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ExJournalist

201 karma · joined July 21, 2009

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ExJournalist··on Ask HN: What are most innovative college programs in online/digital instruction?
You might want to look at www.epsilen.com - owned by NY Times, I believe. Not free or OSS, but more affordable and comes with access to NY Times content.
ExJournalist··on 3G iPads sold out in 49 of 50 states on launch weekend?
Fortune article has a little more on his methodology and said:

"Munster's team called 50 Apple Stores on Sunday and found that 49 of them had sold out of iPad 3Gs and most had run out of Wi-Fi-only models as well. But it's not clear whether that's because demand was high or supplies were low. Munster believes it was probably a bit of both."

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/05/03/ipad-3g-sold-out-in-4...

ExJournalist··on Colorado Senate Majority Leader Beards Amazon
I have trouble taking that state senator too seriously.

He's clearly outraged about "being bullied" by Amazon...

but it's less clear that he has done an cool-headed analysis of the impact of the legislation on all parties (Amazon, affliates, customers, state treasury).

ExJournalist··on Twitter Banned from White House
My wife's employer has that sort of high-handed approach to control of employee behavior. I'm rather astonished that a progressive, 2.0, "open government" administration chooses that sort of avenue to security/leak-control/discipline (or whatever their actual motivation).
ExJournalist··on Eleven Years of Ambition and Failure At AOL
The history of AOL reads like that of the U.S. auto industry:

• Pick the easy money as fast as you can • Pick old-school corporate leadership and hope it'll work in a new, highly competitive world. • Don't worry about looking at the latest innovative directions - or seeking a CEO who can create new ones for your corporation.

There must be some technological/business assets left in AOL. What about finding some leadership that wants to be ahead of the next wave of digital communication?

ExJournalist··on PHP 5.3.0/Lighttpd On Debian (Lenny) (+Imap, MySQL, Sqlite3 And ImageMagick)
I'm a rather low-tech guy, but does anyone have any experience installing such a Linux setup on a external HD.

I've got no PC (or Intel-based) machine around, but I'd like to be able to set up a local serve for my beginner development projects - using a long-in-tooth (667MHz) PPC Powerbook. And I've got an external (firewire) HD (250GB).

This seem workable to anybody? (I'm between jobs and trying to ramp-up my trial projects.)

ExJournalist··on Something's pretty broken with Firebug...
Yes, it's a real pain to see that (for now, for a lot of uses) Firebug's broken.

But it sure speaks well of FF that they have the issues boldly presented on their site.

ExJournalist··on My students forged the notes. I turned them into a lesson plan.
"I was having an epiphany. Isn’t it remarkable, I thought, how the students whined and said it was hard putting 200 words together on any subject? But when they forged excuse notes, they were brilliant..."

To me this is a great example of one of the fundamental problems with so much education: it is full of unchallenging, unrelated-to-life, contrived tasks. When any process (creative writing, math, coding) is harnessed to a fascinating, meaningful-to-students goal... well, of course they're motivated. And creative.

That has always been true of me - when in grammar school, and decades into employment.

ExJournalist··on Document Management - Can "Knowledge Tree Live" move it to the cloud?
Well, document management is free to move to the cloud.

But to the users it sure isn't (for many of commercial solutions). Consider (from the OP):

"According to the company's price list on-premise version of Knowledge Tree has an annual fee of $2,400 for a 20-user license at the basic level. The most basic SaaS version is $2,950 for 10 users, and is limited to 50 GB of storage"

What about small-time users? How about a small-sized offering?

Better yet: some open source solutions?

ExJournalist··on Ask HN: Readability loves readers, but at what cost to authors?
As a "recovering journalist" who constantly recommends Readability to friends, the lack of authorship attribution concerns me greatly.

I don't write Javascript, so I can't provide myself with such a service, but as annoying (heavy bandwidth/printwidth) as many posts are, I think the average web-browsing citizen is soon going to catch on to the joy of reading clean copy.

Here's my vote for Readability (or some other enterprising JS coder) to offer this service along with attribution of authorship and original URL. —just my 2¢

ExJournalist··on Ask HN: What Music Do You Listen To While Coding?
Maybe it's just me, but I really need as close to complete silence as possible. The hum of HD drive is comforable enough for me. Anything more distracts. YMMV.