This is the worrying part. Apparently it will be down to schools and local businesses. That sounds an awful lot like businesses sending out programmers who aren't necessarily great teachers (hell, who aren't necessarily great programmers) to assist teachers who are following a scripted lesson plan. That doesn't sound like a fantastic recipe for success, much as I think the idea in general is a good one. You'd hope they would seek out proper teachers with a programming background, but given the relatively poor pay of teachers and the relatively good pay of programmers, and austerity measures ruling out hiring experts, I'm not entirely hopeful.
I fully agree with this, if you force kids to take programming classes most of them will HATE the class...
The result of this is that the kids who hate the class will disrupt their peers, so that even the kids who might be interested in programming will be put off either via peer pressure or due to the classroom environment being too unruly.
That exact same argument could equally be applied to almost all the compulsory classes that get taught. I had to do something called "combined arts". This consisted of moving around all of the "artistic" disciplines, spending something like 6 weeks on each, which was just long enough that you couldn't get your teeth into anything that might be interesting. I had zero interest in learning to play an instrument, or dance, or acting, or textiles - the actual art part was okay but we didn't have enough time on it to do anything interesting. Also interestingly I hated maths at school, it was taught in such a boring way that seemed to have no real world application - the second I started getting into coding I became mesmerised with maths and would absolutely love to go back and study the subject properly, so it might even open new doors to learning.
At that level though you're really only giving people a basic grounding and a taste to see if they want to carry on with the subject at a higher level. I might not have enjoyed the dance classes but at least it gave me an education in what I didn't want to do with my life. Similarly textiles might seem pointless and I hated it at the time but I can at least fix a torn seam in a jacket. As computers become more ubiquitous in our lives it doesn't seem like a waste at all to give kids a taste of how these magic boxes work. Even if they hate it, they'll at least be more clued up than their parents which might help as there is an increasing chance that they'll have to work with programmers at some point.
No, clearly you don't understand. MS is paying for all the positive reviews. And all the users who claim to like the product, they're all being paid as well. The 900+ reviews on Amazon with an average score of 4.5/5? All bought and paid for. And every negative review is 100% genuine, not sour grapes and definitely not paid for by competitors. Now, give GP back his shiny tinfoil hat and let's... slowly... back... away...
FYI: the Kinect costs are estimated around $20. Subsidizing? Not really. Gorging? Yes.
Do you have a source for that? The teardowns I read suggested lowest cost estimates were $50~ish just for the components, that's not including software (i.e. any licensing costs), hardware assembly, packaging, shipping, the retailer's cut, etc. It would surprise me if MS were losing money on Kinect sales but I don't think they're pocketing vast sums either.
I'm not sure this is the case. Products subsidised by the government are often illegal under certain trade agreements (especially in Europe), but I've never heard of a law saying a company can't subsidise their own product - why would a law stop a company giving money away? This has been standard practice in some industries for decades, the only issue is where it leads to anti-competitive practices.
It's common because there's a perception that if my site is generating content, Google should pay me for that content, but if Google is sending traffic my way, well they should do that for free (they've already had the chance to advertise to those people after all). It's a blatant double standard, but the sooner community driven sites recognise that the community is their only asset and anything they can do to feed into that is valuable to them, the sooner these stupid squabbles will end.
This seems to be the real issue. Twitter are upset that Google are going to use their own gathered data rather than paying them (Twitter) for similar data. That doesn't sound like anything close to an abuse of monopoly, so long as they don't force you to have a Google+ account in order to carry out searches (and they'll even personalise your search results based on either just signing into search or even just using the same PC and allowing it to drop a cookie). Sounds like sour grapes from Twitter, but if it's cheaper to collect the data yourself long term than it is to pay for it, what did they expect?
If the Lib Dems in the UK have proven anything it's that a distant third place party with tiny chances of election will happily sell their manifesto promises down the river for a share of temporary power. It's depressing really to think that the idealist parties of today are just the lobbyist's new best friends of tomorrow. Money in politics really does make a mockery of the whole "democratic process".
Two points. Firstly, not everyone who is against copyright is for pirating. I either buy my content or obtain it from legal sources (e.g. the public domain) but I am still allowed an opinion on copyright, and in my opinion it is too far reaching and the balance of power has swung too far from the original intention. Secondly, they're not selling "on their own terms" those terms have been stolen from the public. We the public granted specific rights for a limited term, recognising these were a necessary evil in order for artists to be paid for what they do. Ever since then our rights have been traded away for short term financial gain or political profit by the very people who should be protecting our rights. That should be offensive enough to anyone on either side of the argument, whether you feel copyright is needed or not, our laws should not be for sale to the highest bidder.
