What's that, you say? It can detect the court ordered electronic monitoring device attached to my ankle? Shit!
The purpose of said monitoring device to ensure that you don't skip out on bail prior to your hearing. Which would trigger the adverts for this no doubt.
... bluetooth-enabled pocket-puss ftw. Kinda reminds me of that commercial where the guy and girl are in a waiting room and a cell-phone rings. The girl digs in her purse and promptly answers her vibrator.... which she turns on... and then is too embarassed to turn off as she quickly hides it...
I can just picture girlfriends asking their b/fs: "Why is it that all of these websites are advertising sex-toys?"
Whenever someone discovers something amazingly useful, it always turns out to have negative side effects. I believe that's called the Law of Unintended Consequences.
There's a belief that women are starting to get bigger breasts as a result of the various hormones that are pumped into chickens to give them bigger breasts.... all this to say: the Law of Unintended Consequences does not only refer to negative side effects.
My sources for this belief are strictly anecdotal and generally as a result of seeing 12 year olds with C-cup sized chests... the parents of these chil'uns would probably agree with you about the side effects being negative though;-)
Don't get me wrong, I'm a HUGE Open Source proponent. I've been using Linux since 98. Started with RedHat, quickly ditched that in favour of Slackware, and only recently moved to KUbuntu. I've also made scripts to do automatic polling and webpage generation using MRTG.
People with the ability and time should *definitely* go for open source, as it's the best compromise between rolling your own and buying proprietary. Not everyone is lucky enough to work in a position where their job is basically feast-or-famine. If you're a sys/net-admin who never has time to do anything because fighting fires is the modus operandi, then there's a little more to the equation than simply licencing costs;-)
On a personal level, there are a number of times where I would much rather spend the extra couple hundred bucks to get someone else to do the work for me... spending $50 bucks to get H&R Block to do my taxes is a really good example of this.
On a business level, your time, or the time of the company's employees, is a resource. If you really have nothing better to do than write custom scripts for an open source application, then that's fine. But as a manager-type, would I rather pay you $30/hr over a couple weeks to add functionality, or pay a vendor a few $k to build that functionality in?
Obviously it's gotta be a case-by-case basis, but it should also be fairly self-evident that sometimes the answer might be something like: "go with the expensive version, and use your time doing that node-upgrade we've been putting off for months"
A lot of what you wrote seems to be minor annoyances (at least from my perspective, since I don't do much in the way of web development, and not a lot of multi-threaded coding either) From the looks of things, a Mac would do me just fine, there is one thing that would drive me nuts though, and that is, if LyX didn't work....
Thanks for the info... I'm going to have to seriously consider getting one of these puppies. I promised myself that I'd never get a desktop again cuz I was sick of lugging around a 21" CRT and mid-tower... but laptops are so damned expensive for what you get... this 24" iMac seems to be a kickass in-between-er.... and my Dell laptop is slowly dying a heat-death.... starting to get vertical lines all over the place >.<
I think it's funny that we made essentially the same comment (though I made mine a few scant moments before you did), and I got modded offtopic, while you got modded insightful... LOL
so is there anything that a person going from a windows/linux PC (currently a Dell Inspiron 9300 notebook) to an iMac should know? Things that most computer science-types (or code junkies) would really like to know before hand? Things that have bitten others in the ass while making the switch?
Care to educate a noob on OS X and linux apps? I've been thinking about pony'ing up the cash for one for a while. I was actually looking at a MacBook, but the 24" monitor with the "tower" built in is really really slick lookin. I'm also curious as to how well the GPUs perform, as I'm still into gaming and might go back to WoW. I also do a lot of simulation (of multi-agent/robot systems) for my masters thesis, so I need the horsepower. What are the pros and cons, as you see them, of buying this beast, and how does it compare with what I could build myself for the same price if I wanted to?
Because in most forensic investigations, they remove the hard-drive from the PC and then perform the investigation using another operating system guaranteed to not have any nasty surprises built in. They're not going to run the risk that buddy has a small script that deletes his entire hard drive if he doesn't hit ctrl-a-s-d-f-enter within seconds of booting up.
