My daughter goes to a school that has this. I had mixed feelings about it until they came after me because I screwed up the lobby check in process and was walking out with my daughter. How did they know who was taking her? I'd rather they protect her than not. I also don't worry so much about kids bringing weapons to school, rape in the parking lot, and so on. All of these things happen in a nearby school system that doesn't have it's own police force.
This is VERY different from how books are experienced.
Reading text on a video screen is very taxing on the eyes. Additionally, and especially in the case of textbooks, interaction with the paper media is something which is important to readers. While its very logical in the case of texts with the capacity to scrawl notes in margins, highlight passages, and tape stickies to pages, there is also an emotional/comfort aspect to the interaction with the paper itself which is simply not there on digital versions.
This is all true, if you're using the wrong technology. If you use something like the Sony PRS-600 or 700, then you get all of this and there is no "video screen" to annoy you. It looks like text on paper, and feels like a lightweight portable electronic device. It's very addictive.
Despite being a heavy tech head I will still print out any extended text to dead tree media because it's simply more comfortable and convenient to access in that manner.
Of course you will, because a lot of text is not formatted for an eReader screen size, and the tools to transfer random documents to an eReader are not readily available - with the exception of Calibre, which hopefully soon will include the ability to spider sites and convert that to an ePub or other ebook format.
While I'm about a generation removed at this point, the pilot programs with current university students show the same attachment.
The current generation of readers are mostly 6" and mostly grayscale. The high-end of the next generation (or maybe two generations away) will be color, larger and have a touch screen for highlighting, annotation, etc.
This is moot, however, many textbook publishers just give away their own reader software for notebooks, and sell deeply discounted electronic versions.
Sony is doing the library thing. It's a bit new, and currently is mostly audio, but they do support text books checked out to a Sony Reader.
Library Search
As far as I can tell, the Sony PRS readers meet most of your specifications:
You could easily use a solar USB charger on it, the amount of energy it uses is negligible.
It's fairly durable, but you wouldn't want to get a book or any electronic device wet. I've dropped it a couple of times, and it's generally a bad idea - like any other electronic device.
The editing isn't available, and wouldn't work - the display is too slow, as is the processor. There's probably no reason an eInk device in the future couldn't handle this, however.
Six months ago I would have agreed with you. I've spent time building my own bookshelves, and lovingly over the years built up my own library. This was a dream ever since I was a kid and learned to love books.
My wife bought me the Sony PRS-505 for Christmas last year. Between it and Calibre (used to be libprs500), I just don't need paper any more. I can download RSS feeds, I can read books. It doesn't replace surfing the web, and it's not a computer (i.e., I don't know or care if it runs Linux, netBSD or whatever). But it's perfect for reading. Good size, good battery life, easy to use, easy to read.
If you want to read PDFs formatted for regular pages, though, move to something with a larger screen. Since PDFs are fixed page format, you have to read them landscape and split each page. That's rather annoying, especially for multi-column text.
All in all, you can't have my eReader. I'm keeping it.
By the way, if we're talking about format wars, between Calibre and good old Unix tools (txt2html rocking especially hard here since it can find paragraphs the hard way), the Sony eReader works extremely well. You still can't do anything with a DRMed book, but you can convert most non DRMed eBook formats out there.
If you're going to complain about DRM, keep in mind that some devices *do* have the option of viewing non DRMed content, and some don't. The Sony PRS-500 and PRS-505 *do* have that ability. That's like a sound player that plays MP3s versus one that only plays DRMed content. So that implies that the same options, legal or not, are available.
Saying that the NWS isn't or wasn't geek friendly is like saying that the pope isn't religious. The NWS has always made advanced data available, and sometimes the software necessary to use it. I think it's more likely that the "geek" community is catching up to the NWS, not the other way 'round.
gclef wrote: Because everything *except* the data backup are traditional "security" roles. Backup is needed, and recognized by security folks as good, but backup isn't traditionally considered a "security" product.
If you view it from more of a risk management viewpoint and call it all "business continuity", then backup fits quite well. In that case most security plays a preventative role, and backup plays a recovery role. My guess is that many of the buyers are viewing it from this viewpoint. If your product / services make sense to your customer, then that's all that really matters.
This is one of those big, gaping holes in open source software. I swear most open source programmers don't even understand the question. Let me try:
Alice is an expert in some area of business. She can even wrap her head around simple databases. How can she write database apps without having to call Bob, the resident Unix hacker who doesn't want to waste his time coding simple data entry screens.
