I would think a bunch of thin-clients would make more sense than these suckers -- the spec pages seem to show that they are more geared toward PDA-similar stuff -- store appointments and the like
would be nice to have somebody remind me when that next physics test would be, though
i hope this is not redundant: but i believe you have to already own a copy of PS2 version of the game to be eligiable for the beta; erm -- that would be a legally registered version;)
besides, knowing japanese probabbly helps. so we will just all sit here and drool, i guess, except the few, the lucky, etc etc.
go out right now and get a console -- really -- it's worth it; i played FF7 on PC only, FF8 on PS1 and then tried it on the PC, and i just could not bring myself to it -- the graphics looked so awful!
FF9,10 all on the console
and besides, the controls are easier to use -- you can play while on a sofa, instead of using a keyboard -- and lastly the vibration function are something you don't know you are missing till you've tried it.
besides -- PS2 can be used for other games -- and if you don't like ANY other game -- spend a tiny bit more and you can have a linux box to play with.
as for LCDs, i am actually refering to their driver chips; as LCDs become commodity, there will be a demand for people to program their functions, like OSD, etc. people will also be involved in the design, manufacture, and testing of these chips. while not a HUGE market, heh, it's a market.
I would imagine that VHS has gotten to a point where the profit margin is simply too low to support the legions of wolf-like salespersons circuit city sports. that's why they are ALWAYS asking you to buy extended warrenties too, btw.
I mean -- I personally believe it's a pretty smart move -- nobody really *needs* VCRs anymore -- the only benefit of being able to record shows are now taken over with PVRs and the like -- besides the legal implications.
The only think i really like about VCRs, though, is that darn the videos are cheap! i'd figure that a VHS tape is at least 3-5 times as much to manufacture as a stamped DVD -- but a movie would sell for 8 bux on VHS and then 20 on DVD (15 is considered a bargain)...
one last thing -- back in the days you could BACKUP your harddrive to the VCR too -- it was an interesting application to say the least -- i mean compare to DLT tapes, VHS are dirt cheap -- and just program your VCR to "record" at a certain time of the day and send a bunch of files to that port at that time; automatic backup for a fraction of the cost; not sure what happened to the company, i don't think many people used it. but certainly a novel idea
A list of few corrolaries (sp?) from the experiment:
1) computers will be less stable: literally. quantum tunneling will eventually screw up enough of your circuit to a point of "beyond repair", really soon, even if there are error checking / repairing enabled -- i still havn't seen any self-repairing technology where the chip would be able to insert one valladium (whatever) between two pieces of gold electrodes. today's large quantities of error checking are designed to correct only a few predictable errors -- i don't even think there are any self repair functionalities on logic chips; (memory chips have redundant rows / columns, but this would be REALLY hard to implement on a logic chip -- and if it was done it will cost TONS of area, which besets (?) the benefit from the small size. computers based on molecular technology will probabbly have this "half life" -- within 5 years half of all chip made will fail despite all the error checking -- so you are absolutely required to buy chips -- and it is also likely that a chip will simply become broken from sitting on a shelf (quantum tunneling, etc). ha... that will be the day =)
2) voltage levels -- not really a problem but somewhat interesting -- small transistors operate on small voltages -- crosstalk and other interference / PS noise, etc will totally screw up your chip, real fast. (differentical signals will help) You will need tons of amplifiers to actually be able to tranmit the signals from this low, low voltage chip to the other components.
3) heat -- wow this sucker packed this tight will be a furnace!! probabbly reaches melt-down voltage within no time... this is already a problem in today's chips -- imagine how bad it will get with small transistors like that (smaller chip, highly defined, descrete areas) -- thermal expansion locally (part of the chip doing stuff) will put stress on the rest of the chip -- and if the heat itself does not pop a transistor / molecule out of place via quantum tunneling / molecular vibrations, the physical stress sure will. this will be interesting to see how they figure it out.
