Whatever you end up doing, don't block browsers out with the horrid "Sorry, you do not have Internet Explorer 5.0 or better" message. Most of the sites that show that message, I can view just fine if I can manage to get past the browser-blocking "welcome" page. Let the browsers "try" to view the page, even if your "what kind of browser are you?" check thinks it shouldn't be able to. Even if it doesn't display perfectly, the user might still get the information they were looking for.
The article says NINE PERCENT OF GROSS (9%), while the blurb says NINE CENTS PER GROSS ($0.000625 each). Big difference there, unless the blurb got that figure from somewhere not in the article.
As I own my own domain, I give a new email alias (e.g. stuff_amazon@happystuffplace.com for an Amazon account) to each entity that asks me for one. Of course, none of these is the one I use for correspondence with people I know. This way, I know exactly who it was that sold my address to a spam list, and can block it with no detriment to my "real" addresses.
I find this as a compromise between real address and dead-end junk, because, for a good deal of sites, I do want them to send me the email... I just want the option to ignore all their email later, should conditions change.
Maybe if you've only got 64MBs of RAM in your computer. I wouldn't call Opera's rendering of pages "much" faster than Mozilla-based browsers.
Who only has 64MB of RAM these days? They're, what, included when you super-size a value meal? Even the ghetto Fry's specials come with 256.
Also, if you end up having to load up another browser anyway (take your pic IE or Firefox) for that part of the web that Opera borks up, where's your speed now?
Considering that I have to do that, oh, once every few weeks, I'm good with the speed.
am I wrong or slashdotters is one of the biggest group of type-B procrastinators ?
(well, you know : first post, polls, waiting for the next headline, moderation, karma and so on...)
While moderation could arguably be Type-B, I'd call that stuff Type-A.
I have IE, Firefox, and Opera on my system, and Opera is consistently the fastest. So there.
Yes, Opera crashes on occasion, but it tends to do so in a very orderly fashion (i.e. right away vs. after hanging the system, and on restart it gives the option to pick up where you left off).
Hey, I thought this company was Google. Our happy interweb friend. What kind of speak is this?
Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt said: 'AOL is one of Google's longest-standing partners, and we are thrilled to strengthen and expand our relationship. Today's agreement leverages technologies from both companies to connect Google users worldwide to a wealth of new content.
Leverages technologies? Wealth of new content? WTF?
Methinks Saruman's been looking into the palantir.
Just don't publish programs in magazines. That really was a painful and stupid way to distrubute software.
Indeed! Especially when, after my 8-year old self spent a couple days entering code at about ten lines an hour, I'd succeeded only in animating the pretty flashing logo for the machine language editor, let alone even THOUGHT about entering the code for the actual game.
Atari was bought out by French game publisher Infogrames a few years back, which uses the Atari name purely because people have a history with it. There's no Atari left in Atari.
Indeed! Also, albums are set up to lead you from one song to the next, often giving an hour-long meta-piece, with its own highs and lows. If I only have one song from an album, it's quite hard to settle into listening. Sure, shuffles are fun, but sometimes I want to have a somewhat longer attention span.
When downloads start costing significantly less online than on CDs (just like CDs should cost significantly less than CDs) people will buy quite a bit more.
I'm with you on the standardized tests. They're bogus on all levels. Politicians want an easy way to screw with funding. School administrators want to get more money. Teachers want to not get fired. Students want to ditch class during the weeks wasted doing test prep rather than *learning*. Not to mention that, while the numbers look pretty, standardized tests tell very little useful information about anything.
Mixing classes has worked. I've seen it. No, they'll probably never function mentally on the level of their peers, but they can be given a chance at a more normal life, interacting with normal people, and, in the end, reducing their "burden" on society. The only thing hurting America here is treating a significant portion of the population like dirt.
Again, full inclusion in the classroom is not easy. It requires support. But it can and does work when implemented properly, which is, unfortunately, very rare. On the whole, the "good on paper" gesture of including special ed kids in a regular classroom without support is wasteful and unfair. People talk big, but almost never follow through properly, giving the extremely low success rate for such attempts.
