test of easy math questions, which would have been embarassing if it had happened.
The fact that almost everyong posting on Slashdot missed the key facts due to the lazy/misleading writing puts the blame squarely on the writer. But I blame the journalist more than the readers - either the writer didn't realize that providing irrelevant "example questions" undermined the entire point of the story, or the writer was intentionally trying to ignore the facts and instead make the administrator look like an idiot.
Read the article more carefully. The test that the school board member said was too hard was the 10th grade test. The questions in the article were from the 4th grade test. Not only that, but the school board member said that they reason that he thought that the 10th grade test was too hard was that the kids were doing well on the 4th grade and 8th grade tests, then were failing the 10th grade test.
It was misleading of the newspaper to present the easy, 4th grade questions as if they were the questions that the school board member thought were too hard. It's disappointing that the writer (apparently) provided absurdly easy "example" questions, to make the school board member look like an idiot. Or perhaps the writer was just too dumb to realize that printing the wrong questions mattered.
It's also a bit disappointing how many slashdot readers didn't catch the newspaper's error.
Compound question such as the "axis" question are actually pretty hard because it requires people to remember quite a few concepts that are rarely useful once out of school. Which axis is X and which is Y? What is mirroring around an axis? What do positive and negative coordinates mean? What does (3,7) mean? Which of 3 and 7 in (3, 7) X and which is Y? And so on. Of course, if you know all of that, then the answer is fairly obvious - visualize an X/Y coordinate space, plot the point, mirror it around an axis, and there you are. Or remember that mirroring around an axis chances the sign of one of the numbers but not both.
Given that the administrator took the 10th grade test, I wish that they'd provided examples from the 10th grade test, instead of the 4th and 8th grade tests. Unless you read carefully you'd think that the administrator was an idiot. But if you read about this issue, you'll find that the administrator was actually saying that he thought that the 10th grade test was too hard, because the kids did well on the earlier grade tests (i.e. those test were fine) but were failing the 10th grade test (i.e. that specific test was too hard). So the point of the story should be that the 10th grade test in particular is too hard, not that the administrator was an idiot. The newspaper printed examples from the lower grade tests, which were properly calibrated for younger kids, is misleading, because the reader is given the impression that the administrator got easy math questions wrong, and was an idiot. So either the writer was too stupid to realize that he was misreprenting the facts, or he was intentionally changing the story to suit an agenda. Neither is impressive.
"That's why making multiple choice tests (and grading them) is so frigging difficult to do very well. To do it completely perfectly you need to be able to predict all possible incorrect interpretations and be sure that none of your "wrong" answers are "right" in a way that you would want to give points for."
Tests are better planned than you think. When you construct a (good) test, all of the answers are put there BECAUSE they tell you something specific about the person taking the test. That's why on four answer questions you'll usually see that one answer is right, one answer is absolutely wrong (i.e. the test taker was guessing wildly) and the other two are the answers that the test taker would arrive at if they didn't understand something.
This can be done for two reasons.
First, it allows test takers who understand the subject well enough to eliminate some of the answers a better chance of getting the right answer, which (indirectly) gives students partial credit for partial knowledge.
Second, test can be scored with different values for different 'wrong' answers. For example, 'right' might be worth 5 points, 'wrong' might be worth 0 points, and the 'close' answers might be worth 2 points, explicitly giving students partial credit for partial knowledge.
And if the testing system is really smart, it can analyze the right and wrong answers and give better guidance to the instructor so that they know to provide specific guidance to the student. For example, if someone repeatly subtracts instead dividing, perhaps they're confused about what the division symbol means, so they can get help with that specifically. Or, as someone else in the discussion pointed out, if they read the division symbol as "+" then perhaps they need glasses. Most scoring systems don't do this, but some do.:-)
"If the 2000 accounts existed and different devices are now connecting to them then there is something fundamentally wrong with the software."
Keep in mind that the 2,000 new mobile devices are being used IN ADDITION TO however those people read email. If they stopped using their desktops and just used iPads, the load on the system would be unchanged. Adding 2,000 new clients to any mail system will consume the system's capacity, and if the system doesn't have that capacity it'll be in trouble. There's no magic capacity fairy.
