I really like your test design, and I know how frustrating it can be to get a novel test design to work without taking up all your time.
Have you tried the following?
1) Just have the mark reader spit out a CSV file, instead of actually marking the sheets. Then you can just bring that data into Excel with whatever scoring system set up (IF statements, etc) that you like. This is how I handled the test I used to coordinate (given to 2200 people a year, in three sessions).
2) It's dopey, but Survey Monkey (surveymonkey.com) will do raw data export. I've never used it for class, but I have used it for research, giving a test to 300 people. You have to do a little cleanup of the data, but if you do it routinely, I'm sure you could just script that in Excel, and bring it all the way out to a scorefile.
There's got to be a way to make your life easier while preserving your test design. I wouldn't want to use it for the kind of testing I do (standardized), but there is a world of difference between classroom assessment and standardized assessment. I think your idea is perfect for the classroom, and I respect you for spending the time and effort on it!
THANK YOU for helping to educate Slashdotters on the real lives of academics. People know their profs from tiny slivers of time where they are "on stage," and that's it. They don't see all the time and thought and effort that went into making that 3hrs-a-week or so possible, and certainly don't see the huge pile of other things profs are required (and often, rightly so) to be involved in. It's a major problem everyone in education, at every level, has: People think they know what their teachers and profs do for a living, but they actually don't.
You did forget to mention when the instructor requires that you buy HIS book as required reading for the class, regardless of what ego-fluffing crap he had written.
And what if he/she happens to be one of the world's experts on the field? I have never bought a textbook written by a prof that was as people often imply: nothing more than a way to gain more income. The few I've used have been excellent. Also, universities have ethics boards for exactly this reason; if you are going to require a book that will end up giving you royalties, you have to demonstrate there is not a better one, or work something out with the publisher so that it's cheaper for your students (I had this once--our price was substantially lower than retail, because the prof. was not getting royalties--his idea; it's also a great book. Sitting right next to me now, 10 years later).
Most, but not all, instructors are teaching because they can't hack it in the real world of their chosen field.
Bullshit. In fact, it's such ridiculous bullshit, I can't believe I'm replying, but:
Many profs have gone out into the "real world" (BTW, research and training are not "real"???), succeeded, and decided to "give back" by going into academia. It's their working retirement, and you get the benefit of their years of experience.
Many profs are actually driving their chosen fields with their research. It is always frustrating to hear people who got a bachelor's go on about their profs' jobs, as if they had ever seen them at their real jobs: researching. Teaching is far from all a prof does. Most of his/her time/energy goes into research, trying to push the field further into new territory. For the privilege of doing this, they are expected to share their knowledge with those "younger" than them.
The requirement to teach a course is not to be the world's expert on the topic, but to know more than the students, so yeah, sometimes you'll get a prof. who isn't that up on the topic. Talk to the administration, not the prof. It's probably not his/her major field, and he/she might be as irritated about the fact that he/she is the teacher as you are. Educational administration is every bit as dunderheaded as in enterprise. They don't know who their employees are or what they do.
Finally, there's your example, which is insane.
If I were looking for someone to fix my drain, I'd look for a plumber, not a PhD in fluid dynamics. I once saw a hilarious Junkyard Wars episode where there was a team of NASA physicists vs. a team of guys who had a well-regarded lowrider shop in Miami. I'm sure you can guess who won. Just because theoretical knowledge does not always map to real-world skill does not mean that theoretical knowledge is useless--the real world skill is a physical manifestation of the work done by the theorists. The former simply would not exist without the latter, and the latter is far, far more difficult to learn than the former. As in your example, a guy with no education can set up your server, but if he wanted to learn all the stuff the PhD knows, it would take the 10 or so years the PhD spent. On the other hand, if you had hired the PhD, you might have a bumpy few weeks or even months, but he'd fill in the practical gaps in his theoretical knowledge and you'd be fine.
On what basis do you assert that? It is the industry standard and has more features--and more ways to get at them--than any word processor out there.
That isn't to say it's perfect; in fact, I have been using Apple's Pages more and more for simple documents. It's faster, and it handles styles correctly. Also, it separates comments from tracked changes, which is awesome.
That being said, any serious writing that I do, and certainly any collaborative work, is always done in Word. It has the best/most complete offering for tables, little things like line and paragraph numbering in the margin (you don't think about that until you need it--and only Word has it, as far as I know), and lots of scripting support, whether it be simple autotext entries, or entire standard tables that you can set to insert by tapping a few characters. Oh, and don't forget total control of keyboard shortcuts.
With absolutely no offense intended (I promise!), it seems to me that the only people who claim Word is "terrible" or that some other offering is better overall, are those who don't have to do a lot of word processing. Word does stuff that no one else does.
(Please god don't send the TeX zombies; I don't have time to explain to them that no, most fields do not use TeX, and I've actually never met anyone off of Slashdot who even knew what it was. Also, yes, I know it's not a word processor. I know. I know.)
I could kiss you for that post. I am a pretty big leftie (well, by American standards--here in Japan the same beliefs get me labeled a Nationalist--e.g. I think Japan should revoke Article 9 of the Constitution and rebuild their military and become a normal country again, China and Korea's whinges be damned), but I am vehemently pro-gun. It makes me fun at university functions.
I'd like to add something though: Yes, the US spends a lot on the military, but that doesn't translate into a skilled military. In fact, we've never been very good at war. It's not a bad thing. I just don't think we have it in our culture to do what it takes to win a war--kill everyone. Well, we did it in WWII with Japan, but we kind of cheated. This is the biggest pragmatic reason why I don't think the US should get involved in any wars (beyond the ethical reasons) they don't have to. We fail and it's embarrassing and expensive. We're a lot better at controlling people with media and money. It's slower, but it works better, and doesn't make people hate us so much.
