Moreover, I'm fine with making the "targeted marketing" compromise that my data is inevitably used for.
More often than not, when I want to buy something I go out and buy it. If I learn of something that's good via advertising, so much the better - but I will still independently research it to see if it is worth my money.
The whole marketing thing doesn't really impact me personally so I don't have as much of a problem with my personal information being up there.
I'm going to quote one of many short stories/anecdotes from one of my favorite books, Hagakure [Hidden in the Leaves] by Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
At the time when there was a council concerning the promotion of a certain man, the council members were at the point of deciding that promotion was useless because of the fact that the man had previously been involved in a drunken brawl. But someone said, "If we were to cast aside every man who had made a mistake once, useful men could probably not be come by. A man who makes a mistake once will be considerably more prudent and useful because of his repentance. I feel that he should be promoted."
Someone else then asked, "Will you guarantee him?"
The man replied, "Of course I will."
The others asked, "By what will you guarantee him?"
And he replied, "I can guarantee him by the fact that he is a man who has erred once. A man who has never once erred is dangerous." That said, the man was promoted.
s/promoted/keep his damn job
...and it's perfectly relevant to this story, is it not? Now that this man has fucked up so badly, he'll be way more cautious than someone who has never fucked up on that scale. That's a quite valuable asset if Apple has the sense and heart to forgive him.
All business nowadays is "short-termist". That's how the housing bubble happened, that's why Americans are saving record-low amounts of their paycheck every week, that's why everyone (especially the federal government) is borrowing money left and right, etc.
We've become a short-term society with short-term attention spans. It's dangerous and it's gonna screw us over in the long run, but the short term sure looks great! -_- *sigh*
The people don't even have to play it. They just have to buy it, and the bad reviews or complaints can be buried in Google or compensated for with advertising, paid reviews, astroturfing, etc. It is one of those situations where you can just keep throwing money at it to make it a non-issue.
If I see what looks like astroturfing I prefer to call it out and apologize later if I'm wrong. The whole practice is just filthy and dishonest IMO.
If a product can't stand on its own accord, then one should hire better programmers/manufacturers/etc. and less marketing people. A quality product with a modest advertising budget will sell itself and ultimately save the company tons of money in customer support, lawsuits, and general ill will.
As stated and promised: my apologies to you, sir.
Incidentally, anything I should be looking out for or worrying about as a prospective teacher if I am ever to be on the "user" end of any Blackboard software?
It won't happen. Any marketing exec can tell you that if a product isn't selling, just keep throwing money towards advertising. Cool factor and peer pressure ("Dude, you don't have Game 3: The Game? What the fuck man, that game rocks!") will keep sales at more-than-acceptable levels.
It's just like Brave New World. So long as the entertainment is good enough, people will remain placated and apathetic.
All the more reason to never invest in one sole means of travel.
Here's what's going to happen - any one of these, or a combination thereof.
1) Flights resume, and while maintenance costs go up (reflected in higher ticket prices), things are relatively safe.
2a) Airlines decide to resume flights even though they aren't really safe because some corporate beancounter figured that the costs of a lawsuit from a crash would be less than the losses of an extended shutdown on air travel. Planes make it along fine anyway.
2b) Same as 2a, except one or more planes stall and kill everyone on board. Massive P.R. disaster and even further setbacks.
3) Engineers get involved and tackle the problem, thereby making the ash a non-issue.
4) The ash cloud is determined to be staying around for a very, very long time. Alternative modes of transportation in the affected zones are established (or re-established). Boats, ferries, trains, etc. boom in popularity. Previously minor airports suddenly become major transportation hubs due to their airspace not being remotely affected (or ever potentially being affected) by the ash cloud. The new travel system becomes Plane to the closest hub > combination of trains and boats to your destination in Europe. People accept the extra travel time as a fact of life.
5) Finally those mad scientists and loopy engineers will get their Trans-Atlantic underwater/underground train for the benefit of all.
6) Europe falls into a major economic recession as a result of stagnating trade.
7) Some unfriendly organization with some sort of agenda (or perhaps even a nation) exacts a land attack somewhere on Europe, leveraging the fact that traditional foreign air support/aid will be difficult to deploy in the affected zones. Said strategic bombings and/or care packages will be deployed regardless, with the occasional bomb or bale of food ramming into a schoolhouse or something of the like and causing a major disaster.
