I'm not saying windows is smart having a one size fits all OS. I'm saying that their file system is "good enough" for most of the things windows does. Not to mention, it makes it hella easy to work on windows machines when you're pulling and swapping hard drives. They're phasing out the old crappy (fat), standardizing on the current (ntfs), and (in theory) looking forward (winFS).
Yes, sometimes file system types can make a performance difference. Using ReiserFS is going to help out when you're doing stuff with lots of little files, yes. How much? I dunno. Will most people be happy with ext3? Yes, absolutely. ext3 will do pretty much everything you need it to do. However, when you choose a filesystem type in the fdisk menu on linux, there are literally this many:
Command (m for help): l
0 Empty 1e Hidden W95 FAT1 80 Old Minix be Solaris boot
1 FAT12 24 NEC DOS 81 Minix / old Lin bf Solaris
2 XENIX root 39 Plan 9 82 Linux swap / So c1 DRDOS/sec (FAT-
3 XENIX usr 3c PartitionMagic 83 Linux c4 DRDOS/sec (FAT-
4 FAT16 <32M 40 Venix 80286 84 OS/2 hidden C: c6 DRDOS/sec (FAT-
5 Extended 41 PPC PReP Boot 85 Linux extended c7 Syrinx
6 FAT16 42 SFS 86 NTFS volume set da Non-FS data
7 HPFS/NTFS 4d QNX4.x 87 NTFS volume set db CP/M / CTOS /.
8 AIX 4e QNX4.x 2nd part 88 Linux plaintext de Dell Utility
9 AIX bootable 4f QNX4.x 3rd part 8e Linux LVM df BootIt
a OS/2 Boot Manag 50 OnTrack DM 93 Amoeba e1 DOS access
b W95 FAT32 51 OnTrack DM6 Aux 94 Amoeba BBT e3 DOS R/O
c W95 FAT32 (LBA) 52 CP/M 9f BSD/OS e4 SpeedStor
e W95 FAT16 (LBA) 53 OnTrack DM6 Aux a0 IBM Thinkpad hi eb BeOS fs
f W95 Ext'd (LBA) 54 OnTrackDM6 a5 FreeBSD ee EFI GPT 10 OPUS 55 EZ-Drive a6 OpenBSD ef EFI (FAT-12/16/ 11 Hidden FAT12 56 Golden Bow a7 NeXTSTEP f0 Linux/PA-RISC b 12 Compaq diagnost 5c Priam Edisk a8 Darwin UFS f1 SpeedStor 14 Hidden FAT16 <3 61 SpeedStor a9 NetBSD f4 SpeedStor 16 Hidden FAT16 63 GNU HURD or Sys ab Darwin boot f2 DOS secondary 17 Hidden HPFS/NTF 64 Novell Netware b7 BSDI fs fd Linux raid auto 18 AST SmartSleep 65 Novell Netware b8 BSDI swap fe LANstep 1b Hidden W95 FAT3 70 DiskSecure Mult bb Boot Wizard hid ff BBT 1c Hidden W95 FAT3 75 PC/IX
I'm not saying there aren't holes in my arguement, but... it's hard to deny that's a crapoload of filesystem types. Now, it's not Linux's fault (or GNU or whoever wrote fdisk) that there are that many options.
But this is a symptom of a greater problem in Linux - it's desire to be every thing to every one. And not in a "get on my bandwagon or get the fuck out" type scenario, like you have with Windows - but a location for everyone to dump any pet project that they have ever made, and eventually we have 43 window managers, 2 Xservers, 18 mail dameons, 97 web browsers, 9 different sets of wireless networking tools (none of which work for more than 3 chipsets), 812 shells, 14 IM clients, 84 Mp3 players, and four office suites. Boy, if you like choice, linux is the place to be. But, some of us find it a bit overwhelming at times (mainly, when "some of us" have to do desktop support for linux).
I can't help but wonder if all the people who are working on different, paralell projects pooled their efforts where Linux would be today.
And as I've been saying for 4 or 5 years now on Slashdot, all I ever wanted out of linux was a universal clipboard with a universal API for cutting and pasting. We now have windows that wobble with hardware accelerated graphics (FC6). Great. I'd like to be able to cut and paste.