Your research seems a bit light and one-sided. Check out "full inclusion," a concept growing in popularity and support, in which "special ed" people are included successfully in "normal" classrooms when a proper support structure is instituted.
Teaching is the job of the person being taught to teach.... Plus, kids haven't been trained to teach, and most of the time won't be as good at it as a teacher, so you're doing a disservice to the lower-ability person too.
What, so you've never gone to study groups? Peers are an excellent way to learn. I know I'll tend to remember things a lot better when shown by peers. I know I can often distill technical lectures by teachers into words my cohorts can understand more easily. Have you never leaned over to the person next to you and asked, "wait, how does that work?" Also, teaching the material to someone else is the best way to ensure that you have learned it well, and often a way to learn it together. I know for a fact that I would have bombed calculus 1 from slacking off, had there not been a student in the class that kept asking me for help.
Life is about teaching things to and learning things from other people. It doesn't require training. It is innate. I'm not talking about full-on tutoring. Casual questions to one another is how we, as social creatures, interact. Robbing people of the opportunity to teach things to one another is a shame.
Given that the "special ed" student is also provided with adequate non-student support so as to not be a burden on the class, but rather a member of it, the situation can be made to benefit everyone. The kids are never FORCED to teach the student that needs help. Anyone who doesn't want to can stay out of it. However, you'd be surprised how many people delight in it.
We do need new generations of teachers, after all. Just like people who like science class becoming scientists, people who like English class becoming writers, and people who like P.E. becoming physical therapists, people who like teaching other people in their class become teachers. Think of it as just another opportunity that is *offered* in the classroom.
It does work, when it's done properly. If "special ed" people are just thrown into a "normal" classroom, a classroom in which the teacher has no experience or training in this situation and is given no support, then it is indeed a complete waste of everyone's time. It serves as a quick excuse for "Well, this didn't work. We tried. Goodbye."
If, however, the class is run well, this can happen. The curriculum is modified for the "special ed" person, giving them assignments that are more along the lines of what they can handle. The people who can keep up do keep up, and those that move more slowly are allowed to move more slowly. However, they are in the COMPANY of people who can do the work more quickly. In this way, the "special ed" person learns how to interact with "normal" people, and the "normal" people are given different perspectives, lessening the second-class-citizen barrier and showing that, yes, they are people too.. The "special ed" person is usually accompanied by an aide, so that the teacher doesn't need to divert an unnecessarily large amount of attention from the rest of the class. Funding from school districts is usually the harshest barrier for this.
Why are special ed classrooms always a disaster? Because they're filled with only special ed people. They imitate each other, pick up each other's bad habits and disruptiveness, just like people in "normal" classrooms emulate each other. They are never even EXPOSED to people who function faster than they do. If an average Joe is put into a room full of JPL scientists, you'd better believe he'll try harder (if supported) than if he's put into a room full of beer-drinking flunkies. The same concept applies here.
Check out "full inclusion," a relatively new concept that has been carried out successfully, with benefits for ALL parties involved, when the people involved are willing.
Additionally, we seem to be obsessed on slashdot in this topic with complaining about "I wasn't challenged enough in school." Should striving to challenge students only apply to the ones we label as smart? Each student has a different "challenging enough to make me try but not so challenging that I give up" range. The way schools are set up, material falls in the "too easy" or "too hard" category for people far too often. I would suggest that the decline in America's educational system is the fault of one-size-fits-all education. It's easier to vomit information at your students that way. However, customizing the curriculum to EACH student, "gifted" as well as "special ed," I believe is an answer that serves everyone.
Take it from someone with a fully-included former-"special ed"-student in the family. It CAN work, if it's done properly.
So we're behind everyone else, and we're going to catch up by going SLOWER? - Bart Simpson on Special Ed
I would say your complaint is with the same-age-same-class paradigm of schooling, rather than whether or not there are "gifted" programs. The parent's complaint is against programs that benefit just a few people, and I think your views are more in line with the parent's than you realize. I would suggest that there is no magical switching level at which someone becomes eligible for accelerated classes, and no need to set up "gifted" programs.
