Much of it isn't in Java yet (after years of engineering and more years of marketing). Why not? Java not faster than a dll? Or Java just too dang expensive to implement?
The fact that Y! can pull slow scripts out and re-code them in C++ as mod_php extensions lets you focus your heavy coders where they are most needed.
As "Battlestar Galactica" is about a lot more than space battles, "Caprica" will be as much family drama as sci-fi tale.
It is just me, or isn't there enough family drama on TV? Why can't we have more Space Battles??? I mean with quad dual cores for less than the cost of a compact car and the effects shipping as presets in most 3D packages, why not a space battle every show? At least 50/50?
From the UK's Open University. These folks spend over 1 million pounds on a course, with textbook, video, multimedia, etc.
They're working to release this as courses in Moodle format (which exports to IMS-LD) over the next year. Since these are "battleship"* lower division, high enrollment courses with top quality content, this may dramatically change the market of educational conten.
Britain's Open University has just announced an ambitious program spend £5.65 million putting its courseware on the Internet under a Creative Commons license
* Dr. Jason Cole, Keynote, Moodle Moot Savannah 2006
Actually, it's less of a redo than a clearing up of a few areas. A good deal of debate has to do with figuring out the best way to do something (such as what exaclty should be put in the alt tag for a student's profile image, etc.).
And yes, it is very important to test the commercial and other open source systems, the statements that various commercial systems make about being compliant may not born out in actual testing.
performance under load?
As reported here:
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2520
OSX has to this time had severe performance problems under load for Web applications, does it look like the improvements in this article will help?
Actually, I meant the quote on memcached as more or less an aside. If you read some of the other discussion on the referenced article it talks about how LJ is doing very large scale MySQL...and then talks about how they use memcached also.
"LJ relies pretty heavily on caching nowadays. None of the stuff in MySQL was quite what they needed, so they built memcached. Used by LJ, Slashdot, Wikipedia, others use it now. Original version in Perl, now written in C. Lots of O(1) operations inside make it quite fast. The client can do multi-server parallel fetching (kick ass!). They run multiple instances on boxes with more than 4GB RAM. They have a 90-93% hit rate on the cache."
If you want to do development, then you'll need to hire someone who understands the code, but Moodle runs 'out of the box' if you have someone who knows how to set up a webserver (most of the problems on the Moodle "Installation problems" forum are from folks who don't know how to set up Apache/IIS).
As an aside note, we've gone through two searchs for Blackboard Administrators where I work, neither time did we find someone with BB Admin experience in the search.
And being used at a number of US institutions (San Francisco State University, Humboldt State University, etc.) and worldwide, with large installations in New Zealand (NZVLE 45,000 students), a number of 10-20,000 student installations in Spain and France, the Open University of the UK is building out for 160,000 students next year, etc.
Evolution is the central organizing principle of biology. If you look in a reputable biology textbook, you will find this stated, likewise if you google it, you will find hundreds of prominant biologists and biological organizations stating it.
Linnaeus developed a classification scheme, not an organizing principle, evolution is the theory that explains the classifcations that Linnaeus discovered.
The reason biologists get upset about having creation 'science' taught as a 'competing theory' is that creation science has yet to generate a single testable, falsifiable, hypothesis, which is the first step to becoming a theory. As such creation science has not progressed to the hypothesis stage of the scientific process, it is trying to get over the finish line when it has not even crossed the starting line.
For a good read on why so many folks have a hard time dealing with the implications of evolution, I suggest reading Darwins Dangerous Idea, by Daniel Dennet, gives a good overview about why creationism rears its head every few decades and why the same old recycled hyperboles have such broad appeal.
from testing surgical procedures or drugs on monkeys to designing new antibiotics, there is quite a bit of care taken, and the testing and design of course relies on the central organizing principle of biology, much as engineering depends a good deal on gravity being reliable.
If creation 'science' contains any 'pure gold' ideas, they will be the result of entirely random processes; by defintition the ideas of creation science cannot be challenged and refined by natural evidence.
Which is really quite ironic if you think about it.
Given infinite time, we must have an infinite number of universes:).
Not to mention the exactly accurate account of the creation of this universe, along with an infinite number of variations that are slightly to horribly wrong 8-0.
