"Do not arouse the wrath of the great and powerful Oz. "

“Some people without brains do an awful lot of talking, don't you think?”

A shame it wasn't Jamie Oliver or a few more people might have heard it.
I don't think there is much overlap between the Oprah audience and the John Oliver audience, and one Oprah endorsement is worth a thousand minor-celebrity condemnations.

They had a budget of $500 million for just the ipads and $800 million for just the software. I work in the defense industry and our contracts are to develop software AND hardware and are well below these figures.

You can get quality android tablets for half the price of a comparable ipad. You can get a chromebook for half the price of a quality android tablet. And keep in mind these are school children that we are giving these devices to. They are going to be covered in food and thrown on the ground and stolen by bullies, etc. We should be buying the most cost effective devices, and I can all but guarantee that the ipad is not it, especially at the volumes we are talking about.

When I was in school back in the 90's we had to buy a $80 ti-82. Now you can get a chromebook for $200 that's more powerful than even the best laptops from a few years earlier. Even if we had the money to buy $700 ipads for every student, that extra $500 / per student would be far better spent on increasing teacher salaries and attracting better teachers.

With 1.3 billion dollars, the school district could have probably commissioned an electronic text book to be written in every single subject taught in school, they could have bought 6.5 million chromebooks without even negotiating a bulk discount.

Anyone who thinks this was a good idea needs to get their head examined. This is the LA school system, where kids can barely read and teachers and kids are living in poverty.

I keep going back and forth on whether to buy one, but I'm tending toward "no" -- a makerspace opened up near me and they have half a dozen different 3d printers but it usually seems that at most, two are ever working at the same time. Despite that, I recently needed an object printed, paid $50 for the membership fee for a month, then spent 13 hours babysitting a print. On the first try, it jumped 2mm on the X axis about 15 minutes into the print. Stopped, restarted, and after spending all day watching it, it jumped 2mm on X axis again with about 30 minutes left on 12 hour print job. Then I had to pay $15 for my scrap plastic.

I was pretty non-plussed, so I tried one of the online printers -- the type which use the very expensive powdered plastic machines -- my piece cost $65 which is pretty pricey, but they came out exactly like I expected. About 20 of those prints would buy a printer, and it is hard to resist that logic, except when I think back to spending an entire freakin day to get garbage and the fact that most of the printers at the makerspace are usually offline because a needed part is on order.

I'm not really sure what my ultimate decision will be, but the promise of consumer 3d printing seems to be more than it delivers at present.

That's the basic rule when you are buying a few computers. It's not the rule when you are purchasing half a $1 billion of computer systems. When your computer budget is larger than the GDP of some small countries, you should be exploring the possibility of saving money by developing custom software.

These kids aren't upgrading from a previous ipad.

The computers don't matter. The OS barely matters, and it gets changed like 1 or 2 times a year. The application that is running on it is what matters, and even an idiot can be taught how to push the button to start an app on any OS, even one they've never used before.

This is like saying that people shouldn't be forced to learn to drive more than 2 makes of cars.

If anything this should be a reason *to* use android (if it was a good reason to begin with). There are more android phones out there, and more android users than iOS users. If anything, teachers are more likely to be familiar with android (52% market) than with iOS (35%).

Not that that should matter. Saying "I can't learn to use software" is like saying "I can't follow and remember instructions", and it should disqualify you from most jobs.

No one is asking anyone to be a hacker. Teachers are only being asked to do what every other person is required to do whether it's filling out an electronic timecard or entering products into an inventory software. It's just following directions. And it's usually a lot easier than the non-interactive paper counterpart.

welcome to california :)

so culture/society is to blame? if so lets segregate? i mean clearly woman need all the help they can get in STEM but why stop there. Society has also demonstrated lack of wage equality so woman only corporations is the logical extension of this thinking. /endsomewhattroll

noscript works

Doesn't a layoff imply that you still have a job to come back to when business improves? As another poster mentioned, the question is not firing, but whether it was for "cause" or more to the point, whether it was for misconduct.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

I see, I'm old enough to remember the older version of "layoff" -- in modern times, it just means fired not for reasons of misconduct.

I brought up HTML as a solution when I thought "interactive books" were like wikipedia pages with some buttons, which HTML5 is more than capable of doing and doing well.

Even the apps that have tablet specific version, no doubt share much (if not the vast majority) of the software. They may be separate apps for commercial purposes, or saving space in terms of higher resolution icons, sprites, etc. I don't consider that to be tablet specific development. It's development for one platform with a little bit of effort spent on specializing UI for phone or tablet.

What I am saying is that they don't even get the performance problem anymore. Games used to be the one thing that couldn't be cross platform because of how hardware specific they were, are now fully capable of being targetted to multiple platforms including mobile platforms.

