icarus_drowning

Just to add to the anecdotal evidence bandwagon, I'm another very happy long term customer, with almost a decade of happy purchases. I've never had a problem nor experienced anything but excellent service. I've had iPhones replaced for free (without Apple Care), free repairs for faulty components in 2 MacBook Pro's (performed immediately and at no cost).

I don't blame you for you dislike of the Apple brand given how you've apparently been treated, but realize that your experience seems to be somewhat anomalous.

Teaching music theory can be hard, but it doesn't have to be. I know, because I do it almost every day (its my day job). To make it relatable, you have to tie it into the elements of music-- for this, I use Copland's "What to Listen for in Music". Once students can generally grasp and talk specifically about Melody, Harmony, Rhythm, and Tone Color, you can relate the music theory to it.

I have about 200 6th-8th graders that are able to perform basic figured-bass analysis on major-key chorales in about 3-4 months by progressing in an orderly fashion from notation to rhythm to major scales to the Circle of Fifths to minor scales to intervals, to chords, and finally, to cadencial analysis. Some of them pretty much view it as a game we play with written notes, but, when reinforced by practical experience in private lessons or participation in ensembles, it is remarkable how much they like it and are sad when we move on to Music History in the second half of the year.

If you read the article, there are several instances of the same problems causing very large errors in elections prior to 2000, for example, several miscalled states for Clinton in previous elections. To claim that these polls "suddenly" stopped working is demonstrably false.

If you knew you'd get a downvoting-kicking, what exactly motivated you to engage in a behavior that so clearly violates the culture here? I'm not accusing, I'm genuinely curious.

Nate Silver wrote a great article in 2010 about why the notion of exit polling itself has a lot of fundamental problems[1]-- among them, the fact that it is extraordinarily difficult to get an truly random sample.

[1]http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/ten-reasons-why-you-s...

This is a great idea. Obviously it would have to be implemented properly and would be subject to the some of the same problems exit polls already have (i.e., voters not wanting to participate), but it solves a lot of the other problems neatly.

That assumption is political, and if you don't understand that then you're not a good match for this community.

Look, we get it that you have strong political opinions. That's great. Have fun expressing them as well or as poorly as you like. But for many, many reasons-- for example, that this is a technology site, or that this is a site that tries to cultivate a community of thoughtful commentary-- it isn't a good idea to post this kind of thing here.

I agree with Jason Brown, who, the article states, noted that the piano chord in the background is critical to capturing the overall sound. Listening to this, I hear everything but the touch of dissonance added by the piano, which completely changes the feel of the chord.

Listen to this and the original[1], you can clearly hear a missing piano part, which gives the chord such a crunchy bite. The damper pedal is clearly depressed as well, and it sounds like there is some sympathetic resonance from the guitars/bass that's helping to muddy up the piano sound.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSm0M-BbVdY

I barely notice it, especially since, reading books, I rarely visit the home screen.

Not related to the content of the post (which, it seems, is mostly a rehash of already-available data), but I must say, the comments over at zdnet must really be going downhill-- there are some truly horrific examples at the end of the article.

I'm especially confused as I've lived my whole life in Colorado Springs, and already visited a Tesla museum here several times. After looking up their website (http://teslamuseum.us/), it seems like they are in dire financial straights, and not really functioning anymore, but it might be worth considering the Springs as a site, since Tesla did so much work here.

Also, (shameless plug alert), I'm currently working on a TV show based on Tesla (http://theteslaarchive.com), so if you're into Tesla, it might be worth looking into chipping in a few bucks to that project too.

I learn by watching and following along with examples, so the following YouTube videos are the ones that I've found the most useful:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71YTkxUNwmg <--Covers the basics and helpful commands. I had never used vim before watching this video, and now I'm reasonably competent at basic text editing.

I needed to do find and replace on a short story I'm working on (changed a character's name), and I found this one helpful: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1_CfIb-3X4

I wanted to understand/use the .vimrc file, so I googled until I hit this one, which I found quite informative: [UPDATE: put in the wrong link, serves me right for picking the last history item with .vimrc in it instead of watching it. The actual video I found helpful was this one of a guy showing his .vimrc file and what various things in it do: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZuy4gBghho]

Lastly, once you're comfortable using it, try going into command mode and typing Shift-a, and notice that it moves your cursor to the end of the line and puts you in insert mode. I saw this tip on HN awhile back, and I hadn't seen it in any basic tutorials, but it is the single most useful command I've come across.

In an attempt (presumably, I can't really know) to distract from a truly historic scientific achievement. Don't forget that part.

Really, I think this might take the cake as the worst comment I've ever read on Hacker News.

The "slick interface" is, I think, the entire genius of the iPhone (especially when compared to its competition). Sure the functions of the iPhone were all (mostly) present in competing devices when it launched, but it was hard(er) to leverage them on Windows Mobile or Blackberry because the interface wasn't nearly as polished and easy to use. (If you doubt that statement, try using a web browser on a 2007-era Blackberry. Even today, with much more of the internet being "mobile aware", the experience is so awful it is almost disingenuous to say that those devices can browse the internet at all).

Simply put, it was very much the "slick interface" that "brought smartphones to the public's attention", and ultimately, illustrated how powerful having a pocket computer really is.

