Might have guessed. That region of the world is well known to be very socially proactive. I helped one of my Chinese Uni students apply for a scholarship at a Uni over there. She got it and is loving it and doing very well.
> to be willing to do very hard work for a small salary, you have to really be dedicated to it. (Of course, I'm NOT saying "keep their pay low", and wouldn't make this remark in front of a politician voting budgets).
bracketed comment : LOL
Yes. That is a very good point. I don't personally consider teachers' salaries in Australia inadequate - they seem about what I would expect for that level of work. I was never sucked into the consumerism treadmill and have very low financial needs anyway (heck, I'm currently on a middle-class Chinese salary and putting away more than I could in Australia as I almost only buy fresh food here, which is virtually no cost - it's the home theatre systems, cars and mortgages that sink the finances. I just skipped all that guff and only buy stuff that is really useful/interesting to me.:-)
I just get sick of people who think teaching is an easy job (including some - few fortunately - teachers). Rather than more salary, I'd much prefer to see class sizes in Australian Primary Schools reduced (which would incidentally create more teaching positions and I wouldn't be over in China because I can't get a permanent teaching position in Aust.)
> That could just be because they have one of the highest levels of female participation too.
Anti-depressant use does not necessarily indicate proportional incidence of depression. I could just as easily highlight gender differences in attitude to seeking medical help. Do a basic stats course at night college before trying to impress people with figures you only half understand the use of.
I'm male, I was not on anti-depressants between ages 15 and 24. But I was near suicidally depressed for most of that time. Brain chemical imbalance easily treated when I finally got around to consulting a GP.
If we want to talk averages, how much longer do women - on average - live than men? How much shorter do teachers (majority of whom are women) live than people in other professions? Have fun with the stats!
> These women can thank their feminist sisters for convincing them all that they would enjoy life as wage slaves more than raising and nurturing their own children.
As opposed to unpaid domestic slavery (not as valid in today's world with all the home automation, but 'housewife' was a damned hard 16 hours a day 7 days a week no leave job not too many decades ago). And becoming a female schoolteacher, particularly at primary level where I was, isn't exactly 'breaking the glass ceiling' socially.
> As for their pay rates, they get paid rather well if you calculate it on a per hourly basis
Only if you only count up 'face time' and not 'prep time' which is convenient for supporting your beliefs but not much else. You are obviously one of these people who think you can just walk into a room of 30 kids and start teaching off the top of your head. I DARE YOU TO TRY THIS FOR ONE HOUR. GO ON. I REALLY DO! It will be the most educational thing you have ever experienced. I guarantee it. Do lower primary: you will probably think that is the easiest. I do mean TEACH, as in something relevant to the curriculum - not just entertain them.
Or at least go read through the syllabus (assuming your government education department produces one). In NSW Australia they are 6 books of A4 size and 300-400 pages each (example lessons not included). Plus a dozen-odd cross-curriculum perspective documents from 50-100 pages each. That covers what must be taught in 7 years (three learning stages) of primary school. That - and the child psychology and basic student counselling skills - is why a bachelor degree in teaching takes 4 years.
That isn't an excessive workload. But it isn't a paid holiday either.
BTW: per hour per child, a teenage babysitter is really raking it in compared to a professional teacher. No training necessary. After all, that's all a primary teacher is really doing all day, isn't it?
> I know I'd give up some of my paycheque for a guaranteed job for life.
Fair point. I'd rather see teachers retained for their ability to teach and hang job security at the expense of the country's future.
> Teachers don't need to worry about being outsourced to India.
No, we tend to outsource ourselves to India (or China in my case). They pay better for good teachers than the West today (relative to local cost of living).
> not joining the teachers pity party with all the other sheeple.
You'd rather join the teacher non-pity party with its own sheeple - their group is bigger, for greater peer-group protection! Fair enough. Doesn't look like your education system ever did much for you, so that's probably understandable. Since this is Slashdot and there is no obvious info on your location attached to your user profile, I will assume you are a US citizen.
