November 11, 2007 – 8:35 pm
I haven’t posted yet on the Android announcement, mostly since I’m still not quite sure what to make of it. My take at the moment is that I’m hopeful but not optimistic, if that makes sense.
Here’s a brief excerpt from a post by Steven Frank that neatly summarizes the main reservation I have with it:
A 34-company committee couldn’t create a successful ham sandwich, much less a mobile application suite. It’s going to be some half-baked turd undoubtedly based on GPE since that’s, you know, better than starting from scratch, right? (Wrong.)
For heaven’s sake: Find someone, ONE person, with a unique vision. Lock them in a room with some programmers and a graphic designer. Twenty people, tops. Change the world. Quit re-hashing the same old bullshit and telling me it’s new, exciting, or in any way innovative. Be ready to fail, many times, but for love of all that is holy take a stand on something.
The thing is, most of the time really great products (especially software) are pioneered by a small group of people who try something that ends up working. Larger teams are sometimes appropriate and can be productive, but only if the initial “vision” (for lack of a better word) is set and everyone else rallies around that to make it happen. Having that many companies involved will more likely than not result in a product that has too many built-in compromises, designed to make everyone happy. which can’t be done.
November 6, 2007 – 11:29 am
Rather than the common approach in academia of putting down Wikipedia for not being a reliable source for students writing papers and reports, professor Martha Groom decided to turn that notion on its head by making fixing (or correcting) the Wikipedia article the actual assignment.
Not only does this creative approach directly address the complaints of inaccuracy by contributing to the system instead of ignoring it, it had an interesting side effect on the quality of the students’ work as well.
For her students, the Wikipedia experiment was “transformative,” and students’ writing online proved better than the average undergrad research paper.
Knowing their work was headed for the Web, not just one harried professor’s eyes, helped students reach higher - as did the standards set by the volunteer “Wikipedians” who police entries for accuracy and neutral tone, Groom said.
The exercise also gave students a taste of working in the real world of peer-reviewed research.
In other words, the students did better work than they otherwise would have, and they were helping out other people as well, by contributing their research and writing time, finding and citing sources, etc.
November 4, 2007 – 5:58 pm
Excerpt from a 37 signals chat session:
Matt L.: “Microsoft to Pay $240 Million for Facebook Stake”
Matt L.: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1193235183…
Sam S.: “Facebook, a service that lets people set up their personal Web pages,”
Sam S.: worst description ever
Jason F.: Sam: lol
Jason F.: It’s amazing how often the media just totally botches such simple shit like that
Sam S.: yeah, doesn’t give you a whole lot of faith in the things they’re reporting about outside your area of expertise
Jason F.: Good observation.
So true.
November 3, 2007 – 11:15 am
I forgot to mention in my recent post on Ubuntu that another thing they’ve really improved on is the NTFS filesystem support. This makes it a lot easier to dual boot with Windows since it gives you full read & write access to all the other partitions on the drive (with no manual configuration needed), so you don’t have to try and split up the space.