What tools can Alice use? Open Office is workable now, and although pretty clumsy, compares to the VB.net "way". Alice has to learn quite a lot to get there, though.
There's Rekall, I've not used it at all, although it looks pretty good.
And then there is GNU Enterprise http://gnue.org/. It is eventually supposed to be an ERP system, but currently the project team is working on what appears to be a very sweet set of db app development tools. Rumor is that it's at a usable point, but I've never been able to crawl through the install process (even on Debian).
There are more, but I haven't found any really good ones.
The issue never was about how much you were being paid, nor whether you were a regular employee or a contractor/consultant.
It *is* the issue. If you get paid hourly, generally the copyright belongs to whomever is paying you. If you are getting paid in more broad terms to "write this system" or "make me some art" for more of a fixed fee, then generally you retain the copyright. IANAL, just a software developer. I learned all about this when doing some software for a client and they decided it was theirs.
By the same token, if you want to pay me about $500 per hour to come take pictures of your wedding, I will gladly do so. And the copyright remains yours, because of the way I am paid.
The issue is that when you're a developer for hire for a company, in virtually all instances you relinquish copyright to your code to the person who hired you.
Just because you negotiated a bum deal doesn't mean that I have to feel sorry for you.
>So here is my idea: distribute the social networks. A user joins the server they want, is >allocated a user id which is user@domain.com, analogous to a Jabber ID, and they can add people >to their network who exist on other servers.
This is a *very* good idea.
>Communities would work similarly with community@communities.domain.com, people join a >community by registering their user ID on the server which hosts the community. For instance, >the Slashdot community might be slashdot@communities.slashdot.org.
Or how about we skip that idea entirely and make the FOAF stuff non-centralized? If the jabber protocol were tweaked slightly (and I'm no expert, this may be impossible or it may already be there) to allow direct connections between users, they could trade FOAF description files.
Think IM meets Gnutella for passing personal descriptions. Searching would be done like Gnutella, through friends (whom you are connected to through your buddy list).
You could even add the Waste protocol into the mix. This would mean that groups could link up in an encrypted way to chat, trade files, or whatever. And if you linked all this to Jabber you would solve the key exchange problem that Waste has by linking a public key with your jabber ID.
Am I making any sense? It's too early for me to tell...
>What is with the suit need to add superfluous syllables to words? Hmm... `competence' is only >three syllables; `competency' must be 33.3% better!
>Is this something they teach in business school?
People repeat what they hear. If everyone around you is saying "Bill Gates sucks" or "No, it's not 'Linux', dumbass, it's 'GNU/Linux'" then it gets parroted back. I feel just as surrounded by buzzwords in my MBA program as I do at the LUG meeting or the 2600 club meeting. Some people take just as much pride in their suit and tie as others do in their "got root?" tshirts.
And before you bring up the cost difference, that cell phone that cryptofreak brings to the mall and can do wireless SSH on has gotta gost as much or more than a nice jacket at Dillards. The cell phone would let me configure my server from anywhere, but the suit might help me get a job.
Different worlds, just jargon. Examples:
1a. I SSH'ed into my home box by port forwarding through my NAT firewall and then setup a tunnel to run X apps on my Cygwin X server, 'cause Windoze is sooooo lame and now I can run XBitchX on my desktop at work. Hell yes!
isn't so different from:
1b. In order to get paid by wire transfer through the LOC we had to have our BOL and proof of shipment emailed as a PDF from the freight consolidator in China. Faxes are soooo lame, now we can hand documents to the bank that are photocopy quality. Now we actually get paid on time. Hell yes!
My mom would think everybody was nuts, pat them on the head and tell them to go outside and play while she baked some cookies. The Dalai Lama would probably just laugh - really loudly.
There's nothing wrong with the University of Phoenix that isn't wrong with other schools. The only folks who hate it are those who tried and failed. I've done both traditional college (for 3 yrs) and UoP, and I'll take UoP any day.
I learned more and I was challenged a hell of a lot more. At UoP I actually learned to communicate with people (horror of horrors!). After all, a good part of your grade depends on how well you can communicate and work with a learning team.
After nearly two years of writing around 6 or 7 papers every five weeks, I find myself panicking and looking around for material to research and write a paper on. Blog time! Yes, somehow open source, Buddhism and B-school can make for a blog - at least it's not the strangest one out there.
