xBox, the 360, now the Zune... You have to wonder how long shareholders will allow the company to "invest" in money-losing ventures.
There's always the hope (for Microsoft) that pouring money into these losers will allow them to drive competitors out of the market. But that isn't really a viable business strategy in the long run. Even the IE/Netscape battle wasn't really won based on Microsoft's ability to compete on price (free)--there was actually a time when Netscape sucked and IE was fairly good. That's why MS "won" that browser battle (though the war isn't won yet).
It will be interesting to see how long Microsoft can continue to shift money from their dominant OS and Office products to money losers without creating an investor revolt.
First off, people who care that much about what others think about their taste in music (or food, clothes, whatever) are in need of serious psychological help. If you don't have the self-confidence to like what you like, and the hell with the rest of the world, you are (in my book) suffering the deepest kind of herd mentality that deserves disdain at every level.
But more to the point, who in the world has other people looking at their iTunes playlist? If someone is looking at my PC and browsing my iTunes library, I suspect that they probably know me well enough to know of my love of 50's car songs (Jan and Dean & The Beach Boys) and penchant for listening to Weird Al's Starwars songs.
I have to ask what type of paranoid thinks that the whole world is trying to ferret out their listening habits...
If you think the 2-minute snippets of news you get from PBS (or any other TV news service) are more informative than a multiple-page article in almost any major print publication, that's just nuts. Despite disclaimers to the contrary, public broadcasters are just as much in the "business" of drawing eyeballs as commercial stations, with the concomitant bias towards cheap sound-bites, pandering to the bread-and-circuses crowd, and pop-psych "analysis." They may not be drawing money from traditional advertisers, but their revenue stream is at least partly based on market share; how many people are listening during the next funding drive and if big sponsors think getting their name attached to a show is likely to help their public image.
At no time has television news (of any kind-public or private) appeared interested in or able to expend the time necessary to give background information and in-depth coverage of complex issues. This is especially true when it comes to situations where there's some horrific video to show. You'll find the PBS cameras pan the carnage just as lovingly as the cameras of "commercial" organizations, with the same cliched phrases and the same trite wrap-up.
While not every printed news source does better (USA Today is like a printed version of TV news) far and away the majority regularly bring a depth and breadth to news that television news just doesn't match. In my opinion, this is likely to continue to be the case for the foreseeable future.
"So Mr. Smith borrows thousands of dollars and fails to repay it, he doesn't get the new job?"
I know it's all the rage here on slashdot to blame big, bad corporations for making an evil profit, and that personal responsibility is about as poplar as the current occupant of the White House, but this is bordering on the silly.
Credit is something that you choose to exercise. It's a business relationship between you and the credit issuer, where they provide you a service (a temporary infusion of cash, often unwisely spent) in return for a consideration (usually interest on the average daily balance). Utilizing this service and failing to pay back what you have borrowed is akin to theft. If you borrowed 5k from a friend and didn't pay it back, we'd all agree that you weren't much of a friend. Play the same trick on a faceless company (say charging back against a small business owner) and you can feel proud that you've "stuck it to the man" and take the accolades and +5 insightful on slashdot, as a brave hero of the masses.
In any event, the example is ridiculous (but a very nice straw man). You don't max out your credit cards to pay medical bills if you have any sense at all. You make payment arrangements with the hospital (they almost all make a practice of this, and generally are very understanding if you're actually making payments). I know, as I used to work for a hospital that did this all the time.
Money is not the problem. If you look at the per-student spending (~ $8000 according to the DoE) and multiply by class size (say around 25 students as an average) you come out with about $200,000 per year, per classroom.
Teachers may be underpaid (though if my former coworkers are any indication, some awfully ignorant/incompetent people are making 50K a year for baby-sitting services in public "schools") but the solution isn't (necessarily) more money per student. I'd guess you could double teacher salaries if you could just kill the graft and waste in a typical school district. On the other hand, as I mentioned, having spent a good bit of time in the staff room and other classrooms, I think a lot of teachers are getting paid more than they're worth. One of the things that drove me away from teaching (although I loved working with the kids) is the adult company I had to keep.
Had a design template in Photoshop that contained all the graphics for buttons, checkboxes, text fields, etc. The designers just grabbed elements from the template and used them to mock up their design. I don't see any reason you couldn't do the same thing using the GIMP.
You should be able to grab screenshots of the elements you want out of Firefox and then reuse them in your layout. The only "hard" part is that for objects that have variable sizes, you have to grab the right and left sides and the middle as separate elements. Then for a "wide" button you stretch the middle portion to the correct width for your text and then place the right and left elements on the sides.
