When some one creates reputable online certification. When companies start accepting online degrees as readily as on-campus degrees prices will drop immediately and immensely. As a result, traditional residential higher ed will suffer from both lower tuition and lower enrollment.
Author Archives: Vince
SSDs may not catch up with HDDs
We all know SSDs are more expensive than HDDs. Although, SSDs out perform HDDs in IOPS/$, they are far behind in other dimensions, especially, GBs/$. However, it has been predicted that SSD cost-performance will pass that of HDD in all dimensions soon. According to a new report this may not be true. “Most of these assumptions were made in early 2012. So far they have turned out to be partially true at best and wrong at worst.” Read the whole thing.
Pony ORM
I didn’t know how much I didn’t know about the internals of python until reading about
Pony ORM. This ORM allows one to query SQL databases using python-like syntax. For example:
select(p for p in Product)
select((p1, p2) for p1 in Product for p2 in Product if p1.name == p2.name and p1 != p2)
select((p.name, count(p.orders)) for p in Product)
There is a good explanation of how on StackOverFlow. Basically, PonyORM compiles the parameter to select (which is python code) using the python compiler and converts the python AST into SQL.
This blows my mind.
The End of Higher Education’s Golden Age
Clay Shirky, a writer and professor at NYU, has a thought-provoking article on Higher Education. He points out a critical, but often ignored, problem.
The biggest threat those of us working in colleges and universities face isn’t video lectures or online tests. It’s the fact that we live in institutions perfectly adapted to an environment that no longer exists.
He notes that the academy is itself a big part of the problem.
[The Golden Age] been gone ten years more than it lasted, in fact, and in the time since it ended, we’ve done more damage to our institutions, and our students, and our junior colleagues, by trying to preserve it than we would have by trying to adapt.
Read the whole article.
Heard around the house
Lily: “What do grits taste like?”
Julia: “Warm, flavored sand with butter on it.”