My school has been offering "Blackboard" to classes for a few years. I TA'd a class last semester that used BB for everything. The way it was configured, students had to authenticate before they could access the website. This means, of course, that you can track individual user access patterns as well as class access patterns. Fortunately, you couldn't look at individual accesses.
The thing that scared me the most was that you could rank users by how frequently they'd hit the webpage, what time of day they looked at certain sections of the site, etc... By presenting this information in aggregate form, you can figure out quite a bit about the work habits of a particular student. Even apache weblogs don't come close to this.
Recently I tried going to the windows update website to patch my Win2K laptop. When I selected the huge security rollup package -- or as I later found out -- any package from that site, I'd get an error message after downloading that said it could not install the patch, error code -2Billion and change. How useful.
So, even if I wanted to install the patches (which I did), I couldn't. The solution (as seems to be the solution for most things dealing with Microsoft problems now) was to download and install IE 6 over my current installation. Apparently that fixed it. I was peeved that the installation added Outlook Express and a new version of Media Player without (as far as I could tell) giving me the choice to leave the current versions.
Re:Extrodinary claims require extrodinary proof...
on
The Magic Box Hoax
·
· Score: 1
I always wondered what balun stood for. Thanks! We used to have them in the dorms at CMU (I hope they have removed 'em all by now and replaced then with a jack that doesn't look like it belongs in an evil scientist's lab). People said they could support 100mbit ethernet over those *ancient* cables, though I never saw it myself.
For those of you who think they can get really cheap ethernet cable with them, think again. The baluns and connectors (at least the IBM ones we used) weren't cheap.
> Repeatedly insert one end of the metal object in and out of the coil. The needle will become an electromagnet.
Yep. You too can create an electromagnet out of a needle and some string. I didn't verify the rest of this article, but this person has no idea as to what an electromagnet is.
Because it takes one starving author and maybe a manager a year to make the book and then a little touchup and printing. The album takes the cost of the band (usually more than one person), technical crews, and a team of suits to make it happen.
Not always true! I don't have an easy link to the finished version of this paper, but here's a look at how different people handle vocabulary (definitely one important aspect of a computer interface, as any unix user will agree).
http://www.si.umich.edu/~furnas/Papers/vocab.pap er . df
What words one person might think of are not necessarily the same as another persons'. Or another, etc... From your link, I'm not sure for what kinds of interfaces Nielsen claims are based upon "web design"? Raise your hand if you have ever been frustrated by the search feature of a website.
The ASIC is version still alive and well. The emulator is quite nice because you can essentially tug a low-end A-Series around on your laptop. They do sell the emulated version on the ES7000 hardware, as well.
Tell me about it. This upstream blows. Fortunately, compression from ssh tunnels makes most X applications (even some rather graphically-intensive ones) bearable remotely.
I find it difficult to believe that a certification would make drivers any better. Here are some points to consider:
Nothing stops me from driving without a license until I'm caught (this is similar to running an open mail relay until the spammers find it). Even then, nothing stops me from driving again. Remember, except for a few struggling ISPs, most are willing to take money from anyone who can pay.
My driver's test was joke. I drove around a parking lot, stalled, and drove no more than 100 yards on a public street. I didn't even have to park. What would make a computer certification any better?
How would you design this certification and ensure that it hasn't expired or is relevant to current software? Expiring a license happens over a known period of time (people will renew on the last day, anyway). How do you predict when something should expire for software? Unlike software, nobody updates cars to new, unfamiliar interfaces.
Along the same lines, who would handle the certification? Most of my spam comes from non-US sources. Are you going to get every UN country to force its ISPs to enforce this? I doubt it.
How do you make sure the person (or group!!!) running the machines actually is the same as the ones who set up the account?
I think certification is great for keeping honest, caring people honest and caring (why punish these people with a pointless exam?). I have a hard time believing that it'll help those who just don't give a damn.
For the past two or three years, CMU has been providing DSL service (for around $400/semester for my 1500/90 connection). For that, we get a connection that is routed directly into the machine room and is great for talking to campus machines remotely.
