Author Archives: Vince

Professor of the Year

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From Critical Theory, we present the professor of the year. Samples:

  • ‘“I hate students,” he said, “they are (as all people) mostly stupid and boring.”‘
  • ‘”[I]f you don’t give me any of your shitty papers, you get an A. If you give me a paper I may read it and not like it and you can get a lower grade.” He received no papers that semester.’
  • ‘Zizek would fill up his sign-up sheet for office hours with fake names to avoid student contact.’

Why do departments and universities put up with this? Priorities are so out of whack at many schools. No one can be good enough in other areas to compensate for this. Furthermore, it is almost a given that he is not as good as he could be (nor as good as he thinks he is) because one necessary condition for learning is humility. You cannot learn anything if you already know it all.

Sitcoms and Windows

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This is real. And real bad. The two Friends stars travel to MS headquarters to talk to Bill Gates about promoting W95. Hilarious antics ensue (not really). However, I didn’t/couldn’t watch the whole thing.

So Friends is as old a W95. Let’s date other sitcoms and Microsoft OSs.

Cheers MS-DOS
Simpsons Windows 1.0
South Park Windows 2.0
Seinfield Windows 3.0
Frasier Windows NT
Parenthood Windows 95
Will and Grace Windows 98
Malcolm in the Middle Windows 2000
Scrubs Windows XP
The Office Windows Vista
The CollegeHumor Show Windows 7
Here Comes Honey Boo Boo Windows 8

To Remember a Lecture Better, Take Notes by Hand

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This year I stopped using Powerpoint slides in my lectures. Well, not completely. It can deliver some content better. Many student remarked to me that it was a better experience. No doubt the students who felt differently would be less likely to tell me that.

According to this article in the Atlantic students retain more information if notes are taken by hand than typed. Interesting. If I ditch powerpoint and ban laptops in class that would waste the expensive infrastructure the university has installed. Surely, the university conducted a study on the efficacy of this teaching methodology before investing such large sums in projectors and classroom wireless. So this study must be bogus.

EMC’s Project Liberty

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We have long noted that NetApp is a software company that wraps hardware around its software. While this is an intentional over simplification, it makes the point that NetApp’s primary value add is ONTAP (their OS/Filesystem).

This wasn’t noted about EMC, partly because it owns VMware and partly due to ignorance. But EMC may be no different from NetApp in this respect. EMC has unbundled their VNX software from their hardware. Read about it here.

Such a move is dramatic. It opens the way for complete commoditization of hardware. It is not clear how this will shake up the industry. Hopefully, it leads to healthy competition resulting in lower prices and greater choices for consumers. Of course that is not EMC’s motivation. It may be reactive because they feel the sun is setting on enterprise SAN (and NAS) and this is the best way for VNX to remain relevant.