This may sound like too much work to you, but keep in mind that once you have captured all the parts you need, you can reuse them on future projects of a similar sort.
I've done a good deal of amateur astronomy (it was my favorite science class in college) including building a couple of telescopes (one from a kit and one from scratch) so I find the discussion around creating a new definition for "planet" interesting. But I'm still not convinced that there's a meaningful reason for the change.
As I said, I'm not opposed (necessarily), I'm just curious as to why this is suddenly a big deal. Claiming "better knowledge" seems specious. Again, as far as I can tell this is about semantics, not some "new knowledge." Maybe the new definition clears up an ambiguity that I'm not seeing, or perhaps there's some value in being able to group these objects as "planets" and "not-planets" in a new and different way, but the benefit doesn't seem large. Which makes me believe (as I stated in my original post) that this is mostly a political thing--infighting among astronomers.
I'm not sure why so many people discussing this think people are opposed "because that's what they learned" -- although it's somewhat amusing that you're parroting that reply even after I explicitly stated that's not my reason for questioning the change. But this is slashdot, where strawmen abound, so I was halfway expecting the "I read your first sentence, then replied" knee-jerk reaction.
code that disobeys the user's wishes, and acts against the user, on their own computer
Hey, you typed a dash at the beginning of a line! It looks like you're creating a bulleted list: and I know that what you really want is for me to reformat the line into a bulleted list with completely new and different formatting from what it had when you started typing
Is this really a "better definition of a planet" -- or just different? IMO, it's all semantics and that's the thing that has some people scratching their heads... This isn't about science, per se, it's about the politics of naming.
I don't really care whether Pluto is a "planet" or "pluton" or "dwarf planet" (since I've long been out of school) but the question I keep asking myself is "Why is the new definition 'better'?" Is it more accurate? Clearer? My take is that if you say "the planets are these nine (or ten, or twenty) bodies," that's perfectly as acceptable as saying "a body that's in orbit around the Sun, that's mostly round, that has cleared other bodies from its vicinity." The first definition is less flexible (and has lead to some arguments over whether newly-discovered bodies are "planets") but the new definition was also carefully crafted to include and exclude the things that are (or are not) to be part of the group.
One thing that amuses me about this is the politics of naming and/or grouping things. The current issue with astronomers is so much like what we get from doctors, with their naming fetish: a sort of neo-pagan belief that naming a thing gives you power over it. I always find it amusing when the doctor tells you you're suffering from plantar fasciitis, which is to say "sole band" - as if calling an injury by its location (in Latin) is some magical incantation. Or perhaps the Latin naming can give us insight into the current controversy. After all, these "star lawyers" are working on their naming conventions.:-)
I have a neighbor who works at the Intel office here in the Silicon Valley and she's known for quite a while that these were in the works. IIRC, she was talking about this back in April or May.
One thing that I've always thought about company layoff planning is that there's a difficult choice to be made over when to notify employees that a layoff is in the works. Too little notice and people feel like they're being dumped without warning, too much and you have a long period of tension and a lot of people slacking off because they know that they're headed for the unemployment line.
When I worked for a division of a major company that was planning layoffs, we all knew in June that the offices in California were going to be closed by the end of the year, and offical notice came in October. The company did something that I considered a stand-up thing: they told us who was going (in October) and gave us official permission for the rest of the year to look for work using company resources. It was cool for them to give us that much notice (though because of the slow market at the time, it was hard to find work even with such a long lead time). However, a lot of employees (including ones who really were supposed to be doing something else) spent the time building houses of cards out of their company business cards, driving remote-controlled cars around the cubes, and generally goofing off.
Again, it was a cool thing for the company to do (and I am aware that there are financial incentives for getting your employees hired off before closing an office--but I don't think those offset the cost of paying them salary for three months) but I can see that there are employers who couldn't afford to do that.
Here's hoping all the folks getting pink slips at Intel can find something else to do as quickly as they'd like.
As a former educator myself, I have to say that the idea that a middle-school student "needs" a laptop to complete writing assignments is more than silly. As a parent, I'd also be opposed to this "no child left without a laptop" program.
Leave aside the fact that Johnny can't spell because of spell-checking and that he can't write a coherent sentence because he thinks that Word's grammar checker is somehow useful.
You teach students to think logically, marshal their arguments, and then structure their ideas into a well-organized whole. At that point, (good) writing starts. Once you have something that's well-written, then you do the "computer-centric" steps, like formatting, adding a TOC, etc. The computer is a useful tool for producing written work (as a writer, I know this well) but it can interfere with the actual writing unless you have the ability to separate the process from the tool. From my teaching experience, most students are still working on this.
