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Ah, the good ol' days..

This story speaks more to GM than it does to chaos and time travel, if you ask me.

Here at good ol' Miami, they banned all 2.4ghz portable phones in the dorms. I'd like to see them enforce that.

Here's a nice video of Diebold's sales pitch in Texas.

Here's a preliminary security report that Ohio and Maryland paid for in the beginning of the year.

Unfortunately not. Nor does it seem to use MODS XML for record storage (which, incidentally, will be used by OpenOffive.org's bibliographic and the bibliophile project, which hopes to do cross searching across the open source literature databases.

SRW/U hopes to supplant Z39.50. Not only does it use MODS, but it still uses ZeeRex and CQL .

For more nerdy e-refererence stuff, check out darcusblog

Would any of you nice folks out there post a message for me to a listserver forum that some participants got the moderator to kick me out because they did not agree with my contrarian point of view?...

I have been kicked out of a number of listserver forums, for example
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/publib
and
http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/archives.html

You think being using Windows at home is bad, try running a corporate network, where workers are taking laptops back and forth every day. Then maintaining network security becomes like this.

And for those who do want to read the story.

But anyone who thinks this is a stupid thing to have to hold the pump the whole damn time knows that shoving your gas cap into the handle will hold the valve open for you, allowing you to clean your windshield/windscreen and/or do other things than get your hand smelling like gasoline.

This isn't a photograph of your car by any chance?

you probably just need to hear this.

Additionally, as compared to their less attractive counterparts, attractive people tend to have more distinguished positions, earn more money, and characterize themselves as happier (Umberson & Hughes, 1987; Diener, Wolsic, & Fujita, 1995)

That brings back bad memories. Last year, during my freshman year of college, I was one of the lucky test subject in a study conducted by one of the CS students. (See http://www.users.muohio.edu/birchmzp/csi/dharna.pd f). It was a poor VB project that had an annoying talking head bouncing around the screen, giving instructions, that I was explicitly told "not to dismiss." And yes, it used Microsoft Agent... I wanted to kill it. Especially when I had to repeat the same action over, and had to listen to the same instructions from it again. On top of that, the VB program's buttons were greyed out until the thing shut up.

*shudder*

I went back to my room and stared lovingly into the login prompt on my FreeBSD machine for an hour after that experience.

In case anyone cares, I've mirrored the article for those of you who don't want to register with the NYT website. The mirror is here.

Yes (warning: adult material). :)
Try not to pound my webspace too hard.

Observe the status bar of the window on the left for the exit URL, and the pr0n window on the right for what was there.

Looks like a case of a rapid fix from MS and a kneejerk editor at Slashdot. How about this spin? "Notified of critical bug, MS immediately issues fix". Nah, wouldn't play to this crowd.

While your point isn't entirely without merit, there are a few points you're overlooking:

1) As noted above, three months does not a rapid fix make.

2) Having every OS you make vulnerable becuase of a freaking MIDI file??? That's pretty sad.

3) Microsoft hasn't been too keen on fixing other bugs. Buffer overflows are especially bad coming from them, since they closed down all new development for a period to supposedly get rid of all the buffer overflows.

4) I took the BuyMusic comment to be a joke, since they went to such lengths to make it a Windows-only solution. Suddenly the phrase, "In order to take full advantage of BuyMusic.com's offerings you must be on a Windows Operating System using Internet Explorer version 5.0 or higher" seems more humorous to some.

Miami, not Miami.

BC, not BC.

Syracuse, not Syracuse.

Benefits:
- Boost in visual skills
- Games teach problem-solving abilities, perseverance, pattern recognition, hypothesis testing, estimating skills, inductive skills, resource management, logistics, mapping, memory, quick thinking, and reasoned judgements. (Click here for the source of that info.)
- Games boost self-esteem. (Here again is the source for that.)

Drawbacks:
- Massive amount of time spent playing. I can't count how many times I've at my computer from 6 PM to 8 AM playing Civilization III. (The time spent playing could have been better spent studying, reading, exercising, getting to enjoy the world, travelling, etc.)
- The solitariness of most games. There seems to be a self-perpetuating cycle in which a socially-isolated person plays games in order to avoid having to be around other people. But then the act of being alone playing games makes you even more socially isolated. I wasted most of my childhood with Nintendo when I should have been outside playing. My college years were similarly wasted with computer games.

