Physics: exams were belled to ~67% for each course. Typically the actual marks on the exam where below that (yeah tough). You needed a 65% average to remain in the program so... every year the class shrank by 50%. Started with around 100, ended with less than 20. Good stuff.
Yep, but a little late for that now unfortunately. What the government could do is replace the backbone with fiber and then give customers the option of sticking with the old copper from the old provider, get service which the old provider leases from the government or from the government/government controlled company directly.
Should read up on a concept called natural monopoly. Some things are only efficient to produce if you can have a monopoly. Telco is one of those. Would nearly every house be wired for cable and phone if every potential vendor of phone and cable had to run there own wires around the country in hopes of getting enough subscribers? Would homeowners like to buy houses with 10 phone jacks in each room and a few cable boxes "just in case" they decide to go with another provider? Nope so the monopoly exists. Similar with things like electricity, water, or even often with things that are highly parishable with a relatively small local demand (cement say). Local market can't support more than one and company can't ship wet cement large distances so each area ends up with a monopoly or near monopoly player.
I'm not sure on the government subsidies, haven't heard of them but it doesn't mean they didn't exist. The problem is if the government said something like "it doesn't make sense to wire the country, but if you do it we'll help so that it will give you a good profit" and I went out and wired the country I would expect to own that stuff I just laid. Similar to a subsidy on purchasing a car say, once I bought the car I claim the subsidy, but I still expect to own the car. I don't want the government to come next year and say "we are starting a carpool and you need to lend your car for 5 hrs a day since we helped pay for it".
I don't know about you guys, I'm on the high/highest end internet connection and have been for the last 10 years. Over that time my bandwidth has increased about 6X down and 16X up for roughly the same price. So 10% premium is roughly 10 years to recoup costs but will they really be able to sell there 25Mbps connection for anything like the same price 10 years from now? It will be the discount bin $20/mth "highspeed" by then. That is the problem, network gear lasts a bit longer than servers but I'd say its half life is less than 10 years now.
Sorry I missed the unguided independent study part of your original comment.
Sadly not you but I think the way that education is structured does contradict what I said. I guess in an attempt to make sure everyone has a "basic" level of necessary skills most governments have found it necessary to have formalized curriculums and/or standardized testing.
Even assuming that these systems are effective and efficient to give students the desired education I'd say they miss the point. They measure and evaluate based on the knowledge gained rather than what IMHO should be the end goal of education: preparing people to live a happy life and contributing to the community.
My problem is with the concept of what is a "basic" level of knowledge. Is it really necessary that everyone know about music, art, and early 20th century history? Sure they are all useful to at least some people but the majority of people will never use them. Similarly with a lot of the more traditionally "useful" subjects of math and science. We often learn things to a point where they are less and less likely to be used (when was the lsat time you needed to use synthetic division?).
The "basic" level of art skills necessary varies depending on whether or not you are likely to ever use it. Similarly with the majority of things in school. Yet the things that nearly everyone will need to know in life, balancing a checkbook, differences between mortgages, household repairs etc, are not required education. The priorities that our education systems give things you'd think that it was really important to be able to find the roots of a polynomial and that moving a power outlet in your house was something you should just wing.
Just because something doesn't work for the majority doesn't mean the minority for which it would work well should be forced to spend their time in structured education instead. Also completely independent education is necessarily the only alternative. Guided study can work too. A kid wants to take a toy apart and figure out how it works rather than just play with it. Okay show them how to do it and help them reason about why things are the way they are. Similarly if a kid loves history but isn't interested in music they shouldn't have to spend an hour a day memorizing music notation. If you don' like it you likely aren't going to do it once someone isn't forcing you to and so it really is a waste of both peoples time IMHO. The teacher doesn't have to dictate what the lesson will be all the time.
How about the choice to have a phone that works without putting it in a dumb looking case? How about saying yes we have a problem instead of "all phones have problems"? Sure it might be true but try pulling that one on your boss if you're late to work or do a crappy job. Who cares about the Blackberry, this is a Apple press conference to address a problem with an Apple product. I don't hate Apple, I have a 27" iMac, an old Powerbook and an iPod and like each of them, but if you have a problem you should admit it without qualifying it. As well 30 days for a refund isn't enough I think. If you are at day 22 and have to wait until next week to order your free Bumper that gives you no time to see if it actually solves the problem before you're stuck with the phone.
