Here's the write-up by Computer People which did the study. It's still not great, nothing written about methodology or even where the study was done, but this should have been TFA instead of the lame Welsh newspaper article.
If Google wants the information, Google should do the work.
Google _is_ doing the work. Hello! In the article yesterday, one publisher complained that publishers don't even necessarily know what books they've published, but Google is going through large collections, finding and notifying publishers, and scanning millions of books. Tell me again who's not doing the work.
What TFA does mention, but kind of glosses over, is that copyright holders have to opt-out of having their works marked as 'not copyrighted'. It seems that Google is being a little disingenuous.
IANAL, but have done some research into copyright law. Copyright exists not only to protect the author/publisher, but also to provide legal access to information. By copyrighting a book, the publisher has agreed to allow fair use of the material. Google is allowing opt-out as a courtesy to publishers, not through any legal obligation.
Copyright law exists for two reasons. First, it provides the author and/or publisher with certain rights which allows them a profit. But it then, and maybe more importantly in this case, provides the consumer with certain rights regarding the use of copyrighted material. If copyright locked down material to the extent that many people believe it would be difficult to gain any benefit from access to information. These consumer rights are usually referred to as "fair use." Two major examples of fair use are libraries and book reviews.
IANAL, but in TFA, a lawyer opined that Google also had a strong case for protection under fair use. No it's not the same as a brick and mortar library, but Google traded off having a limited number of copies of a book for limiting a clients access within a book. Book reviews have long been held to be protected by fair-use and they often quote long passages of a book. Google provides the opportunity to look inside a book without mediation by a reviewer, but serves much the same function in helping the consumer decide whether the book is an important resource for them.
do a Google search on "failure" and look at what pops up first.
And your point is... ?
Let's be serious. All that Google is doing is consolidating the opinion of thousands of websites and coming up with the obvious: for a lot of people our president epitomizes failure. Nobody hacked Google to get that result.
It looks like a nuisance claim which Google was right to ignore.
First, as has been pointed out elsewhere they didn't even register the domain. No, they didn't register it as gmail.co.uk either. So it would appear that their version of "g-mail" isn't a web application. So no infringement there.
Second, in TFA it keeps referring to g-mail with a hyphen. Has anyone ever seen Google use a hyphen? I haven't.
So its not the same type of product and its not named the same. These folks are just gold diggers and I'll bet the case gets thrown out.
Back when I lived in an African village, 1989-92, we had a kerosene refrigerator. All I had to do was trim the wick occasionally and keep feeding it fossil fuel and it kept things cold/frozen for me. A co-worker of mine in another location converted his to burn butane by putting a bunsen burner in place of the kerosene wick.
Although we certainly used our fridge for food and ice, it was also very important to refrigerate meds for the clinic in our village.
When you say you were "dubbed" the Technology Coordinator, does that mean you were already working at the school? In what capacity? If not, what is your background in education?
How large is the school? How big are your labs? What's your bandwidth to the internet? What is your tech budget?
My background: Programmer and IT manager during the '80s, HS teacher and technology coordinator during the '90s, graduate work in ed tech from '99 to '02, and since then back to just being a teacher. (The job opened up close to home and we weren't in a position to move.) So I speak with some authority.
First, it sounds like you need to figure out what they hired you to accomplish. Who hired you? How did they describe what they wanted you to do? Do they have your back? K12 means that you are working with multiple principals. Do they understand the nature of your job? My experience has been that while principals may not be tech-savvy, they are aware of the potential benefits of technology and are results-driven. They won't get in your way if you are even half-competent. Which leaves the "coworkers"; who the heck are they anyway? Is your department large enough to have multiple techs? Or are you referring to teachers? Teachers are not your coworkers! They _are_ your customers! They may have liked the old guy, but it sounds like they also ended up with very low expectations of what he could do for them. "Just give us computers and change our ink occasionally!"
Once you've figured out what they hired you to accomplish, you've got to make sure you do that at the least, but you should do more than just that. Its the vision thing... and sorry it has nothing to do with Linux or Apple or M$. Do you understand the teaching/learning process so well that you fairly burst with ideas of how to use technology in curriculum/instruction? I've been in "computerized" classrooms where the technology actually hindered learning! Don't be the tail wagging the dog! Don't make people jump through so many hoops that they get tired and quit jumping.
Once you've established your vision, its time to start looking at applications which will allow you to begin implementing it. Go to Ed Tech conferences, invite company reps to come demo their offerings, talk to Technology Coordinators from other schools, shoulder tap some bright students to work with you. As I write this I realize I envy you! It sounds like you are basically starting from scratch, so about anything new you implement will be a big improvement over the old system. There's lots of good stuff out there, so don't reinvent the wheel. But don't overwhelm your customers.
For the record: here's the current state of technology at my small High School (135 students 9-12).
