The instructor covered far more material than even he expected every student to master; however, a team of engineers out of one of those classes would collectively have mastered a lot more than if the course was designed so that everybody could get an A. (Likewise even for individual students who excelled in the course.)
I'm speaking from experience from a few classes taught by a physics professor at my university. Granted, he had a fixed grading scale, no after-the-fact curving, but the basic gist was that if you had a 70% average on his nasty tests and a 90% on homework, you would probably get an A. In his first-semester "Physics for Scientists and Engineers" course, the exam average was often under 50%. The distribution was typically bimodal in that course, whereas the Classical Mechanics course I took from him later had slightly higher averages and closer to normal grade distributions.
He wasn't afraid to fail people, either, and if you weren't willing to put in many hours a week figuring out the homework, you were likely to fail. Anyway, his choice to teach more material than he expected everyone to master (and the fact that he was a great teacher, with absurd office hours -- you could often find him in his office until midnight or later) makes me very glad to have taken those courses from him, rather than someone else in the department, despite that the work load pretty much sucked the life out of me those semesters.
Re:The only thing really not broken... yet
on
The DRM Scorecard
·
· Score: 2, Informative
This is not specific to OpenBSD. I did some rudimentary benchmarking for Debian with UP and SMP kernels (same config except for the SMP option), in each case using only one processor, and found between a 15% and 30% performance hit depending on hardware configuration.
The issue was that Debian was (probaby still is) considering not shipping any UP kernels, since it's kind of a pain to maintain a UP and SMP flavor for each kernel configuration. It turns out the performance hit is still big enough that, except on architectures where uniprocessor models are rare, it still makes sense to ship a UP kernel.
Who needs Perl or Ruby when you've got Python?;) It's hard for me to imaging doing much of anything in Perl since I've started writing lots of Python. The funny thing is I was put off by the whitespace significance at first, but that took, oh, 20 minutes to overcome. I love how simple the language is syntactically, which is something you'll never get with Perl--it takes "there's more than one way to do it" a little too far.
And what happens when the admin dies in a car accident? Shit, now we no longer have access to the network because some smart ass memorized his password rather than documenting it in a secure location.
If one admin has the only superuser password, then you have another problem entirely. There should be an emergency administrator account, whose password is stored somewhere physically secure (or known by several administrators). Logins with this account should be logged as suspicious, as it should only be used in a situation where the regular admin (who most certainly should not have written his password down) forgets it or is unavailable.
Besides, you have physical access. I assure you it's not difficult to reset a password if you have physical access to the machine.
Limiting software copyright to fourteen years would be sensible but doesn't go far enough. As RMS has pointed out, it is absurd that software originally gained the protection of copyright by virtue of being a creative work, yet the thing that humans actually create, the source code, is not required to be published.
At the very least, software developers who want the protection of copyright should be required to lodge their source with a central library, to ensure it can be released when copyright expires.
I had originally thought the same thing, but when I considered it the other day, I realized that there are many other types of creative works published, most of which have some sort of "source" that isn't required to be registered with some central authority.
While I agree that source code is necessary to be able to create derivative works, what about music? When a song goes public domain (if we ever see any in our lifetime to do so...), should the author be forced to also release all the material he used to create it, such as the sheet music (if any), the raw audio files used to mix down the final result, and any sequencer files?
How about photographers? Should a photographer have to provide her negatives? (Or raw camera files, for digital?) Or should other graphic artists need to make available the Photoshop or other data files they used to create their works?
Such a requirement for software would really need to be extended for all works of art. I think it would make things really nice, and it would make it easier for the public to benefit from the work now in the public domain. But how do you convince everybody else? Unfortunately, most people have accepted the propaganda that "intellectual property" is just that, property, and that it deserves the same protections (for an unlimited time) as real, tangible property.
Are we talking about the remnants of Tandem being moved to Linux?
Yes, it's NonStop as in Tandem. But it's not so much about moving it to Linux, but enabling Linux to run on it (adding NonStop features to the Linux kernel), and allowing more open source projects to run on NonStop.
You miss an important point: effect can be used as a verb--it just means something different than affect.
To effect something is to build it or bring it into existence.
