If it were concerned about giving consumers "more privacy" on a scale unprecedented in human history, in terms of reducing the amount of data stored about them, it could simply... wipe its hard drives and close its business.
When interviewing laypeople, it is your job to understand their meanings of the words, and you cannot assume that they understand your meaning.
English is not prescriptive, and jargon need not always follow meanings in general parlance. Even if neither of these things were true, assuming that everyone follows the rules would be missing the point entirely.
Ah, I never looked at M263 - I think it was the shittification of M261, a decent introduction to formal algorithm analysis (Big-Oh, proofs) which required nothing more than pen and paper. M261 was just the right course to prepare you to plough through MIT's Introduction to Algorithms textbook, being somewhat more than an "Introduction"!
A former director of the mathematics MSc programme (who is no longer director) once lost his shit in a huge rant about how much the OU has been fucked by the stooges managing it. This was about 8 years ago, maybe? And, like you say, all continued the same way.
Yes, while Ox+Cam aren't necessarily the best undergrad teaching colleges, if they avoid some British education innovation, you need to ask why. The OU itself, at least in the mathematics faculty, has quite a few staff who research(ed) or lecture(d) at Oxbridge.
Creating line of of business applications whose purpose is to automate previously manual processes is much faster when utilizing Java or.NET.
Do you mean server stuff, or..? Certainly where there is training, it's okay for in-house apps to not quite fit in.
Entire frameworks are already at your disposal without have to reinvent something as simple as sorting an array.
Because of course the only options with that are Java and NGWS, so you have to take the whole kaboodle. C++ in particular doesn't exist.
Suggesting that everyone just use Win32 because Windows Forms or WPF or Swing doesn't "look nice" with the rest of the OS windowing system is rather shortsighted. Things cost money to create. Time is expensive. Look and feel is not always the most important thing that those with money care about.
"Good enough is good enough." Except of course when huge changes occur because - as e.g. with Apple in the mobile development space - suddenly a company decides that tight integration and usability is more important than making things easier for platform and third party developers.
Apple certainly didn't invent mobile frameworks and development kits, so I'm not sure where you're going with this point.
No, ya monkey, but Apple was the first to create a highly usable interface out of their own mobile framework + SDK.
PCs are hardly dead and most of the decline can be attributed to the fact that people have no need to upgrade their PC every couple of years.
Nor their phones, yet they do.
You claim that people gave up on PCs and instead are developing web applications. Except...PCs can use web applications too! Web applications have a developer appeal because they can easily target a broad audience.
And yet web apps are not a good reason to get a PC.
And just as a tip, cussing doesn't help emphasize your point. It makes you look childish and uninformed.
Just as a tip, telling your peers not to swear makes you sound like an unimaginative, condescending twat. Grow up.
Would you mind clarifying for me what you would prefer?
Because I agree with you that Java on the desktop is horrible, but only in the sense that it doesn't properly integrate with the operating system - in that sense, web apps are even worse. DotNet/NGWS is better, but still a layer of pointlessness originally created for no other reason than MS didn't like Sun - if you're going to write platform-specific code, might as well use Win32 - then write your own cross-platform layers if needed so absolutely everything looks *native* and integrates beautifully on each target, something that every existing cross-platform library fails fucking hard at.
Once again, this is where Apple got it right: fuck web apps, because you want people to take advantage of your own platform. Hence the iOS SDK. And Android followed. This is why phones and tablets are succeeding while PCs are dying - because people are actually developing for the former, but they've given up on the latter in favour of "the web", where everything is third rate.
The kids of Slashdot who were once the innovators have become the lazy old leeches, so it's natural for them to admire the biggest online leech of all.
Of course, no "one man feat" is impressive when you have billions of dollars and dozens of top quality engineers to back up your effort. Pioneers are impressive precisely because they have none of that, and try as they might, these spoilt kids aren't going to enter the history books for anything more than "largest advertising platform on the planet, and a good variant of Apple's iPhone".
Hurrah for your friend! Yes, this is the historical OU way. Having something excellent but slightly outdated is always better than having a fashionable structure built on sand. I hope that attitude is brought into this project.
To reply to myself, the high quality of OU textbooks are also an important feature. This is why the courses - as is perfectly acceptable at undergraduate level, where you're not learning cutting edge research techniques - had slow update cycles, with some lasting for decades. The fundamentals of Number Theory or Non-Euclidean Geometry (the M203 section dropped in M208, IIRC) won't change, for example. Then it became fashionable to tweak the courses more frequently - the government paid by number of people merely turning up to the final exam (wtf?), so hard courses with high drop-out rates were made simpler, and people discouraged from doing harder courses unless it seemed (too) certain that they were ready. As part of this, rewrites (by often reluctant academics) occurred more often - and IMHO the quality of texts for many courses declined.
