Let's see what's a REALLY BIG downside to coax... Oh wait, I remember, it's that everyone HAS TO SHARE the same connection. Yeah, you know all those ethernet switches that cost practically nothing, guarantee no collisions and allow everyone to communicate full duplex (do you even remember what a collision is or half duplex is anymore)? Well, coax doesn't have those.
The list of UTP advantages is long but INSTALLATION COSTS IS NOT ONE OF THEM. Coax is far cheaper to run, but whatever money you recover from coax will be lost in management nightmares. UTP is cheaper now, when I bought my first home networking gear (12+ years ago) UTP was way beyond what I could afford (cheap 8 port hubs went for several hundred dollars at the time). My first network was coax. When I switched to UTP, I never looked back. UTP is only affordable now because of the economy of scale.
I remember the good ol' days (~15 years ago) when I worked in an office that had a network in 3 coax home run segments with an optically isolated repeater on one of the runs because the feet really add up quick when you have to wind it to each office. Every time one of the segments went down the guy running the network would go to each persons office, poke his head in and ask "did you disconnect your T connector?" We asked people to hold off building their CD images until late at night because if any ONE person started a build (which meant pulling assets from one server) the entire network became nearly unusable for EVERYBODY because all the servers were on one segment. We didn't have internet at this time; only large corporations, universities and netcom users had internet back then.
Gosh, I'm so sorry UTP won the war. We could employ twice as many network technicians if we would have stayed on coax.
Pay should be based on how important your job is to the function of society. Well, go ahead and take for your lovely socialist commune in the mountains. In a capitalist society like ours, your pay is based upon market forces.
Teachers, by contrast are without compare the MOST important people in our society. No.
That is, in fact happening, unfortunately. Lawyers aren't paid according to the innocence of their clients, so I don't see the parallel here. Lawyers who are more successful at winning their client's cases get the higher value cases. If you're a millionaire accused of a crime, who are you going to choose: the public defender or (the late) Johnnie Cochrane? You pay a premium for top flight representation. That's the parallel I alluded to.
Why? So that we can replace one problem with another? All that would do is give us a bunch of teachers whose sole motivation is to win rather than to educate. In this case the "win" scenario is the teacher whose students end up the most educated.
To teach in college, you do. You don't need an advanced degree in chemistry to teach elementary school science. I'm sorry. A lawyer DOES need a doctorate degree in law. And your argument was that a teachers salary should exceed that of the lawyer.
I agree. They should be. But first, we need to get enough good teachers in place so that when half the teachers don't pass, we're still able to educate our kids. A lofty goal indeed. So if we do start your plan, does that mean that more than half the teachers we will be giving raises to will be incompetent educators?
If a school board cans you for doing something unethical, you are unlikely to be employed anywhere around. If a school board is even able to can you. This does not hold the same for lawyers (or doctors). If you want teachers to be the upper crust of professional society, we deserve the most pristine ethical behavior possible.
Check. If they aren't teaching, they're grading papers. They spend half their vacation doing class prep for the next school year. Despite getting the summer "vacation", they work more hours annually than people in most professions. Also check. You've obviously never been a teacher. No, but I've been a statistician. You know what the numbers say? Let's just say your sample size is clearly too small and heavily biased.
God forbid a lawyer ever get disbarred for being unethical.... It actually happens all the time.
My TI-82 programmable calculator still works. I bought it when I was in high school, circa 1992. Is your TI-82 backlit? Is it color? Is the screen an active matrix LCD? How many elements does the screen have and how large are they? Does it have a touch screen? What processor is in it? Does it have any moving parts? Was it subject to heavy daily use for 10 years?
If hardware fails after three years, it was poorly made. Period. How many pieces of hardware in your computer have a warranty that extends past three years? past five? How about the 10 years it'll take?
In the quantities we're talking about buying them, a custom-designed OLPC type device with a tablet instead of a keyboard should easily be attainable for under $100 That has got to the funniest moment in your whole post. You ignore the fact that OLPC is having a terrible time getting an even remotely usable platform for $100 (currently analysts expect it to be in the $150 range, but OLPC spokespeople are estimating $135-140), then extrapolate that to a machine that should survive continuous abuse for 10 years. You claim that a computer should only cost $100 and should be made of quality components with a 10 year lifespan. Clearly you're smoking the good stuff.
Oh please. Are you really implying that a teacher's job is comparable to a lawyers? Do they really need to make over $160K/yr to start? The average starting salary for someone coming out of Harvard Law is only $120K/yr.
Tell you what, I'll consider your cost increase when teachers must:
Completely give up unions
Pay for benefits themselves
Be paid according to the subject competence of their exiting students
Compete for top students so they can get those most likely to be competent in the subject
Hold an advanced degree in the subject they are teaching
Be licensed by passing a state bar (something more impressive than say CBEST, which is a freakin' joke)
Be subject to review by an ethics board with the power to pull their license
Teach all year, most weekends and most holidays
Work 80 hours per week upon starting falling to 60 hours after 5 years
Carry malpractice insurance and be subject to lawsuits every time a student passes their class but doesn't learn anything
Have the ethics board review them if they sued too often for malpractice
Let me know when you've got all that. I'm not even going to consider that kind of pay without something close to this kind of risk.
To cut costs, why not eliminate busing in urban areas where city bus routes already exist?
Because then you would attract predators to ride the city bus. Busses rarely run on time. City bus drivers are not held to the same background check as School bus drivers.
