I find the MOOC format very suitable for my needs and I have consumed dozens. The lecture is a very different format from a book and is intended for very different purposes. Like most people, I prefer lectures to begin with and move to books for further detail.
> requires to watch the complete segment before realising it was not what I was looking for.
Videos are not meant for piece meal consumption, for stuff you already know... more or less... and are of course not intended for information lookup, if that is how you have been using them. You don't attend a classroom to look for stuff. An online course is no different. You attend it when you make a full commitment to learn a topic as defined by the lecturer.
What I don't understand is: How is your problem with MOOCs any different from any Distance Education lecture delivery, Great Lectures or simply classroom format (with a large enough audience where you cannot interrupt the Prof to ask questions). You could say: just read the book for all of those as well. Do you just dislike lectures in general? Would you say that Feynman lectures are a waste of time when you could have simply read a book?
I am not looking for guesswork or assumptions, just data. Indeed.com says that mobile devs are paid 100K based on the jobs advertised with them. I wanted to know how much independent devs were making when they were doing it alone. Perhaps, there is no data available for it yet. I do know that part-time devs don't make very much from anecdotes; but most seemed content as they regarded it as a supplemental income.
> the open source presentation software situation is pretty disappointing at the moment, and giving presentations is a pretty critical part of the job.
How so? How is Impress that disappointing? Academics are not marketers. They don't care about bells and whistles in their presentations. I got through my PhD just fine with black on white slides with no effects whatsoever. Content is king. Even PDF presentations are sufficient. The open source presentation solutions may not be top of the line, but they are certainly adequate.
Indeed. Going by cumulative CO2 emissions since industrialization, US + EU contributed the bulk of the load (US + EU - 51%, China - 9%, India – 3%). So, by the logic of DigiShaman logic, and I fully agree with it when taken in a nation-state sense, the bulk of the burden must be borne by wealthy elite: Citizens of US and EU.
First, it is a question of what the right thing to do is for the planet. It's not a question of doing the opposite of what the rich say. Second, all the rich are not for carbon taxes. Like everyone else, some are for it, some are against it.
Fine, bow to no man, I'm with that (and I get the carbon comedy of the recent climate conference). But do you bow to rationality?... given that the current scientific consensus is that we ought to be burning less carbon? Also, the rich will be the last to be effected by global warming. The poorest of the poor will be first effected, you and I will be next, the uber rich will be the last effected.
> The treatment consists of tricking someone into thinking they're going to get better. Occasionally, this will psychosomatically heal them.
A Homeopath does not believe that he is giving a placebo. He is not trying to get psychosomatic effects. He actually believes and argues that his medicine is chemically working.
Also, occasionally healing something just not make it a medicine. That just accounts for margin of error in probability theory.
If we use your logic and standards of evidence, every superstitious practice on disease ever devised qualifies as medicine.
Its just a polite way of saying it does not work. Also, logically, "no more effective than a placebo" does not necessarily mean: as effective as a placebo.
In that case, the product will just flop. There is no way you can tell the mass market to "Try Dramamine". A small enthusiast community will put up with a lot, but that will hardly provide the critical mass it needs.
This is really a communal conflict, rather than a religious conflict. But then again, that is the case with a few other so-called religious conflicts today.
Even with these riots, it is still difficult to paint Buddhism or Buddha as hostile. The rioters are not at all drawing from any religious teachings. In case of Abrahamic religions, the perps can quote scripture as justification. I don't think there is anything similar in Buddhism.
To add to what others wrote about his coming back, it should also be noted that he was a prince and an heir to the throne. It wasn't as if he abandoned his wife and child to destitution. Add to the fact that ancient and medieval royal marriages were nothing like today's.
Yes, but I would argue that Windows was not heavy even back then. In my tests, XP consumed a little less than 60 MB of RAM with unnecessary services turned off. In 2000, Linux certainly consumed less than that, but mainstream Linux desktops got more heavy than that fairly quickly. Most average Windows users had sluggish desktops because they had too many programs that put themselves in startup, rather than with the Win OS itself being bloated or sluggish. Vista did become a bloat, which was an exception rather than the norm. Win 7 quickly corrected that.
I am not arguing with the point that Linux can be as bloated as Windows or more. My KDE desktop is certainly not more responsive than my Windows boot. I am just saying that this is not a new thing.
And it was always the case that regardless of how much better Linux got with hardware support, Windows generally had it better.
15 years ago, most distros did not work out of the box on most *current* hardware then. The common quip in forums then was: "Oh, you did not check all the hardware for Linux compatibility before you bought it? It's your fault then". Then we got spoilt by Ubuntu which worked out of the box on most hardware.
