They blocked Fark where I work for pornographic reasons. You know what I do? I wait til I get home.
You know what's even worse? I'm a public school teacher, and they block Slashdot at my school because it's a "message board". You know what I do? Read reddit and (gasp!) sometimes Digg (neither of which are blocked... yet) during my conference period, and catch up on Slashdot when I get home. I can't even check my personal email from school. BFD.
Let's all repeat after me, class: blocking your access to certain websites -- whether at school, at work, or even by your ISP -- is not censorship. Censorship has a narrower definition than the average high school kid thinks.
it seems like gauging the difficulty of the puzzle would be fairly simple, just keep track of how many "tricks" you had to apply before you got your definite answer.
This is basically what you have to do. It is complicated, however, by the fact that certain tricks that are pretty easy for computers to do but hard for humans and vice-versa.
I had the same problem at first. I'd picked up a Netgear WG311v2 at Fry's and it took me *forever* to finally get my card working that first time. "Craig's ACX100/111 Guide for Linux" was extremely helpful if you've got hardware using this chipset. (I'd link to it, but don't want to slashdot them or anything.)
The driver was flaky, but functional. Now I've updated to the new driver at acx100.erley.org. Again, it took quite a bit of doing to get it working the first time (documentation for the new 2.6-only driver isn't as good yet), but now that I've gotten it working it's ROCK SOLID. It Just Works.
Well, as much as anything that required recompiling the kernel can Just Work, anyway.
It's basically the same story as with winmodems (no hardware specs), but the Linux community is further along in reverse-engineering because it's... well, it's WiFi, damn it, and not just an easily-upgraded internal modem.
Speaking of which, my brother can't get Linux to see his winmodem on his Compaq Presario laptop. Any pointers?
Hey, a completely offtopic question here, since you seem to be an experienced PuTTY user, and one who uses vim.
I'm ssh'ing to a Linux server from a Windows box using PuTTY. When in vim, I can't seem to get the numeric keypad to actually do numbers. I've tried several of the options in both PuTTY and vim, and no combination seems to do the trick. Any suggestions?
Maybe I've written some software that can help you. I'm a computer science teacher at the high school level, and I take my grading very seriously. But, I hate "busy work" and am equally serious about using technology to streamline my grading workflow.
Now, I assume you only have one PC in your classroom, whereas every student in my room has their own machine in front of them. And that's a huge advantage; if the work is in digital form to begin with, it grades much more quickly.
Anyway, I've done some things to improve my workflow:
My skills quizzer that gives me infinite self-grading quizzes for life.
Scripting to make manual grading and subsequent data entry faster.
It's not my stuff, but Jeff Burgard's Gateway to Mastery concepts are very, very good and encourage real accountability for learning in ways that keep the grading load manageable. (And he's got a lot for math teachers and doesn't assume you have access to more than one teacher PC.)
I don't have time to write more in this comment, but I do have more to say. Reply or email me if you're interested in discussing more.
And I'd add: because I can't code Flash in vim. Over an SSH session to my webserver.
For the past decade (scary I've been coding HTML that long, actually), I've basically used nothing but vi to develop for the web. Except for a brief stint with TextPad back when I used to use Windows.
So, Ajax I could do with my existing tools. It's just coding after all. For Flash, I'd have to obtain and learn a new operating environment. And from my perspective, the learning curve isn't worth the benefits.
You (ObligatoryUserName) have raised my estimation of Flash, though. More power to you.
Goodness. What a vitriolic post. I'm not Mad Merlin, but I think you're not reading his post as clearly as you could be.
You admit your code doesn't run properly on all browsers, and that you have to write extra code to handle the case of browsers that don't support the features you require.
Actually, he said that in creating the XMLHttpRequest object, IE requires a different technique than any of the other browsers. But after that, the code is identical. And further, he codes fallback support for browsers that don't support XMLHttpRequest at all. At least, that's how I read it.
The XMLHTTPRequest standard is defined by IE, and the other browsers are not imitating it properly.