To cut costs, why not build schools with lots and lots of triple-pane windows so that you can exclusively use natural lighting except on cloudy days?
Because it is really expensive to replace those when they get broken, and natural lighting tends to be very harsh and difficult to control.
To cut costs, why not build schools with INTERIOR HALLS so that you don't lose so much heat/air conditioning when the kids open the doors?
Some schools have that. It doesn't help very much. Door openings do not have a flat distribution.
Instead of photocopying handouts for the students, assign them all tablet computers, which are infinitely reusable.
They aren't infinitely reusable, they're easy to steal, they wear out after 3-4 years, their battery would be good at most for 1 year, and the cost of just one is probably less than the cost of every photocopy that kid is likely to receive during his entire career. Printed paper is also easier to read.
Cut administrative costs by grouping multiple districts under a single regional school board with a single administrative staff responsible for paying salaries, budget management, etc.
Large school districts typically waste more money than smaller ones. I was a product of the LAUSD, second largest district in the country (at the time). I can't think of a single thing that monster district had going for it that a smaller district didn't, except maybe for their couple of magnet schools (which didn't save any money, just gave them something to brag about).
"That is a good question. What do you guys think?"
[...brief discussion with participation from others in the class... if you've studied linear functions you can graph what the solution means visually]
"In this class we will only be working with what is called the Real Number System, and in this system there is only one solution to that equation. There are other number systems, and there may be more than one solution to this equation in those systems or there may be no solutions at all. If you would like to know more about this please come talk with me after class."
Now they know that for the remainder of this class the answer is "there is only one solution." They also know there is more complexity there than meets the eye, and those who may be so inclined can explore it further. Of course you can't do any of this if you haven't studied modern algebra which almost always means holding a degree in mathematics.
Teachers have answer books to help them. Unlike english, math is easy for a moron to teach since the answer is either exactly right, or it's wrong.
Okay, so here you are in front of a bunch of students and walking them through the beginnings of algebra and you ask them to solve:
3x + 5 = 23
You go through the motions and the solution x = 6 comes out. Some student in back raises his/her hand and asks:
"Is it possible that x could be something else?"
Is that a good question? Is it a dumb question? Is it obvious? What is the answer? Is it in the answer book? Is that always the answer? Are you sure?
This is a question one could expect in an introductory algebra course and unless you've taken a course in abstract algebra, you probably don't really know the full answer to the question. It is actually a very good question; pursuing higher mathematics questions like that will occupy many hours of homework.
Anyway, back on topic, I wish that the CPU manufacturers could finally come up with a "generational" standard socket. A well-designed module socket should last as long as an expansion slot standard (ISA,PCI,PCIe) and not change for damn near every model of chip.
Unfortunately this isn't as practical as it sounds. As technologies to increase performance continue, the socket technology would quickly become a bottleneck. If we were to go back 10 years ago (1987) our boards would have 3.3v CPUs, 64 bit memory busses and plain old SDR DIMMs. We'd be seriously hamstrung with how much performance we could squeeze out of it. Hyper Transport and CSI would be entirely impossible with the frontside bus design from back then, and would have been entirely impractical to implement back then. A socket that could have grown over that time would have 100 pins for general housekeeping, 200 legacy pins to support FSB and another 700 pins for the multiple hyper transport interconnects. It would have been prohibitively expensive to make boards back then that supported 1000 pin CPUs. We did not know then how exactly we would get to our performance today. A whole memory technology (RIMM) and an expansion card technology (AGP) came and went during that time.
And I have to say that the opinion of "someone who has gone through a security check" isn't terribly authoritative, unless you were turned down for having a similar background to Randal's.
Or unless I read through the appeals proceedings of those who were denied and appealed the decision. They mask the names of people and companies involved and make that material freely available. But you didn't check that, did you? I have a pretty good idea of what disqualifies you. If they didn't give a clearance to anybody who has done drugs, we'd have barely any Ph.D.'s with a clearance. As long as it wasn't recent use, they don't care as long as you don't lie about it.
and Randall still can't get a clearance without being upfront about it.
As someone who has gone through a security background check, worked at Intel and read the decision of the appeals court: I would be fairly surprised if Randal was able to get a security clearance even even if no conviction had occurred. The undisputed portions of the case suggest that Randal lacked an ethical barrier between him and either his curiosity about things for which he did not have access or his desire to gain respect by demonstrating his skill. This was 13 years ago maybe he has changed, I don't know.
Whether his intentions at the time were noble or not: he logged onto a system for which he knew his account should have been deleted; he ran a gate program on the system (after previously being told to stop running a gate on other systems); he cracked one of the passwords to someone with higher access on the system; he then logged on to the system using the cracked user's account; he transferred the password file to another machine; he ran crack on this other machine; he turned up 35 weak passwords; he said nothing; he left for a while to teach a class; he came back; he still said nothing; he re-ran crack on another faster machine (this is apparently what eventually got him caught).
Randal claims he did all this to re-gain respect at Intel's supercomputer division. I have no reason to doubt this is honest. The fact that he so freely gave so much information to the police suggests to me that he was trying to convey that he had no intention of harming Intel's business. However it is very, very bad judgment. Now if you were the agent assigned to his security background check, looking to see if his character demonstrates a likelihood of compromising sensitive information, even unintentionally, what would you think?