Some folks just can't hack that. And BTW - I made it through my entire Bachelor's degree without ever firing up any of the MS Office suite. I used Open Office all the way, even back when it was still fairly beta. Their #$!$ website works only with IE though. They know me by name on their complaint line by now.
My favorite part was in statistics because of the Math thingy in OOo. I could make those formulas look absolutely beautiful.
Well, there *was* MS Project... but I did do a presentation on sourceforge during that class just to make myself feel better. I sold it as "the future of collaborative project management". I got extra points.:-)
Bill, you said you were gonna give away your cash before you died. Well, here's your chance. If you want the opportunity to change the world, give us a global and free information infrastructure. Wouldn't that take mankind to the next level?
Wouldn't that put your name in history as one of the greatest benefactors of mankind? C'mon... it'll push us gearheads that hate you into abject adoration, so you can go ahead and continue your global domination thingy.
I'm not sure if it's sad or just funny that some people DO consider Jedi to be a religion. It's based on something called "Qi Gong" (chee gung) which is very similar to prana yoga, and Jedi itself could easily be considered to be a branch of Taoism.
Qi Gong, in the form of Falun Gong (an offshoot), is currently being severly repressed in China right now. Practitioners are jailed, some people say for standing on street corners and performing miracles. But I haven't seen that...
Should we add Australia to the list of nations opressing this religion? They don't have to worry about it affecting their status as a member of the WTO apparently.
OK, well this isn't really a ghost story, and I wasn't there, but I had it told to me by several people, so here goes.
I was doing some consulting work at a DA's office a few years back. It was about that time that I had really started getting into Quake and was looking for some fresh meat.
After my program had been written, they got a whole new LAN with nice fast (for the time - PII 200) computers and big 17" monitors. This was just the perfect setup for Quake, and I wound up getting one guy addicted to it. Then another, then another, until we started having these huge LAN parties once a week over there.
I don't know how legal it is, but they also liked to hang out there and drink whiskey - lots of it. Have you ever played Quake against a half-lit cop with a REAL gun on his belt screaming "Die Die DIE!"? And you thought getting pulled over for a speeding ticket was bad...
Anyway, they got tired of killing each other and decided one night to play in the cooperative mode where they go through and it's "The Good Guys" against the regular monsters in each level. They also decided to make it a really late night affair and so had several bottles of whiskey during the process.
Well, so here you have a bunch of drunk cops getting to finally express their pent up desire to let loose with heavy weapons, running through Quake levels and having a really great time. Of course there were enough of them, and I'm sure they had it on the easiest level, that they were not really trying hard and probably having fun watching monsters explode into chunks. They probably laughed when a friend got "eviscerated by a fiend", but were having a really good time.
So anyway, if you've played through the first "episode" (is that what it was called?) you'll remember that last level. They all start out on a new level, they move forward just a bit to see what is going on. Then a huge monster arises out of the laval and the screaming starts.
It lifts a hand and smashes it down right on top of them, killing every last one of them. Apparently they were all yelling and running around and falling out of chairs.
So next time you get pulled over, imagine the cop being drunk, playing Quake, and screaming because he just got completely smashed and screaming and rolling around on the floor. It's rather amusing, and would probably be more so if I were a better storyteller.
1. If the *type* of exploit is known, and the *point of communication* (i.e., socket) is known, then an "expert" system can eventually be built that will make exploit creation point and click simple.
2. Any random piece of information can be disseminated to an unlimited number of points on the internet in much much less than 24 hours if there is any semi-organized method of sharing the information. A web site, mailing list, private FTP server, whatever - the internet was created to share information quickly. Code Red shows that even unwilling participants can be used to spread information (or any other payload) to saturation point in less than a day.
3. Even if only one programmer on the internet is creating exploits, there is a system of sharing this information. This is what has occurred with the "zero day" cracks of games that are shared on IRC, and it is very much a formalized and highly popular system. The only difference is that instead of being freely available to Black Hats and White Hats (like a public mailing list), it's only available as information in trade, and is usually traded for something illegal. This creates a nifty little power hiearchy where fifteen-year-olds become something like the Mafia Dons.
4. Exploit code proves that there is a hole. This proof cannot be denied by J Random Marketing Department.
5. A published exploit allows system admins to test whether a published "fix" actually works or not. Even if every admin doesn't do it, a couple will, and if there's a problem it will be announced on security lists (again, spreading at the speed of light).
Conclusion:
Because there will always be groups on the internet willing to share this information, security through obscurity will never work.