Network Novell servers, Windows XP work stations
Teacher Productivity Microsoft Office, PowerSchool/PowerGrade, MyLearningPlan and GroupWise.
Curriculum/InstructionStudents all issued Palm Tungsten E with keyboard and web-synch using PAAM from goknow. Also the HTE suite from goknow and PowerOne Graph from Infinity Software.
Student labs: 2 labs, 35 computers running driveshield and of course behind Border Manager on the network. Software includes MS Office, Inspiration, and Cognitive Tutor Algebra.
Parent isn't overrated, but rather a feeling shared by quite a few people
TFA isn't about "shared feelings", it's about interplanetary life and biological science. I read at 3, and don't particularly like to have to sift through comments of people who just don't like the topic. Who's forcing them to read it???
Certain concepts would be best taught using assembler language, but many modern programming techniques would be obscured by the details of the language. It would be easy to not see the forest for the trees, or in this case not see the module for the instructions.
I've been recommending (and teaching) c++ for several years now. Pascal was great, even Java has its good points. The main thing is whatever language is being used to introduce programming use it as an example language for the programming concepts which are being taught.
So that when things do eventually expire, that it's not until days later when the CPU has melted itself into the motherboard that I find out the cooling system broke just as silently as it ran.
Ironically, you've just hit on a strong point of passive cooling. Unless the laws of thermodynamics change suddenly, the cooling fins on the 300 will just keep doing their job. Forever! No motors to burn out or bearings that need lubing, just heat flowing through aluminum, I assume, and dissipating into the air around the computer. What could be simpler.
Well I RTFA and I can't believe that any article about the history of Moz/FF doesn't say anything about the cool little browser that started it all. I remember downloading Gecko in the fall of 1998 and being startled at the speed and simplicity it brought to the web. Yes, I also saw its shortcomings but I wasn't interested in an application suite. I just wanted a browser that rendered webpages quickly on an older computer and it did that wonderfully, thank you!
Then I kept upgrading through the milestone releases, m1 through m17, and then the point releases on the way to 1.0. A few of them had major bugs, but most of them were quite usable and features kept being added. Mozilla 1.0 was a good browser, but had become a bit bloated. I was looking forward to trying Netscape 6.0, but it turned out to be DOA. What a disappointment! Why/how netscape took gold (pun intended) and turned it into lead is the story that needs to be told.
So I stayed with Mozilla until Phoenix became available. I used both Mozilla and Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox until Firefox was approaching 1.0, by then Firefox was hands-down the best browser available and I haven't looked back since.
Be humble! Seek help when you need it. It sounds like you have a "can do" attitude which can take you a long way, but I can tell you from personal experience that an inexperienced person can spend a lot of time and resources on problems which a call to someone with a bit more experience could quickly resolve.
Be honest with your partners! It's real easy for us to position ourselves as gurus, but more difficult to be honest about our strengths and weaknesses. I've seen many shops where systems were poorly designed because the "tech guy" was unwilling to admit that they were in over their head.
she was retelling extremely sensitive stories about easily identifiable students and teachers, including things that students were telling her in private face-to-face meetings.
Did you RTFB? She claims and after reading through some of the blog I would agree that she was very careful to protect students' privacy. As a teacher myself, and former adjunct, her stories sound like the typical mix of frustration and admiration that teachers everywhere have for their students. She certainly makes a better attempt at protecting student anonymity than most faculty lounge conversations. She is not writing vitriolic diatribes, but is simply laughing and crying over human foibles.
Just glancing at their page, it looks like they've come up with some nice paradigms too eliminate browser clutter.
1)You can choose toolbars using a dropdown box.
2)Shortcuts can include multiple websites. For example, you can set "Home" to open multiple websites in a single click.
Granted governments are imperfect, but look at the record. You use the example of gasoline and paint. What is no longer in either of these? Lead! It wasn't enlightened self-interest which took the lead out saving millions of kids from brain-damage.
Or take the case of auto accidents. For decades Detroit couldn't sell safe cars. Few manufacturers tried and they failed. But 10s of thousands of people were being killed every year. So "Nanny" had to step in. The results were immediate and today with many more cars on the road, we have fewer deaths than we did in the '60s.
Examples are numerous. Sure some people are still going to try to win a Darwin Award, but don't blame the government just because it can't ensure the safety of every citizen. Remember, dead people have no rights.
Slashdot Mirror
There were no studies cited by this article...
Here's the write-up by Computer People which did the study. It's still not great, nothing written about methodology or even where the study was done, but this should have been TFA instead of the lame Welsh newspaper article.
If Google wants the information, Google should do the work.
Google _is_ doing the work. Hello! In the article yesterday, one publisher complained that publishers don't even necessarily know what books they've published, but Google is going through large collections, finding and notifying publishers, and scanning millions of books. Tell me again who's not doing the work.
