There's no problem with universities using anti-cheating detectors. The problem is with universities forcing you to give up your copyright on work that you produced and legally own copyright over. Why should turnitin.com be allowed to profit off of my work? Why should turnitin.com be allowed to sell my paper to another student, without even informing me they have done so, let alone sharing _any_ of the profit with me? Because if you check the license agreement, this is exactly what turnitin.com is allowed to do.
McGill should safeguard against plagiarism. They should not, however, force a student to give up copyright on the material the student produces. Furthermore, they should not require a student to submit a paper to a service that makes all its profit off the work of a student.
This would be copyright infringement, at least in Canada at the undergraduate level. It would be illegal for a professor to submit someone else's work to turnitin.com, thereby claiming that it was their own work. Even if they worked out a deal with turnitin.com so that the professors were _not_ claiming to be submitting their own work, it would still be copyright infringement as the student owns the copyright on a paper they wrote, the professor is NOT at liberty to make unauthorised copies.
There were some small problems with that comparison though in general, it was a very well-written article. Even after fixing the problems, I'd still expect gcc to be lagging behind most of the other compilers as far as execution and perhaps code size. Anyway, I talked to the author of that article and he's writing another article due for early 2004, a further comparison.
I'm curious, why the difference? I presume you are using smart pointers (www.boost.org) and other such additions to the C++ world, and of course you are using STL and the standard library string type. With all of that, you should virtually never need to do pointer arithmetic (though it is still available if you want to) so that whole category of problems is eliminated. So, what else is causing you to be so slow?
Perhaps it is the graphical user interface, though this isn't really fair as C++ doesn't have one. I use Qt and while it costs a substantial amount of money, I find it to be of very high quality. I can write high quality UI in C++ as fast or faster than in Java.
I'm not saying that C++ is better than Java. There are many reasons I'd still want to use Java. However, I just don't see that it is possible that Java could be five times faster to write than C++ for a programmer with the same level of skills in both languages.
Note that most universities, at least in Canada, would consider this plagiarism if you wrote one essay and submitted it to multiple classes. Of course, you are submitting your essay to multiple scholarship sources and in any case, plagiarism isn't treated as seriously in the 'real world'.
I'm not sure if you are commenting about my claim you have to not download and run anything. Here, I am obviously talking about downloading software you aren't completely sure about from the Internet (particularly ActiveX controls, which should pretty much be disabled in this scenario anyway).
Running store-bought software is probably still a reasonable thing to do with a locked-down Windows 98 system. And even MS Office could be used provided you keep it fully patched and don't open documents emailed to you.
So, I'm not sure I agree with you that such a system would be useless. However, if it does not provide enough functionality, you have the choice of upgrading to a newer operating system or of potentially committing a criminal act of facilitating computer attacks when someone breaks into your system and uses it to attack another third party.
It is reasonable to continue to run Windows 98 after the support period ends provided it is behind a decent firewall, the user does not download and run anything, the user does not use MS Office or MS Outlook, and the user does not use MSIE. Or alternatively, of course, the Win98 system is not hooked up to the Internet.
At this point, there's little reason to require an operating system upgrade unless, of course, there's some additional functionality you'd like to use in a more recent version.
Failure to place Windows 98 behind a firewall, or continuing to use an unpatchable version of MSIE after the first unpatched security hole (this will likely happen in January or, optimistically, as late as February 2004), is likely leaving the user open to criminal charges in many countries. In Canada, it is criminally illegal to fail to perform due dilligence to keep your computer secure, or at least is illegal if the computer is used to attack another system. Nobody I know has ever been charged by this, however.
Get a clue. 'Spelt' is certainly a word meaning the same as 'spelled'. Just because you are ignorant and living in North America doesn't mean the rest of the world is.
I disagree. If a student wants to learn MS Access, that student should go to a local adult education centre or perhaps a college and learn it there. Universities should teach the knowledge and pay much less attention to the specific, proprietary, tools.
That's not to say that MS Access has no business being taught at a university. Simply that if it is used, it should be used to teach SQL and relational database fundamentals. MS Access isn't, in my opinion, the best tool to use to teach this knowledge but it isn't necessarily terribly bad.
However, a university has no business teaching a specific tool rather than the underlying knowledge and claiming that this is what industry wants.
