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The author needs a good editor. There's something consistently "off" in both the style and the personality of this article. It made it very hard for me to asses

by scandox 10y ago

The author needs a good editor. There's something consistently "off" in both the style and the personality of this article. It made it very hard for me to assess whether what they are actually saying is worthwhile. Also the calculation mentioned in the title (and which he strangely calls 'archaic') is totally spurious.

ashark 10y ago
This is a marketing piece badly masquerading as an informative article, after the pattern of awful "long copy" email/website marketing pieces. That's why it's "off".
dsjoerg 10y ago
Agreed. It feels like a dialect issue. However the quality of the underlying ideas is good enough that I pushed through. Good analogy.
kyleblarson 10y ago
Agree. The first sentence was so awkward that I stopped reading.
throwaway729 10y ago
Definitely. Even the subtitle is more difficult to follow than necessary because of pointless redundancy. The first few sentences contain many canonical examples of bad writing patterns that get in the way of communication (had had). Nothing grammatically incorrect. Just very simple ideas written in a way that's very difficult to follow. For anyone else who had trouble parsing the article, here's a TL;DR: 1. Why buy fancy top-of-the-line hardware when something cheap and utilitarian will do just fine? 2. The author's figure is made up. He takes an estimate of total spending and then assumes 70% of it was wasted. Based on unsubstantiated personal anecdote. But there's a page-long rant about cookware written in cringe-worthy style. My take: I'm sympathetic with (1). But I also know some people in K-12 IT. They're professionals with some accounting education who know how to perform a reasonable cost-benefit analysis. Sometimes money gets wasted on expensive toys. But sometimes it's less expensive to stick with Macs or Windows machines than retrain hundreds of teachers on Chrome OS or whatever. Sometimes there's bundling and the 30% or 70% that never gets used represented a 0% additional cost to the school. And sometimes people are just stupid.

by scandox 10y ago

ashark 10y ago

This is a marketing piece badly masquerading as an informative article, after the pattern of awful "long copy" email/website marketing pieces. That's why it's "off".

dsjoerg 10y ago

Agreed. It feels like a dialect issue. However the quality of the underlying ideas is good enough that I pushed through. Good analogy.

kyleblarson 10y ago

Agree. The first sentence was so awkward that I stopped reading.

throwaway729 10y ago

Definitely. Even the subtitle is more difficult to follow than necessary because of pointless redundancy. The first few sentences contain many canonical examples of bad writing patterns that get in the way of communication (had had). Nothing grammatically incorrect. Just very simple ideas written in a way that's very difficult to follow. For anyone else who had trouble parsing the article, here's a TL;DR: 1. Why buy fancy top-of-the-line hardware when something cheap and utilitarian will do just fine? 2. The author's figure is made up. He takes an estimate of total spending and then assumes 70% of it was wasted. Based on unsubstantiated personal anecdote. But there's a page-long rant about cookware written in cringe-worthy style. My take: I'm sympathetic with (1). But I also know some people in K-12 IT. They're professionals with some accounting education who know how to perform a reasonable cost-benefit analysis. Sometimes money gets wasted on expensive toys. But sometimes it's less expensive to stick with Macs or Windows machines than retrain hundreds of teachers on Chrome OS or whatever. Sometimes there's bundling and the 30% or 70% that never gets used represented a 0% additional cost to the school. And sometimes people are just stupid.