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User: ekidder

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Comments · 254

  1. Re:Sorry, but we education spending has increased on Gates: Not Much To Show For $5B Spent On Education · · Score: 1

    Quite a few are going to hide behind their union (and the union is going to help those who are innocent - which apparently is most of them). All of it comes down to the same thing, the school systems cater to the teachers and administrators. They are not accountable to students or parents. Those are somewhere on the list below the copiers I think.

    Georgia doesn't have an teachers' union. It has several professional organizations, but none of them have bargaining power. The teacher contracts are almost completely the product of the government and administration. And some of them are pretty farked up. As I'm in the metro, I've been following the APS stuff since the AJC broke it a few years ago. The commentary I've seen in the AJC about the resignations is that the teachers are going to take the district to court for protection, likely to discourage APS from spending the money on court cases.

    /lives in Gwinnett County (Parkview school district)
    //wife is a former teacher
    ///dear god, slashdot comment system is awful

  2. Re:C & C glitches on Strange Glitches In Games · · Score: 1

    C&C 1 was filled of all kinds of neat glitches.

    I remember that when selling filled tiberium silo, you'd get money for the tiberium inside in addition to the building, so you'd essentially get double the money for all of the tiberium you collected. And you could use sandbags to connect your buildings and the computer wouldn't attack them, so I'd run a line of sandbags to their base and build advanced guard towers right in the middle of it.

  3. Re:Why does this "break" anything? on Apple's Mac OS X Update Breaks Perl · · Score: 2, Informative

    Well, 1.3 would be going backwards. 22 > 3 after all. Perl module versions can be a bit confusing. You'll find there are a lot of modules that break older versions.

  4. Re:Coming soon... on Storm Causes AT&T Outage Across Midwest · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I worked during the last strike. I was doing repair line duty. And then we had those massive storms in the midwest and my life was very miserable for four days. It was really really depressing talking to all of those people.

  5. VBA for Outlook on Play Random Sounds for E-Mail Notifications? · · Score: 1

    One way is to use VBA. I don't have much experience with it. All I've ever done is make a quick thing that would page me when the 15-minute notification for meetings came up. If you go to Tools -> Macros -> Visual Basic Editor, the help file in that is very useful, specifically the information on the NewMail event. It won't explain exactly how to do it (and I don't know enougrh to explain how here), but it should go a long way to helping out.

  6. Re:No on Big Brother In Your Front Seat · · Score: 5, Informative

    Indiana doesn't require you to have insurance. You can sign an affidavit stating that you can afford to pay for any accidents you're the cause of. Or something like that. I'm pretty sure you also need to supply some proof that you can afford it, too.

  7. Re:Conventions are for the READER, not the author on Is the 80 Columns Limit Dead? · · Score: 1

    How about, instead of having standards people code to, have standard formatting tools. When people check out code, they apply their personal formatting, so things look like they want. When people check things in, they apply the group-standard formatting, so everything looks the same.

  8. Re:I agree with the FCC... on FCC Looks Into Regulating Violence on TV · · Score: 2, Interesting
  9. Re:It need not threaten your future on IT Outsourcing Need Not Threaten Our Future · · Score: 1

    Funnily enough, in addition to working on my masters degree in CS, I'm also going to begin work on a degree in culinary arts. Not in case I need to use it, mostly because I love to cook :) HOWEVER, it is nice to have some vocational skills to fall back on. I've got a psychology degree as well, so I suppose I could use that in a pinch.

  10. Re:Spreadsheets in the workplace on The Subtle Tyranny Of Spreadsheets · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Excel is also really good for making d20 character sheets :)

  11. Option paralysis on The Paradox of Choice · · Score: 1

    This reminds me of the book "Generation X". It many, many terms and their definitions in the sidebars of the pages of the book. One of them, option paralysis, is the tendency, when given unlimited choices, to choose none. (paraphrasing) I can't say I disagree with the researcher's ideas. I, personally, don't need as many choices about various things in life and I tend to go with what I think works and only casually study my alternatives.

  12. ColoGuys on Looking to Move from EV1? · · Score: 1

    ColoGuys have treated me well. I have a 1U server running there for $200 for 1mbit and no usage limit. Unfortunately, I signed at a bad time :( The price is now $100 for 1U/1mbit and $250 for 1U/5mbit. I've had.. one outage, I think, and was able to reach their support people quickly, so I'm pretty happy. They also provide dedicated servers if you don't want to ship them your own. I admit, I don't use much bandwidth per month, so I dont know if my experience can be related to yours in any way at all.

