Does this mean that they have an internal build of NT on ARM, or is the world going to be graced with "Windows CE Datacenter Enterprise Edition" at some point?
The basic problem with your request is that it is very hard to build a virtualization mechanism that is both useful and portable.
At very least, virtualization software tends to want to install some sort of virtual ethernet device(or muck about with the tun device, if you are running on linux), so that the VMs can have network access. That is typically an operation that requires admin rights. Not uncommonly, other rather invasive install steps are involved.
Unless you are OK with no network, and quite possibly a very slow system(pure userspace instead of any of the paravirtualization tricks, you basically have to have the VM software installed, by an admin. If you do have that, just shlepping the folder with the VM config file and the virtual disk is trivial; but if you don't have that, you have a problem.
Assuming you can get the installs done, either VMware player or Virtualbox would be fine. The students can do the install on their home machines, you can provide the skeleton VM, and make sure that the software is installed on lab machines.
It depends on the calibre of the device. Your basic deskside all-in-one isn't much of a risk. The real cheap seats might only have enough onboard storage to show up on the USB bus and have their firmware blob dumped to them by the driver.
Many of the nicer models, though, have an internal HDD, often with a webserver, to support use cases like "scan, retrieve document through web interface" or "receive and store faxes without printing them all". Those are the ones you have to watch out for.
Given that most printer manufacturers can't seem to design UIs that aren't exercises in pain, it may or may not be obvious based on using the device how much storing it is doing.
In a sense. It is (analogically speaking) somewhere between being a "machine language of the internet" and being one of the "intermediate formats" that things like LLVM and.net use for architecture independence(since, unlike machine language, there is no hardware that actually runs it, and rather more javascript is probably still handwritten than machine language). Because of the ease of handwriting(at least for smaller stuff) it still isn't quite like machine language or one of the intermediate formats.
Had it been designed from the ground up for that purpose, it would probably look a lot more like one of the intermediate architecture-independent code formats; but it was, of course, originally designed to be a writable language for basic interactivity, not a webapp runtime...
Given that stuff like Google Web Toolkit, which allows you to write your application in Java, and then programmatically crunches it down to javascript for execution in the web browser, already exists; I'm not sure that javascript will really matter, even as it becomes the foundation of more and more stuff.
I strongly suspect that, if you'd taken some computer scientists, sat them down, and told them to design a language that was easy to programmatically convert code in other languages to, and also easy(or at least doable) to execute at high speed, you wouldn't get javascript. However, javascript is what we have, and it seems reasonable to expect that it will gradually evolve(through a mixture of the creation of tools like Web Toolkit, and the parts of javascript that browsers focus on optimizing the execution of) to be a more or less adequate cross-platform-intermediate language.
This isn't to say that you'll be prevented from writing javascript manually if you feel like it, nothing will stop you, and some people actually argue that the language isn't nearly as bad as its reputation would suggest; but, for situations involving extremely complex web-apps, I suspect that $LANGUAGE_OF_CHOICE-to-javascript "compilers" will be the rule.
It'll be somewhat analogous to x86 virtualization. From a theoretical perspective, x86 was a shitty architecture to virtualize, which is why pricey IBM stuff has been doing it since shortly before they stopped using dinosaurs to carry packets between sites, and it has only fairly recently become viable on x86s. Nevertheless, through a combination of the evolution of virtualization software, and the gradual addition of useful virtualization features to x86 CPUs and chipsets, x86 virtualization has become highly viable, and fairly efficient.
MA roads pretty much suck; but MA schools consistently put out some of the best results in the country(and, before somebody jumps in bemoaning what a low bar that is, that means that they outperform Europe and much of Asia, to the degree that it has been possible to make reasonable comparisons).
And, naturally, any door for which you must collect the keycard will be utterly indestructible, no matter how flimsy it appears compared to the gigantic armored monstrosities that you can destruct just fine...
Only partially true. Physical access is, indeed, generally a security plus(though not a cure-all: if the inconvenience causes somebody to jury-rig their own remote access solution, you now almost certainly have a much less secure system than one that was designed for remote access in the first place. Also, just because the janitor earns 6 bucks an hour and no hablo ingles doesn't mean he can't connect a serial cable...)
Slow and stupid, though, are dangerous. Humans have a tendency to make stupid, sloppy errors. Anything that requires them to keep hundreds or thousands of complex details in mind brings out the worst in them, and causes stupid misconfigurations. Of course, any tool that allows an MBA to achieve stupid misconfigurations just by dragging objects around in a drool-proof GUI also causes stupid misconfigurations...
Again, it depends on exactly what you want:
If you are significantly space constrained, SSDs may well be your only option(HDDs are either simply impossible, or you would need an ultra-thin variant custom designed and produced just for you, which, with lousy economies of scale, could mean paying hundreds or thousands of dollars per unit).