Solyndra's investors weren't particularly Obama donors - the Waltons (i.e. Walmart) were major investors, and they're hardly Obama fans. Keep in mind also that Solyndra was started and was fast-tracked for funding under a DOE program started under Bush, and Obama's [ep[;e actually slowed things down, did more due diligence, and put more protections in place around the loans that ended up saving us money by pulling the plug on the company. Despite Issa's partisan spinning, this isn't something to blame Obama on - any time the government sets up a fund to promote businesses, some of those businesses will succeed and some will fail, and Solyndra failed because China radically dropped the price of solar cells, wiping out Solyndra's market. The real problem isn't that the US government set up a fund to encourage solar development, it's that the US started years later than China, and with a much lower level of investment, so China is beating us. The answer isn't to give up, it's to compete harder.
The Aptera looks like it does for a reason - its primary goal is efficiency, which is how they got over 200 MPG.
But to do that, they had to not waste energy pushing the car through the air. So they made it aerodynamic, so it looks like an airplane rather than the traditional "box on wheels." And their initial target was a two seater, which is most efficient (because most driving is 1-2 people, and with a two seater you're pushing around less mass).
A year ago (apparently) marketplace realities kicked in. That is, while sedans are less efficient, people prefer buying them because it's useful to be able to carry more people when you need to. So the marketplace for sedans is much larger than two seaters, making it a much smarter business to be in. But since they didn't get their funding, we'll never know how that would have played out.
Though I would love to see what a truly efficient sedan might look like.
"Imagine what they could have done with the $700k they would have saved by choosing a tablet other than an iPad."
The iPad is under $500, so it costs the same or less than any other decent tablet. Are you saying that there's a tablet that costs $150 that's comparable to the iPad? That is pretty hard to imagine. Don't forget to include the management costs - iPads are extremely easy for an enterprise to manage, because they integrate nicely into Exchange (e.g. you can define mail policies on your Exchange server, and iPads do what they're told - encrypt, require password lock, etc.). Android doesn't do this properly yet. That leaves the RIM Playbook, which aside from sucking has the same list price as the iPad. I guess you could save some money buying discontinued products that are being dumped, but that's not a great enterprise hardware strategy.:-)
If you want to complain about the project, complain that they didn't plan for adding one more ActiveSynch server so they had capacity to support their users. Given educational pricing, the software is nearly free, and even an overpriced server would have been a trivial percentage of the project budget.
Keep in mind that they're not talking about adding 2,000 mailboxes, just adding 2,000 devices to access existing mailboxes. So they don't need more storage, just more server compute capacity. If I had to guess, it might be as simple as them running ActiveSynch on a single, under-resourced server (or VM) as a POC, and they didn't expect (or prepare for) the increased demand of 2,000 more tablets. Should be easy to fix. Though inevitably they're trying to do a dozen other things, and it'll take three months to do the paperwork to get the approval to buy a new server and get it deployed. Remember,
If I had to guess, the issue isn't the specific protocol, it's that the number of mail clients doubled. That is, if they have 1,000 employees, each reading mail from a desktop computer, and each employee gets an iPad that they use in addition, they went from 1,000 mail clients to 2,000 mail clients, which would require them to scale the mail server to support it. If I had to guess, the iPads turned out to be much more popular than expected, greating demand that they were unprepared for.
The point of unions isn't that they render everyone angels, it's that it creates an organization that can negotiate in favor of worker's interests to balance the organization that already exists to support management's interests. So an IT workers' union could impose checkpoints in a process such that the workers could make sure that adaquate resources, training, tools, etc., were provided to allow the workers to be successful without working insane hours compensating for poor planning or resourcing. Yes, a good management team ought to be thinking of such things, but the software industry's track record is poor enough (only 10% of IT projects deliver what's required on time and budget) that giving the IT workers more leverage doesn't seem like a bad idea.
"Unions work best for the health and safety of their workers. Anything beyond that is mob rule."
Add in "and are properly equipped and trained and resourced to do their job successfully". For example, air traffic control unions negotiated limits on how many hours controllers could be forced to work, and when they unions were broken and controllers were forced to work so many hours, with no breaks for even going to the bathroom or eating meals, endangering passenger's lives. And when teachers' unions negotiate limits on the numbers of students in classes, so teachers can actually teach students effectively.
Or do you think that the MBA who runs a company knows how best to do people's jobs, not the people who actually do the jobs?
