>> You *NEVER* get rid of the blackmarket by legalizing something.
Tell that to all the prohibition-era gangsters who went legit after the law was repealed. The mafia dropped in size to less than half its previous numbers. The only thing that saved them was the illegalization of narcotics.
Wish I had mod points, you pretty much tore that moron a new one. Hmm, I'm trying to remember the last time I bought blackmarket beer.
I'm not really in favor of legalizing most drugs, but you have a good point that legalizing them would make them cost no more than cigarettes. Most are just plant extracts - without the overhead of the various illegal activities in their production and distribution, most drugs are no harder to grow and produce than alcohol, tobacco, or coffee. Makes me wonder if the biggest lobbyists AGAINST legalization are Colombian...
a picture-in-picture feature that allows viewers to surf channels without switching channels - TV, cable, satellite have all have this for years.
What they are talking about is actually something that hasn't (and can't currently) be done with traditional cable & satellite systems. I have seen a demo where you can actually stream 6 "thumbnail" favorite channels at the same time, and then choose the one you want for fullscreen. Or imagine an application where you are watching the current channel full screen, and the previous/next channels in PIP in the left and right corners. For traditional broadcast systems, this requires a tuner for each stream, which on settops is a fairly expensive resource that doesn't scale well. With IPTV, it just requires a processor capable of decoding N streams simultaneously.
Oh, and sure, some cable/satellite systems APPEAR to have a "wall of channels" but in reality they are compositing and broadcasting them as single transport stream with some fancy graphic overlay to hide that fact. Only way I can see cable doing this is dynamic compositing of streams and then transmitting via their VOD system, but that would require some pretty serious hardware to do for all customers, and not be nearly as flexible.
Who knows how they will eventually use this technology, but you can't argue that using IP for the video give you a lot more capability for cool features in the future.
fast channel changing
While I'm at it... I'm sure they are not properly explaining the technical details, but this is kind of cool, too - basically they burst the video down at several times the "real time" rate (ie for a 6mbps HD stream they'd send it down at 15-20mbps for a second or two). A lot of the channel change delay is due to the video decoder waiting for an I-frame (which is usually only 1-2 times a second w/ MPEG-2, or potentially less with AVC or WMV) before it can start decoding - this way it gets that I-frame that much faster. Again, just a nice little trick you can't do with a traditional broadcast system...
a digital video recorder
This is integrated in the same box, of course.
Anyway, not that I'm all that pro-AT&T or anything - and in fact they are using Microsoft tech for much of this, and based on my experiences with it ASF, WMV, MS-DRM, etc, is all really badly designed for this sort of purpose (I'm not anti-MS either, but it truly does suck compared to DVB and AVC...)
My laptop (which probably has about 1/2 the horsepower of my Athlon X2 4600 desktop) seemed to start up to "usable" state (ie not chugging along on startup apps that prevent me from effectively opening a brower, etc) a good 20-30 seconds before said desktop. I finally tracked the cause down to Steam running on my desktop but not my laptop. Once I set Steam not to run on startup, my desktop now starts up blazingly fast (at least compared to what it used to do).
I find this a bit disturbing. WTF is Steam doing!?
To reduce your NET carbon output to 0, you only need to stop breathing if you stop eating. Or you can just stop eating, and the breathing thing will work itself out.
Or be a good/. reader and just start eating more pizza and Cheetos and you can make your net carbon output negative!
On the other hand I would prefer that his leisure time be spent riding a bike, reading a book, playing with his friends, camping in the woods etc etc etc than being a CEO.
You don't get it, that's exactly what he's doing... reading a book (probably this one) and playing with his friends ("Let's play start up - I get to be CEO!") The only difference is he may make enough money during his play time to pay for college. And if not, he sure learned more than my friends and I did selling lemonade.
So he gave a speech at a conference. Some kids join theater, forensics, or the marching band, some play baseball, some make speeches to Silicon Valley executives. As long as he *wants* to do it and enjoys it, why begrudge the kid his fun??
