"And to top it all off.. they school system is *NOT* allowed to take volenteer help. [I already offered to set them up for them] They belong to the school union, and I dont."
Silly rules like this are best ignored. For the sake of argument, what would happen if you, some sympathic teachers, and a bunch of friends (preferably parents of kids attending this same school) went in and did it anyway?
What's the big bad union going to do? Arrest the volunteers? Fire the teachers? Make you disassemble everything and put it back in the boxes? It would certainly be interesting to hear them explain their objections to the local media, and to justify the delay in doing the job themselves.
The people in charge clearly do not have the best interests of their students at heart. Cut them out of the loop.
I'm not surprised that some students might misuse the laptops when they're allowed to take them home, but that's hardly a good reason for surrendering all the other advantages offered by laptops (as already noted elsewhere in this thread.)
Implement system policies to prevent unauthorized program installations and other similar problems, scan the systems for suspicious stuff on a regular basis, and buy some good imaging software to restore the units to pristine configuration when they get screwed up. It's manageable.
Re:Why can't anyone see the implications of this?
on
This is IT?
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· Score: 1
Your horseless carriage analogy is spot-on.
I'm really quite disappointed in Slashdot. For a generally imaginative and enthusiastic bunch, the reaction here has been uncharacteristically negative. And most of the highly-rated negative posts are so clearly written by people who obviously (1) haven't read the articles (big surprise), (2) didn't stop to think more than three seconds before sagely informing the world that "It's just a durn SCOOTER! HAW HAW!"
No, it's not a scooter. It bears a passing physical and functional resemblance to a scooter, but only in the same way that a microwave oven looks a little like a woodstove.
It's not a bike. It's not a car. It's not a golf cart. It's something new that was never previously possible. It doesn't directly replace any of those other devices in the areas where they are best suited, but those devices are not ideally suited for _all_ their current uses.
Whether it succeeds or fails, it should be allowed to do so on its own merits.
I think the ease of running multiple cables depends mainly on the construction of the house. My 50-year old raised-rancher with plaster walls presents some challenges that a newer house may not. I can see a mini-switch like this being handy in some cases.
So plug the wall-wart into a UPS, like the one that's already there for the system running that critical real-time accounting software. Or am I missing something?
Don't be an idiot. Do you think that the terrorists would have cancelled their plans to kill thousands of people out of courtesy to the Gore administration? Do you think that Gore would have reacted any differently to the attack, given the realities of the situation, the public mood, and the nearly unanimous support Bush has recieved from Congress?
I agree that Ashcroft is going too far, or at very least failing to present a good case for some the actions he has taken. That's a problem, and it's something we need to fix. But frothing at the mouth and ranting about American being a totalitarian "theocracy" is just nonsense. The Taliban are the only people involved who come anywhere close to meeting that description.
"The sea of red white and blue made me nervous from the start."
It shouldn't have, because it has nothing to do with this problem.
In some ways, it's just the opposite. Too many people who find national pride distasteful or jingoistic (and I'm not saying that you're one of them, I have no idea) immediately became critical of the most basic and harmless expressions of support for the United States. Many chose to escalate whatever personal grudge they carry against the current administration in general, in a time when the vast majority of Americans felt that such harsh criticism was unwarranted or inappropriate. Some went so far as to imply that anyone who flew a flag must be some kind of genocidal simpleton.
These actions and attitudes trivialized and marginalized their opinions, and their warnings, in the eyes of many who may otherwise have listened.
I'm not saying that such actions were "wrong", just counterproductive. Critics could have chosen to present rational arguments in terms sympathetic to the mood of the audience (which is always a good idea.) The most vocal chose not do so, and, while it may have made them felt better, it didn't help convince anyone that they were right.
If you define all non-physical security measures as being "obscure" then I suppose your argument is correct, but I think most people would find that definition inadequate.
