The RPi folks claim good performance for media decoding & 3D games, but I haven't heard any big claims about CPU-heavy stuff. Most of the RPi chip is the VideoCore processor, with only a tiny sliver of an ARM hanging off the side.
Technology is creating the potential for massively effective law enforcement, at a cost of massive loss of personal freedom.
And of course it's not just enabling law enforcement, but selective enforcement, identity theft, figuring out when a person won't have an alibi to frame them, tracking dissidents/competitors/rivals, and all sorts of other evils.
You're correct in that the limitations set to grant privacy and freedom must be a strict social contract with accountability, paper trails, and monitored checks/balances in place, because the technical capability to breach them is simply too easy.
One of the STUPIDEST and most annoying things about the newer versions on Windows is that chat windows have an arbitrary fixed max width to the text, with forced linewrapping! You can fullscreen it to your widescreeny heart's content, and be greeted with nothing but giant blank white areas on either side, with just a slit of text down the middle furiously wrapping itself.
This SUCKS for pasting in source code or any other material with intentional linebreaks, and I haven't found anything to be able to allow the text to flow freely through arbitrary window widths, like old versions did. (If there is such an option, please let met know!)
I'm quite content to keep my Skype version outdated, because we use it a lot for communicating with remote developers and this comes up a ton.
This does not "give one a deeper more fundamental sense for how music works", but gives insight into what tends to be popular in the USA. Now, you could say that that has a major effect on the popular culture of the rest of the world because of the way it's exported, but still it's not necessarily the fundamentals of music in general.
Isn't Skype supposed to be encrypted between the end users? Of course, that claim has always been in a "Trust us, we're trustable!" framing, but if this listens to your text & voice comms in order to select ads, that finally does confirm that there is absolutely no privacy on Skype.
I'm not sure this means what you think it means. HDR is a *scanning* feature, not a display feature, the benefit being that you can extract very minute intensity transitions and expand them out clearly.
You'd only need HDR in a physical display if you can regularly see the banding between consecutive shades of those 256 levels on the display (and if you can, your display is most likely not calibrated). Also, if monitors got backlights twice as bright, and blacks significantly darker, that would exaggerate the range and require more levels of control. Neither of these cases are quite likely, nor are they IMO as important as getting past the commonplace 1080p "barrier".
That's why we need dirty-rectangle updates, instead of this retarded continually full-refresh holdover from CRTs. For games and movies, the monitor should do the full-screen scaling, thus not needing some uber-bandwidth sci-fi connector.
That is only true for watching full-screen images, like movies or games. Put desktop applications on there, and the extra elbow room you get from more pixels in the same area running in high density is a great reward.
That might have been high dpi, but the resolution was nothing special. In 2001 IBM blew that out of the water @ 204dpi covering a full 22", and nothing sine has come close. It's the only piece of computer hardware where "I wish they made 'em like they used to" comes to mind.
I recall when Firefly was airing. Every single person I knew who was a fan of it watched torrented versions. Surprise, surprise, popular show got crap ratings and got pulled.
The target market for that kind of audience simply does not watch TV anymore, but is interested in the content, and will go through *convenient* legal channels, if offered.
I've taken 4 years of university courses (electrical engineering & computer engineering), and have taken a few of these coursera & udacity classes. I think I might have asked a professor a question a few times in my university time during class, but it's often (for everybody) "Oh, I'll get to that", just confirmation of what was said because we couldn't quite hear or see something, or "Slow down, I didn't catch that!". I think the only time I ever had any interaction with a prof outside of class was asking about industry and things beyond the coursework a few times.
For the lecture hall style classes with 100-200 (or more) students, do you expect everybody to be able to ask questions and have time taken out of the class to answer them? Do you expect the majority of them to talk to the prof after hours? Multiply that by the number of classes the prof teaches. The numbers simply don't make sense: The majority of students spend very little time personally interacting with the professors, or else the profs would not be able to get anything else done.
Now, the online offerings always have discussion forums, and in my experience the responses to the video/reading material always percolate up very quickly and are addressed by the staff fast, with updated video or errata, and everybody gets the further explanation or clarification needed. Interaction with industry professionals happens there, too, because it's not just fresh learners of the same age taking the material.