The thing I like about your setup is you have properly focused the "gadgets" where it should be focused - on the roast and the grind. I bet 95% of the coffee making & drinking public put all their money into the coffee maker but as you seem to know that's the least important part...
I introduced my parents to Peet's coffee and it totally changed their thinking about what good coffee is. Last year I got them a burr grinder to replace their blade grinder and it was almost as drastic an improvement as good coffee. Interestingly they already had an expensive coffee maker that seemed to suck large amounts of coffee with mediocre results - after the burr grinder it now uses much less coffee and is fantastic.
On an embedded system, you probably don't need anything running but the kernel, udev, and your application. You don't need most of your libraries; it's going to be more efficient to statically link everything. You don't need bash. You don't need Python. You don't need a package manager.
You don't *technically* need anything else, but for development it can be IMMENSELY useful to have a shell and a base set of utils. Busybox will get you everything you need in a multicall binary under 1MB (dynamically linked to glibc).
Things can be even smaller using uclibc instead of glibc, but unless you are building an EXTREMELY low end embedded device and can't spare an extra 1-2MB or so (or 1/2 that with a compressed filesystem like cramfs) it may not be worth the extra hassle trying to build a uclibc toolchain (and potentially deal with uclibc issues with other utils/libs you may use).
Anyway, the nice thing about Busybox is that you port a single package and get huge range of utils. Overall I agree 100% with a previous poster who said the key to rolling your own OS is getting the toolchain working - once you have that, porting is relatively easy (I'm assuming we're talking about non-x86 embedded systems here... with x86 it becomes easier still, as the vast majority of open source development is done on that architecture).
You might want to consider your sources . . http://www.alcoholfacts.org/CrashCourseOnMADD.html
Hah! You might want to consider YOUR sources. Your link is from David Hanson, one of the most outspoken critics of any groups advising alcohol temperance (ie the AMA as well as MADD), legislation, etc.
Not that I am not a big fan of alcohol when consumed responsibly (I'm on my 2nd G&T this evening;). I just think it's absurd to try to play down the role of alcohol in traffic accidents/fatalities. The statistics are overwhelming - if MADD were off by 50% it would still be a big problem.
I'm certainly not looking forward to this policy change (if it happens). That said, I think the American public are smart enough to know the difference between terrible, fake chocolate and good chocolate.
I'm not worried. The US government does not allow beer over 6% (exact percent may be dependent on the state, though that kind of causes a "lowest common denominator" effect) alcohol content to be labeled "beer". That takes out 1/2 of the best Belgian ales, and most of the great barleywines. Luckily so far, there are enough observant people to realize how superior those are to the "mega-beers" to keep them available, but not enough people to make them unavailable:)
Did you perhaps not notice that most cable companies these days are selling the cable connection for telephone services, thus invoking the very same clauses that you are claiming a T1 gives you to make it "expensive"?
I can't even remember the last time I had a problem with a normal POTS line. I'd put it at 6-7 "9's", let alone 5. Comcast may be SELLING phone service, but they are nowhere near that reliability. I can't believe you are equating the two just because Comcast is "claiming" to be selling equivalent service.
Of course, DSL has always run over phone lines and so the argument you put forward was a non-starter from the beginning.
Wow, you are completely wrong, and the original poster is correct. Not even considering that DSL uses a COMPLETELY different technology to transmit information over that wire (your comparison is about as useful as saying my home power lines provide power extremely reliably, so they should work just as well for power line networking or X-10 home automation, which I guarantee - they don't), you are paying more for the service level agreement than anything else. A guarantee of "5 9's" is less than 5 minutes of downtime a year. If I added up all the misc issues with my DSL I'm lucky to have less than several days of downtime in the last year, and sometimes the problems are not resolved until I am on hold for a LOT longer than 5 minutes...
There are reasons that companies need reliability over bandwidth. A reliable 1.5Mbps T1 is completely worth $300/month to a supermarket that needs their debit/credit transactions to go through 24/7. If they had my $50/month DSL they would have lost a LOT more than the $250/month savings.
