My parents have an apple tree growing in the front that has apples that don't brown at all. They taste pretty good as well, and don't seem to have much of a problem with insects. I have no idea if the tree was grown from ra andom seed from an apple or what its lineage is, I don't think it's been grafted. Does that mean it's potentially worth something?
BTW, regarding the article - that's Urbana, Ohio. There's more than one Urbana (e.g. Urbana, Illinois, with the University of Illinois, not Urbana University). That confused me briefly!
You're comparing Microsoft Windows to iOS? Why aren't you comparing Windows to OSX?
How locked down was Zune, how locked down is RT, how is it that the PC platform is becoming more locked down than Apple hardware?
We'd be in much better shape in a world where PPC and Alpha desktop computers were competing with ARM for marketshare, with OF still a relevant standard (rather than just having remnants left behind in the Linux kernel), rather than the total hash that's x86, BIOS, MBR, EFI.
The Apple partition map presaged GPT, OF (which Apple embraced) presaged EFI, all of it quite open. A large part of OSX is open source, and the documentation of everything is superb (I remember when the big criticism of MacOS was that you needed THREE VOLUMES of documentation to cover everything! I still have the phonebook version).
Yeah, iOS and iTunes is not very open, I'll give you that.
I don't like Microsoft, and I haven't liked them since I saw the price they wanted for their sort program for CP/M.
I will also never forgive Bill Gates for using a backslash as a path separator. Every time I hear someone speak a URL, saying "forward slash" I wince.
Microsoft did so many things that have set back the state of computing. Sure, maybe someone else would have screwed things up just as much, maybe even more, but in this world it's Microsoft's fault.
When the Morris worm was the big news, and the cost estimates were flying, I made the observation that MS had caused MUCH more economic damage, and they did it ON PURPOSE!
Man, I take issue with about 90% of what you say. Yes, there are people who are all rules, but I haven't found them more likely to be in an accident, mostly because they spend so much time worrying about the rules they hardly ever fly. What I did find was that people who didn't take flying seriously were the ones more likely to have problems, regardless of their attitude towards being a stickler for the rules. Now, I knew quite a few of the "old fart" pilots, they were great pilots. They also knew their limits, they knew the rules, and they didn't do stupid things. They weren't good because they ignored the rules, they were able to get away with ignoring SOME of the rules because they understood exactly what the rules were for and when you could bend them. You fly a haphazard traffic pattern with them, though, you'd get your ear chewed off.
My experience with FAA regulations is that most of them are more about common sense than blind obedience to stupid rules. If you read between the lines, most of them say "you can kill yourself, just don't kill anyone else, please." Many of the rest are about protocols, how you and other pilots can co-exist in the same airspace. That's as of 9/11, I pretty much stopped around then when stupid security regulations started coming out, so maybe things have changed.
The most dangerous people are yahoos who think the rules are dumb, they're better than the average pilot, they can get away with it, so why should they bother. People who say "flying is easy, any monkey can do it" tend to be like that. Yeah, the mechanics of flying are pretty straightforward, and most people can learn to do it, however I found that people who took longer to learn tended to be the ones that had the highest flying skills eventually.
If your instructor wasn't constantly testing your situational awareness, asking you what you'd do if something unexpected happened, either you had a poor instructor or you weren't paying attention. That's at least half of what your training is about.
If your plan of action if your elevator gets stuck is to ask your front seat passenger to climb into the back seat - well, I don't think you've really thought it through very well. You're either going to be in an uncontrollable spin well before he gets his seat belt unbuckled or the airplane is controllable and the last thing you want to do is push your CG backwards with limited elevator control. Fail.
I'm an airplane pilot and glider instructor, I donated my time to the local glider club. I stopped instructing in part because I was concerned about the liability if a student should be in an accident and someone was hurt. Paying for hefty liability insurance wasn't really practical for me, especially as I wasn't getting any income from it. I pretty much gave the whole thing up shortly after 9/11 when the security regulations started to become too intrusive. It was also becoming too expensive, even for gliders, especially as insurance and gas costs increased.
I've trained many students who went on to become pilots, some became airplane pilots from their exposure to aviation in gliders, some became instructors (a few of whom I trained to be instructors). Without instructors, you don't get student pilots. Without student pilots, you don't get new pilots, or new instructors.
