...it's the competition. I administer a moderately-sized Bb 8 installation (some 1000s of concurrent users, we migrated from 6.3 last semester without too much trouble, and without paying Bb their outrageous consultancy fees) and in all honesty, we would LOVE to ditch Blackboard. Bb 8 is a heckuva lot better than 6.3 but it's still pretty much inadequate. We have a moodle setup up and running for a different part of our online courses, and it gets used pretty thoroughly. HOWEVER, and I hate to say it, moodle is not a replacement for Bb. Not even close. Personally I'm all about the FOSS stuff, but if we tried to mandate migrating from Bb to moodle, our faculty would absolutely explode (this is an highly-rated engineering college and they're quite tech-literate) because most of them just don't have the time or the inclination to revamp their tried-and-true online course material, let alone chase a whole new set of bugs/workarounds incumbent in moving to a new CMS. Inertia is a powerful force:\
I sincerely hope this decision gets us a little closer to having a real alternative to Bb, because paying them to "develop" such a inadequate CMS just feels a lot like highway robbery
PS Bb on commodity 1u servers running Centos 5.3 is WAY faster than on Solaris 10 boxes. We still use Solaris for the Oracle backend but the performance under linux just beat the pants off slowlaris (hate to say it cause I'm a solaris guy)
This sort of thing is hardly new. My wife (medical school grad, ER physician) has a whole TEXTBOOK written by GlaxoSmithKline. She wrote a scathing review of that particular segment because of it, but you better believe that if it makes business sense to do this sort of thing it's going to be done.
running TweakUAC, which allows one to continue operating UAC in quiet mode...
"In such a mode, you keep all the positive effects of UAC, such as Internet Explorer operating in the protected mode, applications starting without the administrative privileges by default, etc. The only thing that gets changed is that you will no longer see the infamous "Windows needs your permission to continue" messages whenever you attempt to make a change to your Vista configuration, or when you run a program that needs administrative rights."
Great! However, Vista didn't like being the server for my Synergy setup with Gutsy on the 2nd monitor. Once I made Gutsy the synergy server it was much more well behaved. Really, it's hard not to have both a Gutsy and a Vista box. They're both pretty fresh.
Perhaps I should clarify: I don't think it's at all important that people judge my relationship one way or the other. In fact, it didn't even occur to me that they would. But the fact remains that people do judge, and the reactions I noted are *very* commonplace. If your wife were sick and required expensive treatment, would you consider it "the height of materialism to believe that the love you feel for someone is proportional to the amount of money you're willing to part with" ? How about a pet?
One other thing... your quote from the article is supposed to illustrate what, exactly? That celebs make good spokespeople?
with all this jibba-jabba about diamonds, etc, there are a couple points that might be made:
first of all, jewelers don't make a "huge profit margin" on diamonds, in fact they generally make very little, unless you walk in there waving a huge wad of cash. there is a very well known document called the "rap sheet" (aka rappaport sheet) which is published weekly and lists the wholesale prices for various grades and types of diamonds. if you know even a little, you can get a jeweler to give you 5% over rap, which is hardly a huge margin compared to media/software/drug companies.
secondly, diamonds are definitely an item for which you get what you pay for. can you overpay? absolutely. but a $5000 diamond from a good retailer (like whiteflash or blue nile) is going to be twice as good as a $2500 diamond when it comes to the all-important flashyness factor (amount of light returned through the top of the stone) also, any good retailer will buy your diamond back for what you paid for it originally if you want to trade up (like the gold guy)
third, I never understood what all the fuss was about diamonds, until I bought my fiancee (now wife) one. I'm a pretty miserly guy in general but I have to say splashing out for a 1ct SI1 with excellent cut and symmetry was an amazingly good decision (for me) in retrospect. she gets complements on it every day (years later), and, sad to say EVERYONE JUDGES OUR RELATIONSHIP BASED ON THE FRICKING ROCK. I can't tell you how many times she's heard "oh he must really love you" -- gak -- sad but true.
finally, to get a bit of historical perspective, the fall of DeBeers has been predicted for quite some time now.. I recommend Ed Epstein's fantastic article from The Atlantic.. if you don't look at the date you might think it was just published: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/198202/diamond
and for those who want a fantastic and unbiased source for diamond info, I highly recommend http://www.pricescope.com/
these guys are the real deal, a buncha PhD's and scads of patents. They even have a working engine that can fit in the wheelwell of a 747 and pull it around the runways. The executive summary of their technology is here, and they have a demo of their technology here.
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I sincerely hope this decision gets us a little closer to having a real alternative to Bb, because paying them to "develop" such a inadequate CMS just feels a lot like highway robbery
PS Bb on commodity 1u servers running Centos 5.3 is WAY faster than on Solaris 10 boxes. We still use Solaris for the Oracle backend but the performance under linux just beat the pants off slowlaris (hate to say it cause I'm a solaris guy)
This sort of thing is hardly new. My wife (medical school grad, ER physician) has a whole TEXTBOOK written by GlaxoSmithKline. She wrote a scathing review of that particular segment because of it, but you better believe that if it makes business sense to do this sort of thing it's going to be done.
"In such a mode, you keep all the positive effects of UAC, such as Internet Explorer operating in the protected mode, applications starting without the administrative privileges by default, etc. The only thing that gets changed is that you will no longer see the infamous "Windows needs your permission to continue" messages whenever you attempt to make a change to your Vista configuration, or when you run a program that needs administrative rights."
Great! However, Vista didn't like being the server for my Synergy setup with Gutsy on the 2nd monitor. Once I made Gutsy the synergy server it was much more well behaved. Really, it's hard not to have both a Gutsy and a Vista box. They're both pretty fresh.
One other thing... your quote from the article is supposed to illustrate what, exactly? That celebs make good spokespeople?
first of all, jewelers don't make a "huge profit margin" on diamonds, in fact they generally make very little, unless you walk in there waving a huge wad of cash. there is a very well known document called the "rap sheet" (aka rappaport sheet) which is published weekly and lists the wholesale prices for various grades and types of diamonds. if you know even a little, you can get a jeweler to give you 5% over rap, which is hardly a huge margin compared to media/software/drug companies.
secondly, diamonds are definitely an item for which you get what you pay for. can you overpay? absolutely. but a $5000 diamond from a good retailer (like whiteflash or blue nile) is going to be twice as good as a $2500 diamond when it comes to the all-important flashyness factor (amount of light returned through the top of the stone) also, any good retailer will buy your diamond back for what you paid for it originally if you want to trade up (like the gold guy)
third, I never understood what all the fuss was about diamonds, until I bought my fiancee (now wife) one. I'm a pretty miserly guy in general but I have to say splashing out for a 1ct SI1 with excellent cut and symmetry was an amazingly good decision (for me) in retrospect. she gets complements on it every day (years later), and, sad to say EVERYONE JUDGES OUR RELATIONSHIP BASED ON THE FRICKING ROCK. I can't tell you how many times she's heard "oh he must really love you" -- gak -- sad but true.
finally, to get a bit of historical perspective, the fall of DeBeers has been predicted for quite some time now.. I recommend Ed Epstein's fantastic article from The Atlantic.. if you don't look at the date you might think it was just published: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/198202/diamond and for those who want a fantastic and unbiased source for diamond info, I highly recommend http://www.pricescope.com/
these guys are the real deal, a buncha PhD's and scads of patents. They even have a working engine that can fit in the wheelwell of a 747 and pull it around the runways. The executive summary of their technology is here, and they have a demo of their technology here.