When you don't "get" something in a live environment, you no longer have the lecture explanation to turn to. You've got to either bug the prof to explain things over and over for you, have some student or TA do the same, or review the non-lecture materials (which might not line up with the lectures) until it "clicks". In the online courses, being able to watch parts of the lecture again is a tremendous help, and often has the same effect of having somebody sit down and re-explain the concepts to you until you get it, with infinite patience.;-) Being able to pause and study equations being presented right in the middle of the teaching is a ton more helpful than having the prof blast through material at his own pace, while you're busy note-taking instead of mentally registering the content (I pause and take extensive notes during the online classes, without missing anything). And whenever I did have a question, I'd pop over to the forum and usually find threads already discussing that exact issue, the persistence of which is a HUGE asset.
Not having hard limits on video length is great; the prof never has to cut things short or rush through content, and never has to contract the syllabus because things ate into lecture time (like excessive questions).
The online classes all have exercises embedded in the lectures in some way. This is the "go up to the chalkboard and do X" moment, but given to everybody at once. Yes, there's some honor code involved, but given that they're free and uncredited right now, there's little point to cheating. And again, if I can't get the exercise I've got the lecture to review and the forums discussing exercises as well (moderated to avoid giving away answers and with staff helping along).
Yes, it is different. But it is quite better in some ways, and I'm not sure the downsides amount to much. And yes, there are definitely some hands-on courses that you're not going to be able to take without equipment & materials to physically work with.
There's also the fact that many people learn from lectures and assignments, in step with progressing through the given reading materials, without ever engaging with their instructors or studying with other students. When there are times that they struggle to get something, reviewing up to that point is where they get their "ah hah!" breakthrough.
Those who learn in such a manner are annoyed by the others who try to push a false "community" baggage on top of their learning, which does not help them at all, and fully welcome online courses.
Meanwhile, while those who learn in the opposite way are offended by the notion of online studies that miss out on the interaction they require in order to learn effectively.
Universities don't teach social skills. You do not need them to get your degree, and with angry helicopter parents making a stink even in the higher education levels now, schools aren't willing to step in on that personal field.
You might argue that those without social skills would more often self-select to train at home given the opportunity and thus the concentration of socially-unskilled people might be measurable there, but going off to university won't fix that. It's an indicator of a cultural failing, not an educational failing.
No, we should move that to high school. If that's the level that everybody is expected to have, why bother padding it out past 13 years of education?
In some countries, the typical US high school age is when people are undergoing actual formal career training paths as part of primary education, depending on the field.
A) College is about knowledge. This used to be the case when a good chunk of information could only be found in academic libraries, but today a simple Google search can find you the information for all but the most specialized of areas.
I think this is a bit mischaracterized. I would substitute "knowledge" for "training". I'm an autodidact, but even so it makes learning a lot faster and easier when there is training, coaching, and a useful path of progression that the learner is taken through. Much of the online materials are reference materials or in situ discussion, not geared to be penetrable for those who do not know the field. Especially in more hands-on fields such as electronics, materials processing, chemistry, etc, being able to actually execute and measure what you're learning gives a stronger and more lasting impression. Of course, there are other fields where simply immersing yourself in online reading materials is quite suitable to gain a good, practical understanding (I'd place mathematics and programming languages here).
This might be covered in what you list as "experience", but typically that word is used to describe social development experiences, learning the politics of your field, and starting up a network of contacts in academia.
Having said all that, I agree that the whole university view of things is failing to meet expectations overall, it's just that for a number of fields "knowledge" is not just reference information.
The question is what do you choose to lock yourself into promising? Underpromise and overdeliver, so have the contract specify charges for doing work, but waive it if it's one of those "Yeah, this is really my dumb fault" moments.
simple != better security against unwanted access.
Yeah, and the information printed right on the sticker provides both at once. I'm pretty baffled as to how a self-contained physical item in your wallet is somehow supposed to be less secure than collecting lots of data points on a net-connected server...
Slashdot Mirror
The RPi folks claim good performance for media decoding & 3D games, but I haven't heard any big claims about CPU-heavy stuff. Most of the RPi chip is the VideoCore processor, with only a tiny sliver of an ARM hanging off the side.
And now with Unity, we can return to those glorious Win3.1 icon mashups!
Technology is creating the potential for massively effective law enforcement, at a cost of massive loss of personal freedom.
