...Slashdot was the last place I could go to avoid Storms. No one took her seriously when she was on the Hillsborough Council, and is an unabashed bigot http://www.sptimes.com/2005/06/09/Hillsborough/Library_no_place_for_.shtml.
That said, I think cleaver teachers could twist this nicely. It states they can present "science." This could actually be used against teaching ID.
My vote is to let it pass and then use it to fuck with Storms' brain.
...if there were no advantage to bipedalism, then bipedal organisms would not have shown up at all This actually demonstrates the poor understanding of evolution pervading American society. Features of organisms are not necessarily the best, or even useful at all. The jury is still out regarding the conditions which led to bipedalism. Even though we see obvious advantages to having this feature, I assure you evolution didn't design it for anything.
Bipedalism has may distinct disadvantages in fact. For example it has left us with a pelvic bone not fit for easy births. If evolution cared about "advantages" one would think safe and easy births would have prevailed over riding a motorcycle.
I will remain skeptical of this, and I encourage eveyone else to as well. Not only is this NOT published in a peer reviewd journal, none of his research is! In fact his publication history over at the Londong School of Economics are filled with mostly book reviews!
Perhaps Blackboard and Desire2Learn woud BOTH like this patent to not stand. If it fails in court, it insures no one else will file a patent the LMS. Blackboard and D2L could be doing this to ensure a rogue company like SCO (or imgaine Microsoft filing such a patent) won't try to play the patent game with them. By choosing to file a patent for something with so much prior art, it seems like BB would expect for this to fail.
It sounds like your institution is running on underpowered hardware. We have a beautiful Sun Cluster which just this semester went to 4 nodes. Even the first week of a semester with record enrollment there was barely a blink. With fail over, users don't even know when an entire node goes down. Like any heavily loaded system it is about a redundancy.
Blackboard is JSP all the way. It was originally written entirely in perl and there is still quite a bit of that code left as well. No asp.net here.
I really have to give kudos to BB for their wide range of platform support. Both versions of their system (Basic Learning Edition and the Community Portal System) can be run on Solaris, Linux, or Windows. Blackboard is not perfect, but WebCT can only benefit from merging with a product that is both easier to administer and easier for most professors to use. All this and a plethora of open source plugins available via Blackboard Building Blocks.
I share an office with 6 others and I am the only programmer. Everyone else does technical writing and training. Our setup works very well: everyone's desk is in an open room. We can easily bounce ideas off of each other and have general stress relieving chats. If you want privacy you just plug in the headphones and no one bothers you.
We also have free domain over our computers. We have a "you break it, you fix it" policy that seems to work well.
Slashdot Mirror
... Dr. Murphy has announced she is leaving USF. The brain drain continues. Our new state slogan: "Florida: spend your tax dollars on not education!"
...Slashdot was the last place I could go to avoid Storms. No one took her seriously when she was on the Hillsborough Council, and is an unabashed bigot http://www.sptimes.com/2005/06/09/Hillsborough/Library_no_place_for_.shtml. That said, I think cleaver teachers could twist this nicely. It states they can present "science." This could actually be used against teaching ID. My vote is to let it pass and then use it to fuck with Storms' brain.
...if there were no advantage to bipedalism, then bipedal organisms would not have shown up at all This actually demonstrates the poor understanding of evolution pervading American society. Features of organisms are not necessarily the best, or even useful at all. The jury is still out regarding the conditions which led to bipedalism. Even though we see obvious advantages to having this feature, I assure you evolution didn't design it for anything.Bipedalism has may distinct disadvantages in fact. For example it has left us with a pelvic bone not fit for easy births. If evolution cared about "advantages" one would think safe and easy births would have prevailed over riding a motorcycle.
I will remain skeptical of this, and I encourage eveyone else to as well. Not only is this NOT published in a peer reviewd journal, none of his research is! In fact his publication history over at the Londong School of Economics are filled with mostly book reviews!
Perhaps Blackboard and Desire2Learn woud BOTH like this patent to not stand. If it fails in court, it insures no one else will file a patent the LMS. Blackboard and D2L could be doing this to ensure a rogue company like SCO (or imgaine Microsoft filing such a patent) won't try to play the patent game with them. By choosing to file a patent for something with so much prior art, it seems like BB would expect for this to fail.
It sounds like your institution is running on underpowered hardware. We have a beautiful Sun Cluster which just this semester went to 4 nodes. Even the first week of a semester with record enrollment there was barely a blink. With fail over, users don't even know when an entire node goes down. Like any heavily loaded system it is about a redundancy.
Blackboard is JSP all the way. It was originally written entirely in perl and there is still quite a bit of that code left as well. No asp.net here.
I really have to give kudos to BB for their wide range of platform support. Both versions of their system (Basic Learning Edition and the Community Portal System) can be run on Solaris, Linux, or Windows. Blackboard is not perfect, but WebCT can only benefit from merging with a product that is both easier to administer and easier for most professors to use. All this and a plethora of open source plugins available via Blackboard Building Blocks.
...May the seas be calm and the wind be at your back .
I share an office with 6 others and I am the only programmer. Everyone else does technical writing and training. Our setup works very well: everyone's desk is in an open room. We can easily bounce ideas off of each other and have general stress relieving chats. If you want privacy you just plug in the headphones and no one bothers you.
We also have free domain over our computers. We have a "you break it, you fix it" policy that seems to work well.