More annoyingly, however, qualifications became less challenging.
There are sooooooooooo many brilliant educators still there, as staff and associate lecturers. So, all is not lost. But please, for heaven's sake, stop "competing" for numbers, OU, and instead just offer highly challenging but well-written courses and let those who are smart and hard-working come to you.
The Open University had higher standards before it decided to compete on quantity, and instead just excelled quietly at offering distance learning courses using traditional materials (with alternative versions to fit accessibility needs), optional regular tutorials distributed around the country, residential schools for those who could attend them, summative coursework, and compulsory written examinations.
In the years leading up to the 2012 funding change, it was appointed a new CEO (sorry.. I mean Vice Chancellor) who used to be an executive at Microsoft "education", and since then it's turned more to the style of a business training provider. Which is really sad. I remember chatting with Harold Wilson's son (the PM established the uni - his son is now an excellent mathematics tutor) at a residential school at the beginning of this transformation, and he talked of his regret to witness the decline of accessibility .
Just throwing out extracts of course materials doesn't make for an education experience. It's about interaction, and challenging assessment.
This. I would never require people to invest more generously than in shallow entertainment, but the fact that we freely choose not to is enough to make me lose interest in humanity.
From the description of the study, it seems to me that people who have formed an opinion won't change it just because they see a single piece of potentially falsified or misleading evidence. For example (looking at one of the experiments), if someone has an opinion on joblessness in the US - which might bring in factors of job stability, hours worked or attainment of a living wage - seeing a single graph on number of employed people in recent years does not allow us to conclude that joblessness has been reduced under Obama, unless you have a very primitive interpretation of "joblessness".
The only damning conclusion is that some academics are so arrogant that they assume test subjects must be faulty if they don't immediately believe the academic's interpretation of some data presented to them.
Then I tip my hat to you. I am worth $2-3 million, plus the value of the house. I live more than comfortably off savings interest and investment income. When I made my biggest sale, "you" were earning around $12 million an hour. Congrats. I respect "you" for "your" work on malaria, too.
Hey, fred, you've wet your pants. "No, I haven't." Sure you have. Wet some more, little baby.
See how stupid your argument is?
Nah. I will only watch
Now, like the coward you are, you're stepping down from a bold "must be purged" to a limp "I will only watch". At least stand by what you said, you slimy little weasel.
while the very system you wish for collapses around you and crushes you,
What are you jabbering on about? What system do I wish for? Are you suggesting that I will achieve it? You're just pulling random soundbites out of a hat. Pull yourself together, boy.
and take pleasure from it.
A sadist, too. Mother must be proud.
My idea of freedom encompasses the freedom to fail miserably and pay the price for it as you certainly will. Good luck!
I'm in my mid-30s and earnt enough money during the first "dot com boom" to last me a lifetime. I now study (mathematics) - and while I certainly do look for grant money, because that's what society has allocated it for, I don't personally need it.
You know, you may be right. I guess it's remotely possible that I'll lose all rational sense and make some stupid investment decision involving absolutely ALL my money. But it's fairly unlikely. What I have, and what much less intelligent people like you lack, is an appreciation of what put me where I am - and a desire to give back to the system that lifted me up. I choose to be decent to those with a worse lot than myself, because I am capable of both logic and empathy.
In brief, I'm more materially successful than you will probably ever be, and unlike you, I'm not a sociopathic, sadistic, bed-wetting dullard who - looking through your Slashdot posting history - does little more all day than sing the praises of capitalism as if it were a religion. So much hatred and so little to show for it. I feel sorry for you.
My sensibilities aren't defiled - but I would support those who are hurt by your pointless cruelty.
As to the Internet, you speak like a true leech: ignoring the creators in favour of those who ride the coattails of greatness.
Good to see a capitalist talking (but in very cowardly terms) about killing me. That's your idea of freedom, after all. And yet, even though you hate me and want to see me "purged", I still love you.
Competition produces inefficiency, as efforts are duplicated and people work to destroy each other rather than cooperate to produce the best possible set of options.
Of course, 1 privately owned company should not have a monopoly on anything, whether it's called a corporation (as in the US) or a government (as in the USSR).
Slashdot Mirror
If it were concerned about giving consumers "more privacy" on a scale unprecedented in human history, in terms of reducing the amount of data stored about them, it could simply... wipe its hard drives and close its business.
When interviewing laypeople, it is your job to understand their meanings of the words, and you cannot assume that they understand your meaning.
English is not prescriptive, and jargon need not always follow meanings in general parlance. Even if neither of these things were true, assuming that everyone follows the rules would be missing the point entirely.