I guess the main point about games is, don't the drawbacks outweigh the benefits? (BTW, I'm on week number 3 of overcoming my computer game addiction. I had to go cold turkey. Good luck to others if you're in the same boat.)

Benefits:
- Boost in visual skills
- Games teach problem-solving abilities, perseverance, pattern recognition, hypothesis testing, estimating skills, inductive skills, resource management, logistics, mapping, memory, quick thinking, and reasoned judgements. (Click here for the source of that info.)
- Games boost self-esteem. (Here again is the source for that.)

Drawbacks:
- Massive amount of time spent playing. I can't count how many times I've at my computer from 6 PM to 8 AM playing Civilization III. (The time spent playing could have been better spent studying, reading, exercising, getting to enjoy the world, travelling, etc.)
- The solitariness of most games. There seems to be a self-perpetuating cycle in which a socially-isolated person plays games in order to avoid having to be around other people. But then the act of being alone playing games makes you even more socially isolated. I wasted most of my childhood with Nintendo when I should have been outside playing. My college years were similarly wasted with computer games.

I guess the main point about games is, don't the drawbacks outweigh the benefits? (BTW, I'm on week number 3 of overcoming my computer game addiction. I had to go cold turkey. Good luck to others if you're in the same boat.)

There are, of course, scientific guidelines behind any art form, such as the Golden Ratio, but this isn't one of them. While I am open to the possibility that there may be some universals in human narrative, I shudder to think that the commodified culture of Hollywood might impose its formulas on us like a mental template. Or is it too late?

Whenever Taylorism is applied to a creative endeavour, we get quanity over quality and the fears of General Ned Ludd and the Army of Redressers as well as Socrates become valid.

Dehumanized art is dead art.

There are, of course, scientific guidelines behind any art form, such as the Golden Ratio, but this isn't one of them. While I am open to the possibility that there may be some universals in human narrative, I shudder to think that the commodified culture of Hollywood might impose its formulas on us like a mental template. Or is it too late?

Whenever Taylorism is applied to a creative endeavour, we get quanity over quality and the fears of General Ned Ludd and the Army of Redressers as well as Socrates become valid.

Dehumanized art is dead art.

The following site at the university where I work: http://muohio.edu/dragonfly gets a lot of hits from educators and their classes. I have not done a lot of looking through it myself but I understand it wins all sort of awards.

I doubt you will make it this far down in the list of replies though :-)

I have to say I like third edition much better than second. It's much easier to play and to convince newbies to play because mysterious concepts like THAC0 have been eliminated in favor of a more intuitive system. I wouldn't say it was sheerly a sales-motivated release, it was also an improvement.

On a semirelevant note, I modified an IRC bot I wrote to roll arbitrary numbers of dice of arbitrary sides and print totals to the channel so if for some reason you're playing over IRC you don't have to rely on any person to roll dice, this way everyone can see the roll. See here.

That episode was an homage (or ripoff) of Ray Brabdury's A Sound of Thunder (soon to be a movie.

When you look at results, most of the prestigious schools are defeated, beaten down, and put to shame by a relatively unknown class of schools, the small liberal-arts college.

When you look at results, most of the prestigious schools are defeated, beaten down, and put to shame by a relatively unknown class of schools, the small liberal-arts college.

I wrote an IRC bot a couple years ago after finding an javascript ALICE web bot, and after seeing mine a friend of mine did as well, both of them talk. Mine goes by a 'save part of the line and spit it back in a new form' approach (prone to errors but a more right way to go), whereas his has a huge database of responses to specific words/phrases (not prone to grammar errors, but less sophisticated), a couple weeks ago we decided to put them in a channel together and have them chat it up (yes I've read the RFC and I know you're not suppose to do this). My bot is named Bananas, my friend's is mini-para, and he is paranOia. The source (GPLed, of course) and necessary files to run it, along with the semi-humorous log of that chat are here. The bot chat features still need a lot of work and more patterns and responses to them, but it's been an interesting and fun project on the whole.

I wrote an IRC bot a couple years ago after finding an javascript ALICE web bot, and after seeing mine a friend of mine did as well, both of them talk. Mine goes by a 'save part of the line and spit it back in a new form' approach (prone to errors but a more right way to go), whereas his has a huge database of responses to specific words/phrases (not prone to grammar errors, but less sophisticated), a couple weeks ago we decided to put them in a channel together and have them chat it up (yes I've read the RFC and I know you're not suppose to do this). My bot is named Bananas, my friend's is mini-para, and he is paranOia. The source (GPLed, of course) and necessary files to run it, along with the semi-humorous log of that chat are here. The bot chat features still need a lot of work and more patterns and responses to them, but it's been an interesting and fun project on the whole.