So what I'm saying is that, although even under the ideal conditions in your post, the civilians would almost necessarily win, the truth is even more dire for the military/government, because the conditions are even further from ideal. The military would make a mess of it no matter what. They couldn't even overthrow a despised dictator and keep the people on their side for more than a month; how could they put down a popular insurgency in their own armed country?
Why on earth should you or I be watched by law enforcement in a supposedly free country? Being constantly watched means sooner or later the police will see something they don't like or don't understand.
Let me expand upon that. I don't know if this is exactly where you were going, but I'm going to go here, because I think it's important.
Laws exist to solve problems when they come up, not to dictate morality. Civilized countries understand this; authoritarian states do not. In the US, laws are often made by elected representatives at the behest of the panicked braying of the Yahoos, without regard to whether they can or should be enforced. These draconian measures are then handed off to law enforcement, they look at them and say, "how the hell are we supposed to enforce this? Why, we'd need to install... a camera in every home! Think of the funding, man! Think of the power." The Yahoos support anything that will make the horror du jour go away. The funding is secured, and everyone gets a camera in their homes.
The way a civilized society works is this:
The society decides that there's something they don't like and that they think should be illegal.
A law is made.
Nothing...
A problem arises and law enforcement gets involved.
Law enforcement compares the problem to the list of laws and chooses the one(s) that fit(s).
You have a trial to determine if that/those law(s) do fit, and to what degree, and what should be done about it in this case.
There is no need to run around with the list, trying to find situations that fit it. That's going about it backwards, and it is time-consuming, expensive, and erodes the very "mind your own business" ethic that America was built on. Also, it needlessly inflates crime statistics, which leads to more panic among the Yahoos, which leads to more law enforcement, which leads to higher numbers--all the way to what I think we have now: a police state.
Let's take the current outrage: child porn (yes, I went straight to it, and I'm posting this on the record). I think most people can agree that it should be illegal (if you don't, and there are actually some pretty rational arguments for believing so, that's too bad--you're way outnumbered, sorry). However, that doesn't mean that every ISP needs to screen every bit of bandwidth to make sure no one is looking at it, and the border guards don't need to search laptop hard drives, and FBI weirdos don't need to hang around in chat rooms trying to entrap people. All that really needs to happen is this: somebody is harmed or distressed by someone and calls the police. In the course of the investigation, that person's child porn collection is discovered, and then the person is charged.
Basically, if you are doing something illegal, you are operating in the open, and are no longer legally guaranteed to remain in control of your life. That's it. You are outside of the legal umbrella of protection. If you decide to take that gamble, and you don't bother anybody, then there isn't any need for the law to be enforced. But the moment you do bother or harm someone, well, then, you might be sorry that you were taking that risk.
I grew up in the US, but I live in Japan now. I would characterize both places as very safe and peaceful. But you wouldn't think so to look at crime statistics. The difference, I think, lies not in the comparative amount of crime, which I suspect is about the same, but the way it's handled. You can't drive for more than 15 minutes in America without seeing a police cruiser. Here, I see maybe one cop a week, and he's not prowling the streets looking for evildoers. He's riding a moped in between police boxes (another difference: the police here have lots of little outposts; if something happens, they're close by, but they stay put and wait for you to call them; usually they're just in there reading or doing paperwork). I don't know if I can count the number of
As an American (living outside of it, which is where you have to go to get a good look at it with fresh eyes), allow me to say the following, no matter how much it stings:
Preach it.
There are a lot of things I think the US is unfairly blamed for, and they piss me off not only because it's unfair, but because the really big things that people should worry about are kind of under most people's radar.
But, and this stings even more, I don't think we will need to worry about the US much longer. They/we are fading into farcical irrelevance, like France. There is a huge crash coming. The moment China opens the RMB, the US is over. And given its behavior since it decided to get involved in everyone's business as a full-time job about 50 years ago, good riddance.
I think that applies even to DVD. I was blown away by The Matrix when I saw it in the theater, but when it came out on DVD, suddenly the CG squiddies looked... Really CG. It's not even a problem of age; new CG action cartoons (that's all I can consider current action/fantasy/sci-fi movies--when you can do anything, effects lose all interest, and will actually highlight the real problems with films--bad writing/acting/etc., because the audience is no longer distracted) look the same.
The increase in cinematic technology has not brought with it better movies (neither has it made them worse), and it doesn't even hold up very well upon closer inspection. Nothing looks real in movies anymore, because it isn't. Hi-res formats only highlight that basic truth.
Write documentation sometimes. Format it well and ship it with your projects!
And while you're at it, learn to spell and how to express yourself with correct, clear, and concise language. Learning how to explain things clearly isn't the dreaded "marketing;" it's essential to getting people to use and like whatever it is that you've spent all your time and effort on.
It seems that every time I have a problem in Linux, I pull up a manpage and cannot figure out what the writer was trying to say. Grammar and spelling errors are abundant. Vagaries abound. They are not updated to reflect the current version of the software. They are sometimes useless, and sometimes worse!
So off I go to the forums.
A day later, my virtual ears ringing from a chorus of technical assholes who don't want me in their club, I just quit trying and go back to Windows or the Mac to get whatever it is I need to do, done.
It is a major problem, because I know I'm not the only one who gets completely turned off to Linux because I can't find something that simply tells me how to make things work.
These are just marketing gimmicks that slap fancy names on features that have been around for years.
That point is not without merit, but the Slashdot knee-jerk to identify anything other than hardcore coding as "marketing" is the problem with Linux, I think. The real innovation in all of these products (I hate Growl and stopped using Quicksilver when I figured out that Spotlight did the same thing, for what I used it for) is in their usability.