Not quite, but you're very close. The XMLHttpRequest standard is defined by IE, and the other browsers are not imitating it. (period)
IE defined the thing (and we're all glad about this). They implemented it a certain way. If I read Mad Merlin correctly (and I personally have no idea if this is true), every other browser that supports XMLHttpRequest, 1) implements it differently than IE, and 2) implements it the same as each other.
You could interpret this to mean that the others are "doing it wrong". Maybe they're just doing it differently to be dicks. However, since XMLHttpRequest isn't a standard, I think the most logical explanation is that though they like the idea, no one likes Microsoft's (admittedly first) implementation. And further, they agree on the Right Way to Do It, and so they all do it that way.
Anyway, last point:
You say you use "standards compliant code", but XMLHTTPRequest is not a W3C standard, it's a Microsoft standard.
I don't think he's implying that XMLHttpRequest is a W3C standard. In fact, I don't think he's talking about XMLHttpRequest at all when he says "As always, I don't design for IE, I write standards compliant code."
I think he's just saying, "IE is notorious for being non-compliant with standards in general, so I find my life is a lot easier (and better for cross-browser compatibility) if I code to the standard where it exists and code to the majority consensus when browsers do it differently. Finally I check it in IE and try to work around its differences as a final step."
Seems fair enough to me, and not very much like he "knows he's full of shit."
It kind of seems to me like they mentioned Yahoo for a lark in this article.
Actually, I'd bet you dollars to donuts that this article was "seeded" by a PR firm in the employ of Yahoo. Their goal: create the impression that Yahoo is second only to Google as a search engine and an employer of Smart People. Make Yahoo seem cool like Google is. For example, the sentence "Yahoo also carries substantial geek cred."
Paul Graham unveils this concept in great detail in his essay The Submarine.
Notice the number of quotes from Yahoo employees vs. the number from Google employees, the insider information about Yahoo's future plans vs. the use of facts you already knew about Google anyway.
Funny you should bring it up. About a month ago, I wrote a Python module to open a.lnk file and parse the pathname or UNC out of it. It's hackish, but works great. Now my recursive directory walks respect shortcuts, too.
Though I don't currently check for cycles, so some poor user might get into an infinite loop some day. Gotta remember to fix that....
I've never read the "PHP in Contrast to Perl" document before. Holy cow, I knew I hated PHP, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Thank you for this.
This was after finals, my junior year of college. My roommate had just upgraded his PC to the latest and greatest, and had purchased one of those steering wheel/pedal controllers.
I'd been playing a couple of hours of Carmageddon (1), which was a first-person demolition race featuring pedestrain zombies you can run over to get extra time. Perhaps you see where this story is going.
Well, we ran out of beer or chips or something, and I was the only one who hadn't had anything to drink, so we all piled into my car to head to the grocery store, which was only a couple of blocks away if you went the back way.
About a minute into the drive, there was a lady sort-of shuffling toward us on the right-hand side of the road. My first thought was: "I can totally get to her!" And I very nearly swerved to do so, even.
Fortunately, since I'd only been playing a couple of hours (and not days and days), and since I hadn't been drinking, I caught myself before I killed anyone, but it did scare me to death, and I've been careful what games I allow myself to play since then.
WHO THE FUCK SEARCHES FOR THOSE THINGS?? It amazes me how stupid people are - rather than type in amazon.com, bestbuy.com, or cnn.com, they actually search for them on Google.
I'll admit that I'm a culprit, though for different reasons than you think. I use Firefox, and have browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped set to true. It greatly speeds up my daily surfing to be able to type "CTRL+L, sl, TAB, ENTER" and get to slashdot. And I sometimes visit bestbuy.com, but I don't want my URLbar history "polluted" with it.
In fact, sometimes I even type the URL in the address bar but don't press ENTER, highlight it with the mouse and then middle click in the current page somewhere to load a specific URL without "saving" it as one I've typed.
So probably it's most likely that the millions of Google users that cause "c" to stand for "CNN" in Google Suggest are really just trying not to clutter up their typed URL history like me.