With regard to universities reading your email: use PGP. Encrypt anything that you don't want anyone else to read. Hell, encrypt everything, if you can get all your correspondents to use it, too. If you're worried about them reading your email, simply taking it off the server a few times a day isn't really going to help you--it wouldn't be difficult for them to keep permanent copies, or just pull the mail spool from a backup tape, if they really wanted email as evidence. So that's a silly reason to use POP over IMAP.
Personally, I use fetchmail to pull my mail off several mail servers and put it in a local (network-wise) IMAP store that works really fast within the network, while still being accessible (via TLS/SSL) outside. Since I use more than one computer regularly, IMAP is really convenient.
For the client, I usually use Mozilla Thunderbird. I like that it's cross-platform (and works equally well on Linux and Windows), and it has a great PGP plugin, Enigmail, that supports both inline and PGP/MIME signing and encryption. I had used Evolution on Linux before, but it was a little too bloaty for my taste, and it doesn't support pgp-inline, which is all that at least half of the people I know can use.
Heh I just noticed I properly spelled out "ten" whereas I used the arabic for the cardinal number "9". Just like the Associated Press style manual (or some such thing) dictates.
Actually, the accepted style is to spell out cardinal numbers less than 10 and use numerals for numbers greater than or equal to 10. But since you were comparing a number less than 10 with one greater or equal to 10, you would "properly" use numerals for both. So, you should actually have said "9 times out of 10." (That is, unless you were starting the sentence with '9', in which case you should spell it out, but that's a whole 'nother story.)
The place where I work (Panera Bread, a restaurant)...
I love that restaurant! Okay, totally off-topic, but still. Anyone in Colorado (do they have locations elsewhere?) should check 'em out some time. Their Turkey Bacon Bravo sandwich and French Onion soup are my favorites (as yet...).
Anyway... In an effort to add some on-topic discussion: my previous employer, Current, would pretty much intimidate people not to work overtime. You were only allowed to work overtime when it was "approved," which was basically only during the Christmas and February "big book" rushes. If you accidentally worked overtime any other time, you could be written up, eventually fired.
This was really frustrating, as you would inevitably get a 20-minute call five minutes before your clock-out time. And they made you feel guilty for leaving when there were lots of calls waiting.
Working for them sucked in plenty of other ways, though. They would hire seasonal workers, giving them the impression that they would be made "regular" employees with benefits after six months. Five months later, they would hire another group of seasonals, train them, and lay off most of the previous group of seasonals. Totally sleazy. But I'm not bitter or anything...
Re:Wow, they requested this?
on
Spam Bits
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· Score: 1
Odd, I've done business with both Directron and emusic and never had a spam problem. I hate Directron for other reasons (their customer service is horrible)...maybe I'm just lucky in the spam department. I've had the same email address for years and I've only gotten a few spams. Never more than one a month. I make new addresses for all the things I have to divulge an email address for, but even those addresses don't get spammed.
T-Mobile customers now get free, unlimited GPRS. You don't need the T-zones package or anything. I believe the only port open is 80, so you might not get FTP or SSL access using an IR/Bluetooth capable phone as a modem, but still, it's completely free and unmetered.
Oh, boy. Either I missed the humor, or you are clueless...
Have you ever tried to bzip an audio file and compare it to an MP3 encoded version? The MP3 file will always be smaller, because the encoder throws out data that it doesn't expect people will actually need to hear.
Even for lossless compression, [b,g]zip sucks on audio. Codecs like Shorten and FLAC work really well for that purpose.
The reasons you give for your dismissal of the AAC format (which, by the way, is the same audio codec used in MPEG-2 movies - ergo DVDs and VCDs. MPEG-4's AAC is the same thing with some added features) are generally vague and uninformed.
A little nitpick: VCDs use MPEG-1, for video and audio. The audio is encoded in MPEG-1 Layer 2 (whereas MP3s are MPEG-1 Layer 3) at a fairly high bitrate, 224kbps if my memory serves me correctly.
Now, the AAC codec used in DVDs is a much higher bitrate than what you'd purchase at iTMS. 448kbps at 48000 KHz vs. 128kbps at 44100 KHz. Naturally, the DVD will have surround sound channels, but since most of the bandwidth will still be devoted to stereo, it's not really fair to compare the AAC that everyone will actually hear when it comes to music to that used by DVDs. In practice, at "normal" bitrates (between 128 and 256 kpbs), MP3 and Ogg Vorbis almost always sound better.
And if we don't respect the decisions of musicians who choose otherwise, then what difference does it make whether some choose to share?
