I am a near full-time instructor who regularly teaches in multiple countries at once thanks to this rig.

For multiple people sharing the same whiteboard, I recommend using WebEx which has a mediocre whiteboard, but it works better than the other's I've tried.

I was thinking that the $5 discount coupon would only be given to people willing to spend 15 minutes filling out the forms to get it. The lawyers will collect the difference after the expiration.

I think it's more likely that there's lawyers sitting around somewhere who are reading news rags and looking for reviews which out this type of stuff. They then initiate the class action and make noise on sites like Slashdot to get people to sign up in order to establish the requirements for it to be considered a class action.

There are far too many people who would do something stupid like say "I clicked the link out of principle!"

More accurately, nVidia could probably make it clear that 3.5 gigs is better than 3 gigs and 512megs is more expensive to add than the extra gig. So, a 4 gig card with 3.5 gigs active is the best you can expect right now. So the user with the 4 gig card can still expect better performance than a user with a 3 gig card.

Pretty sad

I was thinking the same thing. I see this as a massive misappropriation of tax payers' funds. I don't know what the accountants would say on the issue, but I'd imagine that isolation has a higher cost to the tax payer than general population since the convict needs everything brought to them in special quarters built to what I can only assume is a higher standard.

A simple firewall with some sort of websense technology should be more than satisfactory to limit the use of these networks by the inmates. I'm sure it's an issue of "If you build a bigger mouse trap, I'll build a bigger mouse", but there is definitely a finite number of social networking sites out there and I'm pretty sure that there's a room full of near-slaves working in a sweatshop somewhere in the East which are constantly updating those web sense filters.

Here's an even better idea, why not actually track HTTP POST requests to unknown sites as well. This way, when the inmate clicks a button to post something and the websense filter doesn't know how to handle that request, an administrator somewhere on duty will immediately see their screen and then click whether it should be allowed or not. This will allow the inmates to apply to online universities to assist in their rehab while mindless blocking known "Red Zones" like Facebook. I can't imagine that we'd need more than one person on duty for an entire prison corporation during one shift per day.

If the inmate can't post data, push a popup to the user saying "You're attempting to post information to an unknown or unapproved site." followed by "Please wait for approval by an administrator" or "The administrator is not on duty today. Please try your request another day".

This type of a system IS NOT hard to implement. It would be MUCH less expensive than keeping inmates in solitary as well.

I'm pretty sure the biggest problem with American prisons has to be that they are penal facilities instead of rehabilitation facilities. I'm pretty convinced there are such things as people so broken they can't be fixed, but I'm also pretty sure that goal of a prison shouldn't be to punish someone for 25 to life but instead should be to actually fix the problems. The people who seem the most hellbent on hate and punishment of these people often seem a lot scarier than the criminals themselves.

I always sympathize with victims of heinous crimes, but we the people become victims of those who choose to force us to pay for the punishments. When you get someone truly nasty and broken, I don't see we have a choice but to jail them for life. I'd prefer to see them locked in proper facilities to deal with their illnesses instead of exposing criminals of a less extent to them. I don't have an overwhelming need to pamper people who did crimes during their correctional stints. I do however HATE the idea of hardening everyone who enters the system so that some kid who got busted smoking a joint ends up in and out of prison for the next 50 years. If for no other reason than that I don't want to make even more damn hardened criminals, we need to make it possible for prisoners to be online, learn trades, self-discipline, responsibility, etc... but make no mistake, they showed enough poor judgement to end up there, they don't need access to entertainment websites. It should be a tool, not a toy for them.

COOL!! I love that idea! Too bad you posted as AC, I'd be PMing you to ask where I can send a pizza to for that one!

One Saturday morning, I had to rush to the convenience store near the house because we learned we were out of milk for the baby. There was some reason or another it was a rush, I don't quite remember why it couldn't wait. All I know is that I was buying milk for a baby. This is one of those things which goes in the list of "It doesn't get any more pure than that" or "Only a jackass would keep a person from buying milk for their baby", etc...

Well I got there and apparently it was the last 15 minutes before cut-off for lottery tickets for the week. It took precisely 15 minutes to reach the front of the line. Do you know why? Because the three people in front of me had stacks of lottery tickets forms they had spent considerable time (dozens of hours) filling in that all had to be manually fed to the machine before the cut-off because these people actually believed that the actual numbers they chose mattered. It wasn't good enough to just say "Give me 400 quick pick tickets", they had to all be custom.

