Well I see it from a different viewpoint. In an outsourced IT function, I've installed free software for a client. I've recommended buying the supported option, and they refused. My client's users have attempted to contact support directly at the company responsible, and the outcome is *exactly* the same as this guy is reporting, and I got documentation on people wanting to do suppliers for fraud, demanding that we terminated contracts etc... for suppliers we had no contract with. The end user in a corporate environment doesn't know or care about the procurement policy. If it's on their PC, it's "procured", and we were expected to support it, and the suppliers were expected to support it. In my experience, this attitude starts at middle management level in most instances, which is a role that seems to consist entirely of passing blame. Must be productive work if we employ so many of them....
If you deal with a lot of larger companies, you might want to start using the numbers anyway, and get them to deploy the software with the serial number built in. Help->About, what's your account/license number, bob's your uncle. By using a registry key to store the license, you can do it independently of the installer, so someone who deploys for free and later subscribes to support doesn't need to redeploy, only push out a new registry key through their remote desktop management tools.
Yup. As long as the GUI remains resolutely fixed size bitmaps (with a few hacks to allow smudgy zooms) all our HD monitors do for us is make everything to small to read. I always browse at 120-125%, and some sites come out completely borked -- resizing artefacts on images (including many titles, banners etc), text that gets cut off due to hacky fixed-size boxouts etc. It's all crap.
I do also have a problem with installers as they are commonly found in Windows software. Too much human interaction required. Obtain the software, launch the installer, click to actually start, oh wait, have to click acceptance of the license agreement, click to accept where it wants to install stuff, click once more once it's done. That's about the lowest number of steps I've seen. With aptitude, it's one command.
Most Windows installers can be executed with a single text command..MSI files installed with the MS Installer packages (or packaged as an.EXE installer) have one set of switches, and older Installshield packages have another and Wise packages a 3rd. Remote installations over SMS usually either contain every option as command-line arguments or are accompanied by an install script. It's a pretty powerful system, really.
My argument against Windows has always been that it discourages doing things the right way -- it makes people stupid. It never occurred to me to me that installers might work that way until someone asked me to repackage things with Wise Package Studio and I thought "hang on a minute..."... and sure enough, all the options we needed were available on the disks we already had...
I live in a country with universal health care, and glad I am of it too. I needed surgery at 17, and it was done fairly neatly and fairly efficiently. I had never had a job, so couldn't pay, and my parents had several other kids to look after, so wouldn't have much relished a US-style hospital bill....
There should not be any installers. A software package should be one file that is download and run. The file should not be unpacked, it should simple be one executable with all necessary parts inside.
Any software that is not simple a single file is complex and brittle.
Do we have to include the whole operating environment in the file, even eliminating BIOS? Because all modern software builds on external functions and libraries, even on a game console. Heck, even the cartridges for the original Nintendo relied on firmware inside the console to some extent....
These students are wonderful for online classrooms as they tend to be the type of students who "step up" to a challenge and try to figure things out in order to learn. A lot of students in the classroom today just want me to tell them what the answers are. These students will not grow in their education on their own. Gamifying a curriculum can help some of these students.
Funny word that, gamification. I remember when it was a new word, there was an article about it on one of the big sites (Gamasutra, IIRC). One of the more intellectually inclined devs interviewed pointed out that the whole idea of gamification was kind of arse-over-tit, because the whole idea of "fun" in a game comes from the fact that you are constantly learning and applying knowledge to solve problems. Gamification tends to add the accoutrements of gaming -- high score tables, achievements etc -- but ignores the simple lesson from academic studies that learning is the purest form of fun, and all learning is gaming....
Version control is trivial to learn on the job, but the fact that you mention it seems to suggest that you're in the "teach the technology" camp, rather than "teach the theory". A theoretician can be trained to use any technology, but it doesn't always work the other way round. Every technology has its quirks, and ever practitioner has their hacks, and often these hacks go from master to student, and students from the "teach the technology" camp tend to hack the task with the code they know, rather than go looking for an implementation of the appropriate theoretical construct in the chosen system.
They sell you their prestige, their accreditation, their confirmation that you at least showed up to class for four years and jumped through the basic hoops.
These online schools will give you knowledge. But it's always been possible to get that outside of the traditional classroom anyway. There are plenty of self-taught programmers out there (and in plenty of other fields to).
But the thing they're lacking right now is the ability to give you a piece of paper that will get you past HR to a job interview.