Desktop effects did not work on most computers for many years or at least made the desktop unstable after some use.
I think you are pining for a past that never was. You *could* make old hardware work with Linux, but only with some effort. You always toned down your fancy desktops when running on old hardware. If you want to make old hardware work, try a stable, mainstream distro like Debian or Ubuntu, not some "preview" distro. For that old hardware, I'd go with Lubuntu desktop.
> Pointer and String handling are also better in Pascal
Used to be better. C++11 string handling and pointer features are certainly better than what Object Pascal can offer now.
The best parts about Delphi were everything except the language. VCL, IDE and the fast compiler were all great and I still favor them. The language itself was, although very clean, not as productive to work in (just tiedious to type and too verbose to read - no complaints about its semantics). It was however well-modified to support IDEs. It was Delphi that first had language level support for properties, event_handlers and the like.
I still use Lazarus/FreePascal, but wish that I could use/mix modern C++ into the projects.
Lazarus is pretty good. It is a Delphi like/compatible IDE based on FreePascal. I always thought that Delphi's approach to DB GUIs was the most straightforward.
CodeTyphon is a good cross-platform distro for Lazarus that bundles lots of components. It also specializes in cross-compilation. But you are probably not looking for that aspect. It can target multiple GUI toolkits including Win32, Qt & GTK with the same set of components. I am surprised why it isn't more popular. Perhaps it is because Delphi is not as well known as C++/Java/.NET. While I am not a particular fan of Pascal, the component framework (Delphi: VCL, Lazarus: LCL) makes it worth while.
Adam Smith's capitalism isn't what is in charge today. Why talk about some idealized version of capitalism that never was, beyond small town bakers that Adam Smith observed (you are not the only one who has read some economics). The world moved on. Its better to read Piketty than Smith to keep up with the times.
BTW, it makes it a lot easier to cuss and complain when you are anonymous, doesn't it. Does it feel good?
You pretty much hit the nail on its head. When most governments take socialist action, it is because of socialist motives (people demanded it). When US takes socialist action, it is because of capitalist motives (businesses lobbied for it). So cost controls, either through regulation or via competition with the public options (in US, public option often ends up being publicly-funded option, rather than publicly-run option) are quickly ruled out as infeasible or unfair for privates. Then everybody nods their heads on how government is not the solution.
This is not to say that a bit of this does not happen in other countries, but seems to be especially problematic in US.
I have a 64bit processor on my laptop, but I elected to go back to a 32bit OS because I decided that having more free RAM is more important to me than the 64bit advantages. All my VMs use 32bit OSes even on 64bit hosts for the same reason. So its not just for older machines.
I should add... Take Offlike Wikipedia too. The text version will suffice. Perhaps, the Gutenberg repo as well, if you use an ereader. That should cover your information addiction. Of course the point of the Himalayas is to force withdrawl.
Download all the Debian DVDs. The full repo has nearly everything you might conceivably need in terms of software and dev tools. Make sure you take two copies of the data. The last thing you want is a disk dying unexpectedly. It is safer to have one copy as optical disks. I actually did this when I left for a rural location.
I'd download some Coursera courses and fill my ereader as well.
Of course, the best thing to do there would be to enjoy the scenary and practice mindfulness. I am sure you will be doing that as well.
I used Lyx initially for the same reasons and exported to PDFs. Soon it became apparent that it was much easier to just pass Word files since I could just click to accept or reject suggestions (I know Lyx can do that as well... if the people on the other side also use it) from my advisor who used Word. So I exported to Word and stayed there. Plus using Zotero with Word was much easier than with Lyx. I also liked the grammar checker in Word, flawed as it may be (it is popular to criticize it, but I liked it). There is LanguageTool integration for Lyx, which can be more comprehensive, but is also weakly integrated. I do hope to furrther use Lyx in the future though.
> Students can write their reports and essays using LaTex
Good luck getting anyone outside CS to do that. Even if the student learns LaTeX, he/she won't likely be able to collaborate with other students/advisers easily. Exporting and importing into/from PDFs is not really a solution when edits are involved.
> I cannot think of a valid reason students should be learning a proprietary application.
The most common and valid reason is when other people you work with want to use a proprietary application and you are not in a position to make them do otherwise.
I find the MOOC format very suitable for my needs and I have consumed dozens. The lecture is a very different format from a book and is intended for very different purposes. Like most people, I prefer lectures to begin with and move to books for further detail.
> requires to watch the complete segment before realising it was not what I was looking for.