4) not so related: just because someboy comes up with some technology does not mean it's production ready or shows how far the transistor can be pushed! moore's law, as it stands today, still have a realistic barrier couple years down the line, and single transistors does not make it into a viable industrial process -- it took a LONG time for them to figure out the details of today's photolithography -- the masks and CMP (chemical mechanical polishing) took them a LONG time to figure out.
You guys notice the cray 3 GaAs chip as part of the "cray gift", and how it says they wanted to bond the chip directly to the board instead of packing it first?
it never worked -- not because of the lack of money either -- a problem people rarely thinks about is that silicon and PCB material (FR4, for example) has different thermal characteristics -- so when the chip heats up, it heats up the board under it, and then "snap" -- especially considering the small dimension of the contact pad on the chips are (and they are getting smaller and smaller -- making probing (wafer testing) a REALLY exact science) in relationship to the difference in length from the thermal expansion.
it's not until recently, where advances in material sciences (it would actually have to be considered a breakthrough) enabled flip-chip mounts
but if i was LaForge -- i would not give up the visor for his (eventually) artificial eye. i mean -- his visor allowed him to see the EM spectrum from RF-IR border all the way up to some crazy high frequency; imagine how awsome that would be? you will immediately have night-vision / see-through clothes / whatever... add that with a tele-photo / wide angle lense -- you will be kicking some serious butt in the vision dept
excetp telephoto (these days, anyway -- without high-qual deformable lense / changeable index of refraction, etc) pokes out quite far for the telephoto-ing; so you will look terrible)
just leave the system outside; it probabbly works better than liquid to air cooling anyway -- in fact, you can probabbly overclock the sucker in one of those (real) never-ending-winter/nights.;)
and the obligatory comment: there are people using computers in alaska, let alone a cray?
Try Northrop Grumman / Lockeed Martin / Boeing, etc
as for the pure, pure computer area -- i think people are returning to the "core business". (chip wise)
LCD is another area;
wireless is picking up a little steam (look at how many DSL routers there are!), as well as other marginal stuff -- HDTV, PDA, etc...
cellphone and pda integration is considered to be inevitable by some -- so cellphones are not "flatlining", they are just not exploding as they were before.
at the same time digital imaging (cameras / miniDV camcorders) are sparking a huge thing within flash market -- look how the size have doubled time and again: imagine how much $$ of R&D / engineering went into that
home entertainment (xbox / ps2 / cube) is also kinda hot -- sony expect to sell a LOT of ps2s by christmas -- and ppl are gearing up for that too.
there are a couple more -- can't think of them off the top my head though
I digress -- you are right -- i have to admit that it is an unfair comparison between maglev (long distance) rail to everyday commute;
As for "pushers", in Tokyo they are only rush hour -- i actually heard somewhere that they are not-so-famous sumo wrestlers looking for extra cash -- would make sense -- but still interesting
However, i stand my ground that it's expensive and not fun. It sort of applies to commute only -- long distance, even on the shinkansen (sp?), is okay if you get reserved seats -- not as fast as airplane but it's alright; i suppose if maglevs would replace those, i won't mind.
as for expensive, they are! the good part is most real companies pay for the JR pass anyway... still though; had to take trip between two field offices (kumagaya and shinjuku) -- it was a bit over $20 for ~a bit over 1 hour ride -- Metra / CTA in chicago AND MTA / NJ rain aro both cheaper for the distance travelled -- by a LARGE margin.
but i hate to say it -- people (including me, in a limited way) love the train not because it's good and fun and cheap -- i don't think they are -- but it's because it's the best they have, and no alternatives -- so it's not really "love" but rather... "no choice"
What you described was exactly what the thing was advertised as, and the place where i hoped to achieve; but i guess the force was not with me on that one, Luke;)
speaking of which -- how long did it take for you to get to a point where you say to yourself -- hey i am pretty damn good now?
I believe that the spaceorb is a really great idea and it would have picked up much more market share if it only had a smoother learning curve. i mean -- for me anyway -- it was really hard! i can at most manage 2-3 axis at one time (turning and strafing) -- and if i push myself beyond those means, i always forget that i am pushing a certain direction and die (or forget that i am push a certain direction, and there is a wall there, etc etc.
can't quite imagine a way to make it easier though -- there are 6 axis and you just have to know them -- really well -- i think humans might be too much set for the 2D world.
sigh. luckily joystick and hat control worked out alright -- not great, but enough so i finished descent 1,2,3 with it.