Dude, welcome to linux. Windows has One File System(tm) because... it's easier. Linux has 129 filesystems because 129 different people think each one is the best at what it does.
I love linux, but sometimes too much choice is a bad thing. If linux was a car, there'd be 18 steering wheels and no air conditioning, but you'd be able to change the radio stations from the hubcaps.
Point conceded, although arguably that was fry centric.
In looking at my origional post, I don't think I really got across the point that I really, really love futurama. It has a much higher replay value than Family Guy. I just wanted to point out that some of the Futurama eps are painfully bad.
I completely agree. Futurama's humor is episode derived, whereas the Family Guy humor is completely independant of the episodic content. FG basically comes up with great scenes or one liners, and puts them into the episode randomly (as flashbacks or whatever).
The thing is, though, sometimes I like that part of family guy. Family Guy has been milk-out-the-nose funny on multiple ocasions. And even bad episodes of Family Guy are fairly funny. This is contrasted with Futurama, which in every way you think matters is "better", more sophisticated humor, better written, but A.) It's never made me laugh so hard my milk was in danger, and B.) Let's face it - there are some freaking great futurama episodes, but when it's bad, it's BAAAAAD (bend her, obsoletely fabulous, bender should not be allowed on TV, etc).
Which leads into the Bender Paradox: Bender is consistantly the funniest character on Futurama, as long as he is a side character. Bender CANNOT carry an episode. Every bender centric episode is horrible.
As an agnost, my whole take is that we do not have enough evidence to say one way or the other, so why bother. We have a brain, to think and analyse, so why not just use it for that, rather than just spend your life pondering over some entity, fictional or otherwise?
Or, as I like to say, "I care about whether or not there's a god WAAAAY less than I care about whether or not there are unicorns."
People seem to forget that side of atheism. There are some atheists who are adament that there IS NOT and CANNOT EVER BE a god, and then there are those of us who just couldn't give a crap.
It boggles the religious fundie's mind, too, since it's the most important thing in their life. I mean, it's like a hippie wanting to save the environment to the point that they are consumed by it, and me not caring one bit about the environment. Except more so.
I've had him blocked in my preferences since 2000, when the feature was introduced. Voices from the hellmouth, indeed. What really happened at columbine (as told by someone who hasn't been a highschool kid in 30 years, and who was a thousand miles from colorado when it happened).
Now, he wrote a book about a cat. I wonder if it's as preachy as his other dribble? I'd guess so if it's a hollywood movie now.
In conclusion, DIAF. All you new slashdotters that missed him, be glad. He used this website as his personal soapbox.
Microsoft has enough money in their bank - and I mean liquid assets - that they could stop now, and never, ever release another product, and still continue to pay everyone on their payroll at their current rate forever. Just from the interest that their liquid assets pull in.
Windows XP came out over 5 years ago. When it came out, it included nearly every driver for every obscure piece of hardware known to man. It included even in beta a driver for the newfangled Voodoo5 5500 graphics card with 4 GPU's on it. All sorts of network cards and modems (thank god, it supported the lne100tx tulip card and a good number of realtek 8139 cards). Video cards - it supported the Riva TNT2, the state of the art card at the time. It has shitloads of printer drivers. It supports soundblaster live cards.
The reason it doesn't know what your CMEDIA-AZEALUS onboard sound card is, or your GeForce FX 7850GTX Special edition, or your Intel eepro1000 Gigabit network card is, is because it came out 5 years ago! They don't release new driver packs with the updates, so yes, heavens to murtrigord, you're going to have to install some drivers from the CD's that come with your hardware.
This isn't an issue on various flavors of linux because THEY'RE NEWER! Windows XP came out around the same time as RedHat 7.1. Go find a RH7.1 install and see what it recognizes. And Vista is still beta, cheif. Once it comes out, then you can start knocking it. You found a problem with Vista - did you submit a bug report? That's what beta versions are for, ya know. Finding the kind of stuff you found, and rather than ranting about it, getting it fixed before it ships.
I am an Eagle scout, troop 171. I also spent time in troop 343.