Yes, all those things have been around for ages in the *NIX world. But Apple spent their time and effort and money on making them easy, reliable, and even pretty to use. I think it is extremely unwise to dismiss the serious research and software development required to make those features seem like innovations as "marketing."
And I have to agree with the OP in spirit, even if I think that some of the products he listed don't qualify. When I read the title of this post (Does the Linux Desktop Innovate Too Much?), I honestly, literally thought it was a joke. I can't think of a single "innovation" I've seen on my Ubuntu machine in the 4 or 5 years I've been playing with it. I see a lot of trying to catch up, but not a lot of innovation. Sorry, I don't.
There is a gap that is very slowly filling in Linux for people who know how to use a computer however they don't want to remember outdated command lines and poorly documented config file just so they can get work done.
This is exactly why I'm on the Mac after bailing out of Windows, and not on Linux, where I had kind of intended to be. I have successfully set up Ubuntu machines for people who do nothing with their computers, and as long as they don't try to buy software at Walmart, they're fine. I also have several friends who work in servers and use Linux there and also at home. I'm squarely in the middle. I don't mind getting my hands dirty in command line, but I don't think I should have to get in there to do totally routine things. I also don't think I should have to get in there just to make the graphics work. Or the wi-fi.
On the Mac, I pop the Terminal open fairly regularly to make small, undocumented tweaks in behavior. I'm totally comfortable with that, and it's actually one of the main reasons I went to the Mac. I have Linux-like control of the machine, without needing it just to get things done.
Cue the hordes calling me a lazy idiot, but I stand by what I've said. I don't use computers for the joy of it; I used them because I have things to do. Now.
Humans didn't evolve by sitting around in lovey-dovey quilt making sessions. They evolved by the ones who were better able to survive wiping out the ones who were not.
...Which finally explains why there is no such thing as society, family, or pair-bonding in humans!
Most of the world is perfectly happy to let other people carry the load for them.
On behalf of all the people you're supporting with your amazing hardworking skills, I extend to you a heartfelt THANK YOU. As you say, we don't actually like to do anything, so we just sit around all day eating up your hard earned money. Surely you are the only hard-worker in the world, and your yoke must be much to bear.
Doctorow is a revolutionary, plain and simple. It doesn't matter what happens; it has to be overthrown. He is a tiresome blowhard and I often fantasize about giving him a wedgie in public. I've never given a wedgie in my life (I was usually the recipient, probably like a lot of Slashdotters), but he drags discourse down to that level.
Very well put. I am a (perhaps sometimes overly enthusiastic and/or unfair) frequent critic of Doctorow's goofy worldview and various hypocrisies, but at the heart of my intense dislike for the guy is what you've said. Am I an elitist because I don't consider someone without any degrees to be an expert on much of anything, especially difficult subjects like economics and law? Well... Maybe. What's wrong with expecting someone who gets as much of a readership as Doctorow gets to have at least proven himself minimally competent in fields he wants to affect?
I remember when Andrew Keen published his book The Cult of the Amateur, which questioned the real market/economic importance of the Web 2.0 phenomenon, and every time Doctorow mentioned him, it was like this: "Andrew Keen, failed dot-commer, argues in his ridiculous book..." It was always the "failed dot-commer" thing that drove me crazy, because, um, everyone I know in IT lost their jobs in that crash. Does that mean we have no right to comment on the IT industry anymore? On the contrary, someone who was on the bleeding edge of Web 1.0 is probably a pretty good person to consult about the business model failings of future internet businesses. A college-dropout with a high school diploma in hippie who has to give his terrible books away and whom we've only heard of because he made friends with a guy who started a zine and then a blog called Boing Boing and uses it to distort and spin news to advance his silly activist agenda against anybody ever making money off of their creations ever again? Not so much.
It is in his harsh treatment of Keen that we see his true face: He is the amateur in the title, and it is his cult that Keen was warning everyone about. The internet is wonderful for giving people a voice. The problem is that people aren't always very good at judging authority, and armchair economists and lawyers can be mistaken for the real thing.
Yes. I have one (using it now), and it's great. But it goddamned well better be, because it cost $3k.
Now, that is a pretty good deal for what's under the hood, but no, I did not need server-class components. I just wanted a box that was easy to open (and it is--best case design I've ever seen) with multiple drive bays (again, great design on those, too) and industry-standard expansion slots. I whined and moaned about it for about a year before I finally admitted that OS X, which I was using at work, was serving my needs much better than Windows and decided to just pony up the money. My computing life has been less of a hassle (working between OSes), but I still think it was too much money--not for the hardware, but for what I needed.
However, here is the explanation I've heard, and I think it's probably true:
Apple's ace in the hole is high-end graphics and video and audio professionals, and that is who the Mac Pro (and Power Mac of old) is designed for. When times were/are tough, and Joe Sixpack is buying Dell, Trent Reznor is still buying high-end workstations to run his studio on. That is a demographic that Apple simply must not lose.
However, if Apple came in with a mid-range tower, many people who would have bought the 24" iMac and many people (like me) who would have bought the Mac Pro would buy that. Now, Apple moves plenty of iMacs, so that wouldn't be much of a loss, but it would probably wipe out most of the Mac Pro sales. That line would suddenly become incredibly unprofitable. They would not be able to continue making them, and that would leave Trent Reznor under-served, and someone else would get that market.
So this pain that "prosumer" users feel is entirely intentional. Apple has lots of money and is doing pretty well for itself now, but it doesn't have so many users that it can afford to meet everyone's needs at the cost of other product lines. So they force people to choose. Are you more an iMac person, or a Mac Pro person? I'm not saying I like it; I'm just saying that I understand. I think Apple knows they'd sell a million, billion Core 2 Quad towers, but it would pull them entirely out of their traditional core user base in the ultra-high-end, and put all their eggs in the consumer basket. --And that's not a gamble they are ready to make.