I remember working on a product produced by a company that proudly trumpeted their Six Sigma certifications. Had a problem with a board that was sold with the explicit feature of being able to do read-modify-write bus cycles on shared memory (each board had a section of on-board memory that could be shared with the other boards across multibus).
Unfortunately, it turned out that the target board would get memory corrupted when you did that (interfered with refresh cycles, I believe it was). Once I figured out that was happening, I contacted the company.
Six Sigma is all about repeatable and documented processes. Well, they documented it all right. They documented that they had no idea what was wrong, that the person who had designed the hardware had retired, and that they had no one there who was qualified to even understand what I was talking about. I guess since the problem with the board was repeatable, that justified their Six Sigma level! They continued selling that board, with the same claim of capability, for several more years.
Ever since then I've had little respect for that type of certification - worried more about the proper process than about the actual results.
What makes you think that Google Glass is always recording video, much less sending it somewhere? Even if you record video, it's saved where you want it, not sent automatically to Google.
Most people agree that it should have a clear indicator light that shows when it's recording anything, not sure if they added that in the newer version.
It probably won't be too long before head-mounted displays like Google Glass are common as the normal interface you use for your personal wearable computer, currently masquerading as a smart phone. "Augmented Reality" is just one application for such an interface. It will be used for playing music, videos, using the Web, showing you where you are and what's around you; a camera watching you type on a virtual keyboard will be an input method, perhaps along with something like subvocalization pickups.
I don't even own a cell phone, much less Google Glass, but I can see a time when I'd use such an interface (it just isn't good enough yet for me to care). I wouldn't have a problem with a policy that says "please don't wear your head-mounted display in here", but I think it's sort of stupid to have such a rule and not also say "please leave your cell phone turned off and put away" as well. Anything you can do with a Google Glass you can do with a cell phone, you can certainly take videos without it being obvious.
It's a strange idea that the primary purpose for having Google Glass is to take videos of everything you're doing and immediately upload it for everyone to see.
An altimeter in an airplane is normally adjusted to show altitude above sea level (although above a certain height, it's set to assume a standard sea level pressure rather than what the current weather is producing). The two terms have very similar meanings, although I think elevation is more often used to refer to a fixed location.
No, you didn't read that. Not sure what's wrong with your reading comprehension, perhaps it's the way you were taught.
The big problem with teaching by rote memorization is that the student often ends up with no idea how to use what they've memorized. Perhaps for some people, memorizing facts, then learning how to apply them, works, but it isn't an optimal method. You would have learned fine if you were taught the concepts, THEN drilled on your times tables.
My experience in teaching is as a flight instructor. It's rather practical, and we have very high-stakes tests. I don't get people to memorize stall speed, best glide speed, etc, before they even understand what they are.
In any case, the "obvious" part was referring to an adult looking at the test, trying to figure out what it's testing without having been exposed to the actual lessons. What's being taught is how to take apart a specific problem and figure out how to solve it, by looking at "the whole" and "the part you know", which is a perfectly reasonable way of looking at subtraction problems. However, the test question is poorly written.
"part I know" is how the concept is being taught, it won't be a confusing concept to the 6-year-old. The confusing part is that the coffee cup with "6" isn't in the same space as 5 pennies. I think I agree, though, that someone who doesn't really understand it yet might do better, simply by keying in on the key phrases and plugging them in to the pattern they've been taught, rather than wondering how you subtract 5 pennies from a coffee cup with the number 6 in it.
Understanding subtraction, what it is, what it represents, how it occurs in actual problems, is completely different from learning your subtraction tables. This test is testing the conceptual part - the rote part isn't important to answering these questions, as they're small enough you can figure it out by counting.
The adaptive testing I'm talking about is going to be about concepts, not about memorizing facts. For memorizing facts, there are much better methods (see, e.g. Corrective Feedback Paradigm). Both are good uses of computers in education, unlike the garbage that most Computer-Based Education seems to be these days.
It doesn't need to be obvious to the kids, that's simply how they're being taught (and there's nothing wrong with that). Looking at the test as a whole, you can figure out how they're teaching things and what they're testing for.
