You realise that when a big company like Google promises to buy a couple of crates, that guarantees the next batch and helps build economies of scale, right? Also, Google will be buying them with prebuilt cases, which is something that was left out of the first run for reasons of cost. Set up case construction to fulfill this order, and then the additional unit cost of cases for other buyers is negligible.
Notice that they're not working with the government, they're working with Teach First. Teach First is a charity (working specifically within the English education sector, not the UK) which places graduates into schools for a two year on-the-job qualification (as opposed to the standard one-year university-based course that has a significant teaching practice component).
Teach First took on 770 new teachers for the 2011-2012 academic year, and a large percentage of them would have been going into secondary subject teaching where computers wouldn't be considered "core" to their job. I reckon 100 is about the number of candidates they'll be placing in suitable roles anyway.
It's also worth noting that Teach First specialises in schools in deprived areas, which generally have difficulty in attracting good teachers and aren't generally well-enough funded to get a decent IT suite on-site.
So yes, it's a small project, but it's a worthy one. And if it works well, the government will have a hard time not following up on it.
The Hoover dam doesn't hold back the world's largest reservoir -- according to Wikipedia, it's number 30. It's a good example for Americans, though. The top 29 reservoirs on the page total 2195.722 cubic kilometers, or another 58.9 Hoovers' worth of water. By blueg3's reckoning (350 cubic kilometers = 1 mm), that's another 6 millimeters. That's only 29 megadams -- there's a few other megadams to account for, and a lot of normal dams. Iceland impounds a huge amount of water in dams. Europe still has a considerable network of canals, and as well as the water in the canals themselves, there's a lot of reservoirs holding reserve water to account for losses at locking. There's also the artificial ponds and cisterns maintained by individual farmers.
All little bits and pieces add up.
And this is only one variable in a very complicated equation that gives us the entire picture of the current state of the world. Each tiny variable deserves to be studied, not to be dismissed.
It's called Post-Glacial Rebound, the land was pushed down by the glaciers, it's still rising now that the ice is gone. And since water runs down hill the Great Lakes (among others) are draining.
Is it only the beds of the Great Lakes that are rising then? Not, like, the entire continent around them...??
It's that's true (and I sincerely DOUBT IT), then your friend is an idiot. A programmer and Linux "geek" that finds Orca is not good enough, and instead of helping him/herself and improve Orca prefers to bitch it? WHAT THE FAIL!
As a neutral observer, I see no evidence that the blind programmer in question "bitches" about anything -- he simply uses the best (in his opinion) of what is available. As do I. I'm not a fan of most current office suites, but I use MS Office when it's available to me (because it does the job) and I use LibreOffice on my PC (because it does the job and it's free, and it has decent classic keystroke combinations to get stuff done). I know there are flaws in the current suites, but I don't see it worth my time to write a new one, because there's "good enough" out there, and I'm more productive using "good enough" now than downing tools for 5-10 years while I write a better one.
What people don't realize is that the PC builders like Dell get kickbacks from the crapware vendors for installing their junk on your PC. Eliminate that source of revenue and expect to pay more for your PC.
I find it hard to believe that the crapware installed on my PC was worth more than a fiver to the OEM in advertising fees. When you're buying a computer, a fiver is a mere rounding error. I'd happily pay it.
Unfortunately you often need more than one character to represent concepts like "print" or "save", at which point you might as well just write the function in English.
Not quite -- as the logograph association isn't phonetic, it can be considered essentially language-neutral, and hence removes the need for localisation.
I have to say having a mic there really threw me as well. it isn't just musicians, nobody has gone to a karaoke bar? Seen American Idol? been to a concert? Seen an interview?
Since when did they have vintage valve-amplified ribbon radio-announcer mics on American Idol? I think the author's point on that one was the type of mic. They've specifically avoided the stick-and-ball of your standard vocal mic, which is the one everyone would recognise. I'm guessing that the rationale was that stick-and-ball is for singers, and the vintage mic is for speaking, and the icons shown were for voice recognition, but it is still true that that mic isn't an intuitive representation to most.
