Mine was a tiny event. Very close friends, only family that talk to us. No grandparents, no uncles, no one who just likes a free day out.
35 people witnessing _our_ day was perfect.
Fair enough, that's what you wanted. But part of the tradition was always to get people together who wouldn't normally talk to each other. The same thing goes for stag and hen dos. It's all about introducing the various circles of family and friends so that it's more like one thing. It's about introducing his single friend to her single friend and making the circle tighter. It's about introducing her website-designer friend to his small business owner who needs a new online look. To me, a wedding is a community event, and I feel we're starting to neglect the value of community.
This vehicle is intended for use inside urban environments as a shared vehicle (like ZipCars), as most urban vehicles are only used ~10% of the time.
True, perhaps, but a rather meaningless statistic, because usage is not distributed evenly throughout the day. Demand for cars is much higher in the morning and afternoon rush hours. In Spain you can add lunchtime to that (siestas). 10% of 24 hours is about 2 and a half hours, and a lot that can be accounted for by the daily commute....
No they won't -- just like Coursera and MITx, Thrun's business model involves free training and paid-for certification. The classes are free, but the qualification isn't.
By excluding all the non-essentials, the equivalent of a BS in CS could be completed three times faster, in no more than 1.5 years.
Based on what I've seen from Thrun so far, I bet the degree will be widely respected, and frankly, better than 3/4 of today's CS degrees.
There's still the issue of accreditation, and one of the stipulations of an accredited degree programme is the amount of study time. If this methodology really is much more time-efficient than traditional universities, then what we would expect to get out of it (and I would hope we would want this, too) is a higher quality education, not a shorter one.
European universities are already making learning much more flexible -- the European Credit Transfer System makes it much easier to switch universities or to spend a year abroad. At several universities in Scotland, you can leave your degree programme at the end of any year and have a qualification to show for it. 1st year: Certificate of Higher Education, 2nd year: Diploma of Higher Education, 3rd year: Bachelor's degree (ordinary), 4th year: Bachelor's degree (with honours).
If you could teach the equivalent of an honours degree in 2 years, it would still only be a diploma, not a degree. But then you could transfer to a slower university and take lots of interesting modules to expand your breadth of knowledge and get a high pass at the end of it....
This would be what is called a "learning task". It allows the exploration of lots of what we call "concepts" while giving the student a "sense of purpose".
That's going to be tricky, though, because he's going to be up against MITx, an open-source platform designed inside a university to allow exactly that to happen. With the option to set up your own internal servers and to trade your classes and class components with other universities, I think MITx has the upper hand in this one....
They may hit a snag on the more practical side of things when they find that their full paid course is in competition with other examining bodies.
Certainly the model wouldn't extend to my field -- language teaching (and I mean human languages). The language teaching industry is split into two main segments -- the teaching industry, and the exam mill. There are a few big national institutions that handle a few exams offered universally. In UK English, you need to have the Cambridge certificate to be taken seriously. In Spanish, it's the Instituto Cervantes. So you can't teach for free and make people pay for the certificate, because they want someone else's certificate anyway.
In order to keep the customers paying, Udacity need to keep the courses very unique and individual, which isn't going to appeal as much to employers unless they are in that exact specialism. For more general skills (eg a particular programming language), you want to know that they have general competence beyond the confines of the specific course, so it's actually of benefit to have the teaching and assessment from independent bodies. (Maybe a second wind for the likes of Brainbench.)
In essence, the problem is that these courses are modeled on university-style modules, but don't lead to a degree. Employers like degrees, and always will. But they'll want any additional certificates to be business-relevant, not academic in nature.
The thing is it would be easy for AWS to find and disable Megaupload's account. It was Megaupload who wrote the incriminating emails, and it was their business that would be seized. Amazon would retain "safe harbor" and "mere conduit" defence, and no judge would warrant shutting them down.
I have tried to read a couple of science-type books on my Kindle. I find when you have to back-reference a previous page containing an equation or diagram that's important to what follows in the book, you often need to refer back to a previous page. On a Kindle this process is complex, irksome, disruptive and slow.
