The topic about extending ExtJS takes 38 pages, so it is really well covered.
Well, if more pages == more good, then I guess I ought to go looking for an even bigger book!:)
I would have loved to know what it is in those 38 pages that cover the topic of extending ExtJS well. Even basic info about the 38 pages (it walks you through a single example in detail over 38 pages; it starts with a small example & builds on it over 38 pages; it covers sub-topics X, Y, and Z in detail (and X,Y, and Z are particularly important/difficult to do/etc), or whatever) would help me know if this book will be useful to me.
On a more serious note - I appreciate the reviewer taking the time to read through the book, and I appreciate being made aware of this particular title. Much thanks to samzenpus for going out of his/her way to post this!!
On the one hand I appreciate someone bring greater exposure to Moodle, particularly as I've occasionally considered writing a plugin for it myself. On the other hand, I'd love to see this book reviewed by someone who actually has some programming chops. Statements like "I trust that the technical information given in this book is accurate as I have read several other books from the Packt Publishing company" aren't really helpful - the whole point of reading a review of a technical book is to find out things like whether the book is accurate or not.
My guess is that writing a Moodle plugin is the reviewer's first "scratching my own itch" project, I wish the reviewer well with it, and would love to hear from more experienced programmers about this book (if anyone's read it).
hehe - yeah, I hear you. If you're not familiar with ePortfolios then most descriptions sound like heaps of buzzwords from a different industry:)
Speaking as a teacher, I know what an ePortfolio is (more or less), so let me take a shot at explaining it. But instead of re-typing stuff, let me start with stuff from the "ePortfolio" page on wikipedia:
"An electronic portfolio, also known as an e-portfolio or digital portfolio, is a collection of electronic evidence assembled and managed by a user, usually on the Web. [...] E-portfolios are both demonstrations of the user's abilities and platforms for self-expression. [...]
An e-portfolio can be seen as a type of learning record that provides actual evidence of achievement" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_portfolio)
At the end of a traditional school experience, most students have a GPA/transcript, and whatever they've put on their resume. However in some fields (like art, or so I'm told:) ), grades aren't as useful to employers so students instead built up portfolios of their work - collections of good stuff that they've done that shows off both how skilled they are, and what their style is. This way the advertising agency doesn't waste time on the kid who's got a 4.0 but really wants to do Goth/emo illustrating for comic books, etc.
An ePortfolio takes this idea online, obviously. I've also seen it used for fields that don't traditionally require portfolios, in an attempt to make the school experience more "real world-y" ("look - our students are doing real things, not just taking exams! Look at the real things they're doing!"). It's not a bad idea, but has a number of problems/challenges in it's implementation. The biggest problem is that if your field values portfolios then you're probably doing it already. And if your field doesn't (like mine - computer science) then interviewers/grad schools don't really care that you're doing it.
My initial reaction was "Really? Seriously?? How does this make the algorithm any more interesting, easier to understand, or easier to remember? I mean hey - I like 80's console-sounds as much as the next guy, but they're not really adding anything."
Then it hit me that (apparently) many people haven't seen the algorithms visualized like this before. As someone who's been teaching this stuff for years, I've always handed out links to visualizations like this (even if they did lack the retro-hip sound effects:) ). As a matter of fact, I think that one of the first big demonstrations of Java was an applet that demonstrated various sorting algorithms [citation needed:) ]
I've heard good things about this place, but haven't looked through it extensively: http://algoviz.org/
(You know, in all the years I've been on Slashdot, I don't think I've ever wanted to create a new top-level post instead of responding to someone else's comment.... until now. Which is why I can't find the button to do so. I'd love for someone to (politely, with good humor) point out the obvious button that I'm missing)
I'm glad to finally see a top-rated post address this issue.
There are a ton of posts about how society still needs garbage-picker-uppers, but how many Slashdot readers are actually doing that? And more to the point, as off-shoring/out-sourcing keeps blowing low-education jobs out of the country (I read an article the other day about colleges outsourcing the grading that American TA's now do), why would you want to aim for an 'uneducated' job?
If you skip college & get a job in a factory (assuming you can find one)(an American factory, that is), what will you do when the factory is closed & production moved to Mexico?
Sorry for the rant, but there's this odd anti-education bias on Slashdot, even to the point of overlooking the obvious reason why everyone goes to college - to try and avoid their careers being made obsolete.
Re:after reading that review
on
jQuery Cookbook
·
· Score: 1
I hate to harp, but I have to agree
On the publisher's page for the book, visitors can read the book's description, table of contents, and errata, of which there are 22 as of this writing, although none have been confirmed by the authors or publisher
So there are 22 what? Chapters? Chapters and errata? Description, chapters and errata?