As an example, one could interview various games companies in the US and find the mean time between release of a copy-protected piece of software and the crack to bypass the protection. I call this Mean Time Before Crack (MTBC), and it's similar to the open source concept of Mean Time Between Itches (MTBI - the amount of time between the public discussion of a software idea and it's open-source implementation);-).
Re:Why is a civilian spouting off about war?
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A New Kind of War
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Because our military is not a political organization. It may wage wars, win them and lose them but not DECLARE a war. That's up to the citizens of our nation, specifically, our (lame-ass old-fart) elected representatives.
> As much as I hate to admit it, StarOffice is a classic example of the schism between commercial software developers and open source advocates.
OK, this comment is just plain wrong. StarOffice was developed as commercial software from the ground up as a competitor to MS Office and WordPerfect. It was a commercial failure, and Sun purchased the company and open sourced the code. After being open sourced as Open Office, it has become easier to use, more stable and faster. All the hallmarks of open source software (like Apache and Linux).
>1) Perfect (or nearly so) compatibility with the.doc,.xls, and.ppt formats. Too much stuff out there in these formats to not have it.
Open Office builds from the past few months have been every bit as compatible with MS Office as different versions of MS Office have been with each other. I've used it in day-to-day work for nearly a year now and not had any significant problems (or more than my MS Office using coworkers) for Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents.
> 2) Make it available everywhere. Downloading it from the internet is not good enough.
And did napster do this? Uh, not that I recall. And, they seem to have taken the internet by storm. You never know, Star Office may just be the next killer app, simply because of economics...
>3) Make it as close to Office as possible in look and feel, at least for a while.
Yes, that has been done to an amazing degree. On Windows, most users have no idea that they AREN'T using MS Office.
>4) Do a cost analysis and trumpet it everywhere.
Actually, there are some studies posted. Not on this particular subject, but I think it is a really good idea. And with the amount of money Sun is already putting into the project, I think this will be highly likely to happen.
>Unfortunately I think Sun doesn't want to do any of this. Unless they do, StarOffice is going to be an also-ran for at least several more years.
Unfortunately, I think you are both right and wrong at the same time.
Why not let them make 3D raytraced graphics and games with Blender? I can't think of anything nearly as fun and challenging at the very same time! The site is at blender.nl.
Just run them through some of the provided tutorials and let them go - they'll learn it much quicker than I would I think.
OK, get this. I run windows on my little girl's computer (she's 4) and the nickjr.com website added a "radio" section. It requires the MS media player crap so I broke down and installed it.
I'm used to getting a licensing agreement before installing software, but this time I got a "Privacy Agreement" which told me that they would watch everything played across the internet, and I think even on the local hard drive. I essentially had to consent first, then I was allowed to go back and (supposedly) turn it off.
As far as I could tell there was no way for my little girl to listen to NickJr radio without me consenting to allow Microsoft (and whoever they want to sell the data to) to monitor exactly what she listens to and when.
I'm sure Microsoft's point would be that they aren't forcing my little girl to listen to NickJr radio and that I have to make the choice. So I installed it and turned everything off. I guess if I ever get marketing directed at me for children's music I can sue Microsoft or something.
More money in the economy, less money in the consumer's pocket, less consumer confidence. It's six of one and a half-dozen of the other.
The Free Software Movement was an inevitable response to the way corporate america was handling software development. We let Microsoft do it their way for a long time, and computer experts were frustrated because the "hood was welded shut".
Interoperation is there, but done poorly. Microsoft had no interest in the internet by themselves, it took other people to point out that it was the next big thing.
Was I the only one to notice that Microsoft quit shipping a free programming environment many, many years ago? Now why the hell would they go and do that? Because they hate developers. Developers are their primary source of competition.
We won't see the fruits of the free software movement for another decade (in a way), and there had to be a downside when the overinflated market corrected itself.
The free market can work wonders, but it isn't very innovative. Something like government investment in R&D or free software has to come along to shake things up every now and then. It's life.
Slashdot Mirror
My daughter goes to a school that has this. I had mixed feelings about it until they came after me because I screwed up the lobby check in process and was walking out with my daughter. How did they know who was taking her? I'd rather they protect her than not. I also don't worry so much about kids bringing weapons to school, rape in the parking lot, and so on. All of these things happen in a nearby school system that doesn't have it's own police force.
This is VERY different from how books are experienced.
