Actually, the question of educational value is the big elephant in the room. It is completely questionable and absolutely not obvious that these tablets have educational value. Do the kids learn more, faster, or in different ways? Can this be quantified or even vaguely estimated? There are huge IT capital and operational costs involved, and such large expenditures must be justified in terms of return.

It's telling that the article and even the discussion on Slashdot centers on technical questions because those issues are all tangential. If the main goals focus on avoiding the theft of machines and the bypass of parental controls, then the entire project is misguided. How are the children learning, and how does that learning compare to the previous system of learning? What did the $20 million buy?

It depends. It could very well be that the main reason for this mass layoff is not that Microsoft carries more deadweight than another company, say Google or Apple, for example. Many of Google's employees are not necessary, but it can afford to pay them due to its money spigot. Financial metrics, such as operating profit or more importantly projected stock price appreciation, quickly turn non-deadweight employees into deadweight. It's obvious that Microsoft (or any other company) does not execute layoffs in response to an appraisal of the quality or necessarily even the usefulness of employees but rather the financial implications of the cost centers that these employees represent.

Yes, energy usage moderation is a matter of economics and not religion. Rich people with big houses use lot of energy regardless of their views on the environment. Similarly poor people tend to try their best to minimize their energy usage, not because they necessarily care about the environment but because that is what they can afford. This is what I've seen in my life from my experience as part of the bottom 10% as well as the top 5%.

Outstanding papers for the most part will continue to be published. That's not the issue. The problem is that the overwhelming portion of submitted papers are not seminal papers, and it's these papers that are subjected to the defects in the review process, including the following:
(1) Not all reviewers are equally competent for their assigned papers.
(2) Not all reviewers are equally committed to spending the minimum amount of time needed for a thorough review. I have seen reviews submitted by well-known and regarded individuals that were obviously hastily written with a cursory reading of the submission.
(3) The assignment of papers to reviewers is mostly random. Explicit conflicts are filtered, but the assignment is mostly random, even if some sort of bidding process is used, as is done for some conferences.
(4) The number of reviewers is often minimal. For journals, often two reviewers are used. For conferences, 2-5 reviewers may be involved. However, that number includes the less competent and apathetic reviewers.
(5) Decisions are often swayed by a few very opinionated individuals. Especially on a PC, it is not at all rare to see political motivations determine the fate of a paper.

Double-blind reviews are idealistic but not practical. For many/most papers, it's almost trivial to figure out who the authors are based on the title, the subject material, and the references. Most authors will self-reference their own papers.

Fourteen years ago I carried a phone and a PDA. The PDA had wifi, office apps, games, etc., and when needed I could use the phone as a data modem. I eventually migrated to a single device with both phone and PDA functionality, and I've gotten used to the convenience of a single device with the same functionality. I would not want to go backwards in time to once again carrying two devices for the same functionality.

I consider bio-sensors to be gimicky. I imagine most of the people who would find those sensors to be a positive have already bought existing sensor devices.

Using a watch as a convenient but significantly crippled interface to a phone seems like a huge step backwards. I would only accept that huge loss of interface functionality if I could leave the phone behind, i.e., if the phone migrated to the watch. Now, that is something that I would buy in an instant. Anything else is just Pebble++, even if it happens to have a fruit logo on it.

The problem with "hacking" is the openness and crowd sourcing aspect of Google Maps. Wikipedia has the same problem, and the answer was to decrease the openness for editing. Maybe Google will have to adopt a similar strategic decrease in openness for certain parts of Maps.

Will people move to an alternative if Google Maps becomes unreliable? Well, maybe but probably not. If I'm misdirected to a competitor but I'm still able to complete my transaction, then I probably don't care or maybe I don't even realize the misdirection. If a small percentage of the links I click on fail, but most links continue to work and the rest of Maps functionality remains intact, then I won't switch. The losers are not the browser users but the businesses trying to get free advertising. I imagine Google will take care of paid advertising businesses, but they probably don't care as much for the "freeloaders", i.e., Google wants the freeloaders to populate their database, but they don't really care if they benefit or are hurt.

One interesting study would be the correlation between the characteristics of the hiring manager and team members. In my experience the correlation is strong, especially in terms of race and ethnicity. At Bell Labs in the 90's, one out of the three research area organizations had a very high representation of Indian managers and researchers. At Sun, the same was true except that most managers and researchers were white (Americans, Europeans, Australians, etc.). I worked at another company where the manager was Serbian and two other researchers were Serbian.

This is a hypothesis that can be fairly easily corroborated with statistical studies. I'm fairly certain that the bias exists. Of course, whether that bias is good or bad is a separate question.

Two questions about this research:

(1) How did the researchers account for operational language profiles? Language A may have more negative words than positive words, but maybe the one happy word is used 80% of the time. To me, the incidence of positive vs. negative usage is much more important than the histogram of the available vocabulary.

(2) How did the researchers compare the same word in different languages? Is this comparison possible without the introduction of bias in the selection of words for each of the two languages. From the paper authors' website, "This is a comparison between the average user reported happiness scores between several languages. The "happiness" of each word is rated by 50 distinct users on a scale of 1(sad) to 9 (happy). Words from each row language are then translated into each column language and intersected with each other corpora."

So, how much are the results a reflection of the experimenter's biases and skills in translation to the 2nd language. I'm suspicious of this type of comparison. From the article (not the paper), "For example, on a scale of 1 to 9 with nine being the happiest, Germans rate the word “gift” as 3.54. That’s slightly negative. By contrast, English speakers rate “gift” as strongly positive at 7.72." As a somewhat fluent German speaker, I know that the German word "gift" means poison, and I would consider it not just slightly negative but extremely negative. If the experimenters actually presented the German speakers with the German translation of the English word "gift", e.g., something like "Geschenk", then I imagine the German response would have been very positive.

