1) I taught the lab of a second year digital logic class whose prof. might have been good at research but sucked as a teacher. I didn't believe the comments the students made about the class so I sat in (second row, left side of class room that had seats for 50 people) and I couldn't understand a word the man said. He basically faced the board and muttered while making scratchings that sort of looked like K-maps. So, I got my hands on the class syllabus and started taking the first 45 minutes of my 2 hour long lab to teach digital logic. At the end of the semester, I had a lot of people thank me for doing that.
2) Communication is key. If students turned in homework, a lab report or a test that was incomprehensible, I gave it a zero. Engineering is all about communication and I quickly taught my students that being engineering students was not an excuse. If they didn't write legibly and clearly, I didn't care how brilliant their work was because neither I or anyone else could understand it. Oddly enough, the foreign students usually demonstrated better written language skills. (I did have to occasionally to convince them that a thesaurus is a dangerous tool.)
I've been working now for 10 years and communication is still key. I'm in the process of learning Mandarin.
While there still is the "standard" problem to work around, I much prefer to use Turtle Beach cards when I am setting up a system to do recording on the cheap. The sound quality is much better than higher spec'ed Creative products. It helps that Audacity seems to have no problem working with Turtle Beach cards under XP Profession.
If I recall correctly, Clear Logic didn't create custom masks for each ASIC, but programmed their sea-of-gates chips by blowing metal fuses with a laser. However, as already pointed out, they did use Altera's files to create their laser program and that is what sunk their ship.
I know this is off topic, but, as a Canadian living in the US and with two uncles who died of cancer because they were not diagnosed until after their cancers had metastasized, I beg to differ. In both cases, my father (a MD) told them that they should have necessary tests done and therapy started, but the Canadian system didn't allow them to cut the queue. When, six months and eights later, the Canadian system finally got to them, they were past saving.
Because they trusted the Canadian system, neither of them took Dad up on his offer to pay for them to go to California for proton beam treatment when he initial suspected trouble. Both of them died early because of that trust. I love Canada, but the medical program, along with the NDP party are both farces.
I work with 45 people from around the world and with the exception of three people, all have Masters or higher education. What is interesting is that about 53% of us were educated in church run schools up through the 12th (or equivalent) grade. From my limited sample, I don't think that religion backed education is a bad thing. Nor do I think that personal moral behavior based on the tennats of a relgion are bad.
However, I think the problem is when a religious institution no longer concerns itself with helping people but decides that it should dictate to people that we are in trouble. I'll go so far as to apply this to all systems of belief that fall into the religious catagory. If the system of belief must protect itself by demanding that people act in a certain way and seek the power of the government to enforce that behavior, that system of belief should be burned at the stake.
But then, what do I know. I was raised a conservative Christian, but God and I have our doubts about each other.
It is all a matter of focus. Part of my drivers education happened on a frozen lake where I learned how to handle spins and four wheel drifts at up to 80 m/h (129 km/h). Also, when you are doing 120+ and a rabbit jumps in front of you, you do not swerve unless you want to meet your maker. You have to think ahead about what you will do when the unexpected happens at speeds over 100m/h (160 km/h) because when it happens, you don't have time to think. I attribute this mental preparation to having surviving a rear wheel blowout on a ZX-11 Ninja while traveling faster than 150 m/h in rural New Mexico. Same goes for the time I was running 130 or so, in rural Montana, when a coyote jumped in front of me. That cost me a new bumper and the coyote his life.
Every time I decide to "fly low", I put everything out of my mind except for the road and what my vehicle is telling me. I very carefully check my vehicle before heading out. I won't go to speed unless my field of view is greater than 3 miles (5 km) because it takes a long time to slow down when you are going fast. Needless to say, if I come across other traffic, I slow down.
Having said this, I don't recommend it. Why? Because most people aren't going to keep that tight a focus on the road. Nor are they used to listening and feeling, much less having a clue about the feedback their vehicle is giving them.
I am a fan of linux, but with reservations. At work, I was moved from a Sun Utra10 to a Athlon 64 running Red Hat earlier this year. My Sun, while very slow, only had the desktop crash on it about once a year or so. FVWM crashes once a week. GNOME isn't behaving much better. It has got to the point where I save my work as often as I did back when I worked on Windows ME. So, for the end user, I hate to say this, but Linux doesn't "just work".
I am sitting in front of a box running a RedHat flavor Linux - I was upgraded to this machine when my old Ultra10 died. The Athlon64 sure is faster, but you know what, the damn desktop crashes about once a week. I can count the number of times Solaris did that over the past ten years on my body's appendages. What's worse is that the Windows XP box I have at home only needs to be rebooted when I get a new set of patches which happen about once a month. So, jokes about the blue screen of death are pretty lame when you suddenly find yourself staring at a command prompt and and discover that all the apps you had running on the GUI died.
