I remember when people were concerned about their privacy and complained about Gmail mining their emails. Facebook will take it to a whole new level, complete with value-added features such as censorship. People have to understand that decentralization is the only way to go; putting all your eggs in one basket (facebook) will never lead to anything good.
Obligatory XKCD. But seriously, I also follow this strategy. It really amazes me how resource-hungry modern games have become. Fallout:NV lags on low settings on my NV 8800 GTS 512 that was considered top card only a couple of years ago, and no, I'm not spending another $1.3k on a new system any time soon. Back when CRT monitors were popular at least you could play on a lower resolution; now, non-native resolutions just look ugly.
It's not about 'evil intent', it's about a program that behaves badly...it doesn't appear in the list of installed apps, it doesn't use the normal install/uninstall procedures, etc.
There is nothing wrong with an application that doesn't conform to standard practices as long as system administrator is fully aware of what the application does, and knowingly chooses to install it. I may have my own reasons why I want to run a rootkit on my machine (honeypots, etc), and Google is not the one who should deprive me of this opportunity. Now, it would be unethical for me to install this app to spy on somebody, but this should be left to my conscience without Google being a moral police.
I thought the general consensus here on/. was that since I own the hardware, I should be able to use it as I please, so why is my opinion so unpopular?
WTH?? Why are you avoiding mechanism which is in place for those things, namely XDG user dirs? Shotwell, as every good behaving application, uses directory which user defined for storing pictures.
I'm not the OP, but I used the same workaround. The answer is simple - I didn't know about XDG, the command needed to update directory, its parameters, where the config file is located, or whether the app in question is "good behaving". Doing rm & ln is simple, gets the job done, and doesn't require additional googling. The same thing really happened when I installed sun java and didn't know about the alternatives mechanism - manually overriding symlinks, or even prepending java's bin directory to your $PATH is easier than trying to figure out how to do it properly. Of course now that I know about these tools I will use them, but you shouldn't really blame the OP for using something he knows to quickly fix the problem instead of spending additional time learning about new tools.
Both universities I went to required international grad students to pass a spoken English test (typically more difficult to pass than TOEFL) before they were allowed to be TAs. I assume there are similar rules in other schools.
Honestly, I think people should not be able to earn an A+ unless they do extra credit. Too many universities and colleges have professors that give too lenient of grades and it makes people begin to expect it.
Very true. I happened to study in a country where you could earn the highest grade (10) only if you did some significant extra credit, or if you showed that you knew more than the class required in some other way. It highly motivated students to go "above and beyond", and gave a student something to be really proud about when they earned a 10. I also studied in the US, and it's too easy here to get an A - simply do everything that is required with no "thinking outside the box" involved.
Where exactly do you get the notion that people are still learning to write real algorithms in university ? Sure they get shown the result of algorithms. They might even get to implement a binary tree search algorithm (though without the memory allocation part that makes all the difference in real programming). But that's pretty much it.
In decent colleges, they teach you basic algorithm design concepts (e.g. dynamic programming), give some examples, and ask you to come up with a specific algorithm to solve a particular problem. This is hardly as simple as implementing a binary search algorithm (this stuff is typically done in introductory courses). Memory allocation is typically completely irrelevant in Algorithms course.
If a site is not going to treat you with respect and dignity, then take your business elsewhere. A site that measures you in "eyeballs" rather than "contributors" is not something you should be associated with in any way.
Exactly. In fact, Slashdot is one of few sites that are Doing It Right. I was so impressed when I saw the "Disable Advertising" option that I immediately added *.slashdot.org to my AdBlock whitelist (although I should have done it earlier given the amount of time I spend here).
It seems that this argument comes up at least once in every post related to transportation. Please believe me that once you've been in an accident where you were not the guilty party (because of either other driver, vehicle malfunction, or poor road conditions), you will not find this joke even remotely funny.
Actually, I think that it would be better if every person on the road could experience being in a non-serious accident (i.e. without significant injuries) that only involved their car. Maybe then most people would stop thinking that they are above-average drivers.
Start by offering 700MB XVID downloads for about USD$5 from fast servers with fantastic bandwidth.
90s called, they want their 700MB XVIDs back. Nowadays most movies are available in at least 720p, so content providers should match that.
I think one important service that movie studios can provide to attract customers is "online storage". Here's what they should do:
Have a system similar to Steam, where you could buy movies online and they would be available to your account for unlimited time.
New releases should not cost more than $10; older movies should cost proportionally less.
Server bandwidth should be sufficient to enable viewing (and seeking) streaming video in 720p without buffering.
In addition to that, all movies should be downloadable in non-DRM'd format (preferably H.264+AAC+MKV).