This is a flaw in implementation, not in concept. The problem is that the people who specced up the popular ebook formats were fixated on the linear format of the traditional book. The reason a traditional book doesn't repeat things is logistical -- it's an inefficient use of limited space. But there's no justification for making references to earlier diagrams, formulas etc in a natively digital book: the reference should be a pointer to a reusable file, and the referred-to text should appear in situ.
i went in to a departments store today, and there was an ipad display with functioning units, and it was surrounded by kids playing on them, so i think they're popular with kids, all this talk about them being used for education is probably more a marketing excercise to make parents think that these things will turn their kids into prodigies.
A bit like personal computers since the 80s boom then. Ads for parents: "Computers are an educational tool". Reality: "blippity-blip bang bang boom."
It also eliminates the social factor for these kids. Where I am, I've seen more than a few "veal" being home-schooled. If they associate, it's with others who are home schooled. They will never be required to deal with social interactions of differing social groups until they go to college, unless they happen to be lucky enough to have a parent that forces them into these situations.
Not so long ago most people lived in rural communities and (primary) school rolls were more likely to be in single figures than triple. "Collective" home-schooling is pretty similar to the historical norm of schooling. I'm against it personally, but I wouldn't oppose it on a measure as short-sighted as a 40 year old norm....
That would be the same Khan who muddles up his transitives and commutatives and doesn't bother to check them before recording a lesson? And who in fact mislabels the "commutative property" as "communicative"? 1:40 If you're relying on someone to produce material for you, it would help if they actually knew the material to start off with.
If you genuinely want other people to build them, you have to get rid of the non-commercial restriction mentioned on your site. You can't build a market from the handful of people with the interest, equipment and skills to do this.
The idea of "Open Source" is laughable -- you could buy build-your-own-instrument plans long before the birth of software development. I suggest you have a look at the copyright statements on standard guitar plans from StewMac et al.
You are correct that certain ribbons only appear in certain contexts. However, there are lots of "general purpose" ribbons that aren't specific to a particular editing context. If you're in one of them, you stay in it indefinitely, and it creates a new sense of context.
True. However, it means that you have a predictable action sequence. My problem with the ribbon's persistence is that it interferes with the automaticity of tasks -- I have a habit of "do-X-do-Y-do-Z" and the task is done. With ribbons, I have to stop and ask myself whether I have to do X or start with Y, and it slows me down considerably.
And which is going to have a greater overall impact? Making "undertrained desk jockeys" (what elitist tripe!) more efficient, or making "true power users" (more tripe) marginally (two can play at this game) less efficient?
I'm terms of greater impact overall to more people, you're on the wrong side of the equation on this one.
There's nothing elitist about calling someone "undertrained". There is nothing racist about calling someone "undertrained". There is nothing sexist about calling someone "undertrained". What I am complaining about is a corporate culture that doesn't recognise the value of training staff in the proper use of tools, and a software market that continues to dumb itself down in order to pander to this. The individuals are blameless.
Training someone in the proper use of a pre-ribbon-interface Microsoft Office would have a far greater impact on productivity than the ribbon interface itself had. There's a laziness in our modern relationships with technology that I just do not like!
(my understanding is that FB actually pays their workers and does not use slave labor).
You might want to try getting hold of someone from the "Facebook translation dept". Facebook's translations opened them up to millions of new users....
That's the average for an established company. IPOs and other companies with strong growth potentials often have much higher P/E ratios.
The problem with that statement is it assumes all IPOs are "new" companies. Facebook is (in my book) mature. They've reached saturation, they've driven their main competitors out of the market, and they have an established revenue stream (which isn't particularly impressive).
Unfortunately, I learned my classic keypress sequences visually, through menus popping up. I don't know all the old keypress sequences, so if I want to learn a new function, I have to learn the new keypresses -- I end up with an inconsistent mush of two systems.
In the 20th century, one of the goals in the IT world was "context-less computing" -- ie you shouldn't have to switch "modes" to do different tasks. The ribbon has reintroduced modes in a very clumsy way: the ribbon's idea of "context" is the last section of the ribbon you were using. It doesn't matter what you've been doing since you last used the ribbon. You could have been typing constantly for two hours without touching the ribbons, but they're in the last place you left them. You might have forgotten the context, but the computer hasn't. This leaves you unable to work by instinct, because it's random from the user's perspective what you have to do and when.