I've often wondered: was the rather unusual sampling frequency of 44.1kHz chosen to be an exact multiple of concert pitch, where A is 441Hz?
Not at all. It was chosen because it needed to be able to be at least 40 kHz (twice 20 kHz by the Nyquist Theorem), and because during digital audio development in the late 1960s, companies were typically storing the digital signal on high-grade video tape. 44.1 kHz was a compromise reached between Sony and Philips in 1979. This was over 40 kHz, and also matched up with 60 fps of interlaced digital video (3 samples per field of 490/2 lines; 3 x 245 x 60 Hz = 44100 Hz).
Note that as pointed out by another poster, concert A is 440 Hz, not 441. Also note that pitches typically increase by factors of two, not factors of ten: concert A is 440 Hz; the A one octave above that is 880 Hz.
As a computer science teacher who grades tons and tons of student work myself (no TAs or student aides here...), I agree with your whole list.
One time I had a kid who turned in code copied from another student, but unlike most, he denied it when confronted. (He had a lot to lose if he failed the term.) So I was faced with trying to prove it to his parents, who believed him since he's normally a trustworthy kid.
In this case, the cheating was so egregious that I made transparencies (like for an overhead projector) of both the alleged "original" code, and the "copied" code. Though this was a vaguely-specified doubly-linked list container data structure in C++ (and thus prone to be highly individual), the two assignments matched up character for character (except for one variable name) when the transparencies were laid over each other!
Then, I just had to show who was the copier and the copyee, which I was able to easily do with file timestamps, and even a record in the "recent files" showing both students had accessed a floppy disk from their respective machines within five minutes of each other, and that half an hour before the alleged copier turned in his assignment. The copyee had turned his in three days prior.
Needless to say, it was a slam dunk.
However, students are often amazed at how I can detect cheating. One time I was grading one of their more major projects and I saw a distinctive line or two of code I remembered seeing before. I grepped through the other students' projects, but turned up nothing. So then on a lark I grepped through the same assignment done by students from previous years, and turned up a match.
The copyee? A student who had graduated two years prior. Whose best friend was the older brother of the copier. Nailed!
Suprising how highly variable code can be for loosely-defined programs, and how recognizable certain coding styles can be.
So two teachers married make more than 80,000 a year? Thats not a bad haul considering they get the months of July and August off. They also get a week for Winter and spring breaks, and on top of that their sick and vacation time. Do you get that much time off, do you work on call? Do you always have a fixed hour day?
Actually, in Texas we get June and July off, not July and August.
However, the idea that teachers have a "fixed hour day" is laughable. I have four preps, because that's what they ask me to teach. Last week, I was at school Monday night until 1:45 AM grading, Tuesday until 6pm, and Wednesday until 10pm. I have evening commitments Thursday and Friday, so I left "early" at 5, but made up for it by coming in for a couple of hours each on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday of the Labor Day weekend. And I'm not married (as you'd probably guess from my hours worked), so it's just the one salary.
Elementary school teachers have it worse. I've virtually never seen an elementary school teacher who wasn't grading. Admittedly, my grading schedule for last week was worse than average, but not by an order of magnitude or anything.
I have a CS degree from one of the top-ten CS schools in the US, and seven years of teaching experience, but I make just over $35K. And I don't think I'm being selfish in saying that's too low for my level of education/skill and workload. Now, I'm not complaining, because I enjoy my job and knew the pay would be low before I got in, but the point is, most teachers deserve higher pay.
And, in fact, the only reason I get paid as well as I do is that my school district spends slightly more than 80% of its overall budget on salaries. And so I don't have any budget whatsoever (so the $50 CD-burner I'm going to buy for my classroom will come out of pocket), but that's the breaks.
Until you can fire a teacher for being bad at their job you will not have good teachers (and this is very hard to do). Youll simply have better paid bad teachers.
Here, however, is where I agree with you. Not all teachers take their mandate as seriously as I do. Some teachers are terrible, and the current system (in Texas, anyway) is basically such that a school district can only "non-renew" a teacher after their first year with the district. If they hire that teacher for a second year, they pretty much can't be fired unless they 1) touch a student (sex or violence) or 2) touch money they shouldn't.