You mean 'face time': 6 hours a day, 5 days a week, 40 weeks a year. Doesn't count 'prep time' which is uncounted and unpaid (except the 1 hour a week 'Release from Face to Face' - RFF) and possibly letting the church(es) in to take the kids for an hour a week of scripture classes (something I don't do as I believe religion is something for the individual family, not the public school). Australian public system I'm describing here. YMMV.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people think teaching is just walking into a classroom, and starting to teach. YOU CANNOT DO THIS. IT DOES NOT WORK. NOT EVEN FOR 30 MINUTES. There is a reason primary teachers have to study a 4 year bachelor degree before entering a classroom on their own. And if you want to know what fear is, it's your first day ever alone with 31 six-year-olds!!! And they can smell fear. That is a fact.
You *can* get away with a few hours a week prep time, but you are either supremely efficient (and some teachers are) or - much more often - coasting and doing your students a big disservice. Teachers do share lesson plans, and re-use lessons year after year (though they should be updated or they get stale and out of date quicker than a copy of MS Word) and this reduces workload to manageable levels. There are whole pre-made lesson books you can buy, but I've never found one that is even half as good as I can do myself. Some teachers seem to live on them.
Grandparent mentioned guaranteed employment. I agree this is the case. I disagree with the system. Teachers should be retained on their proven ability to teach. Trouble is, when you get three times the salary driving a forklift truck nights at the local steelworks (friend of mine), it's a bit hard to get the best people into the profession in the first place.
BTW rduke15: Where are you that class size is 20? I wanna go there to work. I'm used to 30-35 students to a primary class. I'd happily take a pay cut for such a reduction in class size! Probably put 5 years back on my life expectancy (go look at average lifespans in the teaching profession as compared to others for a real eye-opener as to stress. And women dominate teaching and yet women are supposed to live longer on average than men.)
Yup. Once per student. Someone needs to brush up on their maths:-P (actually I'm teaching Uni. ATM, so it's more like 120 students). And if you are serious about helping the students learn anything, marking isn't just putting a few ticks through it and saying 'yeah, that looks like a B'. If they make a mistake, you should be trying to nut out where they went wrong, keeping in mind if many other students have made the same mistake (which indicates your teaching method has failed for that task and it needs redesign). I HOPE the teachers in your part of the world are professional enough to do something like this!! If not, well, they are hired by YOUR government. And YOU (on average, or your parents if you 18yo) CHOSE that government.
Maybe I'm just young and idealistic. I'm only 33 and a teacher only the past 8 years.
Personally, when teaching Pri of HS, I'd rather be formally at the school for two hours after class off and a week before each term and get paid the extra hours than take it home and do it there for free. That's why I moved to the developing world. The people and their governments still take education seriously over here and pay well (relative to local incomes and costs of living) for good teachers.
It likely involves subjecting the displays to very harsh physical and electrical conditions under carefully calculated control to simulate that running time. That is pretty standard practise in many of these sorts of industries.
Thats how they know CD-Rs only last about 100 years even if seldom used and NAND-Flash looses its memory after 10 years (they knew that one long before Flash had been around for 10 years).
Don't kid yourself. Students only have to do the assignment once. We have to mark it 35 times. Plus all lesson plans (in detail: objectives, outcomes, materials, process, curriculum linkages) for the entire term submitted by the start of each term (so take a week off each of those holiday periods) and refresh training. We may have only 5h a day face time, but add a few hours prep and marking at home to that, please.
At least teachers in countries with > a 3rd-world education system who give a shit do it like this. YMMV.
A few years back I discovered (while having an MRI for an unrelated reason) I was born with an abnormality in my brain that means any moderate-hard blow to the head is very likely to kill me pretty much instantly.
Anyone physically asulting me could well find themselves on manslaughter charges. Assuming they are caught, of course. And it doesn't do me much good either.:-(
Which is why I (from rural Australia) avoid empty places in Sydney, particularly at night, but have no worries about my young cousin (who grew up there) wandering about. She instictively knows where to go and where not and how to carry herself (even I can see that in her), while I only know my limitations in the circumstances.
A friend of my sister was mugged in Sydney about a decade back. He handed over his wallet, but it didn't have enough, so they forced him at knife point to go home, where there was still not enough cash for them but his ATM card was, so he was then taken to make a withdrawal for them.:-/
Three years back a friend of my brother was beaten up (again in Sydney). Not robbed. Just picked at random for a beating - not even a racial thing. He is now permanently disabled:-(
Lets end with a positive story: Same brother -- who is a Tai-kwon-do instructor -- was being harassed by a drunk guy in a crowded bar. He automatically slipped into defensive (sp?- I don't trust what my spell checker just said) posture when the guy pushed into him. The drunk's mates very quickly were hauling the guy away with profuse apology. I hope that guy appreciated having true friends!