However, if you are not significantly space constrained, die stacking doesn't do much to change the cost of SSDs(packaging costs go up; because the die bonding gets harder and more complex, PCB costs go down because you can get away with smaller boards and fewer layers and traces). The cost per square centimeter of functioning silicon, which is the bulk of flash's cost, stays the same.
Already, flash has slaughtered the more space-constrained HDDs(the CF-card sized Microdrives are basically extinct. 1.8 inch HDDs are an endangered species). However, at the 2.5 inch size, the cost of silicon really starts to hold them back. Even by the standards of today's die packaging and PCB tech, a lot of 2.5 inch SSDs are shipping "half-full" or less; because it would be too expensive to purchase the extra flash.
With either contemporary, or plausible near future, packaging, SSDs can definitely win the density battle; but that only changes the cost game in very density constrained situations.
Well, because "cheaters cheat because they are dishonest" is an achingly vacuous near-tautology; and because rates of cheating appear to differ across disciplines, which rather calls out for a more nuanced explanation...
While it is almost certainly the case that comp sci assignments face the best algorithmic scrutiny(CS professors, shockingly enough, are probably more likely and better able than modern literature professors to subject them to such), there are similar algorithmic tools(albeit generally 3rd party contracted stuff) being used against writing assignments at many schools.
I suspect that there are other factors at work, as well. I'll put out the following conjectures(whether you would prefer to say that I "reasoned from first principles" or "pulled them out of my ass" is at you discretion):
1. Intro level courses, in all areas of study, will have higher rates of cheating than later courses. Two basic reasons: Intro level courses are much more likely to be mandated under "core curriculum" or "breadth requirements" or whatever the institution's term for the concept is. This makes them much more likely to have a substantial population of students who are deeply disinterested and/or very poorly suited to the subject. People who don't care, or who can't hack it, are the ones with the strongest motives to cheat.
2. The level of cheating, broadly speaking, will reflect how profitable the area of study is. Other than the accolades of your tiny group of peers, the rewards for being a world-renowned expert in late-middle Assyrian civic structures are basically fuck-all. If you work hard for a decade+, and get lucky, you might get a steady but not-especially lucrative tenured position, maybe a few advances from books, and that's about the best case. Therefore, only people with a genuine enthusiasm for the subject will bother to take more than "Intro to World History 101". There won't be zero cheating(putting your name on the output of your toiling grad students, for instance, is practically a best practice); but there will be less. Things like law, medicine, business, CS(more before the bubble burst than now; but still some) offer relatively good monetary rewards, and so are more likely to attract people who have comparatively little interesting the the subject and just want the diploma. You will therefore expect higher levels of cheating.
3. The level of cheating, broadly speaking, will reflect the student body's belief about "how relevant" the academic material is to the goals that they seek(this is partly covered by #2; but goes more broadly than that). If you, say, want to make it as an English professor, or in Real Serious Math, cheating is largely counterproductive. You learn to write by writing, so if you skip much of the writing, you won't know how to write at the end of the course. You gain facility in math by doing, so you won't be facile if you cheat rather than work. If, though, you are sitting through CS, with visions of being a.com millionaire(or even just a workaday java monkey) dancing in your head, you'll be thinking "why do I need to know this crap about NP complete Turning machines and O complexity and stuff? I just want to write Facebook 2.0!". People smarter and/or wiser than you may well suggest that you are wrong; but you will still be tempted to cheat your way through the "irrelevant" material.
I suspect that Intro CS sits at the intersection of the worst of both worlds. On the one hand, since it's an intro course, you get all the people who aren't really cut out for it learning the hard way that programming isn't as easy as playing video games, even though they both involve computers, who then freak out and start cheating(either to pass at all, if they are really hopeless, or to pass without cutting into their drinking time too much). On the other hand, you have all the people who are seeking Technology riches, and don't want to hear this ivory-tower-crap, they just want to write some programs and get a job.
They do the same thing with their "mobile to mobile" calling features. If you block your caller id and call someone who is "in network" they will get charged minutes as though it was an out of network call. ANI is not blocked when caller-id is but they are too stupid to use it for their own billing purposes? WTF?
That doesn't sound like stupidity to me... That sounds like profitable evil, in the same vein as the "placing the button that causes your phone to load some crappy WAP page at $.10/KB right next to the button you actually want, and making it impossible to remap/disable". I'm sure that, if people who are out of network were using caller-ID spoofing to appear as "in-network", they'd start using ANI. As long as the net effect of not using ANI means more minutes billed, not fewer, though, why would they change?
Gosh, Captain Liberty, I certainly can't think of any way in which regulating fraud committed over the phone might be related to interstate commerce...
