I will second the parent, MOST schools find this kind of behavior despicable, but the schools do exist. A lot of High Schools do this as well and has been in the press the last 8 years or so. Administrators get grants and funding on how well their students do, so they fudge the grades, sometimes the teachers dont even know this is done. My wife was an Instructor at a local college and was phoned up by a counselor at the school to give one of her students a passing grade just because the student needed to graduate and the class had little to do with her major. She didnt do it of course, but my dad (a HS teacher for over 30 years) can vouch for people whose jobs were in jeopardy because they wouldnt change grades. Other teachers who found out grades had been changed by the principle later, tons of horror stories....all thanks to the fantastic "No child left behind".
On a lighter subject, check the book out called "Surely your Joking, Mr Feynnman" It is a great book that reasserts the idea that being curious is much better than rote memorization.
I don't see where we disagree. Except on the notion that re-inventing the rules of physics is just said wrong. Maybe you mean re-discovering the laws of physics? In my calc classes learning how to derive equations is a part of the teaching process. Sure you could just memorize the equations and a lot of people do that but they get frustrated rather quickly.
Standing on the shoulders of Giants is great. However, it is in the process of getting to the solution that you learn the most. Memorizing the answers wont get you somewhere new. Understanding processes does, knowing fundamentals does. A University should teach this. Yes in my CS classes we learned how to write a new computer language so we could write a program to do what we wanted. Because of that learning process I am relatively language independent.
However, I assume that since you find my original post smug you already have a bias against university people. Passing judgments on programs you have little knowledge of.
If you knew even a little about the educational process you would know that memorization does not work. It never has, application of principles does. You have to use knowledge and tie it to more than one memory for it to be ingrained.
Therefore research and application is the BEST way to learn. Which is what you said later in your post which contradicts your earlier assumption that a factory model would work best. The factory model fails in that you, being someone who experimented and researched on his own, is light years ahead of your fellow paper carrying University grads, even the MS students.
hmmm if that is the case, then it is only a matter of time until a unit comes out to translate to existing receivers Wouldnt be difficult to do the translation to infrared. Would be nice so that we can use it on the sets we already have rather than investing in a ton of new tech to use it.
Depends on your definition of education. I would say that research is education. More "students" should be working on research projects for their undergrad degree rather than just taking classes. They would learn more, faster, and retain it much better if they had to learn by research than rote memorization.
I'm sorry, maybe it isn't that standards are falling (which can be demonstrated by entrance ACT/SAT scores going down in many universities.) so much that universities and colleges are passing students that shouldn't be passed, are changing curriculum to make it easier to pass, and are allowing for more chances on probation to get a student to graduate or pay for at least one more semester. I am not blowing this out my ass, sit down with any prof who has taught over the last 30 years, heck even sit down with any HS teacher they will tell you Something is very very wrong.
Sports programs also generate more funding at universities than pretty much any other area. Check out UNL for a good example, and they have a phenomenal educational program I hear.
Ya that irks me as well. Brilliance is not a matter of memorization, which really is all that the SAT/ACT shows an ability to do. Some of the most talented folks I know were no where near 4.0. Hell, I had a 2.7 in college mostly because my memory is aweful, which is demonstrated by my ability to Ace things like CS courses, Physics, Advanced Mathematics and do very well in graphical design courses. I am what many would consider a very successful network administrator and my references will back up my exceptional behavior at my past jobs.
But I say this because I know a TON of people just like me, who either dropped out of college, or just barely passed, but are some of the best and brightest in their fields. Memorization means jack in the real world, I document like hell because I don't remember and don't need to. However it is the easiest thing to grade in school so that is what they measure you on.
Im sorry that you misread my post. I have a lot of friends who have graduated from vo-tech and they were difficult programs. Depending on the vo-tech and university you are comparing the prices will vary. But if you read my post you will see Not that they are not hard, but they are vo-tech, they are meant to crank out one trick horses as fast as possible.