There's likely more to it than that as well, but the point is they generally don't want to use the system they've confiscated...
Point 5: Politics. This is the real crux of Geist's argument, although he doesn't put it as plainly as he might.
ahhh... finally something that makes sense. I didn't think of it that way, but that part is a fairly chilling possibility. Enough small changes and you can effect a large change that would have originally been shitcanned... the whole slowly increasing the temp of the water that a frog is in analogy.
I'm not sure where exactly I'd stand on that one... if it was a strong possibility than I'd agree with his sense of urgency in shitcanning this... if it was an incredibly remote possibility, then I'd stand by my opinion that he's making a big deal out of nothing....
I'm Canadian, so I share your desire to know which Nation is being talked about.... but the big ol' American Flag in the article stub should've probably given it away, eh?
BAH!!! He is a lawyer... *sigh*... at any rate, the potential violation of international law still doesn't explain what the big deal is? The potential violation of international law takes up one measly line in his entire article... so I'm still at a bit of a loss
... because it might give the wrong idea to people.
This is the first I've heard of this. I'm sure someone in the crowd can correct me if I'm wrong, but my basic interpretation of this seems to be:
it shouldn't be necessary
it might go against international law
it gives the impression that people who access this stuff already are doing so illegally
it might cause people to stop putting information up freely
I'd kinda like to address each of these in turn:
it shouldn't be necessary Then what's the big deal?
it might go against international law I'd leave the interpretation of international law to the lawyers... I'm not one, I don't think the author is either.
it gives the impression that people who access this stuff already are doing so illegally O RLY?!!11oneone... this one looks like a red herring to me... new educational act or not, this one probably wouldn't be able to touch previous court decisions regarding fair use, so again, what's the big deal?
it might cause people to stop putting information up freely I'd like to call bullshit on this one as well. Put this into place and 99.99% of Canadians will never even hear about it.
All this really really makes me wonder why this guy is so against this... I can't find a SOLID reason amongst all of his hyperbole... could someone please tell me what I'm missing? Why is this a big deal?
You're working on a system to benefit the students. Your main target group is the group that actually attends most of their classes. If you provide a stripped down version to minimize the benefit to the group that is generally truant, you are minimizing the benefit to the students that attend.
You state that you are worried about whether or not your endeavour will encourage students to become more truant and use the tools to study the night before the exam. Students who are apt to do this will do so regardless of whether or not your project ever comes to fruition. They'll also learn the hard way that their marks suffer from this, and having 200hours worth of video files to sift through in the 12-24 hours of cram time before a final will likely hurt them more than help them. The students who attended class might want to use the full footage to find something they're not too solid on. So posting the full sound/video package will likely not benefit the non-attenders, but could heavily benefit the attenders.
As I mentioned though, non-attenders are likely to skip anyway, though you are right, their truancy might increase slightly... I highly doubt the trend would last more than a semester or two, as people will learn the hard way that attending class does, in fact, help your marks... unless of course you can't understand the prof at all. I had one who was completely unintelligible, and used only u,v and x as variables... the problem was his u's, v's and x's all looked exactly identical in his chicken-scratched blackboard-scrawls. I didn't much attend that class, and an audio/video stream likely wouldn't have helped anyway;-)
My suggestion: Go with the full meal deal and make it as accessible as possible. Allow it outside even (provided you guys have the bandwidth.) Prospective students will use it to see what the profs are like, which may be a good or bad thing for you? As well, non-students will be able to use it to brush up on skills. As to the poster previously who said that this last might hurt the university, I'd like to know how? These non-students would either be in a position where they will never be able to go to a university (in which case the university has lost nothing) or they would be in a position to go to a university (in which case they'll need to actually enrol in order to get a diploma) and they'll have gained a certain amount of respect for a university that makes it's courses freely available. As well, in both cases, these people would likely refer others to this university if they're learning from these audio/video files.
Slashdot Mirror
What's that, you say? It can detect the court ordered electronic monitoring device attached to my ankle? Shit!