Reading text on a video screen is very taxing on the eyes. Additionally, and especially in the case of textbooks, interaction with the paper media is something which is important to readers. While its very logical in the case of texts with the capacity to scrawl notes in margins, highlight passages, and tape stickies to pages, there is also an emotional/comfort aspect to the interaction with the paper itself which is simply not there on digital versions.
This is all true, if you're using the wrong technology. If you use something like the Sony PRS-600 or 700, then you get all of this and there is no "video screen" to annoy you. It looks like text on paper, and feels like a lightweight portable electronic device. It's very addictive.
Despite being a heavy tech head I will still print out any extended text to dead tree media because it's simply more comfortable and convenient to access in that manner.
Of course you will, because a lot of text is not formatted for an eReader screen size, and the tools to transfer random documents to an eReader are not readily available - with the exception of Calibre, which hopefully soon will include the ability to spider sites and convert that to an ePub or other ebook format.
While I'm about a generation removed at this point, the pilot programs with current university students show the same attachment.
The current generation of readers are mostly 6" and mostly grayscale. The high-end of the next generation (or maybe two generations away) will be color, larger and have a touch screen for highlighting, annotation, etc. This is moot, however, many textbook publishers just give away their own reader software for notebooks, and sell deeply discounted electronic versions.
Sony is doing the library thing. It's a bit new, and currently is mostly audio, but they do support text books checked out to a Sony Reader. Library Search
As far as I can tell, the Sony PRS readers meet most of your specifications:
You could easily use a solar USB charger on it, the amount of energy it uses is negligible.
It's fairly durable, but you wouldn't want to get a book or any electronic device wet. I've dropped it a couple of times, and it's generally a bad idea - like any other electronic device.
The editing isn't available, and wouldn't work - the display is too slow, as is the processor. There's probably no reason an eInk device in the future couldn't handle this, however.
Six months ago I would have agreed with you. I've spent time building my own bookshelves, and lovingly over the years built up my own library. This was a dream ever since I was a kid and learned to love books.
My wife bought me the Sony PRS-505 for Christmas last year. Between it and Calibre (used to be libprs500), I just don't need paper any more. I can download RSS feeds, I can read books. It doesn't replace surfing the web, and it's not a computer (i.e., I don't know or care if it runs Linux, netBSD or whatever). But it's perfect for reading. Good size, good battery life, easy to use, easy to read.
If you want to read PDFs formatted for regular pages, though, move to something with a larger screen. Since PDFs are fixed page format, you have to read them landscape and split each page. That's rather annoying, especially for multi-column text.
All in all, you can't have my eReader. I'm keeping it.
By the way, if we're talking about format wars, between Calibre and good old Unix tools (txt2html rocking especially hard here since it can find paragraphs the hard way), the Sony eReader works extremely well. You still can't do anything with a DRMed book, but you can convert most non DRMed eBook formats out there.
If you're going to complain about DRM, keep in mind that some devices *do* have the option of viewing non DRMed content, and some don't. The Sony PRS-500 and PRS-505 *do* have that ability. That's like a sound player that plays MP3s versus one that only plays DRMed content. So that implies that the same options, legal or not, are available.
Saying that the NWS isn't or wasn't geek friendly is like saying that the pope isn't religious. The NWS has always made advanced data available, and sometimes the software necessary to use it. I think it's more likely that the "geek" community is catching up to the NWS, not the other way 'round.
There's no such thing as the force, and there never will be
I happen to disagree with you. Try taking some Kung Fu classes, you'll soon enough learn otherwise. Better yet, try Tai Chi or Qigong.
gclef wrote: Because everything *except* the data backup are traditional "security" roles. Backup is needed, and recognized by security folks as good, but backup isn't traditionally considered a "security" product.
If you view it from more of a risk management viewpoint and call it all "business continuity", then backup fits quite well. In that case most security plays a preventative role, and backup plays a recovery role. My guess is that many of the buyers are viewing it from this viewpoint. If your product / services make sense to your customer, then that's all that really matters.
This is one of those big, gaping holes in open source software. I swear most open source programmers don't even understand the question. Let me try:
.net "way". Alice has to learn quite a lot to get there, though.
h tmlPythonCard, which is looking very nice: Python is a very newbie friendly language. If you use this, then ReportLab (http://www.reportlab.org/) might be a good choice for reporting tools.
Alice is an expert in some area of business. She can even wrap her head around simple databases. How can she write database apps without having to call Bob, the resident Unix hacker who doesn't want to waste his time coding simple data entry screens.