No. That is precisely the point. There won't be a scarcity. The moment the art is sold, shown, exhibited, in the world you propose it could instantly be copied printed replicated by anyone who happens to get near it with a camer. This could happen before the artist makes a single thin dime off of it.
If that were the case original paintings wouldn't sell for many times the cost of prints of the painting. In fact people perceive huge value in owning the original work, whereas for a print they will generally pay the cost of the materials plus some small markup for the retailer.
Yes you will still have those that do it for the love of the doing. But far fewer. Even artists have to put bread on the table.
This is art. Surely quality is far more important than quantity. Why do you assume having a fewer number of people doing it for the love of it will someone be worse for society than a large number of people doing it out of a mercenary desire for money?
Let me know when you are willing to work for free, but in the mean time the artists knowledge and skill is his only stock in trade. Don't take that from him.
You pay the farmer for the eggs, and seem to have no problem with that. Why should the composer get less?
It's never been about working for free. It's about the artist being able to have exclusive rights for long enough that he can make a reasonable living, not multi-millionaires being able to hold onto their rights for the duration of their entire lives plus 70 years or whatever so they can continue to milk the same piece of work over and over.
Not if it meant being able to legally download a copy of the movie, no. If, on the other hand, you had a factory ready to roll out copies of their movie to hit the holiday season market and make you a tidy few million, that's suddenly a bigger incentive for the rights holder to suffer a little accident. Still ridiculous reasoning, it's like abolishing the right of inheritance because that's an incentive to murder (and honestly that is a bigger incentive to murder) - you don't throw out something that's massively beneficial to the majority of society because of one or two nutjobs.
This is the kind of "creative accounting" people talk about that both the music labels and movie studios use to screw money out of both the customers and the artists. They really are parasites on society, I wish more artists would realise that the man on the street is their ally, not the big money studio - together we could cripple their power and reduce them to what they always should have been, the people who move the money around and make stuff happen not the people who syphon large chunks of it off undeservedly.
It's cheap enough that you can give it to kids without worrying if they break it and the expansion board will let them see and play around with some real world applications without everything being on the screen, dry and abstract.
My resumé says I passed geography at school - that doesn't mean I want to draw a representation of a water table when I go for a developer role. I don't think an expectation that the questions are in line with the job as advertised is too much to ask.
It helps if you have 3 months salary in reserve for emergencies like you should so you don't end up entering a bad situation out of desperation.
This is the best advice out there. If you enter any job interview from a position of needing the job rather than wanting it, you risk not being happy in your role. And don't be afraid to turn the question back around - if someone is asking you where you see yourself in five years, why are they asking that? Is it because they want someone who will grow with the company, do they have a specific path mapped out that they'd want you to follow, are they hoping for someone who will stick in the one position forever, etc - ask them, if you got the job, where they'd see your role in five years, because it depends more on them than you at the end of the day (it doesn't matter if you see yourself as CEO if they only see you in a junior role).
He even solved his own problem of how to justify the cost by saying the free users were more demanding and take up more support time. Only offer support for the paying users and to everyone else make it clear that the product is offered "as is". That's been successful for a lot of open source porjects - supporting the world for free is a fool's errand, he could easily set up a support mail and whitelist those who have paid for the product and in one move both reduce his time spent and add an incentive for upgrading.
There are pros and cons to both approaches. With the in-game purchase it's easy to lose track of how much you've spent, but it's equally easy to spend full price on a game and find out it's not worth the cost, and then you're out all of the money at once instead of paying out a little at a time while you're still getting enjoyment from the experience.
They'd never do that - people would too easily realise how empty most movies are without the eye candy of the explosions. Worst case scenario, people might actually start demanding well written stories that aren't full of holes.
I remember support. It's what we used to have back in the days before public betas of supposedly finished products, where users get to find the bugs and report them on a cheap internet forum.
One-child-per-family contributes to child abandonment, gender-specific abortion and infanticide. It's also driving more Chinese to use fertility treatment to give birth to more than one child at a time (since that's not forbidden) which adds to other birth related complications. While I don't disagree something needs to be done about rapid population growth, I don't think a government mandated limit is the right answer.
That only works where the government also has strict control over the internet, otherwise people will get their fill of dumb somewhere else. Would you be just as happy for the government to tell you where you can and can't go online as you would be for them to tell people what they can and can't watch on TV, I wonder?
