That's because everyone has forgotten the basic reason for colleges and universities. Places where people can go and learn, get an education, and/or research. Instead it has become a circus for sports - with its attendant media coverage, fan following, controversies, and what not.

I absolutely respect the need for entertainment and sports. I love it myself. But why the heck are colleges even involved in this racket? And it IS a racket. A racket that media houses and "the suits" that own sport franchises and clubs do extremely well.

So while you say sports should not be brought up in this discussion because it pays for itself, I say that is precisely the problem. Colleges now fancy themselves to be big businesses, sport franchises, media houses, and what not. And it should not be this way. And it is the students and their families that pay the price - literally.

Heck, this whole notion of profit and loss should not even be the primary point of discussion when you talk about colleges and hospitals. I'm an ardent believe in free markets and capitalism, but damn, these two things are so massively screwed up. If any organization's duty (in a capitalistic setup) is to its stakeholders, then these idiots needs to realize that when it comes to colleges and hospitals, their primary stakeholders are the people who patronize their services. Not frickin sport fans and beer bars.

Sorry for the rant. I'm terrified to think how horrible the system is going to be when my kid grows up.

I would mod you up if I had points. I completely agree with you (and I'm not even sure why the previous commenter even got pissed!).

The purpose of taking notes is to distil what we are reading or listening or observing, and then noting it down on paper in a way that makes sense to us. The act itself has merit as lack of speed (and even laziness) forces us to quickly assimilate what we are hearing or seeing, and write it down as efficiently and quickly as we can so we don't fall behind in a lecture. More importantly, it forces us to think through the topic and formally defining it in our own terms.

I even argue that the best note taking happens when we are constrained by limited amounts of note paper. If I have only one page for an hour long lecture, I will really try hard to note down what I think are the important bits or the bits I would most likely forget.

The point really is not to compress the content from say, a hundred pages into one page - I really see the act of note taking as the act of learning itself.

Sure, I'm sure others have different and probably better ways of learning. However, this works for me and I haven't discovered a better way.

That's because the game being played by the big boys is like Chicago style politics. They give you the illusion of choice but in reality, it is a Kansas City Shuffle. You work hard, you work the system, you work the work, if you catch my drift, and you feel like you have a leg up on everyone else. You hear everyone laughing, you laugh along making fun of the other suckers, but the reality is that you are the one that was getting conned all this time.

If you're going to talk about pedantry, I don't understand the experiment to begin with. My concern is probably naive, but consider the fact that over a hundred detectable earthquakes occur every days, and thousands more occur that are too mild to detect.

Aren't earthquakes introducing massive errors in this experiement - considering how long it has been running?
If this concern is valid, they should have used a good vibration isolation mechanism, and I'm not sure if they did.

Of course it does - and in fact this is happening all the time. What makes you think that certain dotcoms or even mobile phone apps are worth the hundreds of millions of dollars as compared to certain other apps that are worth a thousand times less?

I see no reason why a Monet should be worth a hundred mill, just as I fail to see why Instagram should be worth a billion. But I don't begrudge them whatever they are earning or are considered to be worth. If we are going to support "free enterprise" in the truest sense, we should support the big guys as much as the small guys. In fact, the big guys arguably need more help because they have a lot more to lose.

And most importantly, it sends a signal to all the others that this system works even if you get really big or semi-big. Otherwise, you are simply destroying the incentive, the goal post, that people strive for.

And there's a huge problem with precisely this type of thinking. Bands like Radiohead are trying extremely hard to "do the right thing" - i.e. what they consider fair to themselves and to their audience. We, the listeners, should be trying to prop them up instead of calling sour grapes on them because they happen to be millionaires or whatever. If you like Joe No-Name band that has sold all of 50 albums so far, good for you.

Do remember though that your (and my) media consumption largely consists of authors, bands, movie directors, and artists that have attained some level of commercial success. It is really sad to see initiatives like Radiohead's honor based payment scheme - not be wildly successful. I would actually have loved to see Radiohead make 10 times the money from this experiment than they would have from the record label. Just imagine the message that would have sent - not just to Radiohead but to every other artist and even to us.

Honestly, if Radiohead makes a hundred mil instead of ten mil, I wish him all the very best. Thom Yorke's talent, consistency, and hard work deserves all the money he can get. The concept of money is completely nonsensical when it comes to creative works anyway. Heck, even manufactured products nowadays cost what they cost because of factors that have little to do with their manufacturing cost.

But at the very least, if someone is doing good work in a creative field, they should at least have some level of trust in the fact that they can circumvent the established system with its attendant bloodsucking leeches, and still feel like they are getting the same level of respect, exposure, and money. In fact, it should be a lot more.

Yeah, I was going to say, 40ms seems a bit out there. If you consider a touch typist typing 100WPM, that's about 8.3 characters/second, or about 120ms / character. You may think 40ms is fast enough to accommodate that, but not really. Typing is bursty by nature, and so many of those consecutive keystrokes will come close together. If you scan too slowly, you might see two keys "become active" on the same scan, and end up reordering them. At 40ms, that seems entirely likely for a touch typist at 100WPM.

10ms seems far more reasonable.

So, GGGP was less wrong than stated, but for the wrong reasons. Huzzah! That is a rather strange defense. "I thought I was supposed to go south, when actually I was supposed to go north. But, I misread the roadsign and got on a road that goes northeast, so I ended up not too far from my destination. See? I'm not a bad navigator!"

Anyway, in the interest of actual analysis:

Let's go at the low end: 10kHz. And let's pick a beefier keycode, say "R CTRL", that has a 2 byte scan code. No, we're not going to benchmark the hilarious pause key. Get real. The vast majority of the scan codes are 1 byte anyway.

The time to send a key down event should be 2 bytes * 11 clocks, or 22 clock periods at 10kHz. That's 2.2 milliseconds. The time to send a key-up event should be 3 bytes * 11 clocks => 3.3 milliseconds.

Both of those seem pretty fast. The OS itself, though, and whatever layers there are between the PS/2 connector and the OS, will add their own latency. But in a race between a PS/2 keyboard and a USB mouse? I think they're going to both be well under 50ms in any case. 50ms is 20Hz, which is "Intellivision games from the late 70s" speed.

I think it's probably fine to store non-empty cells as objects, as long as you use something like the Flyweight pattern to avoid carrying too much baggage in each cell. It makes for a fine user interface, I'm sure.

To really get good recalc performance, though, you really need to drag the cell dependence graph out of the grid and treat it like an actual program. Once you do that, you could actually JIT the computation represented by all those cells. If you're really walking the object forest for every recalc, you'll never speed up.