The amount of times where the criminal has actually sued like this is huge. The informal advice was shooting to kill is cheaper because dead people can't sue you. At least not where I came from (at the time I left anyway).
Point of interest: According to a conversation I overheard between a cop and a regular citizen in Australia, there a cop can only pull his gun from its holster if he intends to fire it and MUST shoot to kill, not wound. I believe it is to make sure criminals know exactly where they stand and to stop police using a gun for harassment/intimidation purposes. If a holster seal is broken, there is a LOT of paperwork.
If the card is only going to be used for swap, you don't need a battery-backed card. Just a plain old SRAM card would do fine. Again, you are limited to 16M on this type of card - I have never heard of an ATA-SRAM device, battery backed or otherwise. Flash was established and cheap enough by the time there was a need to break the 16M barrier.
I can imagine being able to build something with bank-switching (ah, the days of a 64k address space) to get past the 16M addessing limitation of PCMCIA-memory, but I can also imagine the special driver needed and a big headache.:-/
Could well exist still. This sort of stuff is still used a lot in Teleco equipment (hence Motorola's interest in MRAM). Unlike the consumer PC industry where 2 years is out-of-date, Teleco equipment is needed to be around and supported for decades, so the parts may well be avaliable still. Though you may end up paying a Teleco equipment price.
I bought a Fuji FinePix S602 explicitly because it can record 640x480 at 32fps (ie, pretty close to DVD size, rather than a moving postage stamp). It can also, given a reasonably fast flash card, keep recording until the card is full. 12MB gives me a very feature-basic camcorder, which is all I want. About 120 minutes recording. With the bonus that the video is not interlaced which is great for me since I only ever output to monitor. I don't have enough need for video to own a purpose-built camcorder, but a digicam that can make a passable effort at video suits me well.
Not at that price, of course! Maybe in a few years. Currently I'm still using a 128M card, planning on upgrading to a 1G when the price drops a bit more. I seldom have need to shoot more than a few dozen seconds at a time between being near my computer ATM. I'd also have to check that the camera can go above a 1G card.
If only I could hack it to record 512x256@48fps. I would have my perfect low-end video device. Well... close enough to it.
To be more exact, NAND flash (used in most mass storage devices) can take around 100,000 rewrites. NOR flash (used in embedded systems needing true random access to memory) can take about 1,000,000. (I think I got that the right way around). Assuming one rewrite to a memory block per minute (we are being VERY generous here). How many weeks will your card work for?
Flash cards usually use wear leveling to prolong their lives under heavy rewrite conditions, but even this can't keep up with a lot of page swapping.
Magneto-resistive RAM (MRAM) is a new technology just avaliable at very low capacities (Motorola has 4Mbit - 512kbyte - chips out now) which claims virtually infinite re-write capability (and much better r/w speed, too. If they start making these at higher densities into CF/PCMCIA/card-format-of-the-week, you can probably make it work. I am, in fact, hoping to use this technology at the next generation (16Mbit) for a very similar purpose in a consumer device (which I am designing as a personal project -- hence I have the luxury of waiting around for technology to catch up with my needs!;-).
If you want a hardware project, get yourself a depopulated (ie, no chips) PCMCIA SRAM card designed to hold 4Mbit SRAMS of the same JEDEC pinout and solder on a bunch of MRAMS. They are electricaly compatible with SRAMS. You will need a very fine soldering iron, a very steady hand and a jewlwer's eyepiece for best soldering results. You would max out at 16MBytes, it think, which is the largest size PCMCIA SRAM can handle (limit on addressing pins). Beyond that capacity you are mucking around with simulating ATA devices, something I refuse to do. No waranty offered by the poster on this procedure;-)
> Your point about the Chinese middle class is both apt and horrifying--the forced movements of people by the Chinese government to reach forced sinicization (sp?) and the destruction of any indigenous peoples is just ridiculous.