Double click on the ribbon and it will fold up into a single bar and the full tabs won't open until you click on an entry. That should solve the screen realestate issue since it don't take up any more space unless you are actively using it.
I tried that -- unfortunately it made the interface completely unusable.
The ribbon comes up when you want it. You click on something. Great. But it doesn't disappear until you click in the edit pane. But when you click in the edit pane and the ribbon disappears, the whole page scrolls up, and you're not clicking where you want to click. Moronic.
I agree on the ribbon though - it is a menu, just one that stays open all of the time and presents larger targets. I'm not totally convinced that it's better than menus + toolbar, because the hierarchical nature of it means that you need more mouse clicks and movement to use two actions that are on different menus. The only real complaint about it I have is the amount of screen real-estate it takes up - this is not a problem on a desktop, but Word on a laptop with a smallish screen ends up with less than 50% of the screen usable for actually displaying the document...
Also, we've all widescreens these days, and under the ribbons, everything looks really claustrophobic and letterboxy.
Anyway, larger targets than what? Because in software with menus, I use keystrokes to get wherever I want to go. The ribbon is the graphical-only endstate of the process that caused Microsoft to drop visual underlining of hot-keys by default: no-one is willing to train anyone to use a computer properly. The average computer worker is woefully underefficient due to relying on mousing to do even simple everyday tasks such as switching between italics and plain typeface, or to send an email, or to lock, log off or switch off a computer.
The problem is that the ribbon interface has given up the advantages to the true power users in order to make undertrained desk jockeys marginally more efficient.
They're a direct-to-customer operation -- there's no wholesale step. It's not a fully automated industrial bakery, and that's part of their attraction to the clientele. The loss of efficiency is partly offset by the lack of middlemen.
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Mine was a tiny event. Very close friends, only family that talk to us. No grandparents, no uncles, no one who just likes a free day out. 35 people witnessing _our_ day was perfect.
Fair enough, that's what you wanted. But part of the tradition was always to get people together who wouldn't normally talk to each other. The same thing goes for stag and hen dos. It's all about introducing the various circles of family and friends so that it's more like one thing. It's about introducing his single friend to her single friend and making the circle tighter. It's about introducing her website-designer friend to his small business owner who needs a new online look. To me, a wedding is a community event, and I feel we're starting to neglect the value of community.
This vehicle is intended for use inside urban environments as a shared vehicle (like ZipCars), as most urban vehicles are only used ~10% of the time.
True, perhaps, but a rather meaningless statistic, because usage is not distributed evenly throughout the day. Demand for cars is much higher in the morning and afternoon rush hours. In Spain you can add lunchtime to that (siestas). 10% of 24 hours is about 2 and a half hours, and a lot that can be accounted for by the daily commute....
Not only would the degrees be FREE
No they won't -- just like Coursera and MITx, Thrun's business model involves free training and paid-for certification. The classes are free, but the qualification isn't.
By excluding all the non-essentials, the equivalent of a BS in CS could be completed three times faster, in no more than 1.5 years.
Based on what I've seen from Thrun so far, I bet the degree will be widely respected, and frankly, better than 3/4 of today's CS degrees.
There's still the issue of accreditation, and one of the stipulations of an accredited degree programme is the amount of study time. If this methodology really is much more time-efficient than traditional universities, then what we would expect to get out of it (and I would hope we would want this, too) is a higher quality education, not a shorter one.
European universities are already making learning much more flexible -- the European Credit Transfer System makes it much easier to switch universities or to spend a year abroad. At several universities in Scotland, you can leave your degree programme at the end of any year and have a qualification to show for it. 1st year: Certificate of Higher Education, 2nd year: Diploma of Higher Education, 3rd year: Bachelor's degree (ordinary), 4th year: Bachelor's degree (with honours).
If you could teach the equivalent of an honours degree in 2 years, it would still only be a diploma, not a degree. But then you could transfer to a slower university and take lots of interesting modules to expand your breadth of knowledge and get a high pass at the end of it....
