englishrookie

Believe me, if I the syntax in Dutch would keep, get you a very strange result. (This is a literal translation of a correct Dutch sentence.)

Based on just a few exchanges in Dutch (I'm a native speaker), I'd say it's pretty good. The conversation sounds pretty natural (albeit shallow). Maybe the quality differs per language?

From the article: "PEN America defines a school book ban as any action taken against a book based on its content and as a result of parent or community challenges, administrative decisions, or in response to direct or threatened action by lawmakers or other governmental officials, that leads to a previously accessible book being either completely removed from availability to students, or where access to a book is restricted or diminished."

So I'd say it's more than "parent complaints". The books under discussion are not accessible anymore according to PEN's definition.

Maybe this is another case of the bees foraging near an M&M's factory? https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/pollution-ecology/bee-blu...

Maybe Regolith [1] is something for you. It's an Ubuntu derivative that combines i3 and Gnome. It has sane defaults, a nice app launcher, and everything 'just works': audio, bluetooth, wifi.

I have been using Regolith for half a year now, after 10 years of endless tweaking of XMonad and Gnome under Ubuntu.

[1] https://regolith-desktop.com/

We need a quick fix. I'm based in the Netherlands, two thirds of which is threatened by a sea level rise within the next hundred years. If that sounds far away to you: my grandmother died at age 99. There's a very reasonable chance my children, teenagers right now, will live through this.

How would you call a person belonging to the Mittelstand in German? In another Germanic language, Dutch, you would say "middenstander" (or plural"middenstanders"), derived from "middenstand".

The original article uses the plural too, Mittelstands, but it sounds really weird in German since it's more of mass noun (it's as if you referred to various pots of sugar as 'the sugars'). I believe the correct word would be Mittelständler, but if you're going to anglicize it, Mittelstanders would much better than Mittelstands in my opinion. Then again, I'm not a native speaker of either German or English...

The eye makeup 'kohl' is in no way related to the German word for cabbage. Apparently it's an Arabic word (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kohl). Funnily enough, Kohle (with a schwa at the end) in German means coal (as a mass noun) which is of course black, like the eye makeup.

You might want to reconsider Moodle as an option. There's a new version (4.0) coming up early 2022 with a major UI overhaul. It looks like a big improvement, with the UX design at least ten times better than the current version (though admittedly the bar as set by the current version is not very high).

That said, end users (students / learners) need not be bothered by the sad state of the current backend: you can configure Moodle so they'll only get to see the easy parts (I've seen Moodle used in primary education on two different occasions).

As for your requirements, it looks as though Moodle's got them all covered (depending on the details of course). Except maybe for the live classes, which will probably require a 3rd party plugin.

Other things to consider:

- Cost of customization: Moodle developers are harder find than, say, WordPress developers. Putting something together based on WordPress might also get you there, for less money.

- Edtech standards: Moodle supports H5P, SCORM & LTI out of the box (WordPress has limited support for SCORM & LTI, full support for H5P). This means you can integrate your Moodle based platform with a lot of other systems, offering your courses to customers on their own platforms, when they might otherwise not be willing to do business with you.

- Community support: Moodle's the largest open source LMS out there, and it has excellent support forums. There's also commercial support available through Moodle partners (and, shameless plug, parties such as myself, who offer Moodle customization services).

- Shopping cart / payment features: you can put individual courses behind a paywall, but overall Moodle does not really support e-commerce features (except through integrations such as Edwiser Bridge).

- Installation & deployment: since you're looking for an open source solution, I'm going to assume you want to host the platform yourself. In that case, you might want to look for a system that's easy to install and maintain. WordPress & Moodle have got you covered there, since they're based on LAMP, for which a lot of documentation and external expertise is available.

- Enterprise features: do you require features like advanced customizable reporting, integrations with HR systems, and certification programs? Then you might want to look into Totara. I wouldn't call it open source, though you can host and customize the source code yourself once you buy their per seat licensing (still cheaper than most enterprise LMS solutions out there). Totara's based on a Moodle fork, although they're slowly moving away from the Moodle core code base.

[Edited for layout; added clarification on Totara]

One of the neat things about GFA Basic was its built in support for graphics. It was almost trivially easy to plot graphs of your math homework equations. Or to plot fractals (very slowly).