Apple's somewhat painted themseves into a corner on this. That is, they decided that they wanted to give users the ability to run native apps, but (unlike Palm or WinCE at the time) with a consistent, predictable app experience (no crashing, memory leaks, terrible UIs, porn, writing/reading all over the filesystem, spamming users, etc.). That means that they need to review all apps to filter out the crap. But then that means that all software has to go through that process, so you have to prohibit the ability to bypass the app store approval process. Which means that you can't let people program directly on iPhones/iPads, or to distribute software through downloads that bypass the app store approval process.
The only way out of this is to use the web browser, which can download and run software, but the user is protected because it's all JavaScript running inside the browser's "sand box", limiting the damage that badly behaved software can do.
There are some descendants of HyperCard for Mac OS X (and Windows), such as http://runrev.com/. Functionally they're amazing. But they aren't positioned as tools for novices because they have to convince people to find and buy them (or at least download them, for the free ones). And while HyperCard was great because it was easy, it was also important that it was automatically provided to everyone for free, so novice users could easily find and use it, and even the barrier of having to find and buy a fairly cheap dev tool is enough to scare off novices. For example, runrev's LiveCode is great, but it's between $99 and $1,500 depending on what platforms you want to deploy on. The beauty of HyperCard was that it was easy to use, which includes not having to find or pay for it.
The only way for HyperCard to succeed in its goal of enabling non-technical people to build apps is as a free part of the OS - once it became a paid add-on, it was doomed, because novices would never know about it, much less be willing to pay for it. And professional developers donj't want novice-friendly tools, they want power tools like IB.
While an open souce Hyper-card like platform is very cool, that's not enough to replace the gap that hypercard filled. There are several commercial and open source tools that are "friendly like hypercard", but the other thing that HyperCard had going for it was that it was given to everyone (who bought a Mac) so it was easily available to novice computer users. While it seems easy, even the barrier of having to find out that a tool exists, and installing it, is considerable for a novice, while a pre-installed instance of HyperCard was simply there for everyone to use.
Wouldn't it be cool if some computer manufacturer could take pythoncard, or one of the others, and bundle it pre-installed as a "feature" that their PCs?
"How exactly is this consistent with a $99 per year tax to run software that you compiled on a device that you own?"
All consumer electronics platforms have restrictions around the ability to "run software that you compiled on a device that you own". Mac dev tools are free and anyone can write any app. iOS dev tools are free, but it costs $99 to be allowed to submit apps to the App Store. MSDN memberships (to get the Windows dev tools, etc.) costs $2,500 per developer. Videogame consoles, Kindle, RIM, etc., cost vastly more, and are only available to companies that are approved for access by the platform's owner. And plenty of other platforms (GPS, etc.) are completely closed, so that only the platform owner can write apps. And most platforms (Xbox, PS3, Wii, Kindle, etc.) have a much more restrictive app approval process than Apple's. Pretty much only desktop OS's and android are more open than iOS, with the tradeoff that those platforms are much less stable/predictable than iOS, and arguably for a phone consumers want a more reliable, predictable environment.
So yes, iOS isn't quite as open as Linux, so in an absolute sense the fact that there are some charges and restrictions mean that it's not "open", and you can call any fees a "tax" rehetorically if not literally, but relative to almost all other platforms it's extremely cheap and easy to be an iOS developer. If you want to complain about a "platform tax" you should look at the videogame consoles and most mobile platforms, which all have terms that are brutal to developers. Compared to that, $99 and a trivial approval process is nothing to complain about.
Slashdot Mirror
"Really, those are your thoughts on this? How have RIAA and MPAA managed to go after users so far? By sharing pixie dust? Unicorn meat?"
The parent post (Arancaytar) explained things pretty clearly.
Since you don't appear to understand anything about the BitTorrent protocol, I'll try to explain.
Clients start by getting a .torrent file or magnet link, which contains a tracker URL and the hash of a torrent (unique ID, computed from the contents). They join a swarm by connecting to a tracker and sending the hash of a torrent. The tracker responds with the IP addresses of the peers, which you then connect to, and exchange data with. As a part of the exchange, peers tell each other exactly which pieces of the torrent they have, so that they can decide which data to exchange.
What this basically means is that when you're in a BitTorrent swarm you have to expose your public IP address, and broadcast exactly your status (i.e. documenting exactly what you're downloading, and offering to upload). And you give out whatever another peer asks for.
