The purpose of a library is to provide access to information. It used to be that providing access to books was the way to do that. These days, that means the web.
The internet is a much more efficient publishing medium of information than print. It takes months to print and distribute and catalog hardcopy. As an example, when was the last time you found an up-to-date technical reference in your library? In my town, you can be assured of finding COBOL references in the stacks, but nothing from this century.
Dead trees are expensive, heavy, and present all the burdens of inventory. The web allows you to get anything not slashdotted, and the library doesn't have to pay for the title, track who has it at the moment, fine them if they don't return it on time, etc.
If libraries are to be more relevant than museums, they need the web.
I am definitely against censorware in public libraries and schools, on pragmatic and ideological grounds. It's been shown too often that the products block inappropriately (breast cancer sites), malevolently, (sites critical of censorware, catagorized as raunchy sex, for example), and ineffectively. I also think that the censors pretty much have their heads up their asses, for all the usual ideological 1st amendment reasons.
But I do think that unfettered access to the net is a poor use of educational resources. I run the net at a community college with wide-open access in the library, and people do waste a lot of time in there. While the net can be educational, (even the pr0n could teach a few things) using it a tool to reach specific information for specific purposes strikes me as a more efficient use of human and network bandwidth. Otherwise, I believe it will interfere with, not further, education. It would be like having kids watch t.v. and not specifying the program. You probably shouldn't expect that much useful education would occur. You might have some difficulty when the students have to use the net for research, but that could be done under close supervision.
This won't work in my situation, but in an elementary school it sounds good.
They are where they are because OS/2 went nowhere. They had all major vendors - Dell, Gateway, Compaq, HP, and IBM itself! - tied into buying a windows license for EVERY machine sold. Either they accepted those terms, or much worse terms while their competitors enjoyed a huge price advantage. There isn't much of a market for machines without an OS, and with restrictive licensing agreements MS was able to kill a superior product that shipped a year ahead of win95. If the vendors got together to dictate the price they would pay Microsoft, I bet Balmer would find a whole new rationale for a government role in the market.
I really liked the 2nd ed, then I think Avalon Hill brought out a 3rd edition with great production values and for me, no play value. A similar thing happened with Boot Hill.
Others have mentioned some great old games- Ogre was one. I only played warp war once, saw no need to go back. But I spent countless hours playing Melee/Wizard.
Top Secret - that was a fun game. Silly as hell, with D&D's terrible Character Classes, but it was playable enough to be fun. I think a lot of the GURPs rule sets that would cover the topic got too close to simulation and too far from game.
I still have Melee. I may while away some time with it yet.
You are full of shit. THOUSANDS of *legal* Gore votes were trashed, and THOUSANDS of *illegal* Bush votes were counted. You have to actually read the newspaper accounts. What they reported was that Gore's legal strategy wouldn't have worked, there were not enough undervotes in the few counties at issue. There were plenty of overvotes (where someone marked Gore, and also wrote in Gore) in those few counties, there were plenty of undervotes statewide for a Gore win.
The overseas votes to pro-Bush counties were granted an illegal extension, changing the law after the election, and overseas votes to pro-Gore counties were not.
Face it - we're in a banana republic. Let's hope it's temporary and the Shrub goes home humiliated in a couple of years.
The Bush mantra, borrowed from Stalin: "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything."
Re:Cut and dried Copyright violation
on
Abusing the GPL?
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Mod this up - it's the only answer mentioned so far.
True: in the waning months of WWII, when the city of Strasbourg was threatened by a German counter-offensive, DeGaulle insisted on a militarily unwise defense. Eisenhower then insisted on an offensive to clear the Germans west of the Rhine to end the threat. French troops made no progress. American reinforcements were necessary. DeGaulle angrily asked if Ike "questioned the valor of French troops." I think the question was settled in 1870, again in 1917, and for all time in 1940. 3 French divisions were then withdrawn without permission for "rest and refitting" (with American supplies) in spite of the fact that American divisions had just beaten back the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge and probably needed the rest more than the French. And then the Frogs ^H^H^H^H French disobeyed orders and attempted to seize additional occupation territory in Germany at the expense of the US/British plan. For some reason, Ike didn't simply cut off the supplies. It was American gasoline, food, and ammunition the French forces were using.
In addition, DeGaulle snubbed Roosevelt on FDR's return from Yalta. Staggering ingratitude, considering the American death toll for the Normandy campaign was 29,000, another 106,000 wounded/missing.