And of course it's not just enabling law enforcement, but selective enforcement, identity theft, figuring out when a person won't have an alibi to frame them, tracking dissidents/competitors/rivals, and all sorts of other evils.
You're correct in that the limitations set to grant privacy and freedom must be a strict social contract with accountability, paper trails, and monitored checks/balances in place, because the technical capability to breach them is simply too easy.
One of the STUPIDEST and most annoying things about the newer versions on Windows is that chat windows have an arbitrary fixed max width to the text, with forced linewrapping! You can fullscreen it to your widescreeny heart's content, and be greeted with nothing but giant blank white areas on either side, with just a slit of text down the middle furiously wrapping itself.
This SUCKS for pasting in source code or any other material with intentional linebreaks, and I haven't found anything to be able to allow the text to flow freely through arbitrary window widths, like old versions did. (If there is such an option, please let met know!)
I'm quite content to keep my Skype version outdated, because we use it a lot for communicating with remote developers and this comes up a ton.
Whaaaaat?!?! Really? This is a tremendously unexpected turn of events that nobody outside of your boardroom dealings would have EVER suspected!
This does not "give one a deeper more fundamental sense for how music works", but gives insight into what tends to be popular in the USA. Now, you could say that that has a major effect on the popular culture of the rest of the world because of the way it's exported, but still it's not necessarily the fundamentals of music in general.
Isn't Skype supposed to be encrypted between the end users? Of course, that claim has always been in a "Trust us, we're trustable!" framing, but if this listens to your text & voice comms in order to select ads, that finally does confirm that there is absolutely no privacy on Skype.
I didn't say that it had nothing to do with the other factors, just saying that it was *a* likely factor.
Then you should have quoted the sentence after the one you did. ;-)
I have 2 of them on my desk. :) They're regularly available on eBay, often refurbished.
I'm not sure this means what you think it means. HDR is a *scanning* feature, not a display feature, the benefit being that you can extract very minute intensity transitions and expand them out clearly.
You'd only need HDR in a physical display if you can regularly see the banding between consecutive shades of those 256 levels on the display (and if you can, your display is most likely not calibrated). Also, if monitors got backlights twice as bright, and blacks significantly darker, that would exaggerate the range and require more levels of control. Neither of these cases are quite likely, nor are they IMO as important as getting past the commonplace 1080p "barrier".
That's why we need dirty-rectangle updates, instead of this retarded continually full-refresh holdover from CRTs. For games and movies, the monitor should do the full-screen scaling, thus not needing some uber-bandwidth sci-fi connector.
It's nice to see a "4k" display that's actually 4096 pixels across. That term is unfortunately also used for 4x 1080p, or 3840x2160.
That is only true for watching full-screen images, like movies or games. Put desktop applications on there, and the extra elbow room you get from more pixels in the same area running in high density is a great reward.
Solution: Enjoy lots of high-density information onscreen, without "OS support".
That might have been high dpi, but the resolution was nothing special. In 2001 IBM blew that out of the water @ 204dpi covering a full 22", and nothing sine has come close. It's the only piece of computer hardware where "I wish they made 'em like they used to" comes to mind.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_T221
I recall when Firefly was airing. Every single person I knew who was a fan of it watched torrented versions. Surprise, surprise, popular show got crap ratings and got pulled.
The target market for that kind of audience simply does not watch TV anymore, but is interested in the content, and will go through *convenient* legal channels, if offered.
I've taken 4 years of university courses (electrical engineering & computer engineering), and have taken a few of these coursera & udacity classes. I think I might have asked a professor a question a few times in my university time during class, but it's often (for everybody) "Oh, I'll get to that", just confirmation of what was said because we couldn't quite hear or see something, or "Slow down, I didn't catch that!". I think the only time I ever had any interaction with a prof outside of class was asking about industry and things beyond the coursework a few times.
For the lecture hall style classes with 100-200 (or more) students, do you expect everybody to be able to ask questions and have time taken out of the class to answer them? Do you expect the majority of them to talk to the prof after hours? Multiply that by the number of classes the prof teaches. The numbers simply don't make sense: The majority of students spend very little time personally interacting with the professors, or else the profs would not be able to get anything else done.