That being said, I know a lot of people with families going back to school who aren't entitled either, some have 3 kids and are taking out 42K a year in student loans just trying to make it by every year, I have an amazing amount of respect for them. And if you read my previous posts, you will find that I fully agree that in many areas a Vo-Tech is much better because universities just aren't doing their jobs.
I also have 2 friends who attended vo-tech that are going back for a 4 year engineering degree because they hit the ceiling quickly. IT is unique in that you don't even need a degree to do very very well. That may change in 10 years though. My advice to most new tech people is, unless you have a genuine interest in the humanities and the college atmosphere, VoTech and certifications will get you a lot further than a BS. A BS in CS will give you a different perspective on the IT world but it will be harder to get an IT job with just a CS degree.
But I do stand by the vo-tech one trick pony. That is what vo-tech is designed for, take out all the fluff of a university, give someone trade experience and knowledge and send them out the door. It is a fantastic way to learn a trade. Universities, should never teach a trade in my opinion, they have other purposes.
Exactly, I think there was a90% dropout rate in our program. I tutored later on and I firmly believe it is because the CS profs made us THINK and rationalize. Sure they would show us algorithms for best practices, but we had to understand the Big Oh of each search method to apply it to our programs. We learned that you learn more from making mistakes and 20 hours writing a bad method than you do getting it right the first time.
It took me forever to write a 100 line program in C++ when I first started my freshman year. By my senior year I could write the same program in 15 minutes, to the frustration of the students I was tutoring. But I learned sooo much from those mistakes that it is ingrained in me to enjoy failing because the path to the solution rewards so much more than the solution itself.
This is my beef with other educational programs, where they just give you the solution and have you memorize the anatomy of a cat, or chemical formulas rather than helping the students to figure it out themselves.
The purpose of a university is not to graduate people, the purpose of a University is to EDUCATE people. This idea of dumbing down courses does no one a favor. There are vo-tech colleges for people who cant handle universities. Not that they are not hard, but they are vo-tech, they are meant to crank out one trick horses as fast as possible.
Leads to people complaining that there aren't enough educated peopleA piece of paper does not mean you are educated, especially if all your classes were dumbed down so you didn't actually retain any useful knowledge. This is why the system does not work. The fact that you seem to be on the down the courses so more people can get into the "more smarter jobs for america" thought path is really really sad. Essentially you are saying we need a bunch of sub par people in the "smart jobs" so we should give them the same credentials as much more capable people so we can fill a seat....that is just assinine and makes credentials worthless.
I see this as a direct result of the overloading of the Universities. When you have a prof teaching classrooms of 400 students, checking for cheating becomes practically impossible. I went to a smaller university where the ratio was significantly smaller. The profs could tell if another student wrote your code by style. That and in my university you had to comment like a mad fool, which depending on who you outsourced to might be a dead giveaway.
I recently read one of Feynnman's books and as odd a character he is, I think he hit the nail on the head when talking about how teachers today simply dish out information and the students memorize. This has lent to a society where students know they are going to forget the courseload in a month so why not have someone else do the work for you. College is all about the piece of paper now adays anyway so you can get a higher paying job. At least that is the way the universities seem to present themselves in their advertisements.
You want to keep students from outsourcing? Push them harder, teach rather than have them memorize, administratively, get more teachers. Universities should be hard, people should drop out, if you are not passionate about the subject then head to Vo-Tech. I want universities to go back to learning institutions rather than the factories they have become.
Ok I don't like the idea of changing with my facial expressions. We humans use soo many expressions when talking and even just watching video that any device recording them bound to get confused. What I am interested in is the gesture based technology. Proof of concepts like where they converted the wiimote to a sensor are neat. But I would pay good money for a universal remote where I could gesture with my hands to interact with my consoles. I feel like these are right around the corner. No looking for your remote, just gesture to change the channel or turn up the volume with a precursor motion. Every once in a while you see a company try to hit this market with different products like the playstation webcam thing but no one has hit it on the head yet.
Has anyone heard of a company making good headway in this department?
You cannot assube because tis your premise that that is the conclusion. Apple pays $20K less per engineer because they can. Could be due to prestige, or it could be that apple is just good at flogging people. They also charge a LOT more for their products because of the name they have built.