According to BBC news sources about 18 months ago (documentary on BBC World), the middle class Chinese have moved into Tibet and now the Tibetans are second-class citizens in their own region of the world. Chinese companies won't hire them, instead bringing in workers from further east. The best work they can get is selling tourist junk to visiting middle-class Chinese.
Tibetans seem to be effectively excluded from the benefits of development sent from Beijing.
Of course, this may not be deliberate on the part of Beijing central - there are a lot of middle-operators in there with their own agendas (which usually involve nepotism and pocket-lining, as with everywhere else in the 'developed' world).
An excellent response. Far better than I could have done. As you may have guessed, I was groping at the limits of my personal understandings (hence the disclaimer at the top of my post).
I had never considered the 'colony' idea. It makes more complete sense than what I had proposed.
Also a good look at the theological side, which is something I have even more trouble with. It was very helpful to me to consider your points. Thanx.
"Accelerator" is actually not a bad name for the gas pedal. We call it that exclusively in Aust.
The "accelerator" pedal isn't just for getting faster, but for controlling speed (not velocity, of course, you need to add in the steering wheel for that). You use the "accelerator" pedal to slow down too -- by releasing the pressure on it. The brake is only for fast reductions in speed. Anyone using the brake for *all* their slowing down is driving with VERY bad fuel efficiency (and excessive brake pad wear; and risk of brake failure from overheating;-)!
My sister had a lot of trouble with getting mum's car to coast smoothly when first learning to drive until she grasped the idea that the "accelerator" pedal is for controlling speed, not just increasing it. Now she, like you and I, just does it without thinking about it.
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> Switzerland.
:-)
Might have guessed. That region of the world is well known to be very socially proactive. I helped one of my Chinese Uni students apply for a scholarship at a Uni over there. She got it and is loving it and doing very well.
> to be willing to do very hard work for a small salary, you have to really be dedicated to it. (Of course, I'm NOT saying "keep their pay low", and wouldn't make this remark in front of a politician voting budgets).
bracketed comment : LOL
Yes. That is a very good point. I don't personally consider teachers' salaries in Australia inadequate - they seem about what I would expect for that level of work. I was never sucked into the consumerism treadmill and have very low financial needs anyway (heck, I'm currently on a middle-class Chinese salary and putting away more than I could in Australia as I almost only buy fresh food here, which is virtually no cost - it's the home theatre systems, cars and mortgages that sink the finances. I just skipped all that guff and only buy stuff that is really useful/interesting to me.
I just get sick of people who think teaching is an easy job (including some - few fortunately - teachers). Rather than more salary, I'd much prefer to see class sizes in Australian Primary Schools reduced (which would incidentally create more teaching positions and I wouldn't be over in China because I can't get a permanent teaching position in Aust.)
> That could just be because they have one of the highest levels of female participation too.
Anti-depressant use does not necessarily indicate proportional incidence of depression. I could just as easily highlight gender differences in attitude to seeking medical help. Do a basic stats course at night college before trying to impress people with figures you only half understand the use of.
I'm male, I was not on anti-depressants between ages 15 and 24. But I was near suicidally depressed for most of that time. Brain chemical imbalance easily treated when I finally got around to consulting a GP.
If we want to talk averages, how much longer do women - on average - live than men? How much shorter do teachers (majority of whom are women) live than people in other professions? Have fun with the stats!
> These women can thank their feminist sisters for convincing them all that they would enjoy life as wage slaves more than raising and nurturing their own children.
As opposed to unpaid domestic slavery (not as valid in today's world with all the home automation, but 'housewife' was a damned hard 16 hours a day 7 days a week no leave job not too many decades ago). And becoming a female schoolteacher, particularly at primary level where I was, isn't exactly 'breaking the glass ceiling' socially.
> As for their pay rates, they get paid rather well if you calculate it on a per hourly basis
Only if you only count up 'face time' and not 'prep time' which is convenient for supporting your beliefs but not much else. You are obviously one of these people who think you can just walk into a room of 30 kids and start teaching off the top of your head. I DARE YOU TO TRY THIS FOR ONE HOUR. GO ON. I REALLY DO! It will be the most educational thing you have ever experienced. I guarantee it. Do lower primary: you will probably think that is the easiest. I do mean TEACH, as in something relevant to the curriculum - not just entertain them.
