When I was in high school one of my friends brought a real rifle to school -- so he could do a how-to speech about cleaning a gun. No one said a word about it.
I seem to remember a few years ago (possibly after 9/11, but I'm not sure) there was an incident where an employee of a company that has a governement contract to write software that manages government infrastructure was suspected of terrorist links and so they had to spend tonds of time seaching through the code to make sure the suspect had not programmed a back-door into the system. (I might be misremembering the details here, but that was the gist of it) it seems that closed source is a lot easier to hide things away than open source.
Since when does Warner Brothers own the Lord of the Rings? They may own the movies, but the original material of the books doesn't belong to them, does it? (Of course this is besides the fact that "shire" is in the dictionary)
I don't really want this. I want a good, editable, cut-and-paste-able ebook format. Especially for non-fiction books. I'm in grad school and every time I have to type out a quote it irritates me that the only reason I can't cut and paste everything is based on restrictive laws and fear of piracy. Sure, there's lots of demand on kazaa for books put out by University Presses.
A good resource for filmmakers is B-Independent. While they are mainly horror guys, their message boards have lots of good advice on amature filmmaking from people who are actually making their own films with the equipment.
The police and federal governement do similar things on a fairly regualr basis. It was even included in a Simpons episode where Homer gets a letter saying he has won a free boat if he comes down to the police department and it turns out to be a sting operation to catch him for unpaid parking tickets.
I personally don't see anything underhanded in tricking criminals. I always said that if I was a politician I would take the bribe money and then not do anything. After all, what would they do, complain? (OK so they could whack me I guess...)
As I recall, Teryl decided to leave, so the elimination of her character was initiated by her. Now, of course when the guy who plays general hammond decided to leave the show they didn't kill his character or anything!
You could probably watch any single episode of SG-1 and figure out 90% of what is going on. There is continuity but it is more in terms of reoccuring characters where there are a few people who keep returning as guest stars, but the plots are definitly on the side of action so it is not generally that confusing. There is the ocasionally plot heavy show, but they generally do a "last time on Stargate" where they show you all the relevent storylines even if they build on things that happened several episodes ago.
I think there is more to browser usage than just the raw numbers. I know that according to my web site stats more than half of my visitors use some version of mozilla. My blog appeals to a pretty small niche of people who are generally tech savy and so this leads me to beleive that the power users are using Mozilla much more than the average users.
The signifigance of that s that the power users are the people that non-tech people turn to as well as the people who are more likely to contact a non-moz friendly web site and complain. So what I'm saying is that 1% may be a small amount of change, but the movers and shakers have already moved in much larger numbers.
I basically do this sort of thing now on XP. I'm a grad student and am always popping in and out of various computer labs here on campus. The university gives us a meager 100mb of online storage but it is enough for me to store my current work on it. Additionally, because I hate to use ie, I've installed firefox onto the storage space and run it over the network (sure it takes a couple minutes to start, but once started it works fine) and since the labs recently "upgraded" and deleted winamp, I have it installed to my storage space as well.
Sure it is a pain in that I have to do it all manually, but after a couple minutes, I basically have the lab computer set up the way I want it.
Whenever a new guy comes in and starts cutting back, it is never a good sign. I would start looking for signs that the buisness might be firing people and perhaps looking for a new job. At the very lease when a new boss comes in and starts saying things like "if you were a dedicated employee..." it is the start of a stressfull workplace.
Secondly, as others have mentioned this is the equivelant of a paycut. I suggest you treat it as one and ask for a fair raise that is equal to the ammount paying for those things yourself will cost you.
Well, casinos also have a lot more to worry about than database security. I worked in the cage and credit department at one for 3 years and at one point they made us sew up the pockets in our pants! We could only have clear beverages in clear cups and could not bring ANYTHING into the cage with us.
But then again that casino installed Ticket-in ticket-out machines and the computers they put in the cage to readeam the tickets had NO security on them. We could browse the entire network. I kept telling manegment that all someone would have to do would be to burn a cd with a virus and pop it in and they could have brought down the entire network costing the casino hundreds of thousands of dollars in downtime. Of course they never listened...
Of course these things can be measured, hoever the problem is that the measurement for things of that nature are subjective. Indeed, all these things are subjective. One man's ruining the environment is another's imporiving it. What can you measure that is not based on some degree on subjectivity? Can you measure anything truely meaningfull with out putting a subjective evaluation on it.