2. Do you use 2-factor authentication? I do, and so I'm used to seeing this on applications that don't fully support the 2-factor authentication, which is, I assume why it was asking.

Well, first of all, I'm not berating him, which is why I made an effort to note that I largely agree with his point here-- in fact, it is because I agree with him that I thought it was worth pointing out that "raising awareness" through a blog post is only half the battle-- people are far more inclined to respond to it if the author is willing to take the effort and do something about the problem.

Maybe Dave's planning on filing an objection, I don't know. If he is, great. But it is easy to come off as someone whining on the internet even if you have a respectable position if the only thing you're doing is complaining.

Your assertion is that the press is missing the story. Which seems accurate. But wouldn't it be better to file an objection rather than just writing a blog post about it? Isn't that more useful and practical?

I live in an older home (1955), but when we bought it in 2010 we had the original owner do electric work that had failed inspection-- as a result (and due to the local laws here), this is the only kind of socket we have.

In a way it did, since the OP mentions that Dell turns over its inventory every 10 days.

A friend of my summed this up in a twitter posting the other day: "Those who can, teach. Those who can't pass laws about teaching."

This is a good idea, but it can also lead to burnout. Our kids take a lot of assessments (too many, IMHO), and they start to get cynical really fast. Our school does a comprehensive assessment at the beginning and end of the year to track overall progress (in addition to smaller-scale techniques like the ones you mentioned), which would be fine except that there are so many government-mandated tests* that also have to be given that students start to burn out.

Most professional educators have a pretty good grasp on the pedagogical practices that stress small, repetitive checks for understanding, which-- you're right-- works far better than massive, mind-numbing tests that demand significant student effort.

*Of course, we get the results from these so late that it doesn't give us the ability to make on-the-fly judgements.

Its just so wonderful to see what could otherwise be a frustrating, debilitating experience become something incredibly empowering.

I teach 6-8th grade music at a local charter school, and while my performance isn't tested through standardized exams, I can attest to my colleagues' enormous frustration with this very issue.

For example: during our standardized testing this year, the school put in huge amounts of effort to align student incentives, most of which were silly and clearly ineffective. (My personal favorite? Disallowing students to bring their own books to read after they finished the test to "encourage" them to check their work instead of hurrying through so they could read the next chapter of The Hunger Games. Talk about easy ways to incite student frustration and contempt!)

I can attest to students finishing a test in less than 10 minutes despite being given more than an hour, or refusing to do any of the test at all. I've heard horror stories of students using the multiple-choice answer documents to make pictures by filling in the bubbles, or simply choosing to color in bubbles so lightly that they can't possibly be read. I know of examples in prior years wherein students chose to write essays about how much they hate testing on the essay portion instead of addressing the infantile tripe they were assigned.

Now, these are obviously exceptions to the rule (I'm a bit biased, but I think our students are almost uniformly excellent), but it is amazing how much damage one student can do by choosing not to care. (Or, in some cases, using their answers to vent their frustration).

And why should they? As far as I know, rewarding students for higher performance is disallowed, leaving teachers with very few tools with which to convince students that these tests matter. Sure, you can go on and on about how their scores will be "important" in their future (which, to my knowledge, isn't always true), but that only goes so far. Sometime during the 2 weeks of intensive testing, the kids just don't care anymore.

I'm all for assessing the performance of teachers, and I'm not sure how to fix the problem (or even if it can be fixed), but one thing seems clear to me: they're doing it wrong.

[Updated to fix punctuation errors]

Isn't Grocklaw's track record on this case already strong as well? I can't say that I've paid a great deal of attention to it, but as a casual observer, it seems to me that Grocklaw has all along predicted that most of Oracle's arguments aren't very strong, and as they seem to be dwindling, that strikes me as an even stronger argument in their favor.

After all, if they have not only a generally strong track record in predicting these kinds of cases but also a very good record related to this particular case, I'm inclined to put a lot of stock in what they have to say.

I googled native 48fps footage and found a couple of tests uploaded to viemo from the Scarlet-X, and didn't notice much, however, I'm wondering if any experts on HN could weigh in on whether flash video does any frame dropping or other degradation that would make such examples different than the actual experience. Are there any examples of sites that have native 48fps footage at a high resolution?

Like many other commenters here, I was wary of the use of a higher framerate based on my experience with 240hz TV's, which look so distractingly hyper-real I can't watch them for any sustained length of time, but I'm not sure of how much that has to do with frame-doubling or other "tricks" that might be applied.

Love the minimalist phasing at the end.

Given how many of these middle school Students are probably devouring the ultra-violent "Hunger Games" trilogy in anticipation for the film, I find this complaint/decision odd.

I understand the line of argument that essentially goes "Daisey still highlights a situation that needs to be addressed", but that is fundamentally different from suggesting that factual correctness somehow doesn't matter. Indeed, Daisey is perhaps one of the most obvious examples of why factual correctness does matter, because all of his falsehoods seem to stem from an egotistical desire to paint him as the savior of China's oppressed worker. So while Daisey's overall point is true, it remains that a fundamental part of it- specifically the role of Mike Daisey- is completely false, and, insofar as it really amounts to Daisey attempting to stroke his own ego, it really is tremendously disgusting.