What TFA does mention, but kind of glosses over, is that copyright holders have to opt-out of having their works marked as 'not copyrighted'. It seems that Google is being a little disingenuous.
IANAL, but have done some research into copyright law. Copyright exists not only to protect the author/publisher, but also to provide legal access to information. By copyrighting a book, the publisher has agreed to allow fair use of the material. Google is allowing opt-out as a courtesy to publishers, not through any legal obligation.
Copyright law exists for two reasons. First, it provides the author and/or publisher with certain rights which allows them a profit. But it then, and maybe more importantly in this case, provides the consumer with certain rights regarding the use of copyrighted material. If copyright locked down material to the extent that many people believe it would be difficult to gain any benefit from access to information. These consumer rights are usually referred to as "fair use." Two major examples of fair use are libraries and book reviews.
IANAL, but in TFA, a lawyer opined that Google also had a strong case for protection under fair use. No it's not the same as a brick and mortar library, but Google traded off having a limited number of copies of a book for limiting a clients access within a book. Book reviews have long been held to be protected by fair-use and they often quote long passages of a book. Google provides the opportunity to look inside a book without mediation by a reviewer, but serves much the same function in helping the consumer decide whether the book is an important resource for them.
This could have a strong impact on the restaurant industry in the mountain west where many cafes rely on roadkill as their source of meat.
I can say "Campus green and tow'ring trees" and you understand I'm talking about a green campus.
Unless of course your college has a central park-like area in which case you're actually talking about a green modified by campus.
do a Google search on "failure" and look at what pops up first.
... ?
And your point is
Let's be serious. All that Google is doing is consolidating the opinion of thousands of websites and coming up with the obvious: for a lot of people our president epitomizes failure. Nobody hacked Google to get that result.
It looks like a nuisance claim which Google was right to ignore.
First, as has been pointed out elsewhere they didn't even register the domain. No, they didn't register it as gmail.co.uk either. So it would appear that their version of "g-mail" isn't a web application. So no infringement there.
Second, in TFA it keeps referring to g-mail with a hyphen. Has anyone ever seen Google use a hyphen? I haven't.
So its not the same type of product and its not named the same. These folks are just gold diggers and I'll bet the case gets thrown out.
Back when I lived in an African village, 1989-92, we had a kerosene refrigerator. All I had to do was trim the wick occasionally and keep feeding it fossil fuel and it kept things cold/frozen for me. A co-worker of mine in another location converted his to burn butane by putting a bunsen burner in place of the kerosene wick.
Although we certainly used our fridge for food and ice, it was also very important to refrigerate meds for the clinic in our village.
Don't try to run it under wine, port it using wine. Think Port Wine!
WINE
When you say you were "dubbed" the Technology Coordinator, does that mean you were already working at the school? In what capacity? If not, what is your background in education?
How large is the school? How big are your labs? What's your bandwidth to the internet? What is your tech budget?
My background: Programmer and IT manager during the '80s, HS teacher and technology coordinator during the '90s, graduate work in ed tech from '99 to '02, and since then back to just being a teacher. (The job opened up close to home and we weren't in a position to move.) So I speak with some authority.
First, it sounds like you need to figure out what they hired you to accomplish. Who hired you? How did they describe what they wanted you to do? Do they have your back? K12 means that you are working with multiple principals. Do they understand the nature of your job? My experience has been that while principals may not be tech-savvy, they are aware of the potential benefits of technology and are results-driven. They won't get in your way if you are even half-competent. Which leaves the "coworkers"; who the heck are they anyway? Is your department large enough to have multiple techs? Or are you referring to teachers? Teachers are not your coworkers! They _are_ your customers! They may have liked the old guy, but it sounds like they also ended up with very low expectations of what he could do for them. "Just give us computers and change our ink occasionally!"
Once you've figured out what they hired you to accomplish, you've got to make sure you do that at the least, but you should do more than just that. Its the vision thing... and sorry it has nothing to do with Linux or Apple or M$. Do you understand the teaching/learning process so well that you fairly burst with ideas of how to use technology in curriculum/instruction? I've been in "computerized" classrooms where the technology actually hindered learning! Don't be the tail wagging the dog! Don't make people jump through so many hoops that they get tired and quit jumping.
Once you've established your vision, its time to start looking at applications which will allow you to begin implementing it. Go to Ed Tech conferences, invite company reps to come demo their offerings, talk to Technology Coordinators from other schools, shoulder tap some bright students to work with you. As I write this I realize I envy you! It sounds like you are basically starting from scratch, so about anything new you implement will be a big improvement over the old system. There's lots of good stuff out there, so don't reinvent the wheel. But don't overwhelm your customers.
For the record: here's the current state of technology at my small High School (135 students 9-12).