That was indeed the problem. I did eventually get the thing running and, interestingly, despite using many published mergesort algorithms for sorting linked lists, the bitsort algorithm generally ran a constant 3-4x faster. So it appears that I was wrong about his mergesort having an asymptotic characteristic of O(n^3) and improving the efficiency of his mergesort gave only incremental performance improvement.
Unfortunately this followup will forever be buried below the mod threshhold but it appears that despite my best efforts, radix sort (bitsort in this case) is superior to mergesort for linked lists. I tested different list sizes, different random ranges and a few other things I could think of, and bitsort always ran faster.
The only weirdness I could not get rid of is that every time I compiled using gcc -O2 I got segfaults. I did not have time to track it down, I suspect stack smashing due to array usage irregularities.
But then anyone who thinks the roundabout way he used of accessing the top 16 bits of a 32-bit memory value is 'cool' is definitely on my list of people most likely to re-invent the radix sort badly.
It is clearly a slow day for me. I have gone one step further and ported his code over to Linux (only required a change to GetTickCount) and attempted to run it. His "cool" way of using a pointer hack has caused his code to dump core. The problem is his hack being a signed short int pointer. Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault. 0x08048752 in BitFast (TailNode=0x804a018, run=0) at bitfast.h:37
if (Tail[val]) {//if not 0 (gdb) p val $1 = -22087
So I try putting unsigned on ptrHack. Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault. 0x08048772 in BitFast (TailNode=0x804a018, run=0) at bitfast.h:39
tmpN->nextNode = pN; (gdb) p tmpN $1 = (Node *) 0xffff Yeah. Not so sure that casting is what he really wants. I'm not entirely clear how it is his code will work. I really wanted to clean up his mergesort and re-run it to see how valid his claim is, but it looks hopeless. I'll work on it a little more, but since the problem seems to be in his algorithm, it doesn't look real hopeful.
I don't know what possessed me to look at his code, but he really hasn't shown what he claims to have shown. It isn't clear to me that his code is doing what he says, but what IS clear to me is that his comparison to mergesort is very unfair. He has a TRULY AWFUL implementation of merge sort. For example, every time he goes to split a sub-list in half, he does a linear search from the current node to the end the sub-list. Having determined this value he then does ANOTHER LINEAR SEARCH to find the half-way point.
So he has basically made an O(N^2) time complexity process just to divide the list for the merge sort. This is inside his n*log(n) merge sort. So he has an O(n^3) time complexity mergesort and trumps up how fast his modified radix sort is. Come on! Bubble sort would have beat his mergesort.
His cleverness gets the better of him when it comes to his modified radix sort. For example, he creates two arrays (on the stack) of 65535 elements; apparently unaware that this creates an array with indexes 0..65534.
my hypothesis is that addition breaks down when you get into numbers bigger then about a trillion, in such a way that the result of adding two numbers tends towards the result of multiplication
Interesting. My hypothesis is that multiplication of two such numbers will differ from addition of two such numbers by at least 12 orders of magnitude. Let us know what you find out.
Okay to all the posters prior to this who pointed out the cisco iPhone...
Cisco created that product AFTER Apple announced their iPhone. Cisco allowed their trademark to LAPSE then quickly pulled it back while it was in limbo before being completely abandoned. Cisco incorrectly claimed to have an iPhone product when they renewed the trademark. After word of Apple's iPhone started floating around, Cisco quickly rebranded an existing product to use the iPhone name hoping to hold on to it.
In short, Cisco acted with bad faith, and continues to do so.
I don't particularly like either company, but I think Cisco is the dishonest party in this case.
Despite the scare mongering in TFA, the bottom line is he was subpoenaed for a video that might have been possible evidence in a (possible) serious crime. They're investigating a violent protest - a policeman (apparently) had his skull cracked, for goodness sake. I don't care how pure your protest motives are, that sort of thing is never appropriate. (Well, okay, maybe as an absolute last resort for overthrowing a government, but I don't think we're there yet.)
According to the article, that is incorrect. They are investigating the destruction of a police cruiser tail light which was allegedly partially paid for by federal funds. This isn't to say that the police officer wasn't injured; simply that the federal attorney could not manage to extend his reach to cover that too. The police officer is a state matter, and he (Wolf) is protected by a shield law.
Now according to the Mr. Wolf (and I'm not saying he is unbiased) he is refusing because he does not believe that this is about destruction of property. He believes that the DoJ wants to cherry-pick scenes from his video to show to a grand jury so they will approve of questioning Mr. Wolf about his contacts in the organization. They will then question these contacts about their contacts, and those contacts about their contacts. It is his contention that this is about gathering names, and once the grand jury investigation is over the government will simply drop its case because they don't particularly care about the tail light. They won't to bolster their watch list.
Whether he is right or not, I cannot say. It certainly says something that he is willing to let a judge review the tape in its unedited entirety and be bound by the Judge's decision. However I can also see that the government cannot simply say "sure, go ahead" because they do not want to set a precedent of involving the judiciary for everything that is about to go before a grand jury. After all, a grand jury cannot convict someone.
You indicate your disapproval of web development as a university major, yet fail to explain why.
I'm curious what about web development you see as making it substantive enough to be a degree which stands on its own. You haven't really mentioned anything that isn't already covered in software engineering. The issues faced with web programming are essentially the same issues we faced with client/server/n-tier architecture, and software engineering is the tool to address those issues. A software engineer should be expected to handle web development, it isn't clear that a web developer should be expected to handle software engineering. As such, "web developer" sounds like a vocational specialization of the formal field of software engineering.