They have stopped pushing the phaseout back and it will die a horrible death on May 31. It cost too much, was too much of a drain on the technical support on campus and did not get the technical support they wanted on a timely basis from Verizon. AFAIK, this used a lot of verizon equipment and was a complete hassle. I think that rolling your own DSL would be even worse, because you're depending on a service that the phone company would fight tooth and nail to not provide and is basically sucking money from a service they could profit from.
Caching at the edge is the idea behind Akamai. It helps, except everything has turned into dynamic content now, so it's very hard to cache significant portions of it. It does help, but websites have to trust someone else to serve their content.
I'm not sure how multicast would work with a filesystem. The server doesn't know in advance what the client wants to access, and I am not convinced that client access patterns are close enough in time that they'd be able to benefit from it (exception: 100 employees starting up outlook from a network server at 9am, is that example even remotely likely?). Caching is fairly well-understood. Maybe an appliance by each switch that each client queries first, then if there is a miss in the applicance's cache, it would forward the request to a file server. Since this requires sending a lot of data over a fairly thin pipe, it might be possible to restrict caching/lookup on the appliance to things that are known to be read-only (e.g. programs). That's an obvious optimization, but I'm sure some more fancy caching heuristics could be used in this case, since compute time is cheap compared with network latency. Obviously this would require changes to the operating system... or could you get by with making this machine some sort of proxy for the file server? Time to stop rambling.
Here at CMU we still use AFS on most of the Unix machines on campus. It's an incredible beast to maintain, but when it works, it really works well. Files are cached locally on disk and updated on the "vice" servers as they are changed (or when the file is closed, depending on how you set up the caching). It actually works well on unix machines for both private files in home directories and read-only applications. Just doesn't mesh very well with windows.
I'd argue that in the future, it's going to go down even another level in the memory hierarchy: the network.
I store a lot of my information on remote filesystems (or, yuck, access it through a web browser). How many people use their machines just for email (maybe stored on an IMAP server) or browsing the web? The CPU and even the disk are sitting on their thumbs here. I think that if I finally get one of those palmtop PC's, it's only going to be remote display for something that is stored/running on another machine, just like how I use my laptop now. Sadly, there is no easy upgrade that will "double your network".
In the (database) server market, you're going to find a horrible bottleneck at the memory system, outside the L2 (or L3) caches. Disks, fortunately, are an easy problem to solve. Just throw more spindles at the machine and make sure your database is balanced across them. The number of requests you have hitting the machine can hide the latency of each individual disk. The same sort of thing will not help the PC, since just about everything you do on the PC, to first order, is single-threaded and waiting for an IO to complete (e.g. loading the mozilla binary into memory).
And a fine hack it is. During my free time, I hack it even more.:) I take it you have never used sieve on andrew. I challenge you to use that to file messages into multiple inboxes in pine. It gives you no way of telling if you have new messages in 10's of folders.
I think you mean www.cyrusoft.com. www.cyrussoft.com is a redirect to some.COM that sells "services". I'm not sure what services, though.
I'd take a text-mode email client over mulberry any day. The last time I used it, it was unstable, big and slow. Besides, I can't stand an email program that announces "email is my life" on startup. That's just sick. It looks like it was designed by the same people who thought of the floating windows for VB 3.0. Not to mention, I'm much better at typing than clicking and you can run a text-mode email client from anywhere... and I guess it helps that I was only forced off of AMS last semester.
You can't forget ezimail! The only email client I have seen that has a simple, yet useful and necessary, function: show changed bboards.
That, and I only need a single key (n) to traverse all of the new messages in all of the changed folders on startup. What could be easier? It even has emacs keys!:-)
LeMieux. They like to name machines after Pittsburgh Penguins players. According to PSC, the full-scale machine will be operating in production on April 1, 2002.
Agreed. I use them in computer labs as well (though I haven't tried taking them into the loud mainframe machine room at work). There are a few problems with them:
If you turn them on without any input signal (computer, MP3 player, etc), you hear some static. This goes away as soon as you turn on your music.
When there is a sharp noise (e.g. someone smacking a computer), the headphones amplify the sound and echo it several times.
They perfectly cancel out one really annoying guy's voice. Lips move, no sound.:-)
I can hear most other voices perfectly, but almost no computer fans. The screeching sparc hard drives are out of this unit's range
Random question: does anyone know what type of plug/cord goes on the bottom half of these things? The extension cord is beginning to become separarated from its plug and I'd like to get a new one, but I don't know what it's called!
