In fact, there are technical features in place that actively block prevent many remote clients working. Microsoft are squeezing competitors out of the Windows hosting sphere by making companies buy Terminal Services CALs for all users as well as the licenses for VMWare, Citrix or whatever. Or they could buy just the TS CAL and use RDP instead. Guess which option most clients go for...?
Onlive will have created an interface protocol that bypasses Windows' own protocols, and Microsoft don't have access to an installation, so they can't introduce a patch that breaks Onlive (as they're famous for doing since the days of the war with OS2/Warp).
Compare to the auto-belay devices on many climbing walls. A couple of falls, the second fatal, got a worldwide recall of the most popular brand. They've been redesigned to get rid of the fault and they're back, but they will wear out with age. But even before the recall, they were (according to climber friends) statistically more reliable than a human holding a rope.
So basically, they recalled a safety device that was more safe than a human, and replaced it with humans holding ropes, all in the name of safety.
e.g. Larry Wall invented Perl to solve problems in that his available tools didn't do as well.
Or at least, didn't fit his working style. It seems most languages are conceived to fit with the developer's working style, which makes sense as you usually prefer to use a tool that works well for you. If it works well for others too, so much the better.
Which brings us neatly back to the question of academics vs hobbyists as language designers.
The hobbyist imposes his personal working style on the product. As this working style is based on other environments, it will be familiar and "feel good" to other users of the other environments. However, it will impose the author's style. If the author's style is good, this will be a good thing. But if the author has a few favourite hacky "dirty" code techniques, they'll effectively become a fundamental feature of the language.
Meanwhile the academic is likely to be trying to impose a clean coding style and he's trying to remove the hacks.
But Joe Coder immediately sees the academic as "limiting" him instead of freeing him from bugs, and goes for the buggy, hacky amateur language....
Not any more. C and C++ have both changed C++ 98 wasn't pure-C compatible, IIRC, particularly after C99, although C11 has attempted to bring back the cross-compatibility to an extent.
Implement interoperable components so you can mix and match the best of each breed.
Well that's the thing, isn't it. Cross-calling isn't as easy in most current products as it could be -- just look at SQL handling in many languages: you end up collecting a big long string, call the SQL library then having to do all manner of casts and abstractions to get the answer into a useable form.
But SQL should be simple, because it's not really a persistent thing, and you can handle queries OK as objects, but certain programming paradigms are fundamentally incompatible. Functional languages tend to "evaluate late" by passing about "curried functions". So that means that a procedural language interfacing with a functional language has to maintain that curried function -- it's not a matter of "call other language, get answer" any more. And then what happens when you pass that curried function to an object oriented language? Do you have to create a particular object CurriedFunction? Do you just use a non-specific Object *? How are you going to manage a destructor, and any other required properties or methods in your chosen language?
Come on Raven, this isn't even an argument. The two settings you talk about had a reason to be there, they provided functionality. Sure it is common sense now that this type of functionality has way too many drawbacks and this is why it is being iterated out of the language.
But these are the sort of universal errors that computer science has been thumping on about for decades. New languages from within academia are generally rejected because they try to eliminate hacky coding and force good practice from the ground up. Meanwhile languages from outside academia are designed around the coder's own bad habits and reinforce those habits in others.
So what's not an argument? Even if the original designer of PHP wasn't thinking about shared services, the academics were, and people refused to listen to the academics, even going so far as to tell them to enter "the real world".
But sorry, if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing right.
So the question is, why would Iran do this for a peaceful nuclear program? If Iran's real aim is nuclear power, it would be a lot easier to just do everything out in the open, and let the U.N. weapons inspectors have free reign and allay everybody's fears. On the other hand, if you want the capability to build a nuclear bomb, and don't want the Israelis or the U.S. to stop you, then you do precisely what the Iranians are currently doing: build multiple enrichment facilities (so they can't be taken out by a single airstrike), build them deep underground, and harden them with advanced concrete and blast doors. Watching Ahmadinejad you could be forgiven for thinking that the Iranian government is run by irrational idiots, but this is really a very clever, well-thought-out approach to developing a nuclear bomb.
Even though the Geneva convention forbids destroying civilian infrastructure, NATO proceeded to knock out the entire electricity supply to Belgrade during the Kosovan War. Their justification? It also supplied a few military bases so it was a military target, not a civilian one. There was no comeback against them for this.