What tools can Alice use? Open Office is workable now, and although pretty clumsy, compares to the VB
There's http://pythoncard.sourceforge.net/samples/custdb.
There's Rekall, I've not used it at all, although it looks pretty good.
And then there is GNU Enterprise http://gnue.org/. It is eventually supposed to be an ERP system, but currently the project team is working on what appears to be a very sweet set of db app development tools. Rumor is that it's at a usable point, but I've never been able to crawl through the install process (even on Debian).
There are more, but I haven't found any really good ones.
The issue never was about how much you were being paid, nor whether you were a regular employee or a contractor/consultant.
It *is* the issue. If you get paid hourly, generally the copyright belongs to whomever is paying you. If you are getting paid in more broad terms to "write this system" or "make me some art" for more of a fixed fee, then generally you retain the copyright. IANAL, just a software developer. I learned all about this when doing some software for a client and they decided it was theirs.
By the same token, if you want to pay me about $500 per hour to come take pictures of your wedding, I will gladly do so. And the copyright remains yours, because of the way I am paid.
The issue is that when you're a developer for hire for a company, in virtually all instances you relinquish copyright to your code to the person who hired you.
Just because you negotiated a bum deal doesn't mean that I have to feel sorry for you.
>So here is my idea: distribute the social networks. A user joins the server they want, is
>allocated a user id which is user@domain.com, analogous to a Jabber ID, and they can add people
>to their network who exist on other servers.
This is a *very* good idea.
>Communities would work similarly with community@communities.domain.com, people join a
>community by registering their user ID on the server which hosts the community. For instance,
>the Slashdot community might be slashdot@communities.slashdot.org.
Or how about we skip that idea entirely and make the FOAF stuff non-centralized? If the jabber protocol were tweaked slightly (and I'm no expert, this may be impossible or it may already be there) to allow direct connections between users, they could trade FOAF description files.
Think IM meets Gnutella for passing personal descriptions. Searching would be done like Gnutella, through friends (whom you are connected to through your buddy list).
You could even add the Waste protocol into the mix. This would mean that groups could link up in an encrypted way to chat, trade files, or whatever. And if you linked all this to Jabber you would solve the key exchange problem that Waste has by linking a public key with your jabber ID.
Am I making any sense? It's too early for me to tell...
>What is with the suit need to add superfluous syllables to words? Hmm... `competence' is only
>three syllables; `competency' must be 33.3% better!
>Is this something they teach in business school?
People repeat what they hear. If everyone around you is saying "Bill Gates sucks" or "No, it's not 'Linux', dumbass, it's 'GNU/Linux'" then it gets parroted back. I feel just as surrounded by buzzwords in my MBA program as I do at the LUG meeting or the 2600 club meeting. Some people take just as much pride in their suit and tie as others do in their "got root?" tshirts.
And before you bring up the cost difference, that cell phone that cryptofreak brings to the mall and can do wireless SSH on has gotta gost as much or more than a nice jacket at Dillards. The cell phone would let me configure my server from anywhere, but the suit might help me get a job.
Different worlds, just jargon. Examples:
1a. I SSH'ed into my home box by port forwarding through my NAT firewall and then setup a tunnel to run X apps on my Cygwin X server, 'cause Windoze is sooooo lame and now I can run XBitchX on my desktop at work. Hell yes!
isn't so different from:
1b. In order to get paid by wire transfer through the LOC we had to have our BOL and proof of shipment emailed as a PDF from the freight consolidator in China. Faxes are soooo lame, now we can hand documents to the bank that are photocopy quality. Now we actually get paid on time. Hell yes!
My mom would think everybody was nuts, pat them on the head and tell them to go outside and play while she baked some cookies. The Dalai Lama would probably just laugh - really loudly.
He's my freaking personal hero. Mod him up!! (or something).
There's nothing wrong with the University of Phoenix that isn't wrong with other schools. The only folks who hate it are those who tried and failed. I've done both traditional college (for 3 yrs) and UoP, and I'll take UoP any day.
:-)
I learned more and I was challenged a hell of a lot more. At UoP I actually learned to communicate with people (horror of horrors!). After all, a good part of your grade depends on how well you can communicate and work with a learning team.
After nearly two years of writing around 6 or 7 papers every five weeks, I find myself panicking and looking around for material to research and write a paper on. Blog time! Yes, somehow open source, Buddhism and B-school can make for a blog - at least it's not the strangest one out there.