Passwords and encryption, to use your examples, are exactly the opposite of security through obscurity. Both are pro-active measures taken by responsible parties to reduce the risk of intrusion. The "obscure" counterparts to these measures would be using obvious or default passwords, enabling anonymous access, and failing to enable encrypted communications, all while hoping that no one notices.
Any security measure can be poorly implemented, whether it's physical, electronic, or purely psychological. To know the difference between a good implementation and a bad one it's necessary to know the vulnerabilities inherent in your methods and equipment. That lock on the door may seem like the perfect choice until you discover that it's easily picked. Witholding that information from the owners and potential owners of the faulty lock doesn't protect them from anything, it just gives a false sense of security.
The really Bad Guys don't need to consult BugTraq to discover vulnerabilities. I'm sure some of them do, but if open discussion of the bugs is prohibitied then there are plenty of alternate sources for that sort of information. And while individuals may prefer to attack only high-profile sites, there's nothing guaranteeing that; and once an exploit is sufficiently automated there's no way to know where it'll turn up next.
I've never used the software in question so I dunno if it'd work in this case, but a utility like SRVANY or Invoker might be useful. They simplify the process of making ordinary apps run as background services. If the audio manager software is well behaved and if it doesn't require a user to be logged in for other reasons it might work.
IIRC, the Nautilus as envisioned by Verne was not nuclear powered. It used electricity, but it was generated via some other method.
The Nautilus in the Disney adaptation of 20,000 Leagues was nuclear powered, though I think they cloaked the term in appropriately pseudo-archaic terms. ("Fueled by the power of the atom itself", or something like that.)
"I have to admit, though I am playing it, Civ 3 is a disappointment. On many levels, it is inferior to SMAC or even Civ 2."
Agreed. SMAC isn't perfect and did have some annoying bugs, but even in that state it was, IMHO, a much more polished product (interface, gameplay, and AI) than Civ III currently is.
As many have already said, Civ III has the feel of a game that just isn't quite done.
While nice, I'd say those innovations are fairly obvious improvements that would eventually be independently implemented by any such game. FreeCiv just had the advantage of being able to slipstream the new features in a bit faster.
IMHO, attempts to subdivide domains strictly by geographic regions would simply not work. Aside from being hard to remember (regardless of what you're used to, a long, multipart domain name is harder to remember than a quick short one) the location of a business that isn't strictly brick-and-mortar is largely meaningless to customers. Where is Slashdot.com located, and why should I have to care?
And it doesn't even fit well with those brick-and-mortar entities. Suppose my business is physically located in one state, but incorporated in another? What if I have multiple physical locations? What happens if my business moves across some arbitrary geographic boundry, like between counties in a large state that's been further subdivided?
When more than one entity owns a trademark, who gets to use it, and why? What if my business is incorporated under a different name than that which is generally used with the public? Suppose my company merges with another? What exactly counts as an "international" contact when parcelling out TLD entries, and why are only large million-dollar businesses deserving of such a privilege?
In short, how are customers supposed to relate to utterly arbitrary (to them) stuff like this, and why should they be expected to?
Problems like this are exactly why so many businesses use toll-free phone numbers, PO Boxes, etc. - to avoid all the hassles that come with coupling yourself too closely with any particular physical location and to allow flexibility in your business operations. Reversing that trend on the Internet would just (re)introduce a host of old problems that don't even need to exist in a new medium.
I don't mean to sound harsh. To paraphrase Winston Churhill, the current domain system is the worst, except for all the others. The reason that.com and other TLDs are so popular is not because of evil corporatate brainwashing and stupid users. It's because they're much more friendly and generally more sensible than the alternatives. Trying to shoehorn users into a "logical" system that doesn't account for how the users actually think is generally a mistake, and the kinds of legal and technical problems we're seeing now would still be present in any other system, just in different forms.
I haven't had any problems with register.com either. They were actually quite helpful when one of my email addresses, used as a contact for a few of my domains, was deactivated prematurely. I was on-hold for a while, but after properly identifying myself and explaining the problem I got my account information and the domain records adjusted promptly and with minimal hassle.