If, instead, our schools were run with a "when you know how to do this stuff, you go on to the next stuff" mentality, all the problems would be solved at once. People who are really fast at things could take the next level right away, and perhaps even take time off in between, and people that need more time could take more time. However, we seem so ingrained in keeping the same set of people together all the time in neat rows, whether in regular classes or yanked out into "gifted" classes, that I'd suggest that there's no good solution as it's set up.
If only there was some sort of educational system out there that does things differently. Some place that does things universally for everyone, where people take courses when they are ready for them, and perhaps even spend less hours in the classroom with all the time they stop wasting. If only...
Why is it that people are so obsessed with identifying "gifted" in the K-12 years, then suddenly in college, everyone just takes what they take and is left alone? Apparently it's a big deal here in the US when someone does something a bit faster or slower than everyone else born within 6 months or so of them.
Call me naive, but it seems that if we were to apply more of the university paradigms to K-12, this would not be so much of a problem. Paradigms such as:
A minimum set of classes that people must take, with other people who are just as far in said classes.
Significantly less time spent in a classroom doing nothing productive whatsoever (OK, there's still quite a bit of boredom time in college, but not 7 hours a day). 30 hours in a college classroom somehow teaches more than a year or two of hour-a-day classes in elementary or high school. Magic?
Wide variety of optional courses, the key word being "optional."
Ability and encouragement to interact with people who are not classified exactly the same as you are
Attitude of class as a "want to" rather than a "have to." Minimizing the hours-per-day of pointless class-time helps with this.
Here, gifted kids wouldn't have to be "identified" and put in special ivory-tower classes, but rather could just take courses faster in the subjects they're good at.
My mom grew up in Argentina, and the schools there used a bit of this. There was one classroom for K-5 (small school). The teacher taught stuff. Each student was given assignments based on their abilities, the older or more advanced ones helping out those not as far in their studies. Class went until noon Monday-Friday with the mandatory subjects (Reading, Writing, Math, etc.). Optional courses (sports, music, art) were offered in the afternoon. Kids could go to school as little as four hours a day.
She immigrated to the U.S. after fifth grade, with very limited English. Skipped sixth. Insists that she was an average student back home.
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever you end up doing, don't block browsers out with the horrid "Sorry, you do not have Internet Explorer 5.0 or better" message. Most of the sites that show that message, I can view just fine if I can manage to get past the browser-blocking "welcome" page. Let the browsers "try" to view the page, even if your "what kind of browser are you?" check thinks it shouldn't be able to. Even if it doesn't display perfectly, the user might still get the information they were looking for.
The article says NINE PERCENT OF GROSS (9%), while the blurb says NINE CENTS PER GROSS ($0.000625 each). Big difference there, unless the blurb got that figure from somewhere not in the article.
What, we can own facts now?
Somehow I'm not at all surprised.
Dang, that thing looks like such a nightmare I can't even decide on what sort of snide ergonomics-related comment to make. Therefore:
[Insert snide comment on the horrific ergonomics of that device here]
As I own my own domain, I give a new email alias (e.g. stuff_amazon@happystuffplace.com for an Amazon account) to each entity that asks me for one. Of course, none of these is the one I use for correspondence with people I know. This way, I know exactly who it was that sold my address to a spam list, and can block it with no detriment to my "real" addresses.
I find this as a compromise between real address and dead-end junk, because, for a good deal of sites, I do want them to send me the email... I just want the option to ignore all their email later, should conditions change.
Maybe if you've only got 64MBs of RAM in your computer. I wouldn't call Opera's rendering of pages "much" faster than Mozilla-based browsers.
Who only has 64MB of RAM these days? They're, what, included when you super-size a value meal? Even the ghetto Fry's specials come with 256.
Also, if you end up having to load up another browser anyway (take your pic IE or Firefox) for that part of the web that Opera borks up, where's your speed now?
Considering that I have to do that, oh, once every few weeks, I'm good with the speed.
am I wrong or slashdotters is one of the biggest group of type-B procrastinators ? (well, you know : first post, polls, waiting for the next headline, moderation, karma and so on...)
While moderation could arguably be Type-B, I'd call that stuff Type-A.
You know nothing. This IS the first post.
I have IE, Firefox, and Opera on my system, and Opera is consistently the fastest. So there.