Or at least go read through the syllabus (assuming your government education department produces one). In NSW Australia they are 6 books of A4 size and 300-400 pages each (example lessons not included). Plus a dozen-odd cross-curriculum perspective documents from 50-100 pages each. That covers what must be taught in 7 years (three learning stages) of primary school. That - and the child psychology and basic student counselling skills - is why a bachelor degree in teaching takes 4 years.
That isn't an excessive workload. But it isn't a paid holiday either.
BTW: per hour per child, a teenage babysitter is really raking it in compared to a professional teacher. No training necessary. After all, that's all a primary teacher is really doing all day, isn't it?
> I know I'd give up some of my paycheque for a guaranteed job for life.
Fair point. I'd rather see teachers retained for their ability to teach and hang job security at the expense of the country's future.
> Teachers don't need to worry about being outsourced to India.
No, we tend to outsource ourselves to India (or China in my case). They pay better for good teachers than the West today (relative to local cost of living).
> not joining the teachers pity party with all the other sheeple.
You'd rather join the teacher non-pity party with its own sheeple - their group is bigger, for greater peer-group protection! Fair enough. Doesn't look like your education system ever did much for you, so that's probably understandable. Since this is Slashdot and there is no obvious info on your location attached to your user profile, I will assume you are a US citizen.
> They don't have many teaching hours
You mean 'face time': 6 hours a day, 5 days a week, 40 weeks a year. Doesn't count 'prep time' which is uncounted and unpaid (except the 1 hour a week 'Release from Face to Face' - RFF) and possibly letting the church(es) in to take the kids for an hour a week of scripture classes (something I don't do as I believe religion is something for the individual family, not the public school). Australian public system I'm describing here. YMMV.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people think teaching is just walking into a classroom, and starting to teach. YOU CANNOT DO THIS. IT DOES NOT WORK. NOT EVEN FOR 30 MINUTES. There is a reason primary teachers have to study a 4 year bachelor degree before entering a classroom on their own. And if you want to know what fear is, it's your first day ever alone with 31 six-year-olds!!! And they can smell fear. That is a fact.
You *can* get away with a few hours a week prep time, but you are either supremely efficient (and some teachers are) or - much more often - coasting and doing your students a big disservice. Teachers do share lesson plans, and re-use lessons year after year (though they should be updated or they get stale and out of date quicker than a copy of MS Word) and this reduces workload to manageable levels. There are whole pre-made lesson books you can buy, but I've never found one that is even half as good as I can do myself. Some teachers seem to live on them.
Grandparent mentioned guaranteed employment. I agree this is the case. I disagree with the system. Teachers should be retained on their proven ability to teach. Trouble is, when you get three times the salary driving a forklift truck nights at the local steelworks (friend of mine), it's a bit hard to get the best people into the profession in the first place.
BTW rduke15: Where are you that class size is 20? I wanna go there to work. I'm used to 30-35 students to a primary class. I'd happily take a pay cut for such a reduction in class size! Probably put 5 years back on my life expectancy (go look at average lifespans in the teaching profession as compared to others for a real eye-opener as to stress. And women dominate teaching and yet women are supposed to live longer on average than men.)
Yup. Once per student. Someone needs to brush up on their maths :-P (actually I'm teaching Uni. ATM, so it's more like 120 students). And if you are serious about helping the students learn anything, marking isn't just putting a few ticks through it and saying 'yeah, that looks like a B'. If they make a mistake, you should be trying to nut out where they went wrong, keeping in mind if many other students have made the same mistake (which indicates your teaching method has failed for that task and it needs redesign). I HOPE the teachers in your part of the world are professional enough to do something like this!! If not, well, they are hired by YOUR government. And YOU (on average, or your parents if you 18yo) CHOSE that government.
Maybe I'm just young and idealistic. I'm only 33 and a teacher only the past 8 years.
Personally, when teaching Pri of HS, I'd rather be formally at the school for two hours after class off and a week before each term and get paid the extra hours than take it home and do it there for free. That's why I moved to the developing world. The people and their governments still take education seriously over here and pay well (relative to local incomes and costs of living) for good teachers.
Consumers buying the expensive model are ALSO getting the shaft, since the manufacturer could obviously be selling it at a much lower price.
