professors' salaries are bad. There is a very very good incentive for a professor to charge a lot for their book. It is rare for the assigned textbook to have been written by the professor. Even in the exception, professors are unlikely to receive more than a couple of dollars for each book sold, or say $100 for a typical class. That's not a large supplement to a professor's salary, especially given that it takes a year or more to write a book.
Happened to me in OSX. I killed it, using a force-quit operation, and it seemed to be fine the second time. Since it lacks plugins, though, it's hard to see why anyone would use it when safari-3 is out, and is so much faster. (Yes, I like the "places" idea, but that's not enough to encourage me to use something that may freeze up my system.)
Although this is a bit off-topic, I'm wondering about whether OO has the basics right yet.
Every few months I download the latest and greatest OO, and try to load up a random MSWord file. I have never seen OO handle bullets correctly. And this is for MSWord files created on a whole host of Windows and OSX machines, probably with different locale settings, and also using a variety of MSWord releases.
Not one single time has OO represented bullets correctly as, well, bullets.
So, this is a question to my/. brothers and sisters -- have you experienced an OSX version of OO that handles MSWord files properly? (Please note that I'm speaking about OO here, not NeoOffice. I want to stick to software that's in the mainstream and that therefore will be updated quickly, not a side project that follows a possibly outdated branch.)
Whether this make business sense, only time will tell. As a money-losing Sun investor, I sure hope so. As a two-decade Sun purchaser, it's hard to see this as the sort of innovation for which Sun was once known.
http://oestrem.com/thingstwice/?p=65 provides an informative comparison of the aesthetics of LaTeX, Word, and OO Writer. When beauty is the goal, LaTeX wins.
A key issue, in contrasting PHP with RoR, is deployment.
Deploying PHP is easy in most environments, perhaps as much because of its age as because of its inherent character. I work in an academic environment, in which all professors and students have the ability to make PHP sites. Each of my personal computers also lets me make PHP sites with no difficulty. Deployment amounts to no more than a file copy, perhaps with a change of file permissions. (I won't mention the database work, because of course it is the same for all schemes, PHP, RoR, etc.)
But, unless you're using a host that has been set up to server RoR, deployment may involve changing Apache configuration files, compiling new Apache modules, etc. Such changes require root access (not available to folks sharing machines), and have the potential to break the other sites on the machine.
I think there is a reason why the RoR tutorials, books, and promoters so seldom mention deployment: it is difficult for many people in non-commercial environments that are not set up for RoR.
Oh, and one more thing. All of this fiddling with apache is boring to those who have set out to create websites. Learning Ruby to do RoR is quite fun, actually, and it has the advantage that it lets you use Ruby for other tasks as well. But learning apache doesn't help you with anything but apache; it's a bit of a single-lane road.
RoR has a sort of elegance about it, and you gain a great deal of functionality from the system (e.g. for logins, etc.), and so it is a terrific tool for rapid development, particularly of an evolving idea for a site. It sounds crazy, but the optimal path may be to write the site in RoR and then rewrite it in PHP, so that deployment will be easy and so that the site will scale well[*].
* -- I've not mentioned scaling and speed because these issues are covered in other posts here. Basically, RoR is not impressive on either.
Re:redraws involve headache-inducing white flashes
on
Gran Paradiso Alpha 3
·
· Score: 1
I like Camino, Safari, and Opera, but I have come to rely upon a variety of FireFox plugins, so the aforementioned aren't really options.
redraws involve headache-inducing white flashes
on
Gran Paradiso Alpha 3
·
· Score: 1
On OSX, Gran Paradiso Alpha 3 had an annoying habit of flashing a white screen before redrawing a page. To test this, just go to
http://www.mozilla.org/products/
and click from tab to tab.
One can only hope that this won't occur in the release versions, because it is really quite annoying.
To save you some time, here's how it works: you click through to tell it you want an OSX version, then you tell it powerpc, then you tell it English. Up pops a form asking you what system (um, I said OSX), what version (well, duh, I got here by asking for this new version), then what language (um, English, as I just clicked), and... presto... it's not available. Try other versions, languages,... oh, jeeze, these are also not available.