Google is a very enjoyable place to work from what I hear so if your premise is correct then they should pay less as well.
If jobs were very exciting and fulfilling in and of themselves, we wouldn't need to pay people to do them. Actually this is incorrect. We pay people to do jobs to attract a certain level. The more complicated/responibility a job the higher the salary rate. It has nothing to do with excitement, otherwise a machine worker would make top dollar.
If you are going to be a paycheck hunter and just find a place to put your time in. You are in for a very unfulfilled life. I specifically chose IT because it is enjoyable, therefore in my mind I really don't work. I get paid to do the things I would be doing anyway. There are a plethora of positions like this out there.
You pay people because they have certain needs they want met and you exchange their time for the ability to meet those needs. So the idea that we get paid because a job is not exciting or fulfilling is just plain wrong.
I have dealt with enough, paycheck hunters and shiny thing people to be tired of them. I get tired of asking the question; "Why are you buying that again? Cause it looks good?" We need to ween this populace down to the passionate individuals who get the job done well. I have been in departments saturated with shiny thing and paycheck hunters that could have been run by a quarter of the people passionate in IT and bored. hell when I left my gov't job they had to hire 2 people to replace me, technically there were 3 that replaced me if you count the one that was hired a couple months before I left.
You raise some interesting points. But in the situations I am describing, with a co-lo failover, your backups are happening across the local LAN because the failover at your co-lo is handling the backups so the info never hits the Web.
I am also assuming that if a group can afford a co-lo failover, then they should be able to afford some decent network storage. As you point out, right now iscsi is considerably more expensive and you do get some performance bonuses for quick archival and retrieval. However a good storage server is less than 10K today which can be used for archival, and this is so cheap because you aren't concerned with I/O like production servers SATA will do fine here. Since you are using a device with TCP access here, migrating to a larger storage unit is trivial. However, a point that I have failed to make adequately is that with the offsite storage server you culd hook up a nice Tape drive if you wanted and couldnt afford the space in drives. You and I both hate converting to the next tape format, Here is to LTO lasting a while;) However I look forward to a media with a petabyte of storage that uses some kind of standard such as TCP for communication.
I think what the parent fears is the dept that sticks with the same LTO drive for 20 years and is warning against that flaw. But you know just as well as anyone that unless a person is very shortsighted they will upgrade mediums with the times. There is a situation (rare one) where this is difficult. Where you are storing Massive amounts of data that compound over the years. After a while it becomes time and cost prohibitive to switch removable storage every 5 years.
This is where the live co-lo situation is becoming more popular. With TCP storage solutions becoming more popular and cheaper it is an interesting concept to not only think of a co-lo as a fail-over but also as a location for high availability archival. With an iSCSI device you could expand and upgrade much easier than whatever archival medium that we can ship off-site easily. I think this is where the disconnect is, traditionally an archive has always been thought of as a mass storage device that you carry offsite. This is just a bad concept that a lot of people have, and you obviously don't.
IT seems to be getting the "this is the way dad did it" mentality and forgoing the concepts and robotically following methodology.
give it an internet connection and set it up for on-line fail-over
This is actually becoming a popular way to archive. You dont want a failover necessarily, maybe a failover and a mass storage unit for archival to consempate for corruption. I have worked in 2 places now where we archived to a co-lo, it is up to the sysadmin at the company to find out the best archival schedule. With connection speeds the way they are it works very well and you get real time archives. TCP seems to be a stable transfer medium, even if we ever hit the magical IPV6 days we will have plenty of time to upgrade our IPV4 devices.
With current software packages helping with corruption/dataloss prevention, and the availablity of cheap TBs of storage, I am mainly worried about DR and the less humans involved the better.
That being said, a good tape system where they upgrade in a rational timeline is good enough today.
Well if your paranoid about hackers then your only real good couple of solutions are going to be personal vaults. At Mozy all the data is encrypted and you can use your own key so even if they do get hacked they have a long road ahead of them to get to your data. For extra tinfoil hat protection you can encrypt your files with your favorite method before they are uploaded.