"Economist goes as far to claim that there is no reason for men to be in space, and that all can be done by machines at a fraction of the cost and with more reliability."
I think the Economist and other advocates of a purely unmanned space program are being very shortsighted. The ultimate goal of space exploration, IMHO, is the same as the ultimate goal of terrestrial exploration: Colonization and expansion. Watching space on television will prepare us for that goal, but it won't accomplish it unless we are willing to get off our butts and go there.
What? Check a few options and Win XP is virtually indistinguishable from Win2K. Heck, for the most part it looks and acts just like good ol' Windows 95. Even with the XP skins and stuff turned on it's mostly just a matter of cosmetics.
Perhaps you should stop allowing conveniently labelled genres to determine your reading habits, and find out for yourself.
Unfortunately most of today's children's literature (and TV, and software, etc.) is written to the assumption that kids are stupid. They're not, at least not in any greater proportion than adults. The truth is that a lot of the stuff is just produced by lazy people and marketed to parents with very low expectations. I haven't yet read any of the Harry Potter books, but that's just because I haven't gotten to them yet.
The whole idea that children even need special dumbed-down books is kind of silly in itself, IMHO. Maybe it's an outgrowth of the attitude that books for adults aren't any good unless they're unnecessarily convoluted and difficult to read.
Amen. HP really manages to irritate me. I've had so many bad/worthless experiences with verious companies' technical support options that I seldom use them except as a last resort. I perfer to do it myself.
HP is the only company in recent memory that hasn't just made all the damn drivers available on their web site. It's so stupid that it just baffles me. What makes it even worse is that all those "obsolete" products made last year seem to fall off the face of the earth as far as their web site is concerned. There's no good reason for a company to _ever_ remove a required driver for _any_ product. Just leave them there.
"Here's the thing about Newton. When Newton came out, electronic PDA's *DID NOT EXIST YET*."
Not quite true. If memory serves, Sharp had been making their Wizard line of organizers for a while before the Newton was introduced. And I know Radio Shack and Casio also had fancier organizers that, looking back, definitely fit the PDA idea, within the limits of the technology available at the time. They weren't nearly as versatile as the Newton, but they also weren't as bulky or expensive, and they didn't rely on spotty handwriting recognition for input.
The Newton was a great concept for its time (though the execution left something to be desired). Apple did not invent the PDA concept.
"Seems like there are many here that still don't see anything wrong with blocking ads... Its a not the viewers right to block ads period. It is the same as stealing from a store because you think the price is too high."
That's silly. I suppose I'm also stealing from the networks if I get up to go to the bathroom during a TV commercial.
Most advertising doesn't work the way that advertisers would like it to. That's true of any kind of media. People generally ignore advertisments, and very few people ever act on the, with the immediacy that marketers of banner ads seem to assume they should. Advertising hasn't failed on the web because people block the ads - it's failed because the implementation has been handled so poorly and because the expectations of the advertisers were unrealistic.
That doesn't make any sense. By that reasoning no one should be permitted to have valuable items in their homes, whether they intend to sell them or not, since the presence of those valuables might entice bad people to enter the neighborhood and steal stuff. I suppose the art collector in the nice house down the street is now a public nuisance?
Actually it's not a dumb question. People in wheelchairs have no use for sneakers. People with missing fingers still have a need for cell phones. If this technology became the de-facto standard for cell phone keypads it could be a problem. You might be surprised at how many people are missing fingers or fingertips.
I've always thought that this attitude is pretty silly. Yes, it's important for a student to know certain basic information and understand certain core concepts. But in Real Life there are very few of us who do our jobs without ever using references or tools. The answer should be to make classroom time and exams _more_ like the real world environment, and not turn it into some artificial knowledge vacuum just because the instructors are happier that way.
A test that doesn't allow you to use your notes or check easily available references in class isn't testing knowledge or understanding, just memory. And as a fairly smart guy with a poor memory I've always resented that. Unfortunately some instructors don't understand how to do anything else.