I loved boy scouts. I really had a good time. I was in it all the way from cub scouts, up till my 18th birthday. I still use a lot of the knowledge I gained in scouting - aside from the camping skills, I learned how to camp, and how to tie knots (which comes in handy more often than you'd think), and a number of other skills. The leadership experience was also very important in building me into the person I am today.
However, before I sound like an advertisement for scouts, the point where it started turning down hill was when they introduced "Family Life" merit badge. I think it was while I was a scout - it wasn't in my handbook, but you had to get it to get your Eagle. We all kind of looked at it like it was just an excuse to have the parents do part of the dirty work - part of the merit badge is having "the talk" (both the sex one and the drugs one) with your parents. I look back now and see that it's the religious influence that was probably slipping talks about responsible abstinence and sexuality into a club which otherwise dealt with how to build a good fire, or which boot and sock configuration would avoid the blisters, or how to splint a finger or put your arm in a sling. It comes from the fact that most of the top scouts decision makers now are Mormons. I think something like 2 out of every 5 scouts, maybe more, are mormons. The mormon church has in part co-opted scouts to be part of it's youth program. There's nothing wrong with Mormons, of course, but organized, denomination-specific christianity should not be an integral part of a scout program.
I'm also very dissapointed with the boy scouts' dual standard of government status. I was never a part of a troop that met in a public building (both my troops, and my pack, were church-affiliates), but some boy scout troops meet in schools, for free. Well, the deal is if you use government property for free, you need to conform to government regulations, which includes anti-discriminatory regulations. However, when the scouts want to keep the gays out, they claim private organization status. You can't have your Jamboree at Fort A.P. hill, and rent a government base (and use a lot of government labor) for free one minute, and the next minute, say that homosexuals can't be scouts. Or that people who don't believe in God can't be scouts (not "a god" or "any god" or "a higher power", but "The GOD(tm)").
Thankfully, if there is a saving grace for boy scouts, it's that individually, on a troop level, most of the crap is ignored. I've never been near a troop that forced any religion on anymore, or that wussified scouting on purpose. Our weekly meetings were either talking about the camping trip that just happened, or planning that awesome cold-weather backpacking trip next month. We ran obsticle courses, we learned first aid, we had discussions of good citizenship and community envolvement. We did service projects - we fixed homeless shelters' food pantries, we made handicapped ramps for churches, we cleared overgrowth for city parks. To me that's what scouting is about.
I think what we have here is a case of individual scouting practices on a troop level probably will forego the crap that people are worried about - it's the top level that is out of line here. Also, let me point out that this story is about boy scouts of Los Angeles, and I don't think this is on a national level.
The US has a low population density over the entire country. Nobody lives between Chicago and Denver. The plane states are called "flyover country" for a reason. There's no reason to stop.
The population density around the BOSWASH area is pretty high - as in, 1 in 5 Americans lives within 100 miles of the coast, between Fredericksburg, Va. and Lawrence, Mass.
And yet, we couldn't convince the community that they needed to keep a short, 1 page blurb on the official counterstrike maps - de_dust, cs_office etc. Despite that 1 in 15 people in america owns counterstrike, and at any point, even years after its release, there are 100,000 people playing it, or that it's by far the most popular first person shooter ever.
Gotta make space for those individual pages on pokemon characters.
Well, of course - for university owned computers for which the only approved use is academic, then *NOW* your plan seems perfectly reasonable.
Even at the school where I work, where we have tons of bandwidth, we don't restrict specific sites or what-have-you, but we do restrict what is (and what can be) installed on our lab machines. This keeps the non-school use down quite a bit (no aim, no WoW, etc).
Although, we did have some grad student lately come in and do some sort of research in the linux lab with the Torque gaming engine, studing something about network traffic flow while people are gaming...
Additionally, this jackass needs to stop talking about "academically important" or whatever. People that live on campus, LIVE THERE. And they are ADULTS. The campus is their only option for internet access. Back when I was in school and living in the dorms, you couldn't even hook up a modem to the phone line - it was a digital system. You had to use the campus ethernet to get online.