To start off, let's define "fair"; actually, let's first define test:
test is a mechanism by which a group will be divided into a passing population and a failing population. (In college, you can also further divide into A,B,C,D,etc)
a fair test, or, at least, 100% fair test, does this division perfectly (in the rest of this i will deal with pass/fail only, it works the same between A/B/C/D whatever) -- i.e. 100% of the students (whoever/whatever under test) who deserves to pass passes, and 100% of those who does not deserve to pass fails. ex.: a test that passes 95% of the deserving population while also passes 95% of the un-deserving population is completely useless.
now -- no test is 100% fair, let's first get that straight -- but, a good enough test will get pretty good at these ratios, so assuming that the test is good at what it does: separating the deserving and undeserving population: the question gets pushed back to a more fundamental level: which students deserve to pass?
those with a firm grasp of computer science, of course. but this is enough of a debate-ridden debate (ha) without mixing in our debate. what exactly constitute such an understanding?
In the end, the fairness you are asking (i am jumping ahead a couple steps of logical dedcution; complain if you can't make the leap) is that "is writing code on paper" a valuable skill which would determine my "deservability" to pass this test?
*my* answer is yes. again, this falls into another whole bunch of debate that i won't get into -- but you now know where to look for more info -- however, some key points i will use to support myself:
writing code on paper makes sure that you "design" well -- anybody can figure out a problem with a debugger (well, not everyone, but a fairly large population of programmers) -- but being able to critically find these errors while they are on paper / whiteboard / in your head makes a valuable skill as a programmer. you are no longer a slave of the compiler -- but rather using the compiler as intended: a TOOL. in software engineering, the main focus is design; everyone who thinks that programming (especially large projects) involves sitting down with some coffee and start typing are delusional and really should try taking some software engineering courses. being able to produce a flow-chart and convert that into psuedo-code is exceptionally valuable -- (excepiton is visual basic?) -- and that's really what most professors check for anyway -- logical thinking, algorithmic understanding, not producing dead-locks and memory leaks. relying on the compiler to do the error checking and "debug" when the bug should have not been there the first place because of bad design is bad programming -- and without that skill, i would say it's rightly so that you would fail / not do so well on your tests.
a side note: if a professor is a...hole and nit picks about every syntax err and typos -- (are they still considered typos on paper since i am not typing?) -- then you are screwed anyway so suck it up and do your best. we've been there too.
it would probabbly mean that it is not (actually we are already pretty sure about this, arn't we?) super-conductor mag-lev, but instead just really, really power-hungry conventionaly electro-magnetic levitation.
This would not, should not, and probabbly could not ever be made into a real commercial train; the margin of safty is simply so much less than superconducting maglev
This question has been raised many, many times before, and is still under debate, in almost all areas of education. there is even debates about this applying to silicon chips (device testing -- if the test really reflect the abilities of the device) -- any test engineers reading this should get nostalgic, i reckon.;)
the short answer is: well, it might not be perfect, but it's the best we've got considering the amount of resources, etc etc...
(pretty much the "this is why we have standarized tests" argument).
On the other hand -- there is a longer answer. Most of my "code tests" really only have to do with puedo-coding / algorithmical stuff. i.e. there is a few points that the instructor / TA checks for: does this guy know how a stack works, did his/her implementation leave serious memory leaks, etc. these, i think, can be figured out on paper if you are careful and draws flowcharts, etc. my teachers generally do not take off chuncks for grammar (unlike english -- which is ironic because compilers are so much less forgiving about grammar errors in code than people are regarding errors in speech). So, i do believe the paper coding testes show certain merits.