I can't think of anything else. I don't imagine this situation will last a few days. Now if only there were some natural phenomena to get all of these gaz guzzling cars off of the road in the States so we can have trains even halfway as decent as the ones in Europe.
(Yeah yeah America is bigger than most of Europe combined blah blah, it just means we would benefit all the more from interstate high-speed rail - especially cross-country - if someone would just build the goddamned thing.)
That's a dangerous line of thought... "You don't need to see this."
I think aside from direct personal information, demographic data like this is absolutely fine. It's just like any number of other concepts in this world - there are many ways in which it can be used in a harmful manner, but there are also just as many ways that it can be used in a beneficial manner. Just like free speech IMO.
I see one of three things happening here in regards to your post:
1) The school is running on old Blackboard software (a likely possibility - "Why upgrade when we already have it? It works fine!").
2) The kid really did just see a password carelessly left around or a program carelessly left open, and they're using cracking as a bullshit excuse.
3) You have some sort of interest in Blackboard, either as a shareholder, company employee, or "professional reviewer"., and you're astroturfing.
After all these years of trudging through reviews of software/hardware/etc., I tend to take the majority of what you said with several million grains of salt. In my defense, your post also fits a common astroturf modus operandi: concede a few (small and unimportant) negative points - many of which are not directly related to the software itself (poor documentation, underlying technology (TomCat) has its weaknessess) and write a largely glowing defense of the product otherwise.
Your posts here have helped me come to a few realizations.
1) I was right in giving up on any serious kind of IT career. I don't want to have a stomach ulcer by 35.
2) I feel better about going towards being a teacher.
3) When I do become a teacher, be sure to treat the IT dude to lunch if he ever stops by, and be really nice to him - if only because of all the shit he has to deal with, but also because I especially like to be nice and helpful to the people who get little in the way of respect.
The password for the city-wide administrative account on the Newark (NJ) School District's city-wide network (Total City Pop. ~280,000) was "123" circa 2001.
How do I know? I saw the head IT guy type it in right next to me.
HEAD IT GUY: *laughs* Did you see that?
ME: Yeah, dude, seriously? 123?
HEAD IT GUY: Heh, yeah. I don't really give a shit. If something gets effed up we can just restore from backups. Don't fuck with it, okay?
I made the (very stupid) mistake of telling one of my buddies the account details. I got pulled into the principal's office and suspended for 3 days. Why? In the two days since I learned the pass and subsequently (stupidly) leaked that info, no less than 30 individual terminals in my high school logged onto that account. There was tons of porn, warez, etc. I was asked about all kinds of shit and they basically thought I just loaded up the account with porn or something and was passing it around.
Obviously, I did something stupid and it was my fault. That aside, the head IT guy had the security practices of a retired grandmother running Windows ME with no antivirus.
But yeah, from my experience - at least with that one person - school IT admins are pretty damn incompetent.
As someone who is going into teaching, I can tell you that the statement of "those that can, do; those that can't, teach" is a load of utter bullshit. Find an after-school program - nonprofit or otherwise - and try to teach a class for a week. Any class, of any age group of kids, about anything. A small experience like that will vastly change your experience of how hard teachers have to work.
(Apologies on the late reply, but I've been sick all weekend and I'm only catching up on my/. now.)
If only it would end the whole "I had to drop out of school because my family needed money and I had to work," thing, that would be well worth the cost.
As it stands we're creating a servant economic class of people who don't have high school diplomas. 20 years from now I imagine you won't be able to get even a crappy job without an Associate's Degree (or maybe even a Bachelor's!), thereby increasing the gap even further.
Slashdot Mirror
Moreover, I'm fine with making the "targeted marketing" compromise that my data is inevitably used for.
More often than not, when I want to buy something I go out and buy it. If I learn of something that's good via advertising, so much the better - but I will still independently research it to see if it is worth my money.
The whole marketing thing doesn't really impact me personally so I don't have as much of a problem with my personal information being up there.
You might be thinking of Farm Town (the game Zynga copied to make Farmville), which is based in Java (I believe).
To this day, I still think the Icelandic language is an elaborate, centuries-long joke on the rest of us - especially those of us who try to learn it.
a) Weird Al takes an existing item (the instrumental track) and adds his own bit to it (his lyrics).
b) The Downfall vids take an existing item (the video clip) and add their own bit to it (the subtitles).
How is a in any way different from b?
Ten bucks says if he gets off the case he'll have a job as an iPhone hardware tester at Apple.
