"OS X comes with a long list of drivers installed. Apple would love to drop those, partly because it involves a lot of coordination with printer manufacturers. Little from the customer perspective would likely change."
Not content with the walled gardens they've built for the iPad, IPhone, etc. Apple would, apparently, just like all those other hardware and software manufacturers to just go away.
Maybe Linux distributions should seriously consider using something besides CUPS as a printing subsystem until Apple learns what it means to be part of a community that wasn't of their own making. Unfortunately, present-day Apple would probably just accelerate their separation from the rest of the IT world and CUPS wouldn't even run on anything that wasn't designed in Cupertino.
In the last few years I think we've seen Apple becoming so arrogant they almost make Microsoft look like fine upstanding members of the free software community.
"The ancient, spaghetti-coded Berkeley LPD still works on modern platforms, and it's probably significantly more efficient than CUPS (I haven't actually checked, but that's where I'd lay my bets)."
If by efficiency you mean printer thoughput, I think you'd win your bet. I abandoned CUPS on the system that serves as the print server on home network. It turned out that most applications that generated PostScript output and sent it off to a CUPS client to print on a CUPS server resulted in turning my 20ppm printer into a 1ppm printer... if we were lucky. Ditching the CUPS server and reinstalling LPRng restored the printer's normal throughput. I still have the CUPS clients set up on various systems but as a print server CUPS was a dog.
"Where the goal was to have only 10% of projects rated high, within a year nearly 50% of projects are rated as such."
In a previous life, when I was working in IT at a Chicago bank, we had a weekly project review meeting run by a VP. When I began attending, the project list was a printout from a spreadsheet: typically seven pages of projects rated from 0 (low) to 99 (critical). Nearly all of the projects were wish-list items -- but ranked at "99" -- that required an outside software vendor to modify their software. (IT was routinely hammered over not getting these changes made to a commercial product. Like we had a lot of clout to make that happen.) The projects that the IT folks needed to get done were all ranked at priority "1". I cannot recall a single meeting where a project was ranked anywhere between those two extremes. So we had a growing list of projects consisting of page after page of priority "99" projects that were going nowhere and important IT projects like upgrading storage, patches, etc. sitting at the bottom of the last page at priority "1". Good times.
Uh... when the ham radio operator down the road interferes with his neighbors' radios and television reception, it is the ham operator who has to modify his operation. The FCC would not be letting him off the hook because the neighbors did not purchase radios and televisions that were completely immune to external transmissions that adversely affected their operation. Any lawsuit filed by the ham operator against his neighbors would be laughed out of court.
Of course, the US legal system is so screwed up nowadays, I would not be surprised to see such a lawsuit get dragged through the courts for years for no other reason than the the fact that someone isn't able to make money. The "I want to do something to make money and these people are in my way, so, Mr. Judge, make them go away" attitude by people like Falcone is a disease that needs to be stamped out.
So Monsanto was not responsible for the stuff getting all over town? Nitro,WV is probably a EPA SuperFund site now and Monsanto should be picking up the tab for the clean-up. But since Monsanto's legal department probably makes more in a year than the combined lifetime earnings of the residents of Nitro, I doubt there's a damned thing that can be done to get the company to do the right thing. If you live in WV it looks like you have the choice to get screwed over by a chemical company or a coal mining company. Pity because the landscape down there is really pretty. (At least where the tops of the mountains haven't been torn off.) Or at least it used to be; I haven't been through WV in years.
"I really do feel for them.. it's a pretty shitty deal.. but it's not like they bought a chunk of land to build something and can't get rid of the squatters. It's like they bought a chunk of land in a residential area and are trying to put up a skyscraper."
I can't feel anything for them. They bought up some spectrum and want to use it for something that it wasn't allocated for. It doesn't matter that they spent a ton of money for that spectrum. They failed to do their homework and bought something that doesn't work the way they want it to.
Unless there's been a major policy change, the FCC doesn't let people broadcast in such a way that forces other users to buy new equipment because the new broadcasts are interfering with existing equipment. Years ago I was part of a team that created a software tool (for the FAA) that predicted FM transmitter effects on ILS landing systems. Even though the two frequency bands were supposedly far removed from one another, licenses for new FM stations were denied because of the effect of the combination of the new transmitter's frequency with those of nearby, existing transmitters on the front end of ILS receivers. (Some of the meetings that took place after this tool was delivered turned out to be FAA vs. FCC with the FAA needing to protect the airspace and the FCC wanting to award licenses and collect the licensing fees. In other words: people's lives vs. big bucks.) The place where I was working when this tool was written had a lot of experience on a wide variety of ILS receivers (low cost to high end). The FM interference affected different receivers in different ways. The lower cost ILS receivers were more easily affected by the interference -- on at a few occcasions, some of my coworkers were able to record the audio of nearby radio stations from the front end of an ILS receiver. But you just can't tell the pilots that they now have to go out and buy a much more expensive receiver because someone wants to put up a new FM transmitter. Similarly, what right does a new celllular service have to force the obsolescence of a slew of perfectly operable GPS receivers because of interference generated by their signals? Methinks these guys are whining because someone's telling them that their money-generating cellular network isn't going to work after all. Again, I can't feel any pity for these folks. At all.
