Despite it's outdated UI, I was a fan of Windows Mobile 6.x because of its openness and the resulting flexibility. In locking down WP7 so much, Windows Phone is essentially a "Microsoft iPhone". If I wanted an iPhone, I would just buy an iPhone.
Redesigning the UI to be touch friendly, while keeping the openness of Windows mobile 6.x would have kept me interested.
Android sucks in its own special ways, but at least I have the flexibility to mold it into the tool that I want.
The problem teachers and school have with NCLB is that it pits them against the problem of child poverty which has the greatest affect on test scores, but which they have absolutely no control over.
It's also had some nasty side effects which, in my opinion, are terrible for children regardless of test scores. At my child's school, where the child poverty rate is at least 50%, half the funding for field trips was cut this year in an effort to climb out of dreaded "PI" status and a long tradition of sending all second graders on a trip to the Monterrey Bay Aquarium was nixed in order to focus more resources on test score improvment. My oldest son happened to be in second grade this year and had been looking forward to the trip since last year when all of his second grade friends told him how awesome it was.
In the school's effort to climb out of PI purgatory, I have observed what can only be described as a hysteria leading up to and during the week long testing period. The school would drill it into the kids' head in the months leading up to the testing week on how incredibly important it was for them to try as hard as they could on the tests. My kids actually came home reciting stupid chants about testing. It was as if they had been indoctrinated at a cuban "reeducation" camp. On the weekend before and during every day of testing week, we would get robocalls everyday from the school reminding us to send our kids to bed early and to feed them a healthy breakfast before sending them to school.
The fact that test scores have gone up doesn't necessarily mean that our children have become better educated. If you think test scores equate to competence, I've got an MCSE to sell you.
I'm not totally against the concept of NCLB, or accountability, or even standardized testing, but until the issue of child poverty is dealt with I don't think these policies will ever serve to significantly raise our ranking in the world.
It's been five or so years since I last bought a desktop PC, so my experience is a little out of date, but just to give another example of NVidia's history of support for non-Windows OS's, on my last desktop computer I played the Linux version of America's Army on FreeBSD*...and I got better frame rates** than I did playing the Windows version in Windows!
*Yes, Nvidia even supported FreeBSD way back then; after a quick check I see that they still do.
**Probably related to differences in the port and not the drivers or OSs, but still impressive.
Yeah one of my children is one of those "problem children" that some educators want to cast away into K-12 leper colonies. He also scores off the charts in all of the standardized tests.
The school in our district wanted to put him into the classes with DD (and when I say DD, I mean the "short bus" kids, not the ADHD ones) children. We were appalled.
Because the school was identified for PI under NCLB, we were able to transfer him to a neighboring school eight miles away.
Magically, the problems with his behavior virtually disappeared at the new school. I attribute to the leadership. The leadership at the school in our local district honestly didn't seem to give a shit when our son was there, while the people at the neighboring district are engaged and really seem to care.
I'm not an expert at pedagogy, but there has to a better way of dealing with kids like mine who don't quite conform to behavioral norms than to toss them in a pen together.
My concern over both charter and voucher systems are pretty much the same; That they will inevitably result in society segregating themselves class and in some areas of the country, racial lines.
With both systems, children whose parents lack the financial resources needed to transport their children to schools that are many miles outside of their district will inevitably be left behind. You will end up with a system where the charter a private schools get the students whose parents have the most resources and motivation and the public schools are left with...the leftovers.
This in, in my opinion, a system which is designed to destroy the public school systems as we know it.
The biggest problem with our schools systems is child poverty. Charter school systems and voucher programs do not address this issue at all.
I happen to live in one the poorest congressional districts (a quick check shows #6) in the nation and have four kids two of which are in school. We have a local charter middle school and I have observed the exact phenomenon I described above. Kids that are enrolled in the charter middle school are almost exclusively from middle to upper middle class households.
Ironically, we will almost certainly be enrolling our kids into the charter school when they reach that age. Even though we don't think it's the best option for society as a whole, my wife and I have agreed that it's the best option for our kids at this time.
I would guess if you let parents choose the schools, maybe use a voucher system or something, then it would start to improve. Schools that showed good outcomes would become more popular, and schools that showed worse outcomes would cease to exist.
What you are describing already exists. Read up on charter schools. They have not turned out to be a panacea.
