Does anyone? I'm just asking, ok?
I mean it's easy enough in this controversial field to start a rumor about coercion, force, pressure, obviously there are people who want to see this research fail or be discredited for their own religious or philosophical reasons.
Or maybe there is some truth, but we've seen plenty of people attacking strawmen (and CIA wives) lately in all sorts of fields. Is it too much to ask that if you are going to make claims of pressure, much less force, you have some actual evidence you can point to?
If the best you can do for evidence is vaugue allusions about cultural stereotypes and searching slashdot, I call FUD.
Nothing about pressuring? Where are you getting that from, ScuttleMonkey, and do the/. editors RTFA's themselves?
"According to the WSJ" Schatten quit because he heard that one of the lab workers had donated eggs, but there is nothign about pressure in the WSJ article. Is there in the Nature one?
If Google wants to promote OSS, why not support Cal State, which is using OS directly for learning management systems, at CSU San Francisco and CSU Humboldt?
It's actually Sakai that has yet to prove it's scalability, 27k users on 27 servers as at UMich is not exactly 'scalable'.
Moodle is also much closer in features to WebCT/BB and goes well beyond them in several areas (such as the advanced eLearning development tool Lesson (demo at
World Conservation Learning Network), soon to come Gallery2 integration, easy to set up LDAP integration (well it's beyond BB Enterprise here, you have to hire a BB programmer to help you set up LDAP, not sure about how easy it is with Vista).
Sakai 2, well it's back around Blackboard 5/Moodle 1.2 feature set, it requires a pretty bit step back to switch to it from Blackboard 6 or even 5.5, while Moodle 1.5.2 is much more comparable, in both features and scalability, to the commercial systems.
What features are available in Samigo that are not in the Moodle 1.5.2 quis and/orlesson modules?
Odd, when we were demoing Moodle we ran it on a G3 450 with 100 or so students, and it ran fine. That was 1.1-1.2, it's gotten much faster since then.
Something may be problematic with your setup, though you probably couldn't even install WebCT or Blackboard on your system if it has trouble running Moodle:-).
Have you tried asking for help on the Moodle forums (such as 'servers and performance')? There are some folks running a few hundred students on $300 eMachines plugged into their office ethernet port, they can probably help you get your server running better.
Hi Steve, you could talk to the folks at New Zealand VLE, run by Catalyst IT. They have over 40,000 users on a redundant Moodle cluster and growing.
For just running Moodle, you should be fine with the same hardware and number of sys admins/trainers/support folks you use for WebCT.
Custom development is optional, but a nice feature to improve the overall experience. I've an article on Moodle scalability with links to information about the NZVLE cluster and PHP scalability here
IMO, the main downside is retraining on a new system, however, I think you are going to have to do that anyway soon, I can't see it making good business sense for BB to keep supporting CE or Vista much longer.
If you want to extend a module, the smart way is to talk to the module maintainer abput your plans first so that your changes will be easily integratable into the planned direction for the code.
I would call that the path of a professional programmer, myself, rather than hacking away incommunicado and then complaining b/c you took a direction that was not the best path for the project as a whole.
It's funny how often in 'articles' like this, you can replace oss with css and get about the same conclusion. There are only a few projects that DS out there.
Moodle, Drupal, Gallery, Sugar, obviously there are some insanely great OSS products. It takes a mix of personality, niche, goog code, and user community to make a promising OSS project a great one.
Big news flash, it takes much of this (plus the marketing guys) to make it happen in CSS. Sometimes (too often!) you just have the marketing guys..
it's the heat caused by the fission. A meltdown is dangerous because it generates heat, and if the heat comes in contact with stuff that burns, it makes fire, smoke, explosions & spreads radiation.
Water (esp. in oceanic quantities), prevents the heat from building up (we're also talking about a small reactor with a small core in this case). If the core was well above the water, then you might get a steam explosion when it hits. However, in this case, the core is just above the bottom of the ship.
Regarding the waste issue, it seems a real stinky fish to me, if there is human civilization in 10,000 years, even if the rate of technological advance slows down dramatically, it seems to me it will still be less of a problem than the one we're causing by burning all the coal and oil.