Well, considering it's a corporation rather than a musician choosing to restrict the use of the Beatles stuff... In any case, it ought to be public domain by now. This is just one reason that copyright was never meant to be perpetual--there's hardly any more money to be made from the old Beatles records, most of the artists involved are dead or have been very well compensated, and now this DJ Danger Mouse character has brought new life into the music, more enjoyable material, and it's being suppressed by a corporation.
... If the sysadmin didn't install it you can't run it, (just mount/home and/tmp with -noexec)...
Just a little nitpick:
-noexec isn't really a security measure. Try this on a Linux box:
Drop an executable file into a -noexec mounted partition. Try executing it. Note that it doesn't work: Permission denied.
Now, try running the program like this:/lib/ld-linux.so.2./[program]
Voila! Your -noexec did absolutely nothing to prevent executables on the partition from being executed anyway.
I imagine similar ways exist for most Unixes--just find the linker library. In any case, the good thing is that non-root processes are sandboxed sufficiently as not to destroy anything beyond that user's files.
I thought it was the other way around, don't install Linux because they're too smart. A Linux system is a powerful tool for an inquiring mind. With Windows so much is hidden. But let the kids use Linux and before you know it they'll have hacked your machine with a loadable kernel module exploit.
I'm reminded of how my high school calculus teacher refused to teach calculus when a bee flew in the room. Too risky.:)
Give me a phone that is lightweight, gets decent talk time off a single charge (I'd LOVE to be able to carry my phone an entire work week without charging), and that has features I'll actually use, and I'll be a customer for life.
You'd be interested in a phone like the Ericsson T39m or R520m. They're basically the same phone--GPRS, Bluetooth, IR, incredible battery life--the T39m is a flip phone of sorts, while the R520m is a bit bulkier, "brick" style.
All the features you could need, unless you like to take pictures with your phone... And the reception is great because of the external antenna. With the BHC-10 battery (about $10 on eBay) you could easily go an entire week without a charge.
Ugh... $10.15 - $5.15 is, wait for it, $5.00! No $1's, no change counting... How is this less easy for the cashier than handing him $6? Especially if you don't have a $5 bill?
Slashdot Mirror
-or-
The instructor covered far more material than even he expected every student to master; however, a team of engineers out of one of those classes would collectively have mastered a lot more than if the course was designed so that everybody could get an A. (Likewise even for individual students who excelled in the course.)
I'm speaking from experience from a few classes taught by a physics professor at my university. Granted, he had a fixed grading scale, no after-the-fact curving, but the basic gist was that if you had a 70% average on his nasty tests and a 90% on homework, you would probably get an A. In his first-semester "Physics for Scientists and Engineers" course, the exam average was often under 50%. The distribution was typically bimodal in that course, whereas the Classical Mechanics course I took from him later had slightly higher averages and closer to normal grade distributions.
He wasn't afraid to fail people, either, and if you weren't willing to put in many hours a week figuring out the homework, you were likely to fail. Anyway, his choice to teach more material than he expected everyone to master (and the fact that he was a great teacher, with absurd office hours -- you could often find him in his office until midnight or later) makes me very glad to have taken those courses from him, rather than someone else in the department, despite that the work load pretty much sucked the life out of me those semesters.
MiniDisc uses SCMS (Serial Copy Management System), and it's relatively trivial to defeat. It's not encryption, it's just an extra bit set in the S/PDIF stream. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Copy_Managemen t_System and http://www.esrac.ele.tue.nl/~leon/scms/ (or Google for SCMS killer) for more information.
This is not specific to OpenBSD. I did some rudimentary benchmarking for Debian with UP and SMP kernels (same config except for the SMP option), in each case using only one processor, and found between a 15% and 30% performance hit depending on hardware configuration.
The issue was that Debian was (probaby still is) considering not shipping any UP kernels, since it's kind of a pain to maintain a UP and SMP flavor for each kernel configuration. It turns out the performance hit is still big enough that, except on architectures where uniprocessor models are rare, it still makes sense to ship a UP kernel.
See http://movingsucks.org/benchmark if you're interested.
Who needs Perl or Ruby when you've got Python? ;) It's hard for me to imaging doing much of anything in Perl since I've started writing lots of Python. The funny thing is I was put off by the whitespace significance at first, but that took, oh, 20 minutes to overcome. I love how simple the language is syntactically, which is something you'll never get with Perl--it takes "there's more than one way to do it" a little too far.