(Now, there might well be an argument to be made if the caller-ID spoofer could demonstrate that the spoofed call was strictly intrastate; but I'm guessing that vanishingly few of them are.)
On the other hand; had he been in China, there would have been a chance that they would have tried and shot him.
I suspect that getting shot is mostly just because corruption is a competitive activity, and the stakes for losers are high, rather than because society's commitment to fighting corruption is actually that sincere; but it is still gratifying to watch when it happens.
This, for instance, was a rather heartwarming case. You don't often see Americans that high on the food chain sentenced to much more than "being allowed to resign, and maybe paying some sort of civil penalty, probably without admission of wrongdoing" for gross dereliction of duty while in office. Heck, good old "Scooter" Libby got an oh-so-tough 30 months in jail, and then that was commuted; because "My decision to commute his prison sentence leaves in place a harsh punishment for Mr. Libby. The reputation he gained through his years of public service and professional work in the legal community is forever damaged". Oooh, That has to hurt, good thing that we'll have the extra prison space for potheads.
Whether he is right or wrong really depends on how large a disk you want.
Barring truly revolutionary advances in silicon device fabrication, and(I'm not sufficiently up on my physics to know for sure) possibly a change in physics, sputtering a thin metallic film with the appropriate magnetic properties will always be cheaper, per square centimeter, than fabbing a complex integrated circuit. Further, it is quite likely that the smallest possible magnetic domains will continue to be smaller than the smallest possible flash cells, so you get more bits per square centimeter, and you pay less per square centimeter with the magnetic stuff.
However, as you note, Flash is pretty much ready-to-go. Virtually all the cost is the silicon. Packaging and soldering are relatively cheap(and, since every HDD also has a controller board, both technologies pay the "assemble a PCB" cost). With magnetic storage, though, whether HDD or tape, you have to build a fairly complex and expensive machine to enclose the cheap magnetic medium, and read/write, and keep dust off, and so forth.
If you adopt the naive strategy of comparing each technology's "sweet spot cost"(ie. the cost/GB of the device with the lowest cost/GB of each tech), I suspect that Mr. Unsworth is correct, if not forever, at least for a long time. However, a great many applications don't actually care about that metric. If you know how many GB you need, you don't care about "what is the lowest cost/GB?" you care about "how can I most cheaply get X GB?"
In the case of HDDs, the "sweet spot price" is somewhere between 5 and 10 cents a GB. However, the sweet spot is measured in 1-2 TB devices. If you, say, only needed 20GB, you would be unable to find anybody to sell you a 20GB drive for $1-$2. A quick look a newegg suggests that the cheapest retail HDDs are around $30-$35. You do get 80GB to 160GB for your $35; but you basically can't spend any less. The cost of a machined housing, hiqh quality spindle motor, packing, shipping, etc. just make that impossible. For the same $30-$35, retail, you are looking at around 16GB of flash(less if you want AES encryption and stuff, a little more if it is on sale). Thus, for any application that needs 16GB or less, SSDs are, in absolute $/GB terms, actually cheaper than HDDs(in addition to their other virtues: quiet, low power, shock resistant, small size, etc.)
I suspect that, over time, HDDs will be cheaper than SSDs in "sweet spot price" more or less forever; but the capacity(currently around 16GB, was more like 8GB the last time I wrote something like this) below which the absolute cost advantage lies with SSDs will continue to creep up. If it manages to creep up faster than software bloats, we may reach the dramatic tipping point where an SSD is cheaper, as well as better, than an HDD for the boot volume of a "normal computer", as opposed to just embedded systems, the occasional netbook, and space/power constrained devices.
While the question of whether prices aren't being competed further down because of collusion, or just because of inescapable production costs is an interesting one(and hopefully somebody has their forensic accountants on it, just to be sure), it seems reasonably obvious why SSDs have settled into the niche that they have, and why the manufacturers are making the size/price decisions that they are.
Now that the initial round of epically bad JMicron controllers are mostly gone, and the boring Samsung reference ones are confined mostly to build-to-order options on corporate laptops, all but the ghastliest SSDs are embarrassingly superior to HDDs for the sort of random mixed read/write that makes such a difference for desktop responsiveness. At the same time, though, nothing short of alien nanotech is going to allow them to touch HDDs in price/GB. That being so, you would expect to see SSD capacities largely cluster around "enough for a Windows boot volume, with a few key applications on it; but not much more". Anything less is largely useless to the target market(or, more accurately, anything less is aimed at the embedded devices market, and probably uses entirely different connectors and isn't sold at retail) and anything more gets very expensive very fast. This is, also, the reason why a lot of the high capacity (512GB to 1TB+) SSDs that you see are actually 2 or 4 of the vendor's lower capacity boards stuck together behind a cheap RAID chip. The market for the super high capacity ones just isn't all that big, at least among systems that use SATA as a storage connection bus, so the high capacity drives being sold are practically low-volume engineering samples, just polished enough to be sold for the usual early-adopter premium.
