If iTunes is the only option left due to our old friend vendor-lock then it won't matter if it's a bayonet or not.
The effect will be the same.
That's the whole problem with unnatural monopolies. You get the choice of going along or being amish.
Last I checked, even if you've purchased an iPod, you can still put non-iTunes MP3s on it. Heck, there's a few decent non-iTunes sync packages out there as well.
And it's also about Nintendo, which was the first to require that all apps be approved by the device manufacturer.
Are you sure about that? I was under the impression that console games have been licensed since the dawn of time (I'm remember the magic blue PS2 disks in particular)...
No. I think XKCD is rather witty, a more grown-up thing.
I'd even file it as thought-provoking (particularly some of the earlier strips, which I wish he'd do more of.)
Is it everybody's cup of tea? No, of course not. But no-one should be surprised that the Venn diagram of life shows significant overlap between/. and XKCD readers.
Sure, you buy an iPad, you hope that someone develops software for your specific need
As opposed to buying any other computer, where software magically appears, wrapped in rainbows and delivered by Robocop on a unicorn.
If you have the ability to write software, you can write software for the iPad (I personally plan to, actually). If you don't have the ability, it didn't really matter what OS you were using anyway.
Sorry, I'm more of a hot-rodder than a passive consumer.
Ah, but do you hot-rod everything? Your toaster? TV? Mattress?
That's what bothers me about the arbitrary "passive consumer" vs. "hot-rodder" (or tinkerer, or whatever Doctorow calls it) - it ignores the fact that some things are just *used* as-is. An MP3 player to me is a tool - I use it to play music. In the same way I don't hot-rod my hammer or my daughter's crayons, I don't *want* to manually tinker with my tools. An iPod works well for me - it's simple to use, and does the job I need it to do.
A big part of the reason Apple is popular in the segments they are (publishing, video, graphics, multimedia, education) is that those users don't want a computer - they want a tool. Macs give them the tools they need with the minimum amount of overhead. And you can't call them passive consumers - they just choose where they want to put their creative efforts.
The problem with that line of reasoning is that it assumes that PaintShop is a suitable substitute for PhotoShop. (Or WordPerfect is for MS Word, to use a older example).
While they can be functionally equivalent, when you're looking for a job telling someone you're fluid in vi, emacs, and WordPerfect won't help when the checkbox says "Microsoft Office".
Btw - viewers are very rarely "customers". Certainly for TV programming they are not, the advertisers are.
And yet, my cable bill arrives every month...
The cable bill is the cable company selling the channels to you.
The examples are a bit simplistic - any good business these days makes money on both sides of the equation. They sell your eyeballs to advertisers, and sell the rights to your eyeballs to the cable companies.
Nah, when the "internet" becomes too overenforced, the geeks will move to the "outernet" (or whatever they come up with). Always new frontiers to hide from the idiots (for a time, anyway).
More like "unpaid security forces" - they don't want the ISPs to enforce the law, they want the ISPs to do their work for them.
I love that companies that make their money from slicing rights as thinly as possible so they can sell the same thing over and over, feel it's too much of a burden to enforce the copyrights. Strikes me as "cost of doing business".
Greet the Gatekeepers (receptionists, tea lady etc.) and be nice to them. You will be surprised how this will be helpful later on in your career at the company.
The best advice my father ever gave to me: there are two people whom you need to be on good terms with in a company - the receptionist and whoever processes paychecks. Those two people can make your life miserable or easy, and there's not much you can do about it. Everyone else can be worked around.
In all honesty, we aren't too far from cameras being in all our homes. London already has them on every street.
Not being in London, I wonder - if you were concerned about all the cameras (and if I were in London, I would be), would not a decent counter-measure be a large hat? See if you can bring sombreros into fashion, perhaps?
All of these facts are true... IF and ONLY IF the powers that be actually bother to research it in that level of detail.
If the actual purpose is to supply data for "last day attended by student", I suspect the university won't look to closely at what room the student swiped into, so long as he was in a classroom. If you don't check, you can plausibly deny that you should have caught the shenanigans. And you don't want to catch shenanigans since that would cause you to lose revenue.
on the other hand, a majority of these students are using gov't backed loans and/or grants, so as a taxpayer I want the most out of my money, which means show up and learn, I'm not paying for you to slack off.