My college protects grades a similar way before they're released, last semester I started publishing a form in my web space (hosted on their server :)) that allows you to get your grades (presumably) as soon as they're scanned in, several days before their intended release. I don't know if anyone on staff noticed and/or cared; it may be that the official release time is just there to prevent complaining about "she got her grades before I could". All that was required to make the form was stripping down their grade submit page and changing one of the options in a select.

See also [ http://listserv.muohio.edu/SCRIPTS/WA.EXE?S2=archi ves&q=woman&s=&f=&a=13+October+2002&b=17+October+2 002 ]

At two different universities (undergrad at Miami University and grad State) both programs just recently switched to Java as the intro language and, later on, introduce C/C++ for OS courses.

And this seems to be the big push (I think Cornell uses Java as its intro language too) internationally.

The rational: free (as in a book on Dianetics), object-oriented, relatively painless.

And as far as I know Sun and MS still aren't giving each other reach arounds.

To my knowledge, my school doesn't have any policies about source code. I've asked two different professors about it and they're not sure. So since I have to write programs for homework, I've started to include the BSD license on everything I write, just to be safe. Maybe it wouldn't hold up in court, but it seems like a safe thing to do in case it comes up (who knows, someone may want the tetris game I wrote for OpenGL class).

I'm just going to start this off by saying that no matter what your degree is, you'd better be good at it if you want to get a job. A friend of mine is a CIS minor who is a better programmer than half of the students in our SAN/CS department. Though its true that he shouldn't have any problems getting jobs after his first, it is the first that is the hardest. I imagine that if he were competing for a programming job with a CS major the CS major would win handsdown because of the degree.

Now for my $.02 worth about the MIS majors at my university....
I decided to take one of our lower level CS courses on COBOL to try and kill a few hours. As it just so happened the prof. teaching is the MIS 'liason' in the CS dept. Long story short, I've never ever been in a class were the prof. suggested to the students that the class they were in was too hard and they should take something easier. This was directed specifically at the MIS students. This was a 200 level course, with the prof. suggesting 100 level courses.
When the profs. admit there is an intellegence gap...well, I'll let you go from there.

Would a pacifist have the freedom to not pay to support it? Yes, the government should also defend the borders.

If I don't have the right to keep "all of my money"

In the U.S., one's credit does NOT come from her/his parents

I dare and defy you to find a psychologist who disbelieves it.

Why not have the government seize it all and be just like the ultra-successful Soviet Union?

Do you realize that morality is completely subjective?

Do you realize that you put yourself in the exact same boat that as the Religious Fundamentalists of the U.S.A., who want to impose the Christian religion on all people and totally ban abortion becuase it's a "moral" thing to do?

The Ricky Martin phenomenon is a multi-million dollar part of the entertainment industry, and the entire lot depends on one person: Ricky Martin. What do you think his cut should be? 25%? 10%?

I notice that you didn't mention lottery winners as those who didn't earn their money. Is this perhaps they usually come from the holy "working class"?

"// this is the most hacked, evil, bastardized thing I've ever seen. kjb"

"// this is the most hacked, evil, bastardized thing I've ever seen. kjb"

"// this is the most hacked, evil, bastardized thing I've ever seen. kjb"

Miami University is also changing from C++ to Java for it's OOP courses.

The way things are going seems to be heading downhill in terms of the quality of programmers. Most of the people who have been in my classes thus far cannot understand basic concepts of coding, much less the complexity under the hood. Universities are creating programmers who cannot program, and switching to Java is going to make that worse.

"What's a pointer? What's a memory address?"

Basic concepts forgotton, and I'm sure that future software design will reflect this ignorance.

I don't have anything against Java, though. It's a great idea, widespread, and even though it's slow, remember how young it is. It still has some time to grow, and given it's popularity, I know it will.

Java shouldn't be the only language you know, but it should be one of them.