The only real forces supporting the existence of SSDs larger than that are high-end laptops(if you only have one drive slot, you can't adopt the mixed SSD/HDD strategy), a few loony enthusiasts(if you are the sort of person who buys every highest-end video card on release day, you can probably be convinced to go for a couple of 512GB SSDs, in RAID of course, for your gaming machine) and some truly titanic databases run by the deep-pocketed(though it isn't clear how much of that is SATA connected, and how much is the directly PCIe attached stuff, which is even faster).
I'd say that that is the invisible hand doing its thing.
Ok, so you are a person of somewhat dubious character who "finds" cellphones in bars(whether you did in fact "find" and made no effort to return, or whether you make a profession of "finding" is unclear; but immaterial). Now, you happen to "find" a rather curious device, a clearly Apple-looking cellphone that doesn't publicly exist. What do you do with it?
To an ordinary fence, it is worth fuck all. Because it is a prototype, it is "hot" and probably being watched more closely than usual. Because it is a new model, none of the grey market hacking/unlocking/re-IMEIing/etc. tricks used to run iPhones in various dubiously licit secondary markets are going to work.
To a gadget site, it is worth serious pageviews, plus a fair bit of fanboy wank.
It seems pretty obvious which one of these potential customers you would get in touch with.
In this case, it goes well beyond the "ethical vs. pragmatic" debate of the $500 wallet. Unless it is a very elaborate setup, $500 in bills is functionally untraceable. Your choice comes down merely to whether you would rather "do the right thing" or "have $500".
In this case, an Apple prototype cellphone is all kinds of traceable. It'll have an IMEI burned in and(since it was remotely disabled) has probably left a trail of tower contacts in the recent past. Now Gizmodo has put up a note on their web page saying "Yeah, we have it. Also we took it apart.". Receiving and harboring stolen goods is illegal in basically every state, and can be a federal crime for items $5k or greater that cross state lines. It is totally plausible that a prototype is worth more than five thousand. Depending on the numbers in which they are being produced, it might have even cost that much to manufacture and, being rare and coveted, is worth rather more.
I honestly don't know what Gizmodo is thinking. This isn't one of those "Oh, Apple's mean lawyers are hounding a bunch of harmless kids and their rumor sites again" situations. This is a "Gizmodo staffers have just published a public admission of having committed a state and/or federal crime(and not one of those minimally and largely civilly enforced ones, like DMCA violations and DRM circumvention tools)". One or more of them could easily go to prison.
It isn't "compatibility with existing apps" you'd need to be worried about, its compatibility with the laws of physics....
Pretty much all moderns smartphones are already noted for having fairly packed mainboards and pretty unexciting battery lives. Something a quarter the size(unless you are happy to have a phone an inch thick), would have a truly sad battery life.
Even there, though, it isn't clear that the newspapers aren't completely fucked.
Consider Craigslist vs. Ebay: Ebay wasn't a particularly mortal threat to classifieds(probably didn't help; but didn't seal their doom) because it tried to largely ignore location. That works fine for stuff that is quite valuable per unit weight, or obscure stuff that you can't get just anywhere, so you just have to suck up the shipping, or for stuff that is all shipped anyway, so cutting out the middleman is helpful.
Craigslist, on the other hand, has all the cheapness of being web based; but is explicitly location-centric. And it crushed the classifieds business like a bug(as with most bugs, the crushed remains are still crawling and twitching a bit, bugs are tough motherfuckers; but it is basically game over.)
It wouldn't exactly be rocket surgery to build a nationwide; but location-focused obituary mechanism. Once the present crop of old people are finished dying, it is not going to be pretty for the paper obituaries...
As you note, greed is frequently a reason to find a way around safety.
In this case, though, there is a fairly convenient alignment of incentives(from safety's perspective). This isn't a Bhopal style "Whoops, there goes a few million in pipes and some 10s of thousands of expendable people for whose injuries and deaths we'll basically never be held liable..." thing. Prior encounters between aircraft and ash have, even in the case of successful landing, run in the high tens of millions to fix, per plane. If a plane did go down, after you had knowingly decided to apply some serious optimism about ash concentrations, you'd be looking at a 100 million plus in hardware, and 200+ stiff wrongful death suits.
The structure that looks surprisingly like a gigantic neural network is not, repeat not, the repository of a vast and vengeful consciousness of the murky deeps.
Please carry on with your regularly scheduled consumption.
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Does this mean that they have an internal build of NT on ARM, or is the world going to be graced with "Windows CE Datacenter Enterprise Edition" at some point?
The basic problem with your request is that it is very hard to build a virtualization mechanism that is both useful and portable.