Loans have to be paid back (and around here, the law says they don't go away even if you declare bankrupcy). Grants... well, are you really going to complain about a few grand to a student vs. a few billion getting thrown around elsewhere?
One of my classes this semester does this AND has informal forced attendance through "participation points" that you get through answering questions in class using electronic "clickers". I refuse to attend since it is a waste of my time (I currently have a 100% in the course), yet I will lose a good chunk of points because I value my time.
My first thought after reading this is: what exactly is the criteria for these "participation points"?
Is it based on how many questions asked? Then I'll ask a pile of questions on the first class until I've hit the maximum points allowed, then stop attending.
Is it limited per month or week? Then expect to see me at the beginning of the cycle asking a lot of questions, and then getting up for a bathroom break and not coming back.
Is it some subjective mark assigned by the prof? Then I'll be chatting with the dean about favoritism in the classroom.
All it's doing is making everyone's life a little more miserable for no benefit. (Because if your students thought your lectures were worth attending, they would attend your lectures.
I learn a lot from lectures. Others people don't. Requiring attendance is one way of forcing students to conform to a learning style that may or may not work for them.
Mandatory lectures, mandatory reading, mandatory practice problems, mandatory study groups.... By the time you get to college, you should already know how to learn.
While I'm already all over this thread mocking the idea, I realized that there are some instances where I could support attendance checking:
Classes with a large project-focus: I had an English class where a lot of group work was done in class (and the groups were pre-assigned). Checking to see who's in and who's out makes sense.
Lab components - if you're taking chemistry, it's probably best to require that you can do the hands-on work before passing them (since the exams can only realistically test the theory).
Beyond that, if I can learn the material from the textbook to your satisfaction (as determined by my marks), why do they care if I sat in the room?
all one has to do is walk into a classroom with 10 RFID-enabled cards in their pocket
I was just thinking about that, it should be fairly easy to catch that sort of shenanigans. Just a matter of matching up timing on the cards to identify when the same two cards got to the same 7 classes at exactly the same time.
Solution: put card 1 on a lanyard around neck. Put card 2 in rear pocket of backpack. Wear backpack as you walk through door (preferably during the rush). Sufficient space difference to plausibly be two different people.
(Still expecting a compsci or engineer to just brute-force the combinations and log everyone in everywhere).
Who needs to carry the cards around? You can make RFID spoofers with an ATtiny85 chip, plant one in every class, and then charge students to add their IDs to the broadcast.
Or get fancy and use an ATmega or Propeller along with a wireless chip or an ethernet board. Then you wouldn't even need to show up to program the chip.
Heck, do it as a public service - just have it blast all IDs at the start of each class. Attendance will be through the roof!
Let's pretend that most of the class failed anyway, and most of this prof's classes fail year-after-year-after-year -- what will happen? Yeah, nothing. You've seen it. I've seen it. There are terrible professors and they get away with it regardless of whether people complain.
Not always - I had a prof fail the majority of a 60-person class (over half the class failed, only 9 made a proper passing grade). The dean allowed all who complained to audit the class for free next semester and rewrite the exam.
The students may be paying for SOME of the class, but the majority of their tuition comes from elsewhere.
Not calling BS on it, but I find that stat a bit weird. Up here in Canada tuition is about $800 per course (plus books, fees, etc, etc, etc). Typical undergraduate course has 40-60 students (and I had classes of up to 250).
50 students x $800 each = $40,000 to cover a single course. The 250s are earning $200K for the university. Seems like there'd have to be an awful amount of overhead for outside funding to be requried...
Slashdot Mirror
If iTunes is the only option left due to our old friend vendor-lock then it won't matter if it's a bayonet or not.
The effect will be the same.
That's the whole problem with unnatural monopolies. You get the choice of going along or being amish.
Last I checked, even if you've purchased an iPod, you can still put non-iTunes MP3s on it. Heck, there's a few decent non-iTunes sync packages out there as well.