In Ike's place, I would have liberated Holland and Belgium, and invited the Germans back into France.
I think the way to do this is to require that broadcasters - who lease PUBLIC airways - pony up a ton of free airtime for any political party that garnered measurable support. This will make the paid ad time remaining more costly, and less useful.
Of course, the broadcasters will treat this as a threat to profits, but after their behavior during the last spectrum rip-off they should be strangled to death with their own intestines anyway. (Put it on pay-per-view, I'd watch!)
"Microsoft's (admittally) no better developers, who are a much smaller group and can work with a much more homogeneous code base, don't have to work nearly as hard because they pretty much know the code inside out."
Actually, there are thousands of developers with a hand in nt/2k/xp, and nobody knows 40+million lines of code inside and out. Many changes to the MSFC dll are done by different PRODUCT DIVISIONS (eg SMS from the backoffice folks, IE, office, etc.)
I found most of the developers I encountered to be competent stepford wives/husbands - kind of plastic, missing something fundamental to humanity- but they could code. There were a few that matched the super-iq hype MS surrounds itself with. Anyway, broadly speaking you are probably right: the coding ability is probably comparable. The coding MOTIVATION is very different between open source developers, who do it for love, and MS coders, many of which I suspect are incapable of love. The quality bar was explicitly - "good enough for market adoption"
That has to contribute to dehuminization, and account for the manifest difference in quality between flagship Open Source projects and MS products.
Look, the MS page that *distributes* patches was ITSELF defaced by NIMDA, ("Hacked by Chinese!") which is itself a pretty good indicator of how reasonable it is to require administrators to keep on top of MS patches. There are simply too many for even the staff at MS to keep up with.
Or, to put it another way, the volume of work for a typical admin does not account for spikes related to urgent patches, so they don't get done. It's not like we're all playing Half Life waiting for an update to do.
Unfortunately, it's WAY too expensive. We were considering an upgrade from 4.11, but the license cost was massive. We thought about proceeding, and then learned that the cost was ANNUAL! Noooo thanks.
I will say that it is stupid to change vendors to worst-of-breed-but-likely-to-prevail. Look, you buy the product, use it until you can't anymore, and THEN make your lateral/backward move. NetWare 3.x is STILL supported by somebody- it's not as if Novell support is free anyway. To me, the "dead technology" argument is completely stupid.
We were in compliance. We had 75 hosts, total, and 100 licenses. It incorrectly identified IP addresses, and it's not really my problem to figure out why. It's the vendor's problem not to cripple the product without reason.
And the license logger was in fact pegging the cpu. You are simply wrong about this. It did in fact hamper the performance of the firewall and the only thing they could have done worse was permit unexamined traffic through.
In my experience as an admin, the busywork involved in proving the right to use software is a major resource sink.
For example: CA has *terrible* product activation routines that take longer to complete (if successful- not at all a given) than the installation itself. They are also spam vectors.
Checkpoint firewall products are also a PITA. Long strings to enter, confusing docs regarding which license keys to enter where (fear upgrades), topped by a buggy compliance routine that somehow confuses ip addresses behind the firewall, so it comes to believe you are out of compliance and pegs the cpu with multpile license violation log messages/second. Piss on them. There is really nothing significant they offer but heartburn.
Paul Allen wrote the BASIC ports - Gates helped a bit. It's probably not a coincidence that all the surviving photos from the era show Gates looking over Allen's shoulder while Allen types.
There is a rumor that Gates was hired by his high school to write scheduling software, and had himself placed in classes with a disproportionate number of females. Unethical, but understandable.
Well, M$ presented Gateway, HP, Compaq, and Dell with a choice: stay in business or don't. IBM dared to offer OS/2 Warp as an option and they were denied win95 for one or two of the crucial seasons for pc's (back to school or xmas, I forget which, but it's in the Findings of Fact which have been accepted at every appellate level). IBM never regained the lost market share.
They also DID force computer makers who used their OS to place IE on the desktop in preference to Netscape.
Slashdot Mirror
The purpose of a library is to provide access to information. It used to be that providing access to books was the way to do that. These days, that means the web.
The internet is a much more efficient publishing medium of information than print. It takes months to print and distribute and catalog hardcopy. As an example, when was the last time you found an up-to-date technical reference in your library? In my town, you can be assured of finding COBOL references in the stacks, but nothing from this century.
Dead trees are expensive, heavy, and present all the burdens of inventory. The web allows you to get anything not slashdotted, and the library doesn't have to pay for the title, track who has it at the moment, fine them if they don't return it on time, etc.