From a legal perspective, this gives a media company (or their agent) everything that they need to prove that you're illegally downloading their content. That is:
- They can download the torrent, and prove that it's their copyrighted material.
- They can join the tracker and get the IP address of all of the peers in the swarm.
- They can download data from all of the peers, proving that the peers are serving the data.
- They can negotiate with the peers, and document that they're downloading the data.
- They can look up the ISPs for each of the IP addresses.
- They can go to those ISPs and (by filing a lawsuit) get the customer names and addresses associated with each of the IP addresses.
The math is quite solid. About the only "defense" is that someone else was using your IP address, that some evil software used your computer without your knowledge, or that the ISP reported the wrong customer for the IP address.
The other protocols mentioned (magnet links, DHT, and PEX) are basically accellerators that don't change the fundamentals, so they don't change the fact that BitTorrent was invented to efficiently deliver large files, not hide what you're doing.
Magnet links might help trackers claim that they don't know what they're tracking, since they're just torrent hashes without the file names, etc., but given that all of the tracker sites list all of that info on their web sites, so that people know what they're downloading, that doesn't strike me as a very good defense. But IANAL.
It's still BitTorrent, but using the info encoded in an URL instead of a .torrent file. So yes, it's pretty much copying the eMule magnet link idea, but using the BitTorrent protocol. I bet eMule doesn't sue over it. :-)
Right, but the link URL of a magnet link is basically just a hash, so you can't tell what you're going to download until you start downloading, and then only if you switch to the BitTorrent client and check to see what you're downloading.
They don't operate by making the case waterproof. The showed a demo (I saw it live) and the iPhone 4 was full of water while operating. They're coating everything inside the iPhone, making the microphone, speakers, components, etc., waterproof. Keep in mind that the iPhone's battery is permanently installed, so if the insulate the battery and al of the wires, it should be fine even if covered in water. They did say that you needed to let the phone dry off before charging it again, as the contacts in the charging cable would short.
"who needs a solution that creates more problems?"
What are you talking about? The article describes a process that is applied to electronics to make it waterproof. I saw it demoed, and it appears to work - an iPhone that was not only completely submerged but full of water remained powered on and received a phone call. Which, at CES, was impressive - plenty of cell phones that weren't under water failed to receive phone calls there. :-) Seriously, though, once the device is treated, it feels and acts exactly like it did before treatment. So WTF are you talking about? Do you have some deep understanding of their treatment process and some hidden problems that we don't know about? Do share...
A major reason why all movies cost the same price (at a given theater) is that the theater owners don't want you think think about the price of the ticket, which you would have to do if you got to pick different movies at different prices. Instead, they want you to go to the theatre and pay the price for going to the movies. Yes, they''ll charge extra for 3D, popcorn and drinks. But it's all on top of a fixed ticket price, which you pay because you have no choice, so you don't even think about it. This isn't all bad - the same logic that keeps them from dropping ticket pricess for unpopular movies also prevents them from raising prices on popular movies.
If the movies were different prices, how would it work?
If the most popular movies were cheaper, based on "economies of scale", that would break the movie businesses. Keep in mind that the large majority of movies lose money, so they make a profit based on a small percentage of hits. If they dropped the ticket prices for the big hits, that would eliiminate most of the money that paid for all of the other movies. And, of course, dropping the price of your most popular product doesn't seem like a way to optimize revenue.
You could argue the reverse, that that prices should be higher for the most popular movies, and lower for the unpopular ones. That at least makes sense in that people would be willing to pay more for things that are more popular. Lucikly for us, the movie guys have figured out that raising prices on "hit" movies would irritate viewers more than the potential revenue.
Instead, the way the movie business works, they price the same movie at different prices through different channels over time. First it hits the first run theatres that charge the highest prices. Later it hits second run theatres, who charge less for tickets to people that don't mind waiting (and going to less nice theatres). Then pay-per-view TV, then DVD sales, and TV broadcast. The "hit" movies make more money in theatres, because even though ticket prices are fixed, more people go to see the movie. Later, all of the deals are negotiated - if a network wants to broadcast Avatar in 3D, they'll pay a lot more than broadcasting Plan 9 From Outer Space. And for the "not-hit" movies, they show in fewer theatres, and hope to make a little on PPV, etc.
Impressive!
You're right - I was speaking about professionally constructed testing, which is all field tested, etc. Without that, you're certainly right that you can't be confident that you're measuring what you think you are. For instructor constructed tests, they usually try to do something along the lines of what I described, for the same reasons, but without the rigor.