At very least, virtualization software tends to want to install some sort of virtual ethernet device(or muck about with the tun device, if you are running on linux), so that the VMs can have network access. That is typically an operation that requires admin rights. Not uncommonly, other rather invasive install steps are involved.
Unless you are OK with no network, and quite possibly a very slow system(pure userspace instead of any of the paravirtualization tricks, you basically have to have the VM software installed, by an admin. If you do have that, just shlepping the folder with the VM config file and the virtual disk is trivial; but if you don't have that, you have a problem.
Assuming you can get the installs done, either VMware player or Virtualbox would be fine. The students can do the install on their home machines, you can provide the skeleton VM, and make sure that the software is installed on lab machines.
Otherwise, you are basically doomed.
It depends on the calibre of the device. Your basic deskside all-in-one isn't much of a risk. The real cheap seats might only have enough onboard storage to show up on the USB bus and have their firmware blob dumped to them by the driver.
Many of the nicer models, though, have an internal HDD, often with a webserver, to support use cases like "scan, retrieve document through web interface" or "receive and store faxes without printing them all". Those are the ones you have to watch out for.
Given that most printer manufacturers can't seem to design UIs that aren't exercises in pain, it may or may not be obvious based on using the device how much storing it is doing.
It's likely that he's going to be terminated (from his employment, not physically), if he hasn't been already.
He'll just have to hope that the rules are different here than they are for the chinese manufacturing partners...
In a sense. It is (analogically speaking) somewhere between being a "machine language of the internet" and being one of the "intermediate formats" that things like LLVM and .net use for architecture independence(since, unlike machine language, there is no hardware that actually runs it, and rather more javascript is probably still handwritten than machine language). Because of the ease of handwriting(at least for smaller stuff) it still isn't quite like machine language or one of the intermediate formats.
Had it been designed from the ground up for that purpose, it would probably look a lot more like one of the intermediate architecture-independent code formats; but it was, of course, originally designed to be a writable language for basic interactivity, not a webapp runtime...
Given that stuff like Google Web Toolkit, which allows you to write your application in Java, and then programmatically crunches it down to javascript for execution in the web browser, already exists; I'm not sure that javascript will really matter, even as it becomes the foundation of more and more stuff.
I strongly suspect that, if you'd taken some computer scientists, sat them down, and told them to design a language that was easy to programmatically convert code in other languages to, and also easy(or at least doable) to execute at high speed, you wouldn't get javascript. However, javascript is what we have, and it seems reasonable to expect that it will gradually evolve(through a mixture of the creation of tools like Web Toolkit, and the parts of javascript that browsers focus on optimizing the execution of) to be a more or less adequate cross-platform-intermediate language.
This isn't to say that you'll be prevented from writing javascript manually if you feel like it, nothing will stop you, and some people actually argue that the language isn't nearly as bad as its reputation would suggest; but, for situations involving extremely complex web-apps, I suspect that $LANGUAGE_OF_CHOICE-to-javascript "compilers" will be the rule.
It'll be somewhat analogous to x86 virtualization. From a theoretical perspective, x86 was a shitty architecture to virtualize, which is why pricey IBM stuff has been doing it since shortly before they stopped using dinosaurs to carry packets between sites, and it has only fairly recently become viable on x86s. Nevertheless, through a combination of the evolution of virtualization software, and the gradual addition of useful virtualization features to x86 CPUs and chipsets, x86 virtualization has become highly viable, and fairly efficient.
MA roads pretty much suck; but MA schools consistently put out some of the best results in the country(and, before somebody jumps in bemoaning what a low bar that is, that means that they outperform Europe and much of Asia, to the degree that it has been possible to make reasonable comparisons).
And, naturally, any door for which you must collect the keycard will be utterly indestructible, no matter how flimsy it appears compared to the gigantic armored monstrosities that you can destruct just fine...
Only partially true. Physical access is, indeed, generally a security plus(though not a cure-all: if the inconvenience causes somebody to jury-rig their own remote access solution, you now almost certainly have a much less secure system than one that was designed for remote access in the first place. Also, just because the janitor earns 6 bucks an hour and no hablo ingles doesn't mean he can't connect a serial cable...)
Slow and stupid, though, are dangerous. Humans have a tendency to make stupid, sloppy errors. Anything that requires them to keep hundreds or thousands of complex details in mind brings out the worst in them, and causes stupid misconfigurations. Of course, any tool that allows an MBA to achieve stupid misconfigurations just by dragging objects around in a drool-proof GUI also causes stupid misconfigurations...
Again, it depends on exactly what you want: If you are significantly space constrained, SSDs may well be your only option(HDDs are either simply impossible, or you would need an ultra-thin variant custom designed and produced just for you, which, with lousy economies of scale, could mean paying hundreds or thousands of dollars per unit).