:-/
Lot of shafts going around ATM
It likely involves subjecting the displays to very harsh physical and electrical conditions under carefully calculated control to simulate that running time. That is pretty standard practise in many of these sorts of industries.
Thats how they know CD-Rs only last about 100 years even if seldom used and NAND-Flash looses its memory after 10 years (they knew that one long before Flash had been around for 10 years).
Don't kid yourself. Students only have to do the assignment once. We have to mark it 35 times. Plus all lesson plans (in detail: objectives, outcomes, materials, process, curriculum linkages) for the entire term submitted by the start of each term (so take a week off each of those holiday periods) and refresh training. We may have only 5h a day face time, but add a few hours prep and marking at home to that, please.
At least teachers in countries with > a 3rd-world education system who give a shit do it like this. YMMV.
...but not too useful, especially to me.
:-(
A few years back I discovered (while having an MRI for an unrelated reason) I was born with an abnormality in my brain that means any moderate-hard blow to the head is very likely to kill me pretty much instantly.
Anyone physically asulting me could well find themselves on manslaughter charges. Assuming they are caught, of course. And it doesn't do me much good either.
My Aunt used to leave her car unlocked in downtown Surry Hills, Sydney (where you need 1/2-inch bars on all your house windows).
It was stolen three times.
Always abandoned within a block - it was that bad!
Get a big underarm holster, and carry your PDA/iPOD/phone/wallet hidden in it?
:-/
:-(
One problem, particularly with the phone, you wouldn't want to take a call near some twitchy security people.
Go into bank/store, reach for wallet, get shot. Oh dear. Let's forget this whole idea.
Probably okay for the iPOD, I guess.
Which is why I (from rural Australia) avoid empty places in Sydney, particularly at night, but have no worries about my young cousin (who grew up there) wandering about. She instictively knows where to go and where not and how to carry herself (even I can see that in her), while I only know my limitations in the circumstances.
A friend of my sister was mugged in Sydney about a decade back. He handed over his wallet, but it didn't have enough, so they forced him at knife point to go home, where there was still not enough cash for them but his ATM card was, so he was then taken to make a withdrawal for them. :-/
:-(
Three years back a friend of my brother was beaten up (again in Sydney). Not robbed. Just picked at random for a beating - not even a racial thing. He is now permanently disabled
Lets end with a positive story: Same brother -- who is a Tai-kwon-do instructor -- was being harassed by a drunk guy in a crowded bar. He automatically slipped into defensive (sp?- I don't trust what my spell checker just said) posture when the guy pushed into him. The drunk's mates very quickly were hauling the guy away with profuse apology. I hope that guy appreciated having true friends!
The amount of times where the criminal has actually sued like this is huge. The informal advice was shooting to kill is cheaper because dead people can't sue you. At least not where I came from (at the time I left anyway).
Point of interest: According to a conversation I overheard between a cop and a regular citizen in Australia, there a cop can only pull his gun from its holster if he intends to fire it and MUST shoot to kill, not wound. I believe it is to make sure criminals know exactly where they stand and to stop police using a gun for harassment/intimidation purposes. If a holster seal is broken, there is a LOT of paperwork.
Any Aussie cops like to verify/clarify?
Oh, also:
:-/
If the card is only going to be used for swap, you don't need a battery-backed card. Just a plain old SRAM card would do fine. Again, you are limited to 16M on this type of card - I have never heard of an ATA-SRAM device, battery backed or otherwise. Flash was established and cheap enough by the time there was a need to break the 16M barrier.
I can imagine being able to build something with bank-switching (ah, the days of a 64k address space) to get past the 16M addessing limitation of PCMCIA-memory, but I can also imagine the special driver needed and a big headache.
Could well exist still. This sort of stuff is still used a lot in Teleco equipment (hence Motorola's interest in MRAM). Unlike the consumer PC industry where 2 years is out-of-date, Teleco equipment is needed to be around and supported for decades, so the parts may well be avaliable still. Though you may end up paying a Teleco equipment price.
Don't forget my own Australia's example with the indigenous Tasmanians.