You're correct, "Reading comprehension fail".
The school board member was saying that the 4th and 8th grade tests were fine, but that the 10th grade test was too hard, as evidenced by many students who did fine on the 4th and 8th grade tests then failing the 10th grade test. The school board member then took the hard 10th grade test and failed it, which he presented as evidence that the 10th grade test was too hard.
The newspaper then printed examples from the 4th and 8th grade test, which were, as the board member said, appropriate to 4th and 8th graders.
The mistake you're making is not noticing that the questions were not from the 10th grade test, which is the one that the board member said was too hard. By missing that, you're thinking that the board member failed a test of easy math questions, which would have been embarassing if it had happened.
The fact that almost everyong posting on Slashdot missed the key facts due to the lazy/misleading writing puts the blame squarely on the writer. But I blame the journalist more than the readers - either the writer didn't realize that providing irrelevant "example questions" undermined the entire point of the story, or the writer was intentionally trying to ignore the facts and instead make the administrator look like an idiot.
Read the article more carefully. The test that the school board member said was too hard was the 10th grade test. The questions in the article were from the 4th grade test. Not only that, but the school board member said that they reason that he thought that the 10th grade test was too hard was that the kids were doing well on the 4th grade and 8th grade tests, then were failing the 10th grade test.
It was misleading of the newspaper to present the easy, 4th grade questions as if they were the questions that the school board member thought were too hard. It's disappointing that the writer (apparently) provided absurdly easy "example" questions, to make the school board member look like an idiot. Or perhaps the writer was just too dumb to realize that printing the wrong questions mattered.
It's also a bit disappointing how many slashdot readers didn't catch the newspaper's error.
Compound question such as the "axis" question are actually pretty hard because it requires people to remember quite a few concepts that are rarely useful once out of school. Which axis is X and which is Y? What is mirroring around an axis? What do positive and negative coordinates mean? What does (3,7) mean? Which of 3 and 7 in (3, 7) X and which is Y? And so on. Of course, if you know all of that, then the answer is fairly obvious - visualize an X/Y coordinate space, plot the point, mirror it around an axis, and there you are. Or remember that mirroring around an axis chances the sign of one of the numbers but not both.
Given that the administrator took the 10th grade test, I wish that they'd provided examples from the 10th grade test, instead of the 4th and 8th grade tests. Unless you read carefully you'd think that the administrator was an idiot. But if you read about this issue, you'll find that the administrator was actually saying that he thought that the 10th grade test was too hard, because the kids did well on the earlier grade tests (i.e. those test were fine) but were failing the 10th grade test (i.e. that specific test was too hard). So the point of the story should be that the 10th grade test in particular is too hard, not that the administrator was an idiot. The newspaper printed examples from the lower grade tests, which were properly calibrated for younger kids, is misleading, because the reader is given the impression that the administrator got easy math questions wrong, and was an idiot. So either the writer was too stupid to realize that he was misreprenting the facts, or he was intentionally changing the story to suit an agenda. Neither is impressive.
"That's why making multiple choice tests (and grading them) is so frigging difficult to do very well. To do it completely perfectly you need to be able to predict all possible incorrect interpretations and be sure that none of your "wrong" answers are "right" in a way that you would want to give points for."
Tests are better planned than you think. When you construct a (good) test, all of the answers are put there BECAUSE they tell you something specific about the person taking the test. That's why on four answer questions you'll usually see that one answer is right, one answer is absolutely wrong (i.e. the test taker was guessing wildly) and the other two are the answers that the test taker would arrive at if they didn't understand something.
This can be done for two reasons.
First, it allows test takers who understand the subject well enough to eliminate some of the answers a better chance of getting the right answer, which (indirectly) gives students partial credit for partial knowledge.
Second, test can be scored with different values for different 'wrong' answers. For example, 'right' might be worth 5 points, 'wrong' might be worth 0 points, and the 'close' answers might be worth 2 points, explicitly giving students partial credit for partial knowledge.
And if the testing system is really smart, it can analyze the right and wrong answers and give better guidance to the instructor so that they know to provide specific guidance to the student. For example, if someone repeatly subtracts instead dividing, perhaps they're confused about what the division symbol means, so they can get help with that specifically. Or, as someone else in the discussion pointed out, if they read the division symbol as "+" then perhaps they need glasses. Most scoring systems don't do this, but some do. :-)
"If the 2000 accounts existed and different devices are now connecting to them then there is something fundamentally wrong with the software."
