In Britain the first high school graduation happens after 11th grade; attending sixth form is optional and is primarily done by students intending to study at University.
In these years you specialise in a couple of subjects relevant to your intended course of study, and for university you apply and are accepted for and study exclusively one subject from day 1.
So arguably the US equalivalent is the freshman year of college.
Just to clarify this as well, while sixth form (17~18 years old) is optional in the UK, education is still compulsory until you're 18. you have the option to do this at an apprenticeship or skills based school but lots of people do just default to a levels.
> in the UK, education is still compulsory until you're 18
I've just looked it up because I hadn't heard this - it was only compulsory until 16 "in my day"! Turns out it still is, here in Wales, and also Scotland and NI. Only England changed it to 18. Our devolved governments love to make things confusing.
It's certainly a real term. The context is often student athletes that intentionally didn't play their sport for a season (called redshirting) to maintain their 4-year eligibility so that they can stay for a fifth year and compete in their sport.
Counterpoint, running Dell R430 rack server for nearly ten years -- in that time a single SSD in raid 10, 8 disk array, has failed.
Maybe I got lucky?
Similarly, my last three laptops have all been Dell Precision -- only issue until I switched to Intel integrated gpu was Nvidia on Linux (black screens, laptop attempting liftoff due to gpu heating issues) causing periodic grief.
Also, for the author, Dell Precision provides advanced BIOS options out of the box, something that their consumer line of laptops probably doesn't offer.
We had 4 Dell Itanium racks (circa 2003) all fail with the same exact power-supply overvoltage issue over the course of 4 months. Maybe we got unlucky.
8 years and still going on a Dell R430 rack server (8X SSD in RAID 10, 2X Xeon CPU, ...)
One of the drives failed last year, but used one of the hot spares on standby to put out the fire as it were.
Amazing longevity, perhaps I've just gotten lucky while avoiding obscene 24/7 cloud instance costs. It will die at some point, much like the HN server storing these very words.
Pretty sure only M1/M2 supported, so none Apple's new offerings will fly...yet.
Shame, I'd love to use Linux on Apple's latest and greatest MacBooks, but will stay with tried and true Dell Precision series until the year of the Linux Apple laptop becomes a reality.
Write, eat, brush teeth, scissors, chop vegetables, etc. Basically fine motor skills on the left.
Right:
Throw a baseball, shoot a basketball, play tennis, etc. Power movements on the right.
Could always do some sports lefty, like switch hit in baseball, kick a football (soccer) past half field, or play pool, those kinds of things, but right side has always been stronger.
The only sport where I am much better lefty than righty is table tennis -- probably because to play at higher levels you need fine motor skills, not just brute force.
Exactly, ambidextrous people are freaks of nature, like a professional baseball player who can pitch with either hand from inning to inning, and even then there will be a stronger side -- in other words, it is unlikely that a human being could be equally dominant across both hands.
I've literally forgotten which hand I hold a hammer in. Last time I assembled some furniture, I just couldn't figure out any difference. I think I remember there used to be some slight preference earlier, but I just can't say one side would be any better at it than the other.
(I do have clear preferences for many other activities, though which activities go left and which right seems pretty arbitrary, and might just be what I got used to instead of actual dominance. Like, I hold my phone on the right hand because it's in the right pocket, but is that a preference, or just avoiding putting the phone in the same pocket as keys/flashlight/etc?)
One area where a 4-way stop sign intersection is somewhat superior to a roundabout is the notion of taking turns -- in the States it seems like busy roundabouts are an opportunity for one stream of traffic to just plow through, completely ignoring everyone else who also has something better to do than sit around waiting for others to be courteous :)
We tend not to have a 13th grade, and when that does exist, a PG (post grad) is generally there because they excel at a particular sport.