Dell's recent laptops/desktops have flash bios updates that come out every few weeks. They fix bugs, but also introduce new ones. Be careful with this type of thing! Just because it's easy to make an update doesn't mean that it's okay to skimp on testing because a fix is easy to shove to the customer.
It's fairly obvious that they failed to test the Inspiron 8100 A08 Bios in a system with no floppy drive (e.g. two battery configuration). Once the machine tries to access the floppy drive, the hard drive activity light (shared with the floppy, actually) will not turn off until you suspend or power down. Of course, an antivirus program initializing when you start Windows will access the floppy (that isn't plugged in) and cause the light to turn on forever. While this isn't an issue that causes BSOD (this update actually fixed a few of those bugs), it's definitely an annoyance.
You might be able to get a firmware update for your hard drive from Dell. For my I8100, the update stopped the clicking every few seconds (well, changed it to something much less audible). Supposedly it's just the heads autoparking.
The 8100 (also the same case as the 8000 and 2500) feels extremely flimsy. Go to the Dell support website and download the webpage (sorry, I don't have the URL) that tells you how to take the thing apart. You'll realize that for many things, you don't need to take out any screws until several parts have been removed! The thing snaps together (and consequently feels like it can snap apart). I had the LCD replaced a few weeks ago and I was surprised to see the serviceman remove a few screws and then tug quite hard on the bezel around the screen, until all of the snaps around it gave way. When he replaced the bezel, he tried hard to get it to fit snuggly around the entire screen -- something which I told him to give up upon, because the bezel never fit snuggly even when the machine was brand new.
Don't expect it to feel solid like the small Sony VAIO machines with a magnesium cover. It will flex under its own weight if you don't pick it up evenly on both sides!
My personal experience with the 8100 is that the top get scratched way too easily. It's not flat, instead the silly Dell logo (that looks like a gigantic rivet) and the curves that they put in the top make it somewhat difficult to slide into a backpack without scratching it in the middle. No, not a major issue, but the scratches don't make the laptop any prettier.
Slashdot Mirror
My school has been offering "Blackboard" to classes for a few years. I TA'd a class last semester that used BB for everything. The way it was configured, students had to authenticate before they could access the website. This means, of course, that you can track individual user access patterns as well as class access patterns. Fortunately, you couldn't look at individual accesses.
The thing that scared me the most was that you could rank users by how frequently they'd hit the webpage, what time of day they looked at certain sections of the site, etc... By presenting this information in aggregate form, you can figure out quite a bit about the work habits of a particular student. Even apache weblogs don't come close to this.
So, even if I wanted to install the patches (which I did), I couldn't. The solution (as seems to be the solution for most things dealing with Microsoft problems now) was to download and install IE 6 over my current installation. Apparently that fixed it. I was peeved that the installation added Outlook Express and a new version of Media Player without (as far as I could tell) giving me the choice to leave the current versions.
I always wondered what balun stood for. Thanks! We used to have them in the dorms at CMU (I hope they have removed 'em all by now and replaced then with a jack that doesn't look like it belongs in an evil scientist's lab). People said they could support 100mbit ethernet over those *ancient* cables, though I never saw it myself.
For those of you who think they can get really cheap ethernet cable with them, think again. The baluns and connectors (at least the IBM ones we used) weren't cheap.
> Repeatedly insert one end of the metal object in and out of the coil. The needle will become an electromagnet.
Yep. You too can create an electromagnet out of a needle and some string. I didn't verify the rest of this article, but this person has no idea as to what an electromagnet is.
Because it takes one starving author and maybe a manager a year to make the book and then a little touchup and printing. The album takes the cost of the band (usually more than one person), technical crews, and a team of suits to make it happen.
I always thought a more creative name would be the Great Slashout. Shorter, sexier, but unfortunately, someone snagged the .com.
Not always true! I don't have an easy link to the finished version of this paper, but here's a look at how different people handle vocabulary (definitely one important aspect of a computer interface, as any unix user will agree).
p er . df
http://www.si.umich.edu/~furnas/Papers/vocab.pa
What words one person might think of are not necessarily the same as another persons'. Or another, etc... From your link, I'm not sure for what kinds of interfaces Nielsen claims are based upon "web design"? Raise your hand if you have ever been frustrated by the search feature of a website.