So, yes, people are in school to learn, and to get a degree. However, they also live there. Sometimes they may want to stream some music to listen to while they study. Sometimes they may want to stream some music while they kick back age appropriate beverages and watch The Man Show. Even if you find nothing academically relevant in myspace, or youtube, or whatver, guess what? Kids don't spend 100% of their time doing school/sleeping/doing homework. So what if they want to play some Counterstrike? Or heavens forbid, look at porn? Why do you care, and what gives you the authority to decide if it's ok?
Censorship is bad.
Period, there's no mitigating factors there. Censorship is bad. More access to information is ALWAYS better, and crucial to a free society. For relaxation, pleasure, study, or research, adults should be left to make their own decisions.
If you need more bandwidth, use that proxy server for what could be for - local caching of popular sites. Or, heavens forbid, charge your kids more money and buy more bandwidth. Stop being a dick, though, is really the message that this guy needs.
When I was in college, I took 2 semesters of Middle East history (I have a history degree). My professor, Dr. William Ochsenwald, told us that for a while he lived in Beirut, doing research (among other places, I know he lived also in Istanbul and in Cairo for a while).
Anyway, he said that, back in the 60's, Beirut was a happening place. Supposedly, a good number of international spies had apartments in Beirut, as the city wasn't a place that encouraged question asking. He also said that you could walk down to the bazaar and buy almost anything, up to but not including nuclear weapons, along side the melons and chickens and fabric. Seriously. Beads and pottery, next booth over AK-47's.
People around here still run 800x600 on their 17" monitors, and complain that 1280x1024 is too small.
When I was a ground-pounder, doing on site tech support and installations, etc., I would run into this all the time, especially when people were upgrading from, say, a 17" CRT to a 17" LCD. I would just try to explain to people that the monitor is designed to run at the higher resolution, and if you run it smaller, it's actually harder to read, because it makes its self blurry while it blows up the picture. Or something like that. Usually I would convince people to try to leave the monitor on the native resolution for a week or two.
Seriously. If you put an LCD at a smaller resolution, it just looks awful, but if someone demands it, then whatever. Get 'em a 1600x1200 native resolution so when they crank it to 800x600 it'll scale propotionally.
1.) My brother and I had an N64. It was fun at the time to play golden eye. However, be honest with yourself. These games largely are not fun anymore. The console gaming world was new to 3-D, and most of the play control (I'm looking at you, Mario64) is just abysmal (wait, I was running forward, and now the camera autoswitched and I ran off the cliff to the left...).
The controller was wonky. The games yes were 3-D but even by standards a year or two after launch looked terrible (compare "Goldeneye", 1997, to "Unreal Tournament", 1999). I focus on GoldenEye cause it's the "killer game" for the system that everyone brings up. The controler + bad play control makes the games difficult to play. The bad graphics gave us problems aiming. I mean... I'm not all about graphics. I go back and play old games, and not for nostalgia - because they're good. But, Goldeneye offers nothing above subsequent first person shooters.
Seriously, go back and play a lot of those games. They're... not as fun as you remember. Or, they won't be anymore. And that's what makes a console, or a game, great - when it stands the test of time. ChronoTrigger stands the test of time. Hell, super mario world stands the test of time. The N64 was a reach that the console gaming world wasn't ready for, technologically. And the games don't stand the test of time. Honestly, would you rather go back and play goldeneye over Metal Gear Solid - which was released only a year later?
2.) Playstation did have bad signal to noise ratio. And I don't think it was the best console ever. But, let's be honest. When you've got 100 titles, and 10 killer games, versus 2000 titles, and 50 killer games... you still have 5 times the good games to choose from.
Furthermore, it shows a complete ineptitude as to how the internets work.
"Hey there, Du-Rail. I got's me an IDEAR. Let's ban them online Casinos."
"Sounds good, Tex! Them's dens of heathens anyway."
Gentlemen, your internet tubes also connect to places like... Belarus and Sao Paulo. These places give less than a shit about horse porn - what makes you think they'd care about online gambling?
Statistically speaking, it's likely that a sizable percentage of these students download copyrighted material from the Internet. Do you think any of them are concerned about IP rights then?"
Irrelevant.
"There is a high likelyhood that you might do A, therefore we must assume you also do B."