I'm curious, were these computers allowed on the Internet (perhaps from behind a firewall)? More importantly, were these computers allowed on the Internet after Microsoft stopped issuing new security patches for them?
I had a similar problem with Microsoft. Actually, with their XBox advertising list. They ignored my removal requests (four), my complaint to their support address, and eventually even a written cease-and-desist letter. Luckily, I found Microsoft was a member of eTrust. Dealing with eTrust, in comparison, was a pleasure. I got a response back from eTrust within minutes asking for more details (and a copy of one or more of the spam). They forwarded it on to Microsoft who responded within a day, apologising for the problem, claiming they had never had a copy of the cease-and-desist letter forwarded to their department (quite possible), and explaining what they had done to ensure I would not receive any more spam from them. This certainly seems to have worked so far. I found it sad that a C&D letter didn't work but I'd strongly recommend dealing with eTrust if you can.
Now, I think the company you are dealing with is not an eTrust member. You may still be able to contact eTrust for help, though. I know at least half their complaints are for non-members so it may be worth it, I'm not sure.
What t.v. tuner card do you use? What chipset is your motherboard? How do you find CPU usage on your XP1800?
I ask because I have an XP 1700 that I might use for something like this. However, I have an older Haupauge card and the card is darn unstable. Crashes regularly, even in Windows, and has done with two different motherboard chipsets (both VIA, however). Also, the driver support from Haupauge was terrible. The Linux driver was in a different league as far as quality, compared to the Windows 2k and XP drivers from the manufacturer.
I agree that OS X is generally great with its device support. However, this is apparently not particularly important to most computer users. After all, take a look at Windows. Virtually no device I buy in the Windows world allows me simply to plug it in and have it 'just work'. Most of the time, I have to install a driver, much of the time searching the web for the latest version. Many times, in fact, I am simply unable to find a digitally signed driver for Windows XP though I will admit the driver generally (but not always) still works.
The situation with video cards is even worse. Here, you have to decide whether to go with an old digitally-signed driver or the latest driver which may cause incompatibilities with your system. And then you've got to make sure you have the latest version of DirectX to run your games.
Now, compare this to my experiences with the version of Mandrake that I run. I plug in a new device, it is detected during the boot process, I'm given the option of configuring it if necessary, and the thing generally just works. I haven't had to spend time searching for and downloading the right driver on my Linux system.
Now, Mandrake Linux certainly isn't perfect. Probably not as good as OS X. But still, much better than Windows XP. And people don't seem to complain about XP.
This is what I was told when I worked at Suncor, an oil company. I was maintaining a little over 2000 pages on the Intranet at that point and some high-priced consultant spat these two rules out at us. I said, 'Great, that takes care of 343 pages, what about the other 2000 pages on our intranet web site?' They were quite surprised we had so many pages (this was 1997 or 1998) but could offer no alternative. They just restated both rules.
I have some experience outsourcing development to India. I'm quite interested in knowing some specifics about your experience. How many programmers did you employ in India? Would this have been the same number as you employed in the U.S.? How much extra management was required? How much did you pay the Indian programmers compared to the U.S. programmers? (In Canada, it can often be more expensive to hire Indian programmers) How much did the culture and time zones affect you? How well spec'ed were the functions before you sent them out and how much testing did you do when you got them back?
This is true but doesn't account for the fact that you could buy a Mac without a monitor and then pick up the 20" monitor separately. As far as I can see, you get all of the benefits as with an iMac welded together with the monitor, but you also have the option to upgrade your Mac in, say, four years while still keeping your monitor.
Sure, some people will buy the iMac and use it for ten years, quite happily. For these people, this is a good option. However, it is reasonable to expect a high-quality monitor to outlast the usefulness of even a Mac.
The 'standard' for CPU allocation is apparently roughly 5% for AI and closer to 30% for graphics (not quite sure why, though, as this should be more offloaded to the GPU, but then I'm not a graphics programmer). However, some games (including console games, specifically XBox games) are edging closer to 40% or more for AI, spending much less on graphics (or, rather, offloading almost all the processing to the GPU). These AI instructions, run on the CPU, would still need emulation. Creating DirectX for the PowerPC would, on these games, handle the 5 - 10% that the graphics were eating up. It wouldn't help with the AI, though, nor with some of the other elements that similarly must be emulated or translated. Graphics, fine. Sound, probably fine. Your input devices (which probably take up virtually no CPU already), you can provide high-speed reimplementations. But there's still a lot in modern games that you simply cannot reimplement in a general manner short of emulating the ix86 instruction set.