Iran understandably expects to be invaded soon -- I think Iraq proves the meaning of the word "inevitable" -- so why wouldn't they protect their infrastructure?
Seriously, you don't have a fucking clue. Quotemarks means it's not my opinion. The word considered means it's not my opinion. It's the current diplomatic line. Yes it's bollocks. Yes Israeli government policy is some of the most racist, xenophobic, bigotted, agressive, all-round nasty policy going, but it's still considered a "friendly" nation by the world's major powers.
We took that land from the Arabs, then we gave it away because our great-grandparents were so bigotted against Jews that we wanted to throw them out of Europe -- the Nazis weren't the only ones who persecuted the Jews....
Anyway, it was theft on the part of Europe and America, and that theft was later compounded by the settlers starting further territorial wars.
However, in case the +5 funny went unnoticed by some readers, this:
"Israel has always been considered a "friendly" nation; Iran, not so much."
Was a joke.
It wasn't a joke and it's certainly not funny. Israel is considered friendly in spite of successive Israeli governments' insane tendency to engage and provoke anyone in the area into bitter and protacted bloodshed. And despite cloning passports for use by illegal travelling assassins, Israel is still considered as being trustworthy to handle personal data protected under EU law.
I suppose the main thing is that Israel is mostly white.
There are other reasons you might want underground facilities.
For one, you might be wanted to improve containment in the case of a core meltdown. Sealing an underground facility is easier than sealing Chernobyl was.
Two: where does nuclear waste go? Underground. What is a decommissioned nuclear plant? Nuclear waste. The long term plan may be leave decommissioned plants in situ, or even to convert them for use as ongoing dumps. They're radiation sheilded, after all.
Three: "earthquake zone". And not only that, it's an earthquake zone covered in sandy, crumbly rock. Remember how we destroyed hillsides and collapsed caves with bombs in Afghanistan as a great big propaganda drive about how we were "hunting Bin Laden"? Well, Iran's got similar terrain to Afghanistan. A surface-built nuclear plant would be on -- literally -- shaky ground. It's going to get broken.
Four: a power plant is a strategic installation in and of itself. If you take out a power plant, you cripple your enemy. Now there's supposed to be rules against targetting civilian infrastructure (Geneva Convention and all that), but NATO blew out the power supply to Belgrade during the Kosovo conflict, stating that as it also supplied power to army bases, the power plant was a legitimate military target. Nothing was done about it, so Iran has legitimate reason to believe that an invading army might target their electricity infrastructure. And right now, it's still quite likely that they will be invaded.....
Israel has always been considered a "friendly" nation; Iran, not so much. No-one's looking the other way when they inspect Iran's facilities!
Iran: we want to generate nuclear power
World: use oil instead.
Iran: no no no, you don't understand: you pay us lots of money for oil, so we want to keep selling it to you, and using cheap nuclear domestically.
World: but you're making weapons!
Iran: no we're not.
IAEA: they're telling the truth.
US, UK, Isreal: are you telling me you atomic energy experts know more about atomic energy than our paranoid military intelligence people? They're obviously making bombs.
World:...
Iran: have you seen our nice concrete? It stops our nuclear facilities from collapsing in the event of a geological disaster.
US: earthquake-proof nuclear facilities, in an earthquake zone? Hah! A likely story! They're bomb-proof weapons plants. Even Japan doesn't make its nuclear facilities proof against geological events....
The wheel was invented by Apple (Adam and Eve's tech startup), but unfortunately was rendered useless because Eden was a walled-garden ecosystem, and they lost access to all their apps when the site moderator brought the banhammer down on them...
This entire comment sums up why I am done purchasing any new video games until the industry goes back to the "Goods" way of thinking, and with the way the MPAA and RIAA have been I've been boycotting them as well. The final straw for me was when I took my old PS3 Madden video games into gamestop for trade in value on the next year's version and they gave me $0.75 for 2010 and 2009.
Hmmm... methinks you've got that back-to-front. The very fact that you were given a trade-in proves that Gamestop is still engaged in the "goods" way of thinking. The fact that you got 75 cents for the games is simply a matter of supply-and-demand. Remember that you were trading them because you wanted the new version. A great many people do the same thing. Madden has a very limited market as a second-hand game.