This kind of tagline at the end of the post is unnecesary and silly. The fact that I go 10 miles per hour over the speed limit occasionally is no cause for my car to be impounded and searched for cocaine. Two wrongs never, ever, make a right. If someone is downloading an MP3 off the internet, it may be illegal, but it doesn't give a body of people the right to violate their privacy on a completely unrelated matter.
...You bring all your study-abroad grad students and Post-doc's home.
Jesus christ, where it used to be (dots not feathers) Indians across the board in the Computer Science department that I work for's grad student program, now it's incoming 60% chinese, 20% indian, and 20% other, including US.
I see three very interesting side effects to this:
1.) China may actually be able to become a brainiac super-power overnight.
2.) A great number of technical universities in the US are going to be doing a lot less research, and a number of professors are going to distinguish themselves as consummate researchers, or else fall back in the pack and lose grant money.
3.) My break room won't smell like fish-eye soup all the goddamn time.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, sometimes file system types can make a performance difference. Using ReiserFS is going to help out when you're doing stuff with lots of little files, yes. How much? I dunno. Will most people be happy with ext3? Yes, absolutely. ext3 will do pretty much everything you need it to do. However, when you choose a filesystem type in the fdisk menu on linux, there are literally this many: I'm not saying there aren't holes in my arguement, but... it's hard to deny that's a crapoload of filesystem types. Now, it's not Linux's fault (or GNU or whoever wrote fdisk) that there are that many options.
But this is a symptom of a greater problem in Linux - it's desire to be every thing to every one. And not in a "get on my bandwagon or get the fuck out" type scenario, like you have with Windows - but a location for everyone to dump any pet project that they have ever made, and eventually we have 43 window managers, 2 Xservers, 18 mail dameons, 97 web browsers, 9 different sets of wireless networking tools (none of which work for more than 3 chipsets), 812 shells, 14 IM clients, 84 Mp3 players, and four office suites. Boy, if you like choice, linux is the place to be. But, some of us find it a bit overwhelming at times (mainly, when "some of us" have to do desktop support for linux).
I can't help but wonder if all the people who are working on different, paralell projects pooled their efforts where Linux would be today.
And as I've been saying for 4 or 5 years now on Slashdot, all I ever wanted out of linux was a universal clipboard with a universal API for cutting and pasting. We now have windows that wobble with hardware accelerated graphics (FC6). Great. I'd like to be able to cut and paste.
~Wx
Dude, welcome to linux. Windows has One File System(tm) because... it's easier. Linux has 129 filesystems because 129 different people think each one is the best at what it does.
I love linux, but sometimes too much choice is a bad thing. If linux was a car, there'd be 18 steering wheels and no air conditioning, but you'd be able to change the radio stations from the hubcaps.
Point conceded, although arguably that was fry centric.
In looking at my origional post, I don't think I really got across the point that I really, really love futurama. It has a much higher replay value than Family Guy. I just wanted to point out that some of the Futurama eps are painfully bad.
I completely agree. Futurama's humor is episode derived, whereas the Family Guy humor is completely independant of the episodic content. FG basically comes up with great scenes or one liners, and puts them into the episode randomly (as flashbacks or whatever).
The thing is, though, sometimes I like that part of family guy. Family Guy has been milk-out-the-nose funny on multiple ocasions. And even bad episodes of Family Guy are fairly funny. This is contrasted with Futurama, which in every way you think matters is "better", more sophisticated humor, better written, but A.) It's never made me laugh so hard my milk was in danger, and B.) Let's face it - there are some freaking great futurama episodes, but when it's bad, it's BAAAAAD (bend her, obsoletely fabulous, bender should not be allowed on TV, etc).
Which leads into the Bender Paradox: Bender is consistantly the funniest character on Futurama, as long as he is a side character. Bender CANNOT carry an episode. Every bender centric episode is horrible.
~Wx
As an agnost, my whole take is that we do not have enough evidence to say one way or the other, so why bother. We have a brain, to think and analyse, so why not just use it for that, rather than just spend your life pondering over some entity, fictional or otherwise?
Or, as I like to say, "I care about whether or not there's a god WAAAAY less than I care about whether or not there are unicorns."
