Yes, they probably would. And as for BP, they're a publically-traded multinational company, and were in a commercial relationship with various US companies for the operations in the Gulf of Mexico. The guys most responsible for the leak were US companies, but your media loved the narrative of punishing bad foreigners....
If you could order anything with it, you'd have to pay for it. By limiting themselves to a small number of brands (currently everything seems to be Kraft or Proctor & Gamble) they can get presumably the suppliers to pay for it as part of their advertising budget. I can imagine the pitch now: "Let people go to the store and they might buy a cheaper brand. Pay for this button and you've got a customer for life."
Yes they do. They push people into buying the expense brands that are willing to pay Amazon for the privilege of having their own buttons. They also mean you'll have visible ads for particular brands in your house when friends visit.
I have two degrees from the OU -- it's a very different beast from the MOOCs. Furthermore, the OU was in the process to a transition to "all online" while I was still studying with them, and the courses at the beginning of my study were far more effective than the ones at the end. Even just the simple ability to take my books to the park in my lunchbreak rather than be stuck in a chair at a desk was a pleasure.
This guy could have easily solved this DCMA problem by removing Nintendo assets and using his own.
...and designing his own level. Suddenly that word "easily" becomes inapplicable. In the days before orchestral soundtracks, gazillion-polygon reverse kinematic modelling and 4K-ready texture design (ie Mario64 era), the single biggest job in game design was making levels that played right.
Let me just check me Gog.com bookshelf...
"Broken Sword" I,II,III and IV (1996, 1997, 2003, 2006)
"Magic Carpet" (1994)
"Little Big Adventure" I (1994) and 2 (1997)
"Interstate 76" (1997)
"I have no mouth and I must scream" (1995)
I could go on, but I'll just finish with "Another World" (1991). If gog.com did MAME roms, I'd happily pay for even older stuff, like Pacman, Pengo and Mr Do.
Many are creating their own games but the reason for copying is: human nature and it requires less work.
It's also easier to grab attention with. In the same week that this Mario64 clone was released, numerous original indie titles were presumably released, but they didn't get the press. Shutting down this sort of thing isn't just good for Nintendo, it's good for the indie scene too.
What you are proposing is called "shutting the door when the horse has bolted". It's like not building flood defenses "unless the river is obviously filling people's basements", or not tsunami-proofing your nuclear powerplant "unless a tsunami is obviously knocking out your backup systems and failsafes".
Nintendo's business model has incorporated nostalgia for decades. Sequels, remakes and reissues are their stock-in-trade, and most people are cool with that because they normally do a decent job of it. Allowing others to satiate consumers' nostalgia for free would be suicide to Nintendo.
No doubt some people will say "good -- it'll force them to be original for once", but that's nonsense. Nintendo are still engaged in more innovation than most publishers, who have cookie-cutter FPSes coming out of their ears.
Why no one looks for a solution outside of (a) cease and desist permanently and immediately or (b) lawsuit is beyond me.
Well first of all, a cease and desist is easier and cheaper than drawing up a legally binding contract that is guaranteed to generate no profit, and may serve to reduce sales; and secondly because they typically want the other party to cease and desist!
That's what this reaction against MOOCs is all about. Colleges have decided they don't want MOOCs after it being all the rage for 5 minutes, and they want their old conservative business model back thank you. Too late. So now people are trashing online education as "inferior" even if it isn't.
And Coursera lacks serious cohesion and supervision.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. Both Coursera and edX offer courses of a wide range of qualities. There are good to very good courses on both of them, there are very bland ones on both of them. Some of them even leave out the l and the n.
By cohesion, I assume he means the lack of programmed progression. So that (for example) any time you want to learn a new programming language, they start from zero explaining loops and conditionals etc, yadda yadda yadda.
People are not motivated to learn something until they need to
- Once they need to, they are happy to blast through it intensely
- And they will put it to use right away
- And their motivation comes from needs (for a raise, to be competitive, etc.)
All too often, that means "too late". My first job out of uni refused to train staff with out a "confirmed need" for a particular training course, but typically (particularly at the junior levels) you were given a new assignment at short notice, and even if you theoretically had time for the training course, they were either all booked up, or weren't running that month. This left you blasting through it unhappily as you were indeed putting it to use right away, before you were really ready to. This is how hacky, unmaintainable code gets written.
I've given them an honest shot, but like many I could not finish a course. I found that the lack of a face to face human communication was a huge stumbling block to success. Especially thring to learn python, math subjects, etc. It is far easier to be spoon fed knowledge and walked around complex subjects with your hand held. The main weakness in MOOCs is the lack of human interaction and instruction when you are not able to figure it out on your own.