I think you may be referring to an old Mozy plan as well. Mozy Unlimited for home has no restrictions on space, and if you are ultra paranoid you can use your own keys. Also the initial backup is what takes the most time, after that it is essentially just differentials with a 30 day window. You can also have DVD sets created for extra redundancy and have them sent to your house or an offsite location. My initial backup took a little while but since then the diffs have been so small there hasn't been a problem.
I used to have the same opinions of netbackups as you mentioned, back when the Z drive was popular. But they have come a LONG way to meeting my paranoia needs;) Check out https://mozy.com/support I think you will be impressed.
actually I would say this is one of the cheapest solutions, if you check my other posts, I am a mozy fanboy. $50 a year for a total of $1000 for 20 years. Really not to shabby when you figure you get unlimited storage basically.
ya some recommendations are to put your hard drive and CDROMs in a freezer bag, then throw them in your freezer. These are the people who are really afraid of bit rot the dark and low energy environment really helps evidentially. I have no experience doing it:) I personally think there are better methods;) But if I were storing terabytes of info for home I might consider it.
Sigh, another one of you people. Let me elaborate on your short sided response from an article you probably read. This is also edifying for the parent post
Raid is good for keeping the data alive, it is a backup in the sense of avoiding failure of devices causing major data loss. Raid 10 or a Mirror are your best bets for redundancy. However, a RAID is not going to be a preventative measure against other forms of data corruption, virus, batch file run amuck, accidentally deleting a folder. So you need a separate storage medium, you can pick your favorite, everyone has ones that work well for them. There are several alternatives depending on the size of data you are backing up. For me, I use online storage through a respected vendor MOZY for my home use, which kicks the ass of any other back up medium I have found, including tape. Tape is a dying backup medium in my opinion. I think what most people will be using within the decade are personalized net storage solutions.
BTW if you worked for me you would be fired for being an ass and pretending to know what you are talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
I will second the parent, MOST schools find this kind of behavior despicable, but the schools do exist. A lot of High Schools do this as well and has been in the press the last 8 years or so. Administrators get grants and funding on how well their students do, so they fudge the grades, sometimes the teachers dont even know this is done. My wife was an Instructor at a local college and was phoned up by a counselor at the school to give one of her students a passing grade just because the student needed to graduate and the class had little to do with her major. She didnt do it of course, but my dad (a HS teacher for over 30 years) can vouch for people whose jobs were in jeopardy because they wouldnt change grades. Other teachers who found out grades had been changed by the principle later, tons of horror stories....all thanks to the fantastic "No child left behind".
ugh, I think I just threw up a little ;)
On a lighter subject, check the book out called "Surely your Joking, Mr Feynnman" It is a great book that reasserts the idea that being curious is much better than rote memorization.
Standing on the shoulders of Giants is great. However, it is in the process of getting to the solution that you learn the most. Memorizing the answers wont get you somewhere new. Understanding processes does, knowing fundamentals does. A University should teach this. Yes in my CS classes we learned how to write a new computer language so we could write a program to do what we wanted. Because of that learning process I am relatively language independent.
However, I assume that since you find my original post smug you already have a bias against university people. Passing judgments on programs you have little knowledge of.
If you knew even a little about the educational process you would know that memorization does not work. It never has, application of principles does. You have to use knowledge and tie it to more than one memory for it to be ingrained.
Therefore research and application is the BEST way to learn. Which is what you said later in your post which contradicts your earlier assumption that a factory model would work best. The factory model fails in that you, being someone who experimented and researched on his own, is light years ahead of your fellow paper carrying University grads, even the MS students.
hmmm if that is the case, then it is only a matter of time until a unit comes out to translate to existing receivers Wouldnt be difficult to do the translation to infrared. Would be nice so that we can use it on the sets we already have rather than investing in a ton of new tech to use it.
Depends on your definition of education. I would say that research is education. More "students" should be working on research projects for their undergrad degree rather than just taking classes. They would learn more, faster, and retain it much better if they had to learn by research than rote memorization.