Not really feeling the vendor lock-in.
And it's also about Nintendo, which was the first to require that all apps be approved by the device manufacturer.
Are you sure about that? I was under the impression that console games have been licensed since the dawn of time (I'm remember the magic blue PS2 disks in particular)...
I wonder what we will compare techno-prowess against in 30 years when the first crop of slashdotters rocks the cradle of their first grandchild...
Oh, yeah, I forgot: most Slashdotters won't reproduce.
Well, I've got a 3-year old, and as long as she's curious about the world, I'm not fussy about what tools she uses in her exploration.
Does *anyone* think xkcd is funny?
No. I think XKCD is rather witty, a more grown-up thing.
I'd even file it as thought-provoking (particularly some of the earlier strips, which I wish he'd do more of.)
Is it everybody's cup of tea? No, of course not. But no-one should be surprised that the Venn diagram of life shows significant overlap between /. and XKCD readers.
Sure, you buy an iPad, you hope that someone develops software for your specific need
As opposed to buying any other computer, where software magically appears, wrapped in rainbows and delivered by Robocop on a unicorn.
If you have the ability to write software, you can write software for the iPad (I personally plan to, actually). If you don't have the ability, it didn't really matter what OS you were using anyway.
Sorry, I'm more of a hot-rodder than a passive consumer.
Ah, but do you hot-rod everything? Your toaster? TV? Mattress?
That's what bothers me about the arbitrary "passive consumer" vs. "hot-rodder" (or tinkerer, or whatever Doctorow calls it) - it ignores the fact that some things are just *used* as-is. An MP3 player to me is a tool - I use it to play music. In the same way I don't hot-rod my hammer or my daughter's crayons, I don't *want* to manually tinker with my tools. An iPod works well for me - it's simple to use, and does the job I need it to do.
A big part of the reason Apple is popular in the segments they are (publishing, video, graphics, multimedia, education) is that those users don't want a computer - they want a tool. Macs give them the tools they need with the minimum amount of overhead. And you can't call them passive consumers - they just choose where they want to put their creative efforts.
The problem with that line of reasoning is that it assumes that PaintShop is a suitable substitute for PhotoShop. (Or WordPerfect is for MS Word, to use a older example).
While they can be functionally equivalent, when you're looking for a job telling someone you're fluid in vi, emacs, and WordPerfect won't help when the checkbox says "Microsoft Office".
I don't mind online apps for apps that need to be.. well, online to work.
Gmail's the perfect example - if I don't have a live net connection, there's no point to checking my email, is there?
Btw - viewers are very rarely "customers". Certainly for TV programming they are not, the advertisers are.
And yet, my cable bill arrives every month...
The cable bill is the cable company selling the channels to you.
The examples are a bit simplistic - any good business these days makes money on both sides of the equation. They sell your eyeballs to advertisers, and sell the rights to your eyeballs to the cable companies.
Nah, when the "internet" becomes too overenforced, the geeks will move to the "outernet" (or whatever they come up with). Always new frontiers to hide from the idiots (for a time, anyway).
Even worst, now they want the ISPs act as police.
More like "unpaid security forces" - they don't want the ISPs to enforce the law, they want the ISPs to do their work for them.
I love that companies that make their money from slicing rights as thinly as possible so they can sell the same thing over and over, feel it's too much of a burden to enforce the copyrights. Strikes me as "cost of doing business".
I'd think a better way to put it would be this:
Students have the same rights in school as out of school. The school however, receives additional, typically parental, rights.
And any parent who does not closely supervise how the school exercises those rights shouldn't be surprised at the results...
In addition to good hygiene:
The best advice my father ever gave to me: there are two people whom you need to be on good terms with in a company - the receptionist and whoever processes paychecks. Those two people can make your life miserable or easy, and there's not much you can do about it. Everyone else can be worked around.
Just looking at the posts here, I can see what the game plan is:
1. IT was responsible for maintaining the system, and you can't prove administration knew, so administration plainly isn't at fault.
2. Administration saw the single picture you can prove we saw, and you can't prove that IT looked at anything, so IT plainly isn't at fault
3. Keep the two issues separated at all costs.
In all honesty, we aren't too far from cameras being in all our homes. London already has them on every street.