I don't think the radioactivity of coal is at all a red herring. Rather it points out that we make choices in our energy policy, and blocking modern nuclear plants from being built leads to other, much more destructive* (if less dramatically so) technologies being used.
Coal is a dirty, stupid, primitive way to generate power, and nuclear power is the only current technology with the energy density to replace it.
* between explosions in coal mines, black lung, radiation, mercury, and nitrogen oxides, coal has certainly killed far more people per megawatt year than nuclear.
usually b/c the plant runs out of water or the water lines break.
This thing, worst it can do is sink, and that will cool it down just fine.
If you are worried about radiation, well, maybe you should get more concerned about the rads the alternatives to nuclear are spewing into your air every day.
Inequitable distribution of resources might explain part of the problem. Are the folks in the trailer part with 12 kids stupid or did they just lack access to educational resources (or grow up in a subculture where education was not a priority)?
Folks that appear dumb to highly educated DINCs might actually be quite intelligent, but using their intelligence differently (like trying to figure out how to feed, clothe, and raise 12 kids while still sticking around for their lives).
Or they may have substance abuse problems due to genetics and/or environment, it's certainly clear that intelligent people may have other problems that keep them from appearing successful in the mainstream culture.
It certainly is clear that the rewards of mainstream culture come easier to those who limit the number of children they have, however I don't think it is clear that mainstream cultural rewards correlate reliably with raw intelligence at this time.
E.g. 'smart' vs 'stupid' is not an objective measure of genetic intelligence, rather it contains a large component of culture: they are stupid because they are different vs. they are stupid because they lack processing power & RAM.
we're using at a couple campuses in the Cal State System, San Francisco and Humboldt. Solid, stable, easy to install runs on a range of systems from shared hosts to dedicated clusters, pretty easy to use, more features than BBBlackboard, SSL ready and LDAP built in (they actually charge extra for SSL 'support' in Blackboard Basic!).
Management System, oka LMS (Learning management system).
It does get pretty confusing. A CMS is usually a content management system outside of education. But withing.edu CMS now often means "common management system", which is generally an ERP hacked into something that could be sold to.edu (e.g. PS, not to be confused with a POS...well, ok, maybe 'not' is too generous).
So now CMSs (course MS), are often called LMSs (learning MS), though this is a bit confusing as LMSs were supposed to deliver learning content to students as needed. So these are now often called LCMSs (Learning Content Management Systems).
So the CMS in the article is really the sort of CMS that is now often called an LMS, thought it isn't really an LMS, as that would mean it was an LCMS.
Is that accessible enough?
Anyway, having used Moodle for several years now, it is a very good option for schools, just about equivalent with Blackboard or WebCT for a much better price:-).
On the other hand, if you install the optional netpubish module, Moodle actually can work pretty well as a CMS (C=Content).
O and guess what Moodle stands for... (hint D=dynamic). So Moodle is a SLA, which is obviously 2x better than a mere TLA. Note also what happens if you multiply TLAx2 by (LCMS + CMS).
LDAP authentication is standard, and we're working on a WebDAV enabled file manager for teachers and students which should be ready in the next few weeks.
I rememeber the days when lycos was the search site. Then it started returning garbage with the first big wave of net commercialization (damn you, Bob Davis!).
Then I found this little search site with an odd name just a demo on a stanford.edu webserver when I first found it, that returned much more relevant results.
But then yahoo search results started getting overwhelmed with garbage, and I turned to another little project out of stanford. And that one has a good run, staying ahead of the garbage pretty well until the last year or so.
But now Google's a victim of it's own success, entire industries are devoted to hacking it's search algos, meanwhile (like yahoo before it) it's pouring it's development $ in directions other than it's original core 'killrapp'.
And now we desperately need a newer, better, search engine, but I think maybe not a new web...
Slashdot Mirror
Which there are plenty of slowly expiring in vats of frozen nitrogen at fertility clinics around the world.
"if this thing takes off", those blastocysts will be saving people's lives instead of slowly rotting away.