APPLE EXEC: "Where's the 5G prototype?!"
CHILDS: "I will personally hand it to Mr. Jobs and only Mr. Jobs only, as I can't trust the rest of you with such sensitive technology!"
I'm going to quote one of many short stories/anecdotes from one of my favorite books, Hagakure [Hidden in the Leaves] by Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
At the time when there was a council concerning the promotion of a certain man, the council members were at the point of deciding that promotion was useless because of the fact that the man had previously been involved in a drunken brawl. But someone said, "If we were to cast aside every man who had made a mistake once, useful men could probably not be come by. A man who makes a mistake once will be considerably more prudent and useful because of his repentance. I feel that he should be promoted."
Someone else then asked, "Will you guarantee him?"
The man replied, "Of course I will."
The others asked, "By what will you guarantee him?"
And he replied, "I can guarantee him by the fact that he is a man who has erred once. A man who has never once erred is dangerous." That said, the man was promoted.
s/promoted/keep his damn job
...and it's perfectly relevant to this story, is it not? Now that this man has fucked up so badly, he'll be way more cautious than someone who has never fucked up on that scale. That's a quite valuable asset if Apple has the sense and heart to forgive him.
This already exists in natural form. It's generated in a wide radius every time parents drop their kids off at public school.
Just so long as he doesn't follow the standard Hyrule/India hybrid accounting practices of stashing your rupees in a clay pot.
Thank you, I'll be here all night! Try the veal, bribe your waitress!
All business nowadays is "short-termist". That's how the housing bubble happened, that's why Americans are saving record-low amounts of their paycheck every week, that's why everyone (especially the federal government) is borrowing money left and right, etc.
We've become a short-term society with short-term attention spans. It's dangerous and it's gonna screw us over in the long run, but the short term sure looks great! -_- *sigh*
Thanks a bunch! I hope that I'll luck out and never have to deal with Blackboard. ;_;
The people don't even have to play it. They just have to buy it, and the bad reviews or complaints can be buried in Google or compensated for with advertising, paid reviews, astroturfing, etc. It is one of those situations where you can just keep throwing money at it to make it a non-issue.
If I see what looks like astroturfing I prefer to call it out and apologize later if I'm wrong. The whole practice is just filthy and dishonest IMO.
If a product can't stand on its own accord, then one should hire better programmers/manufacturers/etc. and less marketing people. A quality product with a modest advertising budget will sell itself and ultimately save the company tons of money in customer support, lawsuits, and general ill will.
As stated and promised: my apologies to you, sir.
Incidentally, anything I should be looking out for or worrying about as a prospective teacher if I am ever to be on the "user" end of any Blackboard software?
It won't happen. Any marketing exec can tell you that if a product isn't selling, just keep throwing money towards advertising. Cool factor and peer pressure ("Dude, you don't have Game 3: The Game? What the fuck man, that game rocks!") will keep sales at more-than-acceptable levels.
It's just like Brave New World. So long as the entertainment is good enough, people will remain placated and apathetic.
All the more reason to never invest in one sole means of travel.
Here's what's going to happen - any one of these, or a combination thereof.
1) Flights resume, and while maintenance costs go up (reflected in higher ticket prices), things are relatively safe.
2a) Airlines decide to resume flights even though they aren't really safe because some corporate beancounter figured that the costs of a lawsuit from a crash would be less than the losses of an extended shutdown on air travel. Planes make it along fine anyway.
2b) Same as 2a, except one or more planes stall and kill everyone on board. Massive P.R. disaster and even further setbacks.
3) Engineers get involved and tackle the problem, thereby making the ash a non-issue.
4) The ash cloud is determined to be staying around for a very, very long time. Alternative modes of transportation in the affected zones are established (or re-established). Boats, ferries, trains, etc. boom in popularity. Previously minor airports suddenly become major transportation hubs due to their airspace not being remotely affected (or ever potentially being affected) by the ash cloud. The new travel system becomes Plane to the closest hub > combination of trains and boats to your destination in Europe. People accept the extra travel time as a fact of life.
5) Finally those mad scientists and loopy engineers will get their Trans-Atlantic underwater/underground train for the benefit of all.
6) Europe falls into a major economic recession as a result of stagnating trade.
7) Some unfriendly organization with some sort of agenda (or perhaps even a nation) exacts a land attack somewhere on Europe, leveraging the fact that traditional foreign air support/aid will be difficult to deploy in the affected zones. Said strategic bombings and/or care packages will be deployed regardless, with the occasional bomb or bale of food ramming into a schoolhouse or something of the like and causing a major disaster.