As I've said to my employer, I can teach any competent adult how to use our writing tools. In fact, learning the tools is a fairly straightforward process. What I can't teach an adult (in the time my employer allows for new employee training) is critical thinking, information organization, and grammar.
Let's face it: there are already too many distractions in school, for both students and teachers. If you subtract the amount of time that teachers are required to spend either "teaching the test" and on non-academic subjects, then take away the time kids will spend changing fonts and using "WordArt" you'll wind up with about an hour of real instructional time.
Yes, this has happened to me. Regularly. Enough times that I have lost interest in making further corrections.
And no, I didn't keep careful records of edits. Change tracking and content revision is something I do in my day job, so I'm not really interested in expending that kind of effort on the Wikipedia in the evenings.
Back when I was making edits, I was interested enough in the project that I bothered to keep a list and return to articles I'd changed with the idea of "keeping them up" if anyone had added new info. "Maintenance" of knowledge base articles is something I'm very familiar with as a writer who has done a good bit of editing and I was expecting that Wikipedia articles would require something similar. Imagine my surprise when I returned to articles I'd edited to find that while no new information had been added, the articles were either reverted or re-edited by someone with apprently no grasp of English. It doesn't take many instances of that to show the futility of editing Wikipedia articles and to kill off all enthusiasm for the task.
That's my personal experience. Other writers I know (and I know quite a few technical writers here in the Bay Area) have expressed similar frustration.
Again, there's the possiblity that someone could come up with a solution for this, but I haven't seen it yet.
Let me suggest that before you write me off as a troll, you try it for yourself: Pick an article with an egregious grammar error, correct the mistake, and then come back in a week or ten days. Unless the article is completely obscure (i.e. no one ever sees your changes) chances are that the article will be back in the same sad shape within that time.
When I first discovered the Wikipedia, I thought that it was cool that I could help to "fix" broken articles (I'm a writer in my day job). So I spent a little free time correcting the grammar errors (and generally sloppy writing) in a number of articles, probably around 10. Within a week, all but one of them had either been reverted so that the original mistakes returned, or re-edited introducing the same or similar mistakes. When I saw that, it became clear to me that what Wiki-boosters claim as the main strength of Wikipedia is also a weakness. It also significantly cooled my interest in editing the poorly written articles I come across.
Basically, writing done by committee is always going to be inferior. Since that's the method that the Wikipedia currently uses, it's hard to see any significant improvement in the quality of the articles coming along. Further, I think that there's no real solution to this problem as long as every article is open to editing by anyone at any time. Someone suggested that there should be a static "live" article and then people would work on a dynamic "backend" article that would become the live article once it was edited and checked for accuracy. But I'm not sure even that would work, since it requires someone to take ownership of the article.
Perhaps there's a solution out there, but none of the proposals I've seen suggested looks like it would work.
Actually, IMO the biggest threat to Wikipedia's "quality" claim is that, contrary to the disclaimer at the bottom of pages on en.wikipedia.org, "This Wikipedia isn't English." Vandalism has nothing to do with the problem -- un-vandalized articles are just as bad as the vandalized ones.
Until someone comes up with a way to sort out the crap writing, Wikipedia is still going to have the appearance of something that's poor quality. Some of the articles read like they were written by a random spam generator.
Some examples:
From the article on the the Kuomintang party in Taiwan (ROC)
Current party leader Ma Ying-jeou advocates signing a 30-50 year peace treaty with China and forming a common market as well as Chinese culture.
Nice. How do you parse that? The ROC wants a treaty to form Chinese culture?
Although he is not in custody, his arrest is proving to be a major factor in Serbia and Montenegro's integrations towards the EU.
Yikes! "...integrations towards the EU"?
Or how about: The city was bombarded with shells, snipers randomly shooting.
Yeah, right. Could you tell me how hard it is to bombard a town with snipers randomly shooting? How difficult is it to get the snipers into the cannons? And how do they manage to shoot during their ballistic flight toward the city? If the barrels of the artillery are rifled, I guess any sniper fire would be pretty random.
Here's another one from the article on the V2 Rocket:
It was the progenitor of the rocket race that developed during the Cold War, and ultimately put men on the moon and probes that have left our solar system.
Parse that sentence and you wind up wondering how the V2 helped put men on the probes that have left our solar system. And if any of those men knew that they were on a one-way journey...
Whatever else you may get from Wikipedia (I read it for the laughs), the articles (both writing and factual content) don't say "quality." More like "any idiet cun edit hour artikles, and we du!"
Just click the "Random article" link. Within two or three clicks, you're bound to land on an article that contains spelling, grammar, logical, or factual errors. Not only are some of these articles the worst form of "committee-write," they're chock full of errata, as well as contradictory and even downright wrong information.