Whether an adult who hasn't been taught a specific method, with key phrases ("the whole", "the hidden part", "the part you know"), finds a question difficult to understand, is irrelevant. What I was commenting on is that they don't appear to be following a coherent model, the test isn't properly testing comprehension of the concept. As an adult, you might be able to focus in on the key phrases they're using (and, after looking at the rest of the test, understand how they're being used even without having explicitly seen how it's being taught), thus figuring out the correct answer, but that isn't what the test should be testing for. By confusing the "part" and "whole" (with one being pennies, the other being unnamed units presumably inside a coffee cup??), the whole teaching paradigm is confused.
This has nothing to do with whether an adult can look at the test and figure it out.
The only problem with question 1 is that the "whole" is indicated as a coffee cup.
It's obvious that subtraction is being taught as "the full (whole) amount" minus "the part you know" equals "the hidden (missing) part" (or at least one way of thinking about subtraction problems can be thought of that way).
Some of the other questions are poorly worded as well, but Q1 is really bad.
There's nothing wrong with having tests where some of the problems are "too hard" for the level being tested, tests should be useful as diagnostics, exploring what you DON'T know. It should be totally normal to get a 50% on a test, that just shows what still needs to be taught. There's been a lot of research on computerized adaptive tests, that's what should be used, not testing for failure.
No, the response I got was that since the order of evaluation of function arguments is undefined, they can even be done in parallel. Each of the two expressions has sequence points within them, but the comma in the function call does not define a sequence point.
It isn't about the order of f() and g() being evaluated, but the two arguments to x():
Now, the value of tmp after the call to x() is obviously undefined, but apparently even the two arguments to x() are undefined.
Maybe the specific language specification has changed since then, I don't know, this was around 10-15 years ago, on an Alpha with DEC's ucode-based optimizing compiler.
I once had some code that confused me when the compiler optimized some stuff out.
I had a macro that expanded to a parenthesized expression with several sub-expressions separated by commas that used a temp variable, e.g.:
#define m(a) (tmp = a, f(tmp) + g(tmp))
because the argument (a) could be an expression with side effects.
Now, I knew that the order of evaluation of function arguments wasn't defined, but I never read that as meaning that a compiler could optimize away parts of a function call such as: x(m(1), m(2)); this particular compiler effectively acted as if it was evaluating both arguments in parallel, thus the value of tmp was undefined throughout (I think it eliminated one of the initial assignments).
Changing it to an in-line function made it work; it had initially been code written for a compiler that didn't have in-line functions and was in the middle of a very tight loop.
Also, looking at your other post, and a bit at the FlatRate plan and explanation of it not working, it doesn't sound like "certainty" was referring to how much data you could download but performance. With data-capped plans, you also don't get performance certainty - if everyone is trying use the network at peak periods, they're all going to get much lower performance than they would at other times - the heavy data users don't have any incentive to not use it at that time, so you have to build in enough capacity to handle them as well. It will end up costing more to handle the same number of customers, which means everyone pays more than they would otherwise.
The biggest difference between what I described and the FlatRate plan is that it's averaged over a much longer time period (on the order of a month) rather than a fairly short time period (on the order of minutes). It also isn't strictly trying to be a priority-based system (individual packets aren't handled at different priorities), just that your router speed-caps you based on your priority and current network congestion. If you aren't trying to use more than your current speed cap, you won't even notice it when your priority goes down.
I think they just screwed it up. They should have been able to offer it at competitive prices, and marketed properly could have competed against quota-based systems (queue video of trying to talk to the Grandkids when your data rate suddenly gets cut to 128K, and only getting 1Mbps during peak usage periods anyway - compared to Grandma getting 20Mbps in the evening and never worrying about going over quota and paying less than she would on the "other" plan that only gets her 50GB/month).
You asked in your other post
Would you prefer 8Mbps with no quota or 100Mbps with a 1TB quota?
but we're talking about quota of 250GB. At 100Mbps, you'd blow through that in less than 6 hours. At 8Mbps you could transfer over 2.5TB in a month, and with the method I described, most of the time you'd have a much higher sustained speed.
