1. If you're looking for a shared web host solution (maybe under 50-100k unique hits a month), you can't go wrong with http://www.asmallorange.com/ . I used their "small" shared hosting package for several years and never had a problem.
2. If you're looking for a VPS with quite a bit more available resources than a web host solution and you like to setup your own *nix box, you'd be good with http://www.linode.com/http://www.slicehost.com/ (those two primarily support Linux, but you can setup a NetBSD Xen slice by hand if you are so inclined), or if you really don't want any brakes when it comes to setting up your Xen VPS, http://www.prgmr.com/ (they also primarily support Linux, but they have a HOWTO on their wiki on how to setup NetBSD.)
Your story reminded me of a particular class in college where technology was used appropriately in an English class.
It wasn't recommended for us to use laptops in class; we used pencil and paper for notes for the most part (though computers weren't explicitly banned from the classroom either; I did see a few idiots checking Facebook every minute during class.) However, the professor was fairly tech savvy and had a USB voice recorder slung around his neck at all times. He would record his lectures and put the audio recordings online for everyone to listen to (yes, even for the public, though he also used a robots.txt file so the website wouldn't get spidered by Google.)
When we turned in essays, it was all through email in Word format; him and his TA's then used Word's annotation feature to grade and edit our papers.
But he didn't use this as a crutch! You see, my professor insisted on reading every single essay (though he had let the TA's grade the midterms), and insisted on grading every single final. There were at least two hundred people in the class; it would have been insurmountable for him to grade and read all of those essays by hand.
We still had in class discussions, group discussions, and all of the other sorts of face to face interaction without having to rely on bulletin board software.
For those who are college students at the University of Washington, the class is called "Method, Imagination and Inquiry", ENGLISH 205/CHID 205. It's taught by Leroy Searle. I highly recommend the class to anyone in any discipline.
Hah, that's what I miss about the University setting:
a.) you're strapped for money (for the most part), which means you have to come up with a good technical solution that costs the least money, and b.) everyone has the default mindset of looking at things critically.
Funnily enough, as said above, I used to work at a high school; this is where I've had to butt heads with many people who simply accepted things at face value. It's unfortunate that I had to encounter such things at a high school...
I'm hoping to eventually end up at a Uni sysadmin job myself, it seems that the local university is quite strapped for cash in all areas, so it'll be a while until I'm able to land a job there.
Eh, it's still fairly prevalent; I do hear a lot about how "everything's going up to the cloud", but for a few companies, anything in-house needs to be all Microsoft, because it's a "best practice" that aligns with "company values", etc. etc.
But again (tell me if I'm wrong), we seem to hit on the same point: there's an uncritical acceptance of technology for technology's sake, and this sort of thing seems to come from an education that is so uncritical of the technology that it purports to educate students about.
1. In my previous position, I worked at a high school which had a lot of fancy technology in place for teachers to use. One of the pieces of technology is a "smart board" that is basically a huge tablet with an image projected onto it from a normal projector. Unfortunately, when the "smart board" stops working, it becomes a huge useless slab that sits in the middle third of a regular whiteboard. It's always nice to be able to take a PowerPoint, convert it over to another easily editable presentation format, and write on it during a lecture, but I've found that the teachers are now at the mercy of the IT department for even classroom teaching.
There's also a document camera that teachers can use to show their work while sitting at their desk. What happened to simply writing everything in big bold letters on the whiteboard?
2. In my high school, the extent to which the majority of kids learn "computing" is in "Microcomputing Applications"; this is a class that teaches a hodge podge of various skills, like writing a letter in Word, filling in a spreadsheet in Excel, etc. As someone said above, this is not education, but simply training: people learned how to write letters in English class.
3. The best computing education I received was when I wanted to play computer games on locked down computers in a CCNA class. I didn't learn a damn thing about Cisco stuff (I was unmotivated to learn from CBT's in high school), but I did learn how easy it was to get rid of an admin password on Windows with physical access to the computer, and I also learned a bit about networking when setting up Quake 2 servers for other people to play on in class. Best part about it: I was not caught even once.