Isn't Ghiradelli really just re branded Nestlé though?
No, it's a 150 year old chocolate company in SF that was bought by Lindt in 1998.
Weird how 3 of the best American chocolate companies are in the Bay Area... Ghiradelli, Guittard, and my personal favorite, Scharffen Berger (which really is one of the world's best, even if it was just bought by Hershey's last year:)
most Americans seem to believe that they are living in some kind of unprecedented Mad-Max dystopia that requires their children to be on lockdown 24/7.
This is a good point, and is especially driven home by the ridiculous coverage of the recent Virginia Tech shooting. Every pundit and talking head is now discussing what can be done in colleges, etc to prevent this in the future, when in fact 68 people have died in the last 40+ years in college campus shootings, and most of those were from just 3 incidents. They are obviously horrible, disturbing incidents, but in the long run are responsible for less than 2 deaths a year, which is not even noise among the various types of homicides, let alone overall causes of death in the United States.
Revocation happens with the content (it revoked hardware is basically blacklisted) - so you could only use it on those movies released before the revocation...
Would be amusing to see the 360 HD-DVD revoked, though, given that MS was on the HD-DVD committee and probably had a lot of say over AACS design.
And isn't this the WHOLE reason for Altera and Xilinx???
Yes, it is. I used to work at Altera way back, and still have stock. Make more hardware out of expensive FPGAs with their huge profit margins? I'm all for it!
If only Sony had stuck with that and given us a machine that could real-time raytrace, then I probably would be queueing up to spend $837 on it (UK price of £425 converted at today's exchange rate).
No, if they put 4 more CPUs in along with the memory, increased power requirements, motherboard size, etc, required you'd be queueing up to spend twice that much.
I wonder if it isn't time to give up on the whole "giving grades" thing and let real internships filter them out. It's a lot harder to fake your way through life than it is to fake your way through school.
Agreed, except for the major problem of ratios... in another anecdote... I am now mentoring an intern as part of my (software engineering) job. It's something I generally love doing, but it pretty much requires regular 1-on-1 interaction, probably taking a minimum of 3-4 hours a week of my time. Doesn't bother me - but I'm at a small startup where everyone actually works hard without close supervision and so am in a position to spend time at my discretion. Probably not true of 95% of the companies out there.
So, to learn from an internship may require, say, 5-10% of the time of the mentor (especially at first). This vs the current system of potentially 100's of students per professor/lecturer or at least 10-30+ (depdends on the school I guess) per TA - where, of course, the student is paying their way with no expecatations of productivity. Basically, internships only pay off for a company if the interns provide more benefit based on productivity vs pay and lost mentor time. I'm guessing that's rarely true. I guess the other part is picking the best students early to have an edge in hiring them out of school - but honestly that's rare and limited to the top 10% of students in specific fields.
Ok, to go back to the 1st anecdote I told that started this - what kind of internship do you give to a 19 year old girl with a 3rd grade writing level, no interest the sciences, business, arts, or anything else that one can determine besides hanging out in a sorority? Internships only work for MOTIVATED students, and sadly that is a smaller percentage than you might think. To continue a rant;) I think part of the problem may be TOO much emphasis on "a college education"... let's face it, some people are not cut out for it. The important thing there is to figure out how to motivate them into SOME kind of education/training that will give them useful skills for a future career...
Which, in another light, could mean you're punishing her for doing too well. I understand it probably seemed obvious, and you're probably right, but it might've been a good idea to pull her in and see if she knows what she's talking about.
I think she felt sorry for her and so decided not to bring it up to the point of getting her expelled (then again I think she managed to flunk out soon enough anyway). I actually have to ask her how she resolved this - she said she was going to ask her a couple questions about the paper to make sure, though it was pretty much a foregone conclusion. And trust me, I saw an example of a previous paper - I'm sure many college students were writing above that level in the 2nd grade - I have NO idea how or why she was in college. But there is no way that a person can increase their writing by 10 grade levels in 3 weeks.