I'd disagree but I guess we'll find out how irrelevant this news is when we find that our credit cards aren't being accepted because the processor has had to shut their database again while they patch another Oracle database. I use/. as a one-stop shopping for much of my tech news. I don't find the occasional article about non-Linux software to be be a problem. I know I learned something new today. While I previously knew about the SCN, I didn't know it was a built-in timebomb. Oracle did a couple of things that we've all come to consider pretty stupid: hard-coded limits like the 48-bit size for the SCN, and the 16K value described in the article probably seemed like infinite in size back in 1988. Just like programs that could only handle 9999 records before blowing up, 2-digit year fields, etc. I probably wouldn't have learned about this flaw until much later if/. hadn't reported on the IW article. I gave up on IW ages ago. I'm glad someone's reading their site so I don't have to.
After reading this article, I'm thinking that Oracle is going to be the most hated company on the planet if they arbitrarily cut off the patch for older databases. Some applications (I'm thinking healthcare-related, anything covered by FDA regulations, etc.) can't upgrade just because a new version of software has come out. I expect there'll be quite a bit of pressure to make the patches available for all versions of their database that you can get support for.
... that they're only following the lead of Hollywood. Between the rise of the so-called "reality" shows to the excessive use of the laugh track in current sitcoms (Example: Star of the show enters room: "Hi guys!" [uproarious laughter]. Me: [click]) it seems that most entertainment has already been removed from American television. Frankly, I'd say that the Chinese are fairly late to the removing-excessive-entertainment game.
A lot of the things that I've seen computers used for -- at least in the K-5 classes -- is drill problems (math, vocabulary, etc.). What need is there for "up-to-date" information regarding multiplication tables? If the computers are being used for research, why not put them in the library along with the other research materials? They do not need to be in the classroom. If they're going to be used for training on how to use a computer then why not put them in a lab with enough staff dedicated to dealing with those computers (maintenance, repairs, etc.). That way, each teacher doesn't need to be an expert on the computer and all the software that's on it. How effective of a tool is a computer in the classroom going to be if a single teacher has to be the walking help desk for 20-30 students?
If the state wants to mandate that all students need to take a class on the basics on how to use a computer (Not Office training. Please.) and how to use the Internet for research then fine. Set up a dedicated computer lab for those courses. Add a couple of classrooms, if necessary, to avoid increasing the overall class size. But don't eliminate other courses to fit the mandated curriculum into the school day. I'd be all for lengthening the school day by an hour in order to fit these classes in. (Students will complain but, hey, longer school days are all the rage nowadays.)
"a subject course where students have to buy and learn to program a $25 computer, no more expensive than a typical textbook, that would be a worthwhile application of technology"
Some might consider that to be pointless. Especially since Apple -- whose had their foot in the classroom door for some years now -- seems bent on addicting their customers on locked down appliances and not general purpose computers. You know... the kind that can actually be programmed. Customizing a playlist isn't programming. Maybe Apple will provide the schools the tools so students can write iPhone applications. You can't have too many of those, after all.
Politicians with an axe to grind -- or a bribe in their pocket -- would ignore the OTA just as they now routinely ignore (or decry as being partisan) the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) when its findings are in conflict with their agenda and/or whenever it makes for good theatre in a press conference.
"Heck, most of them don't want to deal with masters students, if you're not a phd candidate or a postdoc then you're not worth their time."
Heh, sometimes being a Ph.D. candidate isn't even good enough to get faculty attention. I knew of a doctoral candidate who had his dissertation sit on the corner of of a professor's desk for the better part of six months. (I know because that professor was the principle investigator on a research contract I was working on and I saw the dissertation sitting every time I came in for project meetings.) Each week I saw more and more paper piled on top of this poor guy's research. Hopefully that sort of inattention, abuse, whatever is not commonplace.
"... it's one of the reasons I selected a school where the top degree was a MS, the professors there actually wanted to teach."