4. Of course, I learned a lot by deciding to install Linux 10 years ago on a spare box. Nowadays, I'm basically told that I'm living in an ivory tower and that "everyone uses Microsoft products."
Why are computers seen as mystical beasts with no rhyme or reason with the actual world? (1) showed me that computers are not even necessarily used as tools for effective teaching but as something "for technology's sake", (2) showed me that there is no drive to break this cycle in the educational system, (3) showed me that the assumptions taken when setting up the system were quite flawed and might be predicated on the presumption that kids wouldn't necessarily have the drive or knowledge to break the password, and (4) showed me that these years of "education" has culminated in an anti-Linux (and I might even go as far as saying "anti-intellectual") stance against computing.
I don't really know if it'd be a great idea to ride an e-bike in Seattle: you'd likely get side swiped by all of those hipster douchebags riding fixed gear bikes.
In my experience, I've had great success with the Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 with Tomato in my house, and I've personally setup an OpenBSD box with pf for a coffee shop. I don't have the connection at home to really saturate much of anything at the moment (I have a Comcast 22 Mbps connection myself), so I can't really comment on how well the router would scale up with a faster connection + NAT. But OpenBSD + pf works extremely well with 20-30+ users all hitting up YouTube; before that, the coffee shop had a D-Link router which faltered within two hours of it being reset (by this time, it has to be power cycled again, ad nauseum.)
As other posters have said, be sure to get at least one 1 Gbps NIC card from Intel or 3Com. I'd personally get two of them and leave the motherboard NIC untouched; I've found that a lot of the lower cost motherboards with low power CPU's usually only have a 10/100 Mbps port, which should be more than enough for most internet connections, but could possibly peter out in real world scenarios.
Fun because they think they can make video games, or fun for the sheer enjoyment of solving problems?
I think teachers/curriculum developers/etc. seemingly misunderstanding this distinction is what worries me the most about integrating the latest entertainment fad into academic disciplines. I remember taking a Cisco CCNA class in high school, and there were vignettes of classes here and there which were supposed to teach us about business; it was quite fun being in those classes back then, but not because I actually enjoyed business.
"The root of the problem is that decisions that impact security are being made by marketing people more concerned with the 'year of the Linux desktop'."
I am wondering if you had any links to either the thing you put up on the web or for any papers that you've published or whatever about this topic? I've posted on this news item already about it, but I figure I should give this a try as well. I've been interested in these sorts of problems for a few months now, but I haven't a clue where to start in terms of reading any sort of articles or whatever. I'm mostly outside the realm of computer science myself.
Hahah, well, yeah. But what if there was a person who did the same exact thing? No, what if there was a person who did the same thing, AND he had a beach ball on top of his head with two ears pasted on top of it?
I've been doing some side research in computer vision for a month or two in order to solve a problem regarding constructing a fairly accurate 3D model of a cat walking in front of a webcam. I'm totally ignorant about the entire field, so I've been trading ideas with another friend of mine who actually brought up the idea in the first place. Some of the ideas went from some sort of "averaging" between rough 3D sketches of a cat between multiple frames (with some sort of checking to see if they are, indeed, "topologically equivalent" [within reason of course, we don't want cats to be equivalent to beach balls]) to simply checking for the cat by first getting the edges of all of the objects in the scene, and then checking out the shadows on the cat in order to check for features varying along the depth axis.
In any case, does anyone know of any good resources / articles that deal with this very problem?
For some reason, I thought they already did this in one of their battlegrounds? I haven't really advanced too far in WoW (the last time I played it was about two years ago), but I did watch my friend play and I thought they had a battleground with AI enemies. But maybe someone can correct me on that?