And you wonder why the IDrs are so concerned about the long range implications of Mr. Darwin's realization...
Given infinite time, both the spontaneous emergence of life AND the spontaneous emergence of an intelligent designer who creates life in His Own Image(TM) are going to happen sometime:-).
Multimedia can result in great improvements in student learning, or it can severly impair learning, depending on how it is used & thanks to folks like Dr. Mayer there is good solid research that can be used for effective instructional design.
giving the benefit of the doubt, this shows that the NSA (what does that stand for?) installs software without doing a thorough code review and without checking what features are on or off.
So it begs the question what else the NSA (wasn't that the National Security Agency?) doesn't know about the code they are installing, something I would think even the rightest of wingers would be concerned about (who wrote that code and what other default settings were left in the 'on' position...).
Unless caused by accident or violence, death is caused by disease. We used to 'wear out' around age 37 200 years ago, on average, now, we average much longer greatly due to our fighting & sometimes defeating various diseases.
The ideal of regenerative medicine is that we could cure diseases caused by environmental stress, as well as ones caused by predators, parasites, and accidents.
If there was only one organ we needed to keep alive rather than the whole body, science might have an easier time solving the problems of the aging brain than the entire body.
IIRC, the 150 year number comes from the gradual buildup of proteins which clog synapses and cause Alzheimers. These build up at different rates in different people, however even at the best rate you get alzheimers by ~150 years. However, if we can prevent alzheimers and prevent brain tumors, then brains might be able to live much longer.
US ESC research* is limited to old lines contaminated with mouse cells and developed in the first years of the research.
If you look at the ASC 'applications' closely, you'll see that they are not very groundbreaking, especially when you look at how US research $$ have been artificially (e.g. by politicians rather than biologists & MDs) to ASC.
So most of 'data' on whether ESC could be effective has been hopeless skewed by political meddling, US biologists have been directed away from the kind of work that would give us the information required to have a clue whether ESC could provide revolutionary cures.**
*Bush's ESC 'funding' was a great move in political gamesmanship***, but a terrible one from a scientific point of view, the cell lines he allowed research on are unsuitable for developing any treatments for human trials as they can't be used on humans due to their being mixed with animal cells. This animal cell contanmination also makes them difficult to use in basic research as you have variables (the animal cells) you can't control for.
**Since most initial US research is federally funded, cutting off funds for a particular line of research dramatically limits what gets accomplished in that field. ***And given the fact that currently adult stem cell research is approaching 40 different applications and embryonic stem cell research has currently found, uhm, zero
To use a sports analogy, it is equivalent to making the Red Sox play the Mets naked and without gloves or bats, and then saying that since the Sox hit 0 home runs (without bats) the Mets must be better batters.
In any event, it is a false dichotomy, both lines of research are important, but they are not at all equivalent, one is pluripotent, the other totipotent.
And ironically, in order for ASC research to have a revolutionary effect, they'll need to find a way to create totipotent ASCs. In which case you have the same religious/political argument against ASCR as you have against ESCR.
Woo hoo.
The *only* thing not allowed in the U.S. is the creation of new embryonic stem cell lines (through the destruction of a fertilized embryo) using Federal funds.
IIRC, it is also illegal to use federal funds to create new lines from unfertilized eggs, e.g. via nuclear transfer.
Slashdot Mirror
https://signin.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?SignIn&co _partnerId=2
Much of it isn't in Java yet (after years of engineering and more years of marketing). Why not? Java not faster than a dll? Or Java just too dang expensive to implement?
The fact that Y! can pull slow scripts out and re-code them in C++ as mod_php extensions lets you focus your heavy coders where they are most needed.
Good article about it here
As "Battlestar Galactica" is about a lot more than space battles, "Caprica" will be as much family drama as sci-fi tale.
It is just me, or isn't there enough family drama on TV? Why can't we have more Space Battles??? I mean with quad dual cores for less than the cost of a compact car and the effects shipping as presets in most 3D packages, why not a space battle every show? At least 50/50?
Hmm, maybe a Spacebattles.com channel?
They're working to release this as courses in Moodle format (which exports to IMS-LD) over the next year. Since these are "battleship"* lower division, high enrollment courses with top quality content, this may dramatically change the market of educational conten.