Similar experience. I chose a smaller school with no advanced degree program because I'd actually be attending classes taught by the faculty I'd met. At the University where I saw that dissertation holding down the corner of the professor's desk, I knew of one faculty member that was sweating getting tenure because he'd made the mistake of taking his teaching seriously. Winning an award for distinguished teaching was very nearly the kiss of death for his career at that school.
I do agree that smaller classes are a great way to learn. I wonder how many of these faculty members that don't want to teach aren't the ones stuck with those classes held in auditoriums with dozens and dozens of students (or more). I can't imagine those "classroom" situations are conducive to learning. The largest classes I can remember taking were those infamous senior/first year grad student classes (they were known as 400/500 level classes when I was there). They were awful. It wasn't until I started taking the 600/700 level classes with maybe ten students that you felt like you were really learning. One of my favorite classes as an undergraduate was taught to about six students. At the beginning of the class, the professor made the comment "I decided to teach this class because I wanted to learn more about..." (He was the department chairman so it's not like he didn't have anything else to do. He was thrilled with the chance to teach.) Since then, I can't imagine taking a class any other way.
``Whitespace is something the human eye is VERY good at seeing, a missing curly-brace on the other hand is NOT.''
Isn't that why most programming editors include a feature like Emacs' "Paren Highlighting"? Turn it on and all those cryptic messages about runaway statements go away. Or, when you are beginning a block enclosed by "( )", "[ ]", or "{ }", add the closing parenthesis, bracket, or brace immediately so you don't forget it. Python's a fine language but switching languages because the coder in unable to remember to close blocks seems, to me, just silly.
That's the first thing that I thought of. If traffic permits, I tend to make slow almost leisurely lane changes, especially if the weather is dicey or if I see something far enough ahead that I need to avoid without having to swerve making some zipping into another lane. How quickly am I going to have to change lanes to avoid fighting some computer alogorithm? Frankly, this sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen the first time the onboard computer steers the car back into a lane only to have it rear-end a slow moving car -- that the driver was slowly changing lanes to avoid -- and someone gets killed. Yeah, the article says that the computer doesn't get involved if the driver uses a signal when changing lanes but that ignores the fact that a lot of drivers don't use the signals if there's no one nearby that would notice the signal. It might be the law but that doesn't mean we need the car enforcing it.
Item "c" isn't necessarily unethical since the only harm would be to the employee that used the tool. It sounds like the company didn't want anyone else using it anyway (not on the approved tool list). Why would the company care if it disappeared?
You misread item "d". The company was the one who'd be wiping the hard disk and not the employee. Nothing malicious would be taking place. Many if not most companies will routinely wipe the hard disk and reinstall Windows on someone's PC when they leave. The former employee's personal tools are gone.
Item "e" just sounds like a courtesy to any future users of the utility (should it somehow survive "c" and "d") as to where to find support. Now if the tool became non-functional and the splash screen told you to call some phone number in order to re-enable it, that might be borderline extortion. Especially if the tool had become part of an established SOP that the company depended on. (Though it would then have to made it onto to that approved tool list, wouldn't it?) A casual user is probably more likely to fire up the tool, see that the tool doesn't work any more, and say "Aw... screw it, that doesn't work any more", delete the tool, and just go back to doing manually what the tool automated.
(Personally, I would have left an email address instead of a phone number to avoid getting a 3:00AM call from a new employee who had a question about the tool.)
SciAm is a shadow of its former self. I subscribed many years ago and the articles were written with the idea that its readers were somewhat well versed in science. Not quite the audience educational level as, say, Nature might require, but you definitely benefited from having taken a lot of science in your schooling. You might have even felt a sense of accomplishment after you finished an article in particle physics or some new medical discovery (neither were close to my college major) and understood what the article was trying to convey. The articles were easy to find and follow and the advertisements were limited to the sidebars of pages or, if full page, were normally marked with the word "Advertisement" on the top or bottom of the page. For me, things started going downhill when they felt a need to include twelve-page advertisements for some country that wanted to tout the nifty technologies that are being used in their economy. At least they didn't look like the regular articles and I could easily skip over them.
Nowadays, the articles seem to be written for junior high school students. Almost worse is the new format where the articles are nearly indistinguishable from the ads. I realize that advertisements are critical to the magazine's ability to survive and I can't fault them for having ads even if the number of them is increasing at a disturbing rate. What I take offense at is reading the left-hand page of an article and moving to the right-hand page only to discover that I've read a paragraph of text from an ad that is formatted identically to the article. (What's next? Blatant product hawking in the text of the articles?) If I was a subscriber, I'd complain but since I only buy it at the grocery store when there appear to be several articles I might find interesting I suppose I can't make too big of a fuss. The recent changes to the magazine mean that I buy it less and less which, if my thoughts on their new direction are any indication of widespread sentiment, isn't going to be doing SciAm any good in the long run.