If they provide such service, I'm sure most people would get rid of their TB hard drives and stop pirating movies, as they would know they can watch a movie they liked any time. They would still be able to backup downloaded movies to avoid the case when the servers become unavailable.
One of my professors had a better way to handle this issue - he required all laptop-users to sit in the back of the classroom. This would still allow students to use laptops in class if they want. However, it would move them sufficiently far away so that other students are not distracted by the clickety-clacking and seeing laptop-users playing games or surfing the web (the same distracting effect as if someone in front of you in a movie theater uses a cell phone).
I firmly believe that pen and paper is still a much better way to take notes and learn in class, but I wouldn't prevent students from using laptops as supposedly they pay the same tuition as everyone else. Even if some students doesn't actively listen to the lecture, it is their choice and it's not an excuse to ban them from attending lectures.
Possibly because some races are over-represented in the lower economic stratas, are unable to afford tertiary educations at top-tier institutions and thus, even though they may be competitively intelligent, aren't able to make the most of it.
Oh, come on. There is plenty of opportunities for intelligent minorities to finance their education in college.
You don't need to go to an Ivy League school to get a decent job. Computer Science department in the state university I'm attending (rank 50-80) regularly publishes the average salary of graduating seniors majoring in CS who secured a job (almost everyone who doesn't go to grad school). Last year it was around $50k - and this is for an entry-level position straight out of college.
If they're short on cash, a very good strategy is to get a 2-year degree from a community college first, and then transfer credits to the university. It is also easier to get into a CC, and prove your worth by getting good grades.
Being US citizens, they qualify for dirt cheap in-state tuition, and various federal aid (e.g. FAFSA, work-study programs, etc).
Being a minority, they qualify for a huge number of scholarships that are not available to white males (especially in CS and Engineering).
There is a large number of other funding opportunities. Our CS department gives a nice lump sum (approx. 1/3 of in-state tuition) every year to top X students in the department. I don't see any reason for an intelligent person to not being able to get good grades and become the top performer.
It is not a secret that colleges still prefer to admit minorities over equally qualified white males, even though racial quotas are supposed to be illegal.
To some of you who might say that these people often live in bad neighborhoods that foster "gang culture", so even smart kids are sucked into it: Often freshmen have to live on campus, so they get immersed into a learning community and have to break connections to places they were raised at. A rather interesting article (pdf) on the "acting white" phenomenon that I recently read might be relevant to this discussion.
Yes, I'm bitter - perhaps that's because most of the benefits listed above didn't apply to me, and I still somehow managed to accomplish my goal of doing a good enough job as an undergrad to be accepted in a top 5 grad school. Upward mobility *does exist* if you're persistent (or desperate) enough.
At least it's better if these teams self-segregate and let more intelligent students work together, rather than having a single student pull all-nighters doing the entire group project on his/her own as the other guys can't (or don't want to) write code. That's pretty much the reason why I hated group projects so much.
It's kind of foreign to see someone taking notes in a CS course. I assume it is because CS courses are about understanding the concept instead of memorizing information.
You sound like someone who teaches a particular course and considers it "The CS Course". At my university, you need to take 15 CS courses for an undergraduate degree in Computer Science, and each one of them requires a different note-taking strategy.
Here's another funny thing about "understanding the concept". Sometimes there are cases when you understand the concept perfectly during the lecture, but when you start doing homework 3 days later, you suddenly realize that now you don't understand it any more. In these cases, going over the most important points in the lecture notes helps you get back on track quickly instead of having to (re-)read the book.
If I have nude photos, love letters, an email from porn-porn-porn.com, or just something I don't want someone else to read in my old mailboxes, how is someone else being able to see them not horribly bad even if they are over 90 days, (or whatever), old?
That's why you should separate your emails as much as possible. Use your work email for work purposes only; your college email to communicate with professors and fellow students about school-related issues; and personal email for stuff that you don't want the whole world to know.
This way you won't be embarrassed when your friendly BOFH from corporate IT decides to read your inbox. You also wouldn't care much about the situations with college email like this one.
So the taxpayer covers the cost of research and the profits are then made selling those products to the taxpayer with a huge markup? I thought that's the system we had now?
The whole point is that "huge markups" will not exist because of competition between companies assuming the patent system is abolished.
It doesn't matter how many times he does it, if he can avoid getting into an "accident" then he should be allowed to do it.
I wonder if the same logic should be applied to drunk driving (with relatively low BAC). I am sure that some people after having a couple of beers drive extra carefully, not exceed the speed limit even by 1 mph, etc to avoid being caught. Arguably under these conditions they are driving safer than while they are sober.