I could go on and on about what made Amiga great, but every time I even mention it, people immediately place me in the slot marked, "crazy." I'd like to see more Amiga philosophy in modern software design, but even I have to admit that light of Amiga may be irretrievably fading. Really, you people have no idea what you missed...
Maybe Reichart can pay you to work on Onion for AmigaOS 4 and we can all relive it!
"[W]arrantless foreign intelligence surveillance within the United States" is not a wiretap. A wiretap involves intercepting the actual content of a conversation.
What the heck? I cannot begin to understand the depth of ignorance of that statement. The DoJ letter I linked specifically mentioned that the letter was in response to concerns over intercepting communications. The letter was arguing that this was legal. Phew! Good thing you posted anonymously.
That's right - you have no expectation of privacy for your phone billing data. That's settled law.
Yeah... 'cuz like HP is in absolutely no hot water at all for acquiring phone billing data on its board members without their permission. I mean, the board members have no expectation of privacy for that. Right?
The President has clearly said he is not breaking the law, and despite what the liberal media is telling you, each and every wiretap still requires an warrant
I'm lost. Are you being sarcastic? Normally I'd think it obvious that this was tongue in cheek, except your nickname makes a Rush reference.
Is the United States Department of Justice, a department headed by an appointee of the president, also part of the liberal media? So when they wrote "This constitutional authority includes the authority to order warrantless foreign intelligence surveillance within the United States"?
The entire executive branch, and much of the republican congress, has said it/they believe that the president has the authority to authorize warrantless wiretaps and furthermore he has done so.
Contrary to the majority of the responses I've read, which suggest that the root is biological (end of story), my experiences suggest otherwise.
Ahh the hasty generalization... or is it the non-representative sample? or is it confirmation bias? or insufficiently large sample set? Several of the responses you've read have pointed out that there is research on this out there. The research strongly supports the notion that there are subjects which, on average, each find boring. Past a certain age, boys will find playing with dolls to be very dull, but girls will thrive in the role-playing they derive from it. At the same time girls will find building a track for slot cars to be monotonous and unrewarding whereas the boy will reap no end of value from it.
It is naive to think that there aren't a barrage of forces that discourage women from pursuing technical fields in these formative years.
I'm not so sure about that.
One girl, leaps and bounds above her male peers in ability, said flat out, "I'm not good at computers: I'm a girl."
And you've concluded that she is avoiding computers because someone has told her that girls+computers do not mix. Have you considered that the computers are simply not interesting to her and she uses this excuse to take a break from them? Bright kids often learn responses that confound adults and buy them a much needed break from something they really don't want to do.
Similarly, another girl with amazing symbolic reasoning ability explained to me that she was bad at math because she struggled with arithmetic.
Coincidentally a boy in the same situation would probably come to the same conclusion. To a young child mathematics and arithmetic seem inextricably linked.
The real difference will occur only when we change the way we teach technical fields to girls, using an approach that makes use of the intellectual strengths of females (men and women are different, as many have pointed out).
Since you do not believe that the differences are biological (you said so in your first paragraph) what does this intellectual strength stem from? Since it is non-biological in origin, isn't it likely that we already have this strength represented? If so, what advantage is there in overrepresenting this particular intellectual strength? I'm really curious what this non-biological intellectual strength is.
want to know the cold hard truth as to why women don't take it up? because they all secretly want to get knocked up, have a baby and stay at home and let someone else do the work.
While there may be some truth to women leaving the workforce being a primary factor in lower wages, your attack on stay-at-home moms is poorly placed. Have you ever actually watched someone do this? Consider their day:
Wake up self, wake up kids, gets kids fed, get oldest ready for school and out the door, change the baby's diaper, gets the 2nd oldest ready for pre-school, drive him to school, drive back, get the baby ready for morning nap, put baby down for morning nap, take care of dishes from breakfast, take a shower, get a load of laundry going, take inventory of food/plan shopping, sweep floor, move laundry to dryer, get another load going, get baby up, give baby snack, off to store for dinner fixings, come back and put food away, pick up oldest from kindergarten, pick up middle child from preschool, back home, fix lunch, feed kids, send kids to play, clean up lunch table, play with kids, get youngest two ready for nap, put youngest two down for nap, give the oldest some quiet craft/activity to do, move laundry to dryer, fold clothes that were in dryer, put clothes away, start dishwasher, wipe down counters and sinks **now you get a brief break until the youngest get up from nap**, get kids up from nap, feed everyone snack, begin prepping for dinner, keep kids entertained, keep baby in clean diaper, kiss boo-boos, bandage scrapes, defuse fights, start cooking dinner...
fuck working all your life when someone else can do it for you.
I've watched my wife do it. It is exhausting work and worst of all it is tedious. The routine offers no intellectual stimulation. Staying at home is HARD WORK and it's selfless. Don't demean it.
Which you are not supposed to do because it lacks necessary electrolytes, manly sodium, calcium and magnesium.
You should tell this to children's hospitals. Apparently you know something that they don't. Come on, it should be obvious that BABY formula would be fortified at least with sodium, calcium and magnesium.
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Let's see what's a REALLY BIG downside to coax... Oh wait, I remember, it's that everyone HAS TO SHARE the same connection. Yeah, you know all those ethernet switches that cost practically nothing, guarantee no collisions and allow everyone to communicate full duplex (do you even remember what a collision is or half duplex is anymore)? Well, coax doesn't have those.
