Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Tag: solution

  • Me Social Media

    Dan Schultz doesn’t like Facebook or Twitter because they are too focussed on individual expression rather than the community. That may be because he is using them wrong. I liked photography as a kid, but I didn’t know any photographers. Flickr happened to come into my life just after I bought my first digital camera.…

  • Stalking Students

    On the BLKBRD-L email list is a discussion about proving students are cheating. Any time the topic comes up, someone says a human in a room is the only way to be sure. Naturally, someone else responds with the latest and greatest technology to detect cheating. In this case, Acxiom offers identity verification: By matching…

  • Email Harvesters

    I missed the story about brothers convicted of harvesting emails the first time. Well, I noticed a followup. Back around 2001, the CIO received complaints about performance for the web server. So, I went log trolling to see what the web server was doing. A single IP dominated the HTTP requests. This one IP passed…

  • The LMS is So Web 1.5

    The claims Blackboard’s Learn 9 provides a Web 2.0 experience has bothered me for a while now. First, it was the drag-n-drop. While cool, that isn’t Web 2.0 in my opinion. A little more on track is the claim: The all-new Web 2.0 experience in Release 9 makes it easy to meaningfully combine information from…

  • Athensdating.org

    I noticed a little black and white sign: “Single? athensdating.org” a while ago. A couple weeks ago it came up in conversation. Today I saw it again. So I visited the site. First impression: A local site should have images to represent something about the locality. Generic stock photography doesn’t cut it for me. The…

  • Information Should Be Free

    Mark Guzdial makes the point teachers add value to the learning process. Normally, I would agree. However, I got hung up on a misquote from a Walter Isaacson article How to Save Your Newspaper in TIME offering micropayments as the solution to newspapers finding a working model to survive since advertisements are not the right one. Mark said it…

  • The Digital Switch

    The Long Tail claims consumers, given more options, will reflect their widely varied interests. Physical stores cannot fill all of the demand, so bytes stored on disk are the fastest, cheapest method for getting stuff to consumers. We see a mostly example of this shift in the shift to digital music. Vinyl records were the…

  • Another Way To RAR

    I was sent a RAR file at work. I didn’t want to install WinRAR because it wasn’t clear whether educational institutions are business or not. The PowerArchiver software worked used only pretended the capability of opening the file. A better solution might be 7-Zip? It supports RAR.

  • Resolutions For 2009

    Read 10,000 pages of science, economics, health, history, or policy books. For 2008, it was read 25 books. This year, I thought to change it page-based as the previous one shied me away from larger books. Two 350 page books vs one 700 page book shouldn’t be a concern. See Reading for last and this years’…