That being said, I think this is also why Apple doesn't really do anything about hobbyist Hackintoshers. They know that these people probably use a Mac laptop, and definitely have an iPod, probably have an iPhone... These are Apple customers, and Apple has (wisely) decided to turn a blind eye to their activities, because it isn't really costing them money, because those users occupy a market that Apple can't serve for business reasons. When a company starts doing it, though, then yes, they crack down (and, I believe, rightly so--$120 is the Leopard upgrade price).
If Apple continues to grow, and the gamble looks like a good bet, we might see lower-end Pros or something, but I think it'll be awhile. In truth, we "prosumers" aren't really that big a market.
My new Mini is actually my first Apple ever. So far, I have not been impressed.
Did you expect to be impressed by an overpriced, underpowered, headless laptop that is designed to suck and move you to the iMac, which is pretty good?
I have one I got off of eBay hooked up to my TV. It has been... okay. It lacks the power necessary to stream content off of my NAS, decode it, and display it without hiccups, so when I want to watch something, I have to copy it to the local hard drive. Then it works great (note: this is the CoreSolo model from 2006). I seriously think the thing is just designed as a toy that doesn't cannibalize other models' sales.
As for the putty-knife upgrade process... Umm... I've been in mine twice without a hitch. Get a sharper or wider putty knife. It should pop right open. I can't really look at that as a design flaw, though. The whole point of the Mini is to be tiny and look nice. You can get other tiny computers, but they all look like ass. I don't mind having to do a little more work getting into my Mini, being that it's a TV computer and part of why I wanted one is that it looks nice in the living room.
And I guess that's bringing me back to my main point: The Mini is not going to satisfy anyone who is looking for a computer, in the way that we (people who read Slashdot) conceptualize them. But that's okay, because it's not designed to, and it's not marketed toward us. I can't really hold Apple responsible for some of my disappointment with my (admittedly old) Mini, because I'm the one who was wooed by the shininess.
I have a MacBook which has been awesome and a Mac Pro which has been awesome (though way more power than I need--see the Hackintosh comment by hairyfeet--Yes). Those are appropriate computers for what I want to do with them. The Mini is just a toy.
$350 for the box (depending on when you bought it)
$75 for wireless ethernet card that wasn't built-in
$60 for additional controller
$30 for the recharager battery pack designed to work with the controllers but doesn't leaving you stuck with conventional batteries
$x for cabling if you need hdmi or whatever.
Where did you buy yours? Mine was $400 for the machine, a 20GB HDD, 2 wireless controllers, 1 wired headset, 1 "charge and play" kit, and two games. That was in 2007. Costco.
I then bought the wireless dongle, which was overpriced; and the wireless headset, which was overpriced; and a different AV cable, which, like all cables for anything, was overpriced. However, the only thing that was really necessary was the AV cable, and that was just because my TV is goofy. The other 2 are totally optional, and I don't actually use the wireless anymore (I've given up on wireless for any high-bandwidth activities--I've sunk way too much time and money into trying to get it to play nice in my apartment and just ran concealed LAN cable to switches everywhere I need proper net connectivity--works right every time and is cheaper to boot).
Personally speaking, switching to the 360 from Windows for gaming has been way cheaper than what I was spending to keep my gaming machine up. I haven't bought any gaming hardware for 2 years. None. I haven't upgraded my gaming rig at all. I've saved a lot of money.
Okay, that's a blatant lie. I did spend quite a bit of money on a computer upgrade. I switched to a Mac Pro. The Xbox team screwed the Windows team out of at least one customer (I'm sure it's many more than one).
There's no way that large format print was produced from a 500 pixel wide Facebook rip.
See, that's what I thought as well, and wondered why I was the only one. Now I know I'm not. The image is clearly a professional shot; if you're looking for a culprit, that's where I'd start looking.
Preach it. It's useless. It's shameful. It's shamefully useless.
I go looking for the doctor's office that is right next door to me (I need the phone number and hours). I know the name, I know the general address... I can't find the damned page.
Then my wife pulls it up in 20 seconds with Yahoo, and I seethe at Google. How could they let this happen? Beaten by Yahoo???
A professor is someone with a PhD who is tenured at the university in question. Cory Doctorow, if I am to believe what I have read (blessed and purified by The Man Himself), doesn't have so much as a bachelor's. The fact that he has been allowed into the front of university classrooms does not make him a "prof." That being said, we can't really hold that mistake against him as he does have all the education of a glass of water.
Me, I've been teaching university in the US and Japan for 6 years. I, too, am not a "prof." I was pretty stoked when I started this job in April and moved up from "Senior Lecturer" to "Assistant Professor." My former boss in the US runs an entire state university's Japanese program, and has done so for 20 years. Her title? "Lecturer." Why? No PhD, just a master's.
This right here is the core reason I loathe Cory Doctorow. He constantly blows himself up to be things he clearly is not. The moment my opinion of him turned for good was the moment in the talk he gave to Microsoft, wherein he described himself as a "half-lawyer." My buddy who just finished law school but hasn't found out if he passed the bar yet is a "half-lawyer." Some Drew Carey lookalike who writes about as well as you would expect from someone who graduated from a "free school," and who likes to pontificate endlessly about legal issues is not.
I would post this on Boing Boing, but I was banned for posting something similar.
Heh, I wish I'd read this this morning. I was just trying to explain to my (non-native-English-language) writing students why it was important for any serious research to use as many sources as possible--because even really good researchers, etc., can make mistakes, and that doesn't mean they are bad researchers or doctors or whatever; it means they're human.
Here's a little N=1 for you, but I really enjoy Wii Sports (are there any other games for the Wii?), but my wife and I don't have one because we live in Japan, and even though we have the biggest place of any of my friends, there just isn't enough space for it to be fun.