If libraries are to be more relevant than museums, they need the web.
This resonates with me.
I am definitely against censorware in public libraries and schools, on pragmatic and ideological grounds. It's been shown too often that the products block inappropriately (breast cancer sites), malevolently, (sites critical of censorware, catagorized as raunchy sex, for example), and ineffectively. I also think that the censors pretty much have their heads up their asses, for all the usual ideological 1st amendment reasons.
But I do think that unfettered access to the net is a poor use of educational resources. I run the net at a community college with wide-open access in the library, and people do waste a lot of time in there. While the net can be educational, (even the pr0n could teach a few things) using it a tool to reach specific information for specific purposes strikes me as a more efficient use of human and network bandwidth. Otherwise, I believe it will interfere with, not further, education. It would be like having kids watch t.v. and not specifying the program. You probably shouldn't expect that much useful education would occur. You might have some difficulty when the students have to use the net for research, but that could be done under close supervision.
This won't work in my situation, but in an elementary school it sounds good.
They are where they are because OS/2 went nowhere.
They had all major vendors - Dell, Gateway, Compaq, HP, and IBM itself! - tied into buying a windows license for EVERY machine sold. Either they accepted those terms, or much worse terms while their competitors enjoyed a huge price advantage. There isn't much of a market for machines without an OS, and with restrictive licensing agreements MS was able to kill a superior product that shipped a year ahead of win95.
If the vendors got together to dictate the price they would pay Microsoft, I bet Balmer would find a whole new rationale for a government role in the market.
Uh, PGP? Apache? Tex? Shall I continue?
Now it's nothing but spambots and cancelbots.
(That's the idea- the actual story was an excellent paragraph. Come back, Segfault!)
I really liked the 2nd ed, then I think Avalon Hill brought out a 3rd edition with great production values and for me, no play value. A similar thing happened with Boot Hill.
Others have mentioned some great old games- Ogre was one. I only played warp war once, saw no need to go back. But I spent countless hours playing Melee/Wizard.
Top Secret - that was a fun game. Silly as hell, with D&D's terrible Character Classes, but it was playable enough to be fun. I think a lot of the GURPs rule sets that would cover the topic got too close to simulation and too far from game.
I still have Melee. I may while away some time with it yet.
The former ftp software (now acquired by NetManage) used to have servers named for sexual lubricants.
You are full of shit. THOUSANDS of *legal* Gore votes were trashed, and THOUSANDS of *illegal* Bush votes were counted. You have to actually read the newspaper accounts. What they reported was that Gore's legal strategy wouldn't have worked, there were not enough undervotes in the few counties at issue. There were plenty of overvotes (where someone marked Gore, and also wrote in Gore) in those few counties, there were plenty of undervotes statewide for a Gore win.
The overseas votes to pro-Bush counties were granted an illegal extension, changing the law after the election, and overseas votes to pro-Gore counties were not.
Face it - we're in a banana republic. Let's hope it's temporary and the Shrub goes home humiliated in a couple of years.
The Bush mantra, borrowed from Stalin: "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything."
Mod this up - it's the only answer mentioned so far.
I work at a community college. We do not have servers under site license, only workstations. Naturally, we are setting up new servers with SAMBA!
True: in the waning months of WWII, when the city of Strasbourg was threatened by a German counter-offensive, DeGaulle insisted on a militarily unwise defense. Eisenhower then insisted on an offensive to clear the Germans west of the Rhine to end the threat. French troops made no progress. American reinforcements were necessary. DeGaulle angrily asked if Ike "questioned the valor of French troops." I think the question was settled in 1870, again in 1917, and for all time in 1940. 3 French divisions were then withdrawn without permission for "rest and refitting" (with American supplies) in spite of the fact that American divisions had just beaten back the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge and probably needed the rest more than the French. And then the Frogs ^H^H^H^H French disobeyed orders and attempted to seize additional occupation territory in Germany at the expense of the US/British plan. For some reason, Ike didn't simply cut off the supplies. It was American gasoline, food, and ammunition the French forces were using.
In addition, DeGaulle snubbed Roosevelt on FDR's return from Yalta. Staggering ingratitude, considering the American death toll for the Normandy campaign was 29,000, another 106,000 wounded/missing.
In Ike's place, I would have liberated Holland and Belgium, and invited the Germans back into France.