Hell, even things as concrete as the fact that X number of species go extinct every year is in and of itself meaningless unless we put a value on that. With out saying that extinction is a good or a bad thing, it just is. It is just as usefull as saying everyone in a cemetery is dead. Well so what?
The things that can be measured are the easiest. There is nothing to debate. It is only when opinions get involved that it gets interesting. When something be it a measurement or an event or something else that happens is interpreted then it gets much more complicated.
Why do you rail against "Leftist philosophy" so much? How do you define "Leftist philosohpy?" It's hard to talk about measurements without defining terms first. Are you implying that "Rightist philosophy" is all about measurement? How do we measure the effectiveness of making abortion illegal, or making a constitutional ammendment against gay marriage, or deposing Sadam, or anything else that seems to be a platform of the right?
allofmp3 may be illegal, however I use it to download copies of stuff I already have on cassette or CD. In the case of my old CD's i'm just too lazy to rip them and in the case of the cassettes it is easier to download them. I use allofmp3 rather than one of the peer to peer services because I know I can find a quality I like and the entire album quickly and easily rather than search and search for it.
...but the seemingly obvious answer to all of this is to turn off the images of the browser and lock down the system and if someone needs to see pictures for some reason have the librarian turn them on for them.
Sure that would require librarians to be computer savy and there will always be kids that could get around the lock outs and sure that doesn't do anything for pornographic writings, but i don't think that's what most people are looking for. Besides, it teaches them problem solving and how to read!
No I don't know him, but the criteria that the original poster used for calling him an amature was the assumption that Aarseth has just "jumped on the bandwagon" when in reality he is one of the biggest and most respected names in the (admittedly very new and small) field of videogame research. I mean Cybertext came out in 1997, and it really is a good book. I was mainly trying to refute that assumption that he was one of those people who just woke up one day and decided to write a book about videogames (see also Video Games: A Popular Culture Phenomenon). So it is possible that Aarseth hasn't played a lot of games, but I would be very, very surprized that someone who seems to have made his career at analyzing games doesn't play them.
Whether Aarseth is correct or not, he is certainly not an amatuer. He is the author of Cybertext which is cited in practically every paper on videogames. He is also the co-founder of the Department of Humanistic Informatics at the University of Bergen as well as the co-founder of Games Studies an academic e-journal about videogames. Finally, he is Associate Professor, Principal Researcher at the Center of Computer Games Research at the Department of Digital Aesthetics & Communication at the IT University of Copenhagen which is pretty much the largest group of videogame academics in the world.
So again, whether or not he is right, and i haven't yet read this latest article so i don't have an opinion, one cannot correctly say that he is an amatuer.
Class-action lawsuit settlements are one of the biggest scams out there. Friends, family and I have been in 3 or 4 of these over the years and every time and in every settlement I've heard of the cunsomers get crap like coupons -- to buy more products from the people who screwed the consumers to begin with!
The only people that profit are *gasp* the lawyers.
I don't know if you've done this or not, but whatever you do, actuall ask the people who are going to work there! Their opinion matters infinitely more than ours. Try to let me know as much as possible what is going on and why. Let them have as much say as you can and still stay sane (because let's face it 45 people are going to have 45 different opinions!).
Actually I was at a conference back in April and one of the presentations discussed studies of the gender of gamers, and I think they refered to that Pew study specifically but i may be misremembering. Anyway they said that those studies tend to be a bit misleading because in general men and women tend to play different kinds of games, for different reasons and for different lengths of time. They said that women tend to play more card games and things like bejeweled online while men tend to play more of the retail buy in a box at the store and install games. Also they said that men tend to play for fun while women tend to play more out of boredom. Finally they said that men tend to play online for longer periods of time than women.
Now of course these are all generalizations and there are certainly exceptions, but I buy what they were saying and so we need to take studies about gender in gaming with a grain of salt to make sure that they aren't whitewashing over some real differences.
Slashdot Mirror
When I was in high school one of my friends brought a real rifle to school -- so he could do a how-to speech about cleaning a gun. No one said a word about it.