Reread the article, and you'll find that even the people working in the online education sector don't agree with you. (Well, Thrun might do.) Codecademy's Gregg Pollack talks about them giving the basic skills:
“Self-guided learning can only take you so far. At some point you need to be put in an environment where you’re working with somebody on projects and being mentored. There’s certainly a piece of the puzzle there that we’re not dealing with yet, that a lot of these online self-guided tools aren’t dealing with yet.”
Note how quick he is to point out that "we" doesn't just mean Codecademy, but everyone in the online learning space. My experience with online learning is limited, but the Udacity course I took (CS253 Web Development) seemed more like a worked example of a programming project than a genuine university course. Plenty of good information, but mostly closely directed to the task at hand, with little scope to genuinely explore alternatives. As a degree-qualified coder, I found it pretty useful, but I could see all the decision-points that they skipped -- a newbie wouldn't. That leaves us with the usual curse of the self-taught/boot-camped coder: they only know one single, blinkered way of doing things. (Sadly many physical campuses are walking blindly down the path towards single-technology bootcampship, but that's a different rant.)
My dream for online learning is to see it become a super-powered replacement for the traditional first year, teaching basic skills quicker and in more depth and breadth than tutorials and traditional homework alone can do. Injecting a technical element into even the artsiest degree scheme, so that we overcome the curse of the technologically and statistically-illiterate hordes who make our management decisions while still leaving them plenty of time to cover the traditional material in their degree schemes.
It's in part novelty, it's in part the cult of the individual. We've seen the internet pay for doctors bills, legal fees, new houses, breast implants etc for individuals, to the detriment of bigger charities that are far more efficient (and often more deserving) because people like an individual person with an individual story -- it's more personal. A genuine "cause" is far more abstract.
Yes, and because the spiritualists have been diluted 1000 times by the number of homeopaths and other practitioners on the site, their advice is made even more effective!
The BBC detects your country and customises itself to it. Certain sections let you choose which national/international view you want. But even then, it's very name has the word "British" in it. Where does Slashdot define it's nationality or target market? Has Slashdot ever analysed the demographics of its readers properly?
I'm not sure if that's supposed to be a joke or not...! Anyway, the important thing is to pick your analogy to match the subject matter, which seems to escape many teachers, who try to chose their analogy based on "student interest". My dad taught the wave equation using tins of baked beans on a conveyor belt. I've seen other teachers use the analogy of watching fenceposts or telegraph poles flashing past from a moving car.
In both cases, the familiar physical example lets the student understand why frequency and wavelength are in inverse proportion to one another (wavelength goes up, frequency goes down and vice versa), which overcomes the natural assumption of "if one's big the other must be big".
My dad was a Chemistry teacher who was often accused of wasting time with silly stories. What he was actually doing was putting into practice the theories of David Ausubel, who proposed something called an "advance organiser" -- the teacher evokes a known and familiar concept analogous to the new concept to be taught, thus priming the brain to understand it implicitly in terms of the analogue and to approach tasks using the same strategies as it would employ on the analogue.
It's not the simple idea of amusing with stories as an adjunct to teaching, it's an integral part of teaching. If this guy does that, cool.
Until they can quote a refresh rate, I don't care.
If they later report that this can stream lightly-compressed 1080p at full frame rate, I will become very interested, but I'm guessing it won't offer any real advantages.
Except that there's little to no public awareness of the Duck/WebM link, so people typing "Duck.com" probably aren't looking for WebM. So no, there's no reason to direct duck.com anywhere other than the homepage.
B) "Hostile enemies"...?
The US ignored the Geneva Convention by saying that they're not soldiers, but then refused to treat them according to criminal law instead.
The problem is that the verdict appears to have been decided on doctored evidence -- OJ was acquitted because it looked like he was being stitched up... bit it was a botched stitch-up. The case would have panned out differently had it been argued on the real evidence. Would he have been found guilty in that case? I don't know. Nobody knows. But he couldn't have been found guilty on the basis of the evidence presented without it being a miscarriage of justice.
Slashdot Mirror
Well I see it from a different viewpoint. In an outsourced IT function, I've installed free software for a client. I've recommended buying the supported option, and they refused. My client's users have attempted to contact support directly at the company responsible, and the outcome is *exactly* the same as this guy is reporting, and I got documentation on people wanting to do suppliers for fraud, demanding that we terminated contracts etc... for suppliers we had no contract with. The end user in a corporate environment doesn't know or care about the procurement policy. If it's on their PC, it's "procured", and we were expected to support it, and the suppliers were expected to support it. In my experience, this attitude starts at middle management level in most instances, which is a role that seems to consist entirely of passing blame. Must be productive work if we employ so many of them....
