In any case, it's an easy fix. Just randomize the order.

Yes... but that is still not entirely fair. I mean usually in the UK system, students are assigned a number, and that's the only identifying mark on the exam scripts, which does randomize the order, though now the bias is present it's just randomly assigned which isn't great.

The American system way over indexes on exams, apparently on the grounds that the more the better. Se also the obsession with standardised tests. Yes... standardised tests are good predictors of performance if the entire system is designed to reward people who do well on standardised tests...

Marking is generally a bit miserable and the more of it there is the worse it will be.

The only one I've done recently has involved the scripts being split into batches and marked (with brief notes on the marks for each question) by TAs, the detailed scheme is finalised then the entire lot is cross checked (much less bad than full marking) by the course lead. I don't think most people do it lie that but it works very well.

The best thing is to minimize the number of exams but make them be the best they can be and make them count.

It's not even about being bad or tired. I've done a fair bit of grading in my time.

Even if you're well rested and happy (you are not), you definitely change over the course of marking because you get used to the exam in some way. You start spotting patterns, and also of course update the internal mark scheme in your head.

It's easy of course if the student get the right answer (or writes nothing). It's those partial credit answers that are a bitch figuring out what the student did and crucially how many marks to award, so that overall the marks are fair. Sometimes you even have to go back and adjust all the marks based on a new insight into your own mark scheme. Students hate that, but the fact is you can only really make a quite broad brush mark scheme on a free form exam, the details are only going to get filled in when your battle plan meets the enemy.

Thing is though students aren't infinitely inventive. There'll be a few different obvious ways of tackling the problem (and very very rarely another way), with the same kinds of mistakes made, so by the time you've done about 25% (say) of the marks, you'll have seen most of the major variations and mistakes, which makes the remaining marking somewhat faster because it's much closer to pattern spotting.

It's likely well documented and well written.

Even so, it's the job of many software engineers to dive into an existing, gnarly codebase and start fixing things. If you select the best of them who really like space stuff and are nerdy about old hardware, it willbe possible to find people who can get up to speed.

There's whole communities of people now including youngsters doing retrocomputing for fun. And NASA will have had continuity, sure all the original devs are gone, but they have always brought on new people.

There's a feature missing you'd like. Why can't you go add that?

Coz it's not my job to do your hobby for you. If YOU want it to be the year of the Wayland desktop, then you code the feature. Otherwise quite whining that people don't want to use Wayland because it's missing features.

Well that's telling... It truly is the gnome windowing system!

It's kind of like saying the text only virtual terminal replaced X address so because many people use it.

Until very recently screen capture didn't work. Window placement still doesn't, and the tooling is still a fragmented mess across the Wayland ecosystem.

You can replace X with Wayland if you don't need to do very much. But it's telling that fanbois describe it as fully featured provided it has the features they personally need. I'd much rather have a replacement system that works on more than the broadest sense.

It's not a fully featured system yet and it is most definitely not going to be the year of the Wayland desktop when the Wayland fans and Devs insist that those users and features don't count.

Yep there are also developers than those who are working on windowing systems.

Seems like collaboration only counts if you're fixing egregious bugs in Wayland design for them. If you are contributing other things instead, fuck you, your not collaborative enough.

I've got bug reports and fixes to my name scattered around the F)OSS world and even the odd library and utility with actual users. That's not enough for me to have on opinion on whether Wayland removing important features literally every other system has will affect it's popularity in the desktop...

Well...

I meant for operation in free space there has to be a global rest frame because there's nothing to be relative too.

The dark matter one is a different point, as you correctly point out. However it is like the ocean, in that the craft will be moving relative to the dark matter ocean. That means using normal momentum and force equations, for a given energy input, the force will depend on the speed of the craft relative to the dark matter ocean.

Don't forget that the earth is spinning, while whirling around the sun which is in turn zooming around the central black hole. The force will change in obvious and predictable ways as the time of day and season changes.

And if course the key thing about dark matter is it doesn't interact with electromagnetic radiation, hehe the name dark, so an electric field won't do much if anything. If it did, we'd be able to detect it using light and it wouldn't be dark.

The 1N/W was a number I picked to make it obvious. Turns out if you pick numbers too high you end up in relativistic calculations, and people are much worse at understanding those. And if it's a bit smaller, cc then people believe the impracticality of making a machine means it doesn't count as if the universe cares about human convenience.

Well who pissed in your cornflakes?

it's a mild but if not quite pedantry. They are on some levels different, some levels similar.

You are way too invested in this to be rational.

I'm saying in a thread about the year of the Wayland desktop that it won't be while they keep considering important features out of scope and then yelling at users about how they stuck and ought to do 1000x more work to make the feature that worked in the previous release of the distro work again.

I'd say if you're happy with it not being the year of the Wayland desktop, then that's fine you do you, except you are clearly unhappy with it. Deeply unhappy with it because when I point out an obvious flaw in the current Wayland desktop experience that's been open for 15 years now and it's unique to Wayland desktops, your response is to yell.

