I'll be honest - I didn't really RTFA that closely, in part because it just fawns over the SSDs.

Can someone tell me why this is significant? (Because it's EBay, because it's the first large-scale deployment of SSDs like this, etc, etc)?

Thanks in advance (and sorry about the clueless SSD noob posting :) )

I keep wondering why do BitCoin articles keep showing up here. Any given article doesn't really seem quite nerdy enough to be real 'News For Nerds' (and yes, I agree that most of the articles here haven't been News For Nerds for a quite some time), and it's kind of a weird topic.

I kinda feel like "BitCoin articles is to Slashdot as gold advertisements is to the Fox News Network".

So I'm going to coin a term that we can add to the Slashdot Taxonomy (or the 'slashonomy', as I like to call it: :) ): Slashgold!

As in:
Random dude: "So, was the article good?"
You: "Naw, it was just another fluff piece promoting slashgold"

Yeah, I totally know what you mean. Since corporations are people too it's important for employees to pick an employer that gets the respect, treatment, and legal benefits that the employer deserves!

(I know it's a typo, but it's a funny typo :) )

Clearly, Provost Catherine Riordan is trying to extort the CompSci department to bring in some dough, or else she's going to cut the department.

Seriously - go back & read the "completely out of touch" article (http://www.geekwire.com/2011/western-washington-provost-were-respect-computer-science-department), and it's all there.

The ONLY concrete criticism she's offering of the computer science department is that they're not "engaging the business community and other people to a sufficient degree". She repeatedly mouths some bland chastisements about not really preparing for / "thinking about the future" (whatever that means), she dismisses the department's effort to "updat[e] their curriculum in a major way to better meet the needs of students" (claiming that she's "not an expert" - if that's true then she should be fired & her 6-figure salary given to someone who is willing to take the time to understand the college she's running), and then keeps coming back to whole thing about reaching out to the region's tech community.

What she wants is for the CompSci department to cough up enough money to help her solve her budget problems. What this is is extortion!

I'm curious about this spate of Slashvertising for Packt books. Is the problem that no-one is writing any other book reviews, or is the problem that Packt is gaming the slashdot system to get these posted?

Really? I had no idea that streaming TV channels to XBox Live would allow my XBox 360 to stream TV channels! Thank you, sir, for the excellent & informative summary! :)
</ ducks >

Well, if more pages == more good, then I guess I ought to go looking for an even bigger book! :)

I would have loved to know what it is in those 38 pages that cover the topic of extending ExtJS well. Even basic info about the 38 pages (it walks you through a single example in detail over 38 pages; it starts with a small example & builds on it over 38 pages; it covers sub-topics X, Y, and Z in detail (and X,Y, and Z are particularly important/difficult to do/etc), or whatever) would help me know if this book will be useful to me.

On a more serious note - I appreciate the reviewer taking the time to read through the book, and I appreciate being made aware of this particular title. Much thanks to samzenpus for going out of his/her way to post this!!

Or they'll be bought by big defense contractors, and the existing big defense contractors will continue to be the big defense contractors....

On the one hand I appreciate someone bring greater exposure to Moodle, particularly as I've occasionally considered writing a plugin for it myself. On the other hand, I'd love to see this book reviewed by someone who actually has some programming chops. Statements like "I trust that the technical information given in this book is accurate as I have read several other books from the Packt Publishing company" aren't really helpful - the whole point of reading a review of a technical book is to find out things like whether the book is accurate or not.

My guess is that writing a Moodle plugin is the reviewer's first "scratching my own itch" project, I wish the reviewer well with it, and would love to hear from more experienced programmers about this book (if anyone's read it).

hehe - yeah, I hear you. If you're not familiar with ePortfolios then most descriptions sound like heaps of buzzwords from a different industry :)

Speaking as a teacher, I know what an ePortfolio is (more or less), so let me take a shot at explaining it. But instead of re-typing stuff, let me start with stuff from the "ePortfolio" page on wikipedia:

"An electronic portfolio, also known as an e-portfolio or digital portfolio, is a collection of electronic evidence assembled and managed by a user, usually on the Web. [...] E-portfolios are both demonstrations of the user's abilities and platforms for self-expression. [...]

An e-portfolio can be seen as a type of learning record that provides actual evidence of achievement" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_portfolio)

At the end of a traditional school experience, most students have a GPA/transcript, and whatever they've put on their resume. However in some fields (like art, or so I'm told :) ), grades aren't as useful to employers so students instead built up portfolios of their work - collections of good stuff that they've done that shows off both how skilled they are, and what their style is. This way the advertising agency doesn't waste time on the kid who's got a 4.0 but really wants to do Goth/emo illustrating for comic books, etc.

An ePortfolio takes this idea online, obviously. I've also seen it used for fields that don't traditionally require portfolios, in an attempt to make the school experience more "real world-y" ("look - our students are doing real things, not just taking exams! Look at the real things they're doing!"). It's not a bad idea, but has a number of problems/challenges in it's implementation. The biggest problem is that if your field values portfolios then you're probably doing it already. And if your field doesn't (like mine - computer science) then interviewers/grad schools don't really care that you're doing it.

My initial reaction was "Really? Seriously?? How does this make the algorithm any more interesting, easier to understand, or easier to remember? I mean hey - I like 80's console-sounds as much as the next guy, but they're not really adding anything."

Then it hit me that (apparently) many people haven't seen the algorithms visualized like this before. As someone who's been teaching this stuff for years, I've always handed out links to visualizations like this (even if they did lack the retro-hip sound effects :) ). As a matter of fact, I think that one of the first big demonstrations of Java was an applet that demonstrated
various sorting algorithms [citation needed :) ]

Anyways, if you're interested in this sort of thing, the link I've been using is:
http://www.sorting-algorithms.com/

I've heard good things about this place, but haven't looked through it extensively:
http://algoviz.org/

(You know, in all the years I've been on Slashdot, I don't think I've ever wanted to create a new top-level post instead of responding to someone else's comment.... until now. Which is why I can't find the button to do so. I'd love for someone to (politely, with good humor) point out the obvious button that I'm missing)

I'm glad to finally see a top-rated post address this issue.

There are a ton of posts about how society still needs garbage-picker-uppers, but how many Slashdot readers are actually doing that? And more to the point, as off-shoring/out-sourcing keeps blowing low-education jobs out of the country (I read an article the other day about colleges outsourcing the grading that American TA's now do), why would you want to aim for an 'uneducated' job?

If you skip college & get a job in a factory (assuming you can find one)(an American factory, that is), what will you do when the factory is closed & production moved to Mexico?

Sorry for the rant, but there's this odd anti-education bias on Slashdot, even to the point of overlooking the obvious reason why everyone goes to college - to try and avoid their careers being made obsolete.

I hate to harp, but I have to agree

So there are 22 what? Chapters? Chapters and errata? Description, chapters and errata?

And why exactly can't the authors or publisher confirm anything? You'd figure that at least one of the 19 contributors could confirm at least their own contributions :)