I don't see how you can protect yourself against some 0-day exploits even with firewall, antivirus, latest patches, etc installed. GP was arguing that MS should supply security software for free with their OS's, so I was talking mostly about home users who use one computer rather than businesses who can afford to have dedicated machines for separate tasks. Of course you can minimize the risk as much as you can, but you can never be 100% sure.
Why Windows-One-Care cannot be part of the OS? And people all over the world will sigh with a relief. Is it not done to milk billions from customers first for a monopoly insecure OS and then second time for making the OS secure.
Because they can? Microsoft isn't in the business of making the world a better place; they are in the business of making money.
A reasonably educated user doesn't need to buy antivirus software to keep their computer safe. All they need to do is to regularly apply patches. I've never used AV on my Windows computers, and got hit only once by a 0-day worm. Think of cost of purchasing AV as a convenience fee for not having to learn how to properly use your computer.
In small shops, it doesn't really matter what convention you choose as you would likely know each workstation anyway, so pick whatever you like (e.g. mythology, human names, Pokemon, etc).
In medium companies, it might be a good idea to assign unique ID to each machine, and put user/location/hardware information in a spreadsheet or a database. Some minimal information maybe embedded in the hostname - such as whether it is a desktop or a laptop (e.g. DSK1234, LPT5124). Each move or ownership change should be ideally done by IT, who should then update the spreadsheet.
In large companies, there will likely be several IT departments (one for each business unit or branch), so manual update of each change will be a hassle. I think the best solution is to automatically put unique hardware-specific information in the hostname during initial imaging. MAC address seems to be the best choice. Once imaging is done and the machine is deployed, inventory tracking agent should report hardware and software information to a central database, which would deduce machine's location based on its IP address.
Don't bother embedding user or location info in the hostname, as it will cause more harm in the long run when machines start changing owners or locations.
Disclaimer: I worked in companies of all three types, and this naming convention worked well for us.
Because the probability of someone simply sniffing plaintext data is far greater than the probability of somebody actively poisoning your DNS. The latter would require the attacker to have many more resources. In other words, encryption is "good enough" to prevent the majority of the problems.
I learned Pascal as my first programming language. As far as I know, Wirth specifically designed it for teaching. Sure, it doesn't provide low-level hardware access as C does, but it enforces good programming practices by not giving a programmer as much freedom. However, nowadays it is hardly used anywhere, so I would probably recommend C++ or Java as the first language to learn. My school chose Java and I think it is was a good decision, mostly because for a beginner Java code is much easier to debug in a good IDE (as opposed to C++).
It's more business/academic oriented - i.e., people who are already carrying around an expensive laptop all the time.
If I am already carrying around a laptop, why would I want to carry another piece of equipment that performs a subset of functions that a laptop can do?
I think it could be a real hit with students
I don't see much value from this device to students. Most textbooks are not available in electronic form, so it's not like students can carry one device instead of several heavy books. Also, from my experience I can tell that students generally don't have any time for casual reading, as going to classes, studying, doing homework/projects, and working/doing research takes way more time than regular 40 hours per week.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember when people were concerned about their privacy and complained about Gmail mining their emails. Facebook will take it to a whole new level, complete with value-added features such as censorship. People have to understand that decentralization is the only way to go; putting all your eggs in one basket (facebook) will never lead to anything good.
Obligatory XKCD. But seriously, I also follow this strategy. It really amazes me how resource-hungry modern games have become. Fallout:NV lags on low settings on my NV 8800 GTS 512 that was considered top card only a couple of years ago, and no, I'm not spending another $1.3k on a new system any time soon. Back when CRT monitors were popular at least you could play on a lower resolution; now, non-native resolutions just look ugly.
It's not about 'evil intent', it's about a program that behaves badly...it doesn't appear in the list of installed apps, it doesn't use the normal install/uninstall procedures, etc.
There is nothing wrong with an application that doesn't conform to standard practices as long as system administrator is fully aware of what the application does, and knowingly chooses to install it. I may have my own reasons why I want to run a rootkit on my machine (honeypots, etc), and Google is not the one who should deprive me of this opportunity. Now, it would be unethical for me to install this app to spy on somebody, but this should be left to my conscience without Google being a moral police.
I thought the general consensus here on /. was that since I own the hardware, I should be able to use it as I please, so why is my opinion so unpopular?
WTH?? Why are you avoiding mechanism which is in place for those things, namely XDG user dirs? Shotwell, as every good behaving application, uses directory which user defined for storing pictures.