The problem with MOOCs for programming, maths etc is that they were outdated before they began. Sitting watching a video, then doing an offline task, then submitting the task online is just not good enough. You want a tight cycle of: present new information -> demonstrate -> test -> integrate with existing knowledge -> test -> present new information....
The likes of w3schools offered this sort of environment long before the screencasters came in. Khan Academy has integrated coding environments into their programming courses, but the video is still a time sink and typically holds the student away from the code window for far too long.
And mostly everyone I've ever known who hold college degrees in high regard are not that good at much of anything.
Perhaps if I had gone to MIT or Stanford I would have a higher opinion of a college education, but that I can never know. (not that my program wasn't highly rated, just not a top 10 school in my field)
I hold my degree in high regard, but not all degrees. I was fortunate enough to be able to study CS at a truly world-class institution, where practically every other week the teaching staff were complaining about how the industry kept trying to tell them to stop teaching CS and just churn out bog-standard "coders". As a result, even after almost a decade without coding, I'm now writing software again using all sorts of computational abstractions from custom datastructures and tree-traversal to propositional logic and FP.
The job of a good teacher isn't just to make sure you learn as much as possible -- students learn (quantatively) most when they're studying stuff that's easy to learn, and that doesn't require a teacher. What the teacher should be doing is teaching the stuff that is hard to learn -- the stuff that students can't do on their own. Most MOOC courses are the former, and a tiny few are the latter, and a few more again are somewhere in between.
I think more places that teach free classes is a good thing... maybe it will force colleges to go to more sane levels in pricing
Most "free courses" are basically the introductory units from a university 101 class or a master's programme, and designed to advertise the school to you. Berkeley have some fantastic courses on Coursera -- they clearly put a lot of time and money into them -- but once you've signed up, you're a marketing asset for their (very) expensive accredited distance programme.
Besides, free courses tend only to be capable of teaching "basic skills" which can objectively be marked right or wrong, so "coding" but not "systems design". This means that the future for them is to remove some of the grunt-work from teaching staff, and allow them to focus on the higher-level abstractions. If there's any justice in the world, it will lead to a higher quality of education. Sadly, it is more likely to be looked at as a cost-cutting measure, and higher-level learning will be left by the wayside....
Well, of course, there are good and bad lectures and lecture videos.
> Well done presentations are the exception -- don't try to build a rule on them.
I am not sure I agree. I have been satisfied with the quality of video lectures in MOOCs. I expect MOOC videos (I just use Coursera) to be better than simple lecture videos that I was accustomed to in the pre-MOOC era. M is for Massive. So I do expect that better care is taken in their production.
We're clearly coming from different places. I studied for a degree and a half with the Open University in the UK, and their production qualities were top class. The other notable thing about the OU was how little of the material was actually in video form -- typically you'd get 6 books, 4 tapes/CDs and 1 VHS tape/DVD for each course. The video was designed with very specific points in mind, and a lot of it would be interviews. Most of the core learning material was in the books.
> which brings us back to the thrust of the article -- doing video properly takes more time than it's worth
We have an article because these lecturers are the exception (IPython Notebooks are quite good teaching tools though). If I wanted a simple presentation with no expectation of effort on media, I'd normally just go download some course lectures from iTunesU.
A good presentation does not need a whole lot of effort. A screen cast format is not bad at all. It can involve slides, live code building, refer to web resources, screen drawing etc. That's pretty multi-modal and does not need a complex set up.
A good presentation needs a pretty significant amount of effort, because while multi-modal input is easy to process, multi-modal output is hard to produce.
Yeah... bout as bloody ignorant as them bloody Romans who invented the bloody thing thousands of years ago.
(You do realise that & is an older letter than K and Z, right...?)
What's that got to do with anything?
Well, how is abuse to follow a language convention that existed before there was even an English language band which has been part of English since long before printing presses &c existed. There is nothing "abusive" in it -- it's just that it's not the way you perssonally write.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, which does nothing to diminish my point!
Yes, they probably would. And as for BP, they're a publically-traded multinational company, and were in a commercial relationship with various US companies for the operations in the Gulf of Mexico. The guys most responsible for the leak were US companies, but your media loved the narrative of punishing bad foreigners....