They report real news? Coulda fooled me:
a r. wars.line.ap/
http://www.cnn.com/2002/SHOWBIZ/Movies/04/11/st
The ASIC is version still alive and well. The emulator is quite nice because you can essentially tug a low-end A-Series around on your laptop. They do sell the emulated version on the ES7000 hardware, as well.
Tell me about it. This upstream blows. Fortunately, compression from ssh tunnels makes most X applications (even some rather graphically-intensive ones) bearable remotely.
- Nothing stops me from driving without a license until I'm caught (this is similar to running an open mail relay until the spammers find it). Even then, nothing stops me from driving again. Remember, except for a few struggling ISPs, most are willing to take money from anyone who can pay.
- My driver's test was joke. I drove around a parking lot, stalled, and drove no more than 100 yards on a public street. I didn't even have to park. What would make a computer certification any better?
- How would you design this certification and ensure that it hasn't expired or is relevant to current software? Expiring a license happens over a known period of time (people will renew on the last day, anyway). How do you predict when something should expire for software? Unlike software, nobody updates cars to new, unfamiliar interfaces.
- Along the same lines, who would handle the certification? Most of my spam comes from non-US sources. Are you going to get every UN country to force its ISPs to enforce this? I doubt it.
- How do you make sure the person (or group!!!) running the machines actually is the same as the ones who set up the account?
I think certification is great for keeping honest, caring people honest and caring (why punish these people with a pointless exam?). I have a hard time believing that it'll help those who just don't give a damn.For the past two or three years, CMU has been providing DSL service (for around $400/semester for my 1500/90 connection). For that, we get a connection that is routed directly into the machine room and is great for talking to campus machines remotely.
They have stopped pushing the phaseout back and it will die a horrible death on May 31. It cost too much, was too much of a drain on the technical support on campus and did not get the technical support they wanted on a timely basis from Verizon. AFAIK, this used a lot of verizon equipment and was a complete hassle. I think that rolling your own DSL would be even worse, because you're depending on a service that the phone company would fight tooth and nail to not provide and is basically sucking money from a service they could profit from.
Caching at the edge is the idea behind Akamai. It helps, except everything has turned into dynamic content now, so it's very hard to cache significant portions of it. It does help, but websites have to trust someone else to serve their content.
I'm not sure how multicast would work with a filesystem. The server doesn't know in advance what the client wants to access, and I am not convinced that client access patterns are close enough in time that they'd be able to benefit from it (exception: 100 employees starting up outlook from a network server at 9am, is that example even remotely likely?). Caching is fairly well-understood. Maybe an appliance by each switch that each client queries first, then if there is a miss in the applicance's cache, it would forward the request to a file server. Since this requires sending a lot of data over a fairly thin pipe, it might be possible to restrict caching/lookup on the appliance to things that are known to be read-only (e.g. programs). That's an obvious optimization, but I'm sure some more fancy caching heuristics could be used in this case, since compute time is cheap compared with network latency. Obviously this would require changes to the operating system... or could you get by with making this machine some sort of proxy for the file server? Time to stop rambling.
Here at CMU we still use AFS on most of the Unix machines on campus. It's an incredible beast to maintain, but when it works, it really works well. Files are cached locally on disk and updated on the "vice" servers as they are changed (or when the file is closed, depending on how you set up the caching). It actually works well on unix machines for both private files in home directories and read-only applications. Just doesn't mesh very well with windows.
I'd argue that in the future, it's going to go down even another level in the memory hierarchy: the network.
I store a lot of my information on remote filesystems (or, yuck, access it through a web browser). How many people use their machines just for email (maybe stored on an IMAP server) or browsing the web? The CPU and even the disk are sitting on their thumbs here. I think that if I finally get one of those palmtop PC's, it's only going to be remote display for something that is stored/running on another machine, just like how I use my laptop now. Sadly, there is no easy upgrade that will "double your network".