Some folks just can't hack that. And BTW - I made it through my entire Bachelor's degree without ever firing up any of the MS Office suite. I used Open Office all the way, even back when it was still fairly beta. Their #$!$ website works only with IE though. They know me by name on their complaint line by now.
My favorite part was in statistics because of the Math thingy in OOo. I could make those formulas look absolutely beautiful.
Well, there *was* MS Project... but I did do a presentation on sourceforge during that class just to make myself feel better. I sold it as "the future of collaborative project management". I got extra points.
Poor wittle Mac user... got an itch you can't scratch? USE OPEN SOURCE!
Yeah, yeah, BSD is open source blah blah blah. Exactly how much of OS X is open source? I can tell you how much of Linux is: 100%
I'm betting you have to pay $1500 for some developer kit to write drivers for that OS.
So just switch to Linux, go to tldp.org and download the driver writing howto and go to town. Enough whining already.
Bill, you said you were gonna give away your cash
before you died. Well, here's your chance. If you want the opportunity to change the world, give us a global and free information infrastructure. Wouldn't that take mankind to the next level?
Wouldn't that put your name in history as one of the greatest benefactors of mankind? C'mon... it'll push us gearheads that hate you into abject adoration, so you can go ahead and continue your global domination thingy.
Puh-leeeeeze!
I'm not sure if it's sad or just funny that some people DO consider Jedi to be a religion. It's based on something called "Qi Gong" (chee gung) which is very similar to prana yoga, and Jedi itself could easily be considered to be a branch of Taoism.
Qi Gong, in the form of Falun Gong (an offshoot), is currently being severly repressed in China right now. Practitioners are jailed, some people say for standing on street corners and performing miracles. But I haven't seen that...
Should we add Australia to the list of nations opressing this religion? They don't have to worry about it affecting their status as a member of the WTO apparently.
For a serious website on this, see madscott.org
OK, well this isn't really a ghost story, and I wasn't there, but I had it told to me by several people, so here goes.
I was doing some consulting work at a DA's office a few years back. It was about that time that I had really started getting into Quake and was looking for some fresh meat.
After my program had been written, they got a whole new LAN with nice fast (for the time - PII 200) computers and big 17" monitors. This was just the perfect setup for Quake, and I wound up getting one guy addicted to it. Then another, then another, until we started having these huge LAN parties once a week over there.
I don't know how legal it is, but they also liked to hang out there and drink whiskey - lots of it. Have you ever played Quake against a half-lit cop with a REAL gun on his belt screaming "Die Die DIE!"? And you thought getting pulled over for a speeding ticket was bad...
Anyway, they got tired of killing each other and decided one night to play in the cooperative mode where they go through and it's "The Good Guys" against the regular monsters in each level. They also decided to make it a really late night affair and so had several bottles of whiskey during the process.
Well, so here you have a bunch of drunk cops getting to finally express their pent up desire to let loose with heavy weapons, running through Quake levels and having a really great time. Of course there were enough of them, and I'm sure they had it on the easiest level, that they were not really trying hard and probably having fun watching monsters explode into chunks. They probably laughed when a friend got "eviscerated by a fiend", but were having a really good time.
So anyway, if you've played through the first "episode" (is that what it was called?) you'll remember that last level. They all start out on a new level, they move forward just a bit to see what is going on. Then a huge monster arises out of the laval and the screaming starts.
It lifts a hand and smashes it down right on top of them, killing every last one of them. Apparently they were all yelling and running around and falling out of chairs.
So next time you get pulled over, imagine the cop being drunk, playing Quake, and screaming because he just got completely smashed and screaming and rolling around on the floor. It's rather amusing, and would probably be more so if I were a better storyteller.
Here's my theory, for what it's worth:
;-).
1. If the *type* of exploit is known, and the *point of communication* (i.e., socket) is known, then an "expert" system can eventually be built that will make exploit creation point and click simple.
2. Any random piece of information can be disseminated to an unlimited number of points on the internet in much much less than 24 hours if there is any semi-organized method of sharing the information. A web site, mailing list, private FTP server, whatever - the internet was created to share information quickly. Code Red shows that even unwilling participants can be used to spread information (or any other payload) to saturation point in less than a day.
3. Even if only one programmer on the internet is creating exploits, there is a system of sharing this information. This is what has occurred with the "zero day" cracks of games that are shared on IRC, and it is very much a formalized and highly popular system. The only difference is that instead of being freely available to Black Hats and White Hats (like a public mailing list), it's only available as information in trade, and is usually traded for something illegal. This creates a nifty little power hiearchy where fifteen-year-olds become something like the Mafia Dons.