And why exactly can't the authors or publisher confirm anything? You'd figure that at least one of the 19 contributors could confirm at least their own contributions:)
TFA is actually pretty interesting, as it mostly re-caps certain sci-fi ideas/novels that have been made into (or made it into) pop culture & various products. It isn't really till the last page of the article that they say that "Since Snow Crash, no novel has had quite the same impact on the computing world, and you might argue that sci-fi and hi-tech are drifting further apart"
FWIW, I think this is the way things are supposed to be - sci-fi is about taking a new, interesting, novel, science-based idea & exploring it; it's not about trying to predict what next year's phone will look like or what computer technology will be driving the market 5 years from now.
The idea of a filter "in there" is interesting, but wouldn't it be difficult to maintain? Can you swap out such a filter without surgery?
I think the idea of a filter is really interesting, but it seems like the sort of thing you'd want to try and put closer to the surface of the body....
Grades reflect all sorts of things that have nothing to do with education, like dedication and the ability to brown nose the teacher.
Dedication is something that has "nothing to do with education"? Dude, dedication is 90% of education. Working hard, keeping at it when you're stuck, making sure that you take the time to work on learning new stuff every day, no matter how much other stuff you've got going on, no matter how sick you happen to be - that's exactly what education is!
It's also great preparation for life after school
I saw this striking scatterplot a couple years back that a student had put together from a survey he'd done. On the X axis was the categorical data of "What do you believe leads to good grades?", with the options being "Hard Work", or "Intelligence". The Y axis were peoples' grades. There was a cluster above 3.5 that all answered "Hard Work", and another cluster below 3.0 that all answered "Intelligence"
It's kinda like in real life - hard work pays off.
If you can, maybe you could leave the lab up, and thus allow people to use it over time, rather than just a limited-time evaluation.
Honestly, if I was going to try this, I'd find people (some teachers, some administrators) who want to make the change (or at least are open to the idea), and have them use the OSS lab over an extended period of time, for their actual, normal teaching. They'll get used to it, and you'll get a number of advantages: you'll have some users/advocates that can tell their peers about OSS (including how much work it *really* takes to move their course materials over), you'll get experience in real, day-to-day administration of the OSS (so you can get a handle on how many problems OpenOffice has when opening MS Office docs, etc), other people will see the lab working, you'll iron out the inevitable bugs that crop up, you'll become familiar with common objections to doing a switch, etc, etc.
Also, I don't know how many labs you've got, but if they fill up, having the the OSS lab available when the others aren't might be incentive to peopel to learn OSS.
So, in a nutshell, don't try to convert all X-thousand computers at once, but do it viral-like: start small, get some support, show it can be done, then build up in future years.
Remember that most people aren't techies, and honestly don't care about their computers, so long as they work - if their computers suddenly change, and they have to do an extra hour of work per day to compensate (the equivalent 3 extra WEEKS of work over a 6 month period), they're not going to want to do it. After all, if someone explained that all the doors in your building needed to be switched (so that you're not buying doors from a monopoly anymore), but you'll now have to wait 2 minutes to go through each door (until you get the hang of it:) ), how would you feel?
Anyways, those are some thoughts, even if this post is a bit long:)
I'm really curious about how one computes this - I"m assuming it's a lot of grunt work, although whenever the gov't brings more info on-line, it should be easy to compute it automatically.
If anyone has any knowledge about this, I'd really like to know - even basic stuff like "What info is public & where do you get it?"
How does one evaluate whether something is standards compliant or not?
I can understand doing some rudimentary testing (write up a simple HTML page, look at it in the browser), but this seems overall useless since
how 'compliant' a browser is will depend on what you write & how nit-picky you are about the rendition (there's no way any one person could possible write enough test-cases to cover everything)
you can't automate it, and
There doesn't appear to be an easy to to compare two browsers ("MS had trouble with this tag, and NS6.0 had trouble with these other three, so I guess NS is better since that one tag is really important")
I can't believe that people haven't formulated something rigorous - does anyone have any pointers?
Thanks!
MikeTheGreat
Did anyone here really think that Bill Gates would say anything other than "Buy software, buy my software, don't use software that you haven't paid for?" It's kinda like expecting Ellison to get up on stage and say something other than "Microsoft sucks; buy my thin client instead", or McNeally to get up and say something other than "Microsoft sucks; buy Java from me instead" Call me cynical, but I usually try not to read what people in charge of companies say in interviews - I'd bet that with a small amount of customization, you could write 'Eliza' plug-ins that will spit out more-or-less the same thing as the real person:)
The article mentions "tens of thousands of programmers" working on Linux, which seems a bit high, even for an OS (high as in "how does one programmer out of 10,000 not duplicate effort & step on other peoples' feet?") - does the author include people working on stuff that technically isn't Linux itself, such as applications like MSQL?