Basically, the GPU means that your CPU is more likely to spend its time doing general-purpose execution rather than graphics. So your suggestion, while good, isn't going to help as much as you may think.
Halo is apparently an A1 game (I wouldn't know, I never played it). DoA3 was fine, I bought that when the price came down. I'm not convinced I'd list it as a must-get game, though, and I certainly wouldn't list any of the other games as must-buy. I'll likely get Amped 2 when it's released, never thought enough of Amped 1 to buy it though. That said, I'm a slashdot user and therefore not typical.
While I may disagree with the quality of the XBox games upon launch, I clearly wasn't remembering the launch of the PS2 correctly. GT3 was almost good enough to make me buy a PS2 but if it wasn't available at launch, I am sure you are right about their library problems at the beginning.
Now, what I thought the XBox did really badly was to not come with DVD playback. And their DVD adapter was _expensive_ (and mine wasn't very good). The PS2 could play DVDs out of the box, no? I'm not quite sure how Microsoft justified that, coming so long after the PS2 was released.
This is a great point. I don't know if the market research was looking at perception or behavior. Slashdot, of course, is a bad place to look for either, we are all geeks. But yes, when Microsoft releases the XBox 2, the perception that it cannot play XBox 1 games may be far more important than the (possible) fact that most people wouldn't actually do so.
The add-on cards were pretty much never good value for money. Sega did this, I think, with the Genesis. But the old Master Systems were so cheap even brand-new that you could buy one cheaper than you could buy the add-on card (which was roughly $100 Canuck at the time).
The add-on card for the XBox 2 would have a rather expensive component that makes the production of this card rather unlikely (but certainly not impossible).
Slashdot Mirror
There's no problem with universities using anti-cheating detectors. The problem is with universities forcing you to give up your copyright on work that you produced and legally own copyright over. Why should turnitin.com be allowed to profit off of my work? Why should turnitin.com be allowed to sell my paper to another student, without even informing me they have done so, let alone sharing _any_ of the profit with me? Because if you check the license agreement, this is exactly what turnitin.com is allowed to do.
McGill should safeguard against plagiarism. They should not, however, force a student to give up copyright on the material the student produces. Furthermore, they should not require a student to submit a paper to a service that makes all its profit off the work of a student.
This would be copyright infringement, at least in Canada at the undergraduate level. It would be illegal for a professor to submit someone else's work to turnitin.com, thereby claiming that it was their own work. Even if they worked out a deal with turnitin.com so that the professors were _not_ claiming to be submitting their own work, it would still be copyright infringement as the student owns the copyright on a paper they wrote, the professor is NOT at liberty to make unauthorised copies.
There were some small problems with that comparison though in general, it was a very well-written article. Even after fixing the problems, I'd still expect gcc to be lagging behind most of the other compilers as far as execution and perhaps code size. Anyway, I talked to the author of that article and he's writing another article due for early 2004, a further comparison.
I'm curious, why the difference? I presume you are using smart pointers (www.boost.org) and other such additions to the C++ world, and of course you are using STL and the standard library string type. With all of that, you should virtually never need to do pointer arithmetic (though it is still available if you want to) so that whole category of problems is eliminated. So, what else is causing you to be so slow?
Perhaps it is the graphical user interface, though this isn't really fair as C++ doesn't have one. I use Qt and while it costs a substantial amount of money, I find it to be of very high quality. I can write high quality UI in C++ as fast or faster than in Java.
I'm not saying that C++ is better than Java. There are many reasons I'd still want to use Java. However, I just don't see that it is possible that Java could be five times faster to write than C++ for a programmer with the same level of skills in both languages.
Note that most universities, at least in Canada, would consider this plagiarism if you wrote one essay and submitted it to multiple classes. Of course, you are submitting your essay to multiple scholarship sources and in any case, plagiarism isn't treated as seriously in the 'real world'.
But yes, you can plagiarise yourself.