To put it interms of semiotics, the designer failed to account for Rosch prototype theory, which says that the form with highest iconicity is the most commonly encountered form.
I think of them like Chinese/Japanese ideograms. Those characters are actually little pictures of things, corrupted over the centuries. For example, the ideogram for a person is ä, which started out as a little stick figure with two legs and a body but eventually simplified into what you see.
A person with no knowledge of these characters might not be able to work out what they mean, but there are at least 1.5 billion people who understand them perfectly because they learned them. They can even figure out the meaning of other ideograms that are combinations of simpler ones, which is similar to seeing an icon of a bookmark with a magnifying glass and inferring that it searches your bookmarks.
So how about we start introducing Chinese characters one by one until the whole interface is changed? Week one, save. Week two, print. Until eventually everything that is arbitrary is in Chinese.
I'm not sure about tags per se, but some sort of multiple categorisation would be good. My Documents, My Pictures, My Music and My Videos looks good until you realise that (eg) the script for your new blockbuster, the publicity shots, the soundtrack and the finished film are in different places. So we all end up falling back on My Documents....
Instinctively saving (which I tend to do about every other sentence) without changing the name first has the same effect - I finally learned (after screwing up WAY too many times) to ALWAYS change the name FIRST ("save as..."), and THEN make the changes and save again. That usage pattern is now burned into my brain, to the point that I get nervous when I see someone else modifying a template without doing a "save as" first!
Amen to that.
If an autosave-and-undo scheme was the standard, there'd need to be a paradigm shift to having a "fork" button on the interface (not necessarily a picture of a fork). If it was that easy to open a new copy, we'd all get the hang of it pretty quickly. We'd also get in the habit of tagging our "major revisions" manually. In other words "all the stuff we call good document management now, but that the current system doesn't encourage us to do."
Your elitist attitude towards education in general really demonstrates why there is so little true entrepeneurship in Germany.
What's you're definition of true entrepreneurship? Lots of small companies forming and going bust or the establishment of stable, successful businesses? Germany is probably the most financially stable country in Europe at the moment, thanks to its well-established technology and manufacturing base.
It's striking how many of the biggest tech companies around today (Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, Google, and I could go on) were founded by innovators who dropped out of college/university/whatever to pursue their ideas.
Ah... now I see what your definition of true entrepreneurship is: copying stuff.
Apple: copied Xerox. Microsoft: copied CP/M, then copied Apple, and somewhere along the way copied umpteen others as well.
Page and Brin aren't "drop-outs" under the traditional definition -- they were PhD students, so they were definitely university graduates by that point.
But hey, if you're going to be a bigot you might as well go the whole hog and be an ignorant bigot.
In most of the world there is "undergraduate" and "postgraduate". "Undergraduate" is your first step -- once you complete undergraduate study, you are "a graduate". Any further study designed for graduates is "postgraduate" because you do it after graduating from your first degree. To most of the world, the MBA is a postgraduate degree. If the terminology where you are is different, that's fair enough where you are, but don't try and correct people who aren't wrong.
Really? Haven't you seen the section at the back of the bus for the 40+ programmer? And only last week, I watched a lynch mob hang a 45-year-old COBOL developer from a poplar tree.
More to the point, DMA and hardware memory addressing made interfacing a breeze. Modern abstraction layers are certainly justifiable in terms of security, but they're a real inconvenience if you need actual control of your computer.
Personally, I hated having comics read to me. How do I remember this? Not sure -- maybe it's a memory that was preserved by seeing younger siblings get stories read to them.
Anyway, the point is that it was all rather disjoint, and just pointing to the speech bubbles didn't make up for the series of undifferentiated voices.
Once I'd started to read, though, I loved comics. But it was the silly little comics that were a collection of one or two page stories that I read in the early days -- when I was about 8 or 9 we started getting the Transformers in the house, the first "serial" comic I'd ever been exposed to.
