Class rank exists and can be used to determine relative capability though.

I have no complaint with the idea that most students simply won't be able to achieve an A-grade if the material is both challenging and taught to proper standards, but I have a major problem with the notion that teachers are required to deny students that have mastered well above 90% of the material an A-grade because other students managed to yet outperform them. I hate the idea of grading on a curve. One should be judged against the mastery of the material, not comparatively against other students during that particular semester.

That said, I have also had college classes where I really should have failed the class but because of the curve, I got an A because I had the highest scores. While some of that reflects upon me, a good chunk of that reflects upon the instructor, the department and its head, and the curricula for that particular course. If students are to be held to high standards then instructors should likewise be held to high standards, and so should their institutions. If they cannot produce results then that should reflect both upon them and upon the revenue they receive in tuition.

I spent 20 years working in K-12 in a suport role. The issues vary greatly across population densities and social and economic status. The large district I worked for (~55,000 students) featured everything from schools where every kid must be prepared to go to college, to trying to arrest the pregnancy and dropout rates.

The problem is when education is treated as a monolithic bloc. Issues vary incredibly widely from school to school, from neighborhood to neighborhood. An additional problem is the attack stemming from the anti-tax crowd on public education, eroding budgets and thus paychecks, generating disrespect for teachers, and causing many to leave the profession for something that pays better. That leads to erosion of the system and it starting to break down.

Someone funny in a dark way that this story is posted right above the FEC's attempt to control mass surveillance via hardware. This kind of thing makes it absolute clear that one of the core goals of these self-described "AI" systems it to finalize the capture of all PII on everyone and transmit it to centralized storehouses controlled by... who exactly?

"Way to go outing yourself as someone who lives locally to Cupertino. For anyone else who actually used it was fucking terrible."

Way to make assumptions. I lived in the US Midwest then; I have never lived in California much less the bay area.

Personally I haven't used a single mapping app, whether MapQuest, Garmin, Google Maps, Apple Maps, Open Street Map, or other that hasn't had some errors. There are how many mappable points and curves on the Earth? 1 trillion? 10 trillion? 100 trillion? No one has them all. And all the commercial services give bad directions from time to time; my spouse had to flag down a Forest Service ranger and send them after a couple that was blindly following Google Maps down a road they weren't going to make even in their big honkin pickup truck.

I never got the hate for Apple Maps, even in the first year or two after release. Apple clearly could not let themselves become captive to Google/Google Maps to a degree they would never be able to overcome, so they had to move forward with something. And even outside SoCal it was OK if not great in the US (I understand international maps took a long time to catch up, but that was true of Google Maps too). I think I used it 2/3 of the time after the first year of stabilization and it worked well enough.

Now one can criticize Apple for not using a tiny bit of their store of cash to speed up the process of expanding their own geomapping database, and I so criticized them at the time. But that didn't mean the product was some sort of failure because it wasn't.

Wow - that page reads like a step-by-step guide on how to violate the Robinson-Patman Act. Too bad we haven't had any real consumer protection enforcement in the US since the 1970s.

"Why did they make him CEO if they know so clearly that he can't be trusted?"

'I never expected the leopard to eat my face! [just the faces of those marks and chumps]'

I didn't really use Works, but I supported enough PCs that had it that I had a lot of exposure to it. I didn't use it because the file formats for it were annoying when I had access to Office.

It was pretty common OE software on new computers too.

If I didn't have access to Office, I tended to use WordPad. It was nearly always good enough honestly.

That's plausible.

I still hate it though. My first version of Office was 4.3, which included Word 6.0 and was ostensibly for Windows 3.1. I'd previously used Clarisworks on Macintoshes in school and before that I used a ghetto cheap program that called itself a word processor but was more of a glorified text editor in MS-DOS that worked well with an Epson dot matrix printer's formatting, so for me Word was great. I felt like the bumpers from Clarisworks had been removed, I had a lot more control over what I could do to a document.

Ribbon feels like they decided that power users didn't matter, and also corresponds with the end of the free Wordpad light-duty word processor and long after Microsoft Works was killed off.

They seem to have forgotten why some of their most popular applications became most popular in their respective categories, and that wasn't just leveraging their OS marketshare OEM install dominance. It was a combination of reasonably good UI design that had a degree of intuitiveness along with fairly easy access to more advanced features, with an added dash of the ability to use data from one application in another without major headaches. Arguably MS Office in the days before Ribbon and Metro UIs exemplify this.

Unfortunately they chose to change the UI for change's sake, ie, because users wouldn't recognize that they now had a shiny new version of the product if they didn't flagrantly change the UI, and they chose UI designs that frankly sucked. They also seem to have harmed that interoperability by trying to push too much of it when it doesn't fully work right.

Obviously there have been software companies that had products that for the professionals constantly using them were better, like WordPerfect to Word, but those didn't generally work well for both the power user and the casual user. Originally Microsoft had managed to bridge that gap. But Ribbon and Metro interfaces have harmed the power user, it's now harder to do things than it should be, and power users have incentive to look for software that gives them the features without the bloat.

I doubt that Microsoft is going to understand this in this revamp. They're going to try to cram some UI change solely for the purpose of making it different than the prior version, and even if it's now "native" it's still going to suck. And they're going to try to force any remaining users on prior versions of Windows off of those and onto Windows 11.

s'okay. Biology is the only scientific discipline where division and multiplication are the same thing.

uh, no. You didn't win.

Places like Bell Labs were more like university research centers than corporate dressing on mandatory-overtime grind. They were not expected to directly turn a profit as business units of the company, because what they did was to lay the groundwork for technology that the other business units could then adapt into products. The return on the investment paid into running them took years or even decades to realize. Without the pressures of needing to turn quarterly or even annual profits they weren't working their researchers to the bone and they were fostering a culture of internship for college students into joining their ranks as researchers to perpetuate the institutional knowledge.

*ow!*

uh, found it...

Not only have I seen that, but I have experienced it.

My socket set and ratchet isn't trying to convince me to be in a relationship with it, to be in love with it, to be something of an equal to it.

Even our pets as living beings capable of expressing themselves are not able to communicate at our level.

Large language model AI is attempting to spoof being human, to mimic being us. There are already examples of people becoming very, VERY upset when their AI-boyfriend or AI-girlfriend is taken away by companies revising the AI standards and interaction rules. This is unhealthy. The relationship needs to remain that of tool user and tool, because anything more than that is one-sided and subject to terrible abuse by anyone that managed to co-opt that system.