Of course, the Wiki-boosters mantra "anyone can fix it" is ridiculous, as there's no value proposition in correcting sloppily written articles when you know that some "administrator" with a fifth-grade reading level is going to revert the article as soon as you've cleaned it up. Of course, this is the same group (Wiki-boosters) who sincerely believe that giving every child in Africa a laptop with the Wikipedia on it is the sure cure of all that continent's ills.
Until Jimbo's Big Bag of Trivia gets some real editorial staff, "quality" will continue to be job 237,345,861.
He appears to have no interest in the practical outcome of his evangelism, either in regards to implementation or tracking results amongst converts. His MO seems to be to come in, spout the benefits of Free Software, and immediately leave the scene before any questions of practicality arise.
That's fine if you're interested in Free Software solely as a political tool (which seems to be the case with RMS). But if you're actually interested in the long-term viability of the model, how it is interwoven with the Open Source movement, and the practical outcomes that can be used as a tool to encourage more folks to look at Free Software as an alternative, you really need hard numbers.
That's not RMS's "thing" though. Hopefully someone else will do the necessary followup.
You've made the classic blunder of using the MS-fanboi rallying cry of "there are millions more Windows users" followed by the only slightly less-well-know Big Lie that "If OSX had that kind of a market share..." Apple would have an equal number of OS flaws.
If you don't think that there's are hackers out there who wouldn't give their eye-teeth for the fame that will come from writing the first successful Mac virus, you're on crack. Not only is there the notoriety, but you'd have spam-kings and Russian mofia dons beating down your door with fistfuls of money. 10% of 300 million computers is still a significant number by anyone's standards.
I'm typing this on a Windows PC, but from your post (despite the disclaimer) I think it's unlikely you have much experience with Mac OS.
that if you're going to attempt to be a Linux apologist, you should try and actually help the folks who are having problems, rather than insisting that they are the problem. The GP is right, I come across this attitude all the time. Indeed, when I first installed Linux a couple years ago, I did it despite the general community of obnoxious "you are so not the haxor"-geeks, not because of them.
There are two side to this: the clueless noobs who want Linux to be just like Windows (which means, essentially, self-configuring or trivially configurable) and the self-proclaimed Linux Uber-geeks, who insist that everyone should be able to figure out obscure, undocumented command-line configurations by trial and error. This is a problem both with Linux itself and with many applications written for Linux.
I really like Linux. I have a Fedora box running at work, a Ubuntu box at home, and another box at home waiting to be converted to some other distro. Nevertheless, the truth is that Linux is not (generally speaking) as easy to use as Windows in terms of either hardware or software configuration. Until we admit that this is a problem for widespread adoption, it's going to continue to be difficult to convince people that Linux is just as good as Windows even though we know that in many ways it is actually even better. One way to make this better (aside from actually coding things to be easier to work with) is to offer support to people who are interested in using Linux.
New users are turned off when they attempt to dip a toe into the waters of Linux and discover that not only is the water much colder than they are used to, but there are obnoxious children splashing everyone, insisting that the water is warm and it's the new user that's the wrong temp.
But come on, the rate of cellphone adoption these days makes it unlikely that there's anyone being attacked during a power outage who is relying soley on their VOIP phone to call 911?
I don't necessarily agree or disagree 100% with the ad, I just thought it was interesting that AT&T thought they needed a "preemptive strike" against VOIP. I wasn't aware that the uptake was high enough to rate that kind of a strategy.
Yes... and we're expecting people with little or no computer experience to install and configure this software... on Linux?
harder to share / look on with a friend, harder to work collaboratively
Collaboration software already exists.
The more important issue in this one is "harder to look on with a friend". At 8", the screen is going to be hard enough to use when you're hunched over with your face a few inches from it. And again, who will install this collaboration software?
Harder to read at length
Can you back up this assertion?
I'll have to dig around a bit, but I'm a writer and I've seen studies that indicate a bias towards paper for reading longer works. Eyestrain is a well-know phenomena among those who spend large amounts of time staring at a screen. Maybe these new screens will be better in terms of reflectivity and emitted light, or maybe their small size will cancel any advantage out. We don't know yet.
harder to transport
Perhaps for full-sized notebooks, but not for the OLPC subnotebook.
Here, I think you're correct. Even if the overall dimensions of the laptop a larger than any one book, the ability to store multiple books in the single laptop makes it unlikely that the computer will be harder to transport than a pile of books. The one issue will be fragility--school kids are VERY hard on things and paper books are extremely resilient.