However, if you are not significantly space constrained, die stacking doesn't do much to change the cost of SSDs(packaging costs go up; because the die bonding gets harder and more complex, PCB costs go down because you can get away with smaller boards and fewer layers and traces). The cost per square centimeter of functioning silicon, which is the bulk of flash's cost, stays the same.
Already, flash has slaughtered the more space-constrained HDDs(the CF-card sized Microdrives are basically extinct. 1.8 inch HDDs are an endangered species). However, at the 2.5 inch size, the cost of silicon really starts to hold them back. Even by the standards of today's die packaging and PCB tech, a lot of 2.5 inch SSDs are shipping "half-full" or less; because it would be too expensive to purchase the extra flash.
With either contemporary, or plausible near future, packaging, SSDs can definitely win the density battle; but that only changes the cost game in very density constrained situations.
Well, because "cheaters cheat because they are dishonest" is an achingly vacuous near-tautology; and because rates of cheating appear to differ across disciplines, which rather calls out for a more nuanced explanation...
While it is almost certainly the case that comp sci assignments face the best algorithmic scrutiny(CS professors, shockingly enough, are probably more likely and better able than modern literature professors to subject them to such), there are similar algorithmic tools(albeit generally 3rd party contracted stuff) being used against writing assignments at many schools.
.com millionaire(or even just a workaday java monkey) dancing in your head, you'll be thinking "why do I need to know this crap about NP complete Turning machines and O complexity and stuff? I just want to write Facebook 2.0!". People smarter and/or wiser than you may well suggest that you are wrong; but you will still be tempted to cheat your way through the "irrelevant" material.
I suspect that there are other factors at work, as well. I'll put out the following conjectures(whether you would prefer to say that I "reasoned from first principles" or "pulled them out of my ass" is at you discretion):
1. Intro level courses, in all areas of study, will have higher rates of cheating than later courses. Two basic reasons: Intro level courses are much more likely to be mandated under "core curriculum" or "breadth requirements" or whatever the institution's term for the concept is. This makes them much more likely to have a substantial population of students who are deeply disinterested and/or very poorly suited to the subject. People who don't care, or who can't hack it, are the ones with the strongest motives to cheat.
2. The level of cheating, broadly speaking, will reflect how profitable the area of study is. Other than the accolades of your tiny group of peers, the rewards for being a world-renowned expert in late-middle Assyrian civic structures are basically fuck-all. If you work hard for a decade+, and get lucky, you might get a steady but not-especially lucrative tenured position, maybe a few advances from books, and that's about the best case. Therefore, only people with a genuine enthusiasm for the subject will bother to take more than "Intro to World History 101". There won't be zero cheating(putting your name on the output of your toiling grad students, for instance, is practically a best practice); but there will be less. Things like law, medicine, business, CS(more before the bubble burst than now; but still some) offer relatively good monetary rewards, and so are more likely to attract people who have comparatively little interesting the the subject and just want the diploma. You will therefore expect higher levels of cheating.
3. The level of cheating, broadly speaking, will reflect the student body's belief about "how relevant" the academic material is to the goals that they seek(this is partly covered by #2; but goes more broadly than that). If you, say, want to make it as an English professor, or in Real Serious Math, cheating is largely counterproductive. You learn to write by writing, so if you skip much of the writing, you won't know how to write at the end of the course. You gain facility in math by doing, so you won't be facile if you cheat rather than work. If, though, you are sitting through CS, with visions of being a
I suspect that Intro CS sits at the intersection of the worst of both worlds. On the one hand, since it's an intro course, you get all the people who aren't really cut out for it learning the hard way that programming isn't as easy as playing video games, even though they both involve computers, who then freak out and start cheating(either to pass at all, if they are really hopeless, or to pass without cutting into their drinking time too much). On the other hand, you have all the people who are seeking Technology riches, and don't want to hear this ivory-tower-crap, they just want to write some programs and get a job.
They do the same thing with their "mobile to mobile" calling features. If you block your caller id and call someone who is "in network" they will get charged minutes as though it was an out of network call. ANI is not blocked when caller-id is but they are too stupid to use it for their own billing purposes? WTF?
That doesn't sound like stupidity to me... That sounds like profitable evil, in the same vein as the "placing the button that causes your phone to load some crappy WAP page at $.10/KB right next to the button you actually want, and making it impossible to remap/disable". I'm sure that, if people who are out of network were using caller-ID spoofing to appear as "in-network", they'd start using ANI. As long as the net effect of not using ANI means more minutes billed, not fewer, though, why would they change?
Gosh, Captain Liberty, I certainly can't think of any way in which regulating fraud committed over the phone might be related to interstate commerce...
(Now, there might well be an argument to be made if the caller-ID spoofer could demonstrate that the spoofed call was strictly intrastate; but I'm guessing that vanishingly few of them are.)