The list of UTP advantages is long but INSTALLATION COSTS IS NOT ONE OF THEM. Coax is far cheaper to run, but whatever money you recover from coax will be lost in management nightmares. UTP is cheaper now, when I bought my first home networking gear (12+ years ago) UTP was way beyond what I could afford (cheap 8 port hubs went for several hundred dollars at the time). My first network was coax. When I switched to UTP, I never looked back. UTP is only affordable now because of the economy of scale.
I remember the good ol' days (~15 years ago) when I worked in an office that had a network in 3 coax home run segments with an optically isolated repeater on one of the runs because the feet really add up quick when you have to wind it to each office. Every time one of the segments went down the guy running the network would go to each persons office, poke his head in and ask "did you disconnect your T connector?" We asked people to hold off building their CD images until late at night because if any ONE person started a build (which meant pulling assets from one server) the entire network became nearly unusable for EVERYBODY because all the servers were on one segment. We didn't have internet at this time; only large corporations, universities and netcom users had internet back then.
Gosh, I'm so sorry UTP won the war. We could employ twice as many network technicians if we would have stayed on coax.
Pay should be based on how important your job is to the function of society.
Well, go ahead and take for your lovely socialist commune in the mountains. In a capitalist society like ours, your pay is based upon market forces.
Teachers, by contrast are without compare the MOST important people in our society.
No.
That is, in fact happening, unfortunately. Lawyers aren't paid according to the innocence of their clients, so I don't see the parallel here.
Lawyers who are more successful at winning their client's cases get the higher value cases. If you're a millionaire accused of a crime, who are you going to choose: the public defender or (the late) Johnnie Cochrane? You pay a premium for top flight representation. That's the parallel I alluded to.
Why? So that we can replace one problem with another? All that would do is give us a bunch of teachers whose sole motivation is to win rather than to educate.
In this case the "win" scenario is the teacher whose students end up the most educated.
To teach in college, you do. You don't need an advanced degree in chemistry to teach elementary school science. I'm sorry.
A lawyer DOES need a doctorate degree in law. And your argument was that a teachers salary should exceed that of the lawyer.
I agree. They should be. But first, we need to get enough good teachers in place so that when half the teachers don't pass, we're still able to educate our kids.
A lofty goal indeed. So if we do start your plan, does that mean that more than half the teachers we will be giving raises to will be incompetent educators?
If a school board cans you for doing something unethical, you are unlikely to be employed anywhere around.
If a school board is even able to can you. This does not hold the same for lawyers (or doctors). If you want teachers to be the upper crust of professional society, we deserve the most pristine ethical behavior possible.
Check. If they aren't teaching, they're grading papers. They spend half their vacation doing class prep for the next school year. Despite getting the summer "vacation", they work more hours annually than people in most professions.
Also check. You've obviously never been a teacher.
No, but I've been a statistician. You know what the numbers say? Let's just say your sample size is clearly too small and heavily biased.
God forbid a lawyer ever get disbarred for being unethical....
It actually happens all the time.
My TI-82 programmable calculator still works. I bought it when I was in high school, circa 1992.
Is your TI-82 backlit? Is it color? Is the screen an active matrix LCD? How many elements does the screen have and how large are they? Does it have a touch screen? What processor is in it? Does it have any moving parts? Was it subject to heavy daily use for 10 years?
If hardware fails after three years, it was poorly made. Period.
How many pieces of hardware in your computer have a warranty that extends past three years? past five? How about the 10 years it'll take?
In the quantities we're talking about buying them, a custom-designed OLPC type device with a tablet instead of a keyboard should easily be attainable for under $100
That has got to the funniest moment in your whole post. You ignore the fact that OLPC is having a terrible time getting an even remotely usable platform for $100 (currently analysts expect it to be in the $150 range, but OLPC spokespeople are estimating $135-140), then extrapolate that to a machine that should survive continuous abuse for 10 years. You claim that a computer should only cost $100 and should be made of quality components with a 10 year lifespan. Clearly you're smoking the good stuff.
Tell you what, I'll consider your cost increase when teachers must:
- Completely give up unions
- Pay for benefits themselves
- Be paid according to the subject competence of their exiting students
- Compete for top students so they can get those most likely to be competent in the subject
- Hold an advanced degree in the subject they are teaching
- Be licensed by passing a state bar (something more impressive than say CBEST, which is a freakin' joke)
- Be subject to review by an ethics board with the power to pull their license
- Teach all year, most weekends and most holidays
- Work 80 hours per week upon starting falling to 60 hours after 5 years
- Carry malpractice insurance and be subject to lawsuits every time a student passes their class but doesn't learn anything
- Have the ethics board review them if they sued too often for malpractice
Let me know when you've got all that. I'm not even going to consider that kind of pay without something close to this kind of risk.To cut costs, why not eliminate busing in urban areas where city bus routes already exist?
Because then you would attract predators to ride the city bus. Busses rarely run on time. City bus drivers are not held to the same background check as School bus drivers.
To cut costs, why not build schools with lots and lots of triple-pane windows so that you can exclusively use natural lighting except on cloudy days?
Because it is really expensive to replace those when they get broken, and natural lighting tends to be very harsh and difficult to control.
To cut costs, why not build schools with INTERIOR HALLS so that you don't lose so much heat/air conditioning when the kids open the doors?
Some schools have that. It doesn't help very much. Door openings do not have a flat distribution.