Yes, Opera crashes on occasion, but it tends to do so in a very orderly fashion (i.e. right away vs. after hanging the system, and on restart it gives the option to pick up where you left off).
In fact, I'd venture to guess that Mozilla-based browsers render far more of the web than Opera.
But Opera renders those pages much faster than the Mozilla-based browsers. Even trade, I'd say.
Exactly why I like Opera. Incompatibility with such gems as ActiveX is, to me, a Feature.
Hey, I thought this company was Google. Our happy interweb friend. What kind of speak is this?
Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt said: 'AOL is one of Google's longest-standing partners, and we are thrilled to strengthen and expand our relationship. Today's agreement leverages technologies from both companies to connect Google users worldwide to a wealth of new content.
Leverages technologies? Wealth of new content? WTF?
Methinks Saruman's been looking into the palantir.
Just don't publish programs in magazines. That really was a painful and stupid way to distrubute software.
Indeed! Especially when, after my 8-year old self spent a couple days entering code at about ten lines an hour, I'd succeeded only in animating the pretty flashing logo for the machine language editor, let alone even THOUGHT about entering the code for the actual game.
Some Dutch company bought rights to use the commodore name and logo and is stamping it on some Chinese made OEM products?
Yes. Like some French company did with Atari, minus the Chinese OEM products.
Destroy him, my robots!!!
That one's actually out on one of those $30 system-in-a-joystick things. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be recording high scores.
Atari was bought out by French game publisher Infogrames a few years back, which uses the Atari name purely because people have a history with it. There's no Atari left in Atari.
They're releasing him back into the wild.
Indeed! Also, albums are set up to lead you from one song to the next, often giving an hour-long meta-piece, with its own highs and lows. If I only have one song from an album, it's quite hard to settle into listening. Sure, shuffles are fun, but sometimes I want to have a somewhat longer attention span.
When downloads start costing significantly less online than on CDs (just like CDs should cost significantly less than CDs) people will buy quite a bit more.
They'll keep repeating their truth until everyone believes it.
14,800 down, 47,600 to go?
I'm with you on the standardized tests. They're bogus on all levels. Politicians want an easy way to screw with funding. School administrators want to get more money. Teachers want to not get fired. Students want to ditch class during the weeks wasted doing test prep rather than *learning*. Not to mention that, while the numbers look pretty, standardized tests tell very little useful information about anything.
Mixing classes has worked. I've seen it. No, they'll probably never function mentally on the level of their peers, but they can be given a chance at a more normal life, interacting with normal people, and, in the end, reducing their "burden" on society. The only thing hurting America here is treating a significant portion of the population like dirt.
Again, full inclusion in the classroom is not easy. It requires support. But it can and does work when implemented properly, which is, unfortunately, very rare. On the whole, the "good on paper" gesture of including special ed kids in a regular classroom without support is wasteful and unfair. People talk big, but almost never follow through properly, giving the extremely low success rate for such attempts.
Your research seems a bit light and one-sided. Check out "full inclusion," a concept growing in popularity and support, in which "special ed" people are included successfully in "normal" classrooms when a proper support structure is instituted.
... Plus, kids haven't been trained to teach, and most of the time won't be as good at it as a teacher, so you're doing a disservice to the lower-ability person too.
Teaching is the job of the person being taught to teach.
What, so you've never gone to study groups? Peers are an excellent way to learn. I know I'll tend to remember things a lot better when shown by peers. I know I can often distill technical lectures by teachers into words my cohorts can understand more easily. Have you never leaned over to the person next to you and asked, "wait, how does that work?" Also, teaching the material to someone else is the best way to ensure that you have learned it well, and often a way to learn it together. I know for a fact that I would have bombed calculus 1 from slacking off, had there not been a student in the class that kept asking me for help.
Life is about teaching things to and learning things from other people. It doesn't require training. It is innate. I'm not talking about full-on tutoring. Casual questions to one another is how we, as social creatures, interact. Robbing people of the opportunity to teach things to one another is a shame.
Given that the "special ed" student is also provided with adequate non-student support so as to not be a burden on the class, but rather a member of it, the situation can be made to benefit everyone. The kids are never FORCED to teach the student that needs help. Anyone who doesn't want to can stay out of it. However, you'd be surprised how many people delight in it.