And what happens when the admin dies in a car accident? Shit, now we no longer have access to the network because some smart ass memorized his password rather than documenting it in a secure location.
If one admin has the only superuser password, then you have another problem entirely. There should be an emergency administrator account, whose password is stored somewhere physically secure (or known by several administrators). Logins with this account should be logged as suspicious, as it should only be used in a situation where the regular admin (who most certainly should not have written his password down) forgets it or is unavailable.
Besides, you have physical access. I assure you it's not difficult to reset a password if you have physical access to the machine.
Limiting software copyright to fourteen years would be sensible but doesn't go far enough. As RMS has pointed out, it is absurd that software originally gained the protection of copyright by virtue of being a creative work, yet the thing that humans actually create, the source code, is not required to be published.
At the very least, software developers who want the protection of copyright should be required to lodge their source with a central library, to ensure it can be released when copyright expires.
I had originally thought the same thing, but when I considered it the other day, I realized that there are many other types of creative works published, most of which have some sort of "source" that isn't required to be registered with some central authority.
While I agree that source code is necessary to be able to create derivative works, what about music? When a song goes public domain (if we ever see any in our lifetime to do so...), should the author be forced to also release all the material he used to create it, such as the sheet music (if any), the raw audio files used to mix down the final result, and any sequencer files?
How about photographers? Should a photographer have to provide her negatives? (Or raw camera files, for digital?) Or should other graphic artists need to make available the Photoshop or other data files they used to create their works?
Such a requirement for software would really need to be extended for all works of art. I think it would make things really nice, and it would make it easier for the public to benefit from the work now in the public domain. But how do you convince everybody else? Unfortunately, most people have accepted the propaganda that "intellectual property" is just that, property, and that it deserves the same protections (for an unlimited time) as real, tangible property.
Any particular reason they don't they make buildings out of these carbon strands instead of with steel girders?
Unfortunately, we can't yet make strands longer than a few centimeters...
Rabbit season!
Duck season!
I had almost forgotten that episode. Best ever...
No. If you actually login by going to https://gmail.google.com, the entire session remains encrypted.
You miss an important point: effect can be used as a verb--it just means something different than affect.
To effect something is to build it or bring it into existence.
Thanks for playing, though.
Except that they weren't convicted of anything: the slimy lawyers settled, as it would make them more money than an actual conviction.
With regard to universities reading your email: use PGP. Encrypt anything that you don't want anyone else to read. Hell, encrypt everything, if you can get all your correspondents to use it, too. If you're worried about them reading your email, simply taking it off the server a few times a day isn't really going to help you--it wouldn't be difficult for them to keep permanent copies, or just pull the mail spool from a backup tape, if they really wanted email as evidence. So that's a silly reason to use POP over IMAP.
Personally, I use fetchmail to pull my mail off several mail servers and put it in a local (network-wise) IMAP store that works really fast within the network, while still being accessible (via TLS/SSL) outside. Since I use more than one computer regularly, IMAP is really convenient.
For the client, I usually use Mozilla Thunderbird. I like that it's cross-platform (and works equally well on Linux and Windows), and it has a great PGP plugin, Enigmail, that supports both inline and PGP/MIME signing and encryption. I had used Evolution on Linux before, but it was a little too bloaty for my taste, and it doesn't support pgp-inline, which is all that at least half of the people I know can use.
Actually, the accepted style is to spell out cardinal numbers less than 10 and use numerals for numbers greater than or equal to 10. But since you were comparing a number less than 10 with one greater or equal to 10, you would "properly" use numerals for both. So, you should actually have said "9 times out of 10." (That is, unless you were starting the sentence with '9', in which case you should spell it out, but that's a whole 'nother story.)
Sorry, I just felt the urge to nitpick. ;)
I love that restaurant! Okay, totally off-topic, but still. Anyone in Colorado (do they have locations elsewhere?) should check 'em out some time. Their Turkey Bacon Bravo sandwich and French Onion soup are my favorites (as yet...).
Anyway... In an effort to add some on-topic discussion: my previous employer, Current, would pretty much intimidate people not to work overtime. You were only allowed to work overtime when it was "approved," which was basically only during the Christmas and February "big book" rushes. If you accidentally worked overtime any other time, you could be written up, eventually fired.