Instead of photocopying handouts for the students, assign them all tablet computers, which are infinitely reusable.
They aren't infinitely reusable, they're easy to steal, they wear out after 3-4 years, their battery would be good at most for 1 year, and the cost of just one is probably less than the cost of every photocopy that kid is likely to receive during his entire career. Printed paper is also easier to read.
Cut administrative costs by grouping multiple districts under a single regional school board with a single administrative staff responsible for paying salaries, budget management, etc.
Large school districts typically waste more money than smaller ones. I was a product of the LAUSD, second largest district in the country (at the time). I can't think of a single thing that monster district had going for it that a smaller district didn't, except maybe for their couple of magnet schools (which didn't save any money, just gave them something to brag about).
How about:
"That is a good question. What do you guys think?"
[...brief discussion with participation from others in the class... if you've studied linear functions you can graph what the solution means visually]
"In this class we will only be working with what is called the Real Number System, and in this system there is only one solution to that equation. There are other number systems, and there may be more than one solution to this equation in those systems or there may be no solutions at all. If you would like to know more about this please come talk with me after class."
Now they know that for the remainder of this class the answer is "there is only one solution." They also know there is more complexity there than meets the eye, and those who may be so inclined can explore it further. Of course you can't do any of this if you haven't studied modern algebra which almost always means holding a degree in mathematics.
if we're going to tell the kids it's a variable, how come we're able to solve for its (one) value?
Because our equation is a proposition with a unique value in the reals. I could ask
3x + 5 >= 23
In which case there are infinitely many solutions. Or I could ask
3x^2 + 5 = 53
In which case there are two. Since this concept isn't always so easy at first grasp, we start at the simplest case and work our way up.
Teachers have answer books to help them. Unlike english, math is easy for a moron to teach since the answer is either exactly right, or it's wrong.
Okay, so here you are in front of a bunch of students and walking them through the beginnings of algebra and you ask them to solve:
3x + 5 = 23
You go through the motions and the solution x = 6 comes out. Some student in back raises his/her hand and asks:
"Is it possible that x could be something else?"
Is that a good question? Is it a dumb question? Is it obvious? What is the answer? Is it in the answer book? Is that always the answer? Are you sure?
This is a question one could expect in an introductory algebra course and unless you've taken a course in abstract algebra, you probably don't really know the full answer to the question. It is actually a very good question; pursuing higher mathematics questions like that will occupy many hours of homework.
The effective average hourly pay for public school teachers ($34.06/hr) exceeds by about 11% the pay of professional specialty and technical workers.
It exceeds by 36% the average hourly pay for everyone (including those without a degree).
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average public school teacher puts in 36.5 hours per week while school is in session. More info here.
Anyway, back on topic, I wish that the CPU manufacturers could finally come up with a "generational" standard socket. A well-designed module socket should last as long as an expansion slot standard (ISA,PCI,PCIe) and not change for damn near every model of chip.
Unfortunately this isn't as practical as it sounds. As technologies to increase performance continue, the socket technology would quickly become a bottleneck. If we were to go back 10 years ago (1987) our boards would have 3.3v CPUs, 64 bit memory busses and plain old SDR DIMMs. We'd be seriously hamstrung with how much performance we could squeeze out of it. Hyper Transport and CSI would be entirely impossible with the frontside bus design from back then, and would have been entirely impractical to implement back then. A socket that could have grown over that time would have 100 pins for general housekeeping, 200 legacy pins to support FSB and another 700 pins for the multiple hyper transport interconnects. It would have been prohibitively expensive to make boards back then that supported 1000 pin CPUs. We did not know then how exactly we would get to our performance today. A whole memory technology (RIMM) and an expansion card technology (AGP) came and went during that time.
And I have to say that the opinion of "someone who has gone through a security check" isn't terribly authoritative, unless you were turned down for having a similar background to Randal's.
Or unless I read through the appeals proceedings of those who were denied and appealed the decision. They mask the names of people and companies involved and make that material freely available. But you didn't check that, did you? I have a pretty good idea of what disqualifies you. If they didn't give a clearance to anybody who has done drugs, we'd have barely any Ph.D.'s with a clearance. As long as it wasn't recent use, they don't care as long as you don't lie about it.
and Randall still can't get a clearance without being upfront about it.
As someone who has gone through a security background check, worked at Intel and read the decision of the appeals court: I would be fairly surprised if Randal was able to get a security clearance even even if no conviction had occurred. The undisputed portions of the case suggest that Randal lacked an ethical barrier between him and either his curiosity about things for which he did not have access or his desire to gain respect by demonstrating his skill. This was 13 years ago maybe he has changed, I don't know.
Whether his intentions at the time were noble or not: he logged onto a system for which he knew his account should have been deleted; he ran a gate program on the system (after previously being told to stop running a gate on other systems); he cracked one of the passwords to someone with higher access on the system; he then logged on to the system using the cracked user's account; he transferred the password file to another machine; he ran crack on this other machine; he turned up 35 weak passwords; he said nothing; he left for a while to teach a class; he came back; he still said nothing; he re-ran crack on another faster machine (this is apparently what eventually got him caught).
Randal claims he did all this to re-gain respect at Intel's supercomputer division. I have no reason to doubt this is honest. The fact that he so freely gave so much information to the police suggests to me that he was trying to convey that he had no intention of harming Intel's business. However it is very, very bad judgment. Now if you were the agent assigned to his security background check, looking to see if his character demonstrates a likelihood of compromising sensitive information, even unintentionally, what would you think?