Despite what students seem to believe, my aunt's (and most lecturers') goal is to teach, not punish - her main reaction was just disbelief that the girl had made her way this far, and frustration that there was really nothing for her to learn at that level when she just needs to learn remedial writing skills.
One trick: Get them to read their own paper. If they are tripping over spelling and pronunciation -- and indeed, don't actually know what half of the words are -- then it's probably not their work. But again, be thorough -- maybe it's a stuttering problem?
How often does someone suddenly develop a stuttering problem 15 weeks into a semester? You appear to be saying "don't assume anything" but of course you have no context, and somehow seem to think PhD lecturers are not capable of recognizing consistent patterns over the course of 3-4 months? Assumptions are not the same as inferring very clear patterns.
Plagiarism is usually pretty blatant -- the more work the student spends polishing the plagiarized work, the more likely it is that going legit would be easier. So, I think you should be very careful not to have any false positives.
Except this was not really plagarism as much as plain cheating (ie have someone else write your paper for you). I don't think she was capable of the level of reading skill required for plagarism:)
students have ways to cheat on term papers. Professors have ways to catch cheaters though. If you assign lots of small writing assignments along with a term paper, for instance, you can pick up on your students' writing styles enough to catch a term paper that was clearly not written by them.
Exactly! I was just about to say almost the same thing...
My aunt teaches geology and last year was telling me about an experience she had with a couple of students in her class. She gave an extra credit paper assignment and of course a number of students took her up on it. One was a Japanese student with fairly poor English skills, but who otherwise understood the point of the assignment. The paper was not the best gramatically, but it covered all of the points very thoroughly - she gave him a 10/10. Another was a sorority girl who was one of the worst students she had - all of her previous papers/midterm essays were barely comprehensible. She turned in something way beyond anything she had written before and received a 0/10 because it was completely obvious someone else wrote her paper.
Moral to the story? Basically what you said - have professors (yeah right)/lecturers/TAs who actually pay enough attention to know their students and what they are capable of (ouch, dangle that preposition, MY English teacher would not be pleased!)
The summary as written is really poor, mostly because it focuses on the technical legal term for what happened(by putting it in the headline).
Well, I'll agree with that at least... then again, please remember this is the same site that just posted an article with the headline "Siberia - The Next Silicon Valley?"
The flash parts used in these devices can only program approx 10k times before they can be expected to start failing.
Modern NAND flash is in the 100k+ erase/program cycles... from an ST application note on wear leveling: "In ST NAND Flash memories each physical block can be programmed or erased reliably over 100,000 times." Of course, the wear leveling is what gets you in the 1M hour MTBF range...
the MTBF numbers for flash assume that you stay within the endurance limits.
With flash, the weak point is wear of the memory cells, in magnetic disks it's physical components like motors/actuators, heads, etc. Either way, more usage = more wear = shorter lifespan.
Besides, MTBF is not at all a good indication of the expected life of the disk - most drive manufacturers basically cheat and calculate the MTBF based on failures before any components would wear out due to usage (obviously... otherwise they'd be testing the drives for years before shipping them). So it's more of a measure of "defect rate".
An interesting comparison between SSDs and magnetic disks will be their MTBFs vs. average lifespans. I would guess with wear leveling covering the most likely point of failure, SSDs will eventually have a much higher MTBF, but also a much smaller range (I guess "deviation" would be the statistical term) in the average lifespan. It's very possible magnetic disks will have an overall longer average lifespan. But if that SSD lifespan can get into the 5-10 year range, then they are going to become REALLY popular for a lot of uses... (goodbye seek time!)
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>> You *NEVER* get rid of the blackmarket by legalizing something.
Tell that to all the prohibition-era gangsters who went legit after the law was repealed. The mafia dropped in size to less than half its previous numbers. The only thing that saved them was the illegalization of narcotics.