Most districts handle that by waiting for bad teachers to leave through retirement or attrition, and just make damn sure that all new hires are "good", as far as you can tell such things, anyway.
If we had a workable system of teacher evaluation and could easily get rid of bad teachers, then people would probably be comfortable paying the remaining "good" teachers more. Probably.
As you can tell from my.sig, I'm a public school teacher. In the past seven years that I've been at my current school, I've also seen the environment grow more homogeneous. You want to know why?
We have over 300 computers. We have over 2300 users, and 2000+ of those are hostile. We have one full-time tech guy. One.
He has to keep those machines running, not to mention install new versions of proprietary educational software. He makes around $35K/yr. Show me another discipline where they expect a single person to support that many machines/users.
We must use Windows machines across the board, because 1) we've already paid for the Windows licenses, and 2) 90% of educational software, which is usually single-vendor, is Windows only. And horridly-written, by and large, I might add.
Ideally, for his sanity we'd have 300 of the exact same machine, with the exact same Ghost image, but due to limited licenses for things like Photoshop and 3DS MAX and Borland C++ or whatever, that's not possible.
But you can bet we're running Windows 2000 across the board, with as many remote administration tools as humanly possible.
It has everything to do with software compatibility requirements and support personnel needing homogeneity to keep their heads above water. It's not a conspiracy, and really doesn't have that much to do with hardware or software costs, to be honest.
Perhaps if oggs were particularly small, say 10-20% the size of the standard mp3, you would probably see more people flocking to it. But in the age of $1/gig hard drives, space isn't such a huge issue.
It's all about your situation. I run Linux at home, so mp3 vs. vorbis is a toss-up in terms of "support". (Actually, since mp3 support isn't shipped with RedHat/Fedora by default, Ogg Vorbis is actually *more* supported....) At work, I wrote my own music player software for my computer lab, and I found it easier to just modify the source to ogg123 than to try to get something else working. So Ogg Vorbis had the advantage. Not to mention I've got 24 client machines in my lab which I can get working on ripping and encoding all at once, giving me a net total throughput of about 4 minutes per CD (counting my walking around to physically swap out CDs).
As far as portables go, I'm almost certainly about to get a Sony CLIÉ, whose audio player supports Ogg Vorbis. And 128MB memory sticks can be had for around $33, and each hold right at four hours of music encoded at 64kbps, so I can buy a handful and have several preloaded "mixes" for long car trips.
I don't know if you've done a listening test with Ogg Vorbis at 64kbps (a.k.a. quality 0) vs. standard mp3 at that bitrate, but I'll give you a hint: one is quite listenable, the other isn't. And AFAIK I don't have access to wma or mp3pro encoders under Linux, so if I want listenable music at 64 kbps, it's going to have to be Ogg Vorbis.
Now, I wouldn't want to listen to 64 kbps compressed audio sitting in my living room on my $150 headphones, but for my noisy car over my factory speakers, it's as good or better than the radio or a tape deck, I'd say.
And speaking of space not being such a huge issue, on Thursday I should receive my new 160 GB hard drive from NewEgg. Then I should finally have enough hard drive space to rip my ~250 albums to FLAC and leave them there, so I shouldn't have to rip ever again, since I can just write a shell script to convert from FLAC to whatever format I like. (And in fact, I already have a couple scripts to do just that.)
Anyway, the beauty of the open market is that consumers can choose the option that suits them best. For me, that's Ogg Vorbis, and I like that it's a format I could potentially use for the rest of my life.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually it's *originally* a quote from Mahatma Gandhi.
A new progression:
Got to give it to Microsoft for not going down easy, at least.
You know what's even worse? I'm a public school teacher, and they block Slashdot at my school because it's a "message board". You know what I do? Read reddit and (gasp!) sometimes Digg (neither of which are blocked... yet) during my conference period, and catch up on Slashdot when I get home. I can't even check my personal email from school. BFD.