Me too. I went camping in the Boundary Waters (the lakes between US Minnesota state and Canada Ontario province) and thought it was a cloud. I'd never been so far out in the wilderness, and I found the light from the sky, without electricity for comparison, to be simultaneously beautiful and terrifying. I felt like something was really wrong up there, knowing that it wasn't.
That was the lesson I took back--well into my adult life: Most humans do not live on earth anymore. We've created someplace else, and when we find ourselves in our natural habitat, it's frightening.
I'm not saying that's good or bad or anything. It was just a profound realization--for me, anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
I really like your test design, and I know how frustrating it can be to get a novel test design to work without taking up all your time.
Have you tried the following?
1) Just have the mark reader spit out a CSV file, instead of actually marking the sheets. Then you can just bring that data into Excel with whatever scoring system set up (IF statements, etc) that you like. This is how I handled the test I used to coordinate (given to 2200 people a year, in three sessions).
2) It's dopey, but Survey Monkey (surveymonkey.com) will do raw data export. I've never used it for class, but I have used it for research, giving a test to 300 people. You have to do a little cleanup of the data, but if you do it routinely, I'm sure you could just script that in Excel, and bring it all the way out to a scorefile.
There's got to be a way to make your life easier while preserving your test design. I wouldn't want to use it for the kind of testing I do (standardized), but there is a world of difference between classroom assessment and standardized assessment. I think your idea is perfect for the classroom, and I respect you for spending the time and effort on it!
THANK YOU for helping to educate Slashdotters on the real lives of academics. People know their profs from tiny slivers of time where they are "on stage," and that's it. They don't see all the time and thought and effort that went into making that 3hrs-a-week or so possible, and certainly don't see the huge pile of other things profs are required (and often, rightly so) to be involved in. It's a major problem everyone in education, at every level, has: People think they know what their teachers and profs do for a living, but they actually don't.
You did forget to mention when the instructor requires that you buy HIS book as required reading for the class, regardless of what ego-fluffing crap he had written.
And what if he/she happens to be one of the world's experts on the field? I have never bought a textbook written by a prof that was as people often imply: nothing more than a way to gain more income. The few I've used have been excellent. Also, universities have ethics boards for exactly this reason; if you are going to require a book that will end up giving you royalties, you have to demonstrate there is not a better one, or work something out with the publisher so that it's cheaper for your students (I had this once--our price was substantially lower than retail, because the prof. was not getting royalties--his idea; it's also a great book. Sitting right next to me now, 10 years later).
Most, but not all, instructors are teaching because they can't hack it in the real world of their chosen field.
Bullshit. In fact, it's such ridiculous bullshit, I can't believe I'm replying, but:
Finally, there's your example, which is insane.
If I were looking for someone to fix my drain, I'd look for a plumber, not a PhD in fluid dynamics. I once saw a hilarious Junkyard Wars episode where there was a team of NASA physicists vs. a team of guys who had a well-regarded lowrider shop in Miami. I'm sure you can guess who won. Just because theoretical knowledge does not always map to real-world skill does not mean that theoretical knowledge is useless--the real world skill is a physical manifestation of the work done by the theorists. The former simply would not exist without the latter, and the latter is far, far more difficult to learn than the former. As in your example, a guy with no education can set up your server, but if he wanted to learn all the stuff the PhD knows, it would take the 10 or so years the PhD spent. On the other hand, if you had hired the PhD, you might have a bumpy few weeks or even months, but he'd fill in the practical gaps in his theoretical knowledge and you'd be fine.
You might even be better off.
A well-crafted post, sir!
MS Word is terrible!
On what basis do you assert that? It is the industry standard and has more features--and more ways to get at them--than any word processor out there.
That isn't to say it's perfect; in fact, I have been using Apple's Pages more and more for simple documents. It's faster, and it handles styles correctly. Also, it separates comments from tracked changes, which is awesome.
That being said, any serious writing that I do, and certainly any collaborative work, is always done in Word. It has the best/most complete offering for tables, little things like line and paragraph numbering in the margin (you don't think about that until you need it--and only Word has it, as far as I know), and lots of scripting support, whether it be simple autotext entries, or entire standard tables that you can set to insert by tapping a few characters. Oh, and don't forget total control of keyboard shortcuts.
With absolutely no offense intended (I promise!), it seems to me that the only people who claim Word is "terrible" or that some other offering is better overall, are those who don't have to do a lot of word processing. Word does stuff that no one else does.
(Please god don't send the TeX zombies; I don't have time to explain to them that no, most fields do not use TeX, and I've actually never met anyone off of Slashdot who even knew what it was. Also, yes, I know it's not a word processor. I know. I know.)
I could kiss you for that post. I am a pretty big leftie (well, by American standards--here in Japan the same beliefs get me labeled a Nationalist--e.g. I think Japan should revoke Article 9 of the Constitution and rebuild their military and become a normal country again, China and Korea's whinges be damned), but I am vehemently pro-gun. It makes me fun at university functions.
I'd like to add something though: Yes, the US spends a lot on the military, but that doesn't translate into a skilled military. In fact, we've never been very good at war. It's not a bad thing. I just don't think we have it in our culture to do what it takes to win a war--kill everyone. Well, we did it in WWII with Japan, but we kind of cheated. This is the biggest pragmatic reason why I don't think the US should get involved in any wars (beyond the ethical reasons) they don't have to. We fail and it's embarrassing and expensive. We're a lot better at controlling people with media and money. It's slower, but it works better, and doesn't make people hate us so much.
So what I'm saying is that, although even under the ideal conditions in your post, the civilians would almost necessarily win, the truth is even more dire for the military/government, because the conditions are even further from ideal. The military would make a mess of it no matter what. They couldn't even overthrow a despised dictator and keep the people on their side for more than a month; how could they put down a popular insurgency in their own armed country?