He starts off far too technical, rather than building up from practical points. Why is he telling us about the "type" function in the first video? Seemingly he's trying to teach the concept of variable typing, but I understand that because I already know it. But for the beginner, this is a pretty random, arbitrary piece of information. There's no clear motivation to any of the stuff he does. Take this second program:
a = 3 + 5
b = a * a - a - 1
c = a * b
print(c)
It's a rather opaque and confusing calculation, and it's overly complicated when you're trying to verify the result. Plus he does this without mentioning order-of-precedence (I'm assuming Python follows mathematical standard oop, but he doesn't say one way or the other).
Lesson 2 is on lists and he points out the "gotcha" of list variable assignment, but he does so without really getting to the meat of it. If you're not familiar with Python, basically an list (array) variable is a pointer, so assigning "a = b" doesn't duplicate the list, it only gives it a second reference. But it's a very clunky explanation.
In essence, I don't think Sal really understands computer programming well enough to produce a well-structured course.
I also think Sal's sacrificing quality for quantity, churning out lessons without properly testing them with a trial audience and tweaking to deal with student problems. When you're getting thousands of people watching each video, there is a lot of value in doing a little more prep....
Ok, fair cop. What I meant was "teaching someone to program in a language without functions is extremely extremely extremely likely to lead to bad coding practice." Personally, I found the unstructured BASIC got me into spaghetti-code habits that left my 6502 assembler code impossibly buggy. At first I resented the restrictions of procedural programming when I started on C, but I quickly came to appreciate how vital the concept of the procedure was to sane and hygienic coding. Good programmers "already" use functions/procedures because they've learned to use them -- new programmers need to be taught to use them.
Chicken and egg. I think if we taught more people the logic required to be able to program well, there would be less* thickos in the world.
* Before some smart-arse says it, yes, I know, at your posh school you were taught to say "fewer". That doesn't make the word "less" wrong, or a sign of lower intelligence.
I think the problem here isn't so much Python as Khan Academy. The initial time to download and set up Python is fairly low, and getting an IDE makes it far easier in the long run than using editor+webpage. Anyway, they should be directing students to install a code editor -- intro to programming without syntax highlighting? No thanks!
Anyway, if you have a look at Khan Academy, they already have computing lessons online, and they are... >drumroll>... Python! So why this switch? Well, the Python videos are rubbish. I can follow them, because I know a reasonable amount of C. But the introduction of lists is too abrupt. The problem of list variables as pointers vs normal variables (argh! I've forgotten what you call them!) is made more confusing by not being adequately explained. The calculation in the first video is unnecessarily complicated so you can't really see what it's doing. I can understand it, but I know I wouldn't have if I was a beginner. It's a bit of a train wreck.
But that's obviously because it's Python, so they just need to start again with the magic "correct language"....
I think C is an excellent language to learn programming basics. It's simple and small.
++Disagree. I started on BASIC (yuck) and then moved on to C at university. C's problem is that it was initially designed for coding in a command-line environment and that makes the core interactivity features a bit weak. Which means that it takes a while before you can actually have a program that seems like a program -- if the program only ever generates one result, why bother with the program and not just do the calculation yourself? You have to anyway -- it's called "debugging".
Javascript was designed to run in a moderately interactive environment -- it's quite heavily tied to HTML forms, making it in practical terms event-driven from the word go. So you can program a calculator based on buttons after ten minutes. You can also throw strings around without worrying about malloc or free. In short, you can produce something that looks like a real program. Most of the flow-control is taken directly from the C spec, so it does teach a skill that can be transferred directly to a "better" programming environment if and when required -- let's hope Khan Academy plan such a "moving on" into their syllabus.
What I'm hoping for is that this establishes a "reference platform" -- they're already talking about trying to influence syllabus development, and one of the problems with developing a CS and/or IT curriculum is the moving target of platforms. A decent HDMI screen is future proof, as is a USB keyboard and mouse, so if people move to Pi on their next refresh cycle, all the money's going on screens which they can continue to use even if they ditch Pi -- no huge loss of cash here.
And besides, a reference platform doesn't even need to be hardware. I doubt it'll be long before there's a very accurate software reproduction of the Pi environment. Stick it on a server and run it on old PCs as terminals. Stick it on a newish PC as a runtime.
The main thing is that there will be a single target for coursework and courseware, rather than a bodged-up constant shift from platform to platform.
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In fact, there are technical features in place that actively block prevent many remote clients working. Microsoft are squeezing competitors out of the Windows hosting sphere by making companies buy Terminal Services CALs for all users as well as the licenses for VMWare, Citrix or whatever. Or they could buy just the TS CAL and use RDP instead. Guess which option most clients go for...?