The presentation quotes Consumer Reports saying that the Bumper fixes the problem and then Steve goes on to say they can't make enough Bumpers so they'll give you another case for free. Hmm, what if that other case doesn't fix the problem? If Bumpers are the fix then Bumpers it should be. If they can't produce them quick enough then they should subsidize your phone bill until they get you into a working condition.
As well people gripe a lot about MS and crew with closed source but I think they are better than a lot of hardware. I seem to recall back in the day looking into P4 inards and the published standards just said "adder and logical register" or whatever and then that the actual part might be implemented differently but performs logically the same.
So you were left guessing how to optimize code or the thing because you had no idea how things are implemented, where something might be shown as a single micro-op but implemented as something that is going to churn registers on you or whatever.
FPGAs are weird though. They are essentially programmable hardware. It is the programs not the hardware that people are giving away for free.
I suppose people could develop test systems using FPGAs and then publish the design for what the dedicated hardware piece would look like though. Okay I retract my comment, there is some potential for open source hardware. Lots more difficulties though than downloading a copy of a package and starting hacking.
They are dreaming. Sure some hardware is relatively easy to develop on your own on a small budget. But most of it needs expensive equipment, fab facilities, testing systems etc. If you think a group of disperse individuals will each have the same equipment to collaborate you're dreaming. If you think a company is going to by the hardware and then let anyone manufacture it again you are dreaming.
The reason why open source software works is that it is easy for people to contribute and it is essentially free to give someone a copy. That is not the case with hardware.
True but there would be a lot of inflation too. I know of people working in oil fields saying that coffee shops have to pay $25 per hour to get workers because of the oil boom. More money with the same amount of goods just equals more expensive goods. They would have to import a lot of the stuff with the money to keep inflation down I think.
It's money just not real money. Lets say it takes ~50 years to deplete the mineral deposits, that brings it down to 20B a year or about 20% of IBMs yearly revenue. So yeah I'm saying that 1/5th of an IBM for 28 million people is not that much money. Nice to have but not really worth fighting for. After all the war in Afganistan has cost ~730B already.
1T isn't that much money to a nation. People talk like it is going to make Afganistan rich. Lets put it in prospective: Canada ~34M people 1.3T per annum GDP. Afganistan 28M people. So all the mineral wealth of Afganistan would enable roughly the per capita GDP of Canada for one year. But of course it will take a couple generations to mine all those resources. This only takes them from poor to slightly less poor.
Also: his name sounds like a porn handle in german: Mark Sugar Mountain. That will get him banned from a lot of countries, and in Japan he'll have to walk around with one of those censor pixellator thing-a-mijiggs:-)
Ah, didn't notice that. I couldn't really tell how the mechanism worked, I thought maybe somehow it stuck the little metal bits between the pages by itself. I don't see how it is much use then. They said it was for people with disablities say. It would still require an able person every 20min or so to reset the device as I'd think it would require as much or more function to place the pages on the little things than just to turn them yourself.
http://www.pageflip.com/Pricing.html, $350. Wireless button operated/foot peddle. I'm sure you could rig it up somehow on a timer so say every three seconds the page is turned picture taken, rinse and repeat.
Indeed. If I can safely and effectively do my work while drunk on a roller coaster why can't I? It is all about the quality and quantity of the work being done. If I work best with distractions, coffee, taking a walk around the building for a few minutes to clear my mind, etc, what should it matter? Some managers just focus too much on process and not enough on output. If your process isn't the "right" one (usually defined as the process that the boss personally prefers) you just aren't doing a good job. There is just way too many things more important than whether there is music playing, or I have a coffee at my desk rather than waiting a couple hours for a break. Incidentally I haven't worked at a place with a formal break for about 4 years, why don't they add that to their "environment'. Oh your a professional not a factory worker so you should be able to manage your own time and take a break when and if you need it. But then if you do you are distracting other people or not as hard working as the next guy over; and they wonder why programmers burn out.
I'm one of those that get distracted by silence. Music adds a little bit of variety to the day and helps keep the wheels turning for me. If I don't have music to help keep things interesting I'll end up getting distracted by everything else around, email, Slashdot, reading up on new tech etc. When solving a hard problem I find I can only think about it for 5 min or so and then I need a brief distraction, 20 sec or so, to take a mental breath to switch frame of view to look at the problem in a different way. Music is perfect for this as roughly that often a new song comes on.
White pages only provide the information if you still live where the person tries to find you. I moved from Canada to Germany. I'm pretty sure people I've lost touch with aren't combing through the german white pages looking for someone with my name. Also, more and more people don't have a landline, especially in the age range that Facebook is more popular in (25-35).