Format method of Win32_Volume WMI class.
Ugh, I'm using "college" like America. W/e.
Ah, I never looked at M263 - I think it was the shittification of M261, a decent introduction to formal algorithm analysis (Big-Oh, proofs) which required nothing more than pen and paper. M261 was just the right course to prepare you to plough through MIT's Introduction to Algorithms textbook, being somewhat more than an "Introduction"!
A former director of the mathematics MSc programme (who is no longer director) once lost his shit in a huge rant about how much the OU has been fucked by the stooges managing it. This was about 8 years ago, maybe? And, like you say, all continued the same way.
Yes, while Ox+Cam aren't necessarily the best undergrad teaching colleges, if they avoid some British education innovation, you need to ask why. The OU itself, at least in the mathematics faculty, has quite a few staff who research(ed) or lecture(d) at Oxbridge.
What driver interfacing can I do with NGWS that I can't do with native user-mode code, please? And when would I actually want to do it?
Creating line of of business applications whose purpose is to automate previously manual processes is much faster when utilizing Java or .NET.
Do you mean server stuff, or..? Certainly where there is training, it's okay for in-house apps to not quite fit in.
Entire frameworks are already at your disposal without have to reinvent something as simple as sorting an array.
Because of course the only options with that are Java and NGWS, so you have to take the whole kaboodle. C++ in particular doesn't exist.
Suggesting that everyone just use Win32 because Windows Forms or WPF or Swing doesn't "look nice" with the rest of the OS windowing system is rather shortsighted. Things cost money to create. Time is expensive. Look and feel is not always the most important thing that those with money care about.
"Good enough is good enough." Except of course when huge changes occur because - as e.g. with Apple in the mobile development space - suddenly a company decides that tight integration and usability is more important than making things easier for platform and third party developers.
Apple certainly didn't invent mobile frameworks and development kits, so I'm not sure where you're going with this point.
No, ya monkey, but Apple was the first to create a highly usable interface out of their own mobile framework + SDK.
PCs are hardly dead and most of the decline can be attributed to the fact that people have no need to upgrade their PC every couple of years.
Nor their phones, yet they do.
You claim that people gave up on PCs and instead are developing web applications. Except...PCs can use web applications too! Web applications have a developer appeal because they can easily target a broad audience.
And yet web apps are not a good reason to get a PC.
And just as a tip, cussing doesn't help emphasize your point. It makes you look childish and uninformed.
Just as a tip, telling your peers not to swear makes you sound like an unimaginative, condescending twat. Grow up.
From a developer viewpoint, NGWS is API layer atop Win32.
The platform agnosticity is just a legacy of the spat with Sun: it's really just for Windows on x86.
Stop it! you'll give the climate change denialists ideas.
"It's not a tragedy - it's a MARKET OPPORTUNITY for radiation shields!"
>it's
Land-lubber.
Would you mind clarifying for me what you would prefer?
Because I agree with you that Java on the desktop is horrible, but only in the sense that it doesn't properly integrate with the operating system - in that sense, web apps are even worse. DotNet/NGWS is better, but still a layer of pointlessness originally created for no other reason than MS didn't like Sun - if you're going to write platform-specific code, might as well use Win32 - then write your own cross-platform layers if needed so absolutely everything looks *native* and integrates beautifully on each target, something that every existing cross-platform library fails fucking hard at.
Once again, this is where Apple got it right: fuck web apps, because you want people to take advantage of your own platform. Hence the iOS SDK. And Android followed. This is why phones and tablets are succeeding while PCs are dying - because people are actually developing for the former, but they've given up on the latter in favour of "the web", where everything is third rate.
What if you're wearing a condom but your one night stand has a knife? Did you even think that through?
The kids of Slashdot who were once the innovators have become the lazy old leeches, so it's natural for them to admire the biggest online leech of all.
Of course, no "one man feat" is impressive when you have billions of dollars and dozens of top quality engineers to back up your effort. Pioneers are impressive precisely because they have none of that, and try as they might, these spoilt kids aren't going to enter the history books for anything more than "largest advertising platform on the planet, and a good variant of Apple's iPhone".
But 3 is just what the OU has been - offering accredited BSc/BA all the way up to PhD, on usually part time and distance learning bases.
Hurrah for your friend! Yes, this is the historical OU way. Having something excellent but slightly outdated is always better than having a fashionable structure built on sand. I hope that attitude is brought into this project.