Oh yeah, I haven't had a virus infection in years on the XP box either. Something about avoiding IE like the plague (Netscape 7.2 works fine) and running a good firewall does the trick. My virus software has not logged any viri infections since 2001.
Uhm, right. Got a nasty cut and want it to heal quickly with very littl scaring? Go to the local chemist and get some betadine or generic knock-off of the same. Then head over to the grocer and get some confectioners (powdered) sugar. Mix the two into a goopy syrup and apply to said wound. Total cost per treatment is very, very little but the results are pretty damn impressive. (Yes, the person can't be alergic to iodine.) My parents (both docs) used this in Mexico and learned it from a doctor who worked in Africa. Now, try and get this simple recipe published to general public or endorsed by any company out there. Good luck.
This whole talk reminds me of a team building exercise I was part of back in 1990 while working as an intern at Microsoft. In one of the exercises, Steve was a member of my team. Part of the exercise was that we chose a team leader who would then tell us all what to do. Steve was chosen and the exercise proceeded. By odd chance, I ended up standing next to Steve and quickly realized that he hadn't a clue what to tell people do. However, he did make a great amplifier. I would make a small suggestion to him and he would shout it out and things would happen.
Somehow, this talk has that feel. He really doesn't have something to say, but he is making a great amplifier for the marketing group.
It doesn't. What is worse, the "blood" diamonds may not just exploit the people who mine them. They may be also used to finance some really horrible things:
My wife, who grew up Sierra Leon during the '80s, will not wear diamonds because the civil war there was financed by diamonds. Many of her friends were either beaten and raped (female) or hacked to bits (male) by machette wielding rebels financed by money that came from illegal diamond trade.
It puts a whole different light on DeBeers commercials.
Stangely enough, the health insurance I get through my company costs (between what I pay and what my company pays) about the same as a friend of mine who is self employed pays for his health insurance. We compared notes and discovered that while I was paying less, his contract income was sufficiently higher than mine to make up the difference that my company covered.
So, I have to disagree with you although my sample set is very small.
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Two stories from when I was a TA:
1) I taught the lab of a second year digital logic class whose prof. might have been good at research but sucked as a teacher. I didn't believe the comments the students made about the class so I sat in (second row, left side of class room that had seats for 50 people) and I couldn't understand a word the man said. He basically faced the board and muttered while making scratchings that sort of looked like K-maps. So, I got my hands on the class syllabus and started taking the first 45 minutes of my 2 hour long lab to teach digital logic. At the end of the semester, I had a lot of people thank me for doing that.
2) Communication is key. If students turned in homework, a lab report or a test that was incomprehensible, I gave it a zero. Engineering is all about communication and I quickly taught my students that being engineering students was not an excuse. If they didn't write legibly and clearly, I didn't care how brilliant their work was because neither I or anyone else could understand it. Oddly enough, the foreign students usually demonstrated better written language skills. (I did have to occasionally to convince them that a thesaurus is a dangerous tool.)
I've been working now for 10 years and communication is still key. I'm in the process of learning Mandarin.
While there still is the "standard" problem to work around, I much prefer to use Turtle Beach cards when I am setting up a system to do recording on the cheap. The sound quality is much better than higher spec'ed Creative products. It helps that Audacity seems to have no problem working with Turtle Beach cards under XP Profession.
If I recall correctly, Clear Logic didn't create custom masks for each ASIC, but programmed their sea-of-gates chips by blowing metal fuses with a laser. However, as already pointed out, they did use Altera's files to create their laser program and that is what sunk their ship.
I know this is off topic, but, as a Canadian living in the US and with two uncles who died of cancer because they were not diagnosed until after their cancers had metastasized, I beg to differ. In both cases, my father (a MD) told them that they should have necessary tests done and therapy started, but the Canadian system didn't allow them to cut the queue. When, six months and eights later, the Canadian system finally got to them, they were past saving.
Because they trusted the Canadian system, neither of them took Dad up on his offer to pay for them to go to California for proton beam treatment when he initial suspected trouble. Both of them died early because of that trust. I love Canada, but the medical program, along with the NDP party are both farces.
I work with 45 people from around the world and with the exception of three people, all have Masters or higher education. What is interesting is that about 53% of us were educated in church run schools up through the 12th (or equivalent) grade. From my limited sample, I don't think that religion backed education is a bad thing. Nor do I think that personal moral behavior based on the tennats of a relgion are bad.