I'm not sure if you are commenting about my claim you have to not download and run anything. Here, I am obviously talking about downloading software you aren't completely sure about from the Internet (particularly ActiveX controls, which should pretty much be disabled in this scenario anyway).
Running store-bought software is probably still a reasonable thing to do with a locked-down Windows 98 system. And even MS Office could be used provided you keep it fully patched and don't open documents emailed to you.
So, I'm not sure I agree with you that such a system would be useless. However, if it does not provide enough functionality, you have the choice of upgrading to a newer operating system or of potentially committing a criminal act of facilitating computer attacks when someone breaks into your system and uses it to attack another third party.
It is reasonable to continue to run Windows 98 after the support period ends provided it is behind a decent firewall, the user does not download and run anything, the user does not use MS Office or MS Outlook, and the user does not use MSIE. Or alternatively, of course, the Win98 system is not hooked up to the Internet.
At this point, there's little reason to require an operating system upgrade unless, of course, there's some additional functionality you'd like to use in a more recent version.
Failure to place Windows 98 behind a firewall, or continuing to use an unpatchable version of MSIE after the first unpatched security hole (this will likely happen in January or, optimistically, as late as February 2004), is likely leaving the user open to criminal charges in many countries. In Canada, it is criminally illegal to fail to perform due dilligence to keep your computer secure, or at least is illegal if the computer is used to attack another system. Nobody I know has ever been charged by this, however.
Get a clue. 'Spelt' is certainly a word meaning the same as 'spelled'. Just because you are ignorant and living in North America doesn't mean the rest of the world is.
I disagree. If a student wants to learn MS Access, that student should go to a local adult education centre or perhaps a college and learn it there. Universities should teach the knowledge and pay much less attention to the specific, proprietary, tools.
That's not to say that MS Access has no business being taught at a university. Simply that if it is used, it should be used to teach SQL and relational database fundamentals. MS Access isn't, in my opinion, the best tool to use to teach this knowledge but it isn't necessarily terribly bad.
However, a university has no business teaching a specific tool rather than the underlying knowledge and claiming that this is what industry wants.
'EA Sucks'.
I'm curious, were these computers allowed on the Internet (perhaps from behind a firewall)? More importantly, were these computers allowed on the Internet after Microsoft stopped issuing new security patches for them?
I had a similar problem with Microsoft. Actually, with their XBox advertising list. They ignored my removal requests (four), my complaint to their support address, and eventually even a written cease-and-desist letter. Luckily, I found Microsoft was a member of eTrust. Dealing with eTrust, in comparison, was a pleasure. I got a response back from eTrust within minutes asking for more details (and a copy of one or more of the spam). They forwarded it on to Microsoft who responded within a day, apologising for the problem, claiming they had never had a copy of the cease-and-desist letter forwarded to their department (quite possible), and explaining what they had done to ensure I would not receive any more spam from them. This certainly seems to have worked so far. I found it sad that a C&D letter didn't work but I'd strongly recommend dealing with eTrust if you can.
Now, I think the company you are dealing with is not an eTrust member. You may still be able to contact eTrust for help, though. I know at least half their complaints are for non-members so it may be worth it, I'm not sure.
What t.v. tuner card do you use? What chipset is your motherboard? How do you find CPU usage on your XP1800?
I ask because I have an XP 1700 that I might use for something like this. However, I have an older Haupauge card and the card is darn unstable. Crashes regularly, even in Windows, and has done with two different motherboard chipsets (both VIA, however). Also, the driver support from Haupauge was terrible. The Linux driver was in a different league as far as quality, compared to the Windows 2k and XP drivers from the manufacturer.
While Win98 will no longer be available, I believe it will still be supported by Microsoft for some time, correct?
Note that the Visual C++ .NET Standard Edition does not include an optimising C++ compiler.
I agree that OS X is generally great with its device support. However, this is apparently not particularly important to most computer users. After all, take a look at Windows. Virtually no device I buy in the Windows world allows me simply to plug it in and have it 'just work'. Most of the time, I have to install a driver, much of the time searching the web for the latest version. Many times, in fact, I am simply unable to find a digitally signed driver for Windows XP though I will admit the driver generally (but not always) still works.
The situation with video cards is even worse. Here, you have to decide whether to go with an old digitally-signed driver or the latest driver which may cause incompatibilities with your system. And then you've got to make sure you have the latest version of DirectX to run your games.