I'm not supplying a right answer. I'm not supplying any answer at all. I'm just pointing out that there are multiple points of view. Understand the other person's point of view and you can start a debate. Stand up and deny the other person any validity and you get nowhere.
And then there is me, wondering why the hell I should care about mister "inventor". And, more importantly, why this "inventor" deserves to be granted harassing rights at the expense of everybody else in order to solve this particular problem of him.
It's a valid question. But everyone's answer changes very dramatically when they come up with a new idea....
No, you're missing the point: we haven't got an agreed way of measuring an "amount" of evolution. Until we have, your statement is no more meaningful than anyone else's.
1.Assuming we all evolved from a universal common ancestor we are all equidistant to the original tree of life
That depends entirely on your metric. If it's by years, we're equidistant. If it's by genetic difference, we're pretty far away from the origin, and this things pretty close. If it's by generations, we're pretty close, and it's pretty far away. (Human mean-time-to-reproduction in the order of decades, primitive cellular culture mean-time-to-reproduction in the order of seconds.)
If this is what all life originated from how did the original organism stay the same over millions of years but at the same time evolve into all living life with no signs at all of anything intermediate?
There was once a family of spearmakers. They were very good at making spears, and people would come from miles around to buy their spears. Because they were so good, the family prospered and multiplied. Then someone invented the sword, and the market for spears dropped, so half the family started making swords. They were very good at making swords, and people would come from miles around to buy their swords. Because they were so good, the family prospered and multiplied. Then someone invented the pistol, and half the family started making pistols. They were very good at making pistols, and people would come from miles around to buy their pistols. Because they were so good, the family prospered and multiplied. This family is now one of the biggest small-arms manufacturers in their country. Somewhere along the line, the branch that continued to produce swords stopped. And yet away in a little mountain village, there's a man descended from the original spear-makers who continues to make traditional spears as ornaments, film props and tourist souvenirs....
Slashdot Mirror
You realise that when a big company like Google promises to buy a couple of crates, that guarantees the next batch and helps build economies of scale, right? Also, Google will be buying them with prebuilt cases, which is something that was left out of the first run for reasons of cost. Set up case construction to fulfill this order, and then the additional unit cost of cases for other buyers is negligible.
Notice that they're not working with the government, they're working with Teach First. Teach First is a charity (working specifically within the English education sector, not the UK) which places graduates into schools for a two year on-the-job qualification (as opposed to the standard one-year university-based course that has a significant teaching practice component).
Teach First took on 770 new teachers for the 2011-2012 academic year, and a large percentage of them would have been going into secondary subject teaching where computers wouldn't be considered "core" to their job. I reckon 100 is about the number of candidates they'll be placing in suitable roles anyway.
It's also worth noting that Teach First specialises in schools in deprived areas, which generally have difficulty in attracting good teachers and aren't generally well-enough funded to get a decent IT suite on-site.
So yes, it's a small project, but it's a worthy one. And if it works well, the government will have a hard time not following up on it.
The non-moving water behind a dam is behind a dam. The non-moving water not behind a dam is somewhere else -- and mostly the sea.
The Hoover dam doesn't hold back the world's largest reservoir -- according to Wikipedia, it's number 30. It's a good example for Americans, though. The top 29 reservoirs on the page total 2195.722 cubic kilometers, or another 58.9 Hoovers' worth of water. By blueg3's reckoning (350 cubic kilometers = 1 mm), that's another 6 millimeters. That's only 29 megadams -- there's a few other megadams to account for, and a lot of normal dams. Iceland impounds a huge amount of water in dams. Europe still has a considerable network of canals, and as well as the water in the canals themselves, there's a lot of reservoirs holding reserve water to account for losses at locking. There's also the artificial ponds and cisterns maintained by individual farmers.
All little bits and pieces add up.
And this is only one variable in a very complicated equation that gives us the entire picture of the current state of the world. Each tiny variable deserves to be studied, not to be dismissed.
Check the spelling of the GP and GGP posts. Hover dam. Hover. Dam.