Videos are not meant for piece meal consumption, for stuff you already know... more or less... and are of course not intended for information lookup, if that is how you have been using them. You don't attend a classroom to look for stuff. An online course is no different. You attend it when you make a full commitment to learn a topic as defined by the lecturer.
What I don't understand is: How is your problem with MOOCs any different from any Distance Education lecture delivery, Great Lectures or simply classroom format (with a large enough audience where you cannot interrupt the Prof to ask questions). You could say: just read the book for all of those as well. Do you just dislike lectures in general? Would you say that Feynman lectures are a waste of time when you could have simply read a book?
I am not looking for guesswork or assumptions, just data. Indeed.com says that mobile devs are paid 100K based on the jobs advertised with them. I wanted to know how much independent devs were making when they were doing it alone. Perhaps, there is no data available for it yet. I do know that part-time devs don't make very much from anecdotes; but most seemed content as they regarded it as a supplemental income.
> When most mobile developers make 1/5th or 1/10th minimum wage
Are you quoting any particular study? I was wondering how much an independent mobile developer, working alone, fulltime, makes on average, per month.
> the open source presentation software situation is pretty disappointing at the moment, and giving presentations is a pretty critical part of the job.
How so? How is Impress that disappointing? Academics are not marketers. They don't care about bells and whistles in their presentations. I got through my PhD just fine with black on white slides with no effects whatsoever. Content is king. Even PDF presentations are sufficient. The open source presentation solutions may not be top of the line, but they are certainly adequate.
Indeed. Going by cumulative CO2 emissions since industrialization, US + EU contributed the bulk of the load (US + EU - 51%, China - 9%, India – 3%). So, by the logic of DigiShaman logic, and I fully agree with it when taken in a nation-state sense, the bulk of the burden must be borne by wealthy elite: Citizens of US and EU.
First, it is a question of what the right thing to do is for the planet. It's not a question of doing the opposite of what the rich say. Second, all the rich are not for carbon taxes. Like everyone else, some are for it, some are against it.
Fine, bow to no man, I'm with that (and I get the carbon comedy of the recent climate conference). But do you bow to rationality?... given that the current scientific consensus is that we ought to be burning less carbon? Also, the rich will be the last to be effected by global warming. The poorest of the poor will be first effected, you and I will be next, the uber rich will be the last effected.
> rest of us having to cut back on our resource usage
Right. That's the point of it. Resource conservation... across all humans... you and I included. You have a problem because it is not socialism?!!
> The treatment consists of tricking someone into thinking they're going to get better. Occasionally, this will psychosomatically heal them.
A Homeopath does not believe that he is giving a placebo. He is not trying to get psychosomatic effects. He actually believes and argues that his medicine is chemically working.
Also, occasionally healing something just not make it a medicine. That just accounts for margin of error in probability theory.
If we use your logic and standards of evidence, every superstitious practice on disease ever devised qualifies as medicine.
Its just a polite way of saying it does not work. Also, logically, "no more effective than a placebo" does not necessarily mean: as effective as a placebo.
In that case, the product will just flop. There is no way you can tell the mass market to "Try Dramamine". A small enthusiast community will put up with a lot, but that will hardly provide the critical mass it needs.
This is really a communal conflict, rather than a religious conflict. But then again, that is the case with a few other so-called religious conflicts today.
Even with these riots, it is still difficult to paint Buddhism or Buddha as hostile. The rioters are not at all drawing from any religious teachings. In case of Abrahamic religions, the perps can quote scripture as justification. I don't think there is anything similar in Buddhism.
To add to what others wrote about his coming back, it should also be noted that he was a prince and an heir to the throne. It wasn't as if he abandoned his wife and child to destitution. Add to the fact that ancient and medieval royal marriages were nothing like today's.
Yes, but I would argue that Windows was not heavy even back then. In my tests, XP consumed a little less than 60 MB of RAM with unnecessary services turned off. In 2000, Linux certainly consumed less than that, but mainstream Linux desktops got more heavy than that fairly quickly. Most average Windows users had sluggish desktops because they had too many programs that put themselves in startup, rather than with the Win OS itself being bloated or sluggish. Vista did become a bloat, which was an exception rather than the norm. Win 7 quickly corrected that.
I am not arguing with the point that Linux can be as bloated as Windows or more. My KDE desktop is certainly not more responsive than my Windows boot. I am just saying that this is not a new thing.
And it was always the case that regardless of how much better Linux got with hardware support, Windows generally had it better.
15 years ago, most distros did not work out of the box on most *current* hardware then. The common quip in forums then was: "Oh, you did not check all the hardware for Linux compatibility before you bought it? It's your fault then". Then we got spoilt by Ubuntu which worked out of the box on most hardware.