Yell all you want, you won't make it the year of the Wayland desktop by shouting people into submission.

I did read an interesting article recently where it had started to bite. Redhat are all gung ho on Wayland, but the kind of people who pay for support contracts aren't interested at all in slick tablet like desktops. In fact they are not really interested in the community much at all, they are paying redhat for stuff to just work. They run big installations with many screens, lots of custom software and driving expensive machinery and instruments.

It turns out that for those folk, yelling about scope doesn't really carry much weight. However they 15 years of yelling about scope and shouting down users had meant they didn't actually know what their paying users needed until they took it away and the paying users got really annoyed that despite forking over heaps of cash their shit broke.

Anyway I'll just get popcorn, I have bigger or at least other fish to fry. Redhat want Wayland and so it's happening more or less regardless of what I do. I'll keep submitting bug fixes to X tools until the switch happens and then I'll submit them to Wayland tools instead.

I'm still going to laugh at people who shout at users for being wrong then shout at them again for not being as popular as they like.

It looks like a delivery van?

UPS also have heavily customised vans, as I believe do Royal Mail. Most delivery vans have some sort of shelving or box storage inside. The major grocery delivery companies have quite heavily customisedstorage and refridgeration systems in their delivery vans.

Thought I did see a very dented Prime van yesterday--dented on the upper slope at the front like it crashed into a low obstacle--with a disorganised jumble of boxes in the back.

What on earth are you taking about? What sense of doom?

And Wayland doesn't have it at all. There is still no protocol, and goodness theres been a bunch of bikeshedding over it...

All I did was point out (with an example) that a feature present on all other systems that's relied on had gone MIA on Wayland desktops, and all the Wayland supporters do is yell about it. And your response was... to yell about it.

I've already covered it

No you did not. You wade into a thread where I'm saying why it won't be the year of the wayland desktop saying (a) you don't care and (b) berating me for saying why it won't be.

I get it it. Everything is everyone else's fault. Wayland is perfect. It will or won't be the year of the wayland desktop, you both don't care and care so much you need to keep shouting. Actually working is out of scope, as is acknowledging why Wayland isn't as popular as you like. Being out of scope, the only options are to yell.

Anyway you clearly care because you're here to tell me how I'm wrong, but ya know what? Yelling at me ain't going to make Wayland work well enough to be the year of the Wayland desktop.

I'll yet again remind you you're on a "year of the Wayland desktop" thread, which it seems you don't want.

Then you want Windows.

lol OK. The last version of Windows I booted on a machine of my own was Windows 95.

Linux is a collaborative effort, why are you suggesting they get a pass on the collaborative part?

They've been providing an amazing, industry leading F/OSS tool for 27 years, with a number of spinoffs, various compatibility things implemented in other libraries. That's pretty good collaboration. They'd do a much less good job if they instead had to piss around trying to get an absolute basic feature of all reasonable desktop systems working across a fragmented mess.

What isn't collaborative is yelling at people when you broke a feature everyone expects to work.

I won't.

Then why are you pissing and moaning on a thread about the year of the Wayland desktop?

That's not a Wayland thing.

Aaah there we go! The old "it's out of scope" argument.

Followed by:

They do NOT owe you support of your favorite piece

complaining at the user for wanting stuff to work.

You actually did both, I'm kinda impressed. Anyhow you are posting on a "year of the Wayland desktop" thread. And I'm thinking of a particular piece of software (ImageJ) which is currently maintained, very popular in many scientific circles and works perfectly on Windows, OSX and oh... what was the other system again?

Wait a moment it'll come to me... ... oh yes that was it X11! And X. But in some cases it (for good reasons) relies on window placement, something X doesn't offer.

Your solution is for the poor imageJ devs to figure out not how to get it working on Linux, or even Wayland and X, but X and Wayland/GNOME, Walyand/KDE, Walyand/whatever this desktop is and Wayland/sway and so on and so on and everything else.

I mean sure, but don't expect it to be the year of the Wayland desktop if your solution to stuff not working is to yell at users about the architectural details of Wayland, and then say that the devs should do 10x the amount of work and users should try and compete with a multibillion dollar company 1 on 1.

It's going to be another "year of the Wayland desktop being heavily pushed but mysteriously not getting as much traction as the Wayland fanboys expect and the wayland fanboys yelling at anyone who tells them why it's not as popular as they expect"

If X sucked as badly as its detractors claimed one would have thought that replacing it with something more functional would take less than the current 15 years, especially as work on X has more or less stalled for a decade.

But it's 2024 and Wayland still doesn't for example support window placement, unlike Windows, OSX and what was that? X11? Huh. I'm sure it's out of scope and anyway the user's fault for wanting it widely supported features that have niche but very important uses.

We've gone from "mechanism not policy" to "neither mechanism nor policy".

Plus anything beyond the basics is a crapshoot because there are three major semicompatible layers (wlroots, gnome, kde), so now automation has coupled into the window management scheme. It's like someone looked at the fragmentation of 90s era uni and said "hold my beer".

So... maybe.