When I studied math at my college, most of my textbooks were old. By old, I mean there were no new editions whatsoever... for instance, the classic Baby Rudin textbook on mathematical analysis is at least $140, and on Amazon, it says that the last edition was made in 1976. So why does it still cost so much? McGraw-Hill is a pretty huge publishing company, so I figure they still need to make a profit, yet they do not need to churn out any more editions...
Further, while publishers often change the books by an infinitesimal amount, I've seen cases where classic textbooks were practically raped and were changed drastically for whatever reason. Case in point: the freshman level Halliday / Resnick physics textbook. I believe in the third or fourth edition, it was concise and easy to follow, without so much verbose explanations that made no sense whatsoever. Nowadays, it's almost exactly identical to the Jewett / Serway textbook, which seems like it's competing against the Knight textbook for the lowest common denominator explanations possible. But I suppose, if I was the publisher, I would ruin a perfectly fine textbook in order to turn a profit.
For whatever reason, even when my school allowed graphing calculators in the calculus series, I've _never_ used them once (okay, here's a probable reason: I had a huge ego about being a mathematics tough guy, or something.) I ended up acing all the exams because I've never allowed myself to rely on them for anything.
I think there's some merit in not allowing any sort of tool in the classroom...
Slashdot Mirror
1. If you're looking for a shared web host solution (maybe under 50-100k unique hits a month), you can't go wrong with http://www.asmallorange.com/ . I used their "small" shared hosting package for several years and never had a problem.
2. If you're looking for a VPS with quite a bit more available resources than a web host solution and you like to setup your own *nix box, you'd be good with http://www.linode.com/ http://www.slicehost.com/ (those two primarily support Linux, but you can setup a NetBSD Xen slice by hand if you are so inclined), or if you really don't want any brakes when it comes to setting up your Xen VPS, http://www.prgmr.com/ (they also primarily support Linux, but they have a HOWTO on their wiki on how to setup NetBSD.)
3. I haven't found a good unmanaged dedicated host yet, though I hear http://www.softlayer.com/ is great. If you want a managed dedicated host, you can't go wrong with http://www.rackspace.com/ .
Your story reminded me of a particular class in college where technology was used appropriately in an English class.
It wasn't recommended for us to use laptops in class; we used pencil and paper for notes for the most part (though computers weren't explicitly banned from the classroom either; I did see a few idiots checking Facebook every minute during class.) However, the professor was fairly tech savvy and had a USB voice recorder slung around his neck at all times. He would record his lectures and put the audio recordings online for everyone to listen to (yes, even for the public, though he also used a robots.txt file so the website wouldn't get spidered by Google.)
When we turned in essays, it was all through email in Word format; him and his TA's then used Word's annotation feature to grade and edit our papers.
But he didn't use this as a crutch! You see, my professor insisted on reading every single essay (though he had let the TA's grade the midterms), and insisted on grading every single final. There were at least two hundred people in the class; it would have been insurmountable for him to grade and read all of those essays by hand.
We still had in class discussions, group discussions, and all of the other sorts of face to face interaction without having to rely on bulletin board software.
For those who are college students at the University of Washington, the class is called "Method, Imagination and Inquiry", ENGLISH 205/CHID 205. It's taught by Leroy Searle. I highly recommend the class to anyone in any discipline.
Hah, that's what I miss about the University setting:
a.) you're strapped for money (for the most part), which means you have to come up with a good technical solution that costs the least money, and
b.) everyone has the default mindset of looking at things critically.
Funnily enough, as said above, I used to work at a high school; this is where I've had to butt heads with many people who simply accepted things at face value. It's unfortunate that I had to encounter such things at a high school...
I'm hoping to eventually end up at a Uni sysadmin job myself, it seems that the local university is quite strapped for cash in all areas, so it'll be a while until I'm able to land a job there.