It's called Post-Glacial Rebound, the land was pushed down by the glaciers, it's still rising now that the ice is gone. And since water runs down hill the Great Lakes (among others) are draining.
Is it only the beds of the Great Lakes that are rising then? Not, like, the entire continent around them...??
It's that's true (and I sincerely DOUBT IT), then your friend is an idiot. A programmer and Linux "geek" that finds Orca is not good enough, and instead of helping him/herself and improve Orca prefers to bitch it? WHAT THE FAIL!
As a neutral observer, I see no evidence that the blind programmer in question "bitches" about anything -- he simply uses the best (in his opinion) of what is available. As do I. I'm not a fan of most current office suites, but I use MS Office when it's available to me (because it does the job) and I use LibreOffice on my PC (because it does the job and it's free, and it has decent classic keystroke combinations to get stuff done). I know there are flaws in the current suites, but I don't see it worth my time to write a new one, because there's "good enough" out there, and I'm more productive using "good enough" now than downing tools for 5-10 years while I write a better one.
What people don't realize is that the PC builders like Dell get kickbacks from the crapware vendors for installing their junk on your PC. Eliminate that source of revenue and expect to pay more for your PC.
I find it hard to believe that the crapware installed on my PC was worth more than a fiver to the OEM in advertising fees. When you're buying a computer, a fiver is a mere rounding error. I'd happily pay it.
Unfortunately you often need more than one character to represent concepts like "print" or "save", at which point you might as well just write the function in English.
Not quite -- as the logograph association isn't phonetic, it can be considered essentially language-neutral, and hence removes the need for localisation.
I have to say having a mic there really threw me as well. it isn't just musicians, nobody has gone to a karaoke bar? Seen American Idol? been to a concert? Seen an interview?
Since when did they have vintage valve-amplified ribbon radio-announcer mics on American Idol? I think the author's point on that one was the type of mic. They've specifically avoided the stick-and-ball of your standard vocal mic, which is the one everyone would recognise. I'm guessing that the rationale was that stick-and-ball is for singers, and the vintage mic is for speaking, and the icons shown were for voice recognition, but it is still true that that mic isn't an intuitive representation to most.
To put it interms of semiotics, the designer failed to account for Rosch prototype theory, which says that the form with highest iconicity is the most commonly encountered form.
I think of them like Chinese/Japanese ideograms. Those characters are actually little pictures of things, corrupted over the centuries. For example, the ideogram for a person is ä, which started out as a little stick figure with two legs and a body but eventually simplified into what you see.
A person with no knowledge of these characters might not be able to work out what they mean, but there are at least 1.5 billion people who understand them perfectly because they learned them. They can even figure out the meaning of other ideograms that are combinations of simpler ones, which is similar to seeing an icon of a bookmark with a magnifying glass and inferring that it searches your bookmarks.
So how about we start introducing Chinese characters one by one until the whole interface is changed? Week one, save. Week two, print. Until eventually everything that is arbitrary is in Chinese.
I'm not sure about tags per se, but some sort of multiple categorisation would be good. My Documents, My Pictures, My Music and My Videos looks good until you realise that (eg) the script for your new blockbuster, the publicity shots, the soundtrack and the finished film are in different places. So we all end up falling back on My Documents....
Instinctively saving (which I tend to do about every other sentence) without changing the name first has the same effect - I finally learned (after screwing up WAY too many times) to ALWAYS change the name FIRST ("save as..."), and THEN make the changes and save again. That usage pattern is now burned into my brain, to the point that I get nervous when I see someone else modifying a template without doing a "save as" first!
Amen to that.
If an autosave-and-undo scheme was the standard, there'd need to be a paradigm shift to having a "fork" button on the interface (not necessarily a picture of a fork). If it was that easy to open a new copy, we'd all get the hang of it pretty quickly. We'd also get in the habit of tagging our "major revisions" manually. In other words "all the stuff we call good document management now, but that the current system doesn't encourage us to do."
Have you seen her bank balance?
Your elitist attitude towards education in general really demonstrates why there is so little true entrepeneurship in Germany.