If you deal with a lot of larger companies, you might want to start using the numbers anyway, and get them to deploy the software with the serial number built in. Help->About, what's your account/license number, bob's your uncle. By using a registry key to store the license, you can do it independently of the installer, so someone who deploys for free and later subscribes to support doesn't need to redeploy, only push out a new registry key through their remote desktop management tools.
Yup. As long as the GUI remains resolutely fixed size bitmaps (with a few hacks to allow smudgy zooms) all our HD monitors do for us is make everything to small to read. I always browse at 120-125%, and some sites come out completely borked -- resizing artefacts on images (including many titles, banners etc), text that gets cut off due to hacky fixed-size boxouts etc. It's all crap.
I do also have a problem with installers as they are commonly found in Windows software. Too much human interaction required. Obtain the software, launch the installer, click to actually start, oh wait, have to click acceptance of the license agreement, click to accept where it wants to install stuff, click once more once it's done. That's about the lowest number of steps I've seen. With aptitude, it's one command.
Most Windows installers can be executed with a single text command. .MSI files installed with the MS Installer packages (or packaged as an .EXE installer) have one set of switches, and older Installshield packages have another and Wise packages a 3rd. Remote installations over SMS usually either contain every option as command-line arguments or are accompanied by an install script. It's a pretty powerful system, really.
My argument against Windows has always been that it discourages doing things the right way -- it makes people stupid. It never occurred to me to me that installers might work that way until someone asked me to repackage things with Wise Package Studio and I thought "hang on a minute..."... and sure enough, all the options we needed were available on the disks we already had...
I live in a country with universal health care, and glad I am of it too. I needed surgery at 17, and it was done fairly neatly and fairly efficiently. I had never had a job, so couldn't pay, and my parents had several other kids to look after, so wouldn't have much relished a US-style hospital bill....
There should not be any installers. A software package should be one file that is download and run. The file should not be unpacked, it should simple be one executable with all necessary parts inside.
Any software that is not simple a single file is complex and brittle.
Do we have to include the whole operating environment in the file, even eliminating BIOS? Because all modern software builds on external functions and libraries, even on a game console. Heck, even the cartridges for the original Nintendo relied on firmware inside the console to some extent....
These students are wonderful for online classrooms as they tend to be the type of students who "step up" to a challenge and try to figure things out in order to learn. A lot of students in the classroom today just want me to tell them what the answers are. These students will not grow in their education on their own. Gamifying a curriculum can help some of these students.
Funny word that, gamification. I remember when it was a new word, there was an article about it on one of the big sites (Gamasutra, IIRC). One of the more intellectually inclined devs interviewed pointed out that the whole idea of gamification was kind of arse-over-tit, because the whole idea of "fun" in a game comes from the fact that you are constantly learning and applying knowledge to solve problems. Gamification tends to add the accoutrements of gaming -- high score tables, achievements etc -- but ignores the simple lesson from academic studies that learning is the purest form of fun, and all learning is gaming....
Version control is trivial to learn on the job, but the fact that you mention it seems to suggest that you're in the "teach the technology" camp, rather than "teach the theory". A theoretician can be trained to use any technology, but it doesn't always work the other way round. Every technology has its quirks, and ever practitioner has their hacks, and often these hacks go from master to student, and students from the "teach the technology" camp tend to hack the task with the code they know, rather than go looking for an implementation of the appropriate theoretical construct in the chosen system.
They sell you their prestige, their accreditation, their confirmation that you at least showed up to class for four years and jumped through the basic hoops.
These online schools will give you knowledge. But it's always been possible to get that outside of the traditional classroom anyway. There are plenty of self-taught programmers out there (and in plenty of other fields to).
But the thing they're lacking right now is the ability to give you a piece of paper that will get you past HR to a job interview.
Reread the article, and you'll find that even the people working in the online education sector don't agree with you. (Well, Thrun might do.) Codecademy's Gregg Pollack talks about them giving the basic skills:
“Self-guided learning can only take you so far. At some point you need to be put in an environment where you’re working with somebody on projects and being mentored. There’s certainly a piece of the puzzle there that we’re not dealing with yet, that a lot of these online self-guided tools aren’t dealing with yet.”