When done right, the apps written in cross platform environments are not noticeably slower than apps written specifically for one architecture in all but the most resource hungry apps.

Ideally what I would like to see is for school districts across states, and countries to form a consortium to develop open source text books (i.e. like a text book version of wikipedia), that schools could use royalty free. This would really help developing nations as well as American school districts. It would eliminate a lot of wasted effort in creating so many textbooks that contain basically the same information. A parabola still works the same way regardless of which edition of which math book we are using.

The textbook industry is rife with corruption, because of the massive payday you get if you can manage to get a constract for a whole school district. And the content is basically just current public domain knowledge packaged together with some artwork.

You could still pay people to contribute to the textbooks, but the difference would be that the content would not be owned by publishers. It would be public domain.

Alright so where's the experiment that proves this? Where is the randomized controlled trial? You can;t just claim these things because they seem plausible. You actually have to do science (the whole part, not just the beginning).

How was emotional development measured? what was the sample size? How were confounding factors controlled for? And after that is proven, now you need to prove that the link of causal rather than just correlative.

How do you know it's not just that autistic kids prefer things over people? How do you know it's the phone causing the autism or autism like behavior?

This is the point where pseudo science assumes they know the answer and where real science (if it were being done) would start.

In real science, people try to prove that their hypothesis is wrong, to see if it can withstand scrutiny. In the pseudo science world you have these fake studies that set out to collect evidence to prove a conclusion that they have decided on beforehand.

I feel like your framing of this as "debating the science" implies an undeserved legitimacy to what I would more appropriately call "condemning pseudo science".

I don't expect parents to only do things that are scientifically proven to help their kids. I expect them to use their intuition and judgement. If you think screens are harming your kids, then restrict their use. Make your kids listen to Mozart for 3 hours a day. Feed them only whole foods. I am all for that. Just don't pretend it's based on science. And especially don't call it science because guessing (hypothesizing) is part of science too.

It was the possibility of creating computer games that got me interested in programming initially. If you would have started telling me in 4th grade about how programming can be used to integrate CRM and ERP systems I probably would have just kept playing Nintendo instead of learning QBASIC.

Sometimes you need to get people hooked on how a topic can be cool before you start showing them how it can be practical.

They also Pearson to make the software. (i.e. they weren't just buying existing software). They could have commisioned software to be made on any platform, or even for it to have been cross platform.

I have seen some screenshots, and I see why you don't think they would be perform well in HTML5. They have video game level graphics. This is also why I pointed out unity as an example of a popular framework that targets all the platforms I mentioned (that you seemed doubtful of). Unity is marketed as a game engine, but you can make whatever apps you want that require performant graphics.

I agree with this statement. I think interactive books would be very helpful in illustrating concepts in ways that a static medium can't. I was envisioning something like wikipedia with it's animations and maybe some added interactivity. I don't think you need to see a emmersive 3d world of an artists conception of ancient Rome to effectively learn.

I think this can be done much more cheaply than ipads and proprietary interactive textbooks of the sort you are describing. I think kids are capable of learning concepts with a lower production value. (i.e. the kind found in HTML5, like wikipedia).

This is irrelevant if you are commissioning your own.

debatable and see my point for #1

Developers actually prefer android for development, but prefer iOS for profit potential.

Such as? Android apps are java which has a much bigger following than objective C or swift.

The fact that they run the same OS means that the time spent on developing "phone software" vs. "tablet software" is the same, because the same software runs on both. While you may feel subjectively that phones and tablets are very different, the people developing the apps that run on them are targeting both platforms simultaneously. It's crazy not to. In fact, now the trend is to target phone, tablet, and desktop browser simultaneously with things like google polymer, and phonegap, etc.

Developers don't like writing different software for phone, tablet, and desktop, windows, mac, linux, and all combinations, and now with modern tools, they really don't have to.

The only thing the size of the glass effects is which UI profile gets loaded. Properly designed software can easily abstract the functionality from the presentation, like in a MVC (model view controller) design.

Whose to say they are happy with it? There are plenty of women who are not happy with the status quo. They are among the ones leading changes such as the one in this article.

That is exactly what these groups are doing. One barrier for women is that society makes it pretty clear what they should like at a very early age. This means that by the age of 10 they have already been led towards playing with dolls instead of tools. Correcting these kinds of barriers takes effort; it won't just correct itself.

Not offended yet. I'm just a bit more curious because not only do I live far from the Bible Belt, I'm an atheist from a family where religion played little to no role, I've only rarely been in a synagogue or church, and those few visits were at minimum more than 25 years in the past. I, and those like me, are probably considered a source of the degradation.