Joined 15 years ago
And it seems that the wondering our remote development team has been doing about what happened to progress on Screenhero's video codec (pumping 800kb/s+ over my line when nothing is happening on screen is a bit excessive) is now answered with a resounding, "We've been trying to get acquired." Well, congrats on that.
Back to VNC and Skype with no cursor of my own, I guess. But at least it's free and has less chance of my ISP throttling my home connection due to saturating the pipes with Screenhero all day.
Here's a PDF explaining the airlock rooms at PHL (they call it a "secure exit lane system") with photos: http://www.aci-na.org/sites/default/files/tufts.pdf
If you look closely at the metal turnstiles in the bottom-right photo on page 8, you can see that there are glass doors between them. These separate and close by sensor to allow only one person at a time through the exit passage. This room is, by necessity, fully covered in cameras, and as other posters have said, it's a short jump from this into something with software recognition that locks the doors and waits for the armored men with clubs.
Sure, it's a far cry from the firetraps that those glass tubes in Syracuse are, but this method of containment is not new -- we were just not really paying attention to it before.
Also keep in mind that unlike something like a web analytics package that gives you the option to filter and sort your data on any combination of criteria imaginable (for no good reason), the questions that academics/educators tend to need the answers to are generally the same for every new set of tests.
In other words, it's not necessary to enable every possible combination, filter, and sort of output, but merely (ha!) to optimize for the specific results that we know we will need (with a nod toward those results we might expect people to want in the future), and to codify the formulae that will produce those results.
Working with not a school but a testing research company (think of a company like "College Board" vs a "Smallville School District") leads you to produce reports that are significantly more detailed and statistically more valuable than "average score" questions like this, all of which is possible within MongoDB. Though, obviously this treads a little more into work product than would be comfortable to expound upon here. ;)
Event the tests themselves are composed of multiple parts that randomize for each student, and lend themselves to the document structure that MongoDB provides. Individualized tests could be assembled from components based on student criteria and stored uniquely for a user as of that time, a thing which would be unnecessarily complex within a relational system.
Could this all have been done with a relational database? Yes, I suppose, but I cringe at the complexity of relating test questions with test answers with users with other data elements ad infinitum using JOINs on both read and write. And this doesn't even touch the topics of sharding and replication, which Mongo made easy in comparison to MySQL or MSSQL.
Choosing MongoDB was the correct decision for this dataset and application. I don't advocate it for every app, but for this one, it was the appropriate fit.
Just because you should expect the internet to be full of douchebags does not mean you need to contribute to their number. It doesn't hurt to be nice.
CMSes are not built to produce beautiful design, but to expedite content publication into a designed-once template, so it's no shock that their output typically exemplifies bottom-barrel design.
And... Should web designers learn to code? Absurd question. If you don't code, you're merely a hack graphic designer, not a web designer. You don't need to code all your designs, but you need to know code well enough to know that your design can be implemented; therefore, you need to know how to code.
f = m*a
f(20) = 20a
f(a) = m*a
f(20) => 20a
Otherwise, quite nice.
Why does everyone here assume that it's a vast conspiracy when, if they returned everything they had on you, it would be a giant red flag to anyone who was denied that they were being explicitly monitored?
The only way to guarantee secrecy for records that should rightfully be secret (whether you agree with the collection methods or not) is to deny everyone's request.