Does anyone? I'm just asking, ok? I mean it's easy enough in this controversial field to start a rumor about coercion, force, pressure, obviously there are people who want to see this research fail or be discredited for their own religious or philosophical reasons. Or maybe there is some truth, but we've seen plenty of people attacking strawmen (and CIA wives) lately in all sorts of fields. Is it too much to ask that if you are going to make claims of pressure, much less force, you have some actual evidence you can point to? If the best you can do for evidence is vaugue allusions about cultural stereotypes and searching slashdot, I call FUD.
Nothing about pressuring? Where are you getting that from, ScuttleMonkey, and do the /. editors RTFA's themselves?
"According to the WSJ" Schatten quit because he heard that one of the lab workers had donated eggs, but there is nothign about pressure in the WSJ article. Is there in the Nature one?
If Google wants to promote OSS, why not support Cal State, which is using OS directly for learning management systems, at CSU San Francisco and CSU Humboldt?
It works, too:-)
It's actually Sakai that has yet to prove it's scalability, 27k users on 27 servers as at UMich is not exactly 'scalable'.
Moodle is also much closer in features to WebCT/BB and goes well beyond them in several areas (such as the advanced eLearning development tool Lesson (demo at World Conservation Learning Network), soon to come Gallery2 integration, easy to set up LDAP integration (well it's beyond BB Enterprise here, you have to hire a BB programmer to help you set up LDAP, not sure about how easy it is with Vista).
Sakai 2, well it's back around Blackboard 5/Moodle 1.2 feature set, it requires a pretty bit step back to switch to it from Blackboard 6 or even 5.5, while Moodle 1.5.2 is much more comparable, in both features and scalability, to the commercial systems.
What features are available in Samigo that are not in the Moodle 1.5.2 quis and/orlesson modules?
Something may be problematic with your setup, though you probably couldn't even install WebCT or Blackboard on your system if it has trouble running Moodle:-).
Have you tried asking for help on the Moodle forums (such as 'servers and performance')? There are some folks running a few hundred students on $300 eMachines plugged into their office ethernet port, they can probably help you get your server running better.
For just running Moodle, you should be fine with the same hardware and number of sys admins/trainers/support folks you use for WebCT.
Custom development is optional, but a nice feature to improve the overall experience. I've an article on Moodle scalability with links to information about the NZVLE cluster and PHP scalability here
NZVLE
IMO, the main downside is retraining on a new system, however, I think you are going to have to do that anyway soon, I can't see it making good business sense for BB to keep supporting CE or Vista much longer.
now, Moodle is:-).
;-) /nt
If you want to extend a module, the smart way is to talk to the module maintainer abput your plans first so that your changes will be easily integratable into the planned direction for the code.
I would call that the path of a professional programmer, myself, rather than hacking away incommunicado and then complaining b/c you took a direction that was not the best path for the project as a whole.
When did UMich go to 100k users?
Last I heard they had about 27,000 on 27 servers(!) and UI was going to be the scalability test with 90k.
news at 11.
It's funny how often in 'articles' like this, you can replace oss with css and get about the same conclusion. There are only a few projects that DS out there.
Moodle, Drupal, Gallery, Sugar, obviously there are some insanely great OSS products. It takes a mix of personality, niche, goog code, and user community to make a promising OSS project a great one.
Big news flash, it takes much of this (plus the marketing guys) to make it happen in CSS. Sometimes (too often!) you just have the marketing guys..
Ba dum dum:-).
it's the heat caused by the fission. A meltdown is dangerous because it generates heat, and if the heat comes in contact with stuff that burns, it makes fire, smoke, explosions & spreads radiation.
Water (esp. in oceanic quantities), prevents the heat from building up (we're also talking about a small reactor with a small core in this case). If the core was well above the water, then you might get a steam explosion when it hits. However, in this case, the core is just above the bottom of the ship.
Regarding the waste issue, it seems a real stinky fish to me, if there is human civilization in 10,000 years, even if the rate of technological advance slows down dramatically, it seems to me it will still be less of a problem than the one we're causing by burning all the coal and oil.
