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Not all universities are like that. Although I doubt anyone has ever heard of it, the whole point behind the CS degree at IUPUI is "intellectual breadth, depth, and adaptiveness." Although we start out with learning C and C++, the courses get into all sorts of areas such as databases, using Un*x servers, assembly, graphics, and tons more. The CS department here focuses on getting to know all of the science behind how all this stuff works as a whole, giving us a good view of the entire computer sciece/IT world as a whole. I haven't toured many other universities, but I'm sure there are more like this. If I toured a college where everything was so specialized, I would look elsewhere.

Maybe something like this: http://tc.iupui.edu/clif/warhoney.png

Doesn't have anything to do with the former symbols, and would take a bit longer to chalk, but when I think of honey, I think of the honeycomb before I do the bees.

Damn...I need to get off my ass and build a directional antenna for my iBook sometime soon so I can try this stuff out. I have access to several points in offices I work with throughout the downtown Indianapolis Area, but they are generally too far from the ground floor to gain access without augmentation.

clif

"...a fetus and an embryo are not the same."

I'm sorry but that's completely incorrect. An embryo is simply a fetus a few months earlier. Allow me to bring you up to date on the science of life. A male reproductive cell (spermatozoa) unites with a female reproductive cell (ovum) and together they become a single celled human being (Zygote). If you look at any chart that shows the Development of a Human Being you will see the first stage of any Adults life being a Zygote, progressing through various stages of development. These stages have been given names, however these named stages are all simply periods of development of the same being created at conception (or perhaps multiple beings in the case of twins). Human Reproduction

I like the effort, but they could do more. Ok, here's the biggest problem with most software companies. The academic version isn't much cheaper. For example, I can go to the bookstore here at IUPUI and get a copy of MS anything for around $5 per CD. That's $25 for VS.net, $5 for XP Pro, etc. Why of why doesn't RedHat, SUN, and everyone else get in on this. We have whole generations of college students that have no idea how to use anything else but MS products. Why did they buy them? Because it was hundreds cheaper than the "alternative". I'm guilty of buying a few MS CDs just so I could have a copy if I needed it. Which I did because I have a VB class. Thus I had to get XP and VS6. for a grand total of $5 (downloaded VS6 from IUWARE). If sun would step up and give away CDs like MS does, as well as offer cheap hardware like apple does for us, then maybe just maybe MS's strangle hold on everyone would start to vanish.

I'm a senior undergrad in New Media at IU Indianapolis. The University is always quick to show all this fancy equipment and high technology stuff (Internet2, CAVE)...but the students never see it or use it. We fund it, but we're not allowed to touch.

You need a jolly fat chick with a huge hat.

Yeah, Looney(CDN$1, there's a Loon on the back) and Tooter(CDN$2, it's a $2 coin) also sounds better.

Colorful money is nicer-looking, as well. I have an old 25 Guilder from an old friend in Holland. Those are really nifty looking.

For more pictures of money, try http://aes.iupui.edu/rwise/notedir/mappage.html. Mr. Wise has an awesome collection online.

Or student copies or copies that MS gives them for free

Not Quite Free. I had to pay $6 for my copy of XP Pro at the IUPUI bookstore. They don't even have a Linux distro available there. I've wanted to call and ask RH why this is so. Why can't I get a boxed (must one up MSFT) version of RH for say $5. Nor can I get Slowaris. Since I am a CS major I think it would be nice for the various UNIX vendors to offer a CHEAP CD to those who have a valid student ID. You can get Star Office though....go figure.

Ok, my rant is done.

As an employee and student of Purdue, the recent "raids" have been completely ignored by all local media. The only coverage I've seen was from national sources: Wired, etc. Who was raided?

The site mentions a raid occuring in Indianapolis, IN, but Purdue's main campus is in West Lafayette, IN. I don't know of any Purdue campuses in Indianapolis other than IUPUI (pronounced EEyoo-POOey :-), a tiny joint satellite campus shared between Indiana University and Purdue. I'm sure the spin-doctors changed it, because IUPUI doesn't have the name-recognition that Purdue has. I don't think IUPUI is known to anyone outside of Indiana.

Exactly...I'm in charge of designing and building placement testing for my university and every damn year we look at MathML and find that it STILL isn't working as promised.

I design a lot of adaptive testing (get one right get a harder question, get one wrong get an easier....but the branching algs are much more complicated) and it sucks to have to have an image file for each item in the testing bank. If I need to make a change, its into one of a number math softs and then photoshopping the results.

If I want to do truely adaptive and add some random elements, I can make the computer create a similar question to see if the student really understands (or doesn't understand) before giving them another level to look at. Its nearly impossible right now. I had to build a gif creator and a small scripting language which completely kills server performance with any ammount of students. With MathML, I could simply throw in the random bits and calculate the answers and let the client computer take care of the rest.