...I would guess that the answer is poverty. My wife and I went to see Cornell West speak several months ago and one of the things he pointed out about our educational system is that if you take out the test scores of children who are living in poverty, the U.S. ranks at or near number one in the world in education.
Currently the U.S. has the second worst child poverty rate of the 23 countries listed here, and higher education rankings general correlate with lower child poverty rates.
Maybe. The police are generally, average people - i.e. idiots to the average Slashdot reader. Even some of their computer forensics people are at the bottom of the barrel intellectually.
Yep. We are 100% virtualized on the server side, and thus are forced to plug our Solidworks dongle into and run the license server on one of the workstations.
We've run into other situations where vendors wanted us to use dongles, but most have move to software based solutions in the last few years.
Re:Disgraced Republican Candidate for Governor
on
HP To Cut 30,000 Jobs
·
· Score: 1
These groups' reports universally leave out the economic contributions of low skilled immigrants, like the billions in payroll and other taxes that they pay every year and the value of the labor that they perform.
Prior to Reconstruction there was no middle class. After 1913, there was a middle class. Your attempt at obfuscation has failed.
Okay great. So what defined a middle class in that era? How large was this middle class? How was wealth dispersed during this era? I don't care about raw efficiency. Efficient markets are brutal and result in needless human suffering.
Libertarians get so caught up with efficiency that they end up losing their humanity.
The US maintained a libertarian economic policy from the end of Reconstruction through 1913. A time period that coincided with the greatest period of economic growth ever seen in history, creating the first universal middle class in history.
"Universal middle class"? Where the hell did you get that tripe from? The Gilded Age was an age marked by robber barons who hoarded wealth at a rate that is almost incomprehensible today. Do you have any wealth or income statistics from that age (they conveniently start at the end of the era you covet) that would back up your assertion?
As Americans, we've had a good run. We were early into the Industrial Revolution, and blessed with abundant natural resources relative to our population. We had an optimisim and risk tollerance that was derived from our immigrant origin. This lead to both a capital and skills gap compared to the rest of the world, which gave us a phenomical standard of living. But today capital moves fluidly to where it is the most effective, and the skills gap is easier to narrow than it once was. This will continue into the future. It's a tough medicine to swallow, but it's true.
Yes, the world is catching up as more of it industrializes, but if you actually look a history of the total wealth of the United States, you will see that it has continued to rise steadily, despite this supposed flow of capital to other places you describe. The only change in the last 30 years has been the distribution of wealth.
Re:Disgraced Republican Candidate for Governor
on
HP To Cut 30,000 Jobs
·
· Score: 1
I asked you not to cite articles by overtly racist groups and you post an article which sources the FAIR, an organization classified as a hate group by the southern poverty law center.
Re:Disgraced Republican Candidate for Governor
on
HP To Cut 30,000 Jobs
·
· Score: 1
I would describe Jerry Brown as a technocrat with liberal leanings.
There was a CBS poll done right before the vote and it showed 80% had "DO NOT WANT" on it... but it was rammed through anyway.
Yet, when polled on the individual aspects of the bill, those same people support it by a ~70/30 margin across the board.
Re:Disgraced Republican Candidate for Governor
on
HP To Cut 30,000 Jobs
·
· Score: 3, Informative
1) High Speed Rail (underfunded referendum)
I specifically mentioned the referendum problem.
2) Underfunding CALPERS on purpose, by granting huge retirement benefits (in the late 90s) to garner the support of Government (tend towards liberal) workers.
CalPERS is actually one of the best funded public pension systems in the nation. The last part of you statement is hilarious, given that the public entities which have been given the most cushy retirement plans are law enforcement and firefighters, constituencies which most certainly do NOT lean liberal.
3) Illegal Immigration and social programs that become entitlements that can never be revoked. Oh, and I'm a racist for even mentioning it.
Please post a study (not by overtly racist groups like CAIR) that demonstrates that illegals are a significant drain on our economy.
BTW, Wilson was a Liberal, so that really doesn't help your case.
Pete Wilson, champion of prop 187, the Three Strikes law, and energy deregulation, a liberal? We must have different definitions of Liberal.
Slashdot Mirror
Despite it's outdated UI, I was a fan of Windows Mobile 6.x because of its openness and the resulting flexibility. In locking down WP7 so much, Windows Phone is essentially a "Microsoft iPhone". If I wanted an iPhone, I would just buy an iPhone.