Wish I had mod points, you pretty much tore that moron a new one. Hmm, I'm trying to remember the last time I bought blackmarket beer.
I'm not really in favor of legalizing most drugs, but you have a good point that legalizing them would make them cost no more than cigarettes. Most are just plant extracts - without the overhead of the various illegal activities in their production and distribution, most drugs are no harder to grow and produce than alcohol, tobacco, or coffee. Makes me wonder if the biggest lobbyists AGAINST legalization are Colombian...
Read between the lines!
Damn, you beat me to it... wish I had mod points!
a picture-in-picture feature that allows viewers to surf channels without switching channels - TV, cable, satellite have all have this for years.
What they are talking about is actually something that hasn't (and can't currently) be done with traditional cable & satellite systems. I have seen a demo where you can actually stream 6 "thumbnail" favorite channels at the same time, and then choose the one you want for fullscreen. Or imagine an application where you are watching the current channel full screen, and the previous/next channels in PIP in the left and right corners. For traditional broadcast systems, this requires a tuner for each stream, which on settops is a fairly expensive resource that doesn't scale well. With IPTV, it just requires a processor capable of decoding N streams simultaneously.
Oh, and sure, some cable/satellite systems APPEAR to have a "wall of channels" but in reality they are compositing and broadcasting them as single transport stream with some fancy graphic overlay to hide that fact. Only way I can see cable doing this is dynamic compositing of streams and then transmitting via their VOD system, but that would require some pretty serious hardware to do for all customers, and not be nearly as flexible.
Who knows how they will eventually use this technology, but you can't argue that using IP for the video give you a lot more capability
for cool features in the future.
fast channel changing
While I'm at it... I'm sure they are not properly explaining the technical details, but this is kind of cool, too - basically they burst the video down at several times the "real time" rate (ie for a 6mbps HD stream they'd send it down at 15-20mbps for a second or two). A lot of the channel change delay is due to the video decoder waiting for an I-frame (which is usually only 1-2 times a second w/ MPEG-2, or potentially less with AVC or WMV) before it can start decoding - this way it gets that I-frame that much faster. Again, just a nice little trick you can't do with a traditional broadcast system...
a digital video recorder
This is integrated in the same box, of course.
Anyway, not that I'm all that pro-AT&T or anything - and in fact they are using Microsoft tech for much of this, and based on my experiences with it ASF, WMV, MS-DRM, etc, is all really badly designed for this sort of purpose (I'm not anti-MS either, but it truly does suck compared to DVB and AVC...)
I just figured this out last week in fact...
My laptop (which probably has about 1/2 the horsepower of my Athlon X2 4600 desktop) seemed to start up to "usable" state (ie not chugging along on startup apps that prevent me from effectively opening a brower, etc) a good 20-30 seconds before said desktop. I finally tracked the cause down to Steam running on my desktop but not my laptop. Once I set Steam not to run on startup, my desktop now starts up blazingly fast (at least compared to what it used to do).
I find this a bit disturbing. WTF is Steam doing!?
Where do you think that carbon comes from!?
/. reader and just start eating more pizza and Cheetos and you can make your net carbon output negative!
C6H12O6 + 6O2 = 6CO2 + 6H2O
To reduce your NET carbon output to 0, you only need to stop breathing if you stop eating. Or you can just stop eating, and the breathing thing will work itself out.
Or be a good
On the other hand I would prefer that his leisure time be spent riding a bike, reading a book, playing with his friends, camping in the woods etc etc etc than being a CEO.
You don't get it, that's exactly what he's doing... reading a book (probably this one) and playing with his friends ("Let's play start up - I get to be CEO!") The only difference is he may make enough money during his play time to pay for college. And if not, he sure learned more than my friends and I did selling lemonade.
So he gave a speech at a conference. Some kids join theater, forensics, or the marching band, some play baseball, some make speeches to Silicon Valley executives. As long as he *wants* to do it and enjoys it, why begrudge the kid his fun??
Nice!