This is just my needs, but I can think of a dozen other uses that could directly benefit students. I've helped set up a few tutoring sites for folks and this would be great to build large libraries of questions without becoming too repetative. Most students learn by repeatedly doing something and if they are repeatedly doing the same questions, they are only learning to memorize the answers.

Blah...give me MusicalML and I'll be just as happy :-) I'm sick of outputting scores to GIF to demonstrate examples and stuff. Wasn't XML supposed to allow us to build this stuff without plugins and stuff????

clif
Manager of Development
Testing Center
Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis

(and)

Exactly...I'm in charge of designing and building placement testing for my university and every damn year we look at MathML and find that it STILL isn't working as promised.

I design a lot of adaptive testing (get one right get a harder question, get one wrong get an easier....but the branching algs are much more complicated) and it sucks to have to have an image file for each item in the testing bank. If I need to make a change, its into one of a number math softs and then photoshopping the results.

If I want to do truely adaptive and add some random elements, I can make the computer create a similar question to see if the student really understands (or doesn't understand) before giving them another level to look at. Its nearly impossible right now. I had to build a gif creator and a small scripting language which completely kills server performance with any ammount of students. With MathML, I could simply throw in the random bits and calculate the answers and let the client computer take care of the rest.

This is just my needs, but I can think of a dozen other uses that could directly benefit students. I've helped set up a few tutoring sites for folks and this would be great to build large libraries of questions without becoming too repetative. Most students learn by repeatedly doing something and if they are repeatedly doing the same questions, they are only learning to memorize the answers.

Blah...give me MusicalML and I'll be just as happy :-) I'm sick of outputting scores to GIF to demonstrate examples and stuff. Wasn't XML supposed to allow us to build this stuff without plugins and stuff????

clif
Manager of Development
Testing Center
Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis

(and)

• The relevance of mentioning "Big Iron" is that this is what made Ellison rich.

  Oracle doesn't get its revenue flows from selling Network Computers with StrongARM chips; that was a loss. It makes its money off selling licenses and services for the DBMS products.

• I will believe that PostgreSQL (which is quite distinct from Postgres ) has "serious corporate backing," as compared to ODS, when we see availability of at least two of the following:
  • An XA interface is produced for PostgreSQL
  • Tuxedo becomes available for PostgreSQL
  • MQSeries becomes available for PostgreSQL
  • Talarian becomes available for PostgreSQL
  • Tibco TIB becomes available for PostgreSQL
  • Tengah becomes available for PostgreSQL
  • R/3 can run atop PostgreSQL
  • PeopleSoft can run atop PostgreSQL

  Those are good examples of "enterprise" software that integrates with ODS and (on the middleware side) are used to allow ODS to be used to build very large scalable applications.

  Substitute MySQL for PostgreSQL as needed here...

By the way, Michael Stonebraker answered the question, Is there a connection between the Ingres and Postgres projects? back in 1994 with the clear answer of NO .

However, way back when the world was young and dinosaurs roamed the earth, I ran a Catalog site that linked to numerous story site, including fanfic, and looked up quite a bit of the law on fanfic and copyright protection.

It's interesting, and mostly precedent rather than law, which is one reason why studio are cautious about going to court on fanfic - there are precedents either way. However, most precedents that I found when researching actually err in favor of the public.

Just a few highpoints - Plots cannot be copyrighted or trademarked. Even if Shakespeares works were still under copyright today, the play West Side Story, while an obvious updating mof Tomeo and Juliet, is an original work, not a derivitive work.

Characters and names are trickier. You can't copyright a name, or even a title (The words 'Star Trek' are not covered by copyright for instance), however you can trademark them. However Trademark law is much looser than copyright law in what you can do with a trademark, so long as your not devalueing or dissipating the trademark. I can use a trademark in a story if it's either A- obvious that I'm not talking about the trademarked product (N/A to fanfic), say I'm talking about the 'Star Wars' Satellite Defense System from the 1980's - I don't even need a discaimer . . . or B- I'm using the trademark in an obviously non-competitive manner that doesn't devalue the trademark. This is why fanfic is normally found to be okay - it can't be considered to dilute or devalue the trademarks.

Unfortunately, as is SOP in this stuff, a studio can afford to harass people with threats, even when they have no real likelihood of winning, and there are precedents on both side, so even then, it's always iffy. I also have no idea how the DMCA affects things, but I doubt it's a good effect. I'm also putting stuff out from when *I* got interested, several years ago. IANAL, I could be misremembering, or even just plain wrong.

trademark law: an overview

World Intellectual Property Organization

(Many poisons cause hallucinations, so getting rid of stomach contents when vision does not match other senses does have evolutionary advantage)