I think this is not correct. The 20K were the content creators and the payments were from the their subscribers which should be a lot more. Even more impressive!
While the report mentions Threema, there are quite a lot more messaging apps. I found a nice list comparing them here: https://www.securemessagingapps.com/
I have been using Fedora on the desktop for the last 7 years. There are lots of pros like large selection of mostly up-to-date packages, good community, security, sane defaults etc. The cons for me are the below par wiki (so I use the Arch wiki) and the version upgrades. The truth is the last few version upgrades were much easier that the previous ones.
Why would you use it over Ubuntu? Ubuntu has an important advantage over all other distros. When you try to install some not-so-common program that is not in the official repositories, usually the linux instructions assume that you are using Ubuntu. For an experienced user it's not really that important but for a novice it certainly is. Now, Ubuntu had some negative publicity with regards to the [amazon unity search](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_%28user_interface%29#Pri...) and Shuttleworth's response ["we have root"](https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/44512/what-does...). On the other hand Fedora, although sponsored by Red Hat, respects the community, so fortunately there were no incidents like that. Ubuntu also had Unity which users either loved or hated, while other distros focused on either Gnome or KDE.
On servers the options are more or less grouped. So, you should first chose between the group of Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora/Centos/RHEL, etc. Once you chose the group then you can chose the distro itself. The fact that I used Fedora on the desktop for so long made the choice of Fedora on the server much easier.
Finally, will Fedora increase your productivity? No, not really. Your setup will increase your productivity. Choices like using KDE or Gnome, or the setup of (keyboard) shortcuts to meet your needs matter. I hope this helps, have fun!
Both Firefox[1] and Chrome[2] removed it from their stores. I don't know if we should expect an official announcement, but it seems that neither Mozilla nor Google commented on the issue. Many other sources reported it though[3][4][5].
If you are using WOT in either Firefox or Chromium/Chrome you can just remove it without replacing it with anything. Both browsers cover that for you with Google's Safe Browsing[6][7].
I think the big mistake was offering something for free and then asking money for it. The first backlash was with the (unverified) certificates and the latest with the tests and assignments.
It might have been a different story if they announced from the beginning that they are only offering their services for free for a certain period of time. They focused on gaining users and they succeeded on that, but now that they are focused on making money they seem to lose users.
I think it's just basic human psychology that once you have access to something, you start feeling entitled to it. However, in reality, Coursera (or any other company) is under no obligation to keep providing free stuff.
It's natural that you are losing users once you start asking for money, it's just impossible to have it otherwise. Let's not forget that Coursera is a business so they obviously need to generate some revenue, sooner or later. What they did seems like a sensible business decision to me. They focused and succeeded with the marketing and branding initially (Coursera became almost synonymous with online courses) and they are collecting the revenue from it now.
> I think it's just basic human psychology that once you have access to something, you start feeling entitled to it.
I don't think that's true. People don't seem to feel that entitled in the "analog" world. But the digital technology changes the equation, and frankly, I think our "lizard brain" is right on this one.
The marginal cost of producing another copy of digitally encoded product is essentially zero, and it requires zero specialist knowledge. Copying binary data is what computers are made for, it's their basic function. Plus, the Internet lets you scale a digital business to the whole world for (almost) free. Honestly, what feels entitled is expecting that one should be able to scale their business by orders of magnitude while retaining the price.
(And in general, charging for copying data feels a lot like charging for air, but that's another topic.)
But regardless, Coursera is really playing fast and loose with their credibility. It used to be that it was the place you could go to get a decent education on some topic for free, at any time and in your own pace. What it (and other sites like it) turned into is a money-making machine. You get forced to follow a particular schedule ("yadda yadda people can't learn if they're not forced"), the course materials are often available only during the particular time window and disappear as soon as the course ends, and now they're also employing a lot of dark patterns to make sure you can't even find the free courses. All that while talking how their mission is to bring accessible education to the world. Bullshit. They're just making money because media wrote a lot about them and made them look hot.
You know how real revolution in education looks like? It looks like this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11561770 - the original article + the comment thread + the links in that comment thread.