It's supposed to be a science journal so format it like one and not like it's Good Housekeeping.
Make that 'Kohl' and not 'Kolb'. And, while I didn't see anything in the FEC listings about Kohl having received anything substantial from tech companies, Lee, on the other hand, seems to do nothing but collect money from PACs and corporations. (The only link I see between these two guys is the concrete industry which makes you wonder what sort of back scratching is going on here.) Both Microsoft and K&L Gates (Bill's daddy's law firm) were contributors. Hmm...
"They also ask the FTC to consider what Google could do with the Android mobile operating system, and suggest that although it does not now, the firm could force hardware makers that use Android to set its search engine as the default."
Oh wait... we haven't heard this before. Where was the letter from senators complaining that Microsoft could do these same kind of things?
I haven't checked yet but does anyone know whether senators Kolb and Lee have received sizable bribes^Wcampaign contributions from Microsoft, their friends, lobbyists, or industry groups that have Microsoft as a major supporter? (I'm guessing that they have.)
"...if some employers are demanding Facebook passwords from interviewees..."
At that point, the interviewee should be saying "Thank you for your time. I'll be posting my interview experience online as soon as I get home" and walking the hell out.
Not that I completely agree with everything that IT management decides to do but...
If folks are using a network that doesn't belong to them and computers that don't belong to them either why aren't they just using the equipment that the company supplies and do the job they were hired to do? It is going to be extremely rare for someone's job to require the ability to install iTunes and manage music on MP3 players? (One has to wonder what will be the next "right" that's being denied to employees? Surfing for pr0n using the corporate network?) The monthly malware/patch meeting I attend has this discussion nearly every time it convenes. One has to wonder what business need is being provided by iTunes. It never fails to amaze me that people think that all the toys that they own need to work flawlessly on the corporate network. Stop calling that thing in your cubicle a personal computer. It ain't. Their workplace, their rules. Deal with it.
I can still remember when having one's briefcase/purse/bag/etc. inspected going into and when leaving the premises was standard procedure. A camera would have been confiscated immediately and removing anything required a manager's approval. (I needed to borrow a keyboard one weekend after mine had croaked and needed my manager's and his manager's approvals on the form that I needed to present to security on the way out of the building. All for something as benign as a keyboard.) Imagine the squawking that would occur nowadays if they started enforcing a policy like that with smartphones with cameras and/or multi-gigabytes of memory and having the ability to get onto the corporate network. Yeah, this was at a defense-oriented company but I've worked at financial firms with just as strict security.
It takes less concentration to sing-along to the radio. When you're on the phone with someone, you actually are listening to and processing what they're saying and formulating a response. That's a lot more difficult than singing. I suspect that language processing uses some of the same parts of the brain that you should be using while driving and diverting that brain power from the driving task is the cause of the poor driving. My anecdotal evidence for this is my experience of carrying on a conversation with one of my relatives while he's driving. His ability to drive without scaring the crap out of everyone when he's attempting to carry on a conversation causes his passengers to shut up when he's driving. And that's when he's talking to people in the same vehicle with both hands on the wheel. I'd hate to see what his driving would be like if he were juggling a cellphone.
What is amazing to me while reading the responses to this article is the lengths that people will go to defend their desire to use their expensive toys while they're in command of a moving vehicle. I seriously doubt that pilots would be defending their right to use a cellphone while on final approach? Yet there's a burning need to be talking at all times while driving a car. Unless you are the only person on the planet that knows whether the person on the other end of the phone call is supposed to cut the red wire or the green wire on the bomb at the orphanage, nothing is more important than driving the car when you're driving the damned car.
It's bad enough that my family physician has to employ a couple of people whose sole job is to deal with the insurance companies all day long. Now it seems, if this idea is approved by the Supreme Court, they'll need to have a patent attorney on retainer to make sure they don't run afoul of some pharmaceutical company who found that a drug's effectiveness can actually be measured.
I thought it was supposed to be a bad idea to have the government getting between the doctor and the patient. If this isn't government getting between me and my doctor, I sure as hell don't know what is.
"Back in the day you put up an antenna and got free TV"
We gave up on cable -- mainly because of the cost -- back in the early '90s. It just wasn't worth it to pay the ever increasing cable bill just to see 2-3 new movies each month -- often scheduled in the middle of the day and conflicting with something else you wanted to tape -- and then the rest of the month was Elton John in concert. We really haven't missed it it at all. The Sopranos? Didn't see that and we're all still doing just fine. The Real Housewives of East Gumshoe Idaho? Couldn't care less. We live just south of the WI border and the OTA stations we get from Chicago are more than enough.