I bought a Fuji FinePix S602 explicitly because it can record 640x480 at 32fps (ie, pretty close to DVD size, rather than a moving postage stamp). It can also, given a reasonably fast flash card, keep recording until the card is full. 12MB gives me a very feature-basic camcorder, which is all I want. About 120 minutes recording. With the bonus that the video is not interlaced which is great for me since I only ever output to monitor. I don't have enough need for video to own a purpose-built camcorder, but a digicam that can make a passable effort at video suits me well.
Not at that price, of course! Maybe in a few years. Currently I'm still using a 128M card, planning on upgrading to a 1G when the price drops a bit more. I seldom have need to shoot more than a few dozen seconds at a time between being near my computer ATM. I'd also have to check that the camera can go above a 1G card.
If only I could hack it to record 512x256@48fps. I would have my perfect low-end video device. Well... close enough to it.
To be more exact, NAND flash (used in most mass storage devices) can take around 100,000 rewrites. NOR flash (used in embedded systems needing true random access to memory) can take about 1,000,000. (I think I got that the right way around). Assuming one rewrite to a memory block per minute (we are being VERY generous here). How many weeks will your card work for?
;-).
;-)
Flash cards usually use wear leveling to prolong their lives under heavy rewrite conditions, but even this can't keep up with a lot of page swapping.
Magneto-resistive RAM (MRAM) is a new technology just avaliable at very low capacities (Motorola has 4Mbit - 512kbyte - chips out now) which claims virtually infinite re-write capability (and much better r/w speed, too. If they start making these at higher densities into CF/PCMCIA/card-format-of-the-week, you can probably make it work. I am, in fact, hoping to use this technology at the next generation (16Mbit) for a very similar purpose in a consumer device (which I am designing as a personal project -- hence I have the luxury of waiting around for technology to catch up with my needs!
If you want a hardware project, get yourself a depopulated (ie, no chips) PCMCIA SRAM card designed to hold 4Mbit SRAMS of the same JEDEC pinout and solder on a bunch of MRAMS. They are electricaly compatible with SRAMS. You will need a very fine soldering iron, a very steady hand and a jewlwer's eyepiece for best soldering results. You would max out at 16MBytes, it think, which is the largest size PCMCIA SRAM can handle (limit on addressing pins). Beyond that capacity you are mucking around with simulating ATA devices, something I refuse to do. No waranty offered by the poster on this procedure
> Your point about the Chinese middle class is both apt and horrifying--the forced movements of people by the Chinese government to reach forced sinicization (sp?) and the destruction of any indigenous peoples is just ridiculous.
According to BBC news sources about 18 months ago (documentary on BBC World), the middle class Chinese have moved into Tibet and now the Tibetans are second-class citizens in their own region of the world. Chinese companies won't hire them, instead bringing in workers from further east. The best work they can get is selling tourist junk to visiting middle-class Chinese.
Tibetans seem to be effectively excluded from the benefits of development sent from Beijing.
Of course, this may not be deliberate on the part of Beijing central - there are a lot of middle-operators in there with their own agendas (which usually involve nepotism and pocket-lining, as with everywhere else in the 'developed' world).
An excellent response. Far better than I could have done. As you may have guessed, I was groping at the limits of my personal understandings (hence the disclaimer at the top of my post).
I had never considered the 'colony' idea. It makes more complete sense than what I had proposed.
Also a good look at the theological side, which is something I have even more trouble with. It was very helpful to me to consider your points. Thanx.
"Accelerator" is actually not a bad name for the gas pedal. We call it that exclusively in Aust.
;-)!
The "accelerator" pedal isn't just for getting faster, but for controlling speed (not velocity, of course, you need to add in the steering wheel for that). You use the "accelerator" pedal to slow down too -- by releasing the pressure on it. The brake is only for fast reductions in speed. Anyone using the brake for *all* their slowing down is driving with VERY bad fuel efficiency (and excessive brake pad wear; and risk of brake failure from overheating
My sister had a lot of trouble with getting mum's car to coast smoothly when first learning to drive until she grasped the idea that the "accelerator" pedal is for controlling speed, not just increasing it. Now she, like you and I, just does it without thinking about it.
...is always interesting to observe.
But damned depressing, too.
> Sorry if I bored you with theology. :)
Not at all. It was very intersting.
Thanx.
Assuming hatched dinosaurs -- like many reptiles -- don't need parental care. If -- like most birds -- they did. No next gen.
:-P