This project has a noble goal, but it's important to be rational about what the project can be expected to accomplish. Setting realistic expectations is extremely important if this isn't going to be written off as another pie-in-the-sky plan that didn't pan out.
The correct expectation lies somewhere between the nutjobs who are saying that a $100 laptop and an offline copy of Wikipedia will solve all of Africa's ills and the nay-sayers who complain it'll never work.
Slashdot Mirror
xBox, the 360, now the Zune... You have to wonder how long shareholders will allow the company to "invest" in money-losing ventures.
There's always the hope (for Microsoft) that pouring money into these losers will allow them to drive competitors out of the market. But that isn't really a viable business strategy in the long run. Even the IE/Netscape battle wasn't really won based on Microsoft's ability to compete on price (free)--there was actually a time when Netscape sucked and IE was fairly good. That's why MS "won" that browser battle (though the war isn't won yet).
It will be interesting to see how long Microsoft can continue to shift money from their dominant OS and Office products to money losers without creating an investor revolt.
First off, people who care that much about what others think about their taste in music (or food, clothes, whatever) are in need of serious psychological help. If you don't have the self-confidence to like what you like, and the hell with the rest of the world, you are (in my book) suffering the deepest kind of herd mentality that deserves disdain at every level.
But more to the point, who in the world has other people looking at their iTunes playlist? If someone is looking at my PC and browsing my iTunes library, I suspect that they probably know me well enough to know of my love of 50's car songs (Jan and Dean & The Beach Boys) and penchant for listening to Weird Al's Starwars songs.
I have to ask what type of paranoid thinks that the whole world is trying to ferret out their listening habits...
Interesting game, professor. The only way to win is not to play.
If you think the 2-minute snippets of news you get from PBS (or any other TV news service) are more informative than a multiple-page article in almost any major print publication, that's just nuts. Despite disclaimers to the contrary, public broadcasters are just as much in the "business" of drawing eyeballs as commercial stations, with the concomitant bias towards cheap sound-bites, pandering to the bread-and-circuses crowd, and pop-psych "analysis." They may not be drawing money from traditional advertisers, but their revenue stream is at least partly based on market share; how many people are listening during the next funding drive and if big sponsors think getting their name attached to a show is likely to help their public image.
At no time has television news (of any kind-public or private) appeared interested in or able to expend the time necessary to give background information and in-depth coverage of complex issues. This is especially true when it comes to situations where there's some horrific video to show. You'll find the PBS cameras pan the carnage just as lovingly as the cameras of "commercial" organizations, with the same cliched phrases and the same trite wrap-up.
While not every printed news source does better (USA Today is like a printed version of TV news) far and away the majority regularly bring a depth and breadth to news that television news just doesn't match. In my opinion, this is likely to continue to be the case for the foreseeable future.
and Google is part of the Internet, right?
It's out there in one of those tube thingys
D
Because the poster clearly doesn't see the need to eliminate all the plugging and unplugging of cables. A mere 90% is sufficient.
"So Mr. Smith borrows thousands of dollars and fails to repay it, he doesn't get the new job?"
I know it's all the rage here on slashdot to blame big, bad corporations for making an evil profit, and that personal responsibility is about as poplar as the current occupant of the White House, but this is bordering on the silly.
Credit is something that you choose to exercise. It's a business relationship between you and the credit issuer, where they provide you a service (a temporary infusion of cash, often unwisely spent) in return for a consideration (usually interest on the average daily balance). Utilizing this service and failing to pay back what you have borrowed is akin to theft. If you borrowed 5k from a friend and didn't pay it back, we'd all agree that you weren't much of a friend. Play the same trick on a faceless company (say charging back against a small business owner) and you can feel proud that you've "stuck it to the man" and take the accolades and +5 insightful on slashdot, as a brave hero of the masses.
In any event, the example is ridiculous (but a very nice straw man). You don't max out your credit cards to pay medical bills if you have any sense at all. You make payment arrangements with the hospital (they almost all make a practice of this, and generally are very understanding if you're actually making payments). I know, as I used to work for a hospital that did this all the time.
Money is not the problem. If you look at the per-student spending (~ $8000 according to the DoE) and multiply by class size (say around 25 students as an average) you come out with about $200,000 per year, per classroom.
Teachers may be underpaid (though if my former coworkers are any indication, some awfully ignorant/incompetent people are making 50K a year for baby-sitting services in public "schools") but the solution isn't (necessarily) more money per student. I'd guess you could double teacher salaries if you could just kill the graft and waste in a typical school district. On the other hand, as I mentioned, having spent a good bit of time in the staff room and other classrooms, I think a lot of teachers are getting paid more than they're worth. One of the things that drove me away from teaching (although I loved working with the kids) is the adult company I had to keep.