If you could order anything with it, you'd have to pay for it. By limiting themselves to a small number of brands (currently everything seems to be Kraft or Proctor & Gamble) they can get presumably the suppliers to pay for it as part of their advertising budget. I can imagine the pitch now: "Let people go to the store and they might buy a cheaper brand. Pay for this button and you've got a customer for life."
These have no reason to exist.
Yes they do. They push people into buying the expense brands that are willing to pay Amazon for the privilege of having their own buttons. They also mean you'll have visible ads for particular brands in your house when friends visit.
I have two degrees from the OU -- it's a very different beast from the MOOCs. Furthermore, the OU was in the process to a transition to "all online" while I was still studying with them, and the courses at the beginning of my study were far more effective than the ones at the end. Even just the simple ability to take my books to the park in my lunchbreak rather than be stuck in a chair at a desk was a pleasure.
Please explain how it would be a parody.
... but not copyright as he hasn't "published" anything.
Hasn't he? I'm sure I saw the software available for download from a website. I must have been dreaming.
This guy could have easily solved this DCMA problem by removing Nintendo assets and using his own.
...and designing his own level. Suddenly that word "easily" becomes inapplicable. In the days before orchestral soundtracks, gazillion-polygon reverse kinematic modelling and 4K-ready texture design (ie Mario64 era), the single biggest job in game design was making levels that played right.
it's parody like, too.
Please feel free to explain how an almost-exact copy of something is a parody. If I photocopy your CV, is that parody too?
Let me just check me Gog.com bookshelf...
"Broken Sword" I,II,III and IV (1996, 1997, 2003, 2006)
"Magic Carpet" (1994)
"Little Big Adventure" I (1994) and 2 (1997)
"Interstate 76" (1997)
"I have no mouth and I must scream" (1995)
I could go on, but I'll just finish with "Another World" (1991). If gog.com did MAME roms, I'd happily pay for even older stuff, like Pacman, Pengo and Mr Do.
Many are creating their own games but the reason for copying is: human nature and it requires less work.
It's also easier to grab attention with. In the same week that this Mario64 clone was released, numerous original indie titles were presumably released, but they didn't get the press. Shutting down this sort of thing isn't just good for Nintendo, it's good for the indie scene too.
Unless it's obviously taking sales away,
What you are proposing is called "shutting the door when the horse has bolted". It's like not building flood defenses "unless the river is obviously filling people's basements", or not tsunami-proofing your nuclear powerplant "unless a tsunami is obviously knocking out your backup systems and failsafes".
Nintendo's business model has incorporated nostalgia for decades. Sequels, remakes and reissues are their stock-in-trade, and most people are cool with that because they normally do a decent job of it. Allowing others to satiate consumers' nostalgia for free would be suicide to Nintendo.
No doubt some people will say "good -- it'll force them to be original for once", but that's nonsense. Nintendo are still engaged in more innovation than most publishers, who have cookie-cutter FPSes coming out of their ears.
Why no one looks for a solution outside of (a) cease and desist permanently and immediately or (b) lawsuit is beyond me.
Well first of all, a cease and desist is easier and cheaper than drawing up a legally binding contract that is guaranteed to generate no profit, and may serve to reduce sales; and secondly because they typically want the other party to cease and desist!
If you can put a VNC client on it, it's a bog-standard thin client, like any other.
That's what this reaction against MOOCs is all about. Colleges have decided they don't want MOOCs after it being all the rage for 5 minutes, and they want their old conservative business model back thank you. Too late. So now people are trashing online education as "inferior" even if it isn't.
Except it is.
And Coursera lacks serious cohesion and supervision.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. Both Coursera and edX offer courses of a wide range of qualities. There are good to very good courses on both of them, there are very bland ones on both of them. Some of them even leave out the l and the n.
By cohesion, I assume he means the lack of programmed progression. So that (for example) any time you want to learn a new programming language, they start from zero explaining loops and conditionals etc, yadda yadda yadda.
People are not motivated to learn something until they need to - Once they need to, they are happy to blast through it intensely - And they will put it to use right away - And their motivation comes from needs (for a raise, to be competitive, etc.)
All too often, that means "too late". My first job out of uni refused to train staff with out a "confirmed need" for a particular training course, but typically (particularly at the junior levels) you were given a new assignment at short notice, and even if you theoretically had time for the training course, they were either all booked up, or weren't running that month. This left you blasting through it unhappily as you were indeed putting it to use right away, before you were really ready to. This is how hacky, unmaintainable code gets written.