Onlive will have created an interface protocol that bypasses Windows' own protocols, and Microsoft don't have access to an installation, so they can't introduce a patch that breaks Onlive (as they're famous for doing since the days of the war with OS2/Warp).
Compare to the auto-belay devices on many climbing walls. A couple of falls, the second fatal, got a worldwide recall of the most popular brand. They've been redesigned to get rid of the fault and they're back, but they will wear out with age. But even before the recall, they were (according to climber friends) statistically more reliable than a human holding a rope.
So basically, they recalled a safety device that was more safe than a human, and replaced it with humans holding ropes, all in the name of safety.
In short: you're quite right.
e.g. Larry Wall invented Perl to solve problems in that his available tools didn't do as well.
Or at least, didn't fit his working style. It seems most languages are conceived to fit with the developer's working style, which makes sense as you usually prefer to use a tool that works well for you. If it works well for others too, so much the better.
Which brings us neatly back to the question of academics vs hobbyists as language designers.
The hobbyist imposes his personal working style on the product. As this working style is based on other environments, it will be familiar and "feel good" to other users of the other environments. However, it will impose the author's style. If the author's style is good, this will be a good thing. But if the author has a few favourite hacky "dirty" code techniques, they'll effectively become a fundamental feature of the language.
Meanwhile the academic is likely to be trying to impose a clean coding style and he's trying to remove the hacks.
But Joe Coder immediately sees the academic as "limiting" him instead of freeing him from bugs, and goes for the buggy, hacky amateur language....
Not any more. C and C++ have both changed C++ 98 wasn't pure-C compatible, IIRC, particularly after C99, although C11 has attempted to bring back the cross-compatibility to an extent.
Implement interoperable components so you can mix and match the best of each breed.
Well that's the thing, isn't it. Cross-calling isn't as easy in most current products as it could be -- just look at SQL handling in many languages: you end up collecting a big long string, call the SQL library then having to do all manner of casts and abstractions to get the answer into a useable form.
But SQL should be simple, because it's not really a persistent thing, and you can handle queries OK as objects, but certain programming paradigms are fundamentally incompatible. Functional languages tend to "evaluate late" by passing about "curried functions". So that means that a procedural language interfacing with a functional language has to maintain that curried function -- it's not a matter of "call other language, get answer" any more. And then what happens when you pass that curried function to an object oriented language? Do you have to create a particular object CurriedFunction? Do you just use a non-specific Object *? How are you going to manage a destructor, and any other required properties or methods in your chosen language?
Come on Raven, this isn't even an argument. The two settings you talk about had a reason to be there, they provided functionality. Sure it is common sense now that this type of functionality has way too many drawbacks and this is why it is being iterated out of the language.
But these are the sort of universal errors that computer science has been thumping on about for decades. New languages from within academia are generally rejected because they try to eliminate hacky coding and force good practice from the ground up. Meanwhile languages from outside academia are designed around the coder's own bad habits and reinforce those habits in others.
So what's not an argument? Even if the original designer of PHP wasn't thinking about shared services, the academics were, and people refused to listen to the academics, even going so far as to tell them to enter "the real world".
But sorry, if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing right.
So the question is, why would Iran do this for a peaceful nuclear program? If Iran's real aim is nuclear power, it would be a lot easier to just do everything out in the open, and let the U.N. weapons inspectors have free reign and allay everybody's fears. On the other hand, if you want the capability to build a nuclear bomb, and don't want the Israelis or the U.S. to stop you, then you do precisely what the Iranians are currently doing: build multiple enrichment facilities (so they can't be taken out by a single airstrike), build them deep underground, and harden them with advanced concrete and blast doors. Watching Ahmadinejad you could be forgiven for thinking that the Iranian government is run by irrational idiots, but this is really a very clever, well-thought-out approach to developing a nuclear bomb.
Even though the Geneva convention forbids destroying civilian infrastructure, NATO proceeded to knock out the entire electricity supply to Belgrade during the Kosovan War. Their justification? It also supplied a few military bases so it was a military target, not a civilian one. There was no comeback against them for this.
Iran understandably expects to be invaded soon -- I think Iraq proves the meaning of the word "inevitable" -- so why wouldn't they protect their infrastructure?
Seriously, you don't have a fucking clue. Quotemarks means it's not my opinion. The word considered means it's not my opinion. It's the current diplomatic line. Yes it's bollocks. Yes Israeli government policy is some of the most racist, xenophobic, bigotted, agressive, all-round nasty policy going, but it's still considered a "friendly" nation by the world's major powers.