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Expression is teh roxor
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Had a design template in Photoshop that contained all the graphics for buttons, checkboxes, text fields, etc. The designers just grabbed elements from the template and used them to mock up their design. I don't see any reason you couldn't do the same thing using the GIMP.
You should be able to grab screenshots of the elements you want out of Firefox and then reuse them in your layout. The only "hard" part is that for objects that have variable sizes, you have to grab the right and left sides and the middle as separate elements. Then for a "wide" button you stretch the middle portion to the correct width for your text and then place the right and left elements on the sides.
This may sound like too much work to you, but keep in mind that once you have captured all the parts you need, you can reuse them on future projects of a similar sort.
I've done a good deal of amateur astronomy (it was my favorite science class in college) including building a couple of telescopes (one from a kit and one from scratch) so I find the discussion around creating a new definition for "planet" interesting. But I'm still not convinced that there's a meaningful reason for the change.
As I said, I'm not opposed (necessarily), I'm just curious as to why this is suddenly a big deal. Claiming "better knowledge" seems specious. Again, as far as I can tell this is about semantics, not some "new knowledge." Maybe the new definition clears up an ambiguity that I'm not seeing, or perhaps there's some value in being able to group these objects as "planets" and "not-planets" in a new and different way, but the benefit doesn't seem large. Which makes me believe (as I stated in my original post) that this is mostly a political thing--infighting among astronomers.
I'm not sure why so many people discussing this think people are opposed "because that's what they learned" -- although it's somewhat amusing that you're parroting that reply even after I explicitly stated that's not my reason for questioning the change. But this is slashdot, where strawmen abound, so I was halfway expecting the "I read your first sentence, then replied" knee-jerk reaction.
And I'm still waiting for a serious answer...
Hey, you typed a dash at the beginning of a line! It looks like you're creating a bulleted list: and I know that what you really want is for me to reformat the line into a bulleted list with completely new and different formatting from what it had when you started typing
Is this really a "better definition of a planet" -- or just different? IMO, it's all semantics and that's the thing that has some people scratching their heads... This isn't about science, per se, it's about the politics of naming.
:-)
I don't really care whether Pluto is a "planet" or "pluton" or "dwarf planet" (since I've long been out of school) but the question I keep asking myself is "Why is the new definition 'better'?" Is it more accurate? Clearer? My take is that if you say "the planets are these nine (or ten, or twenty) bodies," that's perfectly as acceptable as saying "a body that's in orbit around the Sun, that's mostly round, that has cleared other bodies from its vicinity." The first definition is less flexible (and has lead to some arguments over whether newly-discovered bodies are "planets") but the new definition was also carefully crafted to include and exclude the things that are (or are not) to be part of the group.
One thing that amuses me about this is the politics of naming and/or grouping things. The current issue with astronomers is so much like what we get from doctors, with their naming fetish: a sort of neo-pagan belief that naming a thing gives you power over it. I always find it amusing when the doctor tells you you're suffering from plantar fasciitis, which is to say "sole band" - as if calling an injury by its location (in Latin) is some magical incantation. Or perhaps the Latin naming can give us insight into the current controversy. After all, these "star lawyers" are working on their naming conventions.
I have a neighbor who works at the Intel office here in the Silicon Valley and she's known for quite a while that these were in the works. IIRC, she was talking about this back in April or May.
One thing that I've always thought about company layoff planning is that there's a difficult choice to be made over when to notify employees that a layoff is in the works. Too little notice and people feel like they're being dumped without warning, too much and you have a long period of tension and a lot of people slacking off because they know that they're headed for the unemployment line.
When I worked for a division of a major company that was planning layoffs, we all knew in June that the offices in California were going to be closed by the end of the year, and offical notice came in October. The company did something that I considered a stand-up thing: they told us who was going (in October) and gave us official permission for the rest of the year to look for work using company resources. It was cool for them to give us that much notice (though because of the slow market at the time, it was hard to find work even with such a long lead time). However, a lot of employees (including ones who really were supposed to be doing something else) spent the time building houses of cards out of their company business cards, driving remote-controlled cars around the cubes, and generally goofing off.
Again, it was a cool thing for the company to do (and I am aware that there are financial incentives for getting your employees hired off before closing an office--but I don't think those offset the cost of paying them salary for three months) but I can see that there are employers who couldn't afford to do that.
Here's hoping all the folks getting pink slips at Intel can find something else to do as quickly as they'd like.
The standard is that the female just has to "feel uncomfortable." That's it. If she "feels uncomfortable" then you're guilty of sexual harrassment.