"I can tell you that OTA HD is so much better than the recomppessed crap on cable. If you live in a good sized city or near one I really suggest getting a cheap set of rabbit ears and see what you can get OTA. You may be shocked.
I haven't really noticed the difference since we don't have cable and when I'm at a friend's house it's not to watch TV. But I have had people come over and while we might be in another room while the kids are watching something on TV we'll hear someone comment on what a great picture we get. Most stuff is crystal clear. (Though I would really like to see Universal Sports buy some damned HD cameras for their cycling and track & field coverage.)
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Not content with the walled gardens they've built for the iPad, IPhone, etc. Apple would, apparently, just like all those other hardware and software manufacturers to just go away.
Maybe Linux distributions should seriously consider using something besides CUPS as a printing subsystem until Apple learns what it means to be part of a community that wasn't of their own making. Unfortunately, present-day Apple would probably just accelerate their separation from the rest of the IT world and CUPS wouldn't even run on anything that wasn't designed in Cupertino.
In the last few years I think we've seen Apple becoming so arrogant they almost make Microsoft look like fine upstanding members of the free software community.
If by efficiency you mean printer thoughput, I think you'd win your bet. I abandoned CUPS on the system that serves as the print server on home network. It turned out that most applications that generated PostScript output and sent it off to a CUPS client to print on a CUPS server resulted in turning my 20ppm printer into a 1ppm printer... if we were lucky. Ditching the CUPS server and reinstalling LPRng restored the printer's normal throughput. I still have the CUPS clients set up on various systems but as a print server CUPS was a dog.
In a previous life, when I was working in IT at a Chicago bank, we had a weekly project review meeting run by a VP. When I began attending, the project list was a printout from a spreadsheet: typically seven pages of projects rated from 0 (low) to 99 (critical). Nearly all of the projects were wish-list items -- but ranked at "99" -- that required an outside software vendor to modify their software. (IT was routinely hammered over not getting these changes made to a commercial product. Like we had a lot of clout to make that happen.) The projects that the IT folks needed to get done were all ranked at priority "1". I cannot recall a single meeting where a project was ranked anywhere between those two extremes. So we had a growing list of projects consisting of page after page of priority "99" projects that were going nowhere and important IT projects like upgrading storage, patches, etc. sitting at the bottom of the last page at priority "1". Good times.
That just moves their regulatory problem from the FCC to the FAA.
Uh... when the ham radio operator down the road interferes with his neighbors' radios and television reception, it is the ham operator who has to modify his operation. The FCC would not be letting him off the hook because the neighbors did not purchase radios and televisions that were completely immune to external transmissions that adversely affected their operation. Any lawsuit filed by the ham operator against his neighbors would be laughed out of court.
Of course, the US legal system is so screwed up nowadays, I would not be surprised to see such a lawsuit get dragged through the courts for years for no other reason than the the fact that someone isn't able to make money. The "I want to do something to make money and these people are in my way, so, Mr. Judge, make them go away" attitude by people like Falcone is a disease that needs to be stamped out.
So Monsanto was not responsible for the stuff getting all over town? Nitro,WV is probably a EPA SuperFund site now and Monsanto should be picking up the tab for the clean-up. But since Monsanto's legal department probably makes more in a year than the combined lifetime earnings of the residents of Nitro, I doubt there's a damned thing that can be done to get the company to do the right thing. If you live in WV it looks like you have the choice to get screwed over by a chemical company or a coal mining company. Pity because the landscape down there is really pretty. (At least where the tops of the mountains haven't been torn off.) Or at least it used to be; I haven't been through WV in years.
Huh? Were we watching the same cartoon? Ren was the chihuahua. Stimpy was the cat.
I can't feel anything for them. They bought up some spectrum and want to use it for something that it wasn't allocated for. It doesn't matter that they spent a ton of money for that spectrum. They failed to do their homework and bought something that doesn't work the way they want it to.