The report, issued by the American Electronics Association, found that high-tech degrees -- including engineering, math, physics and computer science -- declined 5 percent between 1990 and 1996
A recent Mindcraft survey, commissioned by MS, concluded that NT runs faster than Linux. A survery commissioned by Oracle concluded that Oracle runs faster on Linux than NT. (There was a posting a week or so back on/., but I can't find it)
Now, the AEA, which represents companies that want to convince politicians to loosen imigration restrictions to keep their costs low. I think it's obvious that this is simply another study that was purchased to serve somebody's interests.
My opinions are my own, and not those my anybody else, including my employer
If the monopoly exists solely BECAUSE of overwhelming consumer choice, it is allowed.
I think this is a meaningless metric. Two counterexamples are utilities and MS:
I don't have a choice about who provides my local phone service (as far as I can tell), and I don't particularly like my local phone provider (haven't liked any of the others I tried when I lived in other places, either). Yet each local phone company is allowed to keep it's monopoly (as are some other utilities), in part b/c it's considered to be a 'natural monopoly' (It's more efficient to have a single pipe leading to your house, rather than 4 & picking which one you'll use). These monopolies are tolerated, yet they clearly have (almost) nothing to do with consumer choice.
Further, I would argue (in the case of most non-utilities) that there isn't any way to prove that consumers haven't overwhelmingly choosen the monopolist. In theory, everyone could ditch their Wintel boxes & buy Macs within, say, 4 years. Since everyone continues to buy Wintel, MS's monopoly is clearly because of 'overwhelming consumer choice'.
--Mike Anything posted is my personal opinion, and not to be taken as anyone else's
Slashdot Mirror
The topic about extending ExtJS takes 38 pages, so it is really well covered.
Well, if more pages == more good, then I guess I ought to go looking for an even bigger book! :)
I would have loved to know what it is in those 38 pages that cover the topic of extending ExtJS well. Even basic info about the 38 pages (it walks you through a single example in detail over 38 pages; it starts with a small example & builds on it over 38 pages; it covers sub-topics X, Y, and Z in detail (and X,Y, and Z are particularly important/difficult to do/etc), or whatever) would help me know if this book will be useful to me.
On a more serious note - I appreciate the reviewer taking the time to read through the book, and I appreciate being made aware of this particular title. Much thanks to samzenpus for going out of his/her way to post this!!
No doubt some of those small start ups will soon become big defense contractors!"
Or they'll be bought by big defense contractors, and the existing big defense contractors will continue to be the big defense contractors....
On the one hand I appreciate someone bring greater exposure to Moodle, particularly as I've occasionally considered writing a plugin for it myself. On the other hand, I'd love to see this book reviewed by someone who actually has some programming chops. Statements like "I trust that the technical information given in this book is accurate as I have read several other books from the Packt Publishing company" aren't really helpful - the whole point of reading a review of a technical book is to find out things like whether the book is accurate or not.
My guess is that writing a Moodle plugin is the reviewer's first "scratching my own itch" project, I wish the reviewer well with it, and would love to hear from more experienced programmers about this book (if anyone's read it).
hehe - yeah, I hear you. If you're not familiar with ePortfolios then most descriptions sound like heaps of buzzwords from a different industry :)
Speaking as a teacher, I know what an ePortfolio is (more or less), so let me take a shot at explaining it. But instead of re-typing stuff, let me start with stuff from the "ePortfolio" page on wikipedia:
"An electronic portfolio, also known as an e-portfolio or digital portfolio, is a collection of electronic evidence assembled and managed by a user, usually on the Web. [...] E-portfolios are both demonstrations of the user's abilities and platforms for self-expression. [...]
An e-portfolio can be seen as a type of learning record that provides actual evidence of achievement" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_portfolio)
At the end of a traditional school experience, most students have a GPA/transcript, and whatever they've put on their resume. However in some fields (like art, or so I'm told :) ), grades aren't as useful to employers so students instead built up portfolios of their work - collections of good stuff that they've done that shows off both how skilled they are, and what their style is. This way the advertising agency doesn't waste time on the kid who's got a 4.0 but really wants to do Goth/emo illustrating for comic books, etc.