Why on earth should you or I be watched by law enforcement in a supposedly free country? Being constantly watched means sooner or later the police will see something they don't like or don't understand.
Let me expand upon that. I don't know if this is exactly where you were going, but I'm going to go here, because I think it's important.
Laws exist to solve problems when they come up, not to dictate morality. Civilized countries understand this; authoritarian states do not. In the US, laws are often made by elected representatives at the behest of the panicked braying of the Yahoos, without regard to whether they can or should be enforced. These draconian measures are then handed off to law enforcement, they look at them and say, "how the hell are we supposed to enforce this? Why, we'd need to install... a camera in every home! Think of the funding, man! Think of the power." The Yahoos support anything that will make the horror du jour go away. The funding is secured, and everyone gets a camera in their homes.
The way a civilized society works is this:
There is no need to run around with the list, trying to find situations that fit it. That's going about it backwards, and it is time-consuming, expensive, and erodes the very "mind your own business" ethic that America was built on. Also, it needlessly inflates crime statistics, which leads to more panic among the Yahoos, which leads to more law enforcement, which leads to higher numbers--all the way to what I think we have now: a police state.
Let's take the current outrage: child porn (yes, I went straight to it, and I'm posting this on the record). I think most people can agree that it should be illegal (if you don't, and there are actually some pretty rational arguments for believing so, that's too bad--you're way outnumbered, sorry). However, that doesn't mean that every ISP needs to screen every bit of bandwidth to make sure no one is looking at it, and the border guards don't need to search laptop hard drives, and FBI weirdos don't need to hang around in chat rooms trying to entrap people. All that really needs to happen is this: somebody is harmed or distressed by someone and calls the police. In the course of the investigation, that person's child porn collection is discovered, and then the person is charged.
Basically, if you are doing something illegal, you are operating in the open, and are no longer legally guaranteed to remain in control of your life. That's it. You are outside of the legal umbrella of protection. If you decide to take that gamble, and you don't bother anybody, then there isn't any need for the law to be enforced. But the moment you do bother or harm someone, well, then, you might be sorry that you were taking that risk.
I grew up in the US, but I live in Japan now. I would characterize both places as very safe and peaceful. But you wouldn't think so to look at crime statistics. The difference, I think, lies not in the comparative amount of crime, which I suspect is about the same, but the way it's handled. You can't drive for more than 15 minutes in America without seeing a police cruiser. Here, I see maybe one cop a week, and he's not prowling the streets looking for evildoers. He's riding a moped in between police boxes (another difference: the police here have lots of little outposts; if something happens, they're close by, but they stay put and wait for you to call them; usually they're just in there reading or doing paperwork). I don't know if I can count the number of
As an American (living outside of it, which is where you have to go to get a good look at it with fresh eyes), allow me to say the following, no matter how much it stings:
Preach it.
There are a lot of things I think the US is unfairly blamed for, and they piss me off not only because it's unfair, but because the really big things that people should worry about are kind of under most people's radar.
But, and this stings even more, I don't think we will need to worry about the US much longer. They/we are fading into farcical irrelevance, like France. There is a huge crash coming. The moment China opens the RMB, the US is over. And given its behavior since it decided to get involved in everyone's business as a full-time job about 50 years ago, good riddance.
I think that applies even to DVD. I was blown away by The Matrix when I saw it in the theater, but when it came out on DVD, suddenly the CG squiddies looked... Really CG. It's not even a problem of age; new CG action cartoons (that's all I can consider current action/fantasy/sci-fi movies--when you can do anything, effects lose all interest, and will actually highlight the real problems with films--bad writing/acting/etc., because the audience is no longer distracted) look the same.
The increase in cinematic technology has not brought with it better movies (neither has it made them worse), and it doesn't even hold up very well upon closer inspection. Nothing looks real in movies anymore, because it isn't. Hi-res formats only highlight that basic truth.
Write documentation sometimes. Format it well and ship it with your projects!
And while you're at it, learn to spell and how to express yourself with correct, clear, and concise language. Learning how to explain things clearly isn't the dreaded "marketing;" it's essential to getting people to use and like whatever it is that you've spent all your time and effort on.
It seems that every time I have a problem in Linux, I pull up a manpage and cannot figure out what the writer was trying to say. Grammar and spelling errors are abundant. Vagaries abound. They are not updated to reflect the current version of the software. They are sometimes useless, and sometimes worse!
So off I go to the forums.
A day later, my virtual ears ringing from a chorus of technical assholes who don't want me in their club, I just quit trying and go back to Windows or the Mac to get whatever it is I need to do, done.
It is a major problem, because I know I'm not the only one who gets completely turned off to Linux because I can't find something that simply tells me how to make things work.
These are just marketing gimmicks that slap fancy names on features that have been around for years.
That point is not without merit, but the Slashdot knee-jerk to identify anything other than hardcore coding as "marketing" is the problem with Linux, I think. The real innovation in all of these products (I hate Growl and stopped using Quicksilver when I figured out that Spotlight did the same thing, for what I used it for) is in their usability.
Yes, all those things have been around for ages in the *NIX world. But Apple spent their time and effort and money on making them easy, reliable, and even pretty to use. I think it is extremely unwise to dismiss the serious research and software development required to make those features seem like innovations as "marketing."
And I have to agree with the OP in spirit, even if I think that some of the products he listed don't qualify. When I read the title of this post (Does the Linux Desktop Innovate Too Much?), I honestly, literally thought it was a joke. I can't think of a single "innovation" I've seen on my Ubuntu machine in the 4 or 5 years I've been playing with it. I see a lot of trying to catch up, but not a lot of innovation. Sorry, I don't.
There is a gap that is very slowly filling in Linux for people who know how to use a computer however they don't want to remember outdated command lines and poorly documented config file just so they can get work done.
