It's a load of crap, yes. However, you can run the same installation of Word on any of those without worrying if it will conflict with the version of Apache you have installed.
Windows is dominant partially because if someone writes an application for Windows, everyone with Windows (in most cases) can run it without significant installation and configuration and version incompatibility problems. Better yet, I can get the latest version of just about any Windows app on my Windows without having to look at what version of 30 other applications I have. In Linux, on the other hand, installation and configuration is a whole different beast on different distributions, especially ones that set themselves to use older versions of things.
The ability to write an application on one machine and be pretty much guaranteed that the *software* situation for the machine will be pretty near identical on all the machines that might want to run your application is huge.
And it's not unique to Windows. OSX is essentially an enormously souped up UNIX distro that shares similar benefits to Windows. If I want the same results on Linux, though, I better be prepared to package up (or hope someone else will) a couple dozen different versions to match different distributions.
I wouldn't commit to staying somewhere five years unless I was darn sure I love the place and the type of job, and have no possibility to want to leave the area or try something different. I get antsy after two or three, and being contracted to stay for five would make me stir crazy. Now, I could end up staying at a place longer than that, but I try to minimize the situations where my departure would result in significant losses other than them no longer paying my salary.
I don't know if it could be part of your agreement, but I would much prefer to have an arrangement where I'm given 1% share in the company every 6 months for the next five years, or something along those lines. It's more psychological than anything for me... I'd much rather feel that I have incentive to stay at a company than obligation.
The way they learn and work should somewhat resemble how they will learn and work for the rest of their life.
I'd say zero laptops per student is a superior approach, at least during class time. Unless you're being ironic and suggesting that they could just as well learn to play FreeCell during class time because that's what they'll end up doing in an office job.
Why in a math class? In the years from preschool to Calc 3, I got far more out of the classes that didn't allow calculators (of the sophisticated almost-a-laptop sort, i.e. TI-82, 92) than the ones that did. Usually, whatever class in the sequence followed a class where the teacher allowed calculators involved a lot of catchup.
I suppose that it's nice to be able to see how plotted graphs change when you screw with the parameters, but in my experience, it ended up as a distraction. Although I did work on my programming skills a lot in those courses.
Unless the math course is one where you're simulating some multi-step computational process, I don't see computers, or even calculators, as useful.
Heh... the computer in every classroom. My high school had them. They were used for:
1) Teachers (or TA) entering grades (98%)
2) Students who had finished work early playing Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego or listening to synthesized cats singing Christmas music (2%)
Indeed. I have a bachelor's degree in music composition and have apps out for music grad school, and love telling people about how I got a D in music in 5th grade. I had been playing flute for 3 years, and knew my way around a page of music. Come 5th grade, we had music class with a general "this is a quarter note, this is a half note" curriculum. It was extremely basic, and I saw no need to write anything down... I could pass a test on it, easy. One day, "OK, everyone, turn in your notes!"
Notes?
Apparently, there was to be no test, with the notes making 100% of the grade. The D, rather than F, came from me scribbling down a bunch of things in the time between "Everyone turn in your notes" and the teacher getting to my desk.
The look on the teacher's face would spur quite a conversation if they looked at my notes before trashing themn. Most of my notebooks tended to look like one of the following, especially in the type of class where the professor has it in their head that the material is only useful to pass the final exam:
1 - "Illuminated Manuscript" like the monks used to write when everything was hand-transcribed. Lots of big fancy letters, terribly intricate drawings filling the margins, Escher-esque impossible contraptions, stick figures in unfortunate predicaments.
2 - Homework for other classes
3 - Personal side projects (I wrote a saxophone trio in my Programming Languages class... or was it Database)
Call me silly, but I thought the purpose of taking a course was so that you could continue to use the knowledge AFTER you pass the course, not to just pass the final and forget everything. Apparently, the teacher is confident that the course material, as taught, has no real-world value.
A friend tried to get me into Ultima Online a while back. Once I installed the app, she directed me to an app that would auto-play my character to dig for gold and such, so that I didn't have to spend countless hours on the grind work, but that I could turn off to play when I wanted.
