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Comment Meanwhile, in Finland... (Score 1) 432

...my University has its own Linux distro. While I am not very familiar with Linux, at least half of the workstations are running that. And actually, as I hear from my fellow researchers, the support for Linux workstations is better than for the windows ones. I had to do some work on a Linux server (updating the webpages of the department) and support excellent. I mean, I was asking Root some basic questions by email, and got detailed answer in 30 mins.
OTOH, there are some Linux specific problems that I dont have in Win7, so I don't judge which OS is better. They are just different OSes for different people. What I want to say is that Linux support in the campus is great.

Comment Education system is broken, obviously (Score 2) 804

I am working as researcher/post-grad student, and computer is the number one research tool. Like is hammer for a blacksmith. No surprises there.
When in the same place I work should "forbid" the major research tool in the classrooms, this is an obvious sight that the teaching system I-speak-and-you-listen-and-take-notes is broken. Or at least obsolete.
For most of the time I have been good student, and I am writing a doctoral dissertation now. One would expect I like lectures. Still, most of them are boring as hell. I didn't have smart phone/netbook when I was in high school (and I envy the nowadays students so much for having them), and guess what - when I got bored, I always find a way to distract myself. And the others. Chatting with a schoolmate during class is less distracting that launching a paper airplane, IMHO.

Comment Stagecast and Alice (Score 2, Informative) 799

I know two programming environments, designed specially for children. One is Stagecast Creator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagecast_Creator, which is created in Apple, and was known as Cocoa before Apple reused the name for the Cocoa API. The other is Alice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_(software), created in Carnegie Mellon, by a group led by the late Randy Pausch (you might have seen "The last lecture" by Randy Pausch).
Stagecast creator is a programming tutorial, disguised as a 2D game designer, and Alice is a programming tutorial disguised as 3D scene creator. I, being a keen NES gamer, tend to like Stagecast better.

Comment overwritten once CAN be recovered (Score 2, Informative) 780

> I'd like to see you recover something that has been overwritten once.

You can't do it at home, but professional data recovery service can. Usually you can guess the previous data by precisely measuring the magnetic levels. The old values will influence the resulting intensity. Roughly (I'm not expert!) works like this:

was -- now -- result
0 -- 1 -- 0.9
1 -- 0 -- 0.1
1 -- 1 -- 1.1
0 -- 0 -- 0

That is why you should have MULTIPLE overwrites with RANDOM data.

Comment draw users away (Score 1) 475

"will this draw viewers away to other video sites?"

You mean if other sites provide the same content for free, will I stay on youtube just because it is... pretty?

On contrary, if every second movie I click on leads me to a "not available in your country" text, I will eventually get bored and go to other site even if youtube provides the same content for free.

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