This was really frustrating, as you would inevitably get a 20-minute call five minutes before your clock-out time. And they made you feel guilty for leaving when there were lots of calls waiting.
Working for them sucked in plenty of other ways, though. They would hire seasonal workers, giving them the impression that they would be made "regular" employees with benefits after six months. Five months later, they would hire another group of seasonals, train them, and lay off most of the previous group of seasonals. Totally sleazy. But I'm not bitter or anything...
Odd, I've done business with both Directron and emusic and never had a spam problem. I hate Directron for other reasons (their customer service is horrible)...maybe I'm just lucky in the spam department. I've had the same email address for years and I've only gotten a few spams. Never more than one a month. I make new addresses for all the things I have to divulge an email address for, but even those addresses don't get spammed.
:)
But I'm not complaining.
T-Mobile customers now get free, unlimited GPRS. You don't need the T-zones package or anything. I believe the only port open is 80, so you might not get FTP or SSL access using an IR/Bluetooth capable phone as a modem, but still, it's completely free and unmetered.
There's a HowardForums thread about it.
Oh, boy. Either I missed the humor, or you are clueless...
Have you ever tried to bzip an audio file and compare it to an MP3 encoded version? The MP3 file will always be smaller, because the encoder throws out data that it doesn't expect people will actually need to hear.
Even for lossless compression, [b,g]zip sucks on audio. Codecs like Shorten and FLAC work really well for that purpose.
A little nitpick: VCDs use MPEG-1, for video and audio. The audio is encoded in MPEG-1 Layer 2 (whereas MP3s are MPEG-1 Layer 3) at a fairly high bitrate, 224kbps if my memory serves me correctly.
Now, the AAC codec used in DVDs is a much higher bitrate than what you'd purchase at iTMS. 448kbps at 48000 KHz vs. 128kbps at 44100 KHz. Naturally, the DVD will have surround sound channels, but since most of the bandwidth will still be devoted to stereo, it's not really fair to compare the AAC that everyone will actually hear when it comes to music to that used by DVDs. In practice, at "normal" bitrates (between 128 and 256 kpbs), MP3 and Ogg Vorbis almost always sound better.
And if we don't respect the decisions of musicians who choose otherwise, then what difference does it make whether some choose to share?
Well, considering it's a corporation rather than a musician choosing to restrict the use of the Beatles stuff... In any case, it ought to be public domain by now. This is just one reason that copyright was never meant to be perpetual--there's hardly any more money to be made from the old Beatles records, most of the artists involved are dead or have been very well compensated, and now this DJ Danger Mouse character has brought new life into the music, more enjoyable material, and it's being suppressed by a corporation.
And we have Disney, et al, to thank.
... If the sysadmin didn't install it you can't run it, (just mount /home and /tmp with -noexec)...
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 ./[program]
Just a little nitpick:
-noexec isn't really a security measure. Try this on a Linux box:
Drop an executable file into a -noexec mounted partition. Try executing it. Note that it doesn't work: Permission denied.
Now, try running the program like this:
Voila! Your -noexec did absolutely nothing to prevent executables on the partition from being executed anyway.
I imagine similar ways exist for most Unixes--just find the linker library. In any case, the good thing is that non-root processes are sandboxed sufficiently as not to destroy anything beyond that user's files.
I thought it was the other way around, don't install Linux because they're too smart. A Linux system is a powerful tool for an inquiring mind. With Windows so much is hidden. But let the kids use Linux and before you know it they'll have hacked your machine with a loadable kernel module exploit.
I'm reminded of how my high school calculus teacher refused to teach calculus when a bee flew in the room. Too risky. :)
Sort of like what's already being done at the US-Mexico border.
Because that has been really effective over the years...
You'd be interested in a phone like the Ericsson T39m or R520m. They're basically the same phone--GPRS, Bluetooth, IR, incredible battery life--the T39m is a flip phone of sorts, while the R520m is a bit bulkier, "brick" style.
All the features you could need, unless you like to take pictures with your phone... And the reception is great because of the external antenna. With the BHC-10 battery (about $10 on eBay) you could easily go an entire week without a charge.
Ugh... $10.15 - $5.15 is, wait for it, $5.00! No $1's, no change counting... How is this less easy for the cashier than handing him $6? Especially if you don't have a $5 bill?
Oh, wait, you're the idiot he was referring to...