That lasted about two hours for me. I determined that a game that needs such an app to be fun has a highly flawed design.
So you make an emergent system that can be futzed with "from on high" by a GM. Too many mice? Introduce temporary quests with high rewards for collecting mouse tails. Not enough mice? Introduce temporary mouse-repopulation quests where players are given bonuses for distributing mice from a central breeding center to mouse-poor areas. Balancing the ecology BECOMES the game, and makes quests actually seem meaningful.
I messed around with Lively for a bit, and can easily say that it was a turd. It felt like an extremely limited version of Active Worlds, offering really nothing to do other than change your clothes and walk around a room.
Maybe if it had features (i.e. stuff you can do) it would have gone somewhere. Blaming its failure on a lack of complexity is like blaming a box of tissues for failing as a refrigerator because it only has one little slot to put things in. What it called an open beta, I'd call a pre-alpha tech demo. There was simply nothing there.
Oh, and it was about as user-friendly as the power button on the dome-shaped iMacs (a white button with a white icon on it, perfectly flush with the white surface of the unit, on the back of the unit... without a user manual -- I was at a friend's -- it literally took me hours to find).
The problem, imho, is the focus on "content" over gameplay. So many games these days are based on "how much content is there?" and "how many hours of play does it offer?"
There are games out there where the gameplay mechanics alone can provide countless hours of replayability. Super Mario Kart, Starcraft, Command & Conquer, Guitar Hero, Sim City, etc. all offer this. It's trickier on the MMO end of things, but mid-scale online multiplayer games have done it in the past with large-scale mission-based play that lasts a handful of hours at a time, e.g. the Air Warrior series.
The problem is that almost all MMOs these days have gameplay that revolves almost entirely on grinding quests given by static NPCs. It's tricky to go with another paradigm, and much more risky for such a large investment as an MMO, but I think it could be done. One possible solution would require a GM (human that works for the MMO company, or perhaps automated) that triggers big events requiring a considerable joint effort by a large number of players. Another option would be to have quests be more player-defined (e.g. instead of collecting 30 ostrich feathers for an NPC who then gives you a chocolate, you collect 30 ostrich feathers for another player who needs it for crafting who then gives you something cool). The whole levels and experience paradigm also doesn't help the grinding situation.
A Tale in the Desert seemed to have the right idea philosophically on a lot of this, but in the little I played of it I found the gameplay mind-numbingly dull, and also found that the grind had simply been rearranged into doing menial tasks for higher-up players rather than replaced by interesting gameplay.
On rare occasions, I've hit one by accident and been greeted with unwelcome effects. That doesn't happen often, but having mystery keys whose functionality varies from keyboard to keyboard and depending on how my system is set up disturbs me.
Also, I highly value my desk real estate. When a keyboard is an extra inch or two deep solely for the sake of some idiot buttons, it pisses me off.
What gets to me most, though, is that, since I consider them to be completely useless, on some level I take it as an insult to my intelligence by the keyboard maker... not only that I would ever want such keys, but also that, if I *did* want a bunch of extra keys on the keyboard, that I would assign them to tasks as mundane as changing the volume or pausing a CD. If I glance down at the keyboard, there they are, mocking me. It's as if I bought a fridge with a big permanent sign on it that says "OPEN BY PULLING ON THIS SIDE", a sign that's not movable even if you swap which side of the fridge the hinges and handles are on. In essence, I consider the media center buttons a defect.
That, and they're usually cheap little buttons that break easily or don't press well.
Yeah, I don't like moving my hand to the mouse. However, since the Kinesis doesn't have a numeric keypad, the mouse is very close to the keyboard. I really don't see much solution to that problem, though, without putting the keyboard on rollers (yikes!), having a thumb-mouse mounted to the keyboard (which I find very uncomfortable), or using some head-mounted apparatus (cumbersome, and I don't know how accurate those are for quick things). That, and learning lots of shortcut keys. The positioning of the arrow and Delete keys already has my hand moving around the keyboard a lot less, which helps.