Yep, we purchased one in 1988 which died on us after about a week. But the replacement we got under the warranty lasted until 2005 or so (see my other post here), when the disk drive gave out.

I flunked my 9th grade in high school because of this machine.

I had the exact same use case for my parents' camp site in France. In 1997, I had programmed a camp site management software for the Atari 1040 ST in GFA Basic. It was used for booking reservations, registering new guests, and printing invoices.

At the time, this solution (both the computer and the programming language) were already outdated by at least 5 years. But it was the cheapest solution for my parents, since they couldn't afford a new computer (having just started the camp site).

Of course, it took me hundreds of hours to complete the software but I didn't mind since the project allowed me to sharpen my programming chops at a pretty basic level. For instance, I had to implement my own scrolling routine (there were no text areas in GFA Basic).

Theoretically it should have been possible to make system calls to GEM routines (the UI library in ROM) in GFA Basic, but I never got it to work.

The computer was used until 2005 or so, when the disk drive gave out.

[edit: grammar]

This is so true! I was waiting in the checkout line in the supermarket, and people all around me were discussing how the ancient Greek armies were composed entirely of male Greek citizens. Popular lore can be so wrong! ;-)

Ah, I thought it was me, for whom English is a foreign language. I can't parse this sentence either.

Wow, where was this? What library was that?

I was 12 at the time and had to take turns on my friend's BBC Micro (his parents' really). Of course, he was at the computer for 75% of the time, because "I know how to operate it".

Is that a thing in the US, taking a day off on your birthday? To the best of my knowledge, nobody does that in Europe - certainly not in the Netherlands.

I'm not so sure. All major religions survived the Copernican Turn.

In Civilization 5, Steve Jobs was a "Great Merchant". This sparked some debate too, at the time. The game also had "Great Scientist", "Great Artist", "Great Engineer", and "Great Prophet". Given his huge following, I guess the latter would have been an appropriate category too.

The only trouble I ever had with my Atari ST mouse, which I used for about 10 years, was that the axles got dusty. Well, dusty is an understatement. It was a mechanical mouse, with two axles and a ball with a plastic coating of some kind. As you moved the mouse, the ball brought the axles into motion, thus tracking your (more or less) exact movements.

Every few months I had to use my Swiss knife to scrape the accumulated dirt and dust from the axles. With some finesse, so as not to damage the axles.

The mouse could take quite some abuse too. I used to play Arkanoid (also known as Breakout) a lot, at some point. As well as other games which required a lot of clicking and moving around.

I personally don't hold that opinion, but this could still be construed as racist.

Yes! We Dutch are the bestest in English!

Exactly which Germanic kingdoms do you mean? The Frisians did not convert until after 754 AD (when they killed Saint Boniface - Bonifatius - after he managed to upset them, probably doing stuff like cutting down their holy oak).

The Frisians were never properly incorporated into the Roman empire to begin with, just like many other northern Germanic kingdoms.

As for the EU having a credibility gap, we're doing just fine, thank you very much.

I'm an old php dev, still doing server side development exclusively, and these are genuine questions: 1. What tooling is there available? Do you mean something along the lines of vim or IntelliJ? 2. How do these techniques make the user experience better, compared to e.g. ajax?

About the 'white' part: the Roman empire apparently did not categorize people based on something as superficial as their skin color: "physiognomy did not function as a criterion of social status in the Roman system of stratification". [1]

[1] https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/ElAnt/V1N4/thompson.htm...

The article suggests this is happening without not just the students' consent, but even without their knowledge: "He and Lenhart also say schools should disclose that they’re using systems that could slurp in students’ posts, since not all will have considered who might read or collect their public posts."

Any lessons learned that you want to share? As the owner of a very small consultancy shop I know it's very hard to extract generalized advice from your own failures, but still...

I agree that Netflix has a very limited offering. You won't find any of the classics in there when it comes to movies. You can't really use it as a movie library, in other words.

Spotify actually does have a very large number of songs, and I have no trouble finding classics in many genres - as well as completely new work.

I'm pretty sure the GDPR is enforced at the national level, by national data protection agencies. The one in the Netherlands is severely understaffed and no match for the lawyers of the likes of Google and Facebook.

Maybe this is different in Eastern Europe (you know, the old Warsaw pact countries), but in Western Europe tap water is of very reliable quality, and consistently delivered.