Let's all repeat after me, class: blocking your access to certain websites -- whether at school, at work, or even by your ISP -- is not censorship. Censorship has a narrower definition than the average high school kid thinks.
This is basically what you have to do. It is complicated, however, by the fact that certain tricks that are pretty easy for computers to do but hard for humans and vice-versa.
Agreed. For a computer:
I had my students do this in class this year, so I have some idea what I'm talking about.
I am God ...try prove otherwise.
God doesn't leave out grammatically-significant prepositions.
QED
:)
I had the same problem at first. I'd picked up a Netgear WG311v2 at Fry's and it took me *forever* to finally get my card working that first time. "Craig's ACX100/111 Guide for Linux" was extremely helpful if you've got hardware using this chipset. (I'd link to it, but don't want to slashdot them or anything.)
The driver was flaky, but functional. Now I've updated to the new driver at acx100.erley.org. Again, it took quite a bit of doing to get it working the first time (documentation for the new 2.6-only driver isn't as good yet), but now that I've gotten it working it's ROCK SOLID. It Just Works.
Well, as much as anything that required recompiling the kernel can Just Work, anyway.
It's basically the same story as with winmodems (no hardware specs), but the Linux community is further along in reverse-engineering because it's... well, it's WiFi, damn it, and not just an easily-upgraded internal modem.
Speaking of which, my brother can't get Linux to see his winmodem on his Compaq Presario laptop. Any pointers?
Hey, a completely offtopic question here, since you seem to be an experienced PuTTY user, and one who uses vim.
I'm ssh'ing to a Linux server from a Windows box using PuTTY. When in vim, I can't seem to get the numeric keypad to actually do numbers. I've tried several of the options in both PuTTY and vim, and no combination seems to do the trick. Any suggestions?
Maybe I've written some software that can help you. I'm a computer science teacher at the high school level, and I take my grading very seriously. But, I hate "busy work" and am equally serious about using technology to streamline my grading workflow.
Now, I assume you only have one PC in your classroom, whereas every student in my room has their own machine in front of them. And that's a huge advantage; if the work is in digital form to begin with, it grades much more quickly.
Anyway, I've done some things to improve my workflow:
It's not my stuff, but Jeff Burgard's Gateway to Mastery concepts are very, very good and encourage real accountability for learning in ways that keep the grading load manageable. (And he's got a lot for math teachers and doesn't assume you have access to more than one teacher PC.)
I don't have time to write more in this comment, but I do have more to say. Reply or email me if you're interested in discussing more.
And I'd add: because I can't code Flash in vim. Over an SSH session to my webserver.
For the past decade (scary I've been coding HTML that long, actually), I've basically used nothing but vi to develop for the web. Except for a brief stint with TextPad back when I used to use Windows.
So, Ajax I could do with my existing tools. It's just coding after all. For Flash, I'd have to obtain and learn a new operating environment. And from my perspective, the learning curve isn't worth the benefits.
You (ObligatoryUserName) have raised my estimation of Flash, though. More power to you.
Goodness. What a vitriolic post. I'm not Mad Merlin, but I think you're not reading his post as clearly as you could be.
You admit your code doesn't run properly on all browsers, and that you have to write extra code to handle the case of browsers that don't support the features you require.
Actually, he said that in creating the XMLHttpRequest object, IE requires a different technique than any of the other browsers. But after that, the code is identical. And further, he codes fallback support for browsers that don't support XMLHttpRequest at all. At least, that's how I read it.
The XMLHTTPRequest standard is defined by IE, and the other browsers are not imitating it properly.
Not quite, but you're very close. The XMLHttpRequest standard is defined by IE, and the other browsers are not imitating it. (period)
IE defined the thing (and we're all glad about this). They implemented it a certain way. If I read Mad Merlin correctly (and I personally have no idea if this is true), every other browser that supports XMLHttpRequest, 1) implements it differently than IE, and 2) implements it the same as each other.