Network
Novell servers, Windows XP work stations
Teacher Productivity
Microsoft Office, PowerSchool/PowerGrade, MyLearningPlan and GroupWise.
Curriculum/InstructionStudents all issued Palm Tungsten E with keyboard and web-synch using PAAM from goknow. Also the HTE suite from goknow and PowerOne Graph from Infinity Software.
Student labs: 2 labs, 35 computers running driveshield and of course behind Border Manager on the network. Software includes MS Office, Inspiration, and Cognitive Tutor Algebra.
Google Scholar provides links to some of Heber-Katz' articles. Here's the one on the Scarless Heart.
Parent isn't overrated, but rather a feeling shared by quite a few people
TFA isn't about "shared feelings", it's about interplanetary life and biological science. I read at 3, and don't particularly like to have to sift through comments of people who just don't like the topic. Who's forcing them to read it???
Certain concepts would be best taught using assembler language, but many modern programming techniques would be obscured by the details of the language. It would be easy to not see the forest for the trees, or in this case not see the module for the instructions.
I've been recommending (and teaching) c++ for several years now. Pascal was great, even Java has its good points. The main thing is whatever language is being used to introduce programming use it as an example language for the programming concepts which are being taught.
So that when things do eventually expire, that it's not until days later when the CPU has melted itself into the motherboard that I find out the cooling system broke just as silently as it ran.
Ironically, you've just hit on a strong point of passive cooling. Unless the laws of thermodynamics change suddenly, the cooling fins on the 300 will just keep doing their job. Forever! No motors to burn out or bearings that need lubing, just heat flowing through aluminum, I assume, and dissipating into the air around the computer. What could be simpler.
111 broken programs and 3 working ones, or why does 2 + 2 = 5986?
Steve Oualline
No Starch Press
Well I RTFA and I can't believe that any article about the history of Moz/FF doesn't say anything about the cool little browser that started it all. I remember downloading Gecko in the fall of 1998 and being startled at the speed and simplicity it brought to the web. Yes, I also saw its shortcomings but I wasn't interested in an application suite. I just wanted a browser that rendered webpages quickly on an older computer and it did that wonderfully, thank you!
Then I kept upgrading through the milestone releases, m1 through m17, and then the point releases on the way to 1.0. A few of them had major bugs, but most of them were quite usable and features kept being added. Mozilla 1.0 was a good browser, but had become a bit bloated. I was looking forward to trying Netscape 6.0, but it turned out to be DOA. What a disappointment! Why/how netscape took gold (pun intended) and turned it into lead is the story that needs to be told.
So I stayed with Mozilla until Phoenix became available. I used both Mozilla and Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox until Firefox was approaching 1.0, by then Firefox was hands-down the best browser available and I haven't looked back since.
And that's different from the way their local search works now how???
The only thing I can figure out is that I get to say I'm looking for Starbucks or McDonalds instead of it popping up when I don't want it.
Be humble! Seek help when you need it. It sounds like you have a "can do" attitude which can take you a long way, but I can tell you from personal experience that an inexperienced person can spend a lot of time and resources on problems which a call to someone with a bit more experience could quickly resolve. Be honest with your partners! It's real easy for us to position ourselves as gurus, but more difficult to be honest about our strengths and weaknesses. I've seen many shops where systems were poorly designed because the "tech guy" was unwilling to admit that they were in over their head.
she was retelling extremely sensitive stories about easily identifiable students and teachers, including things that students were telling her in private face-to-face meetings.
Did you RTFB? She claims and after reading through some of the blog I would agree that she was very careful to protect students' privacy. As a teacher myself, and former adjunct, her stories sound like the typical mix of frustration and admiration that teachers everywhere have for their students. She certainly makes a better attempt at protecting student anonymity than most faculty lounge conversations. She is not writing vitriolic diatribes, but is simply laughing and crying over human foibles.
How very informative!
Just glancing at their page, it looks like they've come up with some nice paradigms too eliminate browser clutter. 1)You can choose toolbars using a dropdown box. 2)Shortcuts can include multiple websites. For example, you can set "Home" to open multiple websites in a single click.
Goverments are not good nannies.
What's your alternative?
Granted governments are imperfect, but look at the record. You use the example of gasoline and paint. What is no longer in either of these? Lead! It wasn't enlightened self-interest which took the lead out saving millions of kids from brain-damage.
Or take the case of auto accidents. For decades Detroit couldn't sell safe cars. Few manufacturers tried and they failed. But 10s of thousands of people were being killed every year. So "Nanny" had to step in. The results were immediate and today with many more cars on the road, we have fewer deaths than we did in the '60s.
Examples are numerous. Sure some people are still going to try to win a Darwin Award, but don't blame the government just because it can't ensure the safety of every citizen. Remember, dead people have no rights.