Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Not news for Canadian (Score 1) 69

I was going to post the same thing. I doubt any Canadian who has a cell phone will be surprised by this news. I might be a little surprised that there isn't some other country whose telecoms are squeezing their customers harder, but I think most of us would have assumed we were top five at least before this study came out.

Comment Re:Mostly immaterial what people think... (Score 1) 660

I'm a third-party Illustrator developer and I can say that the move to a subscription model is a bit of a pain for us. We have a lot of users who won't budge from CS6 as a result. This really ties a support anchor around our neck.

That said, knowing a number of people at Adobe I can safely tell you that this wasn't purely a "let's lock people" decision. I'm sure they're happy with that as a by-product, but a big part of the of the reason they went this way was their biggest customers requested it.

You might ask: requested it? Sure. If you're a big company and you have, say, 100 seats of Illustrator, but you only upgrade every two years, you have a major problem. You need $100k to do your upgrade, but you only use it on alternating years. If you don't spend that $100k in one year, your accounting department won't give it to you the year after. Corporate account is *really* stupid that way. Apparently they got a lot of feedback from their corporate users that a subscription model would be ideal: they wouldn't have to worry about big jumps in upgrades (every other version) and it would smooth out their expenses.

Now, could you have worked out some way to let them do that while also letting someone own it? Maybe, but once you build the subscription model code, I imagine they decided supporting both methods was stupid. And again, as others have pointed out, they priced the subscription so if you were a regular upgrader, you're saving money. If you weren't, it will be pricier, but why should Adobe bend over backwards to make that person's life easier? If you skipped every other upgrade, it's a wash in terms of cost.

Comment Re:Abuse of power? (Score 5, Insightful) 557

If the results are going to other people ("a range of stakeholders", which includes Congress) the information is there for Trump if he wants it. By having it delivered to him before he leaves office, that puts a timetable on it. Otherwise it's "Hey, go do this thing for me. Also, I'm out of here", which in my experience results in nothing happening.

Comment Re:pump the brakes, CNN (Score 1) 62

I spent about two months trying to figure out how to tell the suggestion service on Android TV that I was not interested in his crap. I still don't know how he got into my rotation and I'm still not sure why he was finally removed. But it's good to know that CNN is going to inflict him on a whole generation; I feel like my pain should be shared.

Comment Holy Carpal Tunnel Batman (Score 2) 361

I can see some interesting use cases for that TouchBar, but dear God, when that Photoshop lady was demonstrating using the mousepad & TouchBar at the same time, I cringed. I mimicked it on my keyboard in front of me and my wrists cried out in pain -- I can't imagine how it'd be if the keyboard was in my lap (i.e. on a laptop).

Comment Re:Already Implemented in Ontario, Canada (Score 1) 228

It's funny, my wife & I were talking about that the other day. Her cousin's kid can't do multiplication to save her life and neither of us could fathom why they dropped the multiplication table approach. Great, calculators are useful, but if you don't have one, you can't even *do* long-form multiplication if you don't have the Ten Times Table memorized. We agreed that whatever the hell the schools did, our kids are going to know their goddamn multiplication tables.

Comment Already Implemented in Ontario, Canada (Score 4, Insightful) 228

My wife is a kindergarten teacher, and over the last four years there's been a push to 'play based learning', presumably resulting from the same kind of research mentioned in the article.

By and large it seems fine, though it doesn't alleviate some of the problems they mention; specifically my wife still feels the pressure to move through the curriculum, but it's a little less clear how. Part of the 'learning through play' initiative also pushes heavily on 'self guided learning', and while all of this seems great, there's not a lot of guidance given on how to execute. I think most of us would agree that it's better if the student is interested & wants to learn the subject, but there's no real help about what to do if the student /isn't/ interested. Presumably the teacher just forces the kid to learn what has to be learned, but all the material provided leans heavily on instructing teachers not to do that.

At any rate, this is mostly just typical of governments adopting something and not thinking through how to implement fully. Still, the impression I get from my wife & her colleagues is that the ideas are good (play-based learning) but it'd have been nice if there was better instruction on how to follow through.

Comment Re:I'm actually OK with this (Score 1) 592

Fair enough, though every time this is mentioned on the news I can't help but wonder if this wasn't standard practice for the last few Secretaries of State. Do we actually *know* this is unusual? I mean, I know the Fox anchors have an orgasm every time they can talk about this, but I'd feel better knowing that this really was unusual. I honestly have no idea, and I'm suspicious only because it wouldn't be the first time political opponents made a mountain out of a mole hill.

Slashdot Top Deals

God help those who do not help themselves. -- Wilson Mizner

Working...