With the bar set that low, you can't blame guys for going out of their way to avoid the women in their workplaces.
As a former educator myself, I have to say that the idea that a middle-school student "needs" a laptop to complete writing assignments is more than silly. As a parent, I'd also be opposed to this "no child left without a laptop" program.
Leave aside the fact that Johnny can't spell because of spell-checking and that he can't write a coherent sentence because he thinks that Word's grammar checker is somehow useful.
You teach students to think logically, marshal their arguments, and then structure their ideas into a well-organized whole. At that point, (good) writing starts. Once you have something that's well-written, then you do the "computer-centric" steps, like formatting, adding a TOC, etc. The computer is a useful tool for producing written work (as a writer, I know this well) but it can interfere with the actual writing unless you have the ability to separate the process from the tool. From my teaching experience, most students are still working on this.
As I've said to my employer, I can teach any competent adult how to use our writing tools. In fact, learning the tools is a fairly straightforward process. What I can't teach an adult (in the time my employer allows for new employee training) is critical thinking, information organization, and grammar.
Let's face it: there are already too many distractions in school, for both students and teachers. If you subtract the amount of time that teachers are required to spend either "teaching the test" and on non-academic subjects, then take away the time kids will spend changing fonts and using "WordArt" you'll wind up with about an hour of real instructional time.
Yes, this has happened to me. Regularly. Enough times that I have lost interest in making further corrections.
And no, I didn't keep careful records of edits. Change tracking and content revision is something I do in my day job, so I'm not really interested in expending that kind of effort on the Wikipedia in the evenings.
Back when I was making edits, I was interested enough in the project that I bothered to keep a list and return to articles I'd changed with the idea of "keeping them up" if anyone had added new info. "Maintenance" of knowledge base articles is something I'm very familiar with as a writer who has done a good bit of editing and I was expecting that Wikipedia articles would require something similar. Imagine my surprise when I returned to articles I'd edited to find that while no new information had been added, the articles were either reverted or re-edited by someone with apprently no grasp of English. It doesn't take many instances of that to show the futility of editing Wikipedia articles and to kill off all enthusiasm for the task.
That's my personal experience. Other writers I know (and I know quite a few technical writers here in the Bay Area) have expressed similar frustration.
Again, there's the possiblity that someone could come up with a solution for this, but I haven't seen it yet.
Let me suggest that before you write me off as a troll, you try it for yourself: Pick an article with an egregious grammar error, correct the mistake, and then come back in a week or ten days. Unless the article is completely obscure (i.e. no one ever sees your changes) chances are that the article will be back in the same sad shape within that time.
When I first discovered the Wikipedia, I thought that it was cool that I could help to "fix" broken articles (I'm a writer in my day job). So I spent a little free time correcting the grammar errors (and generally sloppy writing) in a number of articles, probably around 10. Within a week, all but one of them had either been reverted so that the original mistakes returned, or re-edited introducing the same or similar mistakes. When I saw that, it became clear to me that what Wiki-boosters claim as the main strength of Wikipedia is also a weakness. It also significantly cooled my interest in editing the poorly written articles I come across.
Basically, writing done by committee is always going to be inferior. Since that's the method that the Wikipedia currently uses, it's hard to see any significant improvement in the quality of the articles coming along. Further, I think that there's no real solution to this problem as long as every article is open to editing by anyone at any time. Someone suggested that there should be a static "live" article and then people would work on a dynamic "backend" article that would become the live article once it was edited and checked for accuracy. But I'm not sure even that would work, since it requires someone to take ownership of the article.
Perhaps there's a solution out there, but none of the proposals I've seen suggested looks like it would work.
Actually, IMO the biggest threat to Wikipedia's "quality" claim is that, contrary to the disclaimer at the bottom of pages on en.wikipedia.org, "This Wikipedia isn't English." Vandalism has nothing to do with the problem -- un-vandalized articles are just as bad as the vandalized ones.
Until someone comes up with a way to sort out the crap writing, Wikipedia is still going to have the appearance of something that's poor quality. Some of the articles read like they were written by a random spam generator.
Some examples:
Whatever else you may get from Wikipedia (I read it for the laughs), the articles (both writing and factual content) don't say "quality." More like "any idiet cun edit hour artikles, and we du!"Just click the "Random article" link. Within two or three clicks, you're bound to land on an article that contains spelling, grammar, logical, or factual errors. Not only are some of these articles the worst form of "committee-write," they're chock full of errata, as well as contradictory and even downright wrong information.