Now, compare this to my experiences with the version of Mandrake that I run. I plug in a new device, it is detected during the boot process, I'm given the option of configuring it if necessary, and the thing generally just works. I haven't had to spend time searching for and downloading the right driver on my Linux system.
Now, Mandrake Linux certainly isn't perfect. Probably not as good as OS X. But still, much better than Windows XP. And people don't seem to complain about XP.
This is what I was told when I worked at Suncor, an oil company. I was maintaining a little over 2000 pages on the Intranet at that point and some high-priced consultant spat these two rules out at us. I said, 'Great, that takes care of 343 pages, what about the other 2000 pages on our intranet web site?' They were quite surprised we had so many pages (this was 1997 or 1998) but could offer no alternative. They just restated both rules.
I have some experience outsourcing development to India. I'm quite interested in knowing some specifics about your experience. How many programmers did you employ in India? Would this have been the same number as you employed in the U.S.? How much extra management was required? How much did you pay the Indian programmers compared to the U.S. programmers? (In Canada, it can often be more expensive to hire Indian programmers) How much did the culture and time zones affect you? How well spec'ed were the functions before you sent them out and how much testing did you do when you got them back?
This is true but doesn't account for the fact that you could buy a Mac without a monitor and then pick up the 20" monitor separately. As far as I can see, you get all of the benefits as with an iMac welded together with the monitor, but you also have the option to upgrade your Mac in, say, four years while still keeping your monitor.
Sure, some people will buy the iMac and use it for ten years, quite happily. For these people, this is a good option. However, it is reasonable to expect a high-quality monitor to outlast the usefulness of even a Mac.
The 'standard' for CPU allocation is apparently roughly 5% for AI and closer to 30% for graphics (not quite sure why, though, as this should be more offloaded to the GPU, but then I'm not a graphics programmer). However, some games (including console games, specifically XBox games) are edging closer to 40% or more for AI, spending much less on graphics (or, rather, offloading almost all the processing to the GPU). These AI instructions, run on the CPU, would still need emulation. Creating DirectX for the PowerPC would, on these games, handle the 5 - 10% that the graphics were eating up. It wouldn't help with the AI, though, nor with some of the other elements that similarly must be emulated or translated. Graphics, fine. Sound, probably fine. Your input devices (which probably take up virtually no CPU already), you can provide high-speed reimplementations. But there's still a lot in modern games that you simply cannot reimplement in a general manner short of emulating the ix86 instruction set.
Basically, the GPU means that your CPU is more likely to spend its time doing general-purpose execution rather than graphics. So your suggestion, while good, isn't going to help as much as you may think.
This assumes the only reason the XBox 2 would have problems running XBox 1 games would be the different CPU. This is not the case.
Halo is apparently an A1 game (I wouldn't know, I never played it). DoA3 was fine, I bought that when the price came down. I'm not convinced I'd list it as a must-get game, though, and I certainly wouldn't list any of the other games as must-buy. I'll likely get Amped 2 when it's released, never thought enough of Amped 1 to buy it though. That said, I'm a slashdot user and therefore not typical.
While I may disagree with the quality of the XBox games upon launch, I clearly wasn't remembering the launch of the PS2 correctly. GT3 was almost good enough to make me buy a PS2 but if it wasn't available at launch, I am sure you are right about their library problems at the beginning.
Now, what I thought the XBox did really badly was to not come with DVD playback. And their DVD adapter was _expensive_ (and mine wasn't very good). The PS2 could play DVDs out of the box, no? I'm not quite sure how Microsoft justified that, coming so long after the PS2 was released.
This is a great point. I don't know if the market research was looking at perception or behavior. Slashdot, of course, is a bad place to look for either, we are all geeks. But yes, when Microsoft releases the XBox 2, the perception that it cannot play XBox 1 games may be far more important than the (possible) fact that most people wouldn't actually do so.
Marketing, of course, is all about perception.
The add-on cards were pretty much never good value for money. Sega did this, I think, with the Genesis. But the old Master Systems were so cheap even brand-new that you could buy one cheaper than you could buy the add-on card (which was roughly $100 Canuck at the time).
The add-on card for the XBox 2 would have a rather expensive component that makes the production of this card rather unlikely (but certainly not impossible).