Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment The RED mark! (Score 1) 208

Red pens and *gasp* telling children they got the wrong answer! A failing grade inflicts unforgivable trauma on the psyches of our little snowflakes.

if little johnny snowflake cant handle a red mark on his paper, then compiler errors are gonna beat his ass and steal his lunch.

OMFG! The RED mark!

You've solved the gender inequality problem in STEM!

More men than women are red/green color blind!

They didn't have their souls crushed by getting red marks, they thought they were doing well, and so continued on in STEM! By the time they realized that they had actually been screwing up the whole time, they had already been writing Java and .Net code for 2 years!

Comment Re:Interesting but... (Score 1) 234

Well, what problem is this making a dent in other than a billionaire setting up a small private school for his kids and some of his employees?

Because if the entire story is "billionaire sets up private school for own kids" ... who gives a shit?

Well, he worked on the Tesla battery technology for years, and then open sourced the patents.

I expect that as soon as he's satisfied it's tweaked to the point it's working as intended, he will open source the curriculum for the school.

I suspect that, should this happen, it's not going to change much about education, since really public education is how to get promoted to the point you are an administrator, and can start raking in the 6 figure salaries, and really has dick-alll to do with teaching kids these days.

Comment Actually, it's closer to Montessori (Score 2) 234

Actually, it's closer to Montessori.

There's nine Montessori schools in the Los Angeles County area, so it's not like he couldn't have just paid for the kids to go to one of those.

There's not a lot of public Montessori's, however they are becoming more common (e.g. North Shoreview and ParkSide Elementary in San Mateo), but they tend to be Magnet schools, and there tends to be a lottery to get in because everyone wants their kid to get in. On the plus side, if you have multiple kids, once the older one gets in, there's a bump in the lottery for your remaining kids, and (A) once in, a kid generally gets to stay as long as the parent remains in the area, and (B) they don't totally screw up.

Frankly, if it's a choice between sending the kids to a private school, and building your own, and it's going to pretty much cost your the same for tuition either way, it's a hell of a benefit he's giving his employees (IMO).

Comment Re:Time for a change? (Score 5, Interesting) 234

The old way had the teacher directly teach the older kids an the age rage, who would then be responsible for teaching the younger kids themselves. This is a great system: you learn better through mentoring, you develop better critical thinking skills when the person teaching you is sometimes wrong, and you likely develop leadership skills along the way.

Having spent part of my time in a system set up like you describe... it's the *ABSOLUTELY WORST* thing you can do to a high achieving kid: take away their opportunity to reach even greater heights, in exchange for keeping them busy by becoming an unpaid teaching assistant.

Thankfully, it really didn't work out (having a 4th grader teach 6th graders math just gets that 4th grader beat up during lunch and after school), and they backed off eventually. Which was fine with me, because I was already working on calculus, organic chemistry, and college level reading that the bookmobile lady snuck me after doubling my number of books checked out quota over everyone elses.

If you want to go back to the "Little House On The Prairie"-style one room schoolhouse, good on you, but please do not drag high achieving kids back there with you, or worse try to "socialize them at their grade level", because I'm telling you, you might as well buy them a T-Shirt with a target on it.

Musk may not being anything new -- and he's really, reading the 3 articles, just describing Montessori with a couple of tweaks, like taking the grade level away -- but at least at his school I don't think you'd be holding back those who are able to vastly outpace the slower learners.

Comment Re:AT&T 210M Trimline (Score 1) 313

Is it made out of bakelite? I hope it has a dial, none of this DTMF crap either!

It has DTMF, but there's a switch to make it pulse dial instead of using tones.

PS: Do you perhaps live in St. George Utah? I know for a fact they installed an exchange with stepper relays instead of DTMF decoders a while back, and since they amortize equipment over 20 years, the thing's still inservice.

Comment Re:The absolute #1 contribution of Java (Score 0) 382

"Whoosh," is the sound you hear over your head. What's the point of Java?

You really do *not* want the honest answer to this question, but I will give it to you anyway: So people who would otherwise be employed asking "Would you like fries with that?" can get non-performance critical programming jobs.

Why do people use it vs why do people use C/C++ vs. Java? Sometimes you need to be closer to hardware. This is one of those times. Therefore, you wouldn't use Java.

You *always* have to be closer to the hardware:

#1: Almost everything is a mobile device these days; people buy laptops instead of desktops, cell phones music players, etc.. The closer you are to the hardware, the better your battery life, the lower power your processor can be to do the same amount of work, the cheaper the unit price for the lower powered hardware and smaller battery, the lower the cooling system costs (mostly, you can go without them, or operate them on "low"), etc., etc..

#2: Being closer to the hardware lets you reduce the number of blades/servers/PaaS instances that you require in your data center or cloud. This reduces costs, again in terms of cooling, but also in rack space, and power requirements. Facebook rewrote their PHP code to be compiled to binary code, and it saved them over 50% in servers. When you are a startup, and have tons of VC money to throw hardware at a problem, you can get away with not having to worry about those things, but when it's time to get to scale, they start to become major issues.

You can *get away* with not being closer to the hardware... for a *short time*, when you are engaged in rapid churn (e.g. new web UI ever 2 hours), or doing a lot of rewrites or running on hardware that better than the hardware you intend to deploy on, but after that being closer to the hardware is *the overriding thing*.

Comment Answer to the related question... (Score 1) 313

Answer to the related question... "What smart phones out now are (or can be reasonably outfitted to be) closest to a dumb phone, considering reliability, simplicity, and battery life?".

That's easy: any of them that you don't install all of those crappy, battery-sucking Apps on, and turn off polling for push notifications from Facebook, email, and so on, so they they aren't constantly running the battery down because then they can actually get the application processor into sleep state once in a while without some stupid polling interval waking them up to use more battery every few picoseconds.

Slashdot Top Deals

"The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception a neccessity." - Oscar Wilde

Working...