I think the way to do this is to require that broadcasters - who lease PUBLIC airways - pony up a ton of free airtime for any political party that garnered measurable support. This will make the paid ad time remaining more costly, and less useful.
Of course, the broadcasters will treat this as a threat to profits, but after their behavior during the last spectrum rip-off they should be strangled to death with their own intestines anyway. (Put it on pay-per-view, I'd watch!)
"Microsoft's (admittally) no better developers, who are a much smaller group and can work with a much more homogeneous code base, don't have to work nearly as hard because they pretty much know the code inside out."
Actually, there are thousands of developers with a hand in nt/2k/xp, and nobody knows 40+million lines of code inside and out. Many changes to the MSFC dll are done by different PRODUCT DIVISIONS (eg SMS from the backoffice folks, IE, office, etc.)
I found most of the developers I encountered to be competent stepford wives/husbands - kind of plastic, missing something fundamental to humanity- but they could code. There were a few that matched the super-iq hype MS surrounds itself with. Anyway, broadly speaking you are probably right: the coding ability is probably comparable. The coding MOTIVATION is very different between open source developers, who do it for love, and MS coders, many of which I suspect are incapable of love. The quality bar was explicitly - "good enough for market adoption"
That has to contribute to dehuminization, and account for the manifest difference in quality between flagship Open Source projects and MS products.
Look, the MS page that *distributes* patches was ITSELF defaced by NIMDA, ("Hacked by Chinese!") which is itself a pretty good indicator of how reasonable it is to require administrators to keep on top of MS patches. There are simply too many for even the staff at MS to keep up with.
Or, to put it another way, the volume of work for a typical admin does not account for spikes related to urgent patches, so they don't get done. It's not like we're all playing Half Life waiting for an update to do.
Unfortunately, it's WAY too expensive. We were considering an upgrade from 4.11, but the license cost was massive. We thought about proceeding, and then learned that the cost was ANNUAL! Noooo thanks.
I will say that it is stupid to change vendors to worst-of-breed-but-likely-to-prevail. Look, you buy the product, use it until you can't anymore, and THEN make your lateral/backward move. NetWare 3.x is STILL supported by somebody- it's not as if Novell support is free anyway. To me, the "dead technology" argument is completely stupid.
Redirect it to another planet - like Mars. I saw "Mars Attacks" - we better pre-empt. If they figure out how to muffle Slim Whitman, we're toast!
Besides, it would be cool to watch.
We were in compliance. We had 75 hosts, total, and 100 licenses. It incorrectly identified IP addresses, and it's not really my problem to figure out why. It's the vendor's problem not to cripple the product without reason.
And the license logger was in fact pegging the cpu. You are simply wrong about this. It did in fact hamper the performance of the firewall and the only thing they could have done worse was permit unexamined traffic through.
In my experience as an admin, the busywork involved in proving the right to use software is a major resource sink.
For example: CA has *terrible* product activation routines that take longer to complete (if successful- not at all a given) than the installation itself. They are also spam vectors.
Checkpoint firewall products are also a PITA. Long strings to enter, confusing docs regarding which license keys to enter where (fear upgrades), topped by a buggy compliance routine that somehow confuses ip addresses behind the firewall, so it comes to believe you are out of compliance and pegs the cpu with multpile license violation log messages/second. Piss on them. There is really nothing significant they offer but heartburn.
hee hee
I was on a raft trip in Utah's Canyonlands when one flew over at low altitude. It put the fear of God into me - or at least fear of the Air Force.
Come on - this is funny! Mod up.
I am a rabid MS basher but have to acknowledge that Linux news dominates here.
Paul Allen wrote the BASIC ports - Gates helped a bit. It's probably not a coincidence that all the surviving photos from the era show Gates looking over Allen's shoulder while Allen types.
There is a rumor that Gates was hired by his high school to write scheduling software, and had himself placed in classes with a disproportionate number of females. Unethical, but understandable.
Turns out that Aragorn is Luke Skywalker's dad!
Bomb Florida? After the election, it sounds like a pretty good idea.
Well, M$ presented Gateway, HP, Compaq, and Dell with a choice: stay in business or don't. IBM dared to offer OS/2 Warp as an option and they were denied win95 for one or two of the crucial seasons for pc's (back to school or xmas, I forget which, but it's in the Findings of Fact which have been accepted at every appellate level). IBM never regained the lost market share.
They also DID force computer makers who used their OS to place IE on the desktop in preference to Netscape.
Both actions are illegal. 100% bullshit free.