At the mean time, there are definitely times when the method fail: in front of a computer you can re-compile / debug until it (mostly) works; paper test you don't have that luxury; my personal feeling is that if you depend on the [compile] button to catch all the errors, then you are not all that great a programmer anyway. but if you have gotten clear enough logic, paper coding should not be a problem (just my opinion, again)
and besides: that's why you have both a final and a project; of course, so you can maybe even grab some extra credit with extra-features on your project.
i would, actually, like to see finals as: here is a problem, you have 4 hours in a room with whatever you like to bring into it (i.e. coffee, jolt, cheese-nips, etc. except friends), and it better be working at the end; that would really bring out the best from the worst: actually, most programming competitions used to be put this way...
If memory serves me correctly, for big corporations, it makes more sense to just hire a bunch of lawyers for a high salary and keep 'em busy, instead of paying hourly rates.
I believe that big insurance companies do this for sure -- as for MSFT, they've got even more $$ so i don't see why they would not have a whole salaried legal dept.
as for annoy the share holders -- unless there is a direct impact to their portfolio, i don't really think they will connect the dots that fast, or in that direction. i believe MSFT can sell the legal fees as an "investment" -- "hey guys, we are paying 10 mil in legal fees, but if we win this, we will rack in billions through the (now legal, or insufficiently enforced) anti-competitive behaviors".
Almost every company (an example that differ might be wolfram research, which exists to please wolfram himself (who, i would say, is a shareholder)) is there to please the shareholders; and shareholders are (mostly) driven by their portfolio value. if you get to value of the portfolio directly, the effect will trickle down into the corporate culture / value / management. i think this is an example of "everyone has someone they answer to"
Slashdot Mirror
I would think a bunch of thin-clients would make more sense than these suckers -- the spec pages seem to show that they are more geared toward PDA-similar stuff -- store appointments and the like
would be nice to have somebody remind me when that next physics test would be, though
i hope this is not redundant: but i believe you have to already own a copy of PS2 version of the game to be eligiable for the beta; erm -- that would be a legally registered version ;)
besides, knowing japanese probabbly helps. so we will just all sit here and drool, i guess, except the few, the lucky, etc etc.
go out right now and get a console -- really -- it's worth it; i played FF7 on PC only, FF8 on PS1 and then tried it on the PC, and i just could not bring myself to it -- the graphics looked so awful!
FF9,10 all on the console
and besides, the controls are easier to use -- you can play while on a sofa, instead of using a keyboard -- and lastly the vibration function are something you don't know you are missing till you've tried it.
besides -- PS2 can be used for other games -- and if you don't like ANY other game -- spend a tiny bit more and you can have a linux box to play with.
I think HP should really consider never to publically use the name "Packard" -- it reminds too much of the PackardBell days... oh the horrors...
as for LCDs, i am actually refering to their driver chips; as LCDs become commodity, there will be a demand for people to program their functions, like OSD, etc. people will also be involved in the design, manufacture, and testing of these chips. while not a HUGE market, heh, it's a market.
I would imagine that VHS has gotten to a point where the profit margin is simply too low to support the legions of wolf-like salespersons circuit city sports. that's why they are ALWAYS asking you to buy extended warrenties too, btw.
I mean -- I personally believe it's a pretty smart move -- nobody really *needs* VCRs anymore -- the only benefit of being able to record shows are now taken over with PVRs and the like -- besides the legal implications.
The only think i really like about VCRs, though, is that darn the videos are cheap! i'd figure that a VHS tape is at least 3-5 times as much to manufacture as a stamped DVD -- but a movie would sell for 8 bux on VHS and then 20 on DVD (15 is considered a bargain)...
one last thing -- back in the days you could BACKUP your harddrive to the VCR too -- it was an interesting application to say the least -- i mean compare to DLT tapes, VHS are dirt cheap -- and just program your VCR to "record" at a certain time of the day and send a bunch of files to that port at that time; automatic backup for a fraction of the cost; not sure what happened to the company, i don't think many people used it. but certainly a novel idea
how can you say that!
it ran the ATARI OS with pacman! this instantly doubles the value on my $599 iPAQ... wait -- is that a iHP nowadays?