Yeah, whatever. I think maybe I'll just wait a while -- maybe a year or a decade -- until it has a normal OSX interface and it's actually available and (one hopes) working.
Meantime, MSWord is really quite compatible with MSWord, so I'll continue to use that. And LaTeX is still here, for technical writing.
Thanks for the comment. It was very informative. I am, in fact, looking into both Rails and Django. I just wish I didn't have to install things (on my own machine) or beg the sysadmin to install things (on a deployment machine) to make test sites.
In case it's of interest to anyone on the thread, e.g. in case it might inspire an informative comment such as the one to which I am now replying, my preference so far is for Django, partly because I like the "feel" of python, and partly because I like the way the admin interface will let me develop the site at the same time colleagues start inserting data.
PS. regarding PHP, a 4.x version is installed on every machine to which I have access. I assume there's significant work involved in setting it up, but the point is that I didn't need to do any of that and -- most significantly -- I didn't have to beg/pay a sysadmin to do it. I agree that PHP is annoying, and this underlies my participation in the present thread.
Re:Equivalent framework for Python
on
Rails Recipes
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Well, there is an excuse left, if you're a PHP programmer looking for a replacement (be that django or rails) -- it's the issue of how to deploy the sucker.
I might be like some others reading this thread. I'm familiar with PHP and I'd like to switch up to something more elegant.
But there's a roadblock when it comes to deployment.
With PHP, it's simple -- your test machine is probably set up already, and your deployment webserver almost certainly is. With Rails and Django, you're in a spot of trouble, since it's quite likely that neither your development machine nor your deployment webserver is set up. It's not trivial to just install "mod" modules to get Rails and Django to work, and you have to own root permissions to do that.
So, a typical user can start creating PHP sites easily, but these wonderful frameworks are a bit difficult. Is it worth the effort? Well, I've only looked into Django in any detail, and I think the answer is "yes", but I'd sure love to see the folks who are writing the Django book drop whatever chapter they are writing and move on to the deployment chapter. That test server they keep talking about is just not very helpful. I need something that I can leave running (efficiently) so that I can get user feedback on my site. The little server they provide, and describe carefully in their document, it's a screwdriver and I need a hammer.
Finally, at version 2, FireFox obeys system-wide key bindings on my Macintosh. This makes it into a usable application, e.g.I can use control-A to go to the start of a text-input box, just like on all other applications.
However, it's not completely perfect... it crashed as I was typing the first version of this post:-(
This is the most informative posting on this topic, and that's saying a lot, because the quality of discussion in this whole thread is uncharacteristically high. (Hm, maybe the posters are all grad students or former grad students, thus proving that a benefit is learning how to do good posts to/.)
Since some sensible things are being said on this thread, and since there is evidently a lack of uniformity about the meanings of words, I am tempted to propose something a bit un-slashdotty -- provide literature citations. Resolving issues such as this, which partly hinge on the precise meanings of words (even the word "precise" itself) is something for which the conventional literature is rather effective.
The parent suggests that women are rare in "most any science department", but that's not true unless you think "science" means "Physics". Visit any undergraduate Biology department and look around -- you'll see that male students are as rare as women are in Physics departments. You'll also have some fun arguments if you claim that science=physics.
1. It seems to be impossible to change the default search engine. I changed it from Yahoo to Google, but the change did not "stick". I've no idea why. But, maybe this is a moot point, since I can't see OSX users switching to Flock.
2. Like FireFox, Flock does not understand OSX key bindings (e.g. I just typed control-A to go to the start of this paragraph to insert a "p" tag), so there seems to be little point in bothering with it.
There are several browsers that follow the OSX interface guidelines, so Flock would have to offer something pretty useful to make me switch.
Isn't science the study of nature? Designing good SQL might be an engineering activity, akin to designing good toothbrushes, but it's not at all related to science.
Some interesting historical insights are provided in Mark Gottlieb's essay The Arrogance Of Ignorance, in the 2006-02-18 issue of Industry Week. A quote: A new generation of the serenely clueless is ready, willing and able to destroy your company.