That was indeed the problem. I did eventually get the thing running and, interestingly, despite using many published mergesort algorithms for sorting linked lists, the bitsort algorithm generally ran a constant 3-4x faster. So it appears that I was wrong about his mergesort having an asymptotic characteristic of O(n^3) and improving the efficiency of his mergesort gave only incremental performance improvement.
Unfortunately this followup will forever be buried below the mod threshhold but it appears that despite my best efforts, radix sort (bitsort in this case) is superior to mergesort for linked lists. I tested different list sizes, different random ranges and a few other things I could think of, and bitsort always ran faster.
The only weirdness I could not get rid of is that every time I compiled using gcc -O2 I got segfaults. I did not have time to track it down, I suspect stack smashing due to array usage irregularities.
But then anyone who thinks the roundabout way he used of accessing the top 16 bits of a 32-bit memory value is 'cool' is definitely on my list of people most likely to re-invent the radix sort badly.
//if not 0
It is clearly a slow day for me. I have gone one step further and ported his code over to Linux (only required a change to GetTickCount) and attempted to run it. His "cool" way of using a pointer hack has caused his code to dump core. The problem is his hack being a signed short int pointer.
Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x08048752 in BitFast (TailNode=0x804a018, run=0) at bitfast.h:37
if (Tail[val]) {
(gdb) p val
$1 = -22087
So I try putting unsigned on ptrHack.
Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x08048772 in BitFast (TailNode=0x804a018, run=0) at bitfast.h:39
tmpN->nextNode = pN;
(gdb) p tmpN
$1 = (Node *) 0xffff
Yeah. Not so sure that casting is what he really wants. I'm not entirely clear how it is his code will work. I really wanted to clean up his mergesort and re-run it to see how valid his claim is, but it looks hopeless. I'll work on it a little more, but since the problem seems to be in his algorithm, it doesn't look real hopeful.
Actually it is much worse than you say.
I don't know what possessed me to look at his code, but he really hasn't shown what he claims to have shown. It isn't clear to me that his code is doing what he says, but what IS clear to me is that his comparison to mergesort is very unfair. He has a TRULY AWFUL implementation of merge sort. For example, every time he goes to split a sub-list in half, he does a linear search from the current node to the end the sub-list. Having determined this value he then does ANOTHER LINEAR SEARCH to find the half-way point.
So he has basically made an O(N^2) time complexity process just to divide the list for the merge sort. This is inside his n*log(n) merge sort. So he has an O(n^3) time complexity mergesort and trumps up how fast his modified radix sort is. Come on! Bubble sort would have beat his mergesort.
His cleverness gets the better of him when it comes to his modified radix sort. For example, he creates two arrays (on the stack) of 65535 elements; apparently unaware that this creates an array with indexes 0..65534.
my hypothesis is that addition breaks down when you get into numbers bigger then about a trillion, in such a way that the result of adding two numbers tends towards the result of multiplication
Interesting. My hypothesis is that multiplication of two such numbers will differ from addition of two such numbers by at least 12 orders of magnitude. Let us know what you find out.
Okay to all the posters prior to this who pointed out the cisco iPhone...
Cisco created that product AFTER Apple announced their iPhone. Cisco allowed their trademark to LAPSE then quickly pulled it back while it was in limbo before being completely abandoned. Cisco incorrectly claimed to have an iPhone product when they renewed the trademark. After word of Apple's iPhone started floating around, Cisco quickly rebranded an existing product to use the iPhone name hoping to hold on to it.
In short, Cisco acted with bad faith, and continues to do so.
I don't particularly like either company, but I think Cisco is the dishonest party in this case.
In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
Despite the scare mongering in TFA, the bottom line is he was subpoenaed for a video that might have been possible evidence in a (possible) serious crime. They're investigating a violent protest - a policeman (apparently) had his skull cracked, for goodness sake. I don't care how pure your protest motives are, that sort of thing is never appropriate. (Well, okay, maybe as an absolute last resort for overthrowing a government, but I don't think we're there yet.)
According to the article, that is incorrect. They are investigating the destruction of a police cruiser tail light which was allegedly partially paid for by federal funds. This isn't to say that the police officer wasn't injured; simply that the federal attorney could not manage to extend his reach to cover that too. The police officer is a state matter, and he (Wolf) is protected by a shield law.
Now according to the Mr. Wolf (and I'm not saying he is unbiased) he is refusing because he does not believe that this is about destruction of property. He believes that the DoJ wants to cherry-pick scenes from his video to show to a grand jury so they will approve of questioning Mr. Wolf about his contacts in the organization. They will then question these contacts about their contacts, and those contacts about their contacts. It is his contention that this is about gathering names, and once the grand jury investigation is over the government will simply drop its case because they don't particularly care about the tail light. They won't to bolster their watch list.
Whether he is right or not, I cannot say. It certainly says something that he is willing to let a judge review the tape in its unedited entirety and be bound by the Judge's decision. However I can also see that the government cannot simply say "sure, go ahead" because they do not want to set a precedent of involving the judiciary for everything that is about to go before a grand jury. After all, a grand jury cannot convict someone.
You indicate your disapproval of web development as a university major, yet fail to explain why.