This would be what is called a "learning task". It allows the exploration of lots of what we call "concepts" while giving the student a "sense of purpose".
That's going to be tricky, though, because he's going to be up against MITx, an open-source platform designed inside a university to allow exactly that to happen. With the option to set up your own internal servers and to trade your classes and class components with other universities, I think MITx has the upper hand in this one....
They may hit a snag on the more practical side of things when they find that their full paid course is in competition with other examining bodies.
Certainly the model wouldn't extend to my field -- language teaching (and I mean human languages). The language teaching industry is split into two main segments -- the teaching industry, and the exam mill. There are a few big national institutions that handle a few exams offered universally. In UK English, you need to have the Cambridge certificate to be taken seriously. In Spanish, it's the Instituto Cervantes. So you can't teach for free and make people pay for the certificate, because they want someone else's certificate anyway.
In order to keep the customers paying, Udacity need to keep the courses very unique and individual, which isn't going to appeal as much to employers unless they are in that exact specialism. For more general skills (eg a particular programming language), you want to know that they have general competence beyond the confines of the specific course, so it's actually of benefit to have the teaching and assessment from independent bodies. (Maybe a second wind for the likes of Brainbench.)
In essence, the problem is that these courses are modeled on university-style modules, but don't lead to a degree. Employers like degrees, and always will. But they'll want any additional certificates to be business-relevant, not academic in nature.
The thing is it would be easy for AWS to find and disable Megaupload's account. It was Megaupload who wrote the incriminating emails, and it was their business that would be seized. Amazon would retain "safe harbor" and "mere conduit" defence, and no judge would warrant shutting them down.
I have tried to read a couple of science-type books on my Kindle. I find when you have to back-reference a previous page containing an equation or diagram that's important to what follows in the book, you often need to refer back to a previous page. On a Kindle this process is complex, irksome, disruptive and slow.
This is a flaw in implementation, not in concept. The problem is that the people who specced up the popular ebook formats were fixated on the linear format of the traditional book. The reason a traditional book doesn't repeat things is logistical -- it's an inefficient use of limited space. But there's no justification for making references to earlier diagrams, formulas etc in a natively digital book: the reference should be a pointer to a reusable file, and the referred-to text should appear in situ.
i went in to a departments store today, and there was an ipad display with functioning units, and it was surrounded by kids playing on them, so i think they're popular with kids, all this talk about them being used for education is probably more a marketing excercise to make parents think that these things will turn their kids into prodigies.
A bit like personal computers since the 80s boom then. Ads for parents: "Computers are an educational tool". Reality: "blippity-blip bang bang boom."
It also eliminates the social factor for these kids. Where I am, I've seen more than a few "veal" being home-schooled. If they associate, it's with others who are home schooled. They will never be required to deal with social interactions of differing social groups until they go to college, unless they happen to be lucky enough to have a parent that forces them into these situations.
Not so long ago most people lived in rural communities and (primary) school rolls were more likely to be in single figures than triple. "Collective" home-schooling is pretty similar to the historical norm of schooling. I'm against it personally, but I wouldn't oppose it on a measure as short-sighted as a 40 year old norm....
That would be the same Khan who muddles up his transitives and commutatives and doesn't bother to check them before recording a lesson? And who in fact mislabels the "commutative property" as "communicative"? 1:40 If you're relying on someone to produce material for you, it would help if they actually knew the material to start off with.
Mounting a Floyd Rose on an aluminium frame sounds like an invitation to a buckling....
If you genuinely want other people to build them, you have to get rid of the non-commercial restriction mentioned on your site. You can't build a market from the handful of people with the interest, equipment and skills to do this.
The idea of "Open Source" is laughable -- you could buy build-your-own-instrument plans long before the birth of software development. I suggest you have a look at the copyright statements on standard guitar plans from StewMac et al.
You are correct that certain ribbons only appear in certain contexts. However, there are lots of "general purpose" ribbons that aren't specific to a particular editing context. If you're in one of them, you stay in it indefinitely, and it creates a new sense of context.
