Does anyone complaining about "young IT professionals" understand that they have a high turnover rate because these professionals find opportunities elsewhere? If the high turnover rate affects the bottom line, then these executives need to stop bellyaching and adapt to the situation. Once someone has enough experience to move to a better job, it might be time to promote them or improve their working environment. At the very least, management must take into account the proper compensation for each employee they want to retain. Complaining about the ones who leave or making excuses that blame generational shortcomings is bad management practice.
Yes, all of us god-fearin' democracy lovin' flyover Americans don't give a poo about what some crazies in costumes did on a boat way back when. America is about obeyin' the law!
> When you step out of character on your parody blog and say you're being sued, and give nasty details, if you're lying that's not parody anymore, it's just lying.
Not if its obvious that you are stepping into a new character. Stepping out of one character and obviously into another is not grounds for lible, and its definitely not lying.
Did FSJ say: "Hey I'm Dan Lyons and..."? No, it was Fake Steve being Fake Steve. Hmm...come to think of it, he never even stepped out of character.
The real reason for massive viruses is windows. I know all of the "unbiased" people will mod this down, but you are fooling yourselves think windows is a legitimate operating system. I set my brother and uncle up with ubuntu boxes last summer and they haven't needed to reboot yet! No viruses. Top speed. Both of them previously had windows machines that took all of about 2 weeks to get so loaded with viruses, it was silly. They haven't had a problem with this since May. Windows isn't going away, you say, but it friggin' should. You probably want to call me a "fan boy", but you have chosen and/or support the wrong operating system, plain and simple. Every time I set someone up with a Linux box, their virus problems go away and their machines (ancient) purr. Am I biased? Confused? Its friggin' results people. I tell you what, if you've done the work to convert four *real* people away from that shit operating system windows and still disagree, mod this down. If you haven't then you have no business having an opinion. I speak from the trenches--real users with *no* savvy, personal computers, home use, no VM. I set them up and they fly. Convert some of these people and see how they begin loving their PCs. Don't mod this if you don't have the cred. Mod it up if you know what I'm saying.
This is no doubt because of the rise of Macs and Linux. If people stuck to a good operating system, then we wouldn't have viruses. I mean, look at the numbers. The correlation is undeniable.
They should have just gone over to the nearest administrative offices and unplugged all of the CRTs running "screen savers". This would have freed power to run the computer even longer and wouldn't have been as tiring.
Agnostic is not usually used to describe one's self but to describe God and thereby one's belief in God. In the sense of the word as it is actually used, agnostic means that God is unknowable, or more precisely, that one *believes* that God is unknowable.
I might be described as agnostic in the sense that I don't believe that someone would actually knowingly pay money for windows.
> For some reason, the/. crowd thinks it is acceptable that a majority of the population uses an OS which is horribly less secure than the ones we ourselves use (Linux, Macs, etc...).
You haven't done a survey so you don't know the usage. I'd imagine more than half of the/. crowd are gamers and thus satisfy their guilty pleasures on a vista box. There is a lot of complaining about vista here simply because that is the major OS of/. Your points are valid, but they are largely falling on ears deafened by the explosions of "Quake" or whatever the kids are playing these days.
> I imagine with this attitude you were in detention a lot as well:-p
I was in detention--a lot. Spent about 1/3 of my days of 4th grade sitting in a curtained box about three feet away from the vice principle for "disciplinary" reasons. Played endless games of chinese checkers with the "counselor" while talking about why I piss my teachers off so much. Generally hated by half of the teachers and loved by none. I think one tolerated me one time--she was a saint.
Now I have an ivy league education and a PhD. I can't say this for the teachers who sent me to D-hall. How about you, sheep boy?
> If I caught a student installing software on a computer without permission, I'd recommend they be expelled, regardless of what they were installing. Its not their computer.
I'm not sure you know how to administer computers or even the philosophy thereof. You should administer them as if anyone will try anything short of physically compromising them with a power tool (physical security is a different department). If someone "installs" something as a normal user, then it shouldn't be able to affect the computer. If it does, you are not doing your job correctly.