So, in the end, my son had to wait an extra 15 minutes to get his milk because these idiots are still breathing air ... which I can only imagine reaches brain cells in suboptimal quantities.

I can honestly say, I've never seen anyone other than fixed-income granny buy a single lottery ticket. It seems far more common that tickets are purchased in wallets, stacks or boxes. It's a tax designed specifically to try and convince people to burn their money on government sponsored gambling instead of online or casino gambling. Either way, the government is 100% sure you'll lose and they'll win and the lottery at least lets them win a greater percentage than if they had to share with the casino.

This is why it's called "The volunteer stupid tax". It's a tax people pay for being stupid and are simply so stupid they choose to pay it voluntarily.

I simply have no patience for those people

$2 is a used paperback book
$2 is a used college text that has a new version
$2 is a bus ticket
$2 is a Egg McMuffin for breakfast.
$2 is a gallon of gas to visit a friend
$2 is half way to something that's 4 bucks

I can go on for ages. I can spend $2 tens of thousands of times a year. If you want to spend $2 on a gambling receipt, you're welcome to do so. You have all my blessings. But the instant you think that the crumby little piece of paper gives you hope for something greater, I recommend you spend $2 on a used bible instead, I have never found anything other than a few interesting old stories in it, but I hear there are billions of suckers out there who have found hope in those things. The odds are far better in your favor there.

On Windows Azure, OpenStack, Citrix and even the ever-lame VMware,there are extensive orchestration tools. Write your script once and next time you need a server, click deploy.

In a world where most programmers don't have a clue why they chose a list vs. an array vs. a tree for anything, this is actually an excellent question to test students with.

This is obviously not an optimal solution to the problem it solves, but it is in fact a fairly compact example that can be used to test whether a student understands recursion and can follow code.

The question isn't whether there is bad code on the exam. This was a great question.

The question is, is there also a question relating to excessive or unbound recursion and what will happen if the number is too big.

What about Big-O notation and algorithmic complexity.

I had to implement a compiler and virtual machine last week because I couldn't find anyone else to do it that was available. This is because not enough people understand topics like recursion.

The teacher who posted the article made it very clear that his competence is limited and he himself is quite slow witted by stating the he found recursion hard to understand at first. Why is this even on Slashdot?

Oh... And 7 is not lucky :)

I have been workong directly and indirectly with massive scale computing for decades:

1) break single threaded tasks into smaller jobs that can be distributed.
2) test that they still work
3) establish a chain of dependencies so that tasks which must be performed in order will.
4) establish pipeline cost and cache coherency cost for each job.
5) distribute tasks who share common data sets to cores which have the lowest latency between them
6) take jobs which depend on output of other jobs and offset their start time so the input data from the other job is available befor it is need in the current job decreasing the cost or synchronization.
8) optimize job distribution so that tasks running in parallel with dependencies will be distributed to cores nearest to one another in the coherency ring.

This is old school thinking. Randomizing should not offer better performance than properly scheduled tasks.

There are hundreds of different BIOSes. System init code isn't like program code, it's non-relocatable. You can't just add a hook and bypass the original. In theory, boot block flash which is a mini-BIOS might be hooked, but every single MB model would be different. Unless you're running a REALLY high volume computer (Surface, Macbook), the investment in such hooks would be meaningless.

HD firmware could be more interesting, but the payoff would be hard to justify. HD vendors tend to use the same firmware for an entire series. Still, I can't see it.

Just because "Security researchers" can show a possible exploit for a specific hd or mb model and raise FUD, I would just reflash those components if I were actually concerned.

EFI is a different beast, but that's why we have signed code and OS bootloaders.

My NAS has history and revisions... I can't really see how it could harm that :/

until someone writes a something which specifically circumvents it. Nice concept, seems of little value. A home NAS with automatic historical backups is much more sensible... or you could use cloud storage and just put it all out there for anyone.

If you use Windows, then you are already vulnerable?

Did you mean "If you put a computer of any type online, it will become a target and someone may eventually hit the jackpot."?