In the (database) server market, you're going to find a horrible bottleneck at the memory system, outside the L2 (or L3) caches. Disks, fortunately, are an easy problem to solve. Just throw more spindles at the machine and make sure your database is balanced across them. The number of requests you have hitting the machine can hide the latency of each individual disk. The same sort of thing will not help the PC, since just about everything you do on the PC, to first order, is single-threaded and waiting for an IO to complete (e.g. loading the mozilla binary into memory).
And a fine hack it is. During my free time, I hack it even more. :) I take it you have never used sieve on andrew. I challenge you to use that to file messages into multiple inboxes in pine. It gives you no way of telling if you have new messages in 10's of folders.
.COM that sells "services". I'm not sure what services, though.
I think you mean www.cyrusoft.com. www.cyrussoft.com is a redirect to some
I'd take a text-mode email client over mulberry any day. The last time I used it, it was unstable, big and slow. Besides, I can't stand an email program that announces "email is my life" on startup. That's just sick. It looks like it was designed by the same people who thought of the floating windows for VB 3.0. Not to mention, I'm much better at typing than clicking and you can run a text-mode email client from anywhere... and I guess it helps that I was only forced off of AMS last semester.
You can't forget ezimail! The only email client I have seen that has a simple, yet useful and necessary, function: show changed bboards.
:-)
That, and I only need a single key (n) to traverse all of the new messages in all of the changed folders on startup. What could be easier? It even has emacs keys!
Looks like the standard LaTeX fonts. They have a tendency to look awful in PDF form, but print beautifully.
Any LaTeX expert know how to change the fonts so that you still have a Times Roman font, but doesn't throw acrobat for a hissy fit?
> How much q&a do you think goes into hobby dice manufacturing?
Q: Does your die roll high?
A: Maybe
Q: Really?
A: Yep.
Q: What will be the next roll?
A: Roll and find out!
This was an article about weasels, not ferrets.
At any rate, you'd have trouble getting something out of a minor.
LeMieux. They like to name machines after Pittsburgh Penguins players. According to PSC, the full-scale machine will be operating in production on April 1, 2002.
Random question: does anyone know what type of plug/cord goes on the bottom half of these things? The extension cord is beginning to become separarated from its plug and I'd like to get a new one, but I don't know what it's called!
Dell's recent laptops/desktops have flash bios updates that come out every few weeks. They fix bugs, but also introduce new ones. Be careful with this type of thing! Just because it's easy to make an update doesn't mean that it's okay to skimp on testing because a fix is easy to shove to the customer.
It's fairly obvious that they failed to test the Inspiron 8100 A08 Bios in a system with no floppy drive (e.g. two battery configuration). Once the machine tries to access the floppy drive, the hard drive activity light (shared with the floppy, actually) will not turn off until you suspend or power down. Of course, an antivirus program initializing when you start Windows will access the floppy (that isn't plugged in) and cause the light to turn on forever. While this isn't an issue that causes BSOD (this update actually fixed a few of those bugs), it's definitely an annoyance.
Your .sig URL gives a 404 error. Where is it??? I want to see!
You might be able to get a firmware update for your hard drive from Dell. For my I8100, the update stopped the clicking every few seconds (well, changed it to something much less audible). Supposedly it's just the heads autoparking.
The 8100 (also the same case as the 8000 and 2500) feels extremely flimsy. Go to the Dell support website and download the webpage (sorry, I don't have the URL) that tells you how to take the thing apart. You'll realize that for many things, you don't need to take out any screws until several parts have been removed! The thing snaps together (and consequently feels like it can snap apart). I had the LCD replaced a few weeks ago and I was surprised to see the serviceman remove a few screws and then tug quite hard on the bezel around the screen, until all of the snaps around it gave way. When he replaced the bezel, he tried hard to get it to fit snuggly around the entire screen -- something which I told him to give up upon, because the bezel never fit snuggly even when the machine was brand new.
Don't expect it to feel solid like the small Sony VAIO machines with a magnesium cover. It will flex under its own weight if you don't pick it up evenly on both sides!
My personal experience with the 8100 is that the top get scratched way too easily. It's not flat, instead the silly Dell logo (that looks like a gigantic rivet) and the curves that they put in the top make it somewhat difficult to slide into a backpack without scratching it in the middle. No, not a major issue, but the scratches don't make the laptop any prettier.