A list of few corrolaries (sp?) from the experiment:
1) computers will be less stable: literally. quantum tunneling will eventually screw up enough of your circuit to a point of "beyond repair", really soon, even if there are error checking / repairing enabled -- i still havn't seen any self-repairing technology where the chip would be able to insert one valladium (whatever) between two pieces of gold electrodes. today's large quantities of error checking are designed to correct only a few predictable errors -- i don't even think there are any self repair functionalities on logic chips; (memory chips have redundant rows / columns, but this would be REALLY hard to implement on a logic chip -- and if it was done it will cost TONS of area, which besets (?) the benefit from the small size. computers based on molecular technology will probabbly have this "half life" -- within 5 years half of all chip made will fail despite all the error checking -- so you are absolutely required to buy chips -- and it is also likely that a chip will simply become broken from sitting on a shelf (quantum tunneling, etc). ha... that will be the day =)
2) voltage levels -- not really a problem but somewhat interesting -- small transistors operate on small voltages -- crosstalk and other interference / PS noise, etc will totally screw up your chip, real fast. (differentical signals will help) You will need tons of amplifiers to actually be able to tranmit the signals from this low, low voltage chip to the other components.
3) heat -- wow this sucker packed this tight will be a furnace!! probabbly reaches melt-down voltage within no time... this is already a problem in today's chips -- imagine how bad it will get with small transistors like that (smaller chip, highly defined, descrete areas) -- thermal expansion locally (part of the chip doing stuff) will put stress on the rest of the chip -- and if the heat itself does not pop a transistor / molecule out of place via quantum tunneling / molecular vibrations, the physical stress sure will. this will be interesting to see how they figure it out.
4) not so related: just because someboy comes up with some technology does not mean it's production ready or shows how far the transistor can be pushed! moore's law, as it stands today, still have a realistic barrier couple years down the line, and single transistors does not make it into a viable industrial process -- it took a LONG time for them to figure out the details of today's photolithography -- the masks and CMP (chemical mechanical polishing) took them a LONG time to figure out.
You guys notice the cray 3 GaAs chip as part of the "cray gift", and how it says they wanted to bond the chip directly to the board instead of packing it first?
it never worked -- not because of the lack of money either -- a problem people rarely thinks about is that silicon and PCB material (FR4, for example) has different thermal characteristics -- so when the chip heats up, it heats up the board under it, and then "snap" -- especially considering the small dimension of the contact pad on the chips are (and they are getting smaller and smaller -- making probing (wafer testing) a REALLY exact science) in relationship to the difference in length from the thermal expansion.
it's not until recently, where advances in material sciences (it would actually have to be considered a breakthrough) enabled flip-chip mounts
FYI
Actually, not sure if someone said this already:
but if i was LaForge -- i would not give up the visor for his (eventually) artificial eye. i mean -- his visor allowed him to see the EM spectrum from RF-IR border all the way up to some crazy high frequency; imagine how awsome that would be? you will immediately have night-vision / see-through clothes / whatever... add that with a tele-photo / wide angle lense -- you will be kicking some serious butt in the vision dept
excetp telephoto (these days, anyway -- without high-qual deformable lense / changeable index of refraction, etc) pokes out quite far for the telephoto-ing; so you will look terrible)
just leave the system outside; it probabbly works better than liquid to air cooling anyway -- in fact, you can probabbly overclock the sucker in one of those (real) never-ending-winter/nights. ;)
and the obligatory comment:
there are people using computers in alaska, let alone a cray?
Heh... you know they were probabbly using it the whole time:
notie how tiny and dark lookin' the screens were? i bet it's a pain in the neck trying to find the cursor on those phones!
I can't wait for the "augmented reality pick-up-chicks-in-a-bay" educational series...