People seem to forget that side of atheism. There are some atheists who are adament that there IS NOT and CANNOT EVER BE a god, and then there are those of us who just couldn't give a crap.
It boggles the religious fundie's mind, too, since it's the most important thing in their life. I mean, it's like a hippie wanting to save the environment to the point that they are consumed by it, and me not caring one bit about the environment. Except more so.
~Wx
By "renting out" that "slot" (!)
Was it really necesary to give us an ascii representation of the female anatomy after you describe it as a slot?
~Wx
Damn zerg rush.
I thought he was dead!
I've had him blocked in my preferences since 2000, when the feature was introduced. Voices from the hellmouth, indeed. What really happened at columbine (as told by someone who hasn't been a highschool kid in 30 years, and who was a thousand miles from colorado when it happened).
Now, he wrote a book about a cat. I wonder if it's as preachy as his other dribble? I'd guess so if it's a hollywood movie now.
In conclusion, DIAF. All you new slashdotters that missed him, be glad. He used this website as his personal soapbox.
~Wx
Microsoft has enough money in their bank - and I mean liquid assets - that they could stop now, and never, ever release another product, and still continue to pay everyone on their payroll at their current rate forever. Just from the interest that their liquid assets pull in.
Microsoft isn't going bankrupt.
Yeah, I definately want to get that from thepiratebay.
There's no Other source for the Remote Desktop client.
~X
Dude, chill.
Windows XP came out over 5 years ago. When it came out, it included nearly every driver for every obscure piece of hardware known to man. It included even in beta a driver for the newfangled Voodoo5 5500 graphics card with 4 GPU's on it. All sorts of network cards and modems (thank god, it supported the lne100tx tulip card and a good number of realtek 8139 cards). Video cards - it supported the Riva TNT2, the state of the art card at the time. It has shitloads of printer drivers. It supports soundblaster live cards.
The reason it doesn't know what your CMEDIA-AZEALUS onboard sound card is, or your GeForce FX 7850GTX Special edition, or your Intel eepro1000 Gigabit network card is, is because it came out 5 years ago! They don't release new driver packs with the updates, so yes, heavens to murtrigord, you're going to have to install some drivers from the CD's that come with your hardware.
This isn't an issue on various flavors of linux because THEY'RE NEWER! Windows XP came out around the same time as RedHat 7.1. Go find a RH7.1 install and see what it recognizes. And Vista is still beta, cheif. Once it comes out, then you can start knocking it. You found a problem with Vista - did you submit a bug report? That's what beta versions are for, ya know. Finding the kind of stuff you found, and rather than ranting about it, getting it fixed before it ships.
~Wix
You do whatever you think is right with your Real Doll's O-Ring...
I am an Eagle scout, troop 171. I also spent time in troop 343.
I loved boy scouts. I really had a good time. I was in it all the way from cub scouts, up till my 18th birthday. I still use a lot of the knowledge I gained in scouting - aside from the camping skills, I learned how to camp, and how to tie knots (which comes in handy more often than you'd think), and a number of other skills. The leadership experience was also very important in building me into the person I am today.
However, before I sound like an advertisement for scouts, the point where it started turning down hill was when they introduced "Family Life" merit badge. I think it was while I was a scout - it wasn't in my handbook, but you had to get it to get your Eagle. We all kind of looked at it like it was just an excuse to have the parents do part of the dirty work - part of the merit badge is having "the talk" (both the sex one and the drugs one) with your parents. I look back now and see that it's the religious influence that was probably slipping talks about responsible abstinence and sexuality into a club which otherwise dealt with how to build a good fire, or which boot and sock configuration would avoid the blisters, or how to splint a finger or put your arm in a sling. It comes from the fact that most of the top scouts decision makers now are Mormons. I think something like 2 out of every 5 scouts, maybe more, are mormons. The mormon church has in part co-opted scouts to be part of it's youth program. There's nothing wrong with Mormons, of course, but organized, denomination-specific christianity should not be an integral part of a scout program.