So do I.
We took that land from the Arabs, then we gave it away because our great-grandparents were so bigotted against Jews that we wanted to throw them out of Europe -- the Nazis weren't the only ones who persecuted the Jews....
Anyway, it was theft on the part of Europe and America, and that theft was later compounded by the settlers starting further territorial wars.
However, in case the +5 funny went unnoticed by some readers, this:
"Israel has always been considered a "friendly" nation; Iran, not so much."
Was a joke.
It wasn't a joke and it's certainly not funny. Israel is considered friendly in spite of successive Israeli governments' insane tendency to engage and provoke anyone in the area into bitter and protacted bloodshed. And despite cloning passports for use by illegal travelling assassins, Israel is still considered as being trustworthy to handle personal data protected under EU law.
I suppose the main thing is that Israel is mostly white.
Not funny at all.
There are other reasons you might want underground facilities.
For one, you might be wanted to improve containment in the case of a core meltdown. Sealing an underground facility is easier than sealing Chernobyl was.
Two: where does nuclear waste go? Underground. What is a decommissioned nuclear plant? Nuclear waste. The long term plan may be leave decommissioned plants in situ, or even to convert them for use as ongoing dumps. They're radiation sheilded, after all.
Three: "earthquake zone". And not only that, it's an earthquake zone covered in sandy, crumbly rock. Remember how we destroyed hillsides and collapsed caves with bombs in Afghanistan as a great big propaganda drive about how we were "hunting Bin Laden"? Well, Iran's got similar terrain to Afghanistan. A surface-built nuclear plant would be on -- literally -- shaky ground. It's going to get broken.
Four: a power plant is a strategic installation in and of itself. If you take out a power plant, you cripple your enemy. Now there's supposed to be rules against targetting civilian infrastructure (Geneva Convention and all that), but NATO blew out the power supply to Belgrade during the Kosovo conflict, stating that as it also supplied power to army bases, the power plant was a legitimate military target. Nothing was done about it, so Iran has legitimate reason to believe that an invading army might target their electricity infrastructure. And right now, it's still quite likely that they will be invaded.....
Israel has always been considered a "friendly" nation; Iran, not so much. No-one's looking the other way when they inspect Iran's facilities!
Iran: we want to generate nuclear power
World: use oil instead.
Iran: no no no, you don't understand: you pay us lots of money for oil, so we want to keep selling it to you, and using cheap nuclear domestically.
World: but you're making weapons!
Iran: no we're not.
IAEA: they're telling the truth.
US, UK, Isreal: are you telling me you atomic energy experts know more about atomic energy than our paranoid military intelligence people? They're obviously making bombs.
World:...
Iran: have you seen our nice concrete? It stops our nuclear facilities from collapsing in the event of a geological disaster.
US: earthquake-proof nuclear facilities, in an earthquake zone? Hah! A likely story! They're bomb-proof weapons plants. Even Japan doesn't make its nuclear facilities proof against geological events....
The wheel was invented by Apple (Adam and Eve's tech startup), but unfortunately was rendered useless because Eden was a walled-garden ecosystem, and they lost access to all their apps when the site moderator brought the banhammer down on them...
This entire comment sums up why I am done purchasing any new video games until the industry goes back to the "Goods" way of thinking, and with the way the MPAA and RIAA have been I've been boycotting them as well. The final straw for me was when I took my old PS3 Madden video games into gamestop for trade in value on the next year's version and they gave me $0.75 for 2010 and 2009.
Hmmm... methinks you've got that back-to-front. The very fact that you were given a trade-in proves that Gamestop is still engaged in the "goods" way of thinking. The fact that you got 75 cents for the games is simply a matter of supply-and-demand. Remember that you were trading them because you wanted the new version. A great many people do the same thing. Madden has a very limited market as a second-hand game.
He starts off far too technical, rather than building up from practical points. Why is he telling us about the "type" function in the first video? Seemingly he's trying to teach the concept of variable typing, but I understand that because I already know it. But for the beginner, this is a pretty random, arbitrary piece of information. There's no clear motivation to any of the stuff he does. Take this second program:
It's a rather opaque and confusing calculation, and it's overly complicated when you're trying to verify the result. Plus he does this without mentioning order-of-precedence (I'm assuming Python follows mathematical standard oop, but he doesn't say one way or the other).