More:
* Dr. Jason Cole, Keynote, Moodle Moot Savannah 2006
The OU's proposal is posted and discussed here:
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=40484
Actually, it's less of a redo than a clearing up of a few areas. A good deal of debate has to do with figuring out the best way to do something (such as what exaclty should be put in the alt tag for a student's profile image, etc.).
And yes, it is very important to test the commercial and other open source systems, the statements that various commercial systems make about being compliant may not born out in actual testing.
performance under load? As reported here: http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2520 OSX has to this time had severe performance problems under load for Web applications, does it look like the improvements in this article will help?
Actually, I meant the quote on memcached as more or less an aside. If you read some of the other discussion on the referenced article it talks about how LJ is doing very large scale MySQL...and then talks about how they use memcached also.
Funny, when I saw Zawodny at OSCON, IIRC the gist was that Yahoo used MySQL where it needs scale and Oracle where it needs superior data integrity?
m l. html (interesting discssion of how Livejournal scales:
More:
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/000593.ht
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/cat_mysql
"LJ relies pretty heavily on caching nowadays. None of the stuff in MySQL was quite what they needed, so they built memcached. Used by LJ, Slashdot, Wikipedia, others use it now. Original version in Perl, now written in C. Lots of O(1) operations inside make it quite fast. The client can do multi-server parallel fetching (kick ass!). They run multiple instances on boxes with more than 4GB RAM. They have a 90-93% hit rate on the cache."
before the treatment, for folks who have had long term damage?
From one of the 27 Moodle partners:
Moodle.com
If you want to do development, then you'll need to hire someone who understands the code, but Moodle runs 'out of the box' if you have someone who knows how to set up a webserver (most of the problems on the Moodle "Installation problems" forum are from folks who don't know how to set up Apache/IIS).
As an aside note, we've gone through two searchs for Blackboard Administrators where I work, neither time did we find someone with BB Admin experience in the search.
From Mark Aliers team. Gives you a wiki with access control, wysiwyg, and all that cool wiki stuff.
Actually there is a wysiwyg wiki in Moodle now, but the new one is better:-).
Get the beta here, (get 1.6 for the wiki) :
And tell Google to hire us all, I mean shouldn't google have an LMS too?
And being used at a number of US institutions (San Francisco State University, Humboldt State University, etc.) and worldwide, with large installations in New Zealand (NZVLE 45,000 students), a number of 10-20,000 student installations in Spain and France, the Open University of the UK is building out for 160,000 students next year, etc.
In fact the install base of Moodle rivals Blackboard/WebCT:
More http://www.moodle.org/stats
What people say about it
& sparklethedarkup, already!
he should have put the engineering and marketing into something like the electric Xootr.
17 mph and ~20lbs, now that was a scooter!
Great way to get funding to build a rocket and 4th dimensional binoculars...seems to be the great-grandparent's argument:-).
a couple of things:
Evolution is the central organizing principle of biology. If you look in a reputable biology textbook, you will find this stated, likewise if you google it, you will find hundreds of prominant biologists and biological organizations stating it.
Linnaeus developed a classification scheme, not an organizing principle, evolution is the theory that explains the classifcations that Linnaeus discovered.
The reason biologists get upset about having creation 'science' taught as a 'competing theory' is that creation science has yet to generate a single testable, falsifiable, hypothesis, which is the first step to becoming a theory. As such creation science has not progressed to the hypothesis stage of the scientific process, it is trying to get over the finish line when it has not even crossed the starting line.
For a good read on why so many folks have a hard time dealing with the implications of evolution, I suggest reading Darwins Dangerous Idea, by Daniel Dennet, gives a good overview about why creationism rears its head every few decades and why the same old recycled hyperboles have such broad appeal.
from testing surgical procedures or drugs on monkeys to designing new antibiotics, there is quite a bit of care taken, and the testing and design of course relies on the central organizing principle of biology, much as engineering depends a good deal on gravity being reliable.
If creation 'science' contains any 'pure gold' ideas, they will be the result of entirely random processes; by defintition the ideas of creation science cannot be challenged and refined by natural evidence.