Unless there's been a major policy change, the FCC doesn't let people broadcast in such a way that forces other users to buy new equipment because the new broadcasts are interfering with existing equipment. Years ago I was part of a team that created a software tool (for the FAA) that predicted FM transmitter effects on ILS landing systems. Even though the two frequency bands were supposedly far removed from one another, licenses for new FM stations were denied because of the effect of the combination of the new transmitter's frequency with those of nearby, existing transmitters on the front end of ILS receivers. (Some of the meetings that took place after this tool was delivered turned out to be FAA vs. FCC with the FAA needing to protect the airspace and the FCC wanting to award licenses and collect the licensing fees. In other words: people's lives vs. big bucks.) The place where I was working when this tool was written had a lot of experience on a wide variety of ILS receivers (low cost to high end). The FM interference affected different receivers in different ways. The lower cost ILS receivers were more easily affected by the interference -- on at a few occcasions, some of my coworkers were able to record the audio of nearby radio stations from the front end of an ILS receiver. But you just can't tell the pilots that they now have to go out and buy a much more expensive receiver because someone wants to put up a new FM transmitter. Similarly, what right does a new celllular service have to force the obsolescence of a slew of perfectly operable GPS receivers because of interference generated by their signals? Methinks these guys are whining because someone's telling them that their money-generating cellular network isn't going to work after all. Again, I can't feel any pity for these folks. At all.
I'd disagree but I guess we'll find out how irrelevant this news is when we find that our credit cards aren't being accepted because the processor has had to shut their database again while they patch another Oracle database. I use /. as a one-stop shopping for much of my tech news. I don't find the occasional article about non-Linux software to be be a problem. I know I learned something new today. While I previously knew about the SCN, I didn't know it was a built-in timebomb. Oracle did a couple of things that we've all come to consider pretty stupid: hard-coded limits like the 48-bit size for the SCN, and the 16K value described in the article probably seemed like infinite in size back in 1988. Just like programs that could only handle 9999 records before blowing up, 2-digit year fields, etc. I probably wouldn't have learned about this flaw until much later if /. hadn't reported on the IW article. I gave up on IW ages ago. I'm glad someone's reading their site so I don't have to.
After reading this article, I'm thinking that Oracle is going to be the most hated company on the planet if they arbitrarily cut off the patch for older databases. Some applications (I'm thinking healthcare-related, anything covered by FDA regulations, etc.) can't upgrade just because a new version of software has come out. I expect there'll be quite a bit of pressure to make the patches available for all versions of their database that you can get support for.
... that they're only following the lead of Hollywood. Between the rise of the so-called "reality" shows to the excessive use of the laugh track in current sitcoms (Example: Star of the show enters room: "Hi guys!" [uproarious laughter]. Me: [click]) it seems that most entertainment has already been removed from American television. Frankly, I'd say that the Chinese are fairly late to the removing-excessive-entertainment game.
A lot of the things that I've seen computers used for -- at least in the K-5 classes -- is drill problems (math, vocabulary, etc.). What need is there for "up-to-date" information regarding multiplication tables? If the computers are being used for research, why not put them in the library along with the other research materials? They do not need to be in the classroom. If they're going to be used for training on how to use a computer then why not put them in a lab with enough staff dedicated to dealing with those computers (maintenance, repairs, etc.). That way, each teacher doesn't need to be an expert on the computer and all the software that's on it. How effective of a tool is a computer in the classroom going to be if a single teacher has to be the walking help desk for 20-30 students?
If the state wants to mandate that all students need to take a class on the basics on how to use a computer (Not Office training. Please.) and how to use the Internet for research then fine. Set up a dedicated computer lab for those courses. Add a couple of classrooms, if necessary, to avoid increasing the overall class size. But don't eliminate other courses to fit the mandated curriculum into the school day. I'd be all for lengthening the school day by an hour in order to fit these classes in. (Students will complain but, hey, longer school days are all the rage nowadays.)
Some might consider that to be pointless. Especially since Apple -- whose had their foot in the classroom door for some years now -- seems bent on addicting their customers on locked down appliances and not general purpose computers. You know... the kind that can actually be programmed. Customizing a playlist isn't programming. Maybe Apple will provide the schools the tools so students can write iPhone applications. You can't have too many of those, after all.
Politicians with an axe to grind -- or a bribe in their pocket -- would ignore the OTA just as they now routinely ignore (or decry as being partisan) the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) when its findings are in conflict with their agenda and/or whenever it makes for good theatre in a press conference.
Heh, sometimes being a Ph.D. candidate isn't even good enough to get faculty attention. I knew of a doctoral candidate who had his dissertation sit on the corner of of a professor's desk for the better part of six months. (I know because that professor was the principle investigator on a research contract I was working on and I saw the dissertation sitting every time I came in for project meetings.) Each week I saw more and more paper piled on top of this poor guy's research. Hopefully that sort of inattention, abuse, whatever is not commonplace.
Similar experience. I chose a smaller school with no advanced degree program because I'd actually be attending classes taught by the faculty I'd met. At the University where I saw that dissertation holding down the corner of the professor's desk, I knew of one faculty member that was sweating getting tenure because he'd made the mistake of taking his teaching seriously. Winning an award for distinguished teaching was very nearly the kiss of death for his career at that school.
