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Comment Both are helpful... (Score 1) 274

Speaking as someone that teaches second semester CS to 300 undergrads a semester, there is value in both.

Advantage Paper: The computer is a crutch. If you know it, you can write it. You are going to to have to do this in coding interviews. Requires no infrastructure to give an exam without cheating. (I actually don't have the space/computers to give a computer exam to hundreds of students at a time.)

Advantage Computer: I/TAs don't have to grade it, I can just use gradescope.com and students won't argue with me for partial credit.

Comment Had the same problem, use an MVNO (Score 1) 798

It was a frustrating experience for sure, but there is an easy solution: switch to any one of the MVNOs or a prepaid plan from the carrier. Figure out what network they are riding on top of that matches your preference, then switch.

I picked GoPhone (from ATT), but straighttalk wireless, or others will work just fine for you and are likely cheaper.

Good luck, but this is an easy one to solve.

Comment Hidden? (Score 4, Informative) 249

There is a fairly straightforward way to locate the cameras if you have a bit more time than me. Using the time of the sunrise and sunset (and the length of the day), you should be able to get a decent fix on the location (people use the same technique on whales and sea turtles.)

Input Devices

Researchers Debut Barcode Replacement 185

eldavojohn writes "MIT Researchers have unveiled a new potential replacement for barcodes. Using an LED covered with a tiny mask and a lens, these new bokodes can be processed by a standard mobile phone camera and can encode thousands of times more information than your average barcode. New applications are being dreamed up by the team. Dr. Mohan of MIT said, 'Let's say you're standing in a library with 20 shelves in front of you and thousands of books. You could take a picture and you'd immediately know where the book you're looking for is.'"

Comment Churn is your enemy (Score 4, Interesting) 268

On paper it is mostly a great idea.

We had a paper on some tricks to play in file systems to make it perform better:

http://prisms.cs.umass.edu/mcorner/papers/fast_2007_tfs.pdf

But when you get down to it, churn is your biggest enemy. If you look at the rate at which people join and leave p2p networks, the amount of replication you need to do can use a lot of bandwidth. Every time a user quits (or drive crashes etc.) all of the data they were storing for others must be replicated again. If they aren't available online for a while you have to assume they have left the network and replicate proactively. See the paper for a few sample calculations based on the churn found in systems like kazaa and skype.

-M

The Internet

Submission + - How to clean up incorrect geolocation information 1

zorro6 writes: "I thought this might be an interesting question/topic and it would sure help me to get some kind of answer. I recently got internet service from a small, local wireless ISP in my area (south central Colorado, USA). The strange thing is that many, many web sites think I am in Quebec, Canada when I use the service. Evidently some geolocation service thinks my IP address indicates I am in Canada. I have checked the obvious. The WHOIS information for my IP correctly indicates a location of Durango, CO. So the bad info is coming from some more sophisticated geolocation service. My ISP is at a loss as to how to fix this but it is causing me a lot of grief. Many of the ads I get shown on Yahoo! for instance are in French! Certain sites won't sell me goods or services because they don't do business in Canada. So far I know that Yahoo! (or their ad provider), Nvidia, Movielink, etc. all think I am in Canada. I would sure appreciate any help/info on how to get this corrected."

Comment Art by students and profs. (Score 1) 366

I recommend asking your students and faculty for their own artwork that they think would fit in this area. You could restrict the theme as desired (or not). A contest could be made out of it. When visitors are admiring a piece of art, it is great being able to tell them the story behind it, and even better when that story involves one of your own folks.

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