Keep in mind that the 2,000 new mobile devices are being used IN ADDITION TO however those people read email. If they stopped using their desktops and just used iPads, the load on the system would be unchanged. Adding 2,000 new clients to any mail system will consume the system's capacity, and if the system doesn't have that capacity it'll be in trouble. There's no magic capacity fairy.
Solyndra's investors weren't particularly Obama donors - the Waltons (i.e. Walmart) were major investors, and they're hardly Obama fans. Keep in mind also that Solyndra was started and was fast-tracked for funding under a DOE program started under Bush, and Obama's [ep[;e actually slowed things down, did more due diligence, and put more protections in place around the loans that ended up saving us money by pulling the plug on the company. Despite Issa's partisan spinning, this isn't something to blame Obama on - any time the government sets up a fund to promote businesses, some of those businesses will succeed and some will fail, and Solyndra failed because China radically dropped the price of solar cells, wiping out Solyndra's market. The real problem isn't that the US government set up a fund to encourage solar development, it's that the US started years later than China, and with a much lower level of investment, so China is beating us. The answer isn't to give up, it's to compete harder.
The Aptera looks like it does for a reason - its primary goal is efficiency, which is how they got over 200 MPG.
But to do that, they had to not waste energy pushing the car through the air. So they made it aerodynamic, so it looks like an airplane rather than the traditional "box on wheels." And their initial target was a two seater, which is most efficient (because most driving is 1-2 people, and with a two seater you're pushing around less mass).
A year ago (apparently) marketplace realities kicked in. That is, while sedans are less efficient, people prefer buying them because it's useful to be able to carry more people when you need to. So the marketplace for sedans is much larger than two seaters, making it a much smarter business to be in. But since they didn't get their funding, we'll never know how that would have played out.
Though I would love to see what a truly efficient sedan might look like.
"Imagine what they could have done with the $700k they would have saved by choosing a tablet other than an iPad."
The iPad is under $500, so it costs the same or less than any other decent tablet. Are you saying that there's a tablet that costs $150 that's comparable to the iPad? That is pretty hard to imagine. Don't forget to include the management costs - iPads are extremely easy for an enterprise to manage, because they integrate nicely into Exchange (e.g. you can define mail policies on your Exchange server, and iPads do what they're told - encrypt, require password lock, etc.). Android doesn't do this properly yet. That leaves the RIM Playbook, which aside from sucking has the same list price as the iPad. I guess you could save some money buying discontinued products that are being dumped, but that's not a great enterprise hardware strategy. :-)
If you want to complain about the project, complain that they didn't plan for adding one more ActiveSynch server so they had capacity to support their users. Given educational pricing, the software is nearly free, and even an overpriced server would have been a trivial percentage of the project budget.
They don't need 5-10 servers.
Keep in mind that they're not talking about adding 2,000 mailboxes, just adding 2,000 devices to access existing mailboxes. So they don't need more storage, just more server compute capacity. If I had to guess, it might be as simple as them running ActiveSynch on a single, under-resourced server (or VM) as a POC, and they didn't expect (or prepare for) the increased demand of 2,000 more tablets. Should be easy to fix. Though inevitably they're trying to do a dozen other things, and it'll take three months to do the paperwork to get the approval to buy a new server and get it deployed. Remember,
If I had to guess, the issue isn't the specific protocol, it's that the number of mail clients doubled. That is, if they have 1,000 employees, each reading mail from a desktop computer, and each employee gets an iPad that they use in addition, they went from 1,000 mail clients to 2,000 mail clients, which would require them to scale the mail server to support it. If I had to guess, the iPads turned out to be much more popular than expected, greating demand that they were unprepared for.
The point of unions isn't that they render everyone angels, it's that it creates an organization that can negotiate in favor of worker's interests to balance the organization that already exists to support management's interests. So an IT workers' union could impose checkpoints in a process such that the workers could make sure that adaquate resources, training, tools, etc., were provided to allow the workers to be successful without working insane hours compensating for poor planning or resourcing. Yes, a good management team ought to be thinking of such things, but the software industry's track record is poor enough (only 10% of IT projects deliver what's required on time and budget) that giving the IT workers more leverage doesn't seem like a bad idea.