I'm also very dissapointed with the boy scouts' dual standard of government status. I was never a part of a troop that met in a public building (both my troops, and my pack, were church-affiliates), but some boy scout troops meet in schools, for free. Well, the deal is if you use government property for free, you need to conform to government regulations, which includes anti-discriminatory regulations. However, when the scouts want to keep the gays out, they claim private organization status. You can't have your Jamboree at Fort A.P. hill, and rent a government base (and use a lot of government labor) for free one minute, and the next minute, say that homosexuals can't be scouts. Or that people who don't believe in God can't be scouts (not "a god" or "any god" or "a higher power", but "The GOD(tm)").
Thankfully, if there is a saving grace for boy scouts, it's that individually, on a troop level, most of the crap is ignored. I've never been near a troop that forced any religion on anymore, or that wussified scouting on purpose. Our weekly meetings were either talking about the camping trip that just happened, or planning that awesome cold-weather backpacking trip next month. We ran obsticle courses, we learned first aid, we had discussions of good citizenship and community envolvement. We did service projects - we fixed homeless shelters' food pantries, we made handicapped ramps for churches, we cleared overgrowth for city parks. To me that's what scouting is about.
I think what we have here is a case of individual scouting practices on a troop level probably will forego the crap that people are worried about - it's the top level that is out of line here. Also, let me point out that this story is about boy scouts of Los Angeles, and I don't think this is on a national level.
~Will
The US has a low population density over the entire country. Nobody lives between Chicago and Denver. The plane states are called "flyover country" for a reason. There's no reason to stop.
The population density around the BOSWASH area is pretty high - as in, 1 in 5 Americans lives within 100 miles of the coast, between Fredericksburg, Va. and Lawrence, Mass.
~Wx
And yet, we couldn't convince the community that they needed to keep a short, 1 page blurb on the official counterstrike maps - de_dust, cs_office etc. Despite that 1 in 15 people in america owns counterstrike, and at any point, even years after its release, there are 100,000 people playing it, or that it's by far the most popular first person shooter ever.
Gotta make space for those individual pages on pokemon characters.
~Will
AAAahhhh, yes! That's a big mistake!
Well, of course - for university owned computers for which the only approved use is academic, then *NOW* your plan seems perfectly reasonable.
Even at the school where I work, where we have tons of bandwidth, we don't restrict specific sites or what-have-you, but we do restrict what is (and what can be) installed on our lab machines. This keeps the non-school use down quite a bit (no aim, no WoW, etc).
Although, we did have some grad student lately come in and do some sort of research in the linux lab with the Torque gaming engine, studing something about network traffic flow while people are gaming...
~Will
Additionally, this jackass needs to stop talking about "academically important" or whatever. People that live on campus, LIVE THERE. And they are ADULTS. The campus is their only option for internet access. Back when I was in school and living in the dorms, you couldn't even hook up a modem to the phone line - it was a digital system. You had to use the campus ethernet to get online.
So, yes, people are in school to learn, and to get a degree. However, they also live there. Sometimes they may want to stream some music to listen to while they study. Sometimes they may want to stream some music while they kick back age appropriate beverages and watch The Man Show. Even if you find nothing academically relevant in myspace, or youtube, or whatver, guess what? Kids don't spend 100% of their time doing school/sleeping/doing homework. So what if they want to play some Counterstrike? Or heavens forbid, look at porn? Why do you care, and what gives you the authority to decide if it's ok?
Censorship is bad.
Period, there's no mitigating factors there. Censorship is bad. More access to information is ALWAYS better, and crucial to a free society. For relaxation, pleasure, study, or research, adults should be left to make their own decisions.
If you need more bandwidth, use that proxy server for what could be for - local caching of popular sites. Or, heavens forbid, charge your kids more money and buy more bandwidth. Stop being a dick, though, is really the message that this guy needs.
~Wx
When I was in college, I took 2 semesters of Middle East history (I have a history degree). My professor, Dr. William Ochsenwald, told us that for a while he lived in Beirut, doing research (among other places, I know he lived also in Istanbul and in Cairo for a while).
Anyway, he said that, back in the 60's, Beirut was a happening place. Supposedly, a good number of international spies had apartments in Beirut, as the city wasn't a place that encouraged question asking. He also said that you could walk down to the bazaar and buy almost anything, up to but not including nuclear weapons, along side the melons and chickens and fabric. Seriously. Beads and pottery, next booth over AK-47's.