Slashdot Mirror
This is the worrying part. Apparently it will be down to schools and local businesses. That sounds an awful lot like businesses sending out programmers who aren't necessarily great teachers (hell, who aren't necessarily great programmers) to assist teachers who are following a scripted lesson plan. That doesn't sound like a fantastic recipe for success, much as I think the idea in general is a good one. You'd hope they would seek out proper teachers with a programming background, but given the relatively poor pay of teachers and the relatively good pay of programmers, and austerity measures ruling out hiring experts, I'm not entirely hopeful.
I fully agree with this, if you force kids to take programming classes most of them will HATE the class... The result of this is that the kids who hate the class will disrupt their peers, so that even the kids who might be interested in programming will be put off either via peer pressure or due to the classroom environment being too unruly.
That exact same argument could equally be applied to almost all the compulsory classes that get taught. I had to do something called "combined arts". This consisted of moving around all of the "artistic" disciplines, spending something like 6 weeks on each, which was just long enough that you couldn't get your teeth into anything that might be interesting. I had zero interest in learning to play an instrument, or dance, or acting, or textiles - the actual art part was okay but we didn't have enough time on it to do anything interesting. Also interestingly I hated maths at school, it was taught in such a boring way that seemed to have no real world application - the second I started getting into coding I became mesmerised with maths and would absolutely love to go back and study the subject properly, so it might even open new doors to learning.
At that level though you're really only giving people a basic grounding and a taste to see if they want to carry on with the subject at a higher level. I might not have enjoyed the dance classes but at least it gave me an education in what I didn't want to do with my life. Similarly textiles might seem pointless and I hated it at the time but I can at least fix a torn seam in a jacket. As computers become more ubiquitous in our lives it doesn't seem like a waste at all to give kids a taste of how these magic boxes work. Even if they hate it, they'll at least be more clued up than their parents which might help as there is an increasing chance that they'll have to work with programmers at some point.
No, clearly you don't understand. MS is paying for all the positive reviews. And all the users who claim to like the product, they're all being paid as well. The 900+ reviews on Amazon with an average score of 4.5/5? All bought and paid for. And every negative review is 100% genuine, not sour grapes and definitely not paid for by competitors. Now, give GP back his shiny tinfoil hat and let's... slowly... back... away...
FYI: the Kinect costs are estimated around $20. Subsidizing? Not really. Gorging? Yes.
Do you have a source for that? The teardowns I read suggested lowest cost estimates were $50~ish just for the components, that's not including software (i.e. any licensing costs), hardware assembly, packaging, shipping, the retailer's cut, etc. It would surprise me if MS were losing money on Kinect sales but I don't think they're pocketing vast sums either.
I'm not sure this is the case. Products subsidised by the government are often illegal under certain trade agreements (especially in Europe), but I've never heard of a law saying a company can't subsidise their own product - why would a law stop a company giving money away? This has been standard practice in some industries for decades, the only issue is where it leads to anti-competitive practices.
"Googol Classic. Now with better spelling."
It's common because there's a perception that if my site is generating content, Google should pay me for that content, but if Google is sending traffic my way, well they should do that for free (they've already had the chance to advertise to those people after all). It's a blatant double standard, but the sooner community driven sites recognise that the community is their only asset and anything they can do to feed into that is valuable to them, the sooner these stupid squabbles will end.
This seems to be the real issue. Twitter are upset that Google are going to use their own gathered data rather than paying them (Twitter) for similar data. That doesn't sound like anything close to an abuse of monopoly, so long as they don't force you to have a Google+ account in order to carry out searches (and they'll even personalise your search results based on either just signing into search or even just using the same PC and allowing it to drop a cookie). Sounds like sour grapes from Twitter, but if it's cheaper to collect the data yourself long term than it is to pay for it, what did they expect?
If the Lib Dems in the UK have proven anything it's that a distant third place party with tiny chances of election will happily sell their manifesto promises down the river for a share of temporary power. It's depressing really to think that the idealist parties of today are just the lobbyist's new best friends of tomorrow. Money in politics really does make a mockery of the whole "democratic process".
Two points. Firstly, not everyone who is against copyright is for pirating. I either buy my content or obtain it from legal sources (e.g. the public domain) but I am still allowed an opinion on copyright, and in my opinion it is too far reaching and the balance of power has swung too far from the original intention. Secondly, they're not selling "on their own terms" those terms have been stolen from the public. We the public granted specific rights for a limited term, recognising these were a necessary evil in order for artists to be paid for what they do. Ever since then our rights have been traded away for short term financial gain or political profit by the very people who should be protecting our rights. That should be offensive enough to anyone on either side of the argument, whether you feel copyright is needed or not, our laws should not be for sale to the highest bidder.