The thing I like about your setup is you have properly focused the "gadgets" where it should be focused - on the roast and the grind. I bet 95% of the coffee making & drinking public put all their money into the coffee maker but as you seem to know that's the least important part...
I introduced my parents to Peet's coffee and it totally changed their thinking about what good coffee is. Last year I got them a burr grinder to replace their blade grinder and it was almost as drastic an improvement as good coffee. Interestingly they already had an expensive coffee maker that seemed to suck large amounts of coffee with mediocre results - after the burr grinder it now uses much less coffee and is fantastic.
On an embedded system, you probably don't need anything running but the kernel, udev, and your application. You don't need most of your libraries; it's going to be more efficient to statically link everything. You don't need bash. You don't need Python. You don't need a package manager.
You don't *technically* need anything else, but for development it can be IMMENSELY useful to have a shell and a base set of utils. Busybox will get you everything you need in a multicall binary under 1MB (dynamically linked to glibc).
Things can be even smaller using uclibc instead of glibc, but unless you are building an EXTREMELY low end embedded device and can't spare an extra 1-2MB or so (or 1/2 that with a compressed filesystem like cramfs) it may not be worth the extra hassle trying to build a uclibc toolchain (and potentially deal with uclibc issues with other utils/libs you may use).
Anyway, the nice thing about Busybox is that you port a single package and get huge range of utils. Overall I agree 100% with a previous poster who said the key to rolling your own OS is getting the toolchain working - once you have that, porting is relatively easy (I'm assuming we're talking about non-x86 embedded systems here... with x86 it becomes easier still, as the vast majority of open source development is done on that architecture).
in which bacteria consume water-soluble brewing waste such as sugar, starch and alcohol
Also know as Vegemite.
Can U spell hypocracy?
Well, we know you can't.
You might want to consider your sourcesl
;). I just think it's absurd to try to play down the role of alcohol in traffic accidents/fatalities. The statistics are overwhelming - if MADD were off by 50% it would still be a big problem.
.
.
http://www.alcoholfacts.org/CrashCourseOnMADD.htm
Hah! You might want to consider YOUR sources. Your link is from David Hanson, one of the most outspoken critics of any groups advising alcohol temperance (ie the AMA as well as MADD), legislation, etc.
Not that I am not a big fan of alcohol when consumed responsibly (I'm on my 2nd G&T this evening
I'm certainly not looking forward to this policy change (if it happens). That said, I think the American public are smart enough to know the difference between terrible, fake chocolate and good chocolate.
:)
I'm not worried. The US government does not allow beer over 6% (exact percent may be dependent on the state, though that kind of causes a "lowest common denominator" effect) alcohol content to be labeled "beer". That takes out 1/2 of the best Belgian ales, and most of the great barleywines. Luckily so far, there are enough observant people to realize how superior those are to the "mega-beers" to keep them available, but not enough people to make them unavailable
Did you perhaps not notice that most cable companies these days are selling the cable connection for telephone services, thus invoking the very same clauses that you are claiming a T1 gives you to make it "expensive"?
I can't even remember the last time I had a problem with a normal POTS line. I'd put it at 6-7 "9's", let alone 5. Comcast may be SELLING phone service, but they are nowhere near that reliability. I can't believe you are equating the two just because Comcast is "claiming" to be selling equivalent service.
Of course, DSL has always run over phone lines and so the argument you put forward was a non-starter from the beginning.
Wow, you are completely wrong, and the original poster is correct. Not even considering that DSL uses a COMPLETELY different technology to transmit information over that wire (your comparison is about as useful as saying my home power lines provide power extremely reliably, so they should work just as well for power line networking or X-10 home automation, which I guarantee - they don't), you are paying more for the service level agreement than anything else. A guarantee of "5 9's" is less than 5 minutes of downtime a year. If I added up all the misc issues with my DSL I'm lucky to have less than several days of downtime in the last year, and sometimes the problems are not resolved until I am on hold for a LOT longer than 5 minutes...