I seem to remember a few years ago (possibly after 9/11, but I'm not sure) there was an incident where an employee of a company that has a governement contract to write software that manages government infrastructure was suspected of terrorist links and so they had to spend tonds of time seaching through the code to make sure the suspect had not programmed a back-door into the system. (I might be misremembering the details here, but that was the gist of it) it seems that closed source is a lot easier to hide things away than open source.
What would be really interesting now would be to know what exactly people sent him in those 5meg attachments.
Since when does Warner Brothers own the Lord of the Rings? They may own the movies, but the original material of the books doesn't belong to them, does it? (Of course this is besides the fact that "shire" is in the dictionary)
The important question is, "Is it low carb?"
I don't really want this. I want a good, editable, cut-and-paste-able ebook format. Especially for non-fiction books. I'm in grad school and every time I have to type out a quote it irritates me that the only reason I can't cut and paste everything is based on restrictive laws and fear of piracy. Sure, there's lots of demand on kazaa for books put out by University Presses.
A good resource for filmmakers is B-Independent. While they are mainly horror guys, their message boards have lots of good advice on amature filmmaking from people who are actually making their own films with the equipment.
The police and federal governement do similar things on a fairly regualr basis. It was even included in a Simpons episode where Homer gets a letter saying he has won a free boat if he comes down to the police department and it turns out to be a sting operation to catch him for unpaid parking tickets.
I personally don't see anything underhanded in tricking criminals. I always said that if I was a politician I would take the bribe money and then not do anything. After all, what would they do, complain? (OK so they could whack me I guess...)
As I recall, Teryl decided to leave, so the elimination of her character was initiated by her. Now, of course when the guy who plays general hammond decided to leave the show they didn't kill his character or anything!
You could probably watch any single episode of SG-1 and figure out 90% of what is going on. There is continuity but it is more in terms of reoccuring characters where there are a few people who keep returning as guest stars, but the plots are definitly on the side of action so it is not generally that confusing. There is the ocasionally plot heavy show, but they generally do a "last time on Stargate" where they show you all the relevent storylines even if they build on things that happened several episodes ago.
I think there is more to browser usage than just the raw numbers. I know that according to my web site stats more than half of my visitors use some version of mozilla. My blog appeals to a pretty small niche of people who are generally tech savy and so this leads me to beleive that the power users are using Mozilla much more than the average users.
The signifigance of that s that the power users are the people that non-tech people turn to as well as the people who are more likely to contact a non-moz friendly web site and complain. So what I'm saying is that 1% may be a small amount of change, but the movers and shakers have already moved in much larger numbers.
I basically do this sort of thing now on XP. I'm a grad student and am always popping in and out of various computer labs here on campus. The university gives us a meager 100mb of online storage but it is enough for me to store my current work on it. Additionally, because I hate to use ie, I've installed firefox onto the storage space and run it over the network (sure it takes a couple minutes to start, but once started it works fine) and since the labs recently "upgraded" and deleted winamp, I have it installed to my storage space as well.
Sure it is a pain in that I have to do it all manually, but after a couple minutes, I basically have the lab computer set up the way I want it.
Whenever a new guy comes in and starts cutting back, it is never a good sign. I would start looking for signs that the buisness might be firing people and perhaps looking for a new job. At the very lease when a new boss comes in and starts saying things like "if you were a dedicated employee..." it is the start of a stressfull workplace.
Secondly, as others have mentioned this is the equivelant of a paycut. I suggest you treat it as one and ask for a fair raise that is equal to the ammount paying for those things yourself will cost you.
"banning portable storage devices such as Apple's iPod from corporate networks as they can be used to introduce malware"
You know what I'm going to say, don't you?
If they are so concerend about malware are they going to ban IE too?
Well, casinos also have a lot more to worry about than database security. I worked in the cage and credit department at one for 3 years and at one point they made us sew up the pockets in our pants! We could only have clear beverages in clear cups and could not bring ANYTHING into the cage with us.
But then again that casino installed Ticket-in ticket-out machines and the computers they put in the cage to readeam the tickets had NO security on them. We could browse the entire network. I kept telling manegment that all someone would have to do would be to burn a cd with a virus and pop it in and they could have brought down the entire network costing the casino hundreds of thousands of dollars in downtime. Of course they never listened...