I do agree that smaller classes are a great way to learn. I wonder how many of these faculty members that don't want to teach aren't the ones stuck with those classes held in auditoriums with dozens and dozens of students (or more). I can't imagine those "classroom" situations are conducive to learning. The largest classes I can remember taking were those infamous senior/first year grad student classes (they were known as 400/500 level classes when I was there). They were awful. It wasn't until I started taking the 600/700 level classes with maybe ten students that you felt like you were really learning. One of my favorite classes as an undergraduate was taught to about six students. At the beginning of the class, the professor made the comment "I decided to teach this class because I wanted to learn more about ..." (He was the department chairman so it's not like he didn't have anything else to do. He was thrilled with the chance to teach.) Since then, I can't imagine taking a class any other way.
Isn't that why most programming editors include a feature like Emacs' "Paren Highlighting"? Turn it on and all those cryptic messages about runaway statements go away. Or, when you are beginning a block enclosed by "( )", "[ ]", or "{ }", add the closing parenthesis, bracket, or brace immediately so you don't forget it. Python's a fine language but switching languages because the coder in unable to remember to close blocks seems, to me, just silly.
That's the first thing that I thought of. If traffic permits, I tend to make slow almost leisurely lane changes, especially if the weather is dicey or if I see something far enough ahead that I need to avoid without having to swerve making some zipping into another lane. How quickly am I going to have to change lanes to avoid fighting some computer alogorithm? Frankly, this sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen the first time the onboard computer steers the car back into a lane only to have it rear-end a slow moving car -- that the driver was slowly changing lanes to avoid -- and someone gets killed. Yeah, the article says that the computer doesn't get involved if the driver uses a signal when changing lanes but that ignores the fact that a lot of drivers don't use the signals if there's no one nearby that would notice the signal. It might be the law but that doesn't mean we need the car enforcing it.
Item "c" isn't necessarily unethical since the only harm would be to the employee that used the tool. It sounds like the company didn't want anyone else using it anyway (not on the approved tool list). Why would the company care if it disappeared?
You misread item "d". The company was the one who'd be wiping the hard disk and not the employee. Nothing malicious would be taking place. Many if not most companies will routinely wipe the hard disk and reinstall Windows on someone's PC when they leave. The former employee's personal tools are gone.
Item "e" just sounds like a courtesy to any future users of the utility (should it somehow survive "c" and "d") as to where to find support. Now if the tool became non-functional and the splash screen told you to call some phone number in order to re-enable it, that might be borderline extortion. Especially if the tool had become part of an established SOP that the company depended on. (Though it would then have to made it onto to that approved tool list, wouldn't it?) A casual user is probably more likely to fire up the tool, see that the tool doesn't work any more, and say "Aw... screw it, that doesn't work any more", delete the tool, and just go back to doing manually what the tool automated.
(Personally, I would have left an email address instead of a phone number to avoid getting a 3:00AM call from a new employee who had a question about the tool.)
SciAm is a shadow of its former self. I subscribed many years ago and the articles were written with the idea that its readers were somewhat well versed in science. Not quite the audience educational level as, say, Nature might require, but you definitely benefited from having taken a lot of science in your schooling. You might have even felt a sense of accomplishment after you finished an article in particle physics or some new medical discovery (neither were close to my college major) and understood what the article was trying to convey. The articles were easy to find and follow and the advertisements were limited to the sidebars of pages or, if full page, were normally marked with the word "Advertisement" on the top or bottom of the page. For me, things started going downhill when they felt a need to include twelve-page advertisements for some country that wanted to tout the nifty technologies that are being used in their economy. At least they didn't look like the regular articles and I could easily skip over them.
Nowadays, the articles seem to be written for junior high school students. Almost worse is the new format where the articles are nearly indistinguishable from the ads. I realize that advertisements are critical to the magazine's ability to survive and I can't fault them for having ads even if the number of them is increasing at a disturbing rate. What I take offense at is reading the left-hand page of an article and moving to the right-hand page only to discover that I've read a paragraph of text from an ad that is formatted identically to the article. (What's next? Blatant product hawking in the text of the articles?) If I was a subscriber, I'd complain but since I only buy it at the grocery store when there appear to be several articles I might find interesting I suppose I can't make too big of a fuss. The recent changes to the magazine mean that I buy it less and less which, if my thoughts on their new direction are any indication of widespread sentiment, isn't going to be doing SciAm any good in the long run.
It's supposed to be a science journal so format it like one and not like it's Good Housekeeping.