To reply to myself, the high quality of OU textbooks are also an important feature. This is why the courses - as is perfectly acceptable at undergraduate level, where you're not learning cutting edge research techniques - had slow update cycles, with some lasting for decades. The fundamentals of Number Theory or Non-Euclidean Geometry (the M203 section dropped in M208, IIRC) won't change, for example. Then it became fashionable to tweak the courses more frequently - the government paid by number of people merely turning up to the final exam (wtf?), so hard courses with high drop-out rates were made simpler, and people discouraged from doing harder courses unless it seemed (too) certain that they were ready. As part of this, rewrites (by often reluctant academics) occurred more often - and IMHO the quality of texts for many courses declined.
More annoyingly, however, qualifications became less challenging.
There are sooooooooooo many brilliant educators still there, as staff and associate lecturers. So, all is not lost. But please, for heaven's sake, stop "competing" for numbers, OU, and instead just offer highly challenging but well-written courses and let those who are smart and hard-working come to you.
It certainly makes for better headlines than, "Extraordinary results explained by bad methodology."
The Open University had higher standards before it decided to compete on quantity, and instead just excelled quietly at offering distance learning courses using traditional materials (with alternative versions to fit accessibility needs), optional regular tutorials distributed around the country, residential schools for those who could attend them, summative coursework, and compulsory written examinations.
In the years leading up to the 2012 funding change, it was appointed a new CEO (sorry.. I mean Vice Chancellor) who used to be an executive at Microsoft "education", and since then it's turned more to the style of a business training provider. Which is really sad. I remember chatting with Harold Wilson's son (the PM established the uni - his son is now an excellent mathematics tutor) at a residential school at the beginning of this transformation, and he talked of his regret to witness the decline of accessibility .
Just throwing out extracts of course materials doesn't make for an education experience. It's about interaction, and challenging assessment.
This. I would never require people to invest more generously than in shallow entertainment, but the fact that we freely choose not to is enough to make me lose interest in humanity.
From the description of the study, it seems to me that people who have formed an opinion won't change it just because they see a single piece of potentially falsified or misleading evidence. For example (looking at one of the experiments), if someone has an opinion on joblessness in the US - which might bring in factors of job stability, hours worked or attainment of a living wage - seeing a single graph on number of employed people in recent years does not allow us to conclude that joblessness has been reduced under Obama, unless you have a very primitive interpretation of "joblessness".
The only damning conclusion is that some academics are so arrogant that they assume test subjects must be faulty if they don't immediately believe the academic's interpretation of some data presented to them.
Then I tip my hat to you. I am worth $2-3 million, plus the value of the house. I live more than comfortably off savings interest and investment income. When I made my biggest sale, "you" were earning around $12 million an hour. Congrats. I respect "you" for "your" work on malaria, too.
Sure they are. Cry some more, little leech.
Could you build any more straw men?
Hey, fred, you've wet your pants. "No, I haven't." Sure you have. Wet some more, little baby.
See how stupid your argument is?
Nah. I will only watch
Now, like the coward you are, you're stepping down from a bold "must be purged" to a limp "I will only watch". At least stand by what you said, you slimy little weasel.
while the very system you wish for collapses around you and crushes you,
What are you jabbering on about? What system do I wish for? Are you suggesting that I will achieve it? You're just pulling random soundbites out of a hat. Pull yourself together, boy.
and take pleasure from it.
A sadist, too. Mother must be proud.
My idea of freedom encompasses the freedom to fail miserably and pay the price for it as you certainly will. Good luck!
I'm in my mid-30s and earnt enough money during the first "dot com boom" to last me a lifetime. I now study (mathematics) - and while I certainly do look for grant money, because that's what society has allocated it for, I don't personally need it.
You know, you may be right. I guess it's remotely possible that I'll lose all rational sense and make some stupid investment decision involving absolutely ALL my money. But it's fairly unlikely. What I have, and what much less intelligent people like you lack, is an appreciation of what put me where I am - and a desire to give back to the system that lifted me up. I choose to be decent to those with a worse lot than myself, because I am capable of both logic and empathy.
In brief, I'm more materially successful than you will probably ever be, and unlike you, I'm not a sociopathic, sadistic, bed-wetting dullard who - looking through your Slashdot posting history - does little more all day than sing the praises of capitalism as if it were a religion. So much hatred and so little to show for it. I feel sorry for you.
My sensibilities aren't defiled - but I would support those who are hurt by your pointless cruelty.
As to the Internet, you speak like a true leech: ignoring the creators in favour of those who ride the coattails of greatness.
Good to see a capitalist talking (but in very cowardly terms) about killing me. That's your idea of freedom, after all. And yet, even though you hate me and want to see me "purged", I still love you.
History is the propaganda of the salesman.
Competition produces inefficiency, as efforts are duplicated and people work to destroy each other rather than cooperate to produce the best possible set of options.
Of course, 1 privately owned company should not have a monopoly on anything, whether it's called a corporation (as in the US) or a government (as in the USSR).