Speaking as a resident who lives along the GWR mainline, I'm almost more excited by the prospect of electrification, which has also been quietly approved. It might even pave the way for it to be converted to high-speed standards (if we in the West Country can ever persuade the government that a) there's anyone here and b) we're worth having transport links to).
Yes and twice yes. Not only would speeding up a line mean increased capacity, but this is an entirely new line- so it's entirely additional capacity, on top of what there is already. And being fast, you get a lot of capacity for your money.
Which is appealing for anyone who, on their regular 2 hour commute, has to stand shoulder to shoulder with strangers in the freezing vestibule.
Define real work. With just a keyboard, a tablet is extremely productive for note taking, email, and organization, which is pretty much all most college students do. Tablets can wirelessly print these days too. It's a great form factor for carrying with you, without the huge bulk of a laptop bag.
For high end students like CS students? Dell is more correct, a PC would be first priority, followed by a tablet. You can't and shouldn't be doing technical work like coding on a tablet. Dell has a pretty narrow vision here of what tablets are capable of. And it's not hard to see a world in which high end students using campus provided labs for the big stuff, and tablets for everything else.
I don't know if you're a CS student with course snobbism, someone who didn't got to Uni, or someone who did a non-CS course but just didn't do any work...
The single most important job that most students will do is word processing. A short essay is regularly 2500 words plus, 4000 is the defacto standard, and dissertations and theses can be anywhere from 15000 to 100000 words. Doing that on a 9" screen with onscreen keyboard would be one of the circles of hell.
If you're a student in any course with even a slightly scientific or monetary bent, spreadsheets and databases will be standard tools. I don't know what the tablet versions of Excel and Access are like, but I'm not optimistic. Almost every course will involve large amounts of secondary research too (yes, even soft subjects like English Literature expect you to do research). Seeing as most tablets can't even do side-by-side windows, I can't even imagine how you'd be supposed to do this with just one device- except maybe with a printer and a whole lot of scrap paper.
If you read what he's actually saying, I think he's exactly right.
There are three basic flavours of device- tablet, smartphone, and "full computer" (desktop or laptop). I don't know a single person who owns a tablet while not owning a full computer, and I definitely don't know anyone who owns a laptop but not a smartphone. Maybe they're out there, but I've never met one. For most people, the tablet seems to be the third tier of device- people only buy them once they've already bought into the other two tiers.
That's not to belittle the tablet market. Apple, Samsung etc. will be happy as long as there's a market for them and as long as they can make a profit on them. But I see not a single shred of evidence that tablets are seriously eating into the mindshare occupied by desktops and laptops.
This site's subtitled "News for Nerds", not "Shopping Tips for Nerds". A long running non-profit organisation releasing the newest (and long awaited) version of their charitable computer hardware, and the fact they're finally hitting their old target of a sub $100 price tag, are all newsworthy.
If you only read news articles about things you can buy, you might not end up reading much news at all.
The other difference is shear distance. Like it or not (and apologies to our friends in Australia/South Africa/Brazil/etc.) most of the world's richest and most heavily populated countries are in the northern hemisphere. An awful lot of them are near the Atlantic, and a substantial amount of the world's wealthiest are in North America.
For most people, a flight to an airport in Canada will be a small fraction of the multi-stepped journey to the Antarctic continent. The last leg (from the airport to the base) might be just as difficult for both, but that's still many hours of travel saved.
It says plenty about the fact that there are no terrorists- imaginative or otherwise.
The US has suffered a grand total of one successful terrorist attack by Islamic extremists- 11th September. It's also had a couple of minor failed attempts by lonely nut jobs. Contrary to what Fox News says, there aren't terrorists around everhy corner, hordes of nasties waiting to pounce. The one major group that definitely did mean the US harm (Al Qaeda) has now been completely crippled and beheaded.
Arguing that "The TSA is stupid" because "they're creating more targets for terrorism" is completely missing the point. They're stupid because they're trying to stop something that almost never happens.
There was a referendum, which unfortunately the "Yes" campaign lost. They were outspent and outmaneuvered by those in power, who have so much vested interest in keeping the current system.
The main advertising point was "you the voter are too stupid to understand an AV system"- and depressingly, the voters accepted it. Probably says a lot about the level of self belief the population in Britain have these days.
Unfortunately a British Pirate Party is unlikely to ever do as well as their counterparts in Germany. Not due to British political attitudes, but due to our electoral system. With our FPTP system, they will be unable to elect any MPs to parliament unless they can get several dozen thousand votes in a single constituency (average of about 70,000 voters per constituency). They need to be number 1 in a race already crammed with popular mainstream parties.