Secondly, even though this story has turned out to be a "hoax", I'm sure its not very far from the truth. The philosophy of teaching in its current form is not about the students' self learning, but about regurgitating tedious information. The "hypothetical" teacher's actions of the story and your attitude are symptomatic of contemporary education. In a perfect learning environment, the teachers would provide learning tools to students and the students would have absolute freedom to explore these tools as much as possible. If some actions are not desirable for the students, then said actions would be disabled via the design of the learning tools. For example--a computer in a classroom would not have the ability to connect to a porn site, etc. In other words, the devices should conform to the needs of the school while the students should have absolute freedom to be creative.
You appear to be a product of the regurgitory educational system I describe because it seems (1) you are incompetent to protect computers, (2) you are incompetent to make them proper learning tools, and (3) you probably don't even acknowledge these facts. Same goes for any teacher or administrator who happens to agree with you.
It was not my intention to start an American vs. Brit literary battle. Who would honestly suspect that anyone would believe the American literary tradition in any way compares to the British--outside of extension? I was trying to point to the fact that "shut the fuck up" is crass and meaningless in any sort of sensible discussion. I'll try to be less subtle next time.
> If you don't know what you are talking about why not just shut the fuck up?
Don't you mean "shut the *bollocks* up" or perhaps "shut the *bugger* up" or one of those lame excuses for the word "fuck" that people with British accents use?
Who said anything about pride? I haven't gone to the library because I haven't needed to, thanks to the wonders of electronic media, which you should embrace if you are serious about academics.
> They almost certainly were unauthorized. But that doesn't matter, as copyright law does grant you some limited rights to make copies without authorization.
It looks as though the defendant put the songs into the kaza shared folder with intent to distribute. I think it is the intent that is the copyright infringement rather than the act of backing up the songs.
It might be more helpful of the anti-DRM community to seek out a better example of fair use.
The post is a little misleading in that it suggests that anyone backing up his mp3 collection is in danger of being sued. While this may eventually become true, the presented case does not appear go that far.
Did any one do the math when they criticized on-line resources? It takes all of 3 ms to get thousands of possible answers to a question with an online search tool. Back in my undergrad days, if I needed to know something, it was 45 minutes before I could get to the library, get a stack of books and search the text myself. This type of inefficiency is mind-boggling these days. I'm almost 40 now, have all the requisite advanced degrees, and am pulling a damn good salary at one of the world's finest educational universities--so I think I am in a position to say with some authority what is intellectually lazy and what is not in terms of researching facts. So, let me declare unambiguously that using google, wikipedia, and yahoo makes good-old-fashion sense. (Kids: don't listen to the fogies--they are bitter about their wasted youth, etc.)
As a matter of fact, I put this philosophy to practice because I've been inside a library for research exactly once in the last five years.
> When you're preparing the publication for submission, you always work your hardest to ensure that everything is accurate and properly phrased to be crystal clear about the limitations and drawbacks of the findings, only to have a reporter read nothing more than the abstract and get everything wrong.
Yes, reporters make this same mistake over and over again.
I'm guessing the database the info comes from is not even encrypted. One could come up with half-a-dozen schemes to prevent this. Here's one: every sensitive record in the database is encrypted with a unique key that is mapped to each session via a very long random number generated on a per-session basis. This random number would be used to decrypt the information in the database (combining, of course, with a server-side key to reconstruct a "permanent key"). So each client-side key would be able to decrypt one and only one sensitive record, making a one-session to many-record scenario impossible. Key-pairs would be generated on a per-session basis from a database of permanent keys that are themselves encrypted and served by a key server. I hereby patent this protocol. Please send me money if you use it or I will sue you.
> Then economics would prevail and people would start spending their money on services provided near the bypass -- hotels, filling stations, restaurants and the like all tend to do well at the intersection of major roadways.