4. Exploit code proves that there is a hole. This proof cannot be denied by J Random Marketing Department.
5. A published exploit allows system admins to test whether a published "fix" actually works or not. Even if every admin doesn't do it, a couple will, and if there's a problem it will be announced on security lists (again, spreading at the speed of light).
Conclusion:
Because there will always be groups on the internet willing to share this information, security through obscurity will never work.
As an example, one could interview various games companies in the US and find the mean time between release of a copy-protected piece of software and the crack to bypass the protection. I call this Mean Time Before Crack (MTBC), and it's similar to the open source concept of Mean Time Between Itches (MTBI - the amount of time between the public discussion of a software idea and it's open-source implementation)
Because our military is not a political organization. It may wage wars, win them and lose them but not DECLARE a war. That's up to the citizens of our nation, specifically, our (lame-ass old-fart) elected representatives.
> As much as I hate to admit it, StarOffice is a classic example of the schism between commercial software developers and open source advocates.
OK, this comment is just plain wrong. StarOffice was developed as commercial software from the ground up as a competitor to MS Office and WordPerfect. It was a commercial failure, and Sun purchased the company and open sourced the code. After being open sourced as Open Office, it has become easier to use, more stable and faster. All the hallmarks of open source software (like Apache and Linux).
Get it right Troll Man.
>1) Perfect (or nearly so) compatibility with the .doc, .xls, and .ppt formats. Too much stuff out there in these formats to not have it.
Open Office builds from the past few months have been every bit as compatible with MS Office as different versions of MS Office have been with each other. I've used it in day-to-day work for nearly a year now and not had any significant problems (or more than my MS Office using coworkers) for Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents.
> 2) Make it available everywhere. Downloading it from the internet is not good enough.
And did napster do this? Uh, not that I recall. And, they seem to have taken the internet by storm. You never know, Star Office may just be the next killer app, simply because of economics...
>3) Make it as close to Office as possible in look and feel, at least for a while.
Yes, that has been done to an amazing degree. On Windows, most users have no idea that they AREN'T using MS Office.
>4) Do a cost analysis and trumpet it everywhere.
Actually, there are some studies posted. Not on this particular subject, but I think it is a really good idea. And with the amount of money Sun is already putting into the project, I think this will be highly likely to happen.
>Unfortunately I think Sun doesn't want to do any of this. Unless they do, StarOffice is going to be an also-ran for at least several more years.
Unfortunately, I think you are both right and wrong at the same time.
Why not let them make 3D raytraced graphics and games with Blender? I can't think of anything nearly as fun and challenging at the very same time! The site is at blender.nl.
Just run them through some of the provided tutorials and let them go - they'll learn it much quicker than I would I think.
OK, get this. I run windows on my little girl's computer (she's 4) and the nickjr.com website added a "radio" section. It requires the MS media player crap so I broke down and installed it.
I'm used to getting a licensing agreement before installing software, but this time I got a "Privacy Agreement" which told me that they would watch everything played across the internet, and I think even on the local hard drive. I essentially had to consent first, then I was allowed to go back and (supposedly) turn it off.
As far as I could tell there was no way for my little girl to listen to NickJr radio without me consenting to allow Microsoft (and whoever they want to sell the data to) to monitor exactly what she listens to and when.
I'm sure Microsoft's point would be that they aren't forcing my little girl to listen to NickJr radio and that I have to make the choice. So I installed it and turned everything off. I guess if I ever get marketing directed at me for children's music I can sue Microsoft or something.
Like that would do a damned bit of good at all.
More money in the economy, less money in the consumer's pocket, less consumer confidence. It's six of one and a half-dozen of the other.
The Free Software Movement was an inevitable response to the way corporate america was handling software development. We let Microsoft do it their way for a long time, and computer experts were frustrated because the "hood was welded shut".
Interoperation is there, but done poorly. Microsoft had no interest in the internet by themselves, it took other people to point out that it was the next big thing.
Was I the only one to notice that Microsoft quit shipping a free programming environment many, many years ago? Now why the hell would they go and do that? Because they hate developers. Developers are their primary source of competition.
We won't see the fruits of the free software movement for another decade (in a way), and there had to be a downside when the overinflated market corrected itself.
The free market can work wonders, but it isn't very innovative. Something like government investment in R&D or free software has to come along to shake things up every now and then. It's life.