"Unions work best for the health and safety of their workers. Anything beyond that is mob rule."
Add in "and are properly equipped and trained and resourced to do their job successfully". For example, air traffic control unions negotiated limits on how many hours controllers could be forced to work, and when they unions were broken and controllers were forced to work so many hours, with no breaks for even going to the bathroom or eating meals, endangering passenger's lives. And when teachers' unions negotiate limits on the numbers of students in classes, so teachers can actually teach students effectively.
Or do you think that the MBA who runs a company knows how best to do people's jobs, not the people who actually do the jobs?
Given that the tablets appear to be so popular that they're swamping the mail server, they're demonstrably not "tablets no one uses",
Nice .sig though.
Exactly. If I had mod points, I'd mod you up.
Apple's somewhat painted themseves into a corner on this. That is, they decided that they wanted to give users the ability to run native apps, but (unlike Palm or WinCE at the time) with a consistent, predictable app experience (no crashing, memory leaks, terrible UIs, porn, writing/reading all over the filesystem, spamming users, etc.). That means that they need to review all apps to filter out the crap. But then that means that all software has to go through that process, so you have to prohibit the ability to bypass the app store approval process. Which means that you can't let people program directly on iPhones/iPads, or to distribute software through downloads that bypass the app store approval process.
The only way out of this is to use the web browser, which can download and run software, but the user is protected because it's all JavaScript running inside the browser's "sand box", limiting the damage that badly behaved software can do.
There are some descendants of HyperCard for Mac OS X (and Windows), such as http://runrev.com/. Functionally they're amazing. But they aren't positioned as tools for novices because they have to convince people to find and buy them (or at least download them, for the free ones). And while HyperCard was great because it was easy, it was also important that it was automatically provided to everyone for free, so novice users could easily find and use it, and even the barrier of having to find and buy a fairly cheap dev tool is enough to scare off novices. For example, runrev's LiveCode is great, but it's between $99 and $1,500 depending on what platforms you want to deploy on. The beauty of HyperCard was that it was easy to use, which includes not having to find or pay for it.
The only way for HyperCard to succeed in its goal of enabling non-technical people to build apps is as a free part of the OS - once it became a paid add-on, it was doomed, because novices would never know about it, much less be willing to pay for it. And professional developers donj't want novice-friendly tools, they want power tools like IB.
Thanks for posting this.
While an open souce Hyper-card like platform is very cool, that's not enough to replace the gap that hypercard filled. There are several commercial and open source tools that are "friendly like hypercard", but the other thing that HyperCard had going for it was that it was given to everyone (who bought a Mac) so it was easily available to novice computer users. While it seems easy, even the barrier of having to find out that a tool exists, and installing it, is considerable for a novice, while a pre-installed instance of HyperCard was simply there for everyone to use.
Wouldn't it be cool if some computer manufacturer could take pythoncard, or one of the others, and bundle it pre-installed as a "feature" that their PCs?
"How exactly is this consistent with a $99 per year tax to run software that you compiled on a device that you own?"
All consumer electronics platforms have restrictions around the ability to "run software that you compiled on a device that you own". Mac dev tools are free and anyone can write any app. iOS dev tools are free, but it costs $99 to be allowed to submit apps to the App Store. MSDN memberships (to get the Windows dev tools, etc.) costs $2,500 per developer. Videogame consoles, Kindle, RIM, etc., cost vastly more, and are only available to companies that are approved for access by the platform's owner. And plenty of other platforms (GPS, etc.) are completely closed, so that only the platform owner can write apps. And most platforms (Xbox, PS3, Wii, Kindle, etc.) have a much more restrictive app approval process than Apple's. Pretty much only desktop OS's and android are more open than iOS, with the tradeoff that those platforms are much less stable/predictable than iOS, and arguably for a phone consumers want a more reliable, predictable environment.
So yes, iOS isn't quite as open as Linux, so in an absolute sense the fact that there are some charges and restrictions mean that it's not "open", and you can call any fees a "tax" rehetorically if not literally, but relative to almost all other platforms it's extremely cheap and easy to be an iOS developer. If you want to complain about a "platform tax" you should look at the videogame consoles and most mobile platforms, which all have terms that are brutal to developers. Compared to that, $99 and a trivial approval process is nothing to complain about.
Exactly! Thanks for posting this!