I'm not the OP, but I used the same workaround. The answer is simple - I didn't know about XDG, the command needed to update directory, its parameters, where the config file is located, or whether the app in question is "good behaving". Doing rm & ln is simple, gets the job done, and doesn't require additional googling. The same thing really happened when I installed sun java and didn't know about the alternatives mechanism - manually overriding symlinks, or even prepending java's bin directory to your $PATH is easier than trying to figure out how to do it properly. Of course now that I know about these tools I will use them, but you shouldn't really blame the OP for using something he knows to quickly fix the problem instead of spending additional time learning about new tools.
Both universities I went to required international grad students to pass a spoken English test (typically more difficult to pass than TOEFL) before they were allowed to be TAs. I assume there are similar rules in other schools.
Honestly, I think people should not be able to earn an A+ unless they do extra credit. Too many universities and colleges have professors that give too lenient of grades and it makes people begin to expect it.
Very true. I happened to study in a country where you could earn the highest grade (10) only if you did some significant extra credit, or if you showed that you knew more than the class required in some other way. It highly motivated students to go "above and beyond", and gave a student something to be really proud about when they earned a 10. I also studied in the US, and it's too easy here to get an A - simply do everything that is required with no "thinking outside the box" involved.
Computer Science != Software Engineering
Where exactly do you get the notion that people are still learning to write real algorithms in university ? Sure they get shown the result of algorithms. They might even get to implement a binary tree search algorithm (though without the memory allocation part that makes all the difference in real programming). But that's pretty much it.
In decent colleges, they teach you basic algorithm design concepts (e.g. dynamic programming), give some examples, and ask you to come up with a specific algorithm to solve a particular problem. This is hardly as simple as implementing a binary search algorithm (this stuff is typically done in introductory courses). Memory allocation is typically completely irrelevant in Algorithms course.
If a site is not going to treat you with respect and dignity, then take your business elsewhere. A site that measures you in "eyeballs" rather than "contributors" is not something you should be associated with in any way.
Exactly. In fact, Slashdot is one of few sites that are Doing It Right. I was so impressed when I saw the "Disable Advertising" option that I immediately added *.slashdot.org to my AdBlock whitelist (although I should have done it earlier given the amount of time I spend here).
It seems that this argument comes up at least once in every post related to transportation. Please believe me that once you've been in an accident where you were not the guilty party (because of either other driver, vehicle malfunction, or poor road conditions), you will not find this joke even remotely funny.
Actually, I think that it would be better if every person on the road could experience being in a non-serious accident (i.e. without significant injuries) that only involved their car. Maybe then most people would stop thinking that they are above-average drivers.
Start by offering 700MB XVID downloads for about USD$5 from fast servers with fantastic bandwidth.
90s called, they want their 700MB XVIDs back. Nowadays most movies are available in at least 720p, so content providers should match that.
I think one important service that movie studios can provide to attract customers is "online storage". Here's what they should do:
If they provide such service, I'm sure most people would get rid of their TB hard drives and stop pirating movies, as they would know they can watch a movie they liked any time. They would still be able to backup downloaded movies to avoid the case when the servers become unavailable.
One of my professors had a better way to handle this issue - he required all laptop-users to sit in the back of the classroom. This would still allow students to use laptops in class if they want. However, it would move them sufficiently far away so that other students are not distracted by the clickety-clacking and seeing laptop-users playing games or surfing the web (the same distracting effect as if someone in front of you in a movie theater uses a cell phone).
I firmly believe that pen and paper is still a much better way to take notes and learn in class, but I wouldn't prevent students from using laptops as supposedly they pay the same tuition as everyone else. Even if some students doesn't actively listen to the lecture, it is their choice and it's not an excuse to ban them from attending lectures.
Possibly because some races are over-represented in the lower economic stratas, are unable to afford tertiary educations at top-tier institutions and thus, even though they may be competitively intelligent, aren't able to make the most of it.
Oh, come on. There is plenty of opportunities for intelligent minorities to finance their education in college.
Yes, I'm bitter - perhaps that's because most of the benefits listed above didn't apply to me, and I still somehow managed to accomplish my goal of doing a good enough job as an undergrad to be accepted in a top 5 grad school. Upward mobility *does exist* if you're persistent (or desperate) enough.
At least it's better if these teams self-segregate and let more intelligent students work together, rather than having a single student pull all-nighters doing the entire group project on his/her own as the other guys can't (or don't want to) write code. That's pretty much the reason why I hated group projects so much.
It's kind of foreign to see someone taking notes in a CS course. I assume it is because CS courses are about understanding the concept instead of memorizing information.
You sound like someone who teaches a particular course and considers it "The CS Course". At my university, you need to take 15 CS courses for an undergraduate degree in Computer Science, and each one of them requires a different note-taking strategy.
