Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: The not-so-Evil Empire, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Russell, I was talking about non-Apple devices, like HP, Dell and ASUS. Like I said upthread, I personally run a MacBook Pro for the reasons stated.
Ah. Gotcha now. I was surprised by the crack about design :-)
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Hard News: The not-so-Evil Empire, in reply to kiwicmc,
A couple of comments: Firstly those password nags from Apple should be taken notice of.
I possibly didn't phrase that very clearly. It wouldn't accept my old (pretty lame) password but didn't make it clear why. It was quite sensible to force everyone to fix their passwords, but it took a bit of working out that that's what was happening.
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Hard News: The not-so-Evil Empire, in reply to Kiwiiano,
Even allowing for exchange rate differences, that’s a helluva difference, and it can’t even be attributed to the better quality of OSX or Apple hardware.
Or to Apple. That's the local rights-holder making a killing. $34 for an iTunes version of a collection of old TV themes is absurd.
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Hard News: Who'd have thought?, in reply to Yamis,
but yeah, we can’t keep calling thousands of students every few years to make sure they’re not in the slammer, living under a bridge or running for mayor somewhere.
I think the focus was this one was how well they did at university. And -- surprise! -- the kids from the liberal high school with a great pastoral culture and no uniforms (or even a really a discernable dress code) did very well in comparisons.
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Hard News: The not-so-Evil Empire, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Assuming you don’t mind your laptop being slow, having the design values of a Christchurch 19-year-old’s Subaru, more stickers than my record box and spooling the fan up to 737 levels every time you give it any work to do, then yes, there are competitors.
Yep, there are tons of options, including really cheap ones. But for some weird reason, the two best-selling laptops on Amazon right now are the 13” Macbook Pro and the Macbook Air. There are two more Macbooks in the top 10. If you count iPads, Apple will be the world’s biggest notebook vendor in 2012, breezing past HP with 60 million sales.
Guess everyone’s really stupid. Or maybe they’re just really good devices.
I fully accept that Macs don’t meet your particular needs. But they work really well for ordinary folks.
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Hard News: The not-so-Evil Empire, in reply to Andre Alessi,
The answer to that is more complicated than simply being a comparison between the technical restrictions of the two OSs. There’s a human element in getting an apps into the Apple store that both reduces the possibility of malware ending up on an iPhone *and* makes getting an app to market a more frustrating and slower for many developers.
That's what I was getting at. Although it's amusing seeing Paul's comment above yours saying that won't work ...
It does seem to work better than not having any human oversight. And designing in security won't necessarily fix social malignancy.
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Hard News: Who'd have thought?, in reply to Stephanie,
Most would agree with you here – what bugs many is that the National Standards were half-baked (if one is generous), then implemented all at once across all schools across all New Zealand. If this was an IT project, it would have ‘major fail’ written all over it.
There are two comparisons to make here:
1. NCEA, which was trialled for years before being implemented -- and delayed when necessary.
2. The secondary school curriculum, which was developed in a really wonderfully open process that included real consultation with parents. I remember being really fucked off with a Joanne Black column where she moaned about it -- and it turned out she hadn't looked past the front page of the dedicated website.
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Hard News: The not-so-Evil Empire, in reply to Tony Siu,
It is written in the app description.
That was my recollection. I didn't find it misleading or confusing in the slightest.
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Hard News: Who'd have thought?, in reply to Yamis,
You can work out ways you might ‘teach’ those things or facilitate them but at the end of the day you’d have to go back and interview every single student a few years after they left and get their opinion about how well you did.
A few years ago when Western Springs College was losing students to certain other schools -- causing it to consider the known success strategy of imposing a school uniform -- one of the things that turned it around was research showing that its students did far better than many others after they'd left school and had to think for and motivate themselves.
As you say, you can't test for that.
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Hard News: Who'd have thought?, in reply to sandra,
note to PM: Data are plural (that’s what a good education does for you :) )
I think I actually knowingly committed that sin in the post. It can be a hard line to hold, that one …