An ePortfolio takes this idea online, obviously. I've also seen it used for fields that don't traditionally require portfolios, in an attempt to make the school experience more "real world-y" ("look - our students are doing real things, not just taking exams! Look at the real things they're doing!"). It's not a bad idea, but has a number of problems/challenges in it's implementation. The biggest problem is that if your field values portfolios then you're probably doing it already. And if your field doesn't (like mine - computer science) then interviewers/grad schools don't really care that you're doing it.
My initial reaction was "Really? Seriously?? How does this make the algorithm any more interesting, easier to understand, or easier to remember? I mean hey - I like 80's console-sounds as much as the next guy, but they're not really adding anything."
Then it hit me that (apparently) many people haven't seen the algorithms visualized like this before. As someone who's been teaching this stuff for years, I've always handed out links to visualizations like this (even if they did lack the retro-hip sound effects :) ). As a matter of fact, I think that one of the first big demonstrations of Java was an applet that demonstrated :) ]
various sorting algorithms [citation needed
Anyways, if you're interested in this sort of thing, the link I've been using is:
http://www.sorting-algorithms.com/
I've heard good things about this place, but haven't looked through it extensively:
http://algoviz.org/
(You know, in all the years I've been on Slashdot, I don't think I've ever wanted to create a new top-level post instead of responding to someone else's comment.... until now. Which is why I can't find the button to do so. I'd love for someone to (politely, with good humor) point out the obvious button that I'm missing)
I'm glad to finally see a top-rated post address this issue.
There are a ton of posts about how society still needs garbage-picker-uppers, but how many Slashdot readers are actually doing that? And more to the point, as off-shoring/out-sourcing keeps blowing low-education jobs out of the country (I read an article the other day about colleges outsourcing the grading that American TA's now do), why would you want to aim for an 'uneducated' job?
If you skip college & get a job in a factory (assuming you can find one)(an American factory, that is), what will you do when the factory is closed & production moved to Mexico?
Sorry for the rant, but there's this odd anti-education bias on Slashdot, even to the point of overlooking the obvious reason why everyone goes to college - to try and avoid their careers being made obsolete.
I hate to harp, but I have to agree
On the publisher's page for the book, visitors can read the book's description, table of contents, and errata, of which there are 22 as of this writing, although none have been confirmed by the authors or publisher
So there are 22 what? Chapters? Chapters and errata? Description, chapters and errata?
And why exactly can't the authors or publisher confirm anything? You'd figure that at least one of the 19 contributors could confirm at least their own contributions :)
Seriously. This is 2010, not 1998. Assuming you're not offering this as an entry-level course (you shouldn't)
From the poster's original request:
"This course will be taking students from the 'What's Lee-nux?' stage "
So the poster specifically does want something for an entry-level course
TFA is actually pretty interesting, as it mostly re-caps certain sci-fi ideas/novels that have been made into (or made it into) pop culture & various products. It isn't really till the last page of the article that they say that "Since Snow Crash, no novel has had quite the same impact on the computing world, and you might argue that sci-fi and hi-tech are drifting further apart"
FWIW, I think this is the way things are supposed to be - sci-fi is about taking a new, interesting, novel, science-based idea & exploring it; it's not about trying to predict what next year's phone will look like or what computer technology will be driving the market 5 years from now.
You'll also need volunteers to participate in that study.
If you bring the beer^H^H^H^Hresearch alcohol, then I'd be happy to volunteer my time :)
The idea of a filter "in there" is interesting, but wouldn't it be difficult to maintain? Can you swap out such a filter without surgery?
I think the idea of a filter is really interesting, but it seems like the sort of thing you'd want to try and put closer to the surface of the body....
Grades reflect all sorts of things that have nothing to do with education, like dedication and the ability to brown nose the teacher.
Dedication is something that has "nothing to do with education"? Dude, dedication is 90% of education. Working hard, keeping at it when you're stuck, making sure that you take the time to work on learning new stuff every day, no matter how much other stuff you've got going on, no matter how sick you happen to be - that's exactly what education is!
It's also great preparation for life after school
I saw this striking scatterplot a couple years back that a student had put together from a survey he'd done. On the X axis was the categorical data of "What do you believe leads to good grades?", with the options being "Hard Work", or "Intelligence". The Y axis were peoples' grades. There was a cluster above 3.5 that all answered "Hard Work", and another cluster below 3.0 that all answered "Intelligence"
It's kinda like in real life - hard work pays off.