>>> The marginal cost of producing another copy of digitally encoded product is essentially zero, and it requires zero specialist knowledge. Copying binary data is what computers are made for, it's their basic function. Plus, the Internet lets you scale a digital business to the whole world for (almost) free. Honestly, what feels entitled is expecting that one should be able to scale their business by orders of magnitude while retaining the price.
Well, it can be said about most of the SaaS companies but that's not how business works. If it doesn't cost you anything to produce, then you should give it away for free might look great at first sight but it's not that great in reality. So if the business is just giving away the product for free, why would someone pay for that? You might say extra features, etc. But they are free to distribute as well!
If we apply this to the physical products, you can equally say that the companies shouldn't charge more than it costs to produce something. But if all companies worked this way, that would take us back to the stone age pretty quickly.
Money motivates people, motivate people produce goods.
> If we apply this to the physical products, you can equally say that the companies shouldn't charge more than it costs to produce something. But if all companies worked this way, that would take us back to the stone age pretty quickly.
But that's what happens in the physical world in face of competition (and that's the "great promise of capitalism", btw.) - prices fall down to minimal sustainable level unless someone is able to erect some artificial structure that will inflate them (like enough layers of middlemen).
But anyway, I don't mind Coursera or others trying out any business model they want. But them talking about a "mission to ensure access to education to everyone", etc.? This is getting dishonest. I'm criticizing them for saying they're doing this for humanity, while in fact getting further and further away from this goal every day.
I do agree with you that we sometimes feel entitled to something and we shouldn't. However, I remember when Udacity started and it was all ah, yes, oh, uh, free courses, free education, access for everyone.
Charge for it but don't try and fool me with "I am nice and doing good" talk.
Yeah and especially Coursera is still waving the banner of "free education for everyone" (and asking to pay to support it...) while employing more and more dark patterns to prevent you from getting viewing the for free.
It looks like they're slowly succumbing too :(. It took me over a minute now to figure out how to get to the videos without having to register first - their new site design makes it much harder than it was when Khan Academy was "just a site". I hope they won't go further in that direction.
Agree. They are running a business so can charge if/what they want. I just think they were a little clumsy how they made the transition. It was particularly annoying for people mid-way through a specialization to find out that the rest of the courses in the specialization would be crippled.
Coursera built its PR engine on the premise of bringing high quality top-university education to the world for free. They gave keynotes to large audiences, did press tours, and even used a .org domain. Very feel-good, and they capitalized on the resulting publicity and good will to raise a lot of money.
No one would have whined much about add-ons for a cost. But to restrict what was originally part of the core free experience - the experience they built their reputation on - is why any backlash now is entirely of their own making.
Someone should just edit the title. It's not "emac's" it's "emacs"! The name was originally derived from "Editor MACroS". Here is the wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs
My Coursera profile lists 67 courses, I have completed ~15 of them and with a passing grade ~8 of them. My most favorite one, which for me was the hardest as well, was The Hardware/Software Interface by Gaetano Borriello and Luis Ceze[1]. I also liked Computer Networks[2] even though it's an introductory course, Functional Programming Principles in Scala[3] which is surprisingly easy unlike the follow up course[4], High Performance Scientific Computing[5], Software Security[6] and Cryptography[7] although I prefer Boneh's class. For non-IT related courses I liked Think Again: How to Reason and Argue[8], Crafting an Effective Writer: Tools of the Trade (Fundamental English Writing)[9], Child Nutrition and Cooking[10] and Work Smarter, Not Harder: Time Management for Personal & Professional Productivity[11].
I often take time to think why I have so many started but not finished courses. Most of them are abandoned on the first week and my assumption is that when I enroll my expectations for the course content and the workload needed are wrong.
Occasionally, I abandon courses because they demand too much time to get something working on linux or because of luck of time. The thing that I noticed about me is that when I get a little behind the schedule then it's almost certainly that I will abandon the course. Additionally, when I try to commit on two courses at the same time then it's certain that I will abandon at least one (usually both).
I finished Cryptography I in March 2012 and wanted to take Cryptography II ever since. Every time the announced time is close it gets pushed back by 4 months.