The finder is certainly a weak point about OSX. I seldom use it. To my mind, it's a lot easier to just use a terminal and type commands to move around, copy things, etc. Directory listings with "ls (pattern)" are easier than with the finder, unless you like scrolling up and down. Heck, you can get the double-clicking effect by the "open" command.
The worst thing about the finder is the inability to do a "create file here" operation. Why am I allowed to make a directory but not a file?
Really, what's the point of the finder? Does anyone with unix experience use it?
Specific. The market is flooded with wonderful resources. Why not put the ball in the students' court? Give as the first assignment the task of identifying a couple of reasonable writing resources, and discussing their relative merits? That way, when you hand back the first assignment you can summarize their ideas. This also tells them, from the start, that you care about this.
General.
The answer depends on class size.
In a small class, the best scheme is to refer them to some standard materials (Strunk and White is effective and popular) and to get them writing. Then mark up their work with individual-based hints. Probably you'll find it helpful to invent a key system, e.g. I write an encircled T in the margin to indicate a weak transition near an underlined spot in the text. (After you've graded a few papers, your key system will solidify. If you supplement it with examples, you'll have a guide that you can hand the students on the first day, and it will have the advantage of being calibrated to the particular class at hand.)
It's also a good idea to have office hours, since sometimes a quick example can save the day... but you'll need to distribute such help fairly, so that one individual doesn't take time from all the others.
(For tiny classes, you can suggest that they hand in work a second time, after following your editorial advice. But I doubt that anyone teaches such classes; this is more for one-on-one work with graduate students.)
For a large class, say hundreds of students, then clearly your hands are tied. The simple answer is that you're not going to be able to help them very much. My advice is to point out writing resources on the first day, and then to simply grade the work. The larger the class, the briefer must be your comments on the writing. You may find it helpful to just mark up the English of the first paragraph, for example. You may not have time to do even this, so you may have to just assign a grade for communication with no explanation... you have to wonder why they are paying tuition for such an overcrowded school, however.
Fail those who don't learn to write, as you would fail those who do not learn the relevant engineering skills, because writing reports is a relevant skill.
Nobody is happy to fail students, but it's not all on you, mate. The Registrar let them into your school without the requisite skills. The President together with the Dean set the faculty hiring practices that led to an overfull class. You can't work 24/7.
Slashdot Mirror
Happened to me in OSX. I killed it, using a force-quit operation, and it seemed to be fine the second time. Since it lacks plugins, though, it's hard to see why anyone would use it when safari-3 is out, and is so much faster. (Yes, I like the "places" idea, but that's not enough to encourage me to use something that may freeze up my system.)
Although this is a bit off-topic, I'm wondering about whether OO has the basics right yet.
/. brothers and sisters -- have you experienced an OSX version of OO that handles MSWord files properly? (Please note that I'm speaking about OO here, not NeoOffice. I want to stick to software that's in the mainstream and that therefore will be updated quickly, not a side project that follows a possibly outdated branch.)
Every few months I download the latest and greatest OO, and try to load up a random MSWord file. I have never seen OO handle bullets correctly. And this is for MSWord files created on a whole host of Windows and OSX machines, probably with different locale settings, and also using a variety of MSWord releases.
Not one single time has OO represented bullets correctly as, well, bullets.
So, this is a question to my
Whether this make business sense, only time will tell. As a money-losing Sun investor, I sure hope so. As a two-decade Sun purchaser, it's hard to see this as the sort of innovation for which Sun was once known.
http://oestrem.com/thingstwice/?p=65 provides an informative comparison of the aesthetics of LaTeX, Word, and OO Writer. When beauty is the goal, LaTeX wins.
A key issue, in contrasting PHP with RoR, is deployment.
Deploying PHP is easy in most environments, perhaps as much because of its age as because of its inherent character. I work in an academic environment, in which all professors and students have the ability to make PHP sites. Each of my personal computers also lets me make PHP sites with no difficulty. Deployment amounts to no more than a file copy, perhaps with a change of file permissions. (I won't mention the database work, because of course it is the same for all schemes, PHP, RoR, etc.)