If Grandma is video-chatting with her grandkids for 2 hours a month, she's not going to be on a plan for "just e-mail and light web browsing". If she's paying $5/month for 1Mbps, how many GB would that pay for on a data-metered plan? If you give her a 100Mbps connection, and she isn't careful about limiting the amount of bandwidth the video-chat wants to use, she's going to blow through her whole quota and end up paying more anyway, she may even need to limit it below 1Mbps! How does that help her?
If she's video-chatting with her grandkids in the evening, she's going to get more than 1Mbps, and if that's not enough then she SHOULD be paying more.
If someone is paying for a 1Gbps base-rate connection (in my scenario of $5/Mbps), they'd be paying $5000/month - so what if they want to download 324TB of data with that?
The problem with the plan you described is with trying to mix data caps with bandwidth caps, it sounds like. Users don't WANT limits, they want performance. If it's too slow, then they'll pay to speed it up. If they don't want to pay more, they can use the network when it's less congested. In either case, they don't have to be worrying all the time about how much data any specific activity is going to chew into their quota. Having a "certainly" of 100GB a month isn't something people want to even think about - with even 1Mbps, they have a certainty of getting at least 324GB/month, and knowing they can't ever possibly go over a quota is a much better certainty.
The basic problem with usage caps is that usage doesn't actually COST anything. It's the provisioning of bandwidth that costs money to provide, not actually transporting the data. This leads to inefficient usage of available resources. You have to build out the network to handle peak loads, but there's no incentive to shift usage.
Dynamically adjusted bandwidth limits, with a lower "guaranteed" limit, makes much more sense. You'd pay a higher rate for a higher minimum.
You adjust the current actual max rate based on how much capacity you've used recently (on the order of a few minutes). Grandma goes to download her e-mail, she gets high priority maximum physical-limit speed for a minute, then (only if bandwidth is currently in short supply) ramp it down, perhaps all the way to the minimum if it's really busy. Grandma does nothing for a while, her priority goes up, perhaps after 10 minutes it's as if she never did anything.
Streaming a video, your priority would be dropped after a short while. In times of high usage, that would limit your rate. Once you stop, your priority would rise back up, same as Grandma. The algorithm would have to be designed to make sure you couldn't game it by bursting
Using the network at periods of low usage would be encouraged, as it would be much faster, which increases utilization of available bandwidth (which could actually save money for the provider as total capacity required might end up being lower).
One way of doing this is simply having a unit of, perhaps, 1Mbps, with offerings based on multiples of that. Grandma might have a 1Mbps service for her occasional e-mail and web-browsing, plus the occasional software update; the guy who regularly syncs with every open source repository might pay for a 10Mbps service (which, in the middle of the night, gets 200Mbps).
Use a fair allocation scheme - as total bandwidth becomes saturated, drop the max rate down until it's no longer saturated. Anyone using less than that rate (times a multiplier based on your current priority) won't be affected, anyone trying to use more will be capped (until it becomes available again). You should, perhaps, also be able to pay for higher priority (so you might have a 2Mbps minimum, but you get a multiplier of 1.5 when calculating your current cap). Priority is, as indicated earlier, based on your recent usage - high bandwidth (relative to your base level) reduces your priority, low or none raises it.
I don't understand what you mean by "USB converter didn't have to translate the protocol stuff". USB has its own protocols, not related to IDE-level commands at all.
ATAPI command set is SCSI; SATA is Serial ATA/ATAPI, so is basically Serial SCSI. Firewire is Serial SCSI. Everything is pretty much the same. Protocol conversion between SCSI, Firewire, PATA is pretty easy, and converting it to be carried over USB is going to be very similar also.
Using a Mac with SCSI was so much easier than the hell PC users had to go through, especially as drives got larger. With SCSI, it just worked. PCs had to worry about drive geometry, and then later how the drive was going to FAKE the drive geometry, jumpers to make large drives look smaller on systems that couldn't handle it, then LBA. As I recall, by the time CD-ROM drives came out, they were almost all ATAPI because it was too crazy not to. At that point, there wasn't much difference between ATA/ATAPI and SCSI except the physical interface.
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My parents have an apple tree growing in the front that has apples that don't brown at all. They taste pretty good as well, and don't seem to have much of a problem with insects. I have no idea if the tree was grown from ra andom seed from an apple or what its lineage is, I don't think it's been grafted. Does that mean it's potentially worth something?