More hope for MEPs (which are elected more proportionally), but then MEPs aren't exactly influential...
As a CEO of Company A, you assume you'll be able to sell your stuff to employees of Company B. Or C, D, E, etc.. If your company can be employee-free, you just assume that you'll be able to sell to people who work for companies that aren't employee-free. There's always other industries too!
No individual company director is looking at the big picture. Why would they? They only care about their own profits, by necessity.
It's almost a Prisoner's Dilemma. Even if any given CEO knows that what they're doing will, when played out by all their peers, kill the economy, they still can't take a different approach for fear of simply being driven out of business and replaced by someone willing to stay the course.
Basically the PC market has been reduced to who can make them the cheapest. Very little innovation is going on.
In many ways innovation is over rated. Lets say we establish that what we need is computer workstations. They need a screen, some input devices, and hey need to be able to run all your basic office/corporate/development software. These things make employees more productive, and the work higher quality.
Once you've established a great way of doing that, there's only so much you can "innovate". You can change things for the sake of changing them, but ultimately you might arrive at the near perfect set up very quickly. That might be desktops and laptops.
The only thing to do now is make them better. Faster, cheaper, smaller, more reliable, etc.. "Innovating", by randomly changing things to new things you've just thought up, is no guarantee of making anything better.
So you can also ballet dance to a basic level? Maintain scuba gear? Speak at least 3 of the top 5 most spoken world languages? Have a pilot's licence?
Maybe you can- in which case congratulations, you sound like a fascinating purpose. But there are more things in the world to learn than there are days in in a life. Most of the things we don't know we probably don't even know is a thing that can be known!
My Win7 machine still blue screens plenty. It's near enough vanilla in terms of the hardware set up, too. It is an Acer, mind, so maybe the blame isn't all on Microsoft...
Which is a terrifying thought. It would make "vegetative" patients little different from those suffering locked-in syndrome combined with paralysis. Imagine being a patient, fully aware of what's going on around you, listening to your doctors and family talking about you as if you're already dead, and discussing when to dispose of you. It's the sort of thing my personal nightmares are made of.
Funnily enough, my appendix ruptured too. I've had exactly two major medical conditions in my life (and many small ones, obviously). That was one. The other I won't go into (because I don't feel like talking about my medical history on the internet), but it was considerably more painful and more protracted.
Yes, I would prefer be alive in a great deal of pain than have my short existence snuffed out. For one, it might get better!
Oh yes, obscure politics pun-based joke. I went there.
Re:Ken Murray's blog
on
How Doctors Die
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Me, on the other hand- I always want to be kept alive. I don't care how much pain I'm in, how humiliating it might be, how "unresponsive"; I only get the one life, and I intend to make it last. And while we're on the subject, if I ever turn up dead, look for my killer- I'm telling you now, it's not suicide.
I've been in pretty terrible pain before with a few different illnesses, and I'd still be happy being alive in that state rather than dead in no state. And on the subject of "unresponsiveness"- there have been a number of studies showing the brains of "vegetative" patients can respond to speech in exactly the same way as normal conscious people, which would make unplugging the machine little better than murder.
Sunspots affect more than just IT. If you said "sunspots are playing havoc with our network" to an electrical engineer, you'd probably give him a nervous breakdown.
If companies want free publicity by being sensible and opposing draconian and disastrous laws, I'm all for it. Sounds like a good use of the/. front page to me.
They would have a bigger chance if people voted for them. Not voting for a party because they don't stand a chance is a hiding to nothing.
Not saying I don't understand the mentality, mind. It's like the Prisoner's Dilemma; just because you know you're trapped into making the wrong decision, it doesn't mean you're able to pick the right one.
No, we are talking about education for the elite. I would imagine the fraction of the population who understand big O notation or boolean logic is pretty small, probably skews to a pretty high income level, and if I remember my fellow students correctly they were mostly white males like me. You can't even take a class like that at some institutions, much less be lucky enough to have great teachers like happened to me and the OP.
Maybe we're getting off track, but TFA is about K-12 education (kindergarten through to 12th grade). The GP is talking about advanced mathematics, granted, but we are talking about universal education in general when we talk about "home schooling" and "the end of traditional schooling".
And I would argue that advanced concepts (such as higher mathematics) are exactly the ones where a tutor should be on hand to answer questions, go over the tricky bits a second time, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking as a resident who lives along the GWR mainline, I'm almost more excited by the prospect of electrification, which has also been quietly approved. It might even pave the way for it to be converted to high-speed standards (if we in the West Country can ever persuade the government that a) there's anyone here and b) we're worth having transport links to).