Lesson 2 is on lists and he points out the "gotcha" of list variable assignment, but he does so without really getting to the meat of it. If you're not familiar with Python, basically an list (array) variable is a pointer, so assigning "a = b" doesn't duplicate the list, it only gives it a second reference. But it's a very clunky explanation.
In essence, I don't think Sal really understands computer programming well enough to produce a well-structured course.
I also think Sal's sacrificing quality for quantity, churning out lessons without properly testing them with a trial audience and tweaking to deal with student problems. When you're getting thousands of people watching each video, there is a lot of value in doing a little more prep....
Doesn't mean it's not worth trying. I'd enjoy being proven wrong.
I'm pretty convinced it is possible, but I don't think the Khan Academy are the people who are going to prove you wrong, sadly.
The existing Python videos don't bode well for the Khan model as a computer tutorial method....
Ok, fair cop. What I meant was "teaching someone to program in a language without functions is extremely extremely extremely likely to lead to bad coding practice." Personally, I found the unstructured BASIC got me into spaghetti-code habits that left my 6502 assembler code impossibly buggy. At first I resented the restrictions of procedural programming when I started on C, but I quickly came to appreciate how vital the concept of the procedure was to sane and hygienic coding. Good programmers "already" use functions/procedures because they've learned to use them -- new programmers need to be taught to use them.
I will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that this is a deep and cutting satire on the childishness of format wars....
As long as the Khan Academy doesn't start casting empty sets to numbers and sticks to a few for loops and string manipulations, what's the problem?
Chicken and egg. I think if we taught more people the logic required to be able to program well, there would be less* thickos in the world.
* Before some smart-arse says it, yes, I know, at your posh school you were taught to say "fewer". That doesn't make the word "less" wrong, or a sign of lower intelligence.
I think the problem here isn't so much Python as Khan Academy. The initial time to download and set up Python is fairly low, and getting an IDE makes it far easier in the long run than using editor+webpage. Anyway, they should be directing students to install a code editor -- intro to programming without syntax highlighting? No thanks!
Anyway, if you have a look at Khan Academy, they already have computing lessons online, and they are... >drumroll>... Python! So why this switch? Well, the Python videos are rubbish. I can follow them, because I know a reasonable amount of C. But the introduction of lists is too abrupt. The problem of list variables as pointers vs normal variables (argh! I've forgotten what you call them!) is made more confusing by not being adequately explained. The calculation in the first video is unnecessarily complicated so you can't really see what it's doing. I can understand it, but I know I wouldn't have if I was a beginner. It's a bit of a train wreck.
But that's obviously because it's Python, so they just need to start again with the magic "correct language"....
He said "methods/functions". And a programming language without functions is a guarantee of bad coding practice....
I think C is an excellent language to learn programming basics. It's simple and small.
++Disagree. I started on BASIC (yuck) and then moved on to C at university. C's problem is that it was initially designed for coding in a command-line environment and that makes the core interactivity features a bit weak. Which means that it takes a while before you can actually have a program that seems like a program -- if the program only ever generates one result, why bother with the program and not just do the calculation yourself? You have to anyway -- it's called "debugging".
Javascript was designed to run in a moderately interactive environment -- it's quite heavily tied to HTML forms, making it in practical terms event-driven from the word go. So you can program a calculator based on buttons after ten minutes. You can also throw strings around without worrying about malloc or free. In short, you can produce something that looks like a real program. Most of the flow-control is taken directly from the C spec, so it does teach a skill that can be transferred directly to a "better" programming environment if and when required -- let's hope Khan Academy plan such a "moving on" into their syllabus.
It had to happen -- there was never a retail markup included in the original pricing scheme. 60% is quite high, though....
What I'm hoping for is that this establishes a "reference platform" -- they're already talking about trying to influence syllabus development, and one of the problems with developing a CS and/or IT curriculum is the moving target of platforms. A decent HDMI screen is future proof, as is a USB keyboard and mouse, so if people move to Pi on their next refresh cycle, all the money's going on screens which they can continue to use even if they ditch Pi -- no huge loss of cash here.
And besides, a reference platform doesn't even need to be hardware. I doubt it'll be long before there's a very accurate software reproduction of the Pi environment. Stick it on a server and run it on old PCs as terminals. Stick it on a newish PC as a runtime.
The main thing is that there will be a single target for coursework and courseware, rather than a bodged-up constant shift from platform to platform.