The Register: P4: total dog or really cooking?

When using the original code, a P4 system took a glacial 19 hours compared with just under 13 hours for a 933MHz PIII. But with code recompiled to use SSE2, the P4 galloped through the test in a shade over seven and a half hours.

"It all comes down to the fact that running today's code the P4 is a dog," Welter told The Reg. "But once the code is optimised for it then it really can wake up and perform quite nicely.

The Register: WinME can't handle more than 512 megs of memory

Windows ME simply can't cope with more than 512MB of memory.

And neither can any other Win9x variant.

And it's a 'feature'. It transpires that Win ME, Win98 and Win95 cannot deal with main memory sizes in excess of 512MB.

Brian Carnell picks up the "Plagiarism' thread on his own site and poses the question "Can Computers Detect Internet Cheating?". I agree with Brian about the problems that arise once search engines have indexed tens of billions of web pages. Cheating will become even more endemic than the 60% of (US) students cited by Brian:

A professor I once had held up a newspaper story reporting a poll in which 60 percent of American college students said they had cheated. "What about the other 40 percent?" he asked rhetorically and then quickly answered his own question, "They're liars" which elicited knowing laughter from the class.

The http://plagiarism.org service is an attempt to cash in on the ever-growing issue of academic cheating and they make some bold claims including:

• Increased Quality. Instructors report that the quality of their students' work increases when they know that manuscripts will be checked for originality.
• Heightened Student Morale. Students themselves report that unchecked cheating and plagiarism by others undermines their own efforts and educational enthusiasm.

I have personal experience of the last point. A number of my students each year 'complain' of the demoralising effect that (undetected) cheating by other students have on their own honest and hard-won efforts. I sympathise with them. I suspect that cheating is more widespread than I'd care to admit. That's why I attempt to set assignments that are not so susceptible to what the Americans call the 'fraternity filing-cabinet' problem.

The commercial service of Plagiarism.org is Turnitin.com:

Turnitin.com provides a simple and efficient means for both instructors and students to ensure the originality of their intellectual property. Documents are simply pasted into a text box and uploaded into our protected systems. Within twenty-four hours users receive one of our custom, easy-to-read originality reports detailing the findings of our extensive database and net-wide searches.

Turnit.com seems to me to be geared more towards those subjects where the submitted work is a report or essay. It'd be interesting to see if they have, for instance, indexed pages of program code so that plagiarism of programming assignments can be detected.

Aa an experiment I am considering submitting this document to several of the plagiarism detectors to see if the quoted paragraphs above pin this document down as similar to the plagiarism.org and turnit.com pages from whence they came.

Incidentally, when I quote from a page I used the cite attribute of the <blockquote> tag to pinpoint the source of the quote. Like so:

Incidentally, when I quote from a page I used the cite attribute of the <:blockquote> tag to pinpoint the source of the quote. Like so: <blockquote cite='http://www.smeed.org/678'>Incidentally, when I quote from a page I used the cite attribute of the <blockquote> tag to pinpoint the source of the quote. Like so: </blockquote>

I wouldn't want anyone thinking that I'd plagiarised stuff without crediting the source ;-)

More later perhaps...

The Scotsman Online

PARENTS have been warned that scientists have now linked the use of mobile phones to memory loss, sleeping disorders and epilepsy among children.

via hbwt: IF ARCHITECTS HAD TO WORK LIKE WEB PROGRAMMERS

PS: My wife has just told me that she disagrees with many of the instructions I've given you in this letter. As architect, it is your responsibility to resolve these differences. I have tried in the past and have been unable to accomplish this. If you can't handle this responsibility, I will have to find another architect.