This is exactly why I'm on the Mac after bailing out of Windows, and not on Linux, where I had kind of intended to be. I have successfully set up Ubuntu machines for people who do nothing with their computers, and as long as they don't try to buy software at Walmart, they're fine. I also have several friends who work in servers and use Linux there and also at home. I'm squarely in the middle. I don't mind getting my hands dirty in command line, but I don't think I should have to get in there to do totally routine things. I also don't think I should have to get in there just to make the graphics work. Or the wi-fi.
On the Mac, I pop the Terminal open fairly regularly to make small, undocumented tweaks in behavior. I'm totally comfortable with that, and it's actually one of the main reasons I went to the Mac. I have Linux-like control of the machine, without needing it just to get things done.
Cue the hordes calling me a lazy idiot, but I stand by what I've said. I don't use computers for the joy of it; I used them because I have things to do. Now.
The argument is eloquent and insightful.
Humans didn't evolve by sitting around in lovey-dovey quilt making sessions. They evolved by the ones who were better able to survive wiping out the ones who were not.
...Which finally explains why there is no such thing as society, family, or pair-bonding in humans!
Most of the world is perfectly happy to let other people carry the load for them.
On behalf of all the people you're supporting with your amazing hardworking skills, I extend to you a heartfelt THANK YOU. As you say, we don't actually like to do anything, so we just sit around all day eating up your hard earned money. Surely you are the only hard-worker in the world, and your yoke must be much to bear.
Doctorow is a revolutionary, plain and simple. It doesn't matter what happens; it has to be overthrown. He is a tiresome blowhard and I often fantasize about giving him a wedgie in public. I've never given a wedgie in my life (I was usually the recipient, probably like a lot of Slashdotters), but he drags discourse down to that level.
Very well put. I am a (perhaps sometimes overly enthusiastic and/or unfair) frequent critic of Doctorow's goofy worldview and various hypocrisies, but at the heart of my intense dislike for the guy is what you've said. Am I an elitist because I don't consider someone without any degrees to be an expert on much of anything, especially difficult subjects like economics and law? Well... Maybe. What's wrong with expecting someone who gets as much of a readership as Doctorow gets to have at least proven himself minimally competent in fields he wants to affect?
I remember when Andrew Keen published his book The Cult of the Amateur, which questioned the real market/economic importance of the Web 2.0 phenomenon, and every time Doctorow mentioned him, it was like this: "Andrew Keen, failed dot-commer, argues in his ridiculous book..." It was always the "failed dot-commer" thing that drove me crazy, because, um, everyone I know in IT lost their jobs in that crash. Does that mean we have no right to comment on the IT industry anymore? On the contrary, someone who was on the bleeding edge of Web 1.0 is probably a pretty good person to consult about the business model failings of future internet businesses. A college-dropout with a high school diploma in hippie who has to give his terrible books away and whom we've only heard of because he made friends with a guy who started a zine and then a blog called Boing Boing and uses it to distort and spin news to advance his silly activist agenda against anybody ever making money off of their creations ever again? Not so much.
It is in his harsh treatment of Keen that we see his true face: He is the amateur in the title, and it is his cult that Keen was warning everyone about. The internet is wonderful for giving people a voice. The problem is that people aren't always very good at judging authority, and armchair economists and lawyers can be mistaken for the real thing.
the total overkill that is the Mac pro line
Yes. I have one (using it now), and it's great. But it goddamned well better be, because it cost $3k.
Now, that is a pretty good deal for what's under the hood, but no, I did not need server-class components. I just wanted a box that was easy to open (and it is--best case design I've ever seen) with multiple drive bays (again, great design on those, too) and industry-standard expansion slots. I whined and moaned about it for about a year before I finally admitted that OS X, which I was using at work, was serving my needs much better than Windows and decided to just pony up the money. My computing life has been less of a hassle (working between OSes), but I still think it was too much money--not for the hardware, but for what I needed.
However, here is the explanation I've heard, and I think it's probably true:
Apple's ace in the hole is high-end graphics and video and audio professionals, and that is who the Mac Pro (and Power Mac of old) is designed for. When times were/are tough, and Joe Sixpack is buying Dell, Trent Reznor is still buying high-end workstations to run his studio on. That is a demographic that Apple simply must not lose.
However, if Apple came in with a mid-range tower, many people who would have bought the 24" iMac and many people (like me) who would have bought the Mac Pro would buy that. Now, Apple moves plenty of iMacs, so that wouldn't be much of a loss, but it would probably wipe out most of the Mac Pro sales. That line would suddenly become incredibly unprofitable. They would not be able to continue making them, and that would leave Trent Reznor under-served, and someone else would get that market.
So this pain that "prosumer" users feel is entirely intentional. Apple has lots of money and is doing pretty well for itself now, but it doesn't have so many users that it can afford to meet everyone's needs at the cost of other product lines. So they force people to choose. Are you more an iMac person, or a Mac Pro person? I'm not saying I like it; I'm just saying that I understand. I think Apple knows they'd sell a million, billion Core 2 Quad towers, but it would pull them entirely out of their traditional core user base in the ultra-high-end, and put all their eggs in the consumer basket. --And that's not a gamble they are ready to make.
That being said, I think this is also why Apple doesn't really do anything about hobbyist Hackintoshers. They know that these people probably use a Mac laptop, and definitely have an iPod, probably have an iPhone... These are Apple customers, and Apple has (wisely) decided to turn a blind eye to their activities, because it isn't really costing them money, because those users occupy a market that Apple can't serve for business reasons. When a company starts doing it, though, then yes, they crack down (and, I believe, rightly so--$120 is the Leopard upgrade price).
If Apple continues to grow, and the gamble looks like a good bet, we might see lower-end Pros or something, but I think it'll be awhile. In truth, we "prosumers" aren't really that big a market.