I've given them an honest shot, but like many I could not finish a course. I found that the lack of a face to face human communication was a huge stumbling block to success. Especially thring to learn python, math subjects, etc. It is far easier to be spoon fed knowledge and walked around complex subjects with your hand held. The main weakness in MOOCs is the lack of human interaction and instruction when you are not able to figure it out on your own.
The problem with MOOCs for programming, maths etc is that they were outdated before they began. Sitting watching a video, then doing an offline task, then submitting the task online is just not good enough. You want a tight cycle of: present new information -> demonstrate -> test -> integrate with existing knowledge -> test -> present new information....
The likes of w3schools offered this sort of environment long before the screencasters came in. Khan Academy has integrated coding environments into their programming courses, but the video is still a time sink and typically holds the student away from the code window for far too long.
Because... "internet".
And mostly everyone I've ever known who hold college degrees in high regard are not that good at much of anything.
Perhaps if I had gone to MIT or Stanford I would have a higher opinion of a college education, but that I can never know. (not that my program wasn't highly rated, just not a top 10 school in my field)
I hold my degree in high regard, but not all degrees. I was fortunate enough to be able to study CS at a truly world-class institution, where practically every other week the teaching staff were complaining about how the industry kept trying to tell them to stop teaching CS and just churn out bog-standard "coders". As a result, even after almost a decade without coding, I'm now writing software again using all sorts of computational abstractions from custom datastructures and tree-traversal to propositional logic and FP.
The job of a good teacher isn't just to make sure you learn as much as possible -- students learn (quantatively) most when they're studying stuff that's easy to learn, and that doesn't require a teacher. What the teacher should be doing is teaching the stuff that is hard to learn -- the stuff that students can't do on their own. Most MOOC courses are the former, and a tiny few are the latter, and a few more again are somewhere in between.
I think more places that teach free classes is a good thing... maybe it will force colleges to go to more sane levels in pricing
Most "free courses" are basically the introductory units from a university 101 class or a master's programme, and designed to advertise the school to you. Berkeley have some fantastic courses on Coursera -- they clearly put a lot of time and money into them -- but once you've signed up, you're a marketing asset for their (very) expensive accredited distance programme.
Besides, free courses tend only to be capable of teaching "basic skills" which can objectively be marked right or wrong, so "coding" but not "systems design". This means that the future for them is to remove some of the grunt-work from teaching staff, and allow them to focus on the higher-level abstractions. If there's any justice in the world, it will lead to a higher quality of education. Sadly, it is more likely to be looked at as a cost-cutting measure, and higher-level learning will be left by the wayside....
Twas a joke, good sirrah.
It's not a general purpose drop-in replacement for the word "and."
That's just fashion. It's like telling someone they shouldn't have three buttons on their suit cuff.
I remember leaving one company and I was the one who ended up turning the lights out on my last day.
Self-employment's a bitch. ;-)
Well, of course, there are good and bad lectures and lecture videos.
> Well done presentations are the exception -- don't try to build a rule on them.
I am not sure I agree. I have been satisfied with the quality of video lectures in MOOCs. I expect MOOC videos (I just use Coursera) to be better than simple lecture videos that I was accustomed to in the pre-MOOC era. M is for Massive. So I do expect that better care is taken in their production.
We're clearly coming from different places. I studied for a degree and a half with the Open University in the UK, and their production qualities were top class. The other notable thing about the OU was how little of the material was actually in video form -- typically you'd get 6 books, 4 tapes/CDs and 1 VHS tape/DVD for each course. The video was designed with very specific points in mind, and a lot of it would be interviews. Most of the core learning material was in the books.
> which brings us back to the thrust of the article -- doing video properly takes more time than it's worth
We have an article because these lecturers are the exception (IPython Notebooks are quite good teaching tools though). If I wanted a simple presentation with no expectation of effort on media, I'd normally just go download some course lectures from iTunesU.
A good presentation does not need a whole lot of effort. A screen cast format is not bad at all. It can involve slides, live code building, refer to web resources, screen drawing etc. That's pretty multi-modal and does not need a complex set up.
A good presentation needs a pretty significant amount of effort, because while multi-modal input is easy to process, multi-modal output is hard to produce.
Yeah... bout as bloody ignorant as them bloody Romans who invented the bloody thing thousands of years ago.
(You do realise that & is an older letter than K and Z, right...?)
What's that got to do with anything?
Well, how is abuse to follow a language convention that existed before there was even an English language band which has been part of English since long before printing presses &c existed. There is nothing "abusive" in it -- it's just that it's not the way you perssonally write.