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Comment Re:I haven't read the article, but (Score 2) 105

Er... are you factoring in that many of the online students may have other things that consume their time, like say... a job and family?

I know that when I was a "brick and mortar" student, I had much, much, much more free time than I do now. And I am exactly the sort of person that considers taking an online course such as this.

Comment Re:How the money could better have been spent (Score 2) 295

Or they could spend more on training and education so we don't end up with someone who is "not an expert on the technical side" running our state broadband deployment program...

This small organization has started 60 public computers, equipped with 10 computers each, loaded them with Open Source software, provided a free curriculum, and trained hundreds of computer mentors - all for 1/8 the cost of these routers...

Comment Re:Purely out of curiosity (Score 1) 692

As an admitted droid fanboy and avid user of Android's Voice Actions, I see some major differences in the video, namely: Siri talks back to you. This is something I've always found to be lacking in Voice Actions.

Continuing with your example - you only covered step 1.

Android:

  • Step 2 - Look down at the phone to verify that it interpreted what you said correctly.
  • Step 3 - Press "send", or go back and manually correct it.

Siri:

  • Step 2 - It reads the message back to you.
  • Step 3 - Say "send", or maybe you can tell Siri to correct it?

Revolutionary? Maybe not. Evolutionary improvement? Definitely.

Can't wait for Google / Android hackers to copy this. :)

Comment AM/PM? (Score 1) 990

So here on the eastern seaboard of Australia, lunchtime will now be at 2 a.m., In New York it will be 4 p.m., and in Moscow it will be 8 a.m.

Why in the world would you go through all that trouble, and still keep a.m. and p.m.?

I have never even seen anybody express UTC in anything other than 24 hour format.

Comment Re:Quis custodiet? (Score 1) 153

(SIP) sucks little black toads: abysmal audio quality, ludicrous registration procedures, non-existent global directory services, and far too many competing clients.

All of these things are true except for the audio quality*. SIP does not specify any particular audio codec. There are high quality codecs available, it's up to the clients to support them. So, I don't see how having many competing clients is a bad thing.

* And possibly the toads. I have not had any toad related issues on my PBX yet.

Comment Re:makes sense to be (Score 1) 246

of course, i'm not educated in the field, but if parent's dna were copied exactly the same, then you wouldn't be much different from your brothers and sisters.

Yikes. You don't have to be a geneticist to understand the very most basic things about genetics - things that affect your daily life, things like "Do I share all the same genes as my brothers and sisters?"

I remember learning about Mendel and the principles of segregation and independent assortment in 7th grade science class.

Are you 12, or did you just sleep through that class, or has the public education system really gotten that much worse?

Comment Re:NPACI Rocks (Score 5, Interesting) 264

Seconded. I used Rocks to build clusters for the university for which I worked, and it made my life much, much easier.

If you are already familiar with Redhat administration, you'll be happy to know Rocks can use either Redhat or CentOS as its base OS.

It uses meta-packages called "rolls", which completely automate the installation and configuration of your computing nodes. There are rolls that include most of the commonly used commercial and Open Source HPC software out there, or you can "roll" your own. Basically you just configure your head node, and then adding a compute node is as simple as setting the BIOS to boot over PXE, plug it in, and done.

Rocks, well, rocks.

Comment Re:A major "con" of cloning falls apart (Score 2) 233

I had never heard that argument, but even if it were true it would still be absurd. Compared to the horribly unsanitary conditions that exist on most factory farms, and the painful end in store for them at the slaughter house, I'd think a little arthritis would be the least of the animals' worries.

But all that aside, this is still not the "major con" to cloning. The big one that comes to mind is the susceptibility to disease due to lack of genetic diversity. All it takes is one mutation in some common disease, and not only is your herd / crop wiped out, but so is everyone's who bought the same clones.

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