Backlights and media center keys are considered a PLUS? I always go out of my way to make sure that my keyboards don't have those. It seems to me that TFA's "Every Occasion" consists entirely of hunt-and-peck typing in the dark, wooing E3 fanboys, making more buttons of dubious utility, giving users RSI, and easing button-mashing on WoW. Yes, those are some occasions, but hardly even close to my top criteria.
Do people out there seriously use the "Play" or "Email" buttons on keyboards? I've always found it easy enough to locate the requisite icon on the desktop, and behavior in that case is much more predictable.
I'll give props for macro recording (I have a programmable keypad that I find indispensible), but most of their other criteria I find quite backwards. I don't need a keyboard with an LCD clock. I need a keyboard with keys.
Hear Hear! Been using an Advantage for 6 months, and it still boggles the mind that other keyboards are still made with the keys so far apart and at that horrible staggered angle. The thumb keys are also glorious, removing the need to move my hands for pretty much anything and significantly reducing the ridiculous amoung of pinky-work most keyboards require. I also very much appreciate a split keyboard that has the 6 on the right half rather than the left.
The arrow keys take some getting used to (though once you do, there are some nice vi-style benefits for screen navigation), and the keyboard can make some games with hard-coded controls completely unplayable (e.g. WASD (LH) and space bar (RH) together in a game that also requires mouse control), but overall a very nice board.
2)Cause little to no change at all at the cost of thousands of what will probably be taxpayer dollars.
You're new here, aren't you? I don't think anything has cost only thousands of taxpayer dollars since you could buy a loaf of bread for a penny and get change.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a load of crap, yes. However, you can run the same installation of Word on any of those without worrying if it will conflict with the version of Apache you have installed.
Windows is dominant partially because if someone writes an application for Windows, everyone with Windows (in most cases) can run it without significant installation and configuration and version incompatibility problems. Better yet, I can get the latest version of just about any Windows app on my Windows without having to look at what version of 30 other applications I have. In Linux, on the other hand, installation and configuration is a whole different beast on different distributions, especially ones that set themselves to use older versions of things.
The ability to write an application on one machine and be pretty much guaranteed that the *software* situation for the machine will be pretty near identical on all the machines that might want to run your application is huge.
And it's not unique to Windows. OSX is essentially an enormously souped up UNIX distro that shares similar benefits to Windows. If I want the same results on Linux, though, I better be prepared to package up (or hope someone else will) a couple dozen different versions to match different distributions.
According to the date listed on Wikipedia, the whole world has been beta testing it for 2 years already. Seems plenty long to me.
Estimated time until someone pulls a Goatse in front of the cameras to see what happens: 4 days.
I wouldn't commit to staying somewhere five years unless I was darn sure I love the place and the type of job, and have no possibility to want to leave the area or try something different. I get antsy after two or three, and being contracted to stay for five would make me stir crazy. Now, I could end up staying at a place longer than that, but I try to minimize the situations where my departure would result in significant losses other than them no longer paying my salary.
I don't know if it could be part of your agreement, but I would much prefer to have an arrangement where I'm given 1% share in the company every 6 months for the next five years, or something along those lines. It's more psychological than anything for me... I'd much rather feel that I have incentive to stay at a company than obligation.
It's a shame that Wesley Willis isn't around any more. I think only he would be capable of utilizing this technology to its full potential.
Rock and roll, Wesley. Rock and roll.
The way they learn and work should somewhat resemble how they will learn and work for the rest of their life.
I'd say zero laptops per student is a superior approach, at least during class time. Unless you're being ironic and suggesting that they could just as well learn to play FreeCell during class time because that's what they'll end up doing in an office job.
Why in a math class? In the years from preschool to Calc 3, I got far more out of the classes that didn't allow calculators (of the sophisticated almost-a-laptop sort, i.e. TI-82, 92) than the ones that did. Usually, whatever class in the sequence followed a class where the teacher allowed calculators involved a lot of catchup.
I suppose that it's nice to be able to see how plotted graphs change when you screw with the parameters, but in my experience, it ended up as a distraction. Although I did work on my programming skills a lot in those courses.