The purpose of said monitoring device to ensure that you don't skip out on bail prior to your hearing. Which would trigger the adverts for this no doubt.
... bluetooth-enabled pocket-puss ftw. Kinda reminds me of that commercial where the guy and girl are in a waiting room and a cell-phone rings. The girl digs in her purse and promptly answers her vibrator.... which she turns on... and then is too embarassed to turn off as she quickly hides it...
I can just picture girlfriends asking their b/fs: "Why is it that all of these websites are advertising sex-toys?"
/sigh
no... no... don't hold back....
Tell us what you really think
<More Dead Horse Beating>
I can't help but wonder if their sales are going to suffer after their Root Kit shenanigans
</More Dead Horse Beating>
You've been waiting since the last large collider story to use that line haven't you?
DOD
Whenever someone discovers something amazingly useful, it always turns out to have negative side effects. I believe that's called the Law of Unintended Consequences.
There's a belief that women are starting to get bigger breasts as a result of the various hormones that are pumped into chickens to give them bigger breasts.... all this to say: the Law of Unintended Consequences does not only refer to negative side effects.
My sources for this belief are strictly anecdotal and generally as a result of seeing 12 year olds with C-cup sized chests... the parents of these chil'uns would probably agree with you about the side effects being negative though ;-)
How about a 24" iMac? ... of course that is a bit more than just an LCD monitor...
I do not work for Apple nor do I own one... yet...
these puppies are pretty sweet though, and my Dell Laptop sucks ass
Don't get me wrong, I'm a HUGE Open Source proponent. I've been using Linux since 98. Started with RedHat, quickly ditched that in favour of Slackware, and only recently moved to KUbuntu. I've also made scripts to do automatic polling and webpage generation using MRTG.
People with the ability and time should *definitely* go for open source, as it's the best compromise between rolling your own and buying proprietary. Not everyone is lucky enough to work in a position where their job is basically feast-or-famine. If you're a sys/net-admin who never has time to do anything because fighting fires is the modus operandi, then there's a little more to the equation than simply licencing costs ;-)
<TIRED JOKE>
Enough is enough! I have had it with these motherfucking tired jokes on this motherfucking site!
</TIRED JOKE>
:-D
The "snakes on a plane" joke was never really funny and the novelty has definitely worn off.
On a personal level, there are a number of times where I would much rather spend the extra couple hundred bucks to get someone else to do the work for me... spending $50 bucks to get H&R Block to do my taxes is a really good example of this.
On a business level, your time, or the time of the company's employees, is a resource. If you really have nothing better to do than write custom scripts for an open source application, then that's fine. But as a manager-type, would I rather pay you $30/hr over a couple weeks to add functionality, or pay a vendor a few $k to build that functionality in?
Obviously it's gotta be a case-by-case basis, but it should also be fairly self-evident that sometimes the answer might be something like: "go with the expensive version, and use your time doing that node-upgrade we've been putting off for months"
YMMV
A lot of what you wrote seems to be minor annoyances (at least from my perspective, since I don't do much in the way of web development, and not a lot of multi-threaded coding either) From the looks of things, a Mac would do me just fine, there is one thing that would drive me nuts though, and that is, if LyX didn't work....
Thanks for the info... I'm going to have to seriously consider getting one of these puppies. I promised myself that I'd never get a desktop again cuz I was sick of lugging around a 21" CRT and mid-tower... but laptops are so damned expensive for what you get... this 24" iMac seems to be a kickass in-between-er.... and my Dell laptop is slowly dying a heat-death.... starting to get vertical lines all over the place >.<
I think it's funny that we made essentially the same comment (though I made mine a few scant moments before you did), and I got modded offtopic, while you got modded insightful... LOL
so is there anything that a person going from a windows/linux PC (currently a Dell Inspiron 9300 notebook) to an iMac should know? Things that most computer science-types (or code junkies) would really like to know before hand? Things that have bitten others in the ass while making the switch?
I'll break with slashdot tradition here:
You're absolutely right... I can't believe it's been that long since I used a C=64 that I forgot about the no hard-drive thing...