BTW, regarding the article - that's Urbana, Ohio. There's more than one Urbana (e.g. Urbana, Illinois, with the University of Illinois, not Urbana University). That confused me briefly!
Google contributes quite a bit, just because its software doesn't mean it's not creative.
I'd be willing to bet that he uses free software all the time. Why doesn't he think that's a worthwhile contribution?
You forgot Jony Ives and iOS7. He did fairly well with some earlier stuff, but ugh.
You're comparing Microsoft Windows to iOS? Why aren't you comparing Windows to OSX?
How locked down was Zune, how locked down is RT, how is it that the PC platform is becoming more locked down than Apple hardware?
We'd be in much better shape in a world where PPC and Alpha desktop computers were competing with ARM for marketshare, with OF still a relevant standard (rather than just having remnants left behind in the Linux kernel), rather than the total hash that's x86, BIOS, MBR, EFI.
The Apple partition map presaged GPT, OF (which Apple embraced) presaged EFI, all of it quite open. A large part of OSX is open source, and the documentation of everything is superb (I remember when the big criticism of MacOS was that you needed THREE VOLUMES of documentation to cover everything! I still have the phonebook version).
Yeah, iOS and iTunes is not very open, I'll give you that.
I don't like Microsoft, and I haven't liked them since I saw the price they wanted for their sort program for CP/M.
I will also never forgive Bill Gates for using a backslash as a path separator. Every time I hear someone speak a URL, saying "forward slash" I wince.
Microsoft did so many things that have set back the state of computing. Sure, maybe someone else would have screwed things up just as much, maybe even more, but in this world it's Microsoft's fault.
When the Morris worm was the big news, and the cost estimates were flying, I made the observation that MS had caused MUCH more economic damage, and they did it ON PURPOSE!
Man, I take issue with about 90% of what you say. Yes, there are people who are all rules, but I haven't found them more likely to be in an accident, mostly because they spend so much time worrying about the rules they hardly ever fly. What I did find was that people who didn't take flying seriously were the ones more likely to have problems, regardless of their attitude towards being a stickler for the rules. Now, I knew quite a few of the "old fart" pilots, they were great pilots. They also knew their limits, they knew the rules, and they didn't do stupid things. They weren't good because they ignored the rules, they were able to get away with ignoring SOME of the rules because they understood exactly what the rules were for and when you could bend them. You fly a haphazard traffic pattern with them, though, you'd get your ear chewed off.
My experience with FAA regulations is that most of them are more about common sense than blind obedience to stupid rules. If you read between the lines, most of them say "you can kill yourself, just don't kill anyone else, please." Many of the rest are about protocols, how you and other pilots can co-exist in the same airspace. That's as of 9/11, I pretty much stopped around then when stupid security regulations started coming out, so maybe things have changed.
The most dangerous people are yahoos who think the rules are dumb, they're better than the average pilot, they can get away with it, so why should they bother. People who say "flying is easy, any monkey can do it" tend to be like that. Yeah, the mechanics of flying are pretty straightforward, and most people can learn to do it, however I found that people who took longer to learn tended to be the ones that had the highest flying skills eventually.
If your instructor wasn't constantly testing your situational awareness, asking you what you'd do if something unexpected happened, either you had a poor instructor or you weren't paying attention. That's at least half of what your training is about.
If your plan of action if your elevator gets stuck is to ask your front seat passenger to climb into the back seat - well, I don't think you've really thought it through very well. You're either going to be in an uncontrollable spin well before he gets his seat belt unbuckled or the airplane is controllable and the last thing you want to do is push your CG backwards with limited elevator control. Fail.
I'm an airplane pilot and glider instructor, I donated my time to the local glider club. I stopped instructing in part because I was concerned about the liability if a student should be in an accident and someone was hurt. Paying for hefty liability insurance wasn't really practical for me, especially as I wasn't getting any income from it. I pretty much gave the whole thing up shortly after 9/11 when the security regulations started to become too intrusive. It was also becoming too expensive, even for gliders, especially as insurance and gas costs increased.
I've trained many students who went on to become pilots, some became airplane pilots from their exposure to aviation in gliders, some became instructors (a few of whom I trained to be instructors). Without instructors, you don't get student pilots. Without student pilots, you don't get new pilots, or new instructors.