Here's another funny thing about "understanding the concept". Sometimes there are cases when you understand the concept perfectly during the lecture, but when you start doing homework 3 days later, you suddenly realize that now you don't understand it any more. In these cases, going over the most important points in the lecture notes helps you get back on track quickly instead of having to (re-)read the book.
is shorter and heavier "more beautiful"?
It depends on the culture. Currently tall and skinny are considered "beautiful" (see: fashion models), but this was not always the case.
If I have nude photos, love letters, an email from porn-porn-porn.com, or just something I don't want someone else to read in my old mailboxes, how is someone else being able to see them not horribly bad even if they are over 90 days, (or whatever), old?
That's why you should separate your emails as much as possible. Use your work email for work purposes only; your college email to communicate with professors and fellow students about school-related issues; and personal email for stuff that you don't want the whole world to know.
This way you won't be embarrassed when your friendly BOFH from corporate IT decides to read your inbox. You also wouldn't care much about the situations with college email like this one.
So the taxpayer covers the cost of research and the profits are then made selling those products to the taxpayer with a huge markup? I thought that's the system we had now?
The whole point is that "huge markups" will not exist because of competition between companies assuming the patent system is abolished.
It doesn't matter how many times he does it, if he can avoid getting into an "accident" then he should be allowed to do it.
I wonder if the same logic should be applied to drunk driving (with relatively low BAC). I am sure that some people after having a couple of beers drive extra carefully, not exceed the speed limit even by 1 mph, etc to avoid being caught. Arguably under these conditions they are driving safer than while they are sober.
I don't see how you can protect yourself against some 0-day exploits even with firewall, antivirus, latest patches, etc installed. GP was arguing that MS should supply security software for free with their OS's, so I was talking mostly about home users who use one computer rather than businesses who can afford to have dedicated machines for separate tasks. Of course you can minimize the risk as much as you can, but you can never be 100% sure.
Why Windows-One-Care cannot be part of the OS? And people all over the world will sigh with a relief. Is it not done to milk billions from customers first for a monopoly insecure OS and then second time for making the OS secure.
Because they can? Microsoft isn't in the business of making the world a better place; they are in the business of making money.
A reasonably educated user doesn't need to buy antivirus software to keep their computer safe. All they need to do is to regularly apply patches. I've never used AV on my Windows computers, and got hit only once by a 0-day worm. Think of cost of purchasing AV as a convenience fee for not having to learn how to properly use your computer.
In small shops, it doesn't really matter what convention you choose as you would likely know each workstation anyway, so pick whatever you like (e.g. mythology, human names, Pokemon, etc).
In medium companies, it might be a good idea to assign unique ID to each machine, and put user/location/hardware information in a spreadsheet or a database. Some minimal information maybe embedded in the hostname - such as whether it is a desktop or a laptop (e.g. DSK1234, LPT5124). Each move or ownership change should be ideally done by IT, who should then update the spreadsheet.
In large companies, there will likely be several IT departments (one for each business unit or branch), so manual update of each change will be a hassle. I think the best solution is to automatically put unique hardware-specific information in the hostname during initial imaging. MAC address seems to be the best choice. Once imaging is done and the machine is deployed, inventory tracking agent should report hardware and software information to a central database, which would deduce machine's location based on its IP address.
Don't bother embedding user or location info in the hostname, as it will cause more harm in the long run when machines start changing owners or locations.
Disclaimer: I worked in companies of all three types, and this naming convention worked well for us.
Because the probability of someone simply sniffing plaintext data is far greater than the probability of somebody actively poisoning your DNS. The latter would require the attacker to have many more resources. In other words, encryption is "good enough" to prevent the majority of the problems.
I learned Pascal as my first programming language. As far as I know, Wirth specifically designed it for teaching. Sure, it doesn't provide low-level hardware access as C does, but it enforces good programming practices by not giving a programmer as much freedom. However, nowadays it is hardly used anywhere, so I would probably recommend C++ or Java as the first language to learn. My school chose Java and I think it is was a good decision, mostly because for a beginner Java code is much easier to debug in a good IDE (as opposed to C++).
It's more business/academic oriented - i.e., people who are already carrying around an expensive laptop all the time.
If I am already carrying around a laptop, why would I want to carry another piece of equipment that performs a subset of functions that a laptop can do?
I think it could be a real hit with students
I don't see much value from this device to students. Most textbooks are not available in electronic form, so it's not like students can carry one device instead of several heavy books. Also, from my experience I can tell that students generally don't have any time for casual reading, as going to classes, studying, doing homework/projects, and working/doing research takes way more time than regular 40 hours per week.