Desktop effects did not work on most computers for many years or at least made the desktop unstable after some use.
I think you are pining for a past that never was. You *could* make old hardware work with Linux, but only with some effort. You always toned down your fancy desktops when running on old hardware. If you want to make old hardware work, try a stable, mainstream distro like Debian or Ubuntu, not some "preview" distro. For that old hardware, I'd go with Lubuntu desktop.
> Pointer and String handling are also better in Pascal
Used to be better. C++11 string handling and pointer features are certainly better than what Object Pascal can offer now.
The best parts about Delphi were everything except the language. VCL, IDE and the fast compiler were all great and I still favor them. The language itself was, although very clean, not as productive to work in (just tiedious to type and too verbose to read - no complaints about its semantics). It was however well-modified to support IDEs. It was Delphi that first had language level support for properties, event_handlers and the like.
I still use Lazarus/FreePascal, but wish that I could use/mix modern C++ into the projects.
What advantages does MSEide+MSEgui have over Lazarus? When I looked at it a few years ago, it seemed way behind Lazarus in every way.
Lazarus is pretty good. It is a Delphi like/compatible IDE based on FreePascal. I always thought that Delphi's approach to DB GUIs was the most straightforward.
CodeTyphon is a good cross-platform distro for Lazarus that bundles lots of components. It also specializes in cross-compilation. But you are probably not looking for that aspect. It can target multiple GUI toolkits including Win32, Qt & GTK with the same set of components. I am surprised why it isn't more popular. Perhaps it is because Delphi is not as well known as C++/Java/.NET. While I am not a particular fan of Pascal, the component framework (Delphi: VCL, Lazarus: LCL) makes it worth while.
http://www.pilotlogic.com/site...
Adam Smith's capitalism isn't what is in charge today. Why talk about some idealized version of capitalism that never was, beyond small town bakers that Adam Smith observed (you are not the only one who has read some economics). The world moved on. Its better to read Piketty than Smith to keep up with the times.
BTW, it makes it a lot easier to cuss and complain when you are anonymous, doesn't it. Does it feel good?
You pretty much hit the nail on its head. When most governments take socialist action, it is because of socialist motives (people demanded it). When US takes socialist action, it is because of capitalist motives (businesses lobbied for it). So cost controls, either through regulation or via competition with the public options (in US, public option often ends up being publicly-funded option, rather than publicly-run option) are quickly ruled out as infeasible or unfair for privates. Then everybody nods their heads on how government is not the solution.
This is not to say that a bit of this does not happen in other countries, but seems to be especially problematic in US.
Do you have any statistics on this?; like life expectancy at puberty through history?
I have a 64bit processor on my laptop, but I elected to go back to a 32bit OS because I decided that having more free RAM is more important to me than the 64bit advantages. All my VMs use 32bit OSes even on 64bit hosts for the same reason. So its not just for older machines.
I should add... Take Offlike Wikipedia too. The text version will suffice.
Perhaps, the Gutenberg repo as well, if you use an ereader.
That should cover your information addiction. Of course the point of the Himalayas is to force withdrawl.
Download all the Debian DVDs. The full repo has nearly everything you might conceivably need in terms of software and dev tools. Make sure you take two copies of the data. The last thing you want is a disk dying unexpectedly. It is safer to have one copy as optical disks. I actually did this when I left for a rural location.
I'd download some Coursera courses and fill my ereader as well.
Of course, the best thing to do there would be to enjoy the scenary and practice mindfulness. I am sure you will be doing that as well.
I used Lyx initially for the same reasons and exported to PDFs. Soon it became apparent that it was much easier to just pass Word files since I could just click to accept or reject suggestions (I know Lyx can do that as well... if the people on the other side also use it) from my advisor who used Word. So I exported to Word and stayed there. Plus using Zotero with Word was much easier than with Lyx. I also liked the grammar checker in Word, flawed as it may be (it is popular to criticize it, but I liked it). There is LanguageTool integration for Lyx, which can be more comprehensive, but is also weakly integrated. I do hope to furrther use Lyx in the future though.
> Students can write their reports and essays using LaTex
Good luck getting anyone outside CS to do that. Even if the student learns LaTeX, he/she won't likely be able to collaborate with other students/advisers easily. Exporting and importing into/from PDFs is not really a solution when edits are involved.
> I cannot think of a valid reason students should be learning a proprietary application.
The most common and valid reason is when other people you work with want to use a proprietary application and you are not in a position to make them do otherwise.