There are reasons that companies need reliability over bandwidth. A reliable 1.5Mbps T1 is completely worth $300/month to a supermarket that needs their debit/credit transactions to go through 24/7. If they had my $50/month DSL they would have lost a LOT more than the $250/month savings.
Isn't Ghiradelli really just re branded Nestlé though?
:)
No, it's a 150 year old chocolate company in SF that was bought by Lindt in 1998.
Weird how 3 of the best American chocolate companies are in the Bay Area... Ghiradelli, Guittard, and my personal favorite, Scharffen Berger (which really is one of the world's best, even if it was just bought by Hershey's last year
most Americans seem to believe that they are living in some kind of unprecedented Mad-Max dystopia that requires their children to be on lockdown 24/7.
This is a good point, and is especially driven home by the ridiculous coverage of the recent Virginia Tech shooting. Every pundit and talking head is now discussing what can be done in colleges, etc to prevent this in the future, when in fact 68 people have died in the last 40+ years in college campus shootings, and most of those were from just 3 incidents. They are obviously horrible, disturbing incidents, but in the long run are responsible for less than 2 deaths a year, which is not even noise among the various types of homicides, let alone overall causes of death in the United States.
Revocation happens with the content (it revoked hardware is basically blacklisted) - so you could only use it on those movies released before the revocation...
Would be amusing to see the 360 HD-DVD revoked, though, given that MS was on the HD-DVD committee and probably had a lot of say over AACS design.
And isn't this the WHOLE reason for Altera and Xilinx???
Yes, it is. I used to work at Altera way back, and still have stock. Make more hardware out of expensive FPGAs with their huge profit margins? I'm all for it!
If only Sony had stuck with that and given us a machine that could real-time raytrace, then I probably would be queueing up to spend $837 on it (UK price of £425 converted at today's exchange rate).
No, if they put 4 more CPUs in along with the memory, increased power requirements, motherboard size, etc, required you'd be queueing up to spend twice that much.
I wonder if it isn't time to give up on the whole "giving grades" thing and let real internships filter them out. It's a lot harder to fake your way through life than it is to fake your way through school.
;) I think part of the problem may be TOO much emphasis on "a college education"... let's face it, some people are not cut out for it. The important thing there is to figure out how to motivate them into SOME kind of education/training that will give them useful skills for a future career...
Agreed, except for the major problem of ratios... in another anecdote... I am now mentoring an intern as part of my (software engineering) job. It's something I generally love doing, but it pretty much requires regular 1-on-1 interaction, probably taking a minimum of 3-4 hours a week of my time. Doesn't bother me - but I'm at a small startup where everyone actually works hard without close supervision and so am in a position to spend time at my discretion. Probably not true of 95% of the companies out there.
So, to learn from an internship may require, say, 5-10% of the time of the mentor (especially at first). This vs the current system of potentially 100's of students per professor/lecturer or at least 10-30+ (depdends on the school I guess) per TA - where, of course, the student is paying their way with no expecatations of productivity. Basically, internships only pay off for a company if the interns provide more benefit based on productivity vs pay and lost mentor time. I'm guessing that's rarely true. I guess the other part is picking the best students early to have an edge in hiring them out of school - but honestly that's rare and limited to the top 10% of students in specific fields.
Ok, to go back to the 1st anecdote I told that started this - what kind of internship do you give to a 19 year old girl with a 3rd grade writing level, no interest the sciences, business, arts, or anything else that one can determine besides hanging out in a sorority? Internships only work for MOTIVATED students, and sadly that is a smaller percentage than you might think. To continue a rant
Which, in another light, could mean you're punishing her for doing too well. I understand it probably seemed obvious, and you're probably right, but it might've been a good idea to pull her in and see if she knows what she's talking about.