~Wx
People around here still run 800x600 on their 17" monitors, and complain that 1280x1024 is too small.
When I was a ground-pounder, doing on site tech support and installations, etc., I would run into this all the time, especially when people were upgrading from, say, a 17" CRT to a 17" LCD. I would just try to explain to people that the monitor is designed to run at the higher resolution, and if you run it smaller, it's actually harder to read, because it makes its self blurry while it blows up the picture. Or something like that. Usually I would convince people to try to leave the monitor on the native resolution for a week or two.
Seriously. If you put an LCD at a smaller resolution, it just looks awful, but if someone demands it, then whatever. Get 'em a 1600x1200 native resolution so when they crank it to 800x600 it'll scale propotionally.
~Will
For some reason I don't think cloning T-Rex Dinosaurs will resault in us eating them!
In Soviet Russia.... Joke is inserted Here!
Ok, two quick things.
1.) My brother and I had an N64. It was fun at the time to play golden eye. However, be honest with yourself. These games largely are not fun anymore. The console gaming world was new to 3-D, and most of the play control (I'm looking at you, Mario64) is just abysmal (wait, I was running forward, and now the camera autoswitched and I ran off the cliff to the left...).
The controller was wonky. The games yes were 3-D but even by standards a year or two after launch looked terrible (compare "Goldeneye", 1997, to "Unreal Tournament", 1999). I focus on GoldenEye cause it's the "killer game" for the system that everyone brings up. The controler + bad play control makes the games difficult to play. The bad graphics gave us problems aiming. I mean... I'm not all about graphics. I go back and play old games, and not for nostalgia - because they're good. But, Goldeneye offers nothing above subsequent first person shooters.
Seriously, go back and play a lot of those games. They're... not as fun as you remember. Or, they won't be anymore. And that's what makes a console, or a game, great - when it stands the test of time. ChronoTrigger stands the test of time. Hell, super mario world stands the test of time. The N64 was a reach that the console gaming world wasn't ready for, technologically. And the games don't stand the test of time. Honestly, would you rather go back and play goldeneye over Metal Gear Solid - which was released only a year later?
2.) Playstation did have bad signal to noise ratio. And I don't think it was the best console ever. But, let's be honest. When you've got 100 titles, and 10 killer games, versus 2000 titles, and 50 killer games... you still have 5 times the good games to choose from.
~Wx
Furthermore, it shows a complete ineptitude as to how the internets work.
"Hey there, Du-Rail. I got's me an IDEAR. Let's ban them online Casinos."
"Sounds good, Tex! Them's dens of heathens anyway."
Gentlemen, your internet tubes also connect to places like... Belarus and Sao Paulo. These places give less than a shit about horse porn - what makes you think they'd care about online gambling?
*sigh*
1.) http://slashdot.org/palm
2.) My phone renders slashdot-minus-CSS just fine. It's a T-Mobile Sidekick II. Without the CSS, the page is perfectly readable.
(to get an idea of what it looks like, in firefox, "View" - "Page Style" - No Style)
~X
Statistically speaking, it's likely that a sizable percentage of these students download copyrighted material from the Internet. Do you think any of them are concerned about IP rights then?"
Irrelevant.
"There is a high likelyhood that you might do A, therefore we must assume you also do B."
This kind of tagline at the end of the post is unnecesary and silly. The fact that I go 10 miles per hour over the speed limit occasionally is no cause for my car to be impounded and searched for cocaine. Two wrongs never, ever, make a right. If someone is downloading an MP3 off the internet, it may be illegal, but it doesn't give a body of people the right to violate their privacy on a completely unrelated matter.
~Wx
Jesus christ, where it used to be (dots not feathers) Indians across the board in the Computer Science department that I work for's grad student program, now it's incoming 60% chinese, 20% indian, and 20% other, including US.
I see three very interesting side effects to this:
1.) China may actually be able to become a brainiac super-power overnight.
2.) A great number of technical universities in the US are going to be doing a lot less research, and a number of professors are going to distinguish themselves as consummate researchers, or else fall back in the pack and lose grant money.
3.) My break room won't smell like fish-eye soup all the goddamn time.
~Wx