Redesigning the UI to be touch friendly, while keeping the openness of Windows mobile 6.x would have kept me interested.
Android sucks in its own special ways, but at least I have the flexibility to mold it into the tool that I want.
You work in a bank or post office?
I would guess banks..
A parents perspective...
The problem teachers and school have with NCLB is that it pits them against the problem of child poverty which has the greatest affect on test scores, but which they have absolutely no control over.
It's also had some nasty side effects which, in my opinion, are terrible for children regardless of test scores. At my child's school, where the child poverty rate is at least 50%, half the funding for field trips was cut this year in an effort to climb out of dreaded "PI" status and a long tradition of sending all second graders on a trip to the Monterrey Bay Aquarium was nixed in order to focus more resources on test score improvment. My oldest son happened to be in second grade this year and had been looking forward to the trip since last year when all of his second grade friends told him how awesome it was.
In the school's effort to climb out of PI purgatory, I have observed what can only be described as a hysteria leading up to and during the week long testing period. The school would drill it into the kids' head in the months leading up to the testing week on how incredibly important it was for them to try as hard as they could on the tests. My kids actually came home reciting stupid chants about testing. It was as if they had been indoctrinated at a cuban "reeducation" camp. On the weekend before and during every day of testing week, we would get robocalls everyday from the school reminding us to send our kids to bed early and to feed them a healthy breakfast before sending them to school.
The fact that test scores have gone up doesn't necessarily mean that our children have become better educated. If you think test scores equate to competence, I've got an MCSE to sell you.
I'm not totally against the concept of NCLB, or accountability, or even standardized testing, but until the issue of child poverty is dealt with I don't think these policies will ever serve to significantly raise our ranking in the world.
It's been five or so years since I last bought a desktop PC, so my experience is a little out of date, but just to give another example of NVidia's history of support for non-Windows OS's, on my last desktop computer I played the Linux version of America's Army on FreeBSD*...and I got better frame rates** than I did playing the Windows version in Windows!
*Yes, Nvidia even supported FreeBSD way back then; after a quick check I see that they still do.
**Probably related to differences in the port and not the drivers or OSs, but still impressive.
Yeah one of my children is one of those "problem children" that some educators want to cast away into K-12 leper colonies. He also scores off the charts in all of the standardized tests.
The school in our district wanted to put him into the classes with DD (and when I say DD, I mean the "short bus" kids, not the ADHD ones) children. We were appalled.
Because the school was identified for PI under NCLB, we were able to transfer him to a neighboring school eight miles away.
Magically, the problems with his behavior virtually disappeared at the new school. I attribute to the leadership. The leadership at the school in our local district honestly didn't seem to give a shit when our son was there, while the people at the neighboring district are engaged and really seem to care.
I'm not an expert at pedagogy, but there has to a better way of dealing with kids like mine who don't quite conform to behavioral norms than to toss them in a pen together.
I'm not sure you understand that this is already how it is.
No, I do understand that that is how it is. The charter and voucher systems only serve to make the problem worse.
My concern over both charter and voucher systems are pretty much the same; That they will inevitably result in society segregating themselves class and in some areas of the country, racial lines.
With both systems, children whose parents lack the financial resources needed to transport their children to schools that are many miles outside of their district will inevitably be left behind. You will end up with a system where the charter a private schools get the students whose parents have the most resources and motivation and the public schools are left with...the leftovers.
This in, in my opinion, a system which is designed to destroy the public school systems as we know it.
The biggest problem with our schools systems is child poverty. Charter school systems and voucher programs do not address this issue at all.
I happen to live in one the poorest congressional districts (a quick check shows #6) in the nation and have four kids two of which are in school. We have a local charter middle school and I have observed the exact phenomenon I described above. Kids that are enrolled in the charter middle school are almost exclusively from middle to upper middle class households.
Ironically, we will almost certainly be enrolling our kids into the charter school when they reach that age. Even though we don't think it's the best option for society as a whole, my wife and I have agreed that it's the best option for our kids at this time.
I would guess if you let parents choose the schools, maybe use a voucher system or something, then it would start to improve. Schools that showed good outcomes would become more popular, and schools that showed worse outcomes would cease to exist.
What you are describing already exists. Read up on charter schools. They have not turned out to be a panacea.