I'm sorry, maybe it isn't that standards are falling (which can be demonstrated by entrance ACT/SAT scores going down in many universities.) so much that universities and colleges are passing students that shouldn't be passed, are changing curriculum to make it easier to pass, and are allowing for more chances on probation to get a student to graduate or pay for at least one more semester. I am not blowing this out my ass, sit down with any prof who has taught over the last 30 years, heck even sit down with any HS teacher they will tell you Something is very very wrong.
Sports programs also generate more funding at universities than pretty much any other area. Check out UNL for a good example, and they have a phenomenal educational program I hear.
But I say this because I know a TON of people just like me, who either dropped out of college, or just barely passed, but are some of the best and brightest in their fields. Memorization means jack in the real world, I document like hell because I don't remember and don't need to. However it is the easiest thing to grade in school so that is what they measure you on.
That being said, I know a lot of people with families going back to school who aren't entitled either, some have 3 kids and are taking out 42K a year in student loans just trying to make it by every year, I have an amazing amount of respect for them. And if you read my previous posts, you will find that I fully agree that in many areas a Vo-Tech is much better because universities just aren't doing their jobs.
I also have 2 friends who attended vo-tech that are going back for a 4 year engineering degree because they hit the ceiling quickly. IT is unique in that you don't even need a degree to do very very well. That may change in 10 years though. My advice to most new tech people is, unless you have a genuine interest in the humanities and the college atmosphere, VoTech and certifications will get you a lot further than a BS. A BS in CS will give you a different perspective on the IT world but it will be harder to get an IT job with just a CS degree.
But I do stand by the vo-tech one trick pony. That is what vo-tech is designed for, take out all the fluff of a university, give someone trade experience and knowledge and send them out the door. It is a fantastic way to learn a trade. Universities, should never teach a trade in my opinion, they have other purposes.
It took me forever to write a 100 line program in C++ when I first started my freshman year. By my senior year I could write the same program in 15 minutes, to the frustration of the students I was tutoring. But I learned sooo much from those mistakes that it is ingrained in me to enjoy failing because the path to the solution rewards so much more than the solution itself.
This is my beef with other educational programs, where they just give you the solution and have you memorize the anatomy of a cat, or chemical formulas rather than helping the students to figure it out themselves.
Leads to people complaining that there aren't enough educated peopleA piece of paper does not mean you are educated, especially if all your classes were dumbed down so you didn't actually retain any useful knowledge. This is why the system does not work. The fact that you seem to be on the down the courses so more people can get into the "more smarter jobs for america" thought path is really really sad. Essentially you are saying we need a bunch of sub par people in the "smart jobs" so we should give them the same credentials as much more capable people so we can fill a seat....that is just assinine and makes credentials worthless.
I recently read one of Feynnman's books and as odd a character he is, I think he hit the nail on the head when talking about how teachers today simply dish out information and the students memorize. This has lent to a society where students know they are going to forget the courseload in a month so why not have someone else do the work for you. College is all about the piece of paper now adays anyway so you can get a higher paying job. At least that is the way the universities seem to present themselves in their advertisements.
You want to keep students from outsourcing? Push them harder, teach rather than have them memorize, administratively, get more teachers. Universities should be hard, people should drop out, if you are not passionate about the subject then head to Vo-Tech. I want universities to go back to learning institutions rather than the factories they have become.
I don't know, project looks stale, no updates in over 2.5 years.
Has anyone heard of a company making good headway in this department?
Google is a very enjoyable place to work from what I hear so if your premise is correct then they should pay less as well.
If you are going to be a paycheck hunter and just find a place to put your time in. You are in for a very unfulfilled life. I specifically chose IT because it is enjoyable, therefore in my mind I really don't work. I get paid to do the things I would be doing anyway. There are a plethora of positions like this out there.
You pay people because they have certain needs they want met and you exchange their time for the ability to meet those needs. So the idea that we get paid because a job is not exciting or fulfilling is just plain wrong.