"// this is the most hacked, evil, bastardized thing I've ever seen. kjb"

"// this is the most hacked, evil, bastardized thing I've ever seen. kjb"

I'm an RA here at Miami University and I can state that, at least here, your room is considered your own private space. Even as an RA, I may not enter a student's room without his/her permission. And once in the room, I may not look in fridges, closets, dressers, etc. without permission. Even the campus cops (who are fully sworn-in officers) may not enter or search a room without permission from the student (or a warrant, of course). I've seen the cops have to get signed waiver sheets from residents before searching their rooms.

Your room is treated as your own private space here, and it should be/is that way everywhere else.

No, the fact of the matter is that the USA was 'screwing over' Latin America well before the Cold War gave us a more plausible excuse. Check your facts next time you spout off about American superiority.

PS. I'm an American too and I'm not exactly proud of all the things my country has done in the past (and continues to do to this day.) We are not neccesarily "the good guys." We are an empire like any other, which happens to carry the biggest stick at the moment.

Fun fact of the day: the term 'gook' did not come out of Korea or Vietnam -- American Marines were using it to refer to natives of Haiti as far back as 1915.

---

From Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere "The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor. The medium of this political confrontation was peculiar and without historical precedent: people's public use of their reason (öffentliches Räsonnement). In our [German] usage this term (i.e., Räsonnement unmistakable preserves the polemical nuances of both sides: simultaneously the invocation of reason and its disdainful disparagement as merely malcontent griping" (27). [Like the English word, "Reflection" = thought; satire.]

Miami University is shelling out big bucks to purchase and roll out Campus Pipeline without banner ads. I'm not sure, and, it seems neither are the implementors, what the real value of the product is. Whenever I ask why we've spent so much money on a Sun Ultra Enterprise server with gigs of memory and hundreds of gigs of disk, all I hear back is, "Well, it lets you check your email over the web."

I dunno, but it seems like Hotmail might do just as well.

ACM has a intercollegiate programming contest each year; here's an archive of old problems: Problem Set Archives. Granted that the question is for high school students, but there are still problems easy enough for high school students to do. You could also tweak some of the problems to make the easier. To do the problems, you could either assign them as homework, or better yet, you could run a mock tournament. Make teams of 3 students with one terminal per team and give them a few problems to do. This probably wouldn't work in a single class period, but I think it's fun as a weekend activity. Also, if you look around, some of the colleges nearby might run a programming contest for high schoolers. I know that those of us who go to the ACM programming contest from Miami University of Ohio, also host a contest for high schoolers each spring.

Have you seen your own website recently? Eh....

A freshmeat search will let you know where to find TripWire. It's a utility that keeps track of various aspects of files (size, permissions, checksums) and alerts you when files have changed. It's a bit of a pain to set up initially, as you want some files to remain exactly the same (/bin/ls), some files to change content but not permissions (/etc/passwd), and some files you just don't care about (/tmp/*). Figuring out how much stuff you want to keep track of takes a lot of time, but when you're done, you can build a database of exactly how all your important files are supposed to look. Once you've done that, you can set TripWire to run periodically, mailing you any deltas.

Here at Miami U., we run TripWire on just about all of our production platforms. If we do get hacked, we should know about it within minutes.

One more note; TripWire recently went commercial. I've noticed their licensing has become much less free over the last year or two, to the point that you can only get the 2.0 version as a "Red Hat Linux binary" without forking over about $500(US). They've still got their Academic Source Release available for free download from their website.

clayton

Well, as I said, this is merely my opinion, but I'm not sure just what benefits college has for the average geek. I'm currently a freshman at Miami University in southern Ohio, and am majoring in systems analysis. While my courses have helped me to learn more about C++ programming and other useful stuff like that, I've also found that there are a lot of "liberal education" requirements that seem quite useless to me. The common argument for these courses is that they help to "broaden my horizons" by making me study things other than what my major is related to, such as chemistry and psychology. However, I feel that these are the type of things that high school is meant for. I always assumed through my years of schooling that once I got to college I'd be able to focus solely on my major, since I'd taken years and years of English and history and other such courses. However, that is not the case. I'm still forced to take courses that (I feel) don't really benefit me in the long run instead of courses that could be better suited for my major.
Another point that the article makes is that the curriculum has a hard tinme staying current with the day's technology, and I am also finding that to be true. One of the important parts of the curriculum here is COBOL programming. COBOL? While I have little real-world experience, I really don't think COBOL is one of the things that employers are searching for on a college graduate's resume.
I dunno, just my two cents.

-mike kania