However, I think the problem is when a religious institution no longer concerns itself with helping people but decides that it should dictate to people that we are in trouble. I'll go so far as to apply this to all systems of belief that fall into the religious catagory. If the system of belief must protect itself by demanding that people act in a certain way and seek the power of the government to enforce that behavior, that system of belief should be burned at the stake.
But then, what do I know. I was raised a conservative Christian, but God and I have our doubts about each other.
It is all a matter of focus. Part of my drivers education happened on a frozen lake where I learned how to handle spins and four wheel drifts at up to 80 m/h (129 km/h). Also, when you are doing 120+ and a rabbit jumps in front of you, you do not swerve unless you want to meet your maker. You have to think ahead about what you will do when the unexpected happens at speeds over 100m/h (160 km/h) because when it happens, you don't have time to think. I attribute this mental preparation to having surviving a rear wheel blowout on a ZX-11 Ninja while traveling faster than 150 m/h in rural New Mexico. Same goes for the time I was running 130 or so, in rural Montana, when a coyote jumped in front of me. That cost me a new bumper and the coyote his life. Every time I decide to "fly low", I put everything out of my mind except for the road and what my vehicle is telling me. I very carefully check my vehicle before heading out. I won't go to speed unless my field of view is greater than 3 miles (5 km) because it takes a long time to slow down when you are going fast. Needless to say, if I come across other traffic, I slow down. Having said this, I don't recommend it. Why? Because most people aren't going to keep that tight a focus on the road. Nor are they used to listening and feeling, much less having a clue about the feedback their vehicle is giving them.
I am a fan of linux, but with reservations. At work, I was moved from a Sun Utra10 to a Athlon 64 running Red Hat earlier this year. My Sun, while very slow, only had the desktop crash on it about once a year or so. FVWM crashes once a week. GNOME isn't behaving much better. It has got to the point where I save my work as often as I did back when I worked on Windows ME. So, for the end user, I hate to say this, but Linux doesn't "just work".
I am sitting in front of a box running a RedHat flavor Linux - I was upgraded to this machine when my old Ultra10 died. The Athlon64 sure is faster, but you know what, the damn desktop crashes about once a week. I can count the number of times Solaris did that over the past ten years on my body's appendages. What's worse is that the Windows XP box I have at home only needs to be rebooted when I get a new set of patches which happen about once a month. So, jokes about the blue screen of death are pretty lame when you suddenly find yourself staring at a command prompt and and discover that all the apps you had running on the GUI died.
Oh yeah, I haven't had a virus infection in years on the XP box either. Something about avoiding IE like the plague (Netscape 7.2 works fine) and running a good firewall does the trick. My virus software has not logged any viri infections since 2001.
So, tell me again how Linux is saving me money?
Uhm, right. Got a nasty cut and want it to heal quickly with very littl scaring? Go to the local chemist and get some betadine or generic knock-off of the same. Then head over to the grocer and get some confectioners (powdered) sugar. Mix the two into a goopy syrup and apply to said wound. Total cost per treatment is very, very little but the results are pretty damn impressive. (Yes, the person can't be alergic to iodine.) My parents (both docs) used this in Mexico and learned it from a doctor who worked in Africa. Now, try and get this simple recipe published to general public or endorsed by any company out there. Good luck.
This whole talk reminds me of a team building exercise I was part of back in 1990 while working as an intern at Microsoft. In one of the exercises, Steve was a member of my team. Part of the exercise was that we chose a team leader who would then tell us all what to do. Steve was chosen and the exercise proceeded. By odd chance, I ended up standing next to Steve and quickly realized that he hadn't a clue what to tell people do. However, he did make a great amplifier. I would make a small suggestion to him and he would shout it out and things would happen.
Somehow, this talk has that feel. He really doesn't have something to say, but he is making a great amplifier for the marketing group.
It doesn't. What is worse, the "blood" diamonds may not just exploit the people who mine them. They may be also used to finance some really horrible things: My wife, who grew up Sierra Leon during the '80s, will not wear diamonds because the civil war there was financed by diamonds. Many of her friends were either beaten and raped (female) or hacked to bits (male) by machette wielding rebels financed by money that came from illegal diamond trade. It puts a whole different light on DeBeers commercials.
Stangely enough, the health insurance I get through my company costs (between what I pay and what my company pays) about the same as a friend of mine who is self employed pays for his health insurance. We compared notes and discovered that while I was paying less, his contract income was sufficiently higher than mine to make up the difference that my company covered. So, I have to disagree with you although my sample set is very small.