sprout

14 年前議論

It's a key design constraint of status.aws.amazon.com that it not depend on any AWS services. (Or so I've heard.)

15 年前議論

    That is not dead which can eternal lie,
    And with strange aeons even death may die.

sprout

16 年前議論

It was a series of reading comprehension problem-solving problems with short answer response.

One bit was five documents relating to an environmental issue in a small town. The exam asked the student to analyze the documents, looking for biases the sources may have and flaws in their reasoning.

It did a good job of measuring ability to synthesize and analyze sources, but it definitely would be harder to recognize more focused improvements in reasoning ability.

sprout

16 年前議論

I actually took part in this study. A few notes:

1. The exam was supposed to be administered 3 times, Freshman, Sophomore, and Senior years. I took it my Freshman and Senior years.

2. The exam was not a normal exam. I won't say it was pointless, it definitely measured something, but it's hard to say exactly what. Imagine you have to make an exam to measure "learning" and this thing was about as close as you could come to getting one. But that's still far off the mark.

3. The sample was not representative. Taking the exam was opt-in, and the college put forth a variety of incentives to get people to take the exams. Despite this, they definitely had a high drop off between sign-up-for-everything freshmen and I'm way too busy to spend three hours taking another exam seniors.

I believe there were schools where it was not opt-in, but even so, I can't imagine any of the students taking this exam had grades riding on their performance. And given that it was a single exam, it was dependent on the students' state of mind on the particular day they took the exam. Three data points per person, over four years. It's hard to draw any conclusions from this data.

sprout

16 年前議論

From personal experience watching my CPU usage, you're dead wrong.

sprout

16 年前議論

>It seems reasonable to expect that such tools can hardly improve the battery life over unrestricted Flash.

If you mean to say what you're saying, that Flashblock doesn't make a significant change from unrestricted Flash, you're dead wrong. Wireless transfer is a notable driver of power consumption, but generally it being on is the main driver, not use. CPU on the other hand draws much more under load, and Flash will put it under a lot of load.

sprout

16 年前議論

I disagree. I don't want to rely on Google for social. Separation of concerns is very important.

As is data portability. This isn't an anti-competitive move, this is a pro-openness move.

sprout

16 年前議論

Not at all. I'm gainfully employed with no intention of moving to Reddit, but the last time they put up a puzzle I solved it just for the fun of it, and wrote a cover letter just to stay in the habit.

sprout

16 年前議論

Politics are politics. Any time more than 10 people form an organization, there are odd political heuristics used by the establishment that can be gamed.

sprout

16 年前議論

If Apple's Click2Flash is really letting 1x1 apps through, that kind of kill Safari as a reasonable Firefox alternative in my book.

sprout

16 年前議論

Given the fact that my 6 year old desktop I never use would serve me just as adequately as "the future of notebooks" for things I need to do, I've always found that attitude to be a useful hedge against needless spending.

sprout

16 年前議論

  s|s/_/*|  s/_/*|

And since I haven't debugged that regex even if it was legible, add two spaces to the beginning of a line to reproduce text verbatim. (Even if it's on one line.)

sprout

16 年前議論

I take fundamental issue with the idea that a single metric should be sufficient to disqualify a student.

If papers and research are exemplary, I see no reason that exams should disqualify someone from obtaining a Doctorate. The bar should be somewhat higher, but not to the point that the only way you can get a PhD without passing all the exams is to win a Nobel.

I don't know how well that applies to this specific case, however.

sprout

16 年前議論

If the Republicans continue to stonewall, I'd expect the filibuster to be abolished. The inaction is getting poisonous.

sprout

16 年前議論

Wow, you travelled to a warzone and you dealt with weaponry. Clearly you're interested in expanding the warzone.

sprout

16 年前議論

I think there's an interesting statement being made by this professor about speed, if the thing in question is really his exams.

I mean, he seems to be making the statement that someone who produces excellent papers and research but is incapable of coming up with a coherent response to an arbitrary topic in a short timeframe is unworthy of a PhD.

It seems to me there's a place for people who can't think on their toes, even among the ranks of the official Doctors.

sprout

16 年前議論

The article also curiously lists IBM exclusively as a "software" company, which seems like an even more clear weasel omission to push an agenda.

sprout

16 年前議論

I don't think the criticism is premature. The has been visible as long as I've been here.

And it definitely discourages commenting in low-traffic threads when the average isn't normalized for viewers.

sprout

16 年前議論

Who are they going to attack? As with Oracle's suit, you can bet Google will be chomping at the bit to invalidate anything they put in the pool, which doubtlessly would weaken their bread and butter MPEG patents.

And the thing is, hardware H.264 will almost certainly be in every phone built until the patents expire, so ragging on a free alternative is just going to jeopardize their existing revenues, for a shot at the hacker community's websites like Wikimedia running H.264 and paying royalties - which will never happen anyway. Meanwhile most likely future for WebM is that some forward thinking companies serve WebM if you're using Firefox/Opera, but most are lazy, pay their H.264 tax, and require you to use IE/Safari/Chrome.

sprout

16 年前議論

>What taxes are going to be raised to pay for the radical increase in spending?

That's an unanswerable question. In order to determine how much taxes will have to be increased to pay for current expenditures, you would need to be able to predict what the economy will be like in a year. If the administration's economic initiatives were successful, there's a possibility taxes will not have to be raised at all. So you're getting angry at Obama because he can't predict what your company's revenues will be in a year, which is totally unreasonable.

I think that applies more generally to most of the points you raised. The Obama administration didn't make the world unpredictable, it has always been that way. I don't even think another failure in the economy makes anything the administration has done categorically bad decisions. I don't think we're in a worse position now than a year ago, and I don't think the fall can be any harder now than it could have been. (Because it could have been atrocious.)

In general I think it's reflective more of business leaders' politics, and those on the left will say that times are hard, and those on the right will say that Obama and the Democrats are making times hard, which again, is totally unreasonable.

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