Note how quick he is to point out that "we" doesn't just mean Codecademy, but everyone in the online learning space. My experience with online learning is limited, but the Udacity course I took (CS253 Web Development) seemed more like a worked example of a programming project than a genuine university course. Plenty of good information, but mostly closely directed to the task at hand, with little scope to genuinely explore alternatives. As a degree-qualified coder, I found it pretty useful, but I could see all the decision-points that they skipped -- a newbie wouldn't. That leaves us with the usual curse of the self-taught/boot-camped coder: they only know one single, blinkered way of doing things. (Sadly many physical campuses are walking blindly down the path towards single-technology bootcampship, but that's a different rant.)
My dream for online learning is to see it become a super-powered replacement for the traditional first year, teaching basic skills quicker and in more depth and breadth than tutorials and traditional homework alone can do. Injecting a technical element into even the artsiest degree scheme, so that we overcome the curse of the technologically and statistically-illiterate hordes who make our management decisions while still leaving them plenty of time to cover the traditional material in their degree schemes.
It's in part novelty, it's in part the cult of the individual. We've seen the internet pay for doctors bills, legal fees, new houses, breast implants etc for individuals, to the detriment of bigger charities that are far more efficient (and often more deserving) because people like an individual person with an individual story -- it's more personal. A genuine "cause" is far more abstract.
Yes, and because the spiritualists have been diluted 1000 times by the number of homeopaths and other practitioners on the site, their advice is made even more effective!
The BBC detects your country and customises itself to it. Certain sections let you choose which national/international view you want. But even then, it's very name has the word "British" in it. Where does Slashdot define it's nationality or target market? Has Slashdot ever analysed the demographics of its readers properly?
No, Slashdot is a website. It has never been a US website, it is just a website that happens to be managed from the US. As far as I can see.
I'm not sure if that's supposed to be a joke or not...! Anyway, the important thing is to pick your analogy to match the subject matter, which seems to escape many teachers, who try to chose their analogy based on "student interest". My dad taught the wave equation using tins of baked beans on a conveyor belt. I've seen other teachers use the analogy of watching fenceposts or telegraph poles flashing past from a moving car.
In both cases, the familiar physical example lets the student understand why frequency and wavelength are in inverse proportion to one another (wavelength goes up, frequency goes down and vice versa), which overcomes the natural assumption of "if one's big the other must be big".
My dad was a Chemistry teacher who was often accused of wasting time with silly stories. What he was actually doing was putting into practice the theories of David Ausubel, who proposed something called an "advance organiser" -- the teacher evokes a known and familiar concept analogous to the new concept to be taught, thus priming the brain to understand it implicitly in terms of the analogue and to approach tasks using the same strategies as it would employ on the analogue.
It's not the simple idea of amusing with stories as an adjunct to teaching, it's an integral part of teaching. If this guy does that, cool.
Maybe they don't normally post here, and couldn't be bothered creating accounts...?
Oops. I read TFA, but didn't RTF blog post. 30 fps. Not interested. I'll stick with a Flip-clone if I want something like that.
Until they can quote a refresh rate, I don't care.
If they later report that this can stream lightly-compressed 1080p at full frame rate, I will become very interested, but I'm guessing it won't offer any real advantages.
Nope. You shouldn't be able to use one product to force people into using other of your products. Ikea beds and bedding, j'accuse....
Except that there's little to no public awareness of the Duck/WebM link, so people typing "Duck.com" probably aren't looking for WebM. So no, there's no reason to direct duck.com anywhere other than the homepage.
This is why it is wise to withhold judgment until you can hear the other side's view.
No, that is why journalists should do their job properly and inform the public accurately and correctly. Lazy writing is to blame here.
Just as well. Some of those guys had very vicious looking goats.
B) "Hostile enemies"...? The US ignored the Geneva Convention by saying that they're not soldiers, but then refused to treat them according to criminal law instead.
The problem is that the verdict appears to have been decided on doctored evidence -- OJ was acquitted because it looked like he was being stitched up... bit it was a botched stitch-up. The case would have panned out differently had it been argued on the real evidence. Would he have been found guilty in that case? I don't know. Nobody knows. But he couldn't have been found guilty on the basis of the evidence presented without it being a miscarriage of justice.
Also, people didn't think "Sun" when you say "Java" -- Google have successfully tied the Android brand to Google.