Eh, it's still fairly prevalent; I do hear a lot about how "everything's going up to the cloud", but for a few companies, anything in-house needs to be all Microsoft, because it's a "best practice" that aligns with "company values", etc. etc.
But again (tell me if I'm wrong), we seem to hit on the same point: there's an uncritical acceptance of technology for technology's sake, and this sort of thing seems to come from an education that is so uncritical of the technology that it purports to educate students about.
1. In my previous position, I worked at a high school which had a lot of fancy technology in place for teachers to use. One of the pieces of technology is a "smart board" that is basically a huge tablet with an image projected onto it from a normal projector. Unfortunately, when the "smart board" stops working, it becomes a huge useless slab that sits in the middle third of a regular whiteboard. It's always nice to be able to take a PowerPoint, convert it over to another easily editable presentation format, and write on it during a lecture, but I've found that the teachers are now at the mercy of the IT department for even classroom teaching.
There's also a document camera that teachers can use to show their work while sitting at their desk. What happened to simply writing everything in big bold letters on the whiteboard?
2. In my high school, the extent to which the majority of kids learn "computing" is in "Microcomputing Applications"; this is a class that teaches a hodge podge of various skills, like writing a letter in Word, filling in a spreadsheet in Excel, etc. As someone said above, this is not education, but simply training: people learned how to write letters in English class.
3. The best computing education I received was when I wanted to play computer games on locked down computers in a CCNA class. I didn't learn a damn thing about Cisco stuff (I was unmotivated to learn from CBT's in high school), but I did learn how easy it was to get rid of an admin password on Windows with physical access to the computer, and I also learned a bit about networking when setting up Quake 2 servers for other people to play on in class. Best part about it: I was not caught even once.
4. Of course, I learned a lot by deciding to install Linux 10 years ago on a spare box. Nowadays, I'm basically told that I'm living in an ivory tower and that "everyone uses Microsoft products."
Why are computers seen as mystical beasts with no rhyme or reason with the actual world? (1) showed me that computers are not even necessarily used as tools for effective teaching but as something "for technology's sake", (2) showed me that there is no drive to break this cycle in the educational system, (3) showed me that the assumptions taken when setting up the system were quite flawed and might be predicated on the presumption that kids wouldn't necessarily have the drive or knowledge to break the password, and (4) showed me that these years of "education" has culminated in an anti-Linux (and I might even go as far as saying "anti-intellectual") stance against computing.
http://www.pond5.com/stock-footage/124619/squeezing-an-orange.html
About as much as having the skin slightly tear off a bit after the half way mark. :(
I don't really know if it'd be a great idea to ride an e-bike in Seattle: you'd likely get side swiped by all of those hipster douchebags riding fixed gear bikes.
In my experience, I've had great success with the Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 with Tomato in my house, and I've personally setup an OpenBSD box with pf for a coffee shop. I don't have the connection at home to really saturate much of anything at the moment (I have a Comcast 22 Mbps connection myself), so I can't really comment on how well the router would scale up with a faster connection + NAT. But OpenBSD + pf works extremely well with 20-30+ users all hitting up YouTube; before that, the coffee shop had a D-Link router which faltered within two hours of it being reset (by this time, it has to be power cycled again, ad nauseum.)
As other posters have said, be sure to get at least one 1 Gbps NIC card from Intel or 3Com. I'd personally get two of them and leave the motherboard NIC untouched; I've found that a lot of the lower cost motherboards with low power CPU's usually only have a 10/100 Mbps port, which should be more than enough for most internet connections, but could possibly peter out in real world scenarios.
Fun because they think they can make video games, or fun for the sheer enjoyment of solving problems?
I think teachers/curriculum developers/etc. seemingly misunderstanding this distinction is what worries me the most about integrating the latest entertainment fad into academic disciplines. I remember taking a Cisco CCNA class in high school, and there were vignettes of classes here and there which were supposed to teach us about business; it was quite fun being in those classes back then, but not because I actually enjoyed business.