Then they could pave over everything and set up walmarts. Then they could bring in a chevron or two that light up half the countryside with glare bombs. Then they could use their common sense and start a casino. Not everyone is a "fool for the city", foghat.
There is a problem to making a trench or bump to big. People slow down for it. If you want instant behavior modification, speed bumps should be nearly invisible and spaced completely randomly. On my street, we have a water "problem" (Californians water their lawns, sidewalks, and streets instead of saving the water for when their houses are on fire). The water on my street pools in the middle of an intersection and makes a beautiful gully that can cause a lot of damage. When the gully is just the right size, drivers don't see it coming and you can hear them hit it and stuff falling off their cars. It is a sound as pleasurable to me as Kathleen Battle's singing Tannhauser. But when the gully gets too big, they race up to it (about 200 yards full throttle), slow down as fast as they can--as if they know its there--and full-throttle it afterward. Its idiotic. But if they had to memorize a perfectly random pattern of invisible gullies, it would be much more difficult, but I don't think you could dance to it.
The route doesn't need improving. The town is under no obligation to make life easy for murderous truck drivers with a disdain for country folk. Best is to put up a blockade that is no wider than the narrowest street in the town. A sign could be put on the blockade, that says something like "good luck trying to get through this blockade". Then, economics would prevail and people would stop buying the gps units that advertise a road through that town. This is the most common sense approach.
Brilliant (no sarcasm intended). Who is doling out scores anyway?
"then protests about things that matter are diluted in a sea of protests that are totally irrelevant, and nobody pays attention to any of them."
But you have put into a negative light what is actually positive. In the sea of protest is a sea of information that gives life to the democratic process.
The problem is that the sea of protest is being turned into a pond. Look into anti-protest tactics used in Seattle when the WTO met. This is the direction we are going here in USA.
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone complaining about "young IT professionals" understand that they have a high turnover rate because these professionals find opportunities elsewhere? If the high turnover rate affects the bottom line, then these executives need to stop bellyaching and adapt to the situation. Once someone has enough experience to move to a better job, it might be time to promote them or improve their working environment. At the very least, management must take into account the proper compensation for each employee they want to retain. Complaining about the ones who leave or making excuses that blame generational shortcomings is bad management practice.
Yes, all of us god-fearin' democracy lovin' flyover Americans don't give a poo about what some crazies in costumes did on a boat way back when. America is about obeyin' the law!
> When you step out of character on your parody blog and say you're being sued, and give nasty details, if you're lying that's not parody anymore, it's just lying.
Not if its obvious that you are stepping into a new character. Stepping out of one character and obviously into another is not grounds for lible, and its definitely not lying.
Did FSJ say: "Hey I'm Dan Lyons and..."? No, it was Fake Steve being Fake Steve. Hmm...come to think of it, he never even stepped out of character.
--
I manually typed this signature.
The real reason for massive viruses is windows. I know all of the "unbiased" people will mod this down, but you are fooling yourselves think windows is a legitimate operating system. I set my brother and uncle up with ubuntu boxes last summer and they haven't needed to reboot yet! No viruses. Top speed. Both of them previously had windows machines that took all of about 2 weeks to get so loaded with viruses, it was silly. They haven't had a problem with this since May. Windows isn't going away, you say, but it friggin' should. You probably want to call me a "fan boy", but you have chosen and/or support the wrong operating system, plain and simple. Every time I set someone up with a Linux box, their virus problems go away and their machines (ancient) purr. Am I biased? Confused? Its friggin' results people. I tell you what, if you've done the work to convert four *real* people away from that shit operating system windows and still disagree, mod this down. If you haven't then you have no business having an opinion. I speak from the trenches--real users with *no* savvy, personal computers, home use, no VM. I set them up and they fly. Convert some of these people and see how they begin loving their PCs. Don't mod this if you don't have the cred. Mod it up if you know what I'm saying.