My new Mini is actually my first Apple ever. So far, I have not been impressed.
Did you expect to be impressed by an overpriced, underpowered, headless laptop that is designed to suck and move you to the iMac, which is pretty good?
I have one I got off of eBay hooked up to my TV. It has been... okay. It lacks the power necessary to stream content off of my NAS, decode it, and display it without hiccups, so when I want to watch something, I have to copy it to the local hard drive. Then it works great (note: this is the CoreSolo model from 2006). I seriously think the thing is just designed as a toy that doesn't cannibalize other models' sales.
As for the putty-knife upgrade process... Umm... I've been in mine twice without a hitch. Get a sharper or wider putty knife. It should pop right open. I can't really look at that as a design flaw, though. The whole point of the Mini is to be tiny and look nice. You can get other tiny computers, but they all look like ass. I don't mind having to do a little more work getting into my Mini, being that it's a TV computer and part of why I wanted one is that it looks nice in the living room.
And I guess that's bringing me back to my main point: The Mini is not going to satisfy anyone who is looking for a computer, in the way that we (people who read Slashdot) conceptualize them. But that's okay, because it's not designed to, and it's not marketed toward us. I can't really hold Apple responsible for some of my disappointment with my (admittedly old) Mini, because I'm the one who was wooed by the shininess.
I have a MacBook which has been awesome and a Mac Pro which has been awesome (though way more power than I need--see the Hackintosh comment by hairyfeet--Yes). Those are appropriate computers for what I want to do with them. The Mini is just a toy.
$350 for the box (depending on when you bought it) $75 for wireless ethernet card that wasn't built-in $60 for additional controller $30 for the recharager battery pack designed to work with the controllers but doesn't leaving you stuck with conventional batteries $x for cabling if you need hdmi or whatever.
Where did you buy yours? Mine was $400 for the machine, a 20GB HDD, 2 wireless controllers, 1 wired headset, 1 "charge and play" kit, and two games. That was in 2007. Costco.
I then bought the wireless dongle, which was overpriced; and the wireless headset, which was overpriced; and a different AV cable, which, like all cables for anything, was overpriced. However, the only thing that was really necessary was the AV cable, and that was just because my TV is goofy. The other 2 are totally optional, and I don't actually use the wireless anymore (I've given up on wireless for any high-bandwidth activities--I've sunk way too much time and money into trying to get it to play nice in my apartment and just ran concealed LAN cable to switches everywhere I need proper net connectivity--works right every time and is cheaper to boot).
Personally speaking, switching to the 360 from Windows for gaming has been way cheaper than what I was spending to keep my gaming machine up. I haven't bought any gaming hardware for 2 years. None. I haven't upgraded my gaming rig at all. I've saved a lot of money.
Okay, that's a blatant lie. I did spend quite a bit of money on a computer upgrade. I switched to a Mac Pro. The Xbox team screwed the Windows team out of at least one customer (I'm sure it's many more than one).
There's no way that large format print was produced from a 500 pixel wide Facebook rip.
See, that's what I thought as well, and wondered why I was the only one. Now I know I'm not. The image is clearly a professional shot; if you're looking for a culprit, that's where I'd start looking.
Preach it. It's useless. It's shameful. It's shamefully useless.
I go looking for the doctor's office that is right next door to me (I need the phone number and hours). I know the name, I know the general address... I can't find the damned page.
Then my wife pulls it up in 20 seconds with Yahoo, and I seethe at Google. How could they let this happen? Beaten by Yahoo???
Unbelievably bad.
A professor is someone with a PhD who is tenured at the university in question. Cory Doctorow, if I am to believe what I have read (blessed and purified by The Man Himself), doesn't have so much as a bachelor's. The fact that he has been allowed into the front of university classrooms does not make him a "prof." That being said, we can't really hold that mistake against him as he does have all the education of a glass of water.
Me, I've been teaching university in the US and Japan for 6 years. I, too, am not a "prof." I was pretty stoked when I started this job in April and moved up from "Senior Lecturer" to "Assistant Professor." My former boss in the US runs an entire state university's Japanese program, and has done so for 20 years. Her title? "Lecturer." Why? No PhD, just a master's.
This right here is the core reason I loathe Cory Doctorow. He constantly blows himself up to be things he clearly is not. The moment my opinion of him turned for good was the moment in the talk he gave to Microsoft, wherein he described himself as a "half-lawyer." My buddy who just finished law school but hasn't found out if he passed the bar yet is a "half-lawyer." Some Drew Carey lookalike who writes about as well as you would expect from someone who graduated from a "free school," and who likes to pontificate endlessly about legal issues is not.
I would post this on Boing Boing, but I was banned for posting something similar.
Heh, I wish I'd read this this morning. I was just trying to explain to my (non-native-English-language) writing students why it was important for any serious research to use as many sources as possible--because even really good researchers, etc., can make mistakes, and that doesn't mean they are bad researchers or doctors or whatever; it means they're human.
Here's a little N=1 for you, but I really enjoy Wii Sports (are there any other games for the Wii?), but my wife and I don't have one because we live in Japan, and even though we have the biggest place of any of my friends, there just isn't enough space for it to be fun.
Me too. I went camping in the Boundary Waters (the lakes between US Minnesota state and Canada Ontario province) and thought it was a cloud. I'd never been so far out in the wilderness, and I found the light from the sky, without electricity for comparison, to be simultaneously beautiful and terrifying. I felt like something was really wrong up there, knowing that it wasn't.
That was the lesson I took back--well into my adult life: Most humans do not live on earth anymore. We've created someplace else, and when we find ourselves in our natural habitat, it's frightening.
I'm not saying that's good or bad or anything. It was just a profound realization--for me, anyway.