On the other hand; had he been in China, there would have been a chance that they would have tried and shot him.
I suspect that getting shot is mostly just because corruption is a competitive activity, and the stakes for losers are high, rather than because society's commitment to fighting corruption is actually that sincere; but it is still gratifying to watch when it happens.
This, for instance, was a rather heartwarming case. You don't often see Americans that high on the food chain sentenced to much more than "being allowed to resign, and maybe paying some sort of civil penalty, probably without admission of wrongdoing" for gross dereliction of duty while in office. Heck, good old "Scooter" Libby got an oh-so-tough 30 months in jail, and then that was commuted; because "My decision to commute his prison sentence leaves in place a harsh punishment for Mr. Libby. The reputation he gained through his years of public service and professional work in the legal community is forever damaged". Oooh, That has to hurt, good thing that we'll have the extra prison space for potheads.
Whether he is right or wrong really depends on how large a disk you want.
Barring truly revolutionary advances in silicon device fabrication, and(I'm not sufficiently up on my physics to know for sure) possibly a change in physics, sputtering a thin metallic film with the appropriate magnetic properties will always be cheaper, per square centimeter, than fabbing a complex integrated circuit. Further, it is quite likely that the smallest possible magnetic domains will continue to be smaller than the smallest possible flash cells, so you get more bits per square centimeter, and you pay less per square centimeter with the magnetic stuff.
However, as you note, Flash is pretty much ready-to-go. Virtually all the cost is the silicon. Packaging and soldering are relatively cheap(and, since every HDD also has a controller board, both technologies pay the "assemble a PCB" cost). With magnetic storage, though, whether HDD or tape, you have to build a fairly complex and expensive machine to enclose the cheap magnetic medium, and read/write, and keep dust off, and so forth.
If you adopt the naive strategy of comparing each technology's "sweet spot cost"(ie. the cost/GB of the device with the lowest cost/GB of each tech), I suspect that Mr. Unsworth is correct, if not forever, at least for a long time. However, a great many applications don't actually care about that metric. If you know how many GB you need, you don't care about "what is the lowest cost/GB?" you care about "how can I most cheaply get X GB?"
In the case of HDDs, the "sweet spot price" is somewhere between 5 and 10 cents a GB. However, the sweet spot is measured in 1-2 TB devices. If you, say, only needed 20GB, you would be unable to find anybody to sell you a 20GB drive for $1-$2. A quick look a newegg suggests that the cheapest retail HDDs are around $30-$35. You do get 80GB to 160GB for your $35; but you basically can't spend any less. The cost of a machined housing, hiqh quality spindle motor, packing, shipping, etc. just make that impossible. For the same $30-$35, retail, you are looking at around 16GB of flash(less if you want AES encryption and stuff, a little more if it is on sale). Thus, for any application that needs 16GB or less, SSDs are, in absolute $/GB terms, actually cheaper than HDDs(in addition to their other virtues: quiet, low power, shock resistant, small size, etc.)
I suspect that, over time, HDDs will be cheaper than SSDs in "sweet spot price" more or less forever; but the capacity(currently around 16GB, was more like 8GB the last time I wrote something like this) below which the absolute cost advantage lies with SSDs will continue to creep up. If it manages to creep up faster than software bloats, we may reach the dramatic tipping point where an SSD is cheaper, as well as better, than an HDD for the boot volume of a "normal computer", as opposed to just embedded systems, the occasional netbook, and space/power constrained devices.
While the question of whether prices aren't being competed further down because of collusion, or just because of inescapable production costs is an interesting one(and hopefully somebody has their forensic accountants on it, just to be sure), it seems reasonably obvious why SSDs have settled into the niche that they have, and why the manufacturers are making the size/price decisions that they are.
Now that the initial round of epically bad JMicron controllers are mostly gone, and the boring Samsung reference ones are confined mostly to build-to-order options on corporate laptops, all but the ghastliest SSDs are embarrassingly superior to HDDs for the sort of random mixed read/write that makes such a difference for desktop responsiveness. At the same time, though, nothing short of alien nanotech is going to allow them to touch HDDs in price/GB. That being so, you would expect to see SSD capacities largely cluster around "enough for a Windows boot volume, with a few key applications on it; but not much more". Anything less is largely useless to the target market(or, more accurately, anything less is aimed at the embedded devices market, and probably uses entirely different connectors and isn't sold at retail) and anything more gets very expensive very fast. This is, also, the reason why a lot of the high capacity (512GB to 1TB+) SSDs that you see are actually 2 or 4 of the vendor's lower capacity boards stuck together behind a cheap RAID chip. The market for the super high capacity ones just isn't all that big, at least among systems that use SATA as a storage connection bus, so the high capacity drives being sold are practically low-volume engineering samples, just polished enough to be sold for the usual early-adopter premium.