  13. Re:I work in Human Resources on Computer Engineering Degree Most Valuable · · Score: 2, Informative

    Never heard of wuarchive.wustl.edu? Such a sad world we live in. I used to download insane amounts of stuff from there.

  14. Re:I don't know of any ... on What is a Good Free MUD Client? · · Score: 2, Informative
  15. Re:Hmm on Ruling on GPS Tracking Devices · · Score: 1

    In Indiana, automatic speeding cameras and such are not legal. The reasoning (or so I am told) is that in order to be fined for a traffic violation, you must be informed by a police officer as the violation is occurring (pulled over and such).

  16. Re:Not surprising on Tampa Police Give Up On Face Recognition Cameras · · Score: 1

    The brain has specialized mechanisms that do nothing but recognize faces. It is in the frontal lobe, I think. (I get my brain parts mixed up) It is one of the reasons you may recognize someone, but cannot remember their name or where you know them from.

  17. Re:Accuracy is relevance on Nutch: An Open Source Search Engine · · Score: 1

    The reason you got the results you did is because Google also checks the links which point to the page it displays. For instance, if you look at the cache of the Amazon result, you get:

    These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: to be or not to be

    That is how Google has always claimed to work (well, sorta). Google has always used more than just the text on the page to judge how well a page matches the search terms. Just because you were expecting it to work differently doesn't make it inaccurate :)

  18. Re:Problems on Exegesis 6 (Perl 6 Subroutines) Released · · Score: 1

    Ow! My groin! I've been doing perl applications development for telecommunications for about three years. Lots of TN3270 screen scraping. Lots of painful TN3270 screen scraping.

  19. Re:How is this illegal? on SBC Hit with Antitrust Lawsuit · · Score: 4, Interesting

    In many (most?) cases, SBC is reselling their lines at a loss, considering that they are still the ones that have to maintain the line. The states have a pretty strict control over how much SBC can charge for lines (being the ILEC and all) and most states have kept that at a low rate. (Illinois is about $16, I think). SBC would probably be happier with it if the ISPs were also paying to have the lines maintained.

  20. Re:The greatest trick the devil ever pulled... on SCO's Other Investor: Sun Microsystems · · Score: 1

    I think that Nicholas Petreley said it best in one of his InfoWorld columns:
    "In the Bible, in John 8:44, it says of the devil: 'When he lies, he speaks his native language.' Yes, this column is about Microsoft Corp. But don't worry. I'm not one of those who think Bill Gates is the devil. I simply suspect that if Microsoft ever met up with the devil, it wouldn't need an interpreter."
    It might be that Sun speaks Devilese pretty fluently, too.

  21. Re:I DO hate XML on Why XML Doesn't Suck · · Score: 1

    Woah. perl.com is running an article about this exact same problem. This article describes how to use SOAP::Lite to talk to a .NET Server. Well, mostly. I just glanced through it, since I don't do any XML work :)

  22. Re:Any plans for Mac OS X support? on Evolution Reaches A New Milestone · · Score: 2

    Err? I was using Entourage for quite a bit of POP and IMAP stuff. Now, I wasn't using Exchange at the same time, which may have been an issue. I've had that problem with Outlook on Windows as well. My solution was to setup multiple profiles for Outlook: Work (Exchange) and Home (POP3 x 2, IMAP x 2). I'm not sure if Entourage supports that. Now, though, I'm using Mail.app, so.. err, well, no point really.

  23. Re:Unfortunately, they got one thing wrong. on Mac OS X 10.2 "Jaguar" Reviews Pour In · · Score: 2

    They're giving out educational discounts. At least, they gave one to me. I ordered 10.2 for $69, which is something pretty hefty :)

  24. Re:Mmm..extrapolation.. on Where's GNU/Linux Usage Headed? · · Score: 1

    Thanks!

  25. Mmm..extrapolation.. on Where's GNU/Linux Usage Headed? · · Score: 5, Funny
    I love extrapolations. I do. They let you determine things which may have no effect on reality. I refer you to this. I wish I knew the author. I first saw it on Usenet long ago.

    Scientists have shown that the moon is moving away at a tiny, although measurable distance from the earth every year. If you do the math, you can calculate that 85 million years ago, the moon was orbiting the earth at a distance of about 35 feet from the earth's surface. This would explain the death of the dinosaurs...the tallest ones, anyway.