Sigh... you guys don't see the irony here, do you?
never publically discuss the moderators on slashdot; else karma will get hit HARD (see parent)
Try Northrop Grumman / Lockeed Martin / Boeing, etc
as for the pure, pure computer area -- i think people are returning to the "core business". (chip wise)
LCD is another area;
wireless is picking up a little steam (look at how many DSL routers there are!), as well as other marginal stuff -- HDTV, PDA, etc...
cellphone and pda integration is considered to be inevitable by some -- so cellphones are not "flatlining", they are just not exploding as they were before.
at the same time digital imaging (cameras / miniDV camcorders) are sparking a huge thing within flash market -- look how the size have doubled time and again: imagine how much $$ of R&D / engineering went into that
home entertainment (xbox / ps2 / cube) is also kinda hot -- sony expect to sell a LOT of ps2s by christmas -- and ppl are gearing up for that too.
there are a couple more -- can't think of them off the top my head though
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/06/13/147213 &mode=thread&tid=126
to the role of moderators on slashdot?
I digress -- you are right -- i have to admit that it is an unfair comparison between maglev (long distance) rail to everyday commute;
As for "pushers", in Tokyo they are only rush hour -- i actually heard somewhere that they are not-so-famous sumo wrestlers looking for extra cash -- would make sense -- but still interesting
However, i stand my ground that it's expensive and not fun. It sort of applies to commute only -- long distance, even on the shinkansen (sp?), is okay if you get reserved seats -- not as fast as airplane but it's alright; i suppose if maglevs would replace those, i won't mind.
as for expensive, they are! the good part is most real companies pay for the JR pass anyway... still though; had to take trip between two field offices (kumagaya and shinjuku) -- it was a bit over $20 for ~a bit over 1 hour ride -- Metra / CTA in chicago AND MTA / NJ rain aro both cheaper for the distance travelled -- by a LARGE margin.
but i hate to say it -- people (including me, in a limited way) love the train not because it's good and fun and cheap -- i don't think they are -- but it's because it's the best they have, and no alternatives -- so it's not really "love" but rather... "no choice"
See that's cool:
;)
What you described was exactly what the thing was advertised as, and the place where i hoped to achieve; but i guess the force was not with me on that one, Luke
speaking of which -- how long did it take for you to get to a point where you say to yourself -- hey i am pretty damn good now?
I believe that the spaceorb is a really great idea and it would have picked up much more market share if it only had a smoother learning curve. i mean -- for me anyway -- it was really hard! i can at most manage 2-3 axis at one time (turning and strafing) -- and if i push myself beyond those means, i always forget that i am pushing a certain direction and die (or forget that i am push a certain direction, and there is a wall there, etc etc.
can't quite imagine a way to make it easier though -- there are 6 axis and you just have to know them -- really well -- i think humans might be too much set for the 2D world.
sigh. luckily joystick and hat control worked out alright -- not great, but enough so i finished descent 1,2,3 with it.
To start off, let's define "fair"; actually, let's first define test:
...hole and nit picks about every syntax err and typos -- (are they still considered typos on paper since i am not typing?) -- then you are screwed anyway so suck it up and do your best. we've been there too.
test is a mechanism by which a group will be divided into a passing population and a failing population. (In college, you can also further divide into A,B,C,D,etc)
a fair test, or, at least, 100% fair test, does this division perfectly (in the rest of this i will deal with pass/fail only, it works the same between A/B/C/D whatever) -- i.e. 100% of the students (whoever/whatever under test) who deserves to pass passes, and 100% of those who does not deserve to pass fails.
ex.: a test that passes 95% of the deserving population while also passes 95% of the un-deserving population is completely useless.
now -- no test is 100% fair, let's first get that straight -- but, a good enough test will get pretty good at these ratios, so assuming that the test is good at what it does: separating the deserving and undeserving population: the question gets pushed back to a more fundamental level: which students deserve to pass?
those with a firm grasp of computer science, of course. but this is enough of a debate-ridden debate (ha) without mixing in our debate. what exactly constitute such an understanding?
In the end, the fairness you are asking (i am jumping ahead a couple steps of logical dedcution; complain if you can't make the leap) is that "is writing code on paper" a valuable skill which would determine my "deservability" to pass this test?
