When I read this:

Having taken the entire course through to the final exam, my overall assessment is: It's amazingly, shockingly awful. Some nights I got seriously depressed at the notion that this might be standard fare for college lectures encountered by many students during their academic careers.

I thought (wrongly, I suppose) that this might be an indictment of college courses in general. Most of the issues he found are, in my experience, valid for live college courses as well. It is "standard fare for college lectures" to have very little student feedback, gigantic jumps in difficulty, and missing definitions of key ideas. To me, though, it does not follow that online courses are inherently inferior. Obviously Delta thinks every teacher gives at least as much effort to teaching as Delta thinks he does himself. Online courses are supposed to solve this problem by creating access to supposed rock star teachers, and at worst (i.e. this Statistics course) they are simply as bad as live mega-lectures, but no worse.

Also, while this is a clear example of poor teaching, I'd like to suggest that the quality of the teacher is not the biggest factor in crummy classes. That factor, I've been thinking lately, is actually the administration. Currently, most of the best k-12 principals simply get out of the way of teachers; the worst create a hostile work environment and undermine the motivations of the student body. While college administrators typically do not exercise the kind of direct control over classes, they do set priorities for the university. Good lesson plans simply are not a priority, perhaps because students don't pay more when they do better. Research, in contrast, is highly lucrative, and working harder at it is likely to produce more research grants.

I'm not suggesting that universities shouldn't do so much research. Research is good! Rather, we're starting to get to the point where we need some level of education between (current) high school and college. In many places, community college provides that level - student-focused instruction of introductory college-level knowledge. I don't think a person should start studying at the university level until that person is learning things that research faculty will actually find engaging to teach (how many math professors love teaching basic calculus?). And once one is studying with those professors, the student should be ready to engage with messy intellectual ideas instead of clear-cut facts, and that's what research faculty deal with all the time.

Indeed, the article is not actually talking about "rock stars" but about poaching senior developers. It is also quite possibly the most perniciously agist thing I have ever read. "People do their best work when their head is barely above water," huh? How about the "truth" that the person who's "slogged through it 100 times before" also knows where the pitfalls are? The entire article reads like a bad stereotype of crotchety old developers too arrogant to follow directions.

I had forgotten about the characters used for drawing boxes, representations, etc. When I think of a CLI, I think of the Linux terminal. Dwarf Fortress is text-only in the style of old CLI games too, but I would consider its text representations "graphics" because their exact position on the screen is important data, whereas in the kind of CLI I'm thinking isn't graphical, there is no data conveyed in the position of text on the screen (with the exception of vertical position = temporal data). Even VI or anything uses ncurses already starts to blur this line.

These aren't really a command line interface anymore, though. Bash is a command line interface; the terminal window is not necessarily. Using Bash means typing out a command and executing it - the closest it gets to a GUI is tab completion. The commands it executes aren't necessarily CLI; obviously, starting X from the command line is starting a GUI, and so is starting VI, even though VI loads in the same terminal that was running Bash.

With all this complication, it occurs to me: what's the point? All this definition is just semantics. Colloquially, most people understand a GUI to mean a certain thing that does not include a CLI. Not everything visual is graphical. But ultimately, it doesn't matter. The poll question, I think, was asking about certain kinds of early GUI that were not limited by what could be displayed in a terminal window. That kind of GUI is, to me, the common and simple definition of a GUI, even though it is certainly possible to create a GUI within the limitations of a terminal window.

You've confused Graphical with Visual. A CLI is indeed a visual interface but it is not graphical, because it does not contain graphs, illustrations, comics, et al. To be graphical, there needs to be data in the presentation of information in addition to the information itself. While text on its own can be considered graphical, as in a brand logo, the font, color, and general presentation of the text is not a part of the interface in a traditional CLI. Admittedly, color-coded text in a CLI does blur this distinction, but it's still appropriate to refer to a CLI as non-graphical due to the limited (and often poorly-implemented, at least on the light-on-dark CLI colors I prefer) nature of the graphical data.

All that said, I find your point about entropy fascinating and I, among probably many others here at Slashdot, would very much like a GUI (not CLI) that works to reduce the entropy closer to CLI levels.

Totally not true. Sports drinks (like Gatorade) are mainly some combination of salts, with a small amount of sugar added for a short burst of energy. Energy drinks (like Monster) are mainly caffeine (and guanine) and sugar intended for longer burst of more intense energy. Sports drinks may advertise themselves as energy boosters, but the principle behind the advertising is the rapid restoration of electrolytes opposed to the somewhat slower restoration from drinking unsalted water. Besides, have you even tasted them? Sports drinks and energy drinks taste nothing alike.

I'd ignore you as a troll but I've seen the local news station fail to make the same distinction, ending up saying that sports drinks are worse than whatever high school kids might be drinking normally (soda) when I'm sure they were thinking of Monster, which easily has twice as much sugar.