True. However, it means that you have a predictable action sequence. My problem with the ribbon's persistence is that it interferes with the automaticity of tasks -- I have a habit of "do-X-do-Y-do-Z" and the task is done. With ribbons, I have to stop and ask myself whether I have to do X or start with Y, and it slows me down considerably.
And which is going to have a greater overall impact? Making "undertrained desk jockeys" (what elitist tripe!) more efficient, or making "true power users" (more tripe) marginally (two can play at this game) less efficient?
I'm terms of greater impact overall to more people, you're on the wrong side of the equation on this one.
There's nothing elitist about calling someone "undertrained". There is nothing racist about calling someone "undertrained". There is nothing sexist about calling someone "undertrained". What I am complaining about is a corporate culture that doesn't recognise the value of training staff in the proper use of tools, and a software market that continues to dumb itself down in order to pander to this. The individuals are blameless.
Training someone in the proper use of a pre-ribbon-interface Microsoft Office would have a far greater impact on productivity than the ribbon interface itself had. There's a laziness in our modern relationships with technology that I just do not like!
HAL.
(my understanding is that FB actually pays their workers and does not use slave labor).
You might want to try getting hold of someone from the "Facebook translation dept". Facebook's translations opened them up to millions of new users....
That's the average for an established company. IPOs and other companies with strong growth potentials often have much higher P/E ratios.
The problem with that statement is it assumes all IPOs are "new" companies. Facebook is (in my book) mature. They've reached saturation, they've driven their main competitors out of the market, and they have an established revenue stream (which isn't particularly impressive).
Hmmm... maybe I've got the details wrong then. All I remember is that it kept obscuring what I was trying to do.
Unfortunately, I learned my classic keypress sequences visually, through menus popping up. I don't know all the old keypress sequences, so if I want to learn a new function, I have to learn the new keypresses -- I end up with an inconsistent mush of two systems.
In the 20th century, one of the goals in the IT world was "context-less computing" -- ie you shouldn't have to switch "modes" to do different tasks. The ribbon has reintroduced modes in a very clumsy way: the ribbon's idea of "context" is the last section of the ribbon you were using. It doesn't matter what you've been doing since you last used the ribbon. You could have been typing constantly for two hours without touching the ribbons, but they're in the last place you left them. You might have forgotten the context, but the computer hasn't. This leaves you unable to work by instinct, because it's random from the user's perspective what you have to do and when.
Double click on the ribbon and it will fold up into a single bar and the full tabs won't open until you click on an entry. That should solve the screen realestate issue since it don't take up any more space unless you are actively using it.
I tried that -- unfortunately it made the interface completely unusable.
The ribbon comes up when you want it. You click on something. Great. But it doesn't disappear until you click in the edit pane. But when you click in the edit pane and the ribbon disappears, the whole page scrolls up, and you're not clicking where you want to click. Moronic.
I agree on the ribbon though - it is a menu, just one that stays open all of the time and presents larger targets. I'm not totally convinced that it's better than menus + toolbar, because the hierarchical nature of it means that you need more mouse clicks and movement to use two actions that are on different menus. The only real complaint about it I have is the amount of screen real-estate it takes up - this is not a problem on a desktop, but Word on a laptop with a smallish screen ends up with less than 50% of the screen usable for actually displaying the document...
Also, we've all widescreens these days, and under the ribbons, everything looks really claustrophobic and letterboxy.
Anyway, larger targets than what? Because in software with menus, I use keystrokes to get wherever I want to go. The ribbon is the graphical-only endstate of the process that caused Microsoft to drop visual underlining of hot-keys by default: no-one is willing to train anyone to use a computer properly. The average computer worker is woefully underefficient due to relying on mousing to do even simple everyday tasks such as switching between italics and plain typeface, or to send an email, or to lock, log off or switch off a computer.
The problem is that the ribbon interface has given up the advantages to the true power users in order to make undertrained desk jockeys marginally more efficient.
They're a direct-to-customer operation -- there's no wholesale step. It's not a fully automated industrial bakery, and that's part of their attraction to the clientele. The loss of efficiency is partly offset by the lack of middlemen.