Rambling of a Coder

Brainfarts of an Idle Mind

 
 

The EBook Reader Debate.

Friday 27 February 2009 at 8:17 pm

feat-libr-300px._V251249390_ Been reading up on this, and of course a quick discussion with morduun too. For those who have missed it, the publishing business is all up in arms about the fact the Kindle2 does Text To Speech. And quite simply i think that this whole debate could have been 100% absolutely avoided if the advertising people behind the Kindle2 had a clue. If they'd just advertised it as a accessibility feature for the partially blind/blind people then no one wouldn't even looked twice at it.  But nope instead they advertised it as a text to speech system on a ebooker reader. What can i say beyond "Idiots"

 

Anyway, in Course land another Computing and a Maths assessment turned in. Don't have the results back for the computing one yet. But on the maths i lost a few points because of not using "Mathematical English"

They were looking for something like:

The is a triangle, so has the area = 1/2 of base x height

                                              = 1/2 x 10m x 12m

                                              = 60m squared

and i wrote something like

10 x 12 = 120

120 / 2 = 60

So the area of the triangle is 60m squared

Stupidity loosing marks for that, but meh if I'd had my coursework BEFORE I'd done the assessment I'd have know how they'd wanted it.

Either way, i only actually lost 3 marks out of the entire assessment for it, just grating that absolutely none of them where for my actual maths solutions.

 

The above is purely an example btw, i way to lazy to type out a real one!

 
 

two comments

Shadee

lol kindle 2. I wish I was surprised but after hearing about the advertising business from Mord I can't say that I am XD And doh losing points for that. that is kinda lame. Even if you didn’t put the exact terminology they wanted in, the method used is still very obvious and that’s all that should matter.

Shadee - 02-03-’09 11:54
morduun

Yeah, the Kindle’s not at fault really, but it’s definitely a discussion worth having — not because current technology has a chance of comparing with the quality of an audiobook, but because future technology most certainly will, and it’s best to hash these things out ahead of time. I think this is probably the ‘make lots of noise and scream loudly’ part of the dialogue, where people who wouldn’t otherwise be arsed to talk about it are forced out of the woodwork. It’ll settle down eventually, most likely a licensing fee of some sort which gets passed on to the lucky reader.

As for your lost marks, I’d make sure you charge them the cost of the books they didn’t send you in exchange, that way it’s even.

morduun (Email ) (URL) - 04-03-’09 19:30


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