Safer than a jigsaw? As in, a jigsaw puzzle? I didn't realize the edges of the puzzle pieces were that sharp...

...or maybe it's a jigsaw puzzle of a laser cutter?

Step One: Convert PowerPoint to randomly switch colors every third word when using Star Trek-like background styles.

(for those who rtfa on the slides)

Yes, using grams is not at all correct because I'm sure the actual mass was not changed (at least that's not what they were trying to prove). The only reason to get different mass on a scale is if the scale was intentionally calibrated wrong, since scales really measure force and not mass. But if the kilopond is meant to equal one kilogram at standard earth gravity, wouldn't it be wrong to use that unit as well, since "standard earth gravity" is the concept being tested? Shouldn't we instead measure/report Newtons exerted on the gnome?

No, because in that case the force would not be straight down, but mostly transverse and the mass to your left would cancel out the mass to your right. The center of gravity may still be right beneath you but unless it's something close to a sphere you can't approximate the gravitational force as all coming from the center of gravity.

I suppose I should qualify myself that "slave labor" was hyperbole for the working conditions in sweat shops, not literally meaning owning people as property. Beyond that, I could suggest that everyone should just get along but there isn't really anyone reading what I'm writing that would benefit were I to suggest what the unions should do differently. How about a vague suggestion that you shouldn't throw out unions (and therefore the only powerful representative for workers' rights) because of any particular problems, and instead seek to solve those problems by negotation (assuming both sides are open to compromise)?

First thing I'll point out, which anyone involved in education will tell you, is that teachers are an entirely different group than "an overgrown and overpaid administration apparatus." Often the two groups are greatly opposed to each other. In fact, teachers unions exist to protect teachers from this administration, not to obtain undue rewards from everyone else.

I'm willing to accept that some people may abuse the system, but I've never heard of someone get rich off of teaching. My general impression is that teachers get paid less than those with similar investment in acquired skills in the private sector (a bachelor's degree and some certification, plus a master's degree in most circumstances), and that nobody in their right mind becomes a teacher in the hope of exploiting some non-existant get rich quick scheme.

If teacher's unions did not exist, the most likely thing to happen would be little to no job security. It's already that way in the California university system; university administrators try to avert unions by refusing to hire full-time tenure track positions, instead hiring a slew of part-time lecturers who often have to waste lots of gas going to multiple universities for enough work. I'll admit there are budget problems in California, but the unions are standing with students against tuition increases and the cuts are actually coming from the state, not from those administrators. It's a tough situation but I think it's fair to ask that nobody's life be made worse than it was when progress is supposed to go forward.

Of course, the #1 reason unions exist is to prevent sweat shop conditions. We forget, but that's how factories used to operate in the US before unionization (late 1800s). Everyone should read up on the Gilded Age and various mining corporations and commodity monopolies.

I'll admit there are sometimes problems with unions because they generally don't know or care about budgetary constraints and argue only for the worker's interests. I heard of some caribbean nation where the companies and unions worked together in good faith, sharing accounting information in a fashion not generally allowed in the US. They were able to come to happy compromises because the unions were then able to understand the situation and even suggest what the workers could sacrifice in exchange for their other priorities. I think that the interests of everyone are best served when the workers can form a union, and when both the union and the management respect each other and are willing to compromise.

Not sure whether you're being serious or not, but yes I'm aware that plenty of people don't like teacher's unions. About the same number of people that don't care about slave labor in third world countries, I'd guess. The idea is based on trying to apply for-profit business principles to education, which generally doesn't work because, among other reasons, teachers are already selected for not caring about high pay. Ideologically speaking, pro-union means pro-individual (protect individuals from bad things that businesses do, like mistreat workers or pollute the environment), whereas anti-union means pro-business (protect business rights to treat workers and dispose of waste as they see fit, usually coupled with an assumption that the free market will sort things out for the general good of all). It sure makes sense that the greatest businessman in the world was pro-business, but that's not what we really expect from the cool guy in the Mac & PC commercials.

I was trying to imagine what computer would possibly tell you how to properly install its internal components until I looked back and saw "Mac Pro." Nothing else will tell you something like that, which you ought to have looked up in the manual (assuming you bought the motherboard on its own, and if you didn't "why would you want to replace memory?")

After reading what Steve Jobs has to say about education reform, it suddenly made sense that he's actually a soul-crushingly ambivalent-to-human-rights modern businessman, not the LSD revering environmentalist hippy that was more his image.

You wish we had those laws. Don't forget that would be a restriction to free trade! In the (fake) words of the World Trade Organization's Anthem of the Global Economy, "Free Trade is our God, Free Trade is our King, All hail Free Trade and His Invisible Hand!"