Which is really quite ironic if you think about it.
Given infinite time, we must have an infinite number of universes:).
Not to mention the exactly accurate account of the creation of this universe, along with an infinite number of variations that are slightly to horribly wrong 8-0.
And you wonder why the IDrs are so concerned about the long range implications of Mr. Darwin's realization...
Given infinite time, both the spontaneous emergence of life AND the spontaneous emergence of an intelligent designer who creates life in His Own Image(TM) are going to happen sometime:-).
Dr. Richard Mayer has done extensive research on the effect of offtopic multimedia thrown in to eLearning projects(cognitive overload).
He wrote a great introductory book (with Ruth Colvin ClarK) on how to use multimedia to improve student learning, rather than hinder it.
For a good look at an online course done pretty much right (at least based on current, peer reviewed research) see the WCLN's Flow course on water resource use & river management (click the login as guest button).
And see the adaptation notes for the discussion of the research backing the course design.
Multimedia can result in great improvements in student learning, or it can severly impair learning, depending on how it is used & thanks to folks like Dr. Mayer there is good solid research that can be used for effective instructional design.
I think I relized that point depended on a false dichtomy, and treated it accordingly.
I'll take the 'live forever option without the ant analogy' option, thanks!
PS if you take a look at John S. Lewis' work (such as Mining the Sky) it may help you get over Malthus.
giving the benefit of the doubt, this shows that the NSA (what does that stand for?) installs software without doing a thorough code review and without checking what features are on or off.
So it begs the question what else the NSA (wasn't that the National Security Agency?) doesn't know about the code they are installing, something I would think even the rightest of wingers would be concerned about (who wrote that code and what other default settings were left in the 'on' position...).
Unless caused by accident or violence, death is caused by disease. We used to 'wear out' around age 37 200 years ago, on average, now, we average much longer greatly due to our fighting & sometimes defeating various diseases.
The ideal of regenerative medicine is that we could cure diseases caused by environmental stress, as well as ones caused by predators, parasites, and accidents.
If there was only one organ we needed to keep alive rather than the whole body, science might have an easier time solving the problems of the aging brain than the entire body.
IIRC, the 150 year number comes from the gradual buildup of proteins which clog synapses and cause Alzheimers. These build up at different rates in different people, however even at the best rate you get alzheimers by ~150 years. However, if we can prevent alzheimers and prevent brain tumors, then brains might be able to live much longer.
US ESC research* is limited to old lines contaminated with mouse cells and developed in the first years of the research.
If you look at the ASC 'applications' closely, you'll see that they are not very groundbreaking, especially when you look at how US research $$ have been artificially (e.g. by politicians rather than biologists & MDs) to ASC.
So most of 'data' on whether ESC could be effective has been hopeless skewed by political meddling, US biologists have been directed away from the kind of work that would give us the information required to have a clue whether ESC could provide revolutionary cures.**
*Bush's ESC 'funding' was a great move in political gamesmanship***, but a terrible one from a scientific point of view, the cell lines he allowed research on are unsuitable for developing any treatments for human trials as they can't be used on humans due to their being mixed with animal cells. This animal cell contanmination also makes them difficult to use in basic research as you have variables (the animal cells) you can't control for.
**Since most initial US research is federally funded, cutting off funds for a particular line of research dramatically limits what gets accomplished in that field.
***And given the fact that currently adult stem cell research is approaching 40 different applications and embryonic stem cell research has currently found, uhm, zero
To use a sports analogy, it is equivalent to making the Red Sox play the Mets naked and without gloves or bats, and then saying that since the Sox hit 0 home runs (without bats) the Mets must be better batters.
In any event, it is a false dichotomy, both lines of research are important, but they are not at all equivalent, one is pluripotent, the other totipotent.
And ironically, in order for ASC research to have a revolutionary effect, they'll need to find a way to create totipotent ASCs. In which case you have the same religious/political argument against ASCR as you have against ESCR.
Woo hoo.
The *only* thing not allowed in the U.S. is the creation of new embryonic stem cell lines (through the destruction of a fertilized embryo) using Federal funds.
IIRC, it is also illegal to use federal funds to create new lines from unfertilized eggs, e.g. via nuclear transfer.