But, unless you're using a host that has been set up to server RoR, deployment may involve changing Apache configuration files, compiling new Apache modules, etc. Such changes require root access (not available to folks sharing machines), and have the potential to break the other sites on the machine.
I think there is a reason why the RoR tutorials, books, and promoters so seldom mention deployment: it is difficult for many people in non-commercial environments that are not set up for RoR.
Oh, and one more thing. All of this fiddling with apache is boring to those who have set out to create websites. Learning Ruby to do RoR is quite fun, actually, and it has the advantage that it lets you use Ruby for other tasks as well. But learning apache doesn't help you with anything but apache; it's a bit of a single-lane road.
RoR has a sort of elegance about it, and you gain a great deal of functionality from the system (e.g. for logins, etc.), and so it is a terrific tool for rapid development, particularly of an evolving idea for a site. It sounds crazy, but the optimal path may be to write the site in RoR and then rewrite it in PHP, so that deployment will be easy and so that the site will scale well[*].
* -- I've not mentioned scaling and speed because these issues are covered in other posts here. Basically, RoR is not impressive on either.
I like Camino, Safari, and Opera, but I have come to rely upon a variety of FireFox plugins, so the aforementioned aren't really options.
On OSX, Gran Paradiso Alpha 3 had an annoying habit of flashing a white screen before redrawing a page. To test this, just go to http://www.mozilla.org/products/ and click from tab to tab.
One can only hope that this won't occur in the release versions, because it is really quite annoying.
I second that. R is the way to go for a scientist unless they have a difficulty typing and need the pointy-clicky stuff that Office provides.
To save you some time, here's how it works: you click through to tell it you want an OSX version, then you tell it powerpc, then you tell it English. Up pops a form asking you what system (um, I said OSX), what version (well, duh, I got here by asking for this new version), then what language (um, English, as I just clicked), and ... presto ... it's not available. Try other versions, languages, ... oh, jeeze, these are also not available.
Yeah, whatever. I think maybe I'll just wait a while -- maybe a year or a decade -- until it has a normal OSX interface and it's actually available and (one hopes) working.
Meantime, MSWord is really quite compatible with MSWord, so I'll continue to use that. And LaTeX is still here, for technical writing.
Thanks for the comment. It was very informative. I am, in fact, looking into both Rails and Django. I just wish I didn't have to install things (on my own machine) or beg the sysadmin to install things (on a deployment machine) to make test sites.
In case it's of interest to anyone on the thread, e.g. in case it might inspire an informative comment such as the one to which I am now replying, my preference so far is for Django, partly because I like the "feel" of python, and partly because I like the way the admin interface will let me develop the site at the same time colleagues start inserting data.
PS. regarding PHP, a 4.x version is installed on every machine to which I have access. I assume there's significant work involved in setting it up, but the point is that I didn't need to do any of that and -- most significantly -- I didn't have to beg/pay a sysadmin to do it. I agree that PHP is annoying, and this underlies my participation in the present thread.
Well, there is an excuse left, if you're a PHP programmer looking for a replacement (be that django or rails) -- it's the issue of how to deploy the sucker.
I might be like some others reading this thread. I'm familiar with PHP and I'd like to switch up to something more elegant.
But there's a roadblock when it comes to deployment.
With PHP, it's simple -- your test machine is probably set up already, and your deployment webserver almost certainly is. With Rails and Django, you're in a spot of trouble, since it's quite likely that neither your development machine nor your deployment webserver is set up. It's not trivial to just install "mod" modules to get Rails and Django to work, and you have to own root permissions to do that.
So, a typical user can start creating PHP sites easily, but these wonderful frameworks are a bit difficult. Is it worth the effort? Well, I've only looked into Django in any detail, and I think the answer is "yes", but I'd sure love to see the folks who are writing the Django book drop whatever chapter they are writing and move on to the deployment chapter. That test server they keep talking about is just not very helpful. I need something that I can leave running (efficiently) so that I can get user feedback on my site. The little server they provide, and describe carefully in their document, it's a screwdriver and I need a hammer.
Finally, at version 2, FireFox obeys system-wide key bindings on my Macintosh. This makes it into a usable application, e.g.I can use control-A to go to the start of a text-input box, just like on all other applications.