Of course these things can be measured, hoever the problem is that the measurement for things of that nature are subjective. Indeed, all these things are subjective. One man's ruining the environment is another's imporiving it. What can you measure that is not based on some degree on subjectivity? Can you measure anything truely meaningfull with out putting a subjective evaluation on it.
Hell, even things as concrete as the fact that X number of species go extinct every year is in and of itself meaningless unless we put a value on that. With out saying that extinction is a good or a bad thing, it just is. It is just as usefull as saying everyone in a cemetery is dead. Well so what?
The things that can be measured are the easiest. There is nothing to debate. It is only when opinions get involved that it gets interesting. When something be it a measurement or an event or something else that happens is interpreted then it gets much more complicated.
Why do you rail against "Leftist philosophy" so much? How do you define "Leftist philosohpy?"
It's hard to talk about measurements without defining terms first. Are you implying that "Rightist philosophy" is all about measurement? How do we measure the effectiveness of making abortion illegal, or making a constitutional ammendment against gay marriage, or deposing Sadam, or anything else that seems to be a platform of the right?
allofmp3 may be illegal, however I use it to download copies of stuff I already have on cassette or CD. In the case of my old CD's i'm just too lazy to rip them and in the case of the cassettes it is easier to download them. I use allofmp3 rather than one of the peer to peer services because I know I can find a quality I like and the entire album quickly and easily rather than search and search for it.
so linux is a copy of windows which is a copy of the mac os which was a copy of Xerox PARC...
...but the seemingly obvious answer to all of this is to turn off the images of the browser and lock down the system and if someone needs to see pictures for some reason have the librarian turn them on for them.
Sure that would require librarians to be computer savy and there will always be kids that could get around the lock outs and sure that doesn't do anything for pornographic writings, but i don't think that's what most people are looking for. Besides, it teaches them problem solving and how to read!
No I don't know him, but the criteria that the original poster used for calling him an amature was the assumption that Aarseth has just "jumped on the bandwagon" when in reality he is one of the biggest and most respected names in the (admittedly very new and small) field of videogame research. I mean Cybertext came out in 1997, and it really is a good book. I was mainly trying to refute that assumption that he was one of those people who just woke up one day and decided to write a book about videogames (see also Video Games: A Popular Culture Phenomenon). So it is possible that Aarseth hasn't played a lot of games, but I would be very, very surprized that someone who seems to have made his career at analyzing games doesn't play them.
Whether Aarseth is correct or not, he is certainly not an amatuer.
He is the author of Cybertext which is cited in practically every paper on videogames.
He is also the co-founder of the Department of Humanistic Informatics at the University of Bergen as well as the co-founder of Games Studies an academic e-journal about videogames.
Finally, he is Associate Professor, Principal Researcher at the Center of Computer Games Research at the Department of Digital Aesthetics & Communication at the IT University of Copenhagen which is pretty much the largest group of videogame academics in the world.
So again, whether or not he is right, and i haven't yet read this latest article so i don't have an opinion, one cannot correctly say that he is an amatuer.
More info on the new game can be found at Firebox.com (link courtesy of matteo bittanti's blog).
Class-action lawsuit settlements are one of the biggest scams out there. Friends, family and I have been in 3 or 4 of these over the years and every time and in every settlement I've heard of the cunsomers get crap like coupons -- to buy more products from the people who screwed the consumers to begin with!
The only people that profit are *gasp* the lawyers.
I don't know if you've done this or not, but whatever you do, actuall ask the people who are going to work there! Their opinion matters infinitely more than ours. Try to let me know as much as possible what is going on and why. Let them have as much say as you can and still stay sane (because let's face it 45 people are going to have 45 different opinions!).
Actually I was at a conference back in April and one of the presentations discussed studies of the gender of gamers, and I think they refered to that Pew study specifically but i may be misremembering. Anyway they said that those studies tend to be a bit misleading because in general men and women tend to play different kinds of games, for different reasons and for different lengths of time. They said that women tend to play more card games and things like bejeweled online while men tend to play more of the retail buy in a box at the store and install games. Also they said that men tend to play for fun while women tend to play more out of boredom. Finally they said that men tend to play online for longer periods of time than women.
Now of course these are all generalizations and there are certainly exceptions, but I buy what they were saying and so we need to take studies about gender in gaming with a grain of salt to make sure that they aren't whitewashing over some real differences.