People were relying on the privacy settings so that they could post stuff that only their friends could see on Facebook. For example you might not care that the world can see a picture of you, but you might want your contact details "private" so you can choose by "friending" someone to let them see that stuff, rather than have the idiot from highschool start calling you and harassing you just because it is so easy to find you again on Facebook. That said I think some level of information should be public on the site, because it is essential for it to do its purpose which I think is to help people reconnect with people they want to. Eg, picture shouldn't be private it is something that is probably publicly available already, similarly with things of public record, school you attended for example.
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Physics: exams were belled to ~67% for each course. Typically the actual marks on the exam where below that (yeah tough). You needed a 65% average to remain in the program so ... every year the class shrank by 50%. Started with around 100, ended with less than 20. Good stuff.
With writing large checks to the endowment. Showed up to class? That should be worth 20%. Actually answered questions and participated? another 20%.
Yep, but a little late for that now unfortunately. What the government could do is replace the backbone with fiber and then give customers the option of sticking with the old copper from the old provider, get service which the old provider leases from the government or from the government/government controlled company directly.
I'm not sure on the government subsidies, haven't heard of them but it doesn't mean they didn't exist. The problem is if the government said something like "it doesn't make sense to wire the country, but if you do it we'll help so that it will give you a good profit" and I went out and wired the country I would expect to own that stuff I just laid. Similar to a subsidy on purchasing a car say, once I bought the car I claim the subsidy, but I still expect to own the car. I don't want the government to come next year and say "we are starting a carpool and you need to lend your car for 5 hrs a day since we helped pay for it".
I don't know about you guys, I'm on the high/highest end internet connection and have been for the last 10 years. Over that time my bandwidth has increased about 6X down and 16X up for roughly the same price. So 10% premium is roughly 10 years to recoup costs but will they really be able to sell there 25Mbps connection for anything like the same price 10 years from now? It will be the discount bin $20/mth "highspeed" by then. That is the problem, network gear lasts a bit longer than servers but I'd say its half life is less than 10 years now.
Sadly not you but I think the way that education is structured does contradict what I said. I guess in an attempt to make sure everyone has a "basic" level of necessary skills most governments have found it necessary to have formalized curriculums and/or standardized testing.
Even assuming that these systems are effective and efficient to give students the desired education I'd say they miss the point. They measure and evaluate based on the knowledge gained rather than what IMHO should be the end goal of education: preparing people to live a happy life and contributing to the community.
My problem is with the concept of what is a "basic" level of knowledge. Is it really necessary that everyone know about music, art, and early 20th century history? Sure they are all useful to at least some people but the majority of people will never use them. Similarly with a lot of the more traditionally "useful" subjects of math and science. We often learn things to a point where they are less and less likely to be used (when was the lsat time you needed to use synthetic division?).
The "basic" level of art skills necessary varies depending on whether or not you are likely to ever use it. Similarly with the majority of things in school. Yet the things that nearly everyone will need to know in life, balancing a checkbook, differences between mortgages, household repairs etc, are not required education. The priorities that our education systems give things you'd think that it was really important to be able to find the roots of a polynomial and that moving a power outlet in your house was something you should just wing.
Just because something doesn't work for the majority doesn't mean the minority for which it would work well should be forced to spend their time in structured education instead. Also completely independent education is necessarily the only alternative. Guided study can work too. A kid wants to take a toy apart and figure out how it works rather than just play with it. Okay show them how to do it and help them reason about why things are the way they are. Similarly if a kid loves history but isn't interested in music they shouldn't have to spend an hour a day memorizing music notation. If you don' like it you likely aren't going to do it once someone isn't forcing you to and so it really is a waste of both peoples time IMHO. The teacher doesn't have to dictate what the lesson will be all the time.
How about the choice to have a phone that works without putting it in a dumb looking case? How about saying yes we have a problem instead of "all phones have problems"? Sure it might be true but try pulling that one on your boss if you're late to work or do a crappy job. Who cares about the Blackberry, this is a Apple press conference to address a problem with an Apple product. I don't hate Apple, I have a 27" iMac, an old Powerbook and an iPod and like each of them, but if you have a problem you should admit it without qualifying it. As well 30 days for a refund isn't enough I think. If you are at day 22 and have to wait until next week to order your free Bumper that gives you no time to see if it actually solves the problem before you're stuck with the phone.
The presentation quotes Consumer Reports saying that the Bumper fixes the problem and then Steve goes on to say they can't make enough Bumpers so they'll give you another case for free. Hmm, what if that other case doesn't fix the problem? If Bumpers are the fix then Bumpers it should be. If they can't produce them quick enough then they should subsidize your phone bill until they get you into a working condition.