I can't think of anything else. I don't imagine this situation will last a few days. Now if only there were some natural phenomena to get all of these gaz guzzling cars off of the road in the States so we can have trains even halfway as decent as the ones in Europe.
(Yeah yeah America is bigger than most of Europe combined blah blah, it just means we would benefit all the more from interstate high-speed rail - especially cross-country - if someone would just build the goddamned thing.)
It's common practice for many websites nowadays. Metallica's website, for instance, has an entire section dedicated to that.
For the uninformed, Gynecomastia is the scientific term for abnormally large mammary glands in men, colloquially known as "moobs" or "man titties".
Save your eyes, save your soul - don't click the link.
That's a dangerous line of thought... "You don't need to see this."
I think aside from direct personal information, demographic data like this is absolutely fine. It's just like any number of other concepts in this world - there are many ways in which it can be used in a harmful manner, but there are also just as many ways that it can be used in a beneficial manner. Just like free speech IMO.
Sometimes, drastic measures are needed when you're after someone...
You made Jehovah come off sounding like Shang Tsung or Nightmare (from Soul Calibur).
"SOOOUUUULSSS! MORE SOOOUUUULS! YOUR SOUL IS MINE!
I see one of three things happening here in regards to your post:
1) The school is running on old Blackboard software (a likely possibility - "Why upgrade when we already have it? It works fine!").
2) The kid really did just see a password carelessly left around or a program carelessly left open, and they're using cracking as a bullshit excuse.
3) You have some sort of interest in Blackboard, either as a shareholder, company employee, or "professional reviewer"., and you're astroturfing.
After all these years of trudging through reviews of software/hardware/etc., I tend to take the majority of what you said with several million grains of salt. In my defense, your post also fits a common astroturf modus operandi: concede a few (small and unimportant) negative points - many of which are not directly related to the software itself (poor documentation, underlying technology (TomCat) has its weaknessess) and write a largely glowing defense of the product otherwise.
Your posts here have helped me come to a few realizations.
1) I was right in giving up on any serious kind of IT career. I don't want to have a stomach ulcer by 35.
2) I feel better about going towards being a teacher.
3) When I do become a teacher, be sure to treat the IT dude to lunch if he ever stops by, and be really nice to him - if only because of all the shit he has to deal with, but also because I especially like to be nice and helpful to the people who get little in the way of respect.
Thank you kindly.
The password for the city-wide administrative account on the Newark (NJ) School District's city-wide network (Total City Pop. ~280,000) was "123" circa 2001.
How do I know? I saw the head IT guy type it in right next to me.
HEAD IT GUY: *laughs* Did you see that?
ME: Yeah, dude, seriously? 123?
HEAD IT GUY: Heh, yeah. I don't really give a shit. If something gets effed up we can just restore from backups. Don't fuck with it, okay?
I made the (very stupid) mistake of telling one of my buddies the account details. I got pulled into the principal's office and suspended for 3 days. Why? In the two days since I learned the pass and subsequently (stupidly) leaked that info, no less than 30 individual terminals in my high school logged onto that account. There was tons of porn, warez, etc. I was asked about all kinds of shit and they basically thought I just loaded up the account with porn or something and was passing it around.
Obviously, I did something stupid and it was my fault. That aside, the head IT guy had the security practices of a retired grandmother running Windows ME with no antivirus.
But yeah, from my experience - at least with that one person - school IT admins are pretty damn incompetent.
As someone who is going into teaching, I can tell you that the statement of "those that can, do; those that can't, teach" is a load of utter bullshit. Find an after-school program - nonprofit or otherwise - and try to teach a class for a week. Any class, of any age group of kids, about anything. A small experience like that will vastly change your experience of how hard teachers have to work.
(Apologies on the late reply, but I've been sick all weekend and I'm only catching up on my /. now.)
Remember the good ol' days before Pearl Harbor when America said they'd have an isolationist stance and meant it?
I wonder how different the world would be today if we were never pulled into the war like that.
If only it would end the whole "I had to drop out of school because my family needed money and I had to work," thing, that would be well worth the cost.
As it stands we're creating a servant economic class of people who don't have high school diplomas. 20 years from now I imagine you won't be able to get even a crappy job without an Associate's Degree (or maybe even a Bachelor's!), thereby increasing the gap even further.