Unless the math course is one where you're simulating some multi-step computational process, I don't see computers, or even calculators, as useful.
Hear hear! (though the slide rule is a bit outmoded, I think... in any case, very little in math class requires a calculator).
If the budget is significant, I'd add to the list real musical instruments.
Heh... the computer in every classroom. My high school had them. They were used for:
1) Teachers (or TA) entering grades (98%)
2) Students who had finished work early playing Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego or listening to synthesized cats singing Christmas music (2%)
Indeed. I have a bachelor's degree in music composition and have apps out for music grad school, and love telling people about how I got a D in music in 5th grade. I had been playing flute for 3 years, and knew my way around a page of music. Come 5th grade, we had music class with a general "this is a quarter note, this is a half note" curriculum. It was extremely basic, and I saw no need to write anything down... I could pass a test on it, easy. One day, "OK, everyone, turn in your notes!"
Notes?
Apparently, there was to be no test, with the notes making 100% of the grade. The D, rather than F, came from me scribbling down a bunch of things in the time between "Everyone turn in your notes" and the teacher getting to my desk.
The look on the teacher's face would spur quite a conversation if they looked at my notes before trashing themn. Most of my notebooks tended to look like one of the following, especially in the type of class where the professor has it in their head that the material is only useful to pass the final exam:
1 - "Illuminated Manuscript" like the monks used to write when everything was hand-transcribed. Lots of big fancy letters, terribly intricate drawings filling the margins, Escher-esque impossible contraptions, stick figures in unfortunate predicaments.
2 - Homework for other classes
3 - Personal side projects (I wrote a saxophone trio in my Programming Languages class... or was it Database)
4 - What notes?
Call me silly, but I thought the purpose of taking a course was so that you could continue to use the knowledge AFTER you pass the course, not to just pass the final and forget everything. Apparently, the teacher is confident that the course material, as taught, has no real-world value.
Tell the publishers of Software Engineering textbooks (i.e. $70 doorstops) that.
A friend tried to get me into Ultima Online a while back. Once I installed the app, she directed me to an app that would auto-play my character to dig for gold and such, so that I didn't have to spend countless hours on the grind work, but that I could turn off to play when I wanted.
That lasted about two hours for me. I determined that a game that needs such an app to be fun has a highly flawed design.
Internet Forum Trolls File Patent for Web Browser that Rick Roll's Itself.
Prior Art: RollTube Firefox extension.
So you make an emergent system that can be futzed with "from on high" by a GM. Too many mice? Introduce temporary quests with high rewards for collecting mouse tails. Not enough mice? Introduce temporary mouse-repopulation quests where players are given bonuses for distributing mice from a central breeding center to mouse-poor areas. Balancing the ecology BECOMES the game, and makes quests actually seem meaningful.
I messed around with Lively for a bit, and can easily say that it was a turd. It felt like an extremely limited version of Active Worlds, offering really nothing to do other than change your clothes and walk around a room.
Maybe if it had features (i.e. stuff you can do) it would have gone somewhere. Blaming its failure on a lack of complexity is like blaming a box of tissues for failing as a refrigerator because it only has one little slot to put things in. What it called an open beta, I'd call a pre-alpha tech demo. There was simply nothing there.
Oh, and it was about as user-friendly as the power button on the dome-shaped iMacs (a white button with a white icon on it, perfectly flush with the white surface of the unit, on the back of the unit... without a user manual -- I was at a friend's -- it literally took me hours to find).
The problem, imho, is the focus on "content" over gameplay. So many games these days are based on "how much content is there?" and "how many hours of play does it offer?"
There are games out there where the gameplay mechanics alone can provide countless hours of replayability. Super Mario Kart, Starcraft, Command & Conquer, Guitar Hero, Sim City, etc. all offer this. It's trickier on the MMO end of things, but mid-scale online multiplayer games have done it in the past with large-scale mission-based play that lasts a handful of hours at a time, e.g. the Air Warrior series.