:)
I think she felt sorry for her and so decided not to bring it up to the point of getting her expelled (then again I think she managed to flunk out soon enough anyway). I actually have to ask her how she resolved this - she said she was going to ask her a couple questions about the paper to make sure, though it was pretty much a foregone conclusion. And trust me, I saw an example of a previous paper - I'm sure many college students were writing above that level in the 2nd grade - I have NO idea how or why she was in college. But there is no way that a person can increase their writing by 10 grade levels in 3 weeks.
Despite what students seem to believe, my aunt's (and most lecturers') goal is to teach, not punish - her main reaction was just disbelief that the girl had made her way this far, and frustration that there was really nothing for her to learn at that level when she just needs to learn remedial writing skills.
One trick: Get them to read their own paper. If they are tripping over spelling and pronunciation -- and indeed, don't actually know what half of the words are -- then it's probably not their work. But again, be thorough -- maybe it's a stuttering problem?
How often does someone suddenly develop a stuttering problem 15 weeks into a semester? You appear to be saying "don't assume anything" but of course you have no context, and somehow seem to think PhD lecturers are not capable of recognizing consistent patterns over the course of 3-4 months? Assumptions are not the same as inferring very clear patterns.
Plagiarism is usually pretty blatant -- the more work the student spends polishing the plagiarized work, the more likely it is that going legit would be easier. So, I think you should be very careful not to have any false positives.
Except this was not really plagarism as much as plain cheating (ie have someone else write your paper for you). I don't think she was capable of the level of reading skill required for plagarism
students have ways to cheat on term papers. Professors have ways to catch cheaters though. If you assign lots of small writing assignments along with a term paper, for instance, you can pick up on your students' writing styles enough to catch a term paper that was clearly not written by them.
Exactly! I was just about to say almost the same thing...
My aunt teaches geology and last year was telling me about an experience she had with a couple of students in her class. She gave an extra credit paper assignment and of course a number of students took her up on it. One was a Japanese student with fairly poor English skills, but who otherwise understood the point of the assignment. The paper was not the best gramatically, but it covered all of the points very thoroughly - she gave him a 10/10. Another was a sorority girl who was one of the worst students she had - all of her previous papers/midterm essays were barely comprehensible. She turned in something way beyond anything she had written before and received a 0/10 because it was completely obvious someone else wrote her paper.
Moral to the story? Basically what you said - have professors (yeah right)/lecturers/TAs who actually pay enough attention to know their students and what they are capable of (ouch, dangle that preposition, MY English teacher would not be pleased!)
That's it. ssh! Don't want to hear any more complaints from a supposed "UNIX server" admin. ssh!
The summary as written is really poor, mostly because it focuses on the technical legal term for what happened(by putting it in the headline).
Well, I'll agree with that at least... then again, please remember this is the same site that just posted an article with the headline "Siberia - The Next Silicon Valley?"
The flash parts used in these devices can only program approx 10k times before they can be expected to start failing.
Modern NAND flash is in the 100k+ erase/program cycles... from an ST application note on wear leveling: "In ST NAND Flash memories each physical block can be programmed or erased reliably over 100,000 times." Of course, the wear leveling is what gets you in the 1M hour MTBF range...
the MTBF numbers for flash assume that you stay within the endurance limits.
With flash, the weak point is wear of the memory cells, in magnetic disks it's physical components like motors/actuators, heads, etc. Either way, more usage = more wear = shorter lifespan.
Besides, MTBF is not at all a good indication of the expected life of the disk - most drive manufacturers basically cheat and calculate the MTBF based on failures before any components would wear out due to usage (obviously... otherwise they'd be testing the drives for years before shipping them). So it's more of a measure of "defect rate".
An interesting comparison between SSDs and magnetic disks will be their MTBFs vs. average lifespans. I would guess with wear leveling covering the most likely point of failure, SSDs will eventually have a much higher MTBF, but also a much smaller range (I guess "deviation" would be the statistical term) in the average lifespan. It's very possible magnetic disks will have an overall longer average lifespan. But if that SSD lifespan can get into the 5-10 year range, then they are going to become REALLY popular for a lot of uses... (goodbye seek time!)