...I would guess that the answer is poverty. My wife and I went to see Cornell West speak several months ago and one of the things he pointed out about our educational system is that if you take out the test scores of children who are living in poverty, the U.S. ranks at or near number one in the world in education.
Currently the U.S. has the second worst child poverty rate of the 23 countries listed here, and higher education rankings general correlate with lower child poverty rates.
Maybe. The police are generally, average people - i.e. idiots to the average Slashdot reader. Even some of their computer forensics people are at the bottom of the barrel intellectually.
Yep. We are 100% virtualized on the server side, and thus are forced to plug our Solidworks dongle into and run the license server on one of the workstations.
We've run into other situations where vendors wanted us to use dongles, but most have move to software based solutions in the last few years.
These groups' reports universally leave out the economic contributions of low skilled immigrants, like the billions in payroll and other taxes that they pay every year and the value of the labor that they perform.
Social safety nets didn't cause Europe's and our troubles. Libertarian economic policy did.
Prior to Reconstruction there was no middle class. After 1913, there was a middle class. Your attempt at obfuscation has failed.
Okay great. So what defined a middle class in that era? How large was this middle class? How was wealth dispersed during this era? I don't care about raw efficiency. Efficient markets are brutal and result in needless human suffering.
Libertarians get so caught up with efficiency that they end up losing their humanity.
The US maintained a libertarian economic policy from the end of Reconstruction through 1913. A time period that coincided with the greatest period of economic growth ever seen in history, creating the first universal middle class in history.
"Universal middle class"? Where the hell did you get that tripe from? The Gilded Age was an age marked by robber barons who hoarded wealth at a rate that is almost incomprehensible today. Do you have any wealth or income statistics from that age (they conveniently start at the end of the era you covet) that would back up your assertion?
If I stop paying taxes, armed federal agents descend on my property and use force to take my money and posessions.
Your precious money would be worth nothing without a government to back its value.
As Americans, we've had a good run. We were early into the Industrial Revolution, and blessed with abundant natural resources relative to our population. We had an optimisim and risk tollerance that was derived from our immigrant origin. This lead to both a capital and skills gap compared to the rest of the world, which gave us a phenomical standard of living. But today capital moves fluidly to where it is the most effective, and the skills gap is easier to narrow than it once was. This will continue into the future. It's a tough medicine to swallow, but it's true.
Yes, the world is catching up as more of it industrializes, but if you actually look a history of the total wealth of the United States, you will see that it has continued to rise steadily, despite this supposed flow of capital to other places you describe. The only change in the last 30 years has been the distribution of wealth.
Then some psycho, leftist, wingnut, lawyer with a brain as disabled as her child flipped the fuck out all over the internets.
Leftists are supporting Newt Gingrich nowadays?
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/06/24/746456/-Fox-has-mislabeled-Republican-scandals-before-more-picts
Incompetent or malicious? You make the call.
I asked you not to cite articles by overtly racist groups and you post an article which sources the FAIR, an organization classified as a hate group by the southern poverty law center.
I would describe Jerry Brown as a technocrat with liberal leanings.
Hey, it just continues the slashdot trend of calling anyone you don't agree with a shill!
Says the Facebook IPO shill.
Paid to post.
+5
Look at the FP's posting history. Brand new account. 100% pro facebook IPO posts.
There was a CBS poll done right before the vote and it showed 80% had "DO NOT WANT" on it... but it was rammed through anyway.
Yet, when polled on the individual aspects of the bill, those same people support it by a ~70/30 margin across the board.
1) High Speed Rail (underfunded referendum)
I specifically mentioned the referendum problem.
2) Underfunding CALPERS on purpose, by granting huge retirement benefits (in the late 90s) to garner the support of Government (tend towards liberal) workers.
CalPERS is actually one of the best funded public pension systems in the nation. The last part of you statement is hilarious, given that the public entities which have been given the most cushy retirement plans are law enforcement and firefighters, constituencies which most certainly do NOT lean liberal.
3) Illegal Immigration and social programs that become entitlements that can never be revoked. Oh, and I'm a racist for even mentioning it .
Please post a study (not by overtly racist groups like CAIR) that demonstrates that illegals are a significant drain on our economy.
BTW, Wilson was a Liberal, so that really doesn't help your case.
Pete Wilson, champion of prop 187, the Three Strikes law, and energy deregulation, a liberal? We must have different definitions of Liberal.