Make that 'Kohl' and not 'Kolb'. And, while I didn't see anything in the FEC listings about Kohl having received anything substantial from tech companies, Lee, on the other hand, seems to do nothing but collect money from PACs and corporations. (The only link I see between these two guys is the concrete industry which makes you wonder what sort of back scratching is going on here.) Both Microsoft and K&L Gates (Bill's daddy's law firm) were contributors. Hmm...
Oh wait... we haven't heard this before. Where was the letter from senators complaining that Microsoft could do these same kind of things?
I haven't checked yet but does anyone know whether senators Kolb and Lee have received sizable bribes^Wcampaign contributions from Microsoft, their friends, lobbyists, or industry groups that have Microsoft as a major supporter? (I'm guessing that they have.)
At that point, the interviewee should be saying "Thank you for your time. I'll be posting my interview experience online as soon as I get home" and walking the hell out.
Not that I completely agree with everything that IT management decides to do but...
If folks are using a network that doesn't belong to them and computers that don't belong to them either why aren't they just using the equipment that the company supplies and do the job they were hired to do? It is going to be extremely rare for someone's job to require the ability to install iTunes and manage music on MP3 players? (One has to wonder what will be the next "right" that's being denied to employees? Surfing for pr0n using the corporate network?) The monthly malware/patch meeting I attend has this discussion nearly every time it convenes. One has to wonder what business need is being provided by iTunes. It never fails to amaze me that people think that all the toys that they own need to work flawlessly on the corporate network. Stop calling that thing in your cubicle a personal computer. It ain't. Their workplace, their rules. Deal with it.
I can still remember when having one's briefcase/purse/bag/etc. inspected going into and when leaving the premises was standard procedure. A camera would have been confiscated immediately and removing anything required a manager's approval. (I needed to borrow a keyboard one weekend after mine had croaked and needed my manager's and his manager's approvals on the form that I needed to present to security on the way out of the building. All for something as benign as a keyboard.) Imagine the squawking that would occur nowadays if they started enforcing a policy like that with smartphones with cameras and/or multi-gigabytes of memory and having the ability to get onto the corporate network. Yeah, this was at a defense-oriented company but I've worked at financial firms with just as strict security.
It takes less concentration to sing-along to the radio. When you're on the phone with someone, you actually are listening to and processing what they're saying and formulating a response. That's a lot more difficult than singing. I suspect that language processing uses some of the same parts of the brain that you should be using while driving and diverting that brain power from the driving task is the cause of the poor driving. My anecdotal evidence for this is my experience of carrying on a conversation with one of my relatives while he's driving. His ability to drive without scaring the crap out of everyone when he's attempting to carry on a conversation causes his passengers to shut up when he's driving. And that's when he's talking to people in the same vehicle with both hands on the wheel. I'd hate to see what his driving would be like if he were juggling a cellphone.
What is amazing to me while reading the responses to this article is the lengths that people will go to defend their desire to use their expensive toys while they're in command of a moving vehicle. I seriously doubt that pilots would be defending their right to use a cellphone while on final approach? Yet there's a burning need to be talking at all times while driving a car. Unless you are the only person on the planet that knows whether the person on the other end of the phone call is supposed to cut the red wire or the green wire on the bomb at the orphanage, nothing is more important than driving the car when you're driving the damned car.
It's bad enough that my family physician has to employ a couple of people whose sole job is to deal with the insurance companies all day long. Now it seems, if this idea is approved by the Supreme Court, they'll need to have a patent attorney on retainer to make sure they don't run afoul of some pharmaceutical company who found that a drug's effectiveness can actually be measured.
I thought it was supposed to be a bad idea to have the government getting between the doctor and the patient. If this isn't government getting between me and my doctor, I sure as hell don't know what is.
We gave up on cable -- mainly because of the cost -- back in the early '90s. It just wasn't worth it to pay the ever increasing cable bill just to see 2-3 new movies each month -- often scheduled in the middle of the day and conflicting with something else you wanted to tape -- and then the rest of the month was Elton John in concert. We really haven't missed it it at all. The Sopranos? Didn't see that and we're all still doing just fine. The Real Housewives of East Gumshoe Idaho? Couldn't care less. We live just south of the WI border and the OTA stations we get from Chicago are more than enough.
I haven't really noticed the difference since we don't have cable and when I'm at a friend's house it's not to watch TV. But I have had people come over and while we might be in another room while the kids are watching something on TV we'll hear someone comment on what a great picture we get. Most stuff is crystal clear. (Though I would really like to see Universal Sports buy some damned HD cameras for their cycling and track & field coverage.)