Now, the online offerings always have discussion forums, and in my experience the responses to the video/reading material always percolate up very quickly and are addressed by the staff fast, with updated video or errata, and everybody gets the further explanation or clarification needed. Interaction with industry professionals happens there, too, because it's not just fresh learners of the same age taking the material.
When you don't "get" something in a live environment, you no longer have the lecture explanation to turn to. You've got to either bug the prof to explain things over and over for you, have some student or TA do the same, or review the non-lecture materials (which might not line up with the lectures) until it "clicks". In the online courses, being able to watch parts of the lecture again is a tremendous help, and often has the same effect of having somebody sit down and re-explain the concepts to you until you get it, with infinite patience. ;-) Being able to pause and study equations being presented right in the middle of the teaching is a ton more helpful than having the prof blast through material at his own pace, while you're busy note-taking instead of mentally registering the content (I pause and take extensive notes during the online classes, without missing anything). And whenever I did have a question, I'd pop over to the forum and usually find threads already discussing that exact issue, the persistence of which is a HUGE asset.
Not having hard limits on video length is great; the prof never has to cut things short or rush through content, and never has to contract the syllabus because things ate into lecture time (like excessive questions).
The online classes all have exercises embedded in the lectures in some way. This is the "go up to the chalkboard and do X" moment, but given to everybody at once. Yes, there's some honor code involved, but given that they're free and uncredited right now, there's little point to cheating. And again, if I can't get the exercise I've got the lecture to review and the forums discussing exercises as well (moderated to avoid giving away answers and with staff helping along).
Yes, it is different. But it is quite better in some ways, and I'm not sure the downsides amount to much. And yes, there are definitely some hands-on courses that you're not going to be able to take without equipment & materials to physically work with.
There's also the fact that many people learn from lectures and assignments, in step with progressing through the given reading materials, without ever engaging with their instructors or studying with other students. When there are times that they struggle to get something, reviewing up to that point is where they get their "ah hah!" breakthrough.
Those who learn in such a manner are annoyed by the others who try to push a false "community" baggage on top of their learning, which does not help them at all, and fully welcome online courses.
Meanwhile, while those who learn in the opposite way are offended by the notion of online studies that miss out on the interaction they require in order to learn effectively.
Universities don't teach social skills. You do not need them to get your degree, and with angry helicopter parents making a stink even in the higher education levels now, schools aren't willing to step in on that personal field.
You might argue that those without social skills would more often self-select to train at home given the opportunity and thus the concentration of socially-unskilled people might be measurable there, but going off to university won't fix that. It's an indicator of a cultural failing, not an educational failing.
No, we should move that to high school. If that's the level that everybody is expected to have, why bother padding it out past 13 years of education?
In some countries, the typical US high school age is when people are undergoing actual formal career training paths as part of primary education, depending on the field.
A) College is about knowledge. This used to be the case when a good chunk of information could only be found in academic libraries, but today a simple Google search can find you the information for all but the most specialized of areas.
I think this is a bit mischaracterized. I would substitute "knowledge" for "training". I'm an autodidact, but even so it makes learning a lot faster and easier when there is training, coaching, and a useful path of progression that the learner is taken through. Much of the online materials are reference materials or in situ discussion, not geared to be penetrable for those who do not know the field. Especially in more hands-on fields such as electronics, materials processing, chemistry, etc, being able to actually execute and measure what you're learning gives a stronger and more lasting impression. Of course, there are other fields where simply immersing yourself in online reading materials is quite suitable to gain a good, practical understanding (I'd place mathematics and programming languages here).
This might be covered in what you list as "experience", but typically that word is used to describe social development experiences, learning the politics of your field, and starting up a network of contacts in academia.
Having said all that, I agree that the whole university view of things is failing to meet expectations overall, it's just that for a number of fields "knowledge" is not just reference information.
"web 2.0"
I think we're up to "web 3.0" now in terms of bleeding-edge buzzword BS.
The question is what do you choose to lock yourself into promising? Underpromise and overdeliver, so have the contract specify charges for doing work, but waive it if it's one of those "Yeah, this is really my dumb fault" moments.
simple != better security against unwanted access.
Yeah, and the information printed right on the sticker provides both at once. I'm pretty baffled as to how a self-contained physical item in your wallet is somehow supposed to be less secure than collecting lots of data points on a net-connected server...