So you were left guessing how to optimize code or the thing because you had no idea how things are implemented, where something might be shown as a single micro-op but implemented as something that is going to churn registers on you or whatever.
I suppose people could develop test systems using FPGAs and then publish the design for what the dedicated hardware piece would look like though. Okay I retract my comment, there is some potential for open source hardware. Lots more difficulties though than downloading a copy of a package and starting hacking.
Hehe. I like free bears.
The reason why open source software works is that it is easy for people to contribute and it is essentially free to give someone a copy. That is not the case with hardware.
True but there would be a lot of inflation too. I know of people working in oil fields saying that coffee shops have to pay $25 per hour to get workers because of the oil boom. More money with the same amount of goods just equals more expensive goods. They would have to import a lot of the stuff with the money to keep inflation down I think.
It's money just not real money. Lets say it takes ~50 years to deplete the mineral deposits, that brings it down to 20B a year or about 20% of IBMs yearly revenue. So yeah I'm saying that 1/5th of an IBM for 28 million people is not that much money. Nice to have but not really worth fighting for. After all the war in Afganistan has cost ~730B already.
1T isn't that much money to a nation. People talk like it is going to make Afganistan rich. Lets put it in prospective: Canada ~34M people 1.3T per annum GDP. Afganistan 28M people. So all the mineral wealth of Afganistan would enable roughly the per capita GDP of Canada for one year. But of course it will take a couple generations to mine all those resources. This only takes them from poor to slightly less poor.
Also: his name sounds like a porn handle in german: Mark Sugar Mountain. That will get him banned from a lot of countries, and in Japan he'll have to walk around with one of those censor pixellator thing-a-mijiggs :-)
Mark Zuckerberg will have to stay out of Pakistan or he will be executed. There goes his vacation plans for this summer.
Ah, didn't notice that. I couldn't really tell how the mechanism worked, I thought maybe somehow it stuck the little metal bits between the pages by itself. I don't see how it is much use then. They said it was for people with disablities say. It would still require an able person every 20min or so to reset the device as I'd think it would require as much or more function to place the pages on the little things than just to turn them yourself.
http://www.pageflip.com/Pricing.html, $350. Wireless button operated/foot peddle. I'm sure you could rig it up somehow on a timer so say every three seconds the page is turned picture taken, rinse and repeat.
Indeed. If I can safely and effectively do my work while drunk on a roller coaster why can't I? It is all about the quality and quantity of the work being done. If I work best with distractions, coffee, taking a walk around the building for a few minutes to clear my mind, etc, what should it matter? Some managers just focus too much on process and not enough on output. If your process isn't the "right" one (usually defined as the process that the boss personally prefers) you just aren't doing a good job. There is just way too many things more important than whether there is music playing, or I have a coffee at my desk rather than waiting a couple hours for a break. Incidentally I haven't worked at a place with a formal break for about 4 years, why don't they add that to their "environment'. Oh your a professional not a factory worker so you should be able to manage your own time and take a break when and if you need it. But then if you do you are distracting other people or not as hard working as the next guy over; and they wonder why programmers burn out.
I'm one of those that get distracted by silence. Music adds a little bit of variety to the day and helps keep the wheels turning for me. If I don't have music to help keep things interesting I'll end up getting distracted by everything else around, email, Slashdot, reading up on new tech etc. When solving a hard problem I find I can only think about it for 5 min or so and then I need a brief distraction, 20 sec or so, to take a mental breath to switch frame of view to look at the problem in a different way. Music is perfect for this as roughly that often a new song comes on.
Well if he was dumb enough to do that then he deserves what he got.
White pages only provide the information if you still live where the person tries to find you. I moved from Canada to Germany. I'm pretty sure people I've lost touch with aren't combing through the german white pages looking for someone with my name. Also, more and more people don't have a landline, especially in the age range that Facebook is more popular in (25-35).
People were relying on the privacy settings so that they could post stuff that only their friends could see on Facebook. For example you might not care that the world can see a picture of you, but you might want your contact details "private" so you can choose by "friending" someone to let them see that stuff, rather than have the idiot from highschool start calling you and harassing you just because it is so easy to find you again on Facebook. That said I think some level of information should be public on the site, because it is essential for it to do its purpose which I think is to help people reconnect with people they want to. Eg, picture shouldn't be private it is something that is probably publicly available already, similarly with things of public record, school you attended for example.