The only real forces supporting the existence of SSDs larger than that are high-end laptops(if you only have one drive slot, you can't adopt the mixed SSD/HDD strategy), a few loony enthusiasts(if you are the sort of person who buys every highest-end video card on release day, you can probably be convinced to go for a couple of 512GB SSDs, in RAID of course, for your gaming machine) and some truly titanic databases run by the deep-pocketed(though it isn't clear how much of that is SATA connected, and how much is the directly PCIe attached stuff, which is even faster).
I'd say that that is the invisible hand doing its thing.
Ok, so you are a person of somewhat dubious character who "finds" cellphones in bars(whether you did in fact "find" and made no effort to return, or whether you make a profession of "finding" is unclear; but immaterial). Now, you happen to "find" a rather curious device, a clearly Apple-looking cellphone that doesn't publicly exist. What do you do with it?
To an ordinary fence, it is worth fuck all. Because it is a prototype, it is "hot" and probably being watched more closely than usual. Because it is a new model, none of the grey market hacking/unlocking/re-IMEIing/etc. tricks used to run iPhones in various dubiously licit secondary markets are going to work.
To a gadget site, it is worth serious pageviews, plus a fair bit of fanboy wank.
It seems pretty obvious which one of these potential customers you would get in touch with.
In this case, it goes well beyond the "ethical vs. pragmatic" debate of the $500 wallet. Unless it is a very elaborate setup, $500 in bills is functionally untraceable. Your choice comes down merely to whether you would rather "do the right thing" or "have $500".
In this case, an Apple prototype cellphone is all kinds of traceable. It'll have an IMEI burned in and(since it was remotely disabled) has probably left a trail of tower contacts in the recent past. Now Gizmodo has put up a note on their web page saying "Yeah, we have it. Also we took it apart.". Receiving and harboring stolen goods is illegal in basically every state, and can be a federal crime for items $5k or greater that cross state lines. It is totally plausible that a prototype is worth more than five thousand. Depending on the numbers in which they are being produced, it might have even cost that much to manufacture and, being rare and coveted, is worth rather more.
I honestly don't know what Gizmodo is thinking. This isn't one of those "Oh, Apple's mean lawyers are hounding a bunch of harmless kids and their rumor sites again" situations. This is a "Gizmodo staffers have just published a public admission of having committed a state and/or federal crime(and not one of those minimally and largely civilly enforced ones, like DMCA violations and DRM circumvention tools)". One or more of them could easily go to prison.
I did see Avatar once; but the "gigantic neural net that doesn't like you much" thing is pure Alpha Centauri... damn xenofungus.
It isn't "compatibility with existing apps" you'd need to be worried about, its compatibility with the laws of physics....
Pretty much all moderns smartphones are already noted for having fairly packed mainboards and pretty unexciting battery lives. Something a quarter the size(unless you are happy to have a phone an inch thick), would have a truly sad battery life.
Even there, though, it isn't clear that the newspapers aren't completely fucked.
Consider Craigslist vs. Ebay: Ebay wasn't a particularly mortal threat to classifieds(probably didn't help; but didn't seal their doom) because it tried to largely ignore location. That works fine for stuff that is quite valuable per unit weight, or obscure stuff that you can't get just anywhere, so you just have to suck up the shipping, or for stuff that is all shipped anyway, so cutting out the middleman is helpful.
Craigslist, on the other hand, has all the cheapness of being web based; but is explicitly location-centric. And it crushed the classifieds business like a bug(as with most bugs, the crushed remains are still crawling and twitching a bit, bugs are tough motherfuckers; but it is basically game over.)
It wouldn't exactly be rocket surgery to build a nationwide; but location-focused obituary mechanism. Once the present crop of old people are finished dying, it is not going to be pretty for the paper obituaries...
As you note, greed is frequently a reason to find a way around safety.
In this case, though, there is a fairly convenient alignment of incentives(from safety's perspective). This isn't a Bhopal style "Whoops, there goes a few million in pipes and some 10s of thousands of expendable people for whose injuries and deaths we'll basically never be held liable..." thing. Prior encounters between aircraft and ash have, even in the case of successful landing, run in the high tens of millions to fix, per plane. If a plane did go down, after you had knowingly decided to apply some serious optimism about ash concentrations, you'd be looking at a 100 million plus in hardware, and 200+ stiff wrongful death suits.
That'd be "career limiting" as they say...
No, not that one. It'd be beneath my proud eukaryotic dignity to be housed in a gooey mass of prokaryotic pond scum, however large.
You, er... might want to stay away from eastern Oregon, though.
The structure that looks surprisingly like a gigantic neural network is not, repeat not, the repository of a vast and vengeful consciousness of the murky deeps.
Please carry on with your regularly scheduled consumption.