This is no doubt because of the rise of Macs and Linux. If people stuck to a good operating system, then we wouldn't have viruses. I mean, look at the numbers. The correlation is undeniable.
They should have just gone over to the nearest administrative offices and unplugged all of the CRTs running "screen savers". This would have freed power to run the computer even longer and wouldn't have been as tiring.
Agnostic is not usually used to describe one's self but to describe God and thereby one's belief in God. In the sense of the word as it is actually used, agnostic means that God is unknowable, or more precisely, that one *believes* that God is unknowable.
I might be described as agnostic in the sense that I don't believe that someone would actually knowingly pay money for windows.
> For some reason, the /. crowd thinks it is acceptable that a majority of the population uses an OS which is horribly less secure than the ones we ourselves use (Linux, Macs, etc...).
/. crowd are gamers and thus satisfy their guilty pleasures on a vista box. There is a lot of complaining about vista here simply because that is the major OS of /. Your points are valid, but they are largely falling on ears deafened by the explosions of "Quake" or whatever the kids are playing these days.
You haven't done a survey so you don't know the usage. I'd imagine more than half of the
> I imagine with this attitude you were in detention a lot as well :-p
I was in detention--a lot. Spent about 1/3 of my days of 4th grade sitting in a curtained box about three feet away from the vice principle for "disciplinary" reasons. Played endless games of chinese checkers with the "counselor" while talking about why I piss my teachers off so much. Generally hated by half of the teachers and loved by none. I think one tolerated me one time--she was a saint.
Now I have an ivy league education and a PhD. I can't say this for the teachers who sent me to D-hall. How about you, sheep boy?
> If I caught a student installing software on a computer without permission, I'd recommend they be expelled, regardless of what they were installing. Its not their computer.
I'm not sure you know how to administer computers or even the philosophy thereof. You should administer them as if anyone will try anything short of physically compromising them with a power tool (physical security is a different department). If someone "installs" something as a normal user, then it shouldn't be able to affect the computer. If it does, you are not doing your job correctly.
Secondly, even though this story has turned out to be a "hoax", I'm sure its not very far from the truth. The philosophy of teaching in its current form is not about the students' self learning, but about regurgitating tedious information. The "hypothetical" teacher's actions of the story and your attitude are symptomatic of contemporary education. In a perfect learning environment, the teachers would provide learning tools to students and the students would have absolute freedom to explore these tools as much as possible. If some actions are not desirable for the students, then said actions would be disabled via the design of the learning tools. For example--a computer in a classroom would not have the ability to connect to a porn site, etc. In other words, the devices should conform to the needs of the school while the students should have absolute freedom to be creative.
You appear to be a product of the regurgitory educational system I describe because it seems (1) you are incompetent to protect computers, (2) you are incompetent to make them proper learning tools, and (3) you probably don't even acknowledge these facts. Same goes for any teacher or administrator who happens to agree with you.
SHUT THE FUCK UP!
It was not my intention to start an American vs. Brit literary battle. Who would honestly suspect that anyone would believe the American literary tradition in any way compares to the British--outside of extension? I was trying to point to the fact that "shut the fuck up" is crass and meaningless in any sort of sensible discussion. I'll try to be less subtle next time.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=shut+the+bugger+up&btnG=Search
Top hit ring a bell?
> If you don't know what you are talking about why not just shut the fuck up?
Don't you mean "shut the *bollocks* up" or perhaps "shut the *bugger* up" or one of those lame excuses for the word "fuck" that people with British accents use?
This is a money company. It has money to give to politicians. We will not know who got greased, but don't look for charges any time soon.
Who said anything about pride? I haven't gone to the library because I haven't needed to, thanks to the wonders of electronic media, which you should embrace if you are serious about academics.
> They almost certainly were unauthorized. But that doesn't matter, as copyright law does grant you some limited rights to make copies without authorization.
It looks as though the defendant put the songs into the kaza shared folder with intent to distribute. I think it is the intent that is the copyright infringement rather than the act of backing up the songs.