I have dealt with enough, paycheck hunters and shiny thing people to be tired of them. I get tired of asking the question; "Why are you buying that again? Cause it looks good?" We need to ween this populace down to the passionate individuals who get the job done well. I have been in departments saturated with shiny thing and paycheck hunters that could have been run by a quarter of the people passionate in IT and bored. hell when I left my gov't job they had to hire 2 people to replace me, technically there were 3 that replaced me if you count the one that was hired a couple months before I left.
I am also assuming that if a group can afford a co-lo failover, then they should be able to afford some decent network storage. As you point out, right now iscsi is considerably more expensive and you do get some performance bonuses for quick archival and retrieval. However a good storage server is less than 10K today which can be used for archival, and this is so cheap because you aren't concerned with I/O like production servers SATA will do fine here. Since you are using a device with TCP access here, migrating to a larger storage unit is trivial. However, a point that I have failed to make adequately is that with the offsite storage server you culd hook up a nice Tape drive if you wanted and couldnt afford the space in drives. You and I both hate converting to the next tape format, Here is to LTO lasting a while ;) However I look forward to a media with a petabyte of storage that uses some kind of standard such as TCP for communication.
This is where the live co-lo situation is becoming more popular. With TCP storage solutions becoming more popular and cheaper it is an interesting concept to not only think of a co-lo as a fail-over but also as a location for high availability archival. With an iSCSI device you could expand and upgrade much easier than whatever archival medium that we can ship off-site easily. I think this is where the disconnect is, traditionally an archive has always been thought of as a mass storage device that you carry offsite. This is just a bad concept that a lot of people have, and you obviously don't.
IT seems to be getting the "this is the way dad did it" mentality and forgoing the concepts and robotically following methodology.
This is actually becoming a popular way to archive. You dont want a failover necessarily, maybe a failover and a mass storage unit for archival to consempate for corruption. I have worked in 2 places now where we archived to a co-lo, it is up to the sysadmin at the company to find out the best archival schedule. With connection speeds the way they are it works very well and you get real time archives. TCP seems to be a stable transfer medium, even if we ever hit the magical IPV6 days we will have plenty of time to upgrade our IPV4 devices.
With current software packages helping with corruption/dataloss prevention, and the availablity of cheap TBs of storage, I am mainly worried about DR and the less humans involved the better.
That being said, a good tape system where they upgrade in a rational timeline is good enough today.
I think you may be referring to an old Mozy plan as well. Mozy Unlimited for home has no restrictions on space, and if you are ultra paranoid you can use your own keys. Also the initial backup is what takes the most time, after that it is essentially just differentials with a 30 day window. You can also have DVD sets created for extra redundancy and have them sent to your house or an offsite location. My initial backup took a little while but since then the diffs have been so small there hasn't been a problem.
I used to have the same opinions of netbackups as you mentioned, back when the Z drive was popular. But they have come a LONG way to meeting my paranoia needs ;) Check out https://mozy.com/support I think you will be impressed.
actually I would say this is one of the cheapest solutions, if you check my other posts, I am a mozy fanboy. $50 a year for a total of $1000 for 20 years. Really not to shabby when you figure you get unlimited storage basically.
ya some recommendations are to put your hard drive and CDROMs in a freezer bag, then throw them in your freezer. These are the people who are really afraid of bit rot the dark and low energy environment really helps evidentially. I have no experience doing it :) I personally think there are better methods ;) But if I were storing terabytes of info for home I might consider it.
Raid is good for keeping the data alive, it is a backup in the sense of avoiding failure of devices causing major data loss. Raid 10 or a Mirror are your best bets for redundancy. However, a RAID is not going to be a preventative measure against other forms of data corruption, virus, batch file run amuck, accidentally deleting a folder. So you need a separate storage medium, you can pick your favorite, everyone has ones that work well for them. There are several alternatives depending on the size of data you are backing up. For me, I use online storage through a respected vendor MOZY for my home use, which kicks the ass of any other back up medium I have found, including tape. Tape is a dying backup medium in my opinion. I think what most people will be using within the decade are personalized net storage solutions.
BTW if you worked for me you would be fired for being an ass and pretending to know what you are talking about.