I don't think the radioactivity of coal is at all a red herring. Rather it points out that we make choices in our energy policy, and blocking modern nuclear plants from being built leads to other, much more destructive* (if less dramatically so) technologies being used.
Coal is a dirty, stupid, primitive way to generate power, and nuclear power is the only current technology with the energy density to replace it.
* between explosions in coal mines, black lung, radiation, mercury, and nitrogen oxides, coal has certainly killed far more people per megawatt year than nuclear.
usually b/c the plant runs out of water or the water lines break.
This thing, worst it can do is sink, and that will cool it down just fine.
If you are worried about radiation, well, maybe you should get more concerned about the rads the alternatives to nuclear are spewing into your air every day.
Americans living near coal-fired power plants are exposed to higher radiation doses than those living near nuclear power plants that meet government regulations.
Inequitable distribution of resources might explain part of the problem. Are the folks in the trailer part with 12 kids stupid or did they just lack access to educational resources (or grow up in a subculture where education was not a priority)?
Folks that appear dumb to highly educated DINCs might actually be quite intelligent, but using their intelligence differently (like trying to figure out how to feed, clothe, and raise 12 kids while still sticking around for their lives).
Or they may have substance abuse problems due to genetics and/or environment, it's certainly clear that intelligent people may have other problems that keep them from appearing successful in the mainstream culture.
It certainly is clear that the rewards of mainstream culture come easier to those who limit the number of children they have, however I don't think it is clear that mainstream cultural rewards correlate reliably with raw intelligence at this time.
E.g. 'smart' vs 'stupid' is not an objective measure of genetic intelligence, rather it contains a large component of culture: they are stupid because they are different vs. they are stupid because they lack processing power & RAM.
Tired=RoR
Expired=PHP 4
Get with the program already:-)
we're using at a couple campuses in the Cal State System, San Francisco and Humboldt. Solid, stable, easy to install runs on a range of systems from shared hosts to dedicated clusters, pretty easy to use, more features than BBBlackboard, SSL ready and LDAP built in (they actually charge extra for SSL 'support' in Blackboard Basic!).
Great user community too, helpful, inventive, worldwide.
And it has more cowbell than any of it's competitors.
Instead of Blackboard?
If they next hire heidi to do switch adds, very soon they will chown all our base!
Ooo look out for the evil space bacteria!
Try this for some real sciencey stuff, easy on the fiction.
Management System, oka LMS (Learning management system).
.edu CMS now often means "common management system", which is generally an ERP hacked into something that could be sold to .edu (e.g. PS, not to be confused with a POS...well, ok, maybe 'not' is too generous).
It does get pretty confusing. A CMS is usually a content management system outside of education. But withing
So now CMSs (course MS), are often called LMSs (learning MS), though this is a bit confusing as LMSs were supposed to deliver learning content to students as needed. So these are now often called LCMSs (Learning Content Management Systems).
So the CMS in the article is really the sort of CMS that is now often called an LMS, thought it isn't really an LMS, as that would mean it was an LCMS.
Is that accessible enough?
Anyway, having used Moodle for several years now, it is a very good option for schools, just about equivalent with Blackboard or WebCT for a much better price:-).
On the other hand, if you install the optional netpubish module, Moodle actually can work pretty well as a CMS (C=Content).
O and guess what Moodle stands for... (hint D=dynamic). So Moodle is a SLA, which is obviously 2x better than a mere TLA. Note also what happens if you multiply TLAx2 by (LCMS + CMS).
HTH, HAND!
Moodle LMS
I rememeber the days when lycos was the search site. Then it started returning garbage with the first big wave of net commercialization (damn you, Bob Davis!).
Then I found this little search site with an odd name just a demo on a stanford.edu webserver when I first found it, that returned much more relevant results.
But then yahoo search results started getting overwhelmed with garbage, and I turned to another little project out of stanford. And that one has a good run, staying ahead of the garbage pretty well until the last year or so.
But now Google's a victim of it's own success, entire industries are devoted to hacking it's search algos, meanwhile (like yahoo before it) it's pouring it's development $ in directions other than it's original core 'killrapp'.
And now we desperately need a newer, better, search engine, but I think maybe not a new web...