I think the problem is that Microsoft's hardware quality is super inconsistent. We had a ton of employees using Surface laptops and tablets at my previous company, particularly sales and support. The company stopped buying them after a few years because the first year failure rate was almost 15%. However, the folks that had the good ones often kept them for 5 years or more.
As someone who about programming and electronics, but knows very little about parallel computing, is this a good place to start? Does anybody have other resources or projects to recommend?
I help to run a once-a-week STEAM program for kids. Here's what we've found about cheap tools.
+ When they are new to a program, kids and parents care about how tools look. We have a nicely organized wall of tools and six identical work tables. It helps get participants excited and helps convince parents that the program is legitimate.
+ Once they buy in, kids don't care about how a tool or project looks. Some of our most popular projects are built from scrap wood or cardboard.
+ Even after they buy in, kids get easily frustrated when a tool doesn't work.
I think it makes perfect sense for the Titan team (or anyone without a pre-existing relationship to a group) to make everything nice-looking since it helps to establish credibility. If you're making something at home or you've already established credibility, you could absolutely cut some corners by using cheaper parts or making parts yourself. Make sure to use quality parts, though. If you rig something that constantly requires little fixes or nudges to stay running, your audience is going to quickly lose interest.
>> I bet their accounting practices are just as screwed up.
The difference is that proper accounting has laws behind it. If your accounting practices are crooked enough, executives can go to jail and/or be personally liable for losses. If there were similar information security laws, I suspect we'd have far fewer breaches like this.
I did a fair amount of volunteering in my kids' school. There is a huuuuge difference between the effective teachers and the teachers that parents like. The school is a public school that uses a lottery to determine admission because 200-250 kids apply for 100 spots each year. Because of this, parent involvement is considerably higher than an ordinary school. You’d expect that this would be the kind of school that would embrace great teachers.
There are a few terrible teachers at the school but they aren't the ones that the parents complain about. As long as a teacher is nice and most kids get good grades, nobody complains. The most hated teachers are the ones who actually try to get kids to behave better and learn more. This is because most parents look at test scores when choosing a school, but they don’t really care about their kid’s score. (It’s easy to rationalize a poor test score--"The test doesn’t measure what’s wonderful about Taylor.") Instead, parents mostly want their kids to be happy and stay out of trouble. A teacher that doesn’t make her students work very hard and doesn’t demand good behavior meets those criteria perfectly.
I volunteer with two organizations--one group serves mostly privileged high achievers (kids on track to be lawyers, architects, etc.) while the other is made up of kids who are probably only 50/50 to graduate high school. In both groups, most of the kids are TERRIBLE writers. Their vocabulary is usually fairly limited and their writing is stilted and repetitive.
Being a good writer generally doesn't matter in high school. Most classes don't require much writing and for those that do, they just require students to convey the right number of facts and avoid most grammar mistakes.
Kids also engage in far more code-switching than adults, I think. When asked for a recommendation, It's possible that this particular kid just dashed off a quick email rather than really sit down to write something engaging.
>> I'll defend the parent comment by observing that we can reproduce this effect with non-judicial metrics, like "murder rate in majority foo-race communities". Assuming the reporting rate for murders is very high across the board, this escapes bias in both policing and conviction rates, and sends us back to other explanations.
A community has a fair amount of power in deciding where crime happens. The police (by policy or culture) can choose to push illegal activity to certain neighborhoods. If the police come down hard on drugs, prostitution, etc. in white neighborhoods, then that activity will move to non-white neighborhoods. The problems that come along with increased illegal activity, including higher murder rates, will be concentrated in non-white neighborhoods.
Auto and life insurance are usually more expensive for men, but health insurance is usually more expensive for women. It would be interesting to see who comes out ahead overall.
Since the 80's, the state of Montana has banned insurance underwriting based on gender. There have been attempts to reverse that law, but none have passed.
My male Montana cousins always had slightly cheaper insurance than I did, but my female Montana cousins more than made up for it.
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