No. That is precisely the point. There won't be a scarcity. The moment the art is sold, shown, exhibited, in the world you propose it could instantly be copied printed replicated by anyone who happens to get near it with a camer. This could happen before the artist makes a single thin dime off of it.
If that were the case original paintings wouldn't sell for many times the cost of prints of the painting. In fact people perceive huge value in owning the original work, whereas for a print they will generally pay the cost of the materials plus some small markup for the retailer.
Yes you will still have those that do it for the love of the doing. But far fewer. Even artists have to put bread on the table.
This is art. Surely quality is far more important than quantity. Why do you assume having a fewer number of people doing it for the love of it will someone be worse for society than a large number of people doing it out of a mercenary desire for money?
Let me know when you are willing to work for free, but in the mean time the artists knowledge and skill is his only stock in trade. Don't take that from him. You pay the farmer for the eggs, and seem to have no problem with that. Why should the composer get less?
It's never been about working for free. It's about the artist being able to have exclusive rights for long enough that he can make a reasonable living, not multi-millionaires being able to hold onto their rights for the duration of their entire lives plus 70 years or whatever so they can continue to milk the same piece of work over and over.
Not if it meant being able to legally download a copy of the movie, no. If, on the other hand, you had a factory ready to roll out copies of their movie to hit the holiday season market and make you a tidy few million, that's suddenly a bigger incentive for the rights holder to suffer a little accident. Still ridiculous reasoning, it's like abolishing the right of inheritance because that's an incentive to murder (and honestly that is a bigger incentive to murder) - you don't throw out something that's massively beneficial to the majority of society because of one or two nutjobs.
This is the kind of "creative accounting" people talk about that both the music labels and movie studios use to screw money out of both the customers and the artists. They really are parasites on society, I wish more artists would realise that the man on the street is their ally, not the big money studio - together we could cripple their power and reduce them to what they always should have been, the people who move the money around and make stuff happen not the people who syphon large chunks of it off undeservedly.
It's cheap enough that you can give it to kids without worrying if they break it and the expansion board will let them see and play around with some real world applications without everything being on the screen, dry and abstract.
They're a long way away from $25 though.
My resumé says I passed geography at school - that doesn't mean I want to draw a representation of a water table when I go for a developer role. I don't think an expectation that the questions are in line with the job as advertised is too much to ask.
It helps if you have 3 months salary in reserve for emergencies like you should so you don't end up entering a bad situation out of desperation.
This is the best advice out there. If you enter any job interview from a position of needing the job rather than wanting it, you risk not being happy in your role. And don't be afraid to turn the question back around - if someone is asking you where you see yourself in five years, why are they asking that? Is it because they want someone who will grow with the company, do they have a specific path mapped out that they'd want you to follow, are they hoping for someone who will stick in the one position forever, etc - ask them, if you got the job, where they'd see your role in five years, because it depends more on them than you at the end of the day (it doesn't matter if you see yourself as CEO if they only see you in a junior role).
The question is whether they automatically have that right if it wasn't expressly granted.
[spam removed]
Is it free to play?
He even solved his own problem of how to justify the cost by saying the free users were more demanding and take up more support time. Only offer support for the paying users and to everyone else make it clear that the product is offered "as is". That's been successful for a lot of open source porjects - supporting the world for free is a fool's errand, he could easily set up a support mail and whitelist those who have paid for the product and in one move both reduce his time spent and add an incentive for upgrading.
There are pros and cons to both approaches. With the in-game purchase it's easy to lose track of how much you've spent, but it's equally easy to spend full price on a game and find out it's not worth the cost, and then you're out all of the money at once instead of paying out a little at a time while you're still getting enjoyment from the experience.
They'd never do that - people would too easily realise how empty most movies are without the eye candy of the explosions. Worst case scenario, people might actually start demanding well written stories that aren't full of holes.
I remember support. It's what we used to have back in the days before public betas of supposedly finished products, where users get to find the bugs and report them on a cheap internet forum.
One-child-per-family contributes to child abandonment, gender-specific abortion and infanticide. It's also driving more Chinese to use fertility treatment to give birth to more than one child at a time (since that's not forbidden) which adds to other birth related complications. While I don't disagree something needs to be done about rapid population growth, I don't think a government mandated limit is the right answer.
That only works where the government also has strict control over the internet, otherwise people will get their fill of dumb somewhere else. Would you be just as happy for the government to tell you where you can and can't go online as you would be for them to tell people what they can and can't watch on TV, I wonder?