The problem is with the concept of a "legitimate" offense, as though some quintessential characteristic of an action or statement should outlaw personal feelings. How one feels is reality. For those of who are married, try telling your wife that she shouldn't feel offended because you didn't mean to hurt her, so that should make her feel better.

This entire discussion of "legitimate" offenses boils down to whether one cares about what others feels. If I care about the listener and that listener feels offended, then I would address their feelings, regardless of my personal feelings about the offense. If I don't care about the listener, then I either ignore the listener, or if I feel the sting of societal condemnation, I attack the "legitimacy" of the offense or the morality or intelligence of the listener.

It's much more nuanced than that. There's this incorrect aggregation of the notion of offense, as though something is either offensive to everyone or offensive to no one. A speaker can offend without intention to offend. It should be obvious that each individual is the only person who has not only the right but the ability to determine personally felt offense. The right and ability to determine offense for oneself should not be confused with the legal or moral right to determine the resulting societal actions.

That is, each person gets to decide if the term "redskin" is personally offensive. However, just because one or more people take offense doesn't necessarily grant that group or society as a whole to impose sanctions for that offense. But, likewise, the lack of societal sanction should not be extended to prohibit personal feelings or thoughts. In fact, in my opinion, hearing "You have no right to be offended!" is much more hurtful than the original offense.

Making any comments about the desirability or appropriateness of the percentage of women, blacks, hispanics, etc. in a company implies personal knowledge about the desired or appropriate range of percentages. But, that's where it gets difficult. It's easy to say that the numbers are too low, but it's hard to pin down what the target numbers should be. Should the percentage of women be 50%? But, if there are 10x more men applying for the job, is that appropriate? As others have discussed in this forum, a separate question is whether the 10:1 ratio of men:women applicants is appropriate.

This discussion also presents perhaps a hazy melding of two distinct, important questions: (1) Are there an appropriate percentage of a certain demographic group within a company, and (2) do the members of that demographic group have the same opportunities to get a job in that company? The first question deals with the aggregate end result, while the latter question deals with the probabilities for an individual. In my opinion, the second question is more important but difficult to measure. So, the first question is used as a lazy alternative.

Actually the paper says that the Google guys approximated power-on hours with a notion of age, which I assume was approximated by a knowledge of either the manufacture date of the delivery date. From the paper, annualized failure rate (AFR) is somewhat correlated with age, but not necessarily strongly enough to predict probability of failure. Even with their large drive population, the paper points out that the drive model mix is not consistent over time and therefore, not much can be made of the apparently weak correlation between AFR and age, which could be perhaps be more greatly influenced by drive model.

The negative correlation with very cold temperatures is interesting but hard to understand without further analysis. Perhaps some drive models didn't handle fly height adjustments well at low temperatures. It's hard to figure out without more data. It should also be pointed out the temperatures were obtained via SMART, and the SMART standard doesn't mandate how temperature is reported. So, different manufacturers could report temperatures in different ways, i.e., different locations (which can easily vary by up to 30 degrees C), different aggregation methods (time windows, sampling frequency), etc. So, the aggregate data is probably not as useful as the data per drive model.

I actually prefer the built-in system. For example, I have a limited data plan because my non-wifi data needs are low, so using an online map like Google Maps or Waze costs extra on a recurring basis. With a phone, I would have to go through the motions of removing it from my pocket, attaching it to the bracket, and plugging it in, as well as the reverse motions when leaving the car. I would also need a special bracket to hold the phone, and even with this bracket, the screen would shake more than an integrated system. The phone screen is significantly smaller. The phone audio is not integrated into the car speakers, so audio levels have to be adjusted, and navigation directions sometimes compete with music. The built-in system also has a physical joystick and dial with voice feedback (not to mention voice recognition) so that I can control it more easily than the using the phone's touchscreen.

I do use my phone for navigation sometimes when I drive my older car. But, given a choice, I always prefer the built-in system.

The goal of the upgrade was an easy performance upgrade, i.e., pop it in and enjoy the speed.

What my experience shows is that DRAM costs less, yields a better performance increase, and most importantly is plug-and-play. Obviously, different machines and operational workloads will affect results, but if SSD performance is not plug-and-play, the value proposition for many users is greatly diminished.

Hmm, if you assume there is no seek time, then ideally IOPS will be 120 if your request size is exactly a full track, which is almost never the case. IOPS will be 1s / (seek_time + rotational_latency + access_time + overhead). How many IOPS you can get from a 7200rpm drive depends on a lot of factors. Are the requests uniformly randomly distributed? Is NCQ enabled? What is the max track span of the requests? If the max track span is narrow and on the outer part of the disk, then you can get a lot IOPS, quite a bit more than 120.

Whether or not an SSD is worthwhile depends on the use case. I just put a low-end SSD in an old desktop to replace an HDD. The performance difference was basically negligible. I was quite disappointed. The system bootup was a bit faster, but application startup wasn't any better. And, since I always put my machine to sleep instead of shutting down, bootup times are unimportant. Fortunately, I could live with the dramatically smaller storage capacity because my main storage is on another machine. In contrast, I doubled the DRAM on my other machine, and the performance boost was amazing. The $30 I spent on the DRAM was a much better investment than the $70 for the SSD.