We do need new generations of teachers, after all. Just like people who like science class becoming scientists, people who like English class becoming writers, and people who like P.E. becoming physical therapists, people who like teaching other people in their class become teachers. Think of it as just another opportunity that is *offered* in the classroom.
It does work, when it's done properly. If "special ed" people are just thrown into a "normal" classroom, a classroom in which the teacher has no experience or training in this situation and is given no support, then it is indeed a complete waste of everyone's time. It serves as a quick excuse for "Well, this didn't work. We tried. Goodbye."
If, however, the class is run well, this can happen. The curriculum is modified for the "special ed" person, giving them assignments that are more along the lines of what they can handle. The people who can keep up do keep up, and those that move more slowly are allowed to move more slowly. However, they are in the COMPANY of people who can do the work more quickly. In this way, the "special ed" person learns how to interact with "normal" people, and the "normal" people are given different perspectives, lessening the second-class-citizen barrier and showing that, yes, they are people too.. The "special ed" person is usually accompanied by an aide, so that the teacher doesn't need to divert an unnecessarily large amount of attention from the rest of the class. Funding from school districts is usually the harshest barrier for this.
Why are special ed classrooms always a disaster? Because they're filled with only special ed people. They imitate each other, pick up each other's bad habits and disruptiveness, just like people in "normal" classrooms emulate each other. They are never even EXPOSED to people who function faster than they do. If an average Joe is put into a room full of JPL scientists, you'd better believe he'll try harder (if supported) than if he's put into a room full of beer-drinking flunkies. The same concept applies here.
Check out "full inclusion," a relatively new concept that has been carried out successfully, with benefits for ALL parties involved, when the people involved are willing.
Additionally, we seem to be obsessed on slashdot in this topic with complaining about "I wasn't challenged enough in school." Should striving to challenge students only apply to the ones we label as smart? Each student has a different "challenging enough to make me try but not so challenging that I give up" range. The way schools are set up, material falls in the "too easy" or "too hard" category for people far too often. I would suggest that the decline in America's educational system is the fault of one-size-fits-all education. It's easier to vomit information at your students that way. However, customizing the curriculum to EACH student, "gifted" as well as "special ed," I believe is an answer that serves everyone.
Take it from someone with a fully-included former-"special ed"-student in the family. It CAN work, if it's done properly.
So we're behind everyone else, and we're going to catch up by going SLOWER? - Bart Simpson on Special Ed
I would say your complaint is with the same-age-same-class paradigm of schooling, rather than whether or not there are "gifted" programs. The parent's complaint is against programs that benefit just a few people, and I think your views are more in line with the parent's than you realize. I would suggest that there is no magical switching level at which someone becomes eligible for accelerated classes, and no need to set up "gifted" programs.
If, instead, our schools were run with a "when you know how to do this stuff, you go on to the next stuff" mentality, all the problems would be solved at once. People who are really fast at things could take the next level right away, and perhaps even take time off in between, and people that need more time could take more time. However, we seem so ingrained in keeping the same set of people together all the time in neat rows, whether in regular classes or yanked out into "gifted" classes, that I'd suggest that there's no good solution as it's set up.
If only there was some sort of educational system out there that does things differently. Some place that does things universally for everyone, where people take courses when they are ready for them, and perhaps even spend less hours in the classroom with all the time they stop wasting. If only...
Call me naive, but it seems that if we were to apply more of the university paradigms to K-12, this would not be so much of a problem. Paradigms such as:
Here, gifted kids wouldn't have to be "identified" and put in special ivory-tower classes, but rather could just take courses faster in the subjects they're good at.
My mom grew up in Argentina, and the schools there used a bit of this. There was one classroom for K-5 (small school). The teacher taught stuff. Each student was given assignments based on their abilities, the older or more advanced ones helping out those not as far in their studies. Class went until noon Monday-Friday with the mandatory subjects (Reading, Writing, Math, etc.). Optional courses (sports, music, art) were offered in the afternoon. Kids could go to school as little as four hours a day.
She immigrated to the U.S. after fifth grade, with very limited English. Skipped sixth. Insists that she was an average student back home.