I agree that the test itself was largely language-independent. But the two years of CS I took to get to that point certainly were not. Nor were the some of the follow-on cources in college-level CS.

I wasn't complaining that after two years of language instruction, I was not fluent in a language. I was stating that even compared the low bar set by the standards of the class, I was horrible, even in relation to my peers, who were being taught in the same way and came from the same background.

You'll get no argument from me that waiting until high-school to teach foreign language, and then doing so in typical lecture classes, isn't very effective. But that's not what my post was addressing.

Throughout my entire educational career, I was a slacker. I got decent grades (if not straight A's) without studying, paying much attention in class, or doing homework. I have a natural aptitude for the humanities and the sciences, and am adequate in math. (Better with applied vs. theoretical math.)

My one exception was foreign languages; I have absolutely no ability whatsoever in foreign languages. In American, I can speed-read, and have reasonable facility with writing. In any other language, it mattered not at all how much I studied, practiced, or did my homework, I was horrible, even by the low standards of an American high-school foreign language class. French, Latin, even American Sign Language as an adult, and I was hopeless. I got barely passing grades in French and Latin out of pity more than anything else.

Some difficult things are simply difficult for some people, and no amount of hard work is going to fix that. Throwing students against subjects they are unable to master is a waste of resource and is discouraging for both the student and teacher. I'm not saying students shouldn't be challenged; just that the idea that "hard work" will magically enable a student to master any subject is toxic.

Waaaayyy back in the mid-90's, I took the AP CS test my junior year of HS. The test was scheduled right after I took the AP US History test in the AM (I rocked that test with a 5 and passed out of 2 semesters of history for it) and as my brain was fried, I staggered into the principal's conference room to take the AP CS test with another dozen or so kids from my class.

I completely bombed the test (a 2)... my brain was so scorched from the history exam that morning I couldn't make heads or proverbial tails of the essay questions. I got a 2, and I'm glad I did. Why? Because that was when the test was still being administered in Pascal, and by the time I got to college, my school had shifted over to C++ as their main "teaching language". It's no fun taking an advanced CS class when all your assignments take extra time while you give yourself a crash course in C-style syntax everybody else is taking for granted.

That said, despite the fact I flunked the test, my actual high school CS class was excellent. It meant that when I had to re-take intro-to-CS in college all I had to do was learn new syntax for the concepts I already knew; the overlap of the theory was pretty complete.

On another note, why would we expect the average high-schooler to pass a college-level CS exam? It's a hard test, just like it's supposed to be. And it's a subject that many students, no matter their other virtues, don't have much aptitude in. (I'd be interested to know what this one year in "Computer Science" that all Chinese kids are given actually consists of...)

All that said... yes, waaayyyy more than 10% of our high schools need to be offering the class. Every high school surely contains some students with both the aptitude and desire to take such a class.

GNU stands for GNU's Not UNIX.

Linux is just "Linus with an 'x' at the end to make the name look UNIX-y"

Due to their commanding smartphone marketshare, along with millions of devices with embedded Linux shipped every year, wouldn't Samsung be the largest UNIX vendor?

Oh? What's that? You weren't counting embedded Linux and I'm a pedantic #$(*#$&@!!!. Can't argue with that!

News Flash! Company legally buys competitor's gear on the open market!

What, precisely, is the story here?

I think the idea is more about user data (rather than applications themselves) not being shuffled in and out on File I/O, the SCSI stack, LBA's, etc.

Along with the new O/S, they are also working on getting both Linux, and (oddly) Android running on it.

If you RTFA, you'd see that they'd like to re-structure the O/S to take full advantage of the systems planned giganto memory capacity, instead of being built around shuffling data on and off disk.

Yeah, they are a for-profit corporation, I'm pretty sure most of what they do is a "money grab"; it's kind of their job.

And where is all the "walled garden" crap coming from? The O/S will be open source and they are looking to also release a Linux variant that will run on the thing.

The article yammers on and on about how the O/S will be built based on memory-driven I/O instead of file-system based I/O. However, IBM's i/OS (a.k.a. OS/400) has been built on memory-mapped I/O from the beginning (circa 1988.) (And it has a DB-driven "filesystem" that Microsoft has been unable to ship despite about 25 years of failure.)

I know it's not quite the same thing, but I cannot imagine that this new O/S will somehow eliminate the need for flash and/or disk. I don't see them managing to get the memristor cost down enough to entirely replace disk/flash. If they had actually shipped some of the things before now, I could maybe believe it, but they haven't.

A pure political story, with absolutely no geek angle whatsoever, has no place here. It brings in a lot of page hits, and a lot of comments from politically-frothy Slashdot posters, but long-term it rather undermines the credibility of the site.

The headline implies that the systems are too large to meet some statutory obligation. This is not the case; the truth is that they are saying their systems are too large to comply with this new, not-previously-existing requirement.

I'm not saying I believe them, but it's certainly a plausible argument. It's perfectly normal for the subject of a subpeona or other court order to object to it on the grounds that compliance would prevent the ordinary course of business. I can certainly conceive of a system that takes in huge amount of data and discards 99.99 percent of it; it's par for the course in Business Intelligence systems in the private sector. Wal-Mart, for instance, does not need to retain indefinitely which transactions at particular times contain particular sets of items. After a year or so, the data is far less useful, and ever-larger datasets are harder to search and process. It makes perfect sense to completely discard the data after a certain period of time and have no provisions in the system to archive it on a long-term basis. (This whole concept is referred to as Information Lifecycle Management.)

A court order saying "Wal-Mart, keep all transaction data indefinitely, starting Right Now" is certainly going to result in Wal-Mart objecting on the grounds that it cannot do so without completely destroying it's business.

I was thinking about the fiberglass, and realized it doesn't necessarily refer to fiber-reinforced resin sheets. Fiberglass insulation has very little in the way of other ingredients in it...

And cellulose has a long history as an insulation material (it has pluses and minuses), anything that would make it lighter on a volume basis would improve it's insulation properties.

Instead of flying from Honolulu to Hong Kong, there are any number of Western European states he could have flown to prior to going public. Once there, he could have happily Schengen'd himself nearly anywhere in Western Europe at will, as there are precisely zero border checks within the Schengen agreement. It would be fairly easy to hide for months.

I expect the NSA figured out the source of the leaks within 24 hours, as a simple check of passenger manifests showing an unauthorized trip by an NSA clearance-holder to Hong Kong would have been pretty damning. If, on the other hand, he had merely told his boss he was going on a long vacation to Europe, it would have been a while before they were able to pin it on him.

I can't say Western Europe would have been safe indefinitely, but he would have had much more time and more options than HK and Russia.