I remember working on a product produced by a company that proudly trumpeted their Six Sigma certifications. Had a problem with a board that was sold with the explicit feature of being able to do read-modify-write bus cycles on shared memory (each board had a section of on-board memory that could be shared with the other boards across multibus).
Unfortunately, it turned out that the target board would get memory corrupted when you did that (interfered with refresh cycles, I believe it was). Once I figured out that was happening, I contacted the company.
Six Sigma is all about repeatable and documented processes. Well, they documented it all right. They documented that they had no idea what was wrong, that the person who had designed the hardware had retired, and that they had no one there who was qualified to even understand what I was talking about. I guess since the problem with the board was repeatable, that justified their Six Sigma level! They continued selling that board, with the same claim of capability, for several more years.
Ever since then I've had little respect for that type of certification - worried more about the proper process than about the actual results.
I guess I'm underwhelmed. I never realized people were that into destroying tires.
What makes you think that Google Glass is always recording video, much less sending it somewhere? Even if you record video, it's saved where you want it, not sent automatically to Google.
Most people agree that it should have a clear indicator light that shows when it's recording anything, not sure if they added that in the newer version.
It probably won't be too long before head-mounted displays like Google Glass are common as the normal interface you use for your personal wearable computer, currently masquerading as a smart phone. "Augmented Reality" is just one application for such an interface. It will be used for playing music, videos, using the Web, showing you where you are and what's around you; a camera watching you type on a virtual keyboard will be an input method, perhaps along with something like subvocalization pickups.
I don't even own a cell phone, much less Google Glass, but I can see a time when I'd use such an interface (it just isn't good enough yet for me to care). I wouldn't have a problem with a policy that says "please don't wear your head-mounted display in here", but I think it's sort of stupid to have such a rule and not also say "please leave your cell phone turned off and put away" as well. Anything you can do with a Google Glass you can do with a cell phone, you can certainly take videos without it being obvious.
It's a strange idea that the primary purpose for having Google Glass is to take videos of everything you're doing and immediately upload it for everyone to see.
An altimeter in an airplane is normally adjusted to show altitude above sea level (although above a certain height, it's set to assume a standard sea level pressure rather than what the current weather is producing). The two terms have very similar meanings, although I think elevation is more often used to refer to a fixed location.
No, you didn't read that. Not sure what's wrong with your reading comprehension, perhaps it's the way you were taught.
The big problem with teaching by rote memorization is that the student often ends up with no idea how to use what they've memorized. Perhaps for some people, memorizing facts, then learning how to apply them, works, but it isn't an optimal method. You would have learned fine if you were taught the concepts, THEN drilled on your times tables.
My experience in teaching is as a flight instructor. It's rather practical, and we have very high-stakes tests. I don't get people to memorize stall speed, best glide speed, etc, before they even understand what they are.
In any case, the "obvious" part was referring to an adult looking at the test, trying to figure out what it's testing without having been exposed to the actual lessons. What's being taught is how to take apart a specific problem and figure out how to solve it, by looking at "the whole" and "the part you know", which is a perfectly reasonable way of looking at subtraction problems. However, the test question is poorly written.
"part I know" is how the concept is being taught, it won't be a confusing concept to the 6-year-old. The confusing part is that the coffee cup with "6" isn't in the same space as 5 pennies. I think I agree, though, that someone who doesn't really understand it yet might do better, simply by keying in on the key phrases and plugging them in to the pattern they've been taught, rather than wondering how you subtract 5 pennies from a coffee cup with the number 6 in it.
Understanding subtraction, what it is, what it represents, how it occurs in actual problems, is completely different from learning your subtraction tables. This test is testing the conceptual part - the rote part isn't important to answering these questions, as they're small enough you can figure it out by counting.
The adaptive testing I'm talking about is going to be about concepts, not about memorizing facts. For memorizing facts, there are much better methods (see, e.g. Corrective Feedback Paradigm). Both are good uses of computers in education, unlike the garbage that most Computer-Based Education seems to be these days.
It doesn't need to be obvious to the kids, that's simply how they're being taught (and there's nothing wrong with that). Looking at the test as a whole, you can figure out how they're teaching things and what they're testing for.