Slashdot Mirror
"And to top it all off .. they school system is *NOT* allowed to take volenteer help. [I already offered to set them up for them] They belong to the school union, and I dont."
Silly rules like this are best ignored. For the sake of argument, what would happen if you, some sympathic teachers, and a bunch of friends (preferably parents of kids attending this same school) went in and did it anyway?
What's the big bad union going to do? Arrest the volunteers? Fire the teachers? Make you disassemble everything and put it back in the boxes? It would certainly be interesting to hear them explain their objections to the local media, and to justify the delay in doing the job themselves.
The people in charge clearly do not have the best interests of their students at heart. Cut them out of the loop.
"An ACCESS (Jet) database."
Um, no.
I'm not surprised that some students might misuse the laptops when they're allowed to take them home, but that's hardly a good reason for surrendering all the other advantages offered by laptops (as already noted elsewhere in this thread.)
Implement system policies to prevent unauthorized program installations and other similar problems, scan the systems for suspicious stuff on a regular basis, and buy some good imaging software to restore the units to pristine configuration when they get screwed up. It's manageable.
Your horseless carriage analogy is spot-on.
I'm really quite disappointed in Slashdot. For a generally imaginative and enthusiastic bunch, the reaction here has been uncharacteristically negative. And most of the highly-rated negative posts are so clearly written by people who obviously (1) haven't read the articles (big surprise), (2) didn't stop to think more than three seconds before sagely informing the world that "It's just a durn SCOOTER! HAW HAW!"
No, it's not a scooter. It bears a passing physical and functional resemblance to a scooter, but only in the same way that a microwave oven looks a little like a woodstove.
It's not a bike. It's not a car. It's not a golf cart. It's something new that was never previously possible. It doesn't directly replace any of those other devices in the areas where they are best suited, but those devices are not ideally suited for _all_ their current uses.
Whether it succeeds or fails, it should be allowed to do so on its own merits.
I think the ease of running multiple cables depends mainly on the construction of the house. My 50-year old raised-rancher with plaster walls presents some challenges that a newer house may not. I can see a mini-switch like this being handy in some cases.
So plug the wall-wart into a UPS, like the one that's already there for the system running that critical real-time accounting software. Or am I missing something?
Don't be an idiot. Do you think that the terrorists would have cancelled their plans to kill thousands of people out of courtesy to the Gore administration? Do you think that Gore would have reacted any differently to the attack, given the realities of the situation, the public mood, and the nearly unanimous support Bush has recieved from Congress?
I agree that Ashcroft is going too far, or at very least failing to present a good case for some the actions he has taken. That's a problem, and it's something we need to fix. But frothing at the mouth and ranting about American being a totalitarian "theocracy" is just nonsense. The Taliban are the only people involved who come anywhere close to meeting that description.
"The sea of red white and blue made me nervous from the start."
It shouldn't have, because it has nothing to do with this problem.
In some ways, it's just the opposite. Too many people who find national pride distasteful or jingoistic (and I'm not saying that you're one of them, I have no idea) immediately became critical of the most basic and harmless expressions of support for the United States. Many chose to escalate whatever personal grudge they carry against the current administration in general, in a time when the vast majority of Americans felt that such harsh criticism was unwarranted or inappropriate. Some went so far as to imply that anyone who flew a flag must be some kind of genocidal simpleton.
These actions and attitudes trivialized and marginalized their opinions, and their warnings, in the eyes of many who may otherwise have listened.
I'm not saying that such actions were "wrong", just counterproductive. Critics could have chosen to present rational arguments in terms sympathetic to the mood of the audience (which is always a good idea.) The most vocal chose not do so, and, while it may have made them felt better, it didn't help convince anyone that they were right.
If you define all non-physical security measures as being "obscure" then I suppose your argument is correct, but I think most people would find that definition inadequate.
Passwords and encryption, to use your examples, are exactly the opposite of security through obscurity. Both are pro-active measures taken by responsible parties to reduce the risk of intrusion. The "obscure" counterparts to these measures would be using obvious or default passwords, enabling anonymous access, and failing to enable encrypted communications, all while hoping that no one notices.