I'm curious what about web development you see as making it substantive enough to be a degree which stands on its own. You haven't really mentioned anything that isn't already covered in software engineering. The issues faced with web programming are essentially the same issues we faced with client/server/n-tier architecture, and software engineering is the tool to address those issues. A software engineer should be expected to handle web development, it isn't clear that a web developer should be expected to handle software engineering. As such, "web developer" sounds like a vocational specialization of the formal field of software engineering.
I could go on and on about what made Amiga great, but every time I even mention it, people immediately place me in the slot marked, "crazy." I'd like to see more Amiga philosophy in modern software design, but even I have to admit that light of Amiga may be irretrievably fading. Really, you people have no idea what you missed...
Maybe Reichart can pay you to work on Onion for AmigaOS 4 and we can all relive it!
"[W]arrantless foreign intelligence surveillance within the United States" is not a wiretap. A wiretap involves intercepting the actual content of a conversation.
What the heck? I cannot begin to understand the depth of ignorance of that statement. The DoJ letter I linked specifically mentioned that the letter was in response to concerns over intercepting communications. The letter was arguing that this was legal. Phew! Good thing you posted anonymously.
That's right - you have no expectation of privacy for your phone billing data. That's settled law.
Yeah... 'cuz like HP is in absolutely no hot water at all for acquiring phone billing data on its board members without their permission. I mean, the board members have no expectation of privacy for that. Right?
Clueless.
The President has clearly said he is not breaking the law, and despite what the liberal media is telling you, each and every wiretap still requires an warrant
I'm lost. Are you being sarcastic? Normally I'd think it obvious that this was tongue in cheek, except your nickname makes a Rush reference.
Is the United States Department of Justice, a department headed by an appointee of the president, also part of the liberal media? So when they wrote "This constitutional authority includes the authority to order warrantless foreign intelligence surveillance within the United States"?
The entire executive branch, and much of the republican congress, has said it/they believe that the president has the authority to authorize warrantless wiretaps and furthermore he has done so.
Contrary to the majority of the responses I've read, which suggest that the root is biological (end of story), my experiences suggest otherwise.
Ahh the hasty generalization... or is it the non-representative sample? or is it confirmation bias? or insufficiently large sample set? Several of the responses you've read have pointed out that there is research on this out there. The research strongly supports the notion that there are subjects which, on average, each find boring. Past a certain age, boys will find playing with dolls to be very dull, but girls will thrive in the role-playing they derive from it. At the same time girls will find building a track for slot cars to be monotonous and unrewarding whereas the boy will reap no end of value from it.
It is naive to think that there aren't a barrage of forces that discourage women from pursuing technical fields in these formative years.
I'm not so sure about that.
One girl, leaps and bounds above her male peers in ability, said flat out, "I'm not good at computers: I'm a girl."
And you've concluded that she is avoiding computers because someone has told her that girls+computers do not mix. Have you considered that the computers are simply not interesting to her and she uses this excuse to take a break from them? Bright kids often learn responses that confound adults and buy them a much needed break from something they really don't want to do.
Similarly, another girl with amazing symbolic reasoning ability explained to me that she was bad at math because she struggled with arithmetic.
Coincidentally a boy in the same situation would probably come to the same conclusion. To a young child mathematics and arithmetic seem inextricably linked.
The real difference will occur only when we change the way we teach technical fields to girls, using an approach that makes use of the intellectual strengths of females (men and women are different, as many have pointed out).
Since you do not believe that the differences are biological (you said so in your first paragraph) what does this intellectual strength stem from? Since it is non-biological in origin, isn't it likely that we already have this strength represented? If so, what advantage is there in overrepresenting this particular intellectual strength? I'm really curious what this non-biological intellectual strength is.
want to know the cold hard truth as to why women don't take it up? because they all secretly want to get knocked up, have a baby and stay at home and let someone else do the work.
While there may be some truth to women leaving the workforce being a primary factor in lower wages, your attack on stay-at-home moms is poorly placed. Have you ever actually watched someone do this? Consider their day:
Wake up self, wake up kids, gets kids fed, get oldest ready for school and out the door, change the baby's diaper, gets the 2nd oldest ready for pre-school, drive him to school, drive back, get the baby ready for morning nap, put baby down for morning nap, take care of dishes from breakfast, take a shower, get a load of laundry going, take inventory of food/plan shopping, sweep floor, move laundry to dryer, get another load going, get baby up, give baby snack, off to store for dinner fixings, come back and put food away, pick up oldest from kindergarten, pick up middle child from preschool, back home, fix lunch, feed kids, send kids to play, clean up lunch table, play with kids, get youngest two ready for nap, put youngest two down for nap, give the oldest some quiet craft/activity to do, move laundry to dryer, fold clothes that were in dryer, put clothes away, start dishwasher, wipe down counters and sinks **now you get a brief break until the youngest get up from nap**, get kids up from nap, feed everyone snack, begin prepping for dinner, keep kids entertained, keep baby in clean diaper, kiss boo-boos, bandage scrapes, defuse fights, start cooking dinner...
fuck working all your life when someone else can do it for you.
I've watched my wife do it. It is exhausting work and worst of all it is tedious. The routine offers no intellectual stimulation. Staying at home is HARD WORK and it's selfless. Don't demean it.
Which you are not supposed to do because it lacks necessary electrolytes, manly sodium, calcium and magnesium.
You should tell this to children's hospitals. Apparently you know something that they don't. Come on, it should be obvious that BABY formula would be fortified at least with sodium, calcium and magnesium.