"The root of the problem is that decisions that impact security are being made by marketing people more concerned with the 'year of the Linux desktop'."
# su - problem /home/marketing
problem$ pwd
doh.
So this is the program that allows me to auto aim in Quake 2, yet is still pleasurable and safe to use.
I guess this sounds alright.
Well, for one, instead of a bunch of clunky individual servers on my diagram, I can now draw a cloud. It saves me a TON of time.
(okay, not really.)
Abductive reasoning is probably the closest thing to what you're describing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abductive_reasoning
Will this thing detect proper amounts of pressure from a chair?
The Amicus Brief response by the video game industry is broken, here's a direct link for the PDF of the brief:
http://cdn4.libsyn.com/gamepolitics/2009_07_22_ESA_Cal_Cert_Opp_14_FINAL.pdf?nvb=20090724170520&nva=20090725171520&t=0e120a59ff4ca8b96b5ac
Thankfully, I've been meaning to eat monitors for a while, so this is only good news.
It's not oil... but it's definitely biological...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kh_SC-oZLMg
I'm sure Filipino (Tagalog) are exactly what Indian people speak, you idiot.
I am wondering if you had any links to either the thing you put up on the web or for any papers that you've published or whatever about this topic? I've posted on this news item already about it, but I figure I should give this a try as well. I've been interested in these sorts of problems for a few months now, but I haven't a clue where to start in terms of reading any sort of articles or whatever. I'm mostly outside the realm of computer science myself.
Hahah, well, yeah. But what if there was a person who did the same exact thing? No, what if there was a person who did the same thing, AND he had a beach ball on top of his head with two ears pasted on top of it?
But...
I've been doing some side research in computer vision for a month or two in order to solve a problem regarding constructing a fairly accurate 3D model of a cat walking in front of a webcam. I'm totally ignorant about the entire field, so I've been trading ideas with another friend of mine who actually brought up the idea in the first place. Some of the ideas went from some sort of "averaging" between rough 3D sketches of a cat between multiple frames (with some sort of checking to see if they are, indeed, "topologically equivalent" [within reason of course, we don't want cats to be equivalent to beach balls]) to simply checking for the cat by first getting the edges of all of the objects in the scene, and then checking out the shadows on the cat in order to check for features varying along the depth axis.
In any case, does anyone know of any good resources / articles that deal with this very problem?
For some reason, I thought they already did this in one of their battlegrounds? I haven't really advanced too far in WoW (the last time I played it was about two years ago), but I did watch my friend play and I thought they had a battleground with AI enemies. But maybe someone can correct me on that?
Is this type of Jazz more like Coltrane's earlier work or his later free jazz?
When I studied math at my college, most of my textbooks were old. By old, I mean there were no new editions whatsoever... for instance, the classic Baby Rudin textbook on mathematical analysis is at least $140, and on Amazon, it says that the last edition was made in 1976. So why does it still cost so much? McGraw-Hill is a pretty huge publishing company, so I figure they still need to make a profit, yet they do not need to churn out any more editions...
Further, while publishers often change the books by an infinitesimal amount, I've seen cases where classic textbooks were practically raped and were changed drastically for whatever reason. Case in point: the freshman level Halliday / Resnick physics textbook. I believe in the third or fourth edition, it was concise and easy to follow, without so much verbose explanations that made no sense whatsoever. Nowadays, it's almost exactly identical to the Jewett / Serway textbook, which seems like it's competing against the Knight textbook for the lowest common denominator explanations possible. But I suppose, if I was the publisher, I would ruin a perfectly fine textbook in order to turn a profit.
For whatever reason, even when my school allowed graphing calculators in the calculus series, I've _never_ used them once (okay, here's a probable reason: I had a huge ego about being a mathematics tough guy, or something.) I ended up acing all the exams because I've never allowed myself to rely on them for anything.
I think there's some merit in not allowing any sort of tool in the classroom...