Any security measure can be poorly implemented, whether it's physical, electronic, or purely psychological. To know the difference between a good implementation and a bad one it's necessary to know the vulnerabilities inherent in your methods and equipment. That lock on the door may seem like the perfect choice until you discover that it's easily picked. Witholding that information from the owners and potential owners of the faulty lock doesn't protect them from anything, it just gives a false sense of security.
The really Bad Guys don't need to consult BugTraq to discover vulnerabilities. I'm sure some of them do, but if open discussion of the bugs is prohibitied then there are plenty of alternate sources for that sort of information. And while individuals may prefer to attack only high-profile sites, there's nothing guaranteeing that; and once an exploit is sufficiently automated there's no way to know where it'll turn up next.
I've never used the software in question so I dunno if it'd work in this case, but a utility like SRVANY or Invoker might be useful. They simplify the process of making ordinary apps run as background services. If the audio manager software is well behaved and if it doesn't require a user to be logged in for other reasons it might work.
IIRC, the Nautilus as envisioned by Verne was not nuclear powered. It used electricity, but it was generated via some other method.
The Nautilus in the Disney adaptation of 20,000 Leagues was nuclear powered, though I think they cloaked the term in appropriately pseudo-archaic terms. ("Fueled by the power of the atom itself", or something like that.)
"I have to admit, though I am playing it, Civ 3 is a disappointment. On many levels, it is inferior to SMAC or even Civ 2."
Agreed. SMAC isn't perfect and did have some annoying bugs, but even in that state it was, IMHO, a much more polished product (interface, gameplay, and AI) than Civ III currently is.
As many have already said, Civ III has the feel of a game that just isn't quite done.
While nice, I'd say those innovations are fairly obvious improvements that would eventually be independently implemented by any such game. FreeCiv just had the advantage of being able to slipstream the new features in a bit faster.
IMHO, attempts to subdivide domains strictly by geographic regions would simply not work. Aside from being hard to remember (regardless of what you're used to, a long, multipart domain name is harder to remember than a quick short one) the location of a business that isn't strictly brick-and-mortar is largely meaningless to customers. Where is Slashdot.com located, and why should I have to care?
.com and other TLDs are so popular is not because of evil corporatate brainwashing and stupid users. It's because they're much more friendly and generally more sensible than the alternatives. Trying to shoehorn users into a "logical" system that doesn't account for how the users actually think is generally a mistake, and the kinds of legal and technical problems we're seeing now would still be present in any other system, just in different forms.
And it doesn't even fit well with those brick-and-mortar entities. Suppose my business is physically located in one state, but incorporated in another? What if I have multiple physical locations? What happens if my business moves across some arbitrary geographic boundry, like between counties in a large state that's been further subdivided?
When more than one entity owns a trademark, who gets to use it, and why? What if my business is incorporated under a different name than that which is generally used with the public? Suppose my company merges with another? What exactly counts as an "international" contact when parcelling out TLD entries, and why are only large million-dollar businesses deserving of such a privilege?
In short, how are customers supposed to relate to utterly arbitrary (to them) stuff like this, and why should they be expected to?
Problems like this are exactly why so many businesses use toll-free phone numbers, PO Boxes, etc. - to avoid all the hassles that come with coupling yourself too closely with any particular physical location and to allow flexibility in your business operations. Reversing that trend on the Internet would just (re)introduce a host of old problems that don't even need to exist in a new medium.
I don't mean to sound harsh. To paraphrase Winston Churhill, the current domain system is the worst, except for all the others. The reason that
I haven't had any problems with register.com either. They were actually quite helpful when one of my email addresses, used as a contact for a few of my domains, was deactivated prematurely. I was on-hold for a while, but after properly identifying myself and explaining the problem I got my account information and the domain records adjusted promptly and with minimal hassle.
What happens if they refuse to sign such a thing?