You could interpret this to mean that the others are "doing it wrong". Maybe they're just doing it differently to be dicks. However, since XMLHttpRequest isn't a standard, I think the most logical explanation is that though they like the idea, no one likes Microsoft's (admittedly first) implementation. And further, they agree on the Right Way to Do It, and so they all do it that way.
Anyway, last point:
You say you use "standards compliant code", but XMLHTTPRequest is not a W3C standard, it's a Microsoft standard.
I don't think he's implying that XMLHttpRequest is a W3C standard. In fact, I don't think he's talking about XMLHttpRequest at all when he says "As always, I don't design for IE, I write standards compliant code."
I think he's just saying, "IE is notorious for being non-compliant with standards in general, so I find my life is a lot easier (and better for cross-browser compatibility) if I code to the standard where it exists and code to the majority consensus when browsers do it differently. Finally I check it in IE and try to work around its differences as a final step."
Seems fair enough to me, and not very much like he "knows he's full of shit."
But what do I know?
It kind of seems to me like they mentioned Yahoo for a lark in this article.
Actually, I'd bet you dollars to donuts that this article was "seeded" by a PR firm in the employ of Yahoo. Their goal: create the impression that Yahoo is second only to Google as a search engine and an employer of Smart People. Make Yahoo seem cool like Google is. For example, the sentence "Yahoo also carries substantial geek cred."
Paul Graham unveils this concept in great detail in his essay The Submarine.
Notice the number of quotes from Yahoo employees vs. the number from Google employees, the insider information about Yahoo's future plans vs. the use of facts you already knew about Google anyway.
Bet.
Ever tried handling a shortcut in a script?
Funny you should bring it up. About a month ago, I wrote a Python module to open a .lnk file and parse the pathname or UNC out of it. It's hackish, but works great. Now my recursive directory walks respect shortcuts, too.
Though I don't currently check for cycles, so some poor user might get into an infinite loop some day. Gotta remember to fix that....
I've never read the "PHP in Contrast to Perl" document before. Holy cow, I knew I hated PHP, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Thank you for this.
True story about Carmageddon:
This was after finals, my junior year of college. My roommate had just upgraded his PC to the latest and greatest, and had purchased one of those steering wheel/pedal controllers.
I'd been playing a couple of hours of Carmageddon (1), which was a first-person demolition race featuring pedestrain zombies you can run over to get extra time. Perhaps you see where this story is going.
Well, we ran out of beer or chips or something, and I was the only one who hadn't had anything to drink, so we all piled into my car to head to the grocery store, which was only a couple of blocks away if you went the back way.
About a minute into the drive, there was a lady sort-of shuffling toward us on the right-hand side of the road. My first thought was: "I can totally get to her!" And I very nearly swerved to do so, even.
Fortunately, since I'd only been playing a couple of hours (and not days and days), and since I hadn't been drinking, I caught myself before I killed anyone, but it did scare me to death, and I've been careful what games I allow myself to play since then.
a: amazon
b: best buy
c: cnn
WHO THE FUCK SEARCHES FOR THOSE THINGS?? It amazes me how stupid people are - rather than type in amazon.com, bestbuy.com, or cnn.com, they actually search for them on Google.
I'll admit that I'm a culprit, though for different reasons than you think. I use Firefox, and have browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped set to true . It greatly speeds up my daily surfing to be able to type "CTRL+L, sl, TAB, ENTER" and get to slashdot. And I sometimes visit bestbuy.com, but I don't want my URLbar history "polluted" with it.
In fact, sometimes I even type the URL in the address bar but don't press ENTER, highlight it with the mouse and then middle click in the current page somewhere to load a specific URL without "saving" it as one I've typed.
So probably it's most likely that the millions of Google users that cause "c" to stand for "CNN" in Google Suggest are really just trying not to clutter up their typed URL history like me.
*cough*
You go, boy. +5 Funny for you!
I've often wondered: was the rather unusual sampling frequency of 44.1kHz chosen to be an exact multiple of concert pitch, where A is 441Hz?