It might be more helpful of the anti-DRM community to seek out a better example of fair use.
The post is a little misleading in that it suggests that anyone backing up his mp3 collection is in danger of being sued. While this may eventually become true, the presented case does not appear go that far.
Did any one do the math when they criticized on-line resources? It takes all of 3 ms to get thousands of possible answers to a question with an online search tool. Back in my undergrad days, if I needed to know something, it was 45 minutes before I could get to the library, get a stack of books and search the text myself. This type of inefficiency is mind-boggling these days. I'm almost 40 now, have all the requisite advanced degrees, and am pulling a damn good salary at one of the world's finest educational universities--so I think I am in a position to say with some authority what is intellectually lazy and what is not in terms of researching facts. So, let me declare unambiguously that using google, wikipedia, and yahoo makes good-old-fashion sense. (Kids: don't listen to the fogies--they are bitter about their wasted youth, etc.)
As a matter of fact, I put this philosophy to practice because I've been inside a library for research exactly once in the last five years.
> When you're preparing the publication for submission, you always work your hardest to ensure that everything is accurate and properly phrased to be crystal clear about the limitations and drawbacks of the findings, only to have a reporter read nothing more than the abstract and get everything wrong.
Yes, reporters make this same mistake over and over again.
I'm guessing the database the info comes from is not even encrypted. One could come up with half-a-dozen schemes to prevent this. Here's one: every sensitive record in the database is encrypted with a unique key that is mapped to each session via a very long random number generated on a per-session basis. This random number would be used to decrypt the information in the database (combining, of course, with a server-side key to reconstruct a "permanent key"). So each client-side key would be able to decrypt one and only one sensitive record, making a one-session to many-record scenario impossible. Key-pairs would be generated on a per-session basis from a database of permanent keys that are themselves encrypted and served by a key server. I hereby patent this protocol. Please send me money if you use it or I will sue you.
> Then economics would prevail and people would start spending their money on services provided near the bypass -- hotels, filling stations, restaurants and the like all tend to do well at the intersection of major roadways.
Then they could pave over everything and set up walmarts. Then they could bring in a chevron or two that light up half the countryside with glare bombs. Then they could use their common sense and start a casino. Not everyone is a "fool for the city", foghat.
There is a problem to making a trench or bump to big. People slow down for it. If you want instant behavior modification, speed bumps should be nearly invisible and spaced completely randomly. On my street, we have a water "problem" (Californians water their lawns, sidewalks, and streets instead of saving the water for when their houses are on fire). The water on my street pools in the middle of an intersection and makes a beautiful gully that can cause a lot of damage. When the gully is just the right size, drivers don't see it coming and you can hear them hit it and stuff falling off their cars. It is a sound as pleasurable to me as Kathleen Battle's singing Tannhauser. But when the gully gets too big, they race up to it (about 200 yards full throttle), slow down as fast as they can--as if they know its there--and full-throttle it afterward. Its idiotic. But if they had to memorize a perfectly random pattern of invisible gullies, it would be much more difficult, but I don't think you could dance to it.
> Sounds like the route should be improved.
The route doesn't need improving. The town is under no obligation to make life easy for murderous truck drivers with a disdain for country folk. Best is to put up a blockade that is no wider than the narrowest street in the town. A sign could be put on the blockade, that says something like "good luck trying to get through this blockade". Then, economics would prevail and people would stop buying the gps units that advertise a road through that town. This is the most common sense approach.
Brilliant (no sarcasm intended). Who is doling out scores anyway? "then protests about things that matter are diluted in a sea of protests that are totally irrelevant, and nobody pays attention to any of them." But you have put into a negative light what is actually positive. In the sea of protest is a sea of information that gives life to the democratic process. The problem is that the sea of protest is being turned into a pond. Look into anti-protest tactics used in Seattle when the WTO met. This is the direction we are going here in USA.
I though New Zealand had draconian immigration policies. Do they like over-educated biophysicists with killer publication records?