"Economist goes as far to claim that there is no reason for men to be in space, and that all can be done by machines at a fraction of the cost and with more reliability."
I think the Economist and other advocates of a purely unmanned space program are being very shortsighted. The ultimate goal of space exploration, IMHO, is the same as the ultimate goal of terrestrial exploration: Colonization and expansion. Watching space on television will prepare us for that goal, but it won't accomplish it unless we are willing to get off our butts and go there.
What? Check a few options and Win XP is virtually indistinguishable from Win2K. Heck, for the most part it looks and acts just like good ol' Windows 95. Even with the XP skins and stuff turned on it's mostly just a matter of cosmetics.
Perhaps you should stop allowing conveniently labelled genres to determine your reading habits, and find out for yourself.
Unfortunately most of today's children's literature (and TV, and software, etc.) is written to the assumption that kids are stupid. They're not, at least not in any greater proportion than adults. The truth is that a lot of the stuff is just produced by lazy people and marketed to parents with very low expectations. I haven't yet read any of the Harry Potter books, but that's just because I haven't gotten to them yet.
The whole idea that children even need special dumbed-down books is kind of silly in itself, IMHO. Maybe it's an outgrowth of the attitude that books for adults aren't any good unless they're unnecessarily convoluted and difficult to read.
Amen. HP really manages to irritate me. I've had so many bad/worthless experiences with verious companies' technical support options that I seldom use them except as a last resort. I perfer to do it myself.
HP is the only company in recent memory that hasn't just made all the damn drivers available on their web site. It's so stupid that it just baffles me. What makes it even worse is that all those "obsolete" products made last year seem to fall off the face of the earth as far as their web site is concerned. There's no good reason for a company to _ever_ remove a required driver for _any_ product. Just leave them there.
"Here's the thing about Newton. When Newton came out, electronic PDA's *DID NOT EXIST YET*."
Not quite true. If memory serves, Sharp had been making their Wizard line of organizers for a while before the Newton was introduced. And I know Radio Shack and Casio also had fancier organizers that, looking back, definitely fit the PDA idea, within the limits of the technology available at the time. They weren't nearly as versatile as the Newton, but they also weren't as bulky or expensive, and they didn't rely on spotty handwriting recognition for input.
The Newton was a great concept for its time (though the execution left something to be desired). Apple did not invent the PDA concept.
"Seems like there are many here that still don't see anything wrong with blocking ads... Its a not the viewers right to block ads period. It is the same as stealing from a store because you think the price is too high."
That's silly. I suppose I'm also stealing from the networks if I get up to go to the bathroom during a TV commercial.
Most advertising doesn't work the way that advertisers would like it to. That's true of any kind of media. People generally ignore advertisments, and very few people ever act on the, with the immediacy that marketers of banner ads seem to assume they should. Advertising hasn't failed on the web because people block the ads - it's failed because the implementation has been handled so poorly and because the expectations of the advertisers were unrealistic.
That doesn't make any sense. By that reasoning no one should be permitted to have valuable items in their homes, whether they intend to sell them or not, since the presence of those valuables might entice bad people to enter the neighborhood and steal stuff. I suppose the art collector in the nice house down the street is now a public nuisance?
Actually it's not a dumb question. People in wheelchairs have no use for sneakers. People with missing fingers still have a need for cell phones. If this technology became the de-facto standard for cell phone keypads it could be a problem. You might be surprised at how many people are missing fingers or fingertips.
I've always thought that this attitude is pretty silly. Yes, it's important for a student to know certain basic information and understand certain core concepts. But in Real Life there are very few of us who do our jobs without ever using references or tools. The answer should be to make classroom time and exams _more_ like the real world environment, and not turn it into some artificial knowledge vacuum just because the instructors are happier that way.
A test that doesn't allow you to use your notes or check easily available references in class isn't testing knowledge or understanding, just memory. And as a fairly smart guy with a poor memory I've always resented that. Unfortunately some instructors don't understand how to do anything else.