Of course, the Wiki-boosters mantra "anyone can fix it" is ridiculous, as there's no value proposition in correcting sloppily written articles when you know that some "administrator" with a fifth-grade reading level is going to revert the article as soon as you've cleaned it up. Of course, this is the same group (Wiki-boosters) who sincerely believe that giving every child in Africa a laptop with the Wikipedia on it is the sure cure of all that continent's ills.
Until Jimbo's Big Bag of Trivia gets some real editorial staff, "quality" will continue to be job 237,345,861.
He appears to have no interest in the practical outcome of his evangelism, either in regards to implementation or tracking results amongst converts. His MO seems to be to come in, spout the benefits of Free Software, and immediately leave the scene before any questions of practicality arise.
That's fine if you're interested in Free Software solely as a political tool (which seems to be the case with RMS). But if you're actually interested in the long-term viability of the model, how it is interwoven with the Open Source movement, and the practical outcomes that can be used as a tool to encourage more folks to look at Free Software as an alternative, you really need hard numbers.
That's not RMS's "thing" though. Hopefully someone else will do the necessary followup.
You have got to be kidding, right?
You've made the classic blunder of using the MS-fanboi rallying cry of "there are millions more Windows users" followed by the only slightly less-well-know Big Lie that "If OSX had that kind of a market share..." Apple would have an equal number of OS flaws.
If you don't think that there's are hackers out there who wouldn't give their eye-teeth for the fame that will come from writing the first successful Mac virus, you're on crack. Not only is there the notoriety, but you'd have spam-kings and Russian mofia dons beating down your door with fistfuls of money. 10% of 300 million computers is still a significant number by anyone's standards.
I'm typing this on a Windows PC, but from your post (despite the disclaimer) I think it's unlikely you have much experience with Mac OS.
that if you're going to attempt to be a Linux apologist, you should try and actually help the folks who are having problems, rather than insisting that they are the problem. The GP is right, I come across this attitude all the time. Indeed, when I first installed Linux a couple years ago, I did it despite the general community of obnoxious "you are so not the haxor"-geeks, not because of them.
There are two side to this: the clueless noobs who want Linux to be just like Windows (which means, essentially, self-configuring or trivially configurable) and the self-proclaimed Linux Uber-geeks, who insist that everyone should be able to figure out obscure, undocumented command-line configurations by trial and error. This is a problem both with Linux itself and with many applications written for Linux.
I really like Linux. I have a Fedora box running at work, a Ubuntu box at home, and another box at home waiting to be converted to some other distro. Nevertheless, the truth is that Linux is not (generally speaking) as easy to use as Windows in terms of either hardware or software configuration. Until we admit that this is a problem for widespread adoption, it's going to continue to be difficult to convince people that Linux is just as good as Windows even though we know that in many ways it is actually even better. One way to make this better (aside from actually coding things to be easier to work with) is to offer support to people who are interested in using Linux.
New users are turned off when they attempt to dip a toe into the waters of Linux and discover that not only is the water much colder than they are used to, but there are obnoxious children splashing everyone, insisting that the water is warm and it's the new user that's the wrong temp.
I thought the spin coming from the Republicrats and Democans was bad enough. Why do scientists have to jump on the spin bandwagon?
But come on, the rate of cellphone adoption these days makes it unlikely that there's anyone being attacked during a power outage who is relying soley on their VOIP phone to call 911?
I don't necessarily agree or disagree 100% with the ad, I just thought it was interesting that AT&T thought they needed a "preemptive strike" against VOIP. I wasn't aware that the uptake was high enough to rate that kind of a strategy.
Yes... and we're expecting people with little or no computer experience to install and configure this software... on Linux?
The more important issue in this one is "harder to look on with a friend". At 8", the screen is going to be hard enough to use when you're hunched over with your face a few inches from it. And again, who will install this collaboration software?
I'll have to dig around a bit, but I'm a writer and I've seen studies that indicate a bias towards paper for reading longer works. Eyestrain is a well-know phenomena among those who spend large amounts of time staring at a screen. Maybe these new screens will be better in terms of reflectivity and emitted light, or maybe their small size will cancel any advantage out. We don't know yet.
Here, I think you're correct. Even if the overall dimensions of the laptop a larger than any one book, the ability to store multiple books in the single laptop makes it unlikely that the computer will be harder to transport than a pile of books. The one issue will be fragility--school kids are VERY hard on things and paper books are extremely resilient.
This project has a noble goal, but it's important to be rational about what the project can be expected to accomplish. Setting realistic expectations is extremely important if this isn't going to be written off as another pie-in-the-sky plan that didn't pan out.
The correct expectation lies somewhere between the nutjobs who are saying that a $100 laptop and an offline copy of Wikipedia will solve all of Africa's ills and the nay-sayers who complain it'll never work.