That's because it's not up north, it's in The Midlands. Clues' in the name, really.
But then there are some Londoners who think Cambridge is The North, so at least it's half right.
Yes and twice yes. Not only would speeding up a line mean increased capacity, but this is an entirely new line- so it's entirely additional capacity, on top of what there is already. And being fast, you get a lot of capacity for your money.
Which is appealing for anyone who, on their regular 2 hour commute, has to stand shoulder to shoulder with strangers in the freezing vestibule.
Define real work. With just a keyboard, a tablet is extremely productive for note taking, email, and organization, which is pretty much all most college students do. Tablets can wirelessly print these days too. It's a great form factor for carrying with you, without the huge bulk of a laptop bag.
For high end students like CS students? Dell is more correct, a PC would be first priority, followed by a tablet. You can't and shouldn't be doing technical work like coding on a tablet. Dell has a pretty narrow vision here of what tablets are capable of. And it's not hard to see a world in which high end students using campus provided labs for the big stuff, and tablets for everything else.
I don't know if you're a CS student with course snobbism, someone who didn't got to Uni, or someone who did a non-CS course but just didn't do any work...
The single most important job that most students will do is word processing. A short essay is regularly 2500 words plus, 4000 is the defacto standard, and dissertations and theses can be anywhere from 15000 to 100000 words. Doing that on a 9" screen with onscreen keyboard would be one of the circles of hell.
If you're a student in any course with even a slightly scientific or monetary bent, spreadsheets and databases will be standard tools. I don't know what the tablet versions of Excel and Access are like, but I'm not optimistic. Almost every course will involve large amounts of secondary research too (yes, even soft subjects like English Literature expect you to do research). Seeing as most tablets can't even do side-by-side windows, I can't even imagine how you'd be supposed to do this with just one device- except maybe with a printer and a whole lot of scrap paper.
If you read what he's actually saying, I think he's exactly right.
There are three basic flavours of device- tablet, smartphone, and "full computer" (desktop or laptop). I don't know a single person who owns a tablet while not owning a full computer, and I definitely don't know anyone who owns a laptop but not a smartphone. Maybe they're out there, but I've never met one. For most people, the tablet seems to be the third tier of device- people only buy them once they've already bought into the other two tiers.
That's not to belittle the tablet market. Apple, Samsung etc. will be happy as long as there's a market for them and as long as they can make a profit on them. But I see not a single shred of evidence that tablets are seriously eating into the mindshare occupied by desktops and laptops.
This site's subtitled "News for Nerds", not "Shopping Tips for Nerds". A long running non-profit organisation releasing the newest (and long awaited) version of their charitable computer hardware, and the fact they're finally hitting their old target of a sub $100 price tag, are all newsworthy.
If you only read news articles about things you can buy, you might not end up reading much news at all.
The other difference is shear distance. Like it or not (and apologies to our friends in Australia/South Africa/Brazil/etc.) most of the world's richest and most heavily populated countries are in the northern hemisphere. An awful lot of them are near the Atlantic, and a substantial amount of the world's wealthiest are in North America.
For most people, a flight to an airport in Canada will be a small fraction of the multi-stepped journey to the Antarctic continent. The last leg (from the airport to the base) might be just as difficult for both, but that's still many hours of travel saved.
+1 Tragically true.
You've made me sad now.
It says plenty about the fact that there are no terrorists- imaginative or otherwise.
The US has suffered a grand total of one successful terrorist attack by Islamic extremists- 11th September. It's also had a couple of minor failed attempts by lonely nut jobs. Contrary to what Fox News says, there aren't terrorists around everhy corner, hordes of nasties waiting to pounce. The one major group that definitely did mean the US harm (Al Qaeda) has now been completely crippled and beheaded.
Arguing that "The TSA is stupid" because "they're creating more targets for terrorism" is completely missing the point. They're stupid because they're trying to stop something that almost never happens.
There was a referendum, which unfortunately the "Yes" campaign lost. They were outspent and outmaneuvered by those in power, who have so much vested interest in keeping the current system.
The main advertising point was "you the voter are too stupid to understand an AV system"- and depressingly, the voters accepted it. Probably says a lot about the level of self belief the population in Britain have these days.
Unfortunately a British Pirate Party is unlikely to ever do as well as their counterparts in Germany. Not due to British political attitudes, but due to our electoral system. With our FPTP system, they will be unable to elect any MPs to parliament unless they can get several dozen thousand votes in a single constituency (average of about 70,000 voters per constituency). They need to be number 1 in a race already crammed with popular mainstream parties.