However, it's not completely perfect ... it crashed as I was typing the first version of this post :-(
This is the most informative posting on this topic, and that's saying a lot, because the quality of discussion in this whole thread is uncharacteristically high. (Hm, maybe the posters are all grad students or former grad students, thus proving that a benefit is learning how to do good posts to /.)
Since some sensible things are being said on this thread, and since there is evidently a lack of uniformity about the meanings of words, I am tempted to propose something a bit un-slashdotty -- provide literature citations. Resolving issues such as this, which partly hinge on the precise meanings of words (even the word "precise" itself) is something for which the conventional literature is rather effective.
Illustrator: expensive Inkscape: free
The parent suggests that women are rare in "most any science department", but that's not true unless you think "science" means "Physics". Visit any undergraduate Biology department and look around -- you'll see that male students are as rare as women are in Physics departments. You'll also have some fun arguments if you claim that science=physics.
Give the boy credit, for planning to devote his time to charity work.
1. It seems to be impossible to change the default search engine. I changed it from Yahoo to Google, but the change did not "stick". I've no idea why. But, maybe this is a moot point, since I can't see OSX users switching to Flock.
2. Like FireFox, Flock does not understand OSX key bindings (e.g. I just typed control-A to go to the start of this paragraph to insert a "p" tag), so there seems to be little point in bothering with it.
There are several browsers that follow the OSX interface guidelines, so Flock would have to offer something pretty useful to make me switch.
Isn't science the study of nature? Designing good SQL might be an engineering activity, akin to designing good toothbrushes, but it's not at all related to science.
Some interesting historical insights are provided in Mark Gottlieb's essay The Arrogance Of Ignorance, in the 2006-02-18 issue of Industry Week. A quote: A new generation of the serenely clueless is ready, willing and able to destroy your company.
(Average of 1 Customer Reviews)
The worst thing about the finder is the inability to do a "create file here" operation. Why am I allowed to make a directory but not a file?
Really, what's the point of the finder? Does anyone with unix experience use it?
Specific. The market is flooded with wonderful resources. Why not put the ball in the students' court? Give as the first assignment the task of identifying a couple of reasonable writing resources, and discussing their relative merits? That way, when you hand back the first assignment you can summarize their ideas. This also tells them, from the start, that you care about this.
General. The answer depends on class size.
In a small class, the best scheme is to refer them to some standard materials (Strunk and White is effective and popular) and to get them writing. Then mark up their work with individual-based hints. Probably you'll find it helpful to invent a key system, e.g. I write an encircled T in the margin to indicate a weak transition near an underlined spot in the text. (After you've graded a few papers, your key system will solidify. If you supplement it with examples, you'll have a guide that you can hand the students on the first day, and it will have the advantage of being calibrated to the particular class at hand.)
It's also a good idea to have office hours, since sometimes a quick example can save the day ... but you'll need to distribute such help fairly, so that one individual doesn't take time from all the others.
(For tiny classes, you can suggest that they hand in work a second time, after following your editorial advice. But I doubt that anyone teaches such classes; this is more for one-on-one work with graduate students.)
For a large class, say hundreds of students, then clearly your hands are tied. The simple answer is that you're not going to be able to help them very much. My advice is to point out writing resources on the first day, and then to simply grade the work. The larger the class, the briefer must be your comments on the writing. You may find it helpful to just mark up the English of the first paragraph, for example. You may not have time to do even this, so you may have to just assign a grade for communication with no explanation ... you have to wonder why they are paying tuition for such an overcrowded school, however.
Fail those who don't learn to write, as you would fail those who do not learn the relevant engineering skills, because writing reports is a relevant skill. Nobody is happy to fail students, but it's not all on you, mate. The Registrar let them into your school without the requisite skills. The President together with the Dean set the faculty hiring practices that led to an overfull class. You can't work 24/7.
The Globe and Mail newspaper today has an article about growing meat in a jar. Test products so far taste like "jelly on fabric" ... yum ...
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM .20060327.wxmeat27/BNStory/Science/home