The problem is that almost all MMOs these days have gameplay that revolves almost entirely on grinding quests given by static NPCs. It's tricky to go with another paradigm, and much more risky for such a large investment as an MMO, but I think it could be done. One possible solution would require a GM (human that works for the MMO company, or perhaps automated) that triggers big events requiring a considerable joint effort by a large number of players. Another option would be to have quests be more player-defined (e.g. instead of collecting 30 ostrich feathers for an NPC who then gives you a chocolate, you collect 30 ostrich feathers for another player who needs it for crafting who then gives you something cool). The whole levels and experience paradigm also doesn't help the grinding situation.
A Tale in the Desert seemed to have the right idea philosophically on a lot of this, but in the little I played of it I found the gameplay mind-numbingly dull, and also found that the grind had simply been rearranged into doing menial tasks for higher-up players rather than replaced by interesting gameplay.
I find them infuriating on a couple levels...
On rare occasions, I've hit one by accident and been greeted with unwelcome effects. That doesn't happen often, but having mystery keys whose functionality varies from keyboard to keyboard and depending on how my system is set up disturbs me.
Also, I highly value my desk real estate. When a keyboard is an extra inch or two deep solely for the sake of some idiot buttons, it pisses me off.
What gets to me most, though, is that, since I consider them to be completely useless, on some level I take it as an insult to my intelligence by the keyboard maker... not only that I would ever want such keys, but also that, if I *did* want a bunch of extra keys on the keyboard, that I would assign them to tasks as mundane as changing the volume or pausing a CD. If I glance down at the keyboard, there they are, mocking me. It's as if I bought a fridge with a big permanent sign on it that says "OPEN BY PULLING ON THIS SIDE", a sign that's not movable even if you swap which side of the fridge the hinges and handles are on. In essence, I consider the media center buttons a defect.
That, and they're usually cheap little buttons that break easily or don't press well.
Yeah, I don't like moving my hand to the mouse. However, since the Kinesis doesn't have a numeric keypad, the mouse is very close to the keyboard. I really don't see much solution to that problem, though, without putting the keyboard on rollers (yikes!), having a thumb-mouse mounted to the keyboard (which I find very uncomfortable), or using some head-mounted apparatus (cumbersome, and I don't know how accurate those are for quick things). That, and learning lots of shortcut keys. The positioning of the arrow and Delete keys already has my hand moving around the keyboard a lot less, which helps.
Backlights and media center keys are considered a PLUS? I always go out of my way to make sure that my keyboards don't have those. It seems to me that TFA's "Every Occasion" consists entirely of hunt-and-peck typing in the dark, wooing E3 fanboys, making more buttons of dubious utility, giving users RSI, and easing button-mashing on WoW. Yes, those are some occasions, but hardly even close to my top criteria.
Do people out there seriously use the "Play" or "Email" buttons on keyboards? I've always found it easy enough to locate the requisite icon on the desktop, and behavior in that case is much more predictable.
I'll give props for macro recording (I have a programmable keypad that I find indispensible), but most of their other criteria I find quite backwards. I don't need a keyboard with an LCD clock. I need a keyboard with keys.
Hear Hear! Been using an Advantage for 6 months, and it still boggles the mind that other keyboards are still made with the keys so far apart and at that horrible staggered angle. The thumb keys are also glorious, removing the need to move my hands for pretty much anything and significantly reducing the ridiculous amoung of pinky-work most keyboards require. I also very much appreciate a split keyboard that has the 6 on the right half rather than the left.
The arrow keys take some getting used to (though once you do, there are some nice vi-style benefits for screen navigation), and the keyboard can make some games with hard-coded controls completely unplayable (e.g. WASD (LH) and space bar (RH) together in a game that also requires mouse control), but overall a very nice board.
Still need to buy a second one for home.
2)Cause little to no change at all at the cost of thousands of what will probably be taxpayer dollars.
You're new here, aren't you? I don't think anything has cost only thousands of taxpayer dollars since you could buy a loaf of bread for a penny and get change.
First Post! But I posted it with Vista, so it may actually show up a bit later.