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 Wednesday, May 22, 2002
Charles Haddad rakes Apple over the coals for the way it has treated developers in the past -- especially when it shuts them out of the market by stealing their ideas and rolling them into its standard package. [via Scripting News] However, Haddad also notes that Apple has, at the same time, improved the lives of all its developers by increasing the appeal of its systems -- more people buy Macs because of the quality software they ship with. Haddad also has an excellent suggestion along these lines:
 Apple would do well to use its Macs as a platform to showcase the best of third-party software. It's already doing so to some extent: The latest Macs are shipping with OmniGroup's excellent shareware outliner and graphing programs. But here again, PCs have done better, typically shipping with far more programs than the Mac. 
Yeah. Why not ship Radio with every Mac? :-)
Also: LaunchBar and Mozilla (dump IE, please) and Fetch and maybe SBook and MacJournal. Shareware could still ship as demo versions that require users to pay -- this way Apple wouldn't have to raise the price of its systems but would probably increase the number of people who use shareware. It would also save us lots of downloading time. 4:38:29 PM 
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Education Week reports that
Similar to the United States' creation of public schools, such as charter schools or alternative schools, that operate outside the regular public school system, the Mexican government has established an informal set of schools intended to improve education for two groups of Mexicans[~]children in rural communities and youths who can't afford the living expenses and fees required to attend even a public high school or university.
Classes are taught by Mexican youths who have completed at least 9th grade themselves. Teachers live with community leaders in the small villages in which they teach. In exchange for two years of teaching they get a stipend to attend a university for six years.
Sounds great in that kids who might not otherwise get an education can now do so, not to mention the benefits for the teachers to go on to even higher education. On the other hand, it seems like this might create (or perpetuate) a sort of under-educated (but not completely ignorant, in the sense of having zero education) under-class with only the minimal skills required to become productive cogs in a capitalist machine. In other words, these schools seem better than nothing, but they also seem unlikely to seriously change the massive poverty and unequal distribution of resources from which they spring. 4:27:14 PM
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Via DayPop: The hilarious, scary, and very smart cartoon strip, Get Your War On is going to be made into a book with some proceeds going to land mine relief efforts in Afghanistan. This strip pushes buttons on so many levels, I don't even know where to begin.
9:40:20 AM
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Education Week reports that
Similar to the United States' creation of public schools, such as charter schools or alternative schools, that operate outside the regular public school system, the Mexican government has established an informal set of schools intended to improve education for two groups of Mexicans[~]children in rural communities and youths who can't afford the living expenses and fees required to attend even a public high school or university.
Classes are taught by Mexican youths who have completed at least 9th grade themselves. Teachers live with community leaders in the small villages in which they teach. In exchange for two years of teaching they get a stipend to attend a university for six years.
Sounds great in that kids who might not otherwise get an education can now do so, not to mention the benefits for the teachers to go on to even higher education. On the other hand, it seems like this might create (or perpetuate) a sort of under-educated (but not completely ignorant, in the sense of having zero education) under-class with only the minimal skills required to become productive cogs in a capitalist machine. In other words, these schools seem better than nothing, but they also seem unlikely to seriously change the massive poverty and unequal distribution of resources from which they spring. 9:38:48 AM
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Will Leshner says his blogging app, Radio Poster, is getting better. I can't wait to see the improvements he's making. 8:24:26 AM
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Hard to believe, but Eric Alterman is now blogging for MSNBC.com. Interesting comments on the role of editors for writers. I agree -- we all could benefit from an editor, but is a blog with an editor actually a blog? Aren't bloggers their own editors? Isn't that part of the point?
Whatever. Alterman says his page should be at altercation.msnbc.com, but so far, that URL is not really live. 8:17:38 AM
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Dive into Mark recently discussed an article at Kuro5hin about misleading emoticons. Mark included the "Waka Waka" poem, which I had never seen but which I think would be great for teaching poetry to poetry-shy contemporary students (for many of whom poetry is like Latin -- a "dead" language). From Dive into Mark:
First, the poem itself (there are many versions, this is just one):
<> ! * ' ' #
^ " ` $ $ -
! * = @ $ _
% * <> ~ # 4
& [ ] . . /
| { , , system halted
In English, this reads:
waka waka bang splat tick tick hash
caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash
bang splat equal at dollar under-score
percent splat waka waka tilda number four
ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash
vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma crash
In a related vein, more and more people are posting their creative writing (short stories and novels, as well as poetry) online. This is nothing new -- vanity pages devoted to poetry were among the first (and often worst). But there's some great stuff out there. The best (and most experimental) I know of is Douglas Rushkoff's Exit Strategy. Today markpasc.blog links to a new novel (in progress) for our enjoyment (this one posted via Radio: American Invisible.
If you read this and know of other online novels/short stories -- especially those posted or developed with blogging software, please let me know. 8:09:10 AM
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