Whether an adult who hasn't been taught a specific method, with key phrases ("the whole", "the hidden part", "the part you know"), finds a question difficult to understand, is irrelevant. What I was commenting on is that they don't appear to be following a coherent model, the test isn't properly testing comprehension of the concept. As an adult, you might be able to focus in on the key phrases they're using (and, after looking at the rest of the test, understand how they're being used even without having explicitly seen how it's being taught), thus figuring out the correct answer, but that isn't what the test should be testing for. By confusing the "part" and "whole" (with one being pennies, the other being unnamed units presumably inside a coffee cup??), the whole teaching paradigm is confused.
This has nothing to do with whether an adult can look at the test and figure it out.
The only problem with question 1 is that the "whole" is indicated as a coffee cup.
It's obvious that subtraction is being taught as "the full (whole) amount" minus "the part you know" equals "the hidden (missing) part" (or at least one way of thinking about subtraction problems can be thought of that way).
Some of the other questions are poorly worded as well, but Q1 is really bad.
There's nothing wrong with having tests where some of the problems are "too hard" for the level being tested, tests should be useful as diagnostics, exploring what you DON'T know. It should be totally normal to get a 50% on a test, that just shows what still needs to be taught. There's been a lot of research on computerized adaptive tests, that's what should be used, not testing for failure.
No, the response I got was that since the order of evaluation of function arguments is undefined, they can even be done in parallel. Each of the two expressions has sequence points within them, but the comma in the function call does not define a sequence point.
It isn't about the order of f() and g() being evaluated, but the two arguments to x():
x( (tmp = 1, f(tmp) + g(tmp) ), (tmp = 2, f(tmp) + g(tmp) ) );
Now, the value of tmp after the call to x() is obviously undefined, but apparently even the two arguments to x() are undefined.
Maybe the specific language specification has changed since then, I don't know, this was around 10-15 years ago, on an Alpha with DEC's ucode-based optimizing compiler.
I once had some code that confused me when the compiler optimized some stuff out.
I had a macro that expanded to a parenthesized expression with several sub-expressions separated by commas that used a temp variable, e.g.:
#define m(a) (tmp = a, f(tmp) + g(tmp))
because the argument (a) could be an expression with side effects.
Now, I knew that the order of evaluation of function arguments wasn't defined, but I never read that as meaning that a compiler could optimize away parts of a function call such as: x(m(1), m(2)); this particular compiler effectively acted as if it was evaluating both arguments in parallel, thus the value of tmp was undefined throughout (I think it eliminated one of the initial assignments).
Changing it to an in-line function made it work; it had initially been code written for a compiler that didn't have in-line functions and was in the middle of a very tight loop.
Also, looking at your other post, and a bit at the FlatRate plan and explanation of it not working, it doesn't sound like "certainty" was referring to how much data you could download but performance. With data-capped plans, you also don't get performance certainty - if everyone is trying use the network at peak periods, they're all going to get much lower performance than they would at other times - the heavy data users don't have any incentive to not use it at that time, so you have to build in enough capacity to handle them as well. It will end up costing more to handle the same number of customers, which means everyone pays more than they would otherwise.
The biggest difference between what I described and the FlatRate plan is that it's averaged over a much longer time period (on the order of a month) rather than a fairly short time period (on the order of minutes). It also isn't strictly trying to be a priority-based system (individual packets aren't handled at different priorities), just that your router speed-caps you based on your priority and current network congestion. If you aren't trying to use more than your current speed cap, you won't even notice it when your priority goes down.
I think they just screwed it up. They should have been able to offer it at competitive prices, and marketed properly could have competed against quota-based systems (queue video of trying to talk to the Grandkids when your data rate suddenly gets cut to 128K, and only getting 1Mbps during peak usage periods anyway - compared to Grandma getting 20Mbps in the evening and never worrying about going over quota and paying less than she would on the "other" plan that only gets her 50GB/month).
You asked in your other post
Would you prefer 8Mbps with no quota or 100Mbps with a 1TB quota?
but we're talking about quota of 250GB. At 100Mbps, you'd blow through that in less than 6 hours. At 8Mbps you could transfer over 2.5TB in a month, and with the method I described, most of the time you'd have a much higher sustained speed.