LOAD "ACLUE",8,1
Care to educate a noob on OS X and linux apps? I've been thinking about pony'ing up the cash for one for a while. I was actually looking at a MacBook, but the 24" monitor with the "tower" built in is really really slick lookin. I'm also curious as to how well the GPUs perform, as I'm still into gaming and might go back to WoW. I also do a lot of simulation (of multi-agent/robot systems) for my masters thesis, so I need the horsepower. What are the pros and cons, as you see them, of buying this beast, and how does it compare with what I could build myself for the same price if I wanted to?
you're right... that is simple... Janet's da bomb!!11oneone
Because in most forensic investigations, they remove the hard-drive from the PC and then perform the investigation using another operating system guaranteed to not have any nasty surprises built in. They're not going to run the risk that buddy has a small script that deletes his entire hard drive if he doesn't hit ctrl-a-s-d-f-enter within seconds of booting up.
There's likely more to it than that as well, but the point is they generally don't want to use the system they've confiscated...
Point 5: Politics. This is the real crux of Geist's argument, although he doesn't put it as plainly as he might.
ahhh... finally something that makes sense. I didn't think of it that way, but that part is a fairly chilling possibility. Enough small changes and you can effect a large change that would have originally been shitcanned... the whole slowly increasing the temp of the water that a frog is in analogy.
I'm not sure where exactly I'd stand on that one... if it was a strong possibility than I'd agree with his sense of urgency in shitcanning this... if it was an incredibly remote possibility, then I'd stand by my opinion that he's making a big deal out of nothing....
thanks for the info AC ;-)
I'm Canadian, so I share your desire to know which Nation is being talked about.... but the big ol' American Flag in the article stub should've probably given it away, eh?
BAH!!! He is a lawyer... *sigh* ... at any rate, the potential violation of international law still doesn't explain what the big deal is? The potential violation of international law takes up one measly line in his entire article... so I'm still at a bit of a loss
... because it might give the wrong idea to people.
This is the first I've heard of this. I'm sure someone in the crowd can correct me if I'm wrong, but my basic interpretation of this seems to be:
I'd kinda like to address each of these in turn:
All this really really makes me wonder why this guy is so against this... I can't find a SOLID reason amongst all of his hyperbole... could someone please tell me what I'm missing? Why is this a big deal?
You're working on a system to benefit the students. Your main target group is the group that actually attends most of their classes. If you provide a stripped down version to minimize the benefit to the group that is generally truant, you are minimizing the benefit to the students that attend.
You state that you are worried about whether or not your endeavour will encourage students to become more truant and use the tools to study the night before the exam. Students who are apt to do this will do so regardless of whether or not your project ever comes to fruition. They'll also learn the hard way that their marks suffer from this, and having 200hours worth of video files to sift through in the 12-24 hours of cram time before a final will likely hurt them more than help them. The students who attended class might want to use the full footage to find something they're not too solid on. So posting the full sound/video package will likely not benefit the non-attenders, but could heavily benefit the attenders.
As I mentioned though, non-attenders are likely to skip anyway, though you are right, their truancy might increase slightly... I highly doubt the trend would last more than a semester or two, as people will learn the hard way that attending class does, in fact, help your marks... unless of course you can't understand the prof at all. I had one who was completely unintelligible, and used only u,v and x as variables... the problem was his u's, v's and x's all looked exactly identical in his chicken-scratched blackboard-scrawls. I didn't much attend that class, and an audio/video stream likely wouldn't have helped anyway ;-)
My suggestion: Go with the full meal deal and make it as accessible as possible. Allow it outside even (provided you guys have the bandwidth.) Prospective students will use it to see what the profs are like, which may be a good or bad thing for you? As well, non-students will be able to use it to brush up on skills. As to the poster previously who said that this last might hurt the university, I'd like to know how? These non-students would either be in a position where they will never be able to go to a university (in which case the university has lost nothing) or they would be in a position to go to a university (in which case they'll need to actually enrol in order to get a diploma) and they'll have gained a certain amount of respect for a university that makes it's courses freely available. As well, in both cases, these people would likely refer others to this university if they're learning from these audio/video files.