More hope for MEPs (which are elected more proportionally), but then MEPs aren't exactly influential...
As a CEO of Company A, you assume you'll be able to sell your stuff to employees of Company B. Or C, D, E, etc.. If your company can be employee-free, you just assume that you'll be able to sell to people who work for companies that aren't employee-free. There's always other industries too!
No individual company director is looking at the big picture. Why would they? They only care about their own profits, by necessity.
It's almost a Prisoner's Dilemma. Even if any given CEO knows that what they're doing will, when played out by all their peers, kill the economy, they still can't take a different approach for fear of simply being driven out of business and replaced by someone willing to stay the course.
Basically the PC market has been reduced to who can make them the cheapest. Very little innovation is going on.
In many ways innovation is over rated. Lets say we establish that what we need is computer workstations. They need a screen, some input devices, and hey need to be able to run all your basic office/corporate/development software. These things make employees more productive, and the work higher quality.
Once you've established a great way of doing that, there's only so much you can "innovate". You can change things for the sake of changing them, but ultimately you might arrive at the near perfect set up very quickly. That might be desktops and laptops.
The only thing to do now is make them better. Faster, cheaper, smaller, more reliable, etc.. "Innovating", by randomly changing things to new things you've just thought up, is no guarantee of making anything better.
So you can also ballet dance to a basic level? Maintain scuba gear? Speak at least 3 of the top 5 most spoken world languages? Have a pilot's licence?
Maybe you can- in which case congratulations, you sound like a fascinating purpose. But there are more things in the world to learn than there are days in in a life. Most of the things we don't know we probably don't even know is a thing that can be known!
My Win7 machine still blue screens plenty. It's near enough vanilla in terms of the hardware set up, too. It is an Acer, mind, so maybe the blame isn't all on Microsoft...
Out of interest, when was the last time a terrorist used technology stolen from a government space agency to launch an attack? Ever?
Which is a terrifying thought. It would make "vegetative" patients little different from those suffering locked-in syndrome combined with paralysis. Imagine being a patient, fully aware of what's going on around you, listening to your doctors and family talking about you as if you're already dead, and discussing when to dispose of you. It's the sort of thing my personal nightmares are made of.
Funnily enough, my appendix ruptured too. I've had exactly two major medical conditions in my life (and many small ones, obviously). That was one. The other I won't go into (because I don't feel like talking about my medical history on the internet), but it was considerably more painful and more protracted.
Yes, I would prefer be alive in a great deal of pain than have my short existence snuffed out. For one, it might get better!
But Harriet Harman is still in the Opposition!
Oh yes, obscure politics pun-based joke. I went there.
Me, on the other hand- I always want to be kept alive. I don't care how much pain I'm in, how humiliating it might be, how "unresponsive"; I only get the one life, and I intend to make it last. And while we're on the subject, if I ever turn up dead, look for my killer- I'm telling you now, it's not suicide.
I've been in pretty terrible pain before with a few different illnesses, and I'd still be happy being alive in that state rather than dead in no state. And on the subject of "unresponsiveness"- there have been a number of studies showing the brains of "vegetative" patients can respond to speech in exactly the same way as normal conscious people, which would make unplugging the machine little better than murder.
Sunspots affect more than just IT. If you said "sunspots are playing havoc with our network" to an electrical engineer, you'd probably give him a nervous breakdown.
Forget a cheque. Send them the payment in small change. In a pre-paid envelope, preferably.
If companies want free publicity by being sensible and opposing draconian and disastrous laws, I'm all for it. Sounds like a good use of the /. front page to me.
They would have a bigger chance if people voted for them. Not voting for a party because they don't stand a chance is a hiding to nothing.
Not saying I don't understand the mentality, mind. It's like the Prisoner's Dilemma; just because you know you're trapped into making the wrong decision, it doesn't mean you're able to pick the right one.
No, we are talking about education for the elite. I would imagine the fraction of the population who understand big O notation or boolean logic is pretty small, probably skews to a pretty high income level, and if I remember my fellow students correctly they were mostly white males like me. You can't even take a class like that at some institutions, much less be lucky enough to have great teachers like happened to me and the OP.
Maybe we're getting off track, but TFA is about K-12 education (kindergarten through to 12th grade). The GP is talking about advanced mathematics, granted, but we are talking about universal education in general when we talk about "home schooling" and "the end of traditional schooling".
And I would argue that advanced concepts (such as higher mathematics) are exactly the ones where a tutor should be on hand to answer questions, go over the tricky bits a second time, etc.