*my* answer is yes. again, this falls into another whole bunch of debate that i won't get into -- but you now know where to look for more info -- however, some key points i will use to support myself:
writing code on paper makes sure that you "design" well -- anybody can figure out a problem with a debugger (well, not everyone, but a fairly large population of programmers) -- but being able to critically find these errors while they are on paper / whiteboard / in your head makes a valuable skill as a programmer. you are no longer a slave of the compiler -- but rather using the compiler as intended: a TOOL. in software engineering, the main focus is design; everyone who thinks that programming (especially large projects) involves sitting down with some coffee and start typing are delusional and really should try taking some software engineering courses. being able to produce a flow-chart and convert that into psuedo-code is exceptionally valuable -- (excepiton is visual basic?) -- and that's really what most professors check for anyway -- logical thinking, algorithmic understanding, not producing dead-locks and memory leaks. relying on the compiler to do the error checking and "debug" when the bug should have not been there the first place because of bad design is bad programming -- and without that skill, i would say it's rightly so that you would fail / not do so well on your tests.
a side note: if a professor is a
it would probabbly mean that it is not (actually we are already pretty sure about this, arn't we?) super-conductor mag-lev, but instead just really, really power-hungry conventionaly electro-magnetic levitation.
This would not, should not, and probabbly could not ever be made into a real commercial train; the margin of safty is simply so much less than superconducting maglev
This question has been raised many, many times before, and is still under debate, in almost all areas of education. there is even debates about this applying to silicon chips (device testing -- if the test really reflect the abilities of the device) -- any test engineers reading this should get nostalgic, i reckon. ;)
the short answer is: well, it might not be perfect, but it's the best we've got considering the amount of resources, etc etc...
(pretty much the "this is why we have standarized tests" argument).
On the other hand -- there is a longer answer. Most of my "code tests" really only have to do with puedo-coding / algorithmical stuff. i.e. there is a few points that the instructor / TA checks for: does this guy know how a stack works, did his/her implementation leave serious memory leaks, etc. these, i think, can be figured out on paper if you are careful and draws flowcharts, etc. my teachers generally do not take off chuncks for grammar (unlike english -- which is ironic because compilers are so much less forgiving about grammar errors in code than people are regarding errors in speech). So, i do believe the paper coding testes show certain merits.
At the mean time, there are definitely times when the method fail: in front of a computer you can re-compile / debug until it (mostly) works; paper test you don't have that luxury; my personal feeling is that if you depend on the [compile] button to catch all the errors, then you are not all that great a programmer anyway. but if you have gotten clear enough logic, paper coding should not be a problem (just my opinion, again)
and besides: that's why you have both a final and a project; of course, so you can maybe even grab some extra credit with extra-features on your project.
i would, actually, like to see finals as:
here is a problem, you have 4 hours in a room with whatever you like to bring into it (i.e. coffee, jolt, cheese-nips, etc. except friends), and it better be working at the end; that would really bring out the best from the worst: actually, most programming competitions used to be put this way...
I am SURE everyone has gotten that DISNEY / MSFT or AOL / MSFT chain letter where if you forward this email bill gates will send you a couple bux...
;)
So... same spirit here; forward this to your senator in your state and you just might get 40 bux from bill gates too
If memory serves me correctly, for big corporations, it makes more sense to just hire a bunch of lawyers for a high salary and keep 'em busy, instead of paying hourly rates.
I believe that big insurance companies do this for sure -- as for MSFT, they've got even more $$ so i don't see why they would not have a whole salaried legal dept.
as for annoy the share holders -- unless there is a direct impact to their portfolio, i don't really think they will connect the dots that fast, or in that direction. i believe MSFT can sell the legal fees as an "investment" -- "hey guys, we are paying 10 mil in legal fees, but if we win this, we will rack in billions through the (now legal, or insufficiently enforced) anti-competitive behaviors".
Almost every company (an example that differ might be wolfram research, which exists to please wolfram himself (who, i would say, is a shareholder)) is there to please the shareholders; and shareholders are (mostly) driven by their portfolio value. if you get to value of the portfolio directly, the effect will trickle down into the corporate culture / value / management. i think this is an example of "everyone has someone they answer to"