Not being in London, I wonder - if you were concerned about all the cameras (and if I were in London, I would be), would not a decent counter-measure be a large hat? See if you can bring sombreros into fashion, perhaps?
If there's "no proof" that anyone in IT viewed the images, how did the picture of the kid eating candy end up in the hands of a school administrator?
It's possible that the school administrator had access to the pictures without going through the IT people.
If the administrator had access to the images without going through IT, that puts a damper on the whole scapegoat plan.
All of these facts are true... IF and ONLY IF the powers that be actually bother to research it in that level of detail.
If the actual purpose is to supply data for "last day attended by student", I suspect the university won't look to closely at what room the student swiped into, so long as he was in a classroom. If you don't check, you can plausibly deny that you should have caught the shenanigans. And you don't want to catch shenanigans since that would cause you to lose revenue.
I had to pay an awful lot of fees for most of those services. Student union (counseling), health services, rec passes if I wanted one...
on the other hand, a majority of these students are using gov't backed loans and/or grants, so as a taxpayer I want the most out of my money, which means show up and learn, I'm not paying for you to slack off.
Loans have to be paid back (and around here, the law says they don't go away even if you declare bankrupcy). Grants... well, are you really going to complain about a few grand to a student vs. a few billion getting thrown around elsewhere?
One of my classes this semester does this AND has informal forced attendance through "participation points" that you get through answering questions in class using electronic "clickers". I refuse to attend since it is a waste of my time (I currently have a 100% in the course), yet I will lose a good chunk of points because I value my time.
My first thought after reading this is: what exactly is the criteria for these "participation points"?
All it's doing is making everyone's life a little more miserable for no benefit. (Because if your students thought your lectures were worth attending, they would attend your lectures.
I learn a lot from lectures. Others people don't. Requiring attendance is one way of forcing students to conform to a learning style that may or may not work for them.
Mandatory lectures, mandatory reading, mandatory practice problems, mandatory study groups.... By the time you get to college, you should already know how to learn.
While I'm already all over this thread mocking the idea, I realized that there are some instances where I could support attendance checking:
Beyond that, if I can learn the material from the textbook to your satisfaction (as determined by my marks), why do they care if I sat in the room?
full body scanners of course.
all one has to do is walk into a classroom with 10 RFID-enabled cards in their pocket
I was just thinking about that, it should be fairly easy to catch that sort of shenanigans. Just a matter of matching up timing on the cards to identify when the same two cards got to the same 7 classes at exactly the same time.
Solution: put card 1 on a lanyard around neck. Put card 2 in rear pocket of backpack. Wear backpack as you walk through door (preferably during the rush). Sufficient space difference to plausibly be two different people.
(Still expecting a compsci or engineer to just brute-force the combinations and log everyone in everywhere).
Who needs to carry the cards around? You can make RFID spoofers with an ATtiny85 chip, plant one in every class, and then charge students to add their IDs to the broadcast.
Or get fancy and use an ATmega or Propeller along with a wireless chip or an ethernet board. Then you wouldn't even need to show up to program the chip.
Heck, do it as a public service - just have it blast all IDs at the start of each class. Attendance will be through the roof!
Let's pretend that most of the class failed anyway, and most of this prof's classes fail year-after-year-after-year -- what will happen? Yeah, nothing. You've seen it. I've seen it. There are terrible professors and they get away with it regardless of whether people complain.
Not always - I had a prof fail the majority of a 60-person class (over half the class failed, only 9 made a proper passing grade). The dean allowed all who complained to audit the class for free next semester and rewrite the exam.
The students may be paying for SOME of the class, but the majority of their tuition comes from elsewhere.
Not calling BS on it, but I find that stat a bit weird. Up here in Canada tuition is about $800 per course (plus books, fees, etc, etc, etc). Typical undergraduate course has 40-60 students (and I had classes of up to 250).
50 students x $800 each = $40,000 to cover a single course. The 250s are earning $200K for the university. Seems like there'd have to be an awful amount of overhead for outside funding to be requried...