If Grandma is video-chatting with her grandkids for 2 hours a month, she's not going to be on a plan for "just e-mail and light web browsing". If she's paying $5/month for 1Mbps, how many GB would that pay for on a data-metered plan? If you give her a 100Mbps connection, and she isn't careful about limiting the amount of bandwidth the video-chat wants to use, she's going to blow through her whole quota and end up paying more anyway, she may even need to limit it below 1Mbps! How does that help her?
If she's video-chatting with her grandkids in the evening, she's going to get more than 1Mbps, and if that's not enough then she SHOULD be paying more.
If someone is paying for a 1Gbps base-rate connection (in my scenario of $5/Mbps), they'd be paying $5000/month - so what if they want to download 324TB of data with that?
The problem with the plan you described is with trying to mix data caps with bandwidth caps, it sounds like. Users don't WANT limits, they want performance. If it's too slow, then they'll pay to speed it up. If they don't want to pay more, they can use the network when it's less congested. In either case, they don't have to be worrying all the time about how much data any specific activity is going to chew into their quota. Having a "certainly" of 100GB a month isn't something people want to even think about - with even 1Mbps, they have a certainty of getting at least 324GB/month, and knowing they can't ever possibly go over a quota is a much better certainty.
We all know that Lithium isn't flammable at all, and Li-ion batteries never catch fire.
The basic problem with usage caps is that usage doesn't actually COST anything. It's the provisioning of bandwidth that costs money to provide, not actually transporting the data. This leads to inefficient usage of available resources. You have to build out the network to handle peak loads, but there's no incentive to shift usage.
Dynamically adjusted bandwidth limits, with a lower "guaranteed" limit, makes much more sense. You'd pay a higher rate for a higher minimum.
You adjust the current actual max rate based on how much capacity you've used recently (on the order of a few minutes). Grandma goes to download her e-mail, she gets high priority maximum physical-limit speed for a minute, then (only if bandwidth is currently in short supply) ramp it down, perhaps all the way to the minimum if it's really busy. Grandma does nothing for a while, her priority goes up, perhaps after 10 minutes it's as if she never did anything.
Streaming a video, your priority would be dropped after a short while. In times of high usage, that would limit your rate. Once you stop, your priority would rise back up, same as Grandma. The algorithm would have to be designed to make sure you couldn't game it by bursting
Using the network at periods of low usage would be encouraged, as it would be much faster, which increases utilization of available bandwidth (which could actually save money for the provider as total capacity required might end up being lower).
One way of doing this is simply having a unit of, perhaps, 1Mbps, with offerings based on multiples of that. Grandma might have a 1Mbps service for her occasional e-mail and web-browsing, plus the occasional software update; the guy who regularly syncs with every open source repository might pay for a 10Mbps service (which, in the middle of the night, gets 200Mbps).
Use a fair allocation scheme - as total bandwidth becomes saturated, drop the max rate down until it's no longer saturated. Anyone using less than that rate (times a multiplier based on your current priority) won't be affected, anyone trying to use more will be capped (until it becomes available again). You should, perhaps, also be able to pay for higher priority (so you might have a 2Mbps minimum, but you get a multiplier of 1.5 when calculating your current cap). Priority is, as indicated earlier, based on your recent usage - high bandwidth (relative to your base level) reduces your priority, low or none raises it.
I don't understand what you mean by "USB converter didn't have to translate the protocol stuff". USB has its own protocols, not related to IDE-level commands at all.
ATAPI command set is SCSI; SATA is Serial ATA/ATAPI, so is basically Serial SCSI. Firewire is Serial SCSI. Everything is pretty much the same. Protocol conversion between SCSI, Firewire, PATA is pretty easy, and converting it to be carried over USB is going to be very similar also.
Using a Mac with SCSI was so much easier than the hell PC users had to go through, especially as drives got larger. With SCSI, it just worked. PCs had to worry about drive geometry, and then later how the drive was going to FAKE the drive geometry, jumpers to make large drives look smaller on systems that couldn't handle it, then LBA. As I recall, by the time CD-ROM drives came out, they were almost all ATAPI because it was too crazy not to. At that point, there wasn't much difference between ATA/ATAPI and SCSI except the physical interface.
How do you handle out-of-state drivers and residents who drive in other states? Do you record the odometer on entry and exit to the state?