What's you're definition of true entrepreneurship? Lots of small companies forming and going bust or the establishment of stable, successful businesses? Germany is probably the most financially stable country in Europe at the moment, thanks to its well-established technology and manufacturing base.
It's striking how many of the biggest tech companies around today (Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, Google, and I could go on) were founded by innovators who dropped out of college/university/whatever to pursue their ideas.
Ah... now I see what your definition of true entrepreneurship is: copying stuff.
Apple: copied Xerox. Microsoft: copied CP/M, then copied Apple, and somewhere along the way copied umpteen others as well.
Page and Brin aren't "drop-outs" under the traditional definition -- they were PhD students, so they were definitely university graduates by that point.
But hey, if you're going to be a bigot you might as well go the whole hog and be an ignorant bigot.
In most of the world there is "undergraduate" and "postgraduate". "Undergraduate" is your first step -- once you complete undergraduate study, you are "a graduate". Any further study designed for graduates is "postgraduate" because you do it after graduating from your first degree. To most of the world, the MBA is a postgraduate degree. If the terminology where you are is different, that's fair enough where you are, but don't try and correct people who aren't wrong.
Really? Haven't you seen the section at the back of the bus for the 40+ programmer? And only last week, I watched a lynch mob hang a 45-year-old COBOL developer from a poplar tree.
</sarcasm>
More to the point, DMA and hardware memory addressing made interfacing a breeze. Modern abstraction layers are certainly justifiable in terms of security, but they're a real inconvenience if you need actual control of your computer.
Personally, I hated having comics read to me. How do I remember this? Not sure -- maybe it's a memory that was preserved by seeing younger siblings get stories read to them.
Anyway, the point is that it was all rather disjoint, and just pointing to the speech bubbles didn't make up for the series of undifferentiated voices.
Once I'd started to read, though, I loved comics. But it was the silly little comics that were a collection of one or two page stories that I read in the early days -- when I was about 8 or 9 we started getting the Transformers in the house, the first "serial" comic I'd ever been exposed to.
I'm not supplying a right answer. I'm not supplying any answer at all. I'm just pointing out that there are multiple points of view. Understand the other person's point of view and you can start a debate. Stand up and deny the other person any validity and you get nowhere.
And then there is me, wondering why the hell I should care about mister "inventor". And, more importantly, why this "inventor" deserves to be granted harassing rights at the expense of everybody else in order to solve this particular problem of him.
It's a valid question. But everyone's answer changes very dramatically when they come up with a new idea....
No, you're missing the point: we haven't got an agreed way of measuring an "amount" of evolution. Until we have, your statement is no more meaningful than anyone else's.
1.Assuming we all evolved from a universal common ancestor we are all equidistant to the original tree of life
That depends entirely on your metric. If it's by years, we're equidistant. If it's by genetic difference, we're pretty far away from the origin, and this things pretty close. If it's by generations, we're pretty close, and it's pretty far away. (Human mean-time-to-reproduction in the order of decades, primitive cellular culture mean-time-to-reproduction in the order of seconds.)
If this is what all life originated from how did the original organism stay the same over millions of years but at the same time evolve into all living life with no signs at all of anything intermediate?
There was once a family of spearmakers. They were very good at making spears, and people would come from miles around to buy their spears. Because they were so good, the family prospered and multiplied. Then someone invented the sword, and the market for spears dropped, so half the family started making swords. They were very good at making swords, and people would come from miles around to buy their swords. Because they were so good, the family prospered and multiplied. Then someone invented the pistol, and half the family started making pistols. They were very good at making pistols, and people would come from miles around to buy their pistols. Because they were so good, the family prospered and multiplied. This family is now one of the biggest small-arms manufacturers in their country. Somewhere along the line, the branch that continued to produce swords stopped. And yet away in a little mountain village, there's a man descended from the original spear-makers who continues to make traditional spears as ornaments, film props and tourist souvenirs....
I guess He wasn't so keen on us eating mangoes then. And where did He put the easy-open tab on the cow?