Not at all. It was chosen because it needed to be able to be at least 40 kHz (twice 20 kHz by the Nyquist Theorem), and because during digital audio development in the late 1960s, companies were typically storing the digital signal on high-grade video tape. 44.1 kHz was a compromise reached between Sony and Philips in 1979. This was over 40 kHz, and also matched up with 60 fps of interlaced digital video (3 samples per field of 490/2 lines; 3 x 245 x 60 Hz = 44100 Hz).
Note that as pointed out by another poster, concert A is 440 Hz, not 441. Also note that pitches typically increase by factors of two, not factors of ten: concert A is 440 Hz; the A one octave above that is 880 Hz.
That is FANTASTIC! Feel free to TA at Leander any time. High school students can't sue for much....
As a computer science teacher who grades tons and tons of student work myself (no TAs or student aides here...), I agree with your whole list.
One time I had a kid who turned in code copied from another student, but unlike most, he denied it when confronted. (He had a lot to lose if he failed the term.) So I was faced with trying to prove it to his parents, who believed him since he's normally a trustworthy kid.
In this case, the cheating was so egregious that I made transparencies (like for an overhead projector) of both the alleged "original" code, and the "copied" code. Though this was a vaguely-specified doubly-linked list container data structure in C++ (and thus prone to be highly individual), the two assignments matched up character for character (except for one variable name) when the transparencies were laid over each other!
Then, I just had to show who was the copier and the copyee, which I was able to easily do with file timestamps, and even a record in the "recent files" showing both students had accessed a floppy disk from their respective machines within five minutes of each other, and that half an hour before the alleged copier turned in his assignment. The copyee had turned his in three days prior.
Needless to say, it was a slam dunk.
However, students are often amazed at how I can detect cheating. One time I was grading one of their more major projects and I saw a distinctive line or two of code I remembered seeing before. I grepped through the other students' projects, but turned up nothing. So then on a lark I grepped through the same assignment done by students from previous years, and turned up a match.
The copyee? A student who had graduated two years prior. Whose best friend was the older brother of the copier. Nailed!
Suprising how highly variable code can be for loosely-defined programs, and how recognizable certain coding styles can be.
So two teachers married make more than 80,000 a year? Thats not a bad haul considering they get the months of July and August off. They also get a week for Winter and spring breaks, and on top of that their sick and vacation time. Do you get that much time off, do you work on call? Do you always have a fixed hour day?
Actually, in Texas we get June and July off, not July and August.
However, the idea that teachers have a "fixed hour day" is laughable. I have four preps, because that's what they ask me to teach. Last week, I was at school Monday night until 1:45 AM grading, Tuesday until 6pm, and Wednesday until 10pm. I have evening commitments Thursday and Friday, so I left "early" at 5, but made up for it by coming in for a couple of hours each on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday of the Labor Day weekend. And I'm not married (as you'd probably guess from my hours worked), so it's just the one salary.
Elementary school teachers have it worse. I've virtually never seen an elementary school teacher who wasn't grading. Admittedly, my grading schedule for last week was worse than average, but not by an order of magnitude or anything.
I have a CS degree from one of the top-ten CS schools in the US, and seven years of teaching experience, but I make just over $35K. And I don't think I'm being selfish in saying that's too low for my level of education/skill and workload. Now, I'm not complaining, because I enjoy my job and knew the pay would be low before I got in, but the point is, most teachers deserve higher pay.
And, in fact, the only reason I get paid as well as I do is that my school district spends slightly more than 80% of its overall budget on salaries. And so I don't have any budget whatsoever (so the $50 CD-burner I'm going to buy for my classroom will come out of pocket), but that's the breaks.
Until you can fire a teacher for being bad at their job you will not have good teachers (and this is very hard to do). Youll simply have better paid bad teachers.
Here, however, is where I agree with you. Not all teachers take their mandate as seriously as I do. Some teachers are terrible, and the current system (in Texas, anyway) is basically such that a school district can only "non-renew" a teacher after their first year with the district. If they hire that teacher for a second year, they pretty much can't be fired unless they 1) touch a student (sex or violence) or 2) touch money they shouldn't.