For students & teachers, it's even better - the XNA Creators Club subscription is free through their 'DreamSpark' thingee:
https://downloads.channel8.msdn.com/Products/XNA_Game_Studio.aspx
(Looks like 'free for 1 year, then $100/year afterwards' is the official line)
If you can, maybe you could leave the lab up, and thus allow people to use it over time, rather than just a limited-time evaluation.
:)
Honestly, if I was going to try this, I'd find people (some teachers, some administrators) who want to make the change (or at least are open to the idea), and have them use the OSS lab over an extended period of time, for their actual, normal teaching. They'll get used to it, and you'll get a number of advantages: you'll have some users/advocates that can tell their peers about OSS (including how much work it *really* takes to move their course materials over), you'll get experience in real, day-to-day administration of the OSS (so you can get a handle on how many problems OpenOffice has when opening MS Office docs, etc), other people will see the lab working, you'll iron out the inevitable bugs that crop up, you'll become familiar with common objections to doing a switch, etc, etc.
Also, I don't know how many labs you've got, but if they fill up, having the the OSS lab available when the others aren't might be incentive to peopel to learn OSS.
So, in a nutshell, don't try to convert all X-thousand computers at once, but do it viral-like: start small, get some support, show it can be done, then build up in future years.
Remember that most people aren't techies, and honestly don't care about their computers, so long as they work - if their computers suddenly change, and they have to do an extra hour of work per day to compensate (the equivalent 3 extra WEEKS of work over a 6 month period), they're not going to want to do it. After all, if someone explained that all the doors in your building needed to be switched (so that you're not buying doors from a monopoly anymore), but you'll now have to wait 2 minutes to go through each door (until you get the hang of it:) ), how would you feel?
Anyways, those are some thoughts, even if this post is a bit long
I'm really curious about how one computes this - I"m assuming it's a lot of grunt work, although whenever the gov't brings more info on-line, it should be easy to compute it automatically.
If anyone has any knowledge about this, I'd really like to know - even basic stuff like "What info is public & where do you get it?"
I can understand doing some rudimentary testing (write up a simple HTML page, look at it in the browser), but this seems overall useless since
I can't believe that people haven't formulated something rigorous - does anyone have any pointers?
Thanks!
MikeTheGreat
Given that this post is by an Anonymous Coward, I think it's pretty clear that this post is a blatant troll.
Did anyone here really think that Bill Gates would say anything other than "Buy software, buy my software, don't use software that you haven't paid for?" :)
It's kinda like expecting Ellison to get up on stage and say something other than "Microsoft sucks; buy my thin client instead", or McNeally to get up and say something other than "Microsoft sucks; buy Java from me instead"
Call me cynical, but I usually try not to read what people in charge of companies say in interviews - I'd bet that with a small amount of customization, you could write 'Eliza' plug-ins that will spit out more-or-less the same thing as the real person
The article mentions "tens of thousands of programmers" working on Linux, which seems a bit high, even for an OS (high as in "how does one programmer out of 10,000 not duplicate effort & step on other peoples' feet?") - does the author include people working on stuff that technically isn't Linux itself, such as applications like MSQL?
The report, issued by the American Electronics Association, found that high-tech degrees -- including engineering, math, physics and computer science -- declined 5 percent between 1990 and 1996
/., but I can't find it)
A recent Mindcraft survey, commissioned by MS, concluded that NT runs faster than Linux. A survery commissioned by Oracle concluded that Oracle runs faster on Linux than NT. (There was a posting a week or so back on
Now, the AEA, which represents companies that want to convince politicians to loosen imigration restrictions to keep their costs low. I think it's obvious that this is simply another study that was purchased to serve somebody's interests.
My opinions are my own, and not those my anybody else, including my employer
I think this is a meaningless metric. Two counterexamples are utilities and MS:
I don't have a choice about who provides my local phone service (as far as I can tell), and I don't particularly like my local phone provider (haven't liked any of the others I tried when I lived in other places, either). Yet each local phone company is allowed to keep it's monopoly (as are some other utilities), in part b/c it's considered to be a 'natural monopoly' (It's more efficient to have a single pipe leading to your house, rather than 4 & picking which one you'll use). These monopolies are tolerated, yet they clearly have (almost) nothing to do with consumer choice.
Further, I would argue (in the case of most non-utilities) that there isn't any way to prove that consumers haven't overwhelmingly choosen the monopolist. In theory, everyone could ditch their Wintel boxes & buy Macs within, say, 4 years. Since everyone continues to buy Wintel, MS's monopoly is clearly because of 'overwhelming consumer choice'.
--Mike
Anything posted is my personal opinion, and not to be taken as anyone else's