Most districts handle that by waiting for bad teachers to leave through retirement or attrition, and just make damn sure that all new hires are "good", as far as you can tell such things, anyway.
If we had a workable system of teacher evaluation and could easily get rid of bad teachers, then people would probably be comfortable paying the remaining "good" teachers more. Probably.
Anyway, just my $0.02.
As you can tell from my .sig, I'm a public school teacher. In the past seven years that I've been at my current school, I've also seen the environment grow more homogeneous. You want to know why?
We have over 300 computers. We have over 2300 users, and 2000+ of those are hostile. We have one full-time tech guy. One.
He has to keep those machines running, not to mention install new versions of proprietary educational software. He makes around $35K/yr. Show me another discipline where they expect a single person to support that many machines/users.
We must use Windows machines across the board, because 1) we've already paid for the Windows licenses, and 2) 90% of educational software, which is usually single-vendor, is Windows only. And horridly-written, by and large, I might add.
Ideally, for his sanity we'd have 300 of the exact same machine, with the exact same Ghost image, but due to limited licenses for things like Photoshop and 3DS MAX and Borland C++ or whatever, that's not possible.
But you can bet we're running Windows 2000 across the board, with as many remote administration tools as humanly possible.
It has everything to do with software compatibility requirements and support personnel needing homogeneity to keep their heads above water. It's not a conspiracy, and really doesn't have that much to do with hardware or software costs, to be honest.
But then, Kenny G is a no-talent ass-clown...
Actually, it's Michael Bolton who is the no-talent ass-clown, but then that's nitpicking, isn't it?
Well, on second thought, they're both no-talent ass-clowns. Sorry to interrupt.
And BCPL, also Basic CPL, came from CPL (the Combined Programming Language), a collection of working papers done by Chris Strachey in the mid 60s.
I give this lecture to my beginning comp sci students, to explain the heritage of this "C++" they're about to learn.
Perhaps if oggs were particularly small, say 10-20% the size of the standard mp3, you would probably see more people flocking to it. But in the age of $1/gig hard drives, space isn't such a huge issue.
It's all about your situation. I run Linux at home, so mp3 vs. vorbis is a toss-up in terms of "support". (Actually, since mp3 support isn't shipped with RedHat/Fedora by default, Ogg Vorbis is actually *more* supported....) At work, I wrote my own music player software for my computer lab, and I found it easier to just modify the source to ogg123 than to try to get something else working. So Ogg Vorbis had the advantage. Not to mention I've got 24 client machines in my lab which I can get working on ripping and encoding all at once, giving me a net total throughput of about 4 minutes per CD (counting my walking around to physically swap out CDs).
As far as portables go, I'm almost certainly about to get a Sony CLIÉ, whose audio player supports Ogg Vorbis. And 128MB memory sticks can be had for around $33, and each hold right at four hours of music encoded at 64kbps, so I can buy a handful and have several preloaded "mixes" for long car trips.
I don't know if you've done a listening test with Ogg Vorbis at 64kbps (a.k.a. quality 0) vs. standard mp3 at that bitrate, but I'll give you a hint: one is quite listenable, the other isn't. And AFAIK I don't have access to wma or mp3pro encoders under Linux, so if I want listenable music at 64 kbps, it's going to have to be Ogg Vorbis.
Now, I wouldn't want to listen to 64 kbps compressed audio sitting in my living room on my $150 headphones, but for my noisy car over my factory speakers, it's as good or better than the radio or a tape deck, I'd say.
And speaking of space not being such a huge issue, on Thursday I should receive my new 160 GB hard drive from NewEgg. Then I should finally have enough hard drive space to rip my ~250 albums to FLAC and leave them there, so I shouldn't have to rip ever again, since I can just write a shell script to convert from FLAC to whatever format I like. (And in fact, I already have a couple scripts to do just that.)
Anyway, the beauty of the open market is that consumers can choose the option that suits them best. For me, that's Ogg Vorbis, and I like that it's a format I could potentially use for the rest of my life.