You're right in that I should have. However, as a freshman or sophomore, I wasn't really clever enough to realize what the university was offering wasn't what I wanted. It also doesn't help that the classes you took (in our program) the first year and a half all tended to be mostly about development or programming. Going into junior and senior years I was naive enough to consider the possibility that the classes I was taking in things like formal languages and automata were an efficient use of my educational dollar with respect to my goals.
The school I went to was Ohio State, which I think is the second largest university in the US. As a senior in high school, I also looked at Ohio University and possibly Miami at Oxford. I don't think any of them had Software Development programs... or at least if they did, they were all named "computer science." So yes it was a stupid choice on my part, but at the time (97), there weren't any other obvious options at the places I looked at.
That said, I think the computer science program at OSU has become more friendly to would be developers than it used to be. This probably has something to do with an infusion of new young blood and a gradual response to student demand.
I have a bachelor's in CS and did a year in grad school after spending a few years in industry and I can confidently say the people who designed the CS curriculum have their heads up their asses. Considering most people wanted to go into fields like software development, the program spent entirely too much time on subjects like hardware circuits, non deterministic turing machines, the halting problem, axiomatic semantics.
Meanwhile, it spent no time or virtually no time on some of the most important problems in the field of software development: interface design, usability, and software testing methodologies. Furthermore, the curriculum and assignments were geared in a manner that steered students away from experimentation with important tools like data persistence, logging, or security frameworks. In other words, code reuse was often restricted to simplistic data structures.
The problem is that 90% of the programs out there teach computer science when 90% of the students out there want a program that teaches something like software development.
Classic example. My program spent lots of time on topics that are irrelevant 99.9% of the time like np-completeness and axiomatic semantics. Meanwhile, it spent no time on topics like end user interface design which is relevant most of the time.
There is this peculiar notion in academia that the world of computing consists of computer scientists and the lowly computer tradesman whose craft is unworthy of a college degree. Software development, like mechanical engineering, is a discipline that requires extensive study and software developers are in far more demand than the lofty computer scientists.
Personally, I've always suspected that the real problem lies in the accreditation process which has created a static set of standards for this holy computer science program before the computer field itself has had the opportunity to mature. Hence colleges are restricted from experimenting with curriculum. Hence curriculums do not change to meet student and industry demands. What is it that they say about premature optimization?
Blizzard had enough problems initially without having to worry about supporting a half dozen linux distributions. I use linux regularly at home and at work and they didn't alienate me.
Anyways, if the linux user is more likely to play WoW than other users, it's not because they run linux. It would be because they were tech users and early adopters. Most people I know that fit this description and play games also run windows or can do emulation.
My guess is they developed a cross platform version to help keep the code clean and to keep their options open. At the beginning of a three (?) year development project with an estimated lifespan of 5-6 (?) years, you don't want to be elimating markets that are poised for massive growth if you can avoid it. Eg, at the start of development, linux could have a 0.3% (?) home user desktop market share, but at 9 years later at the product's end of life, it could have a 20% market share.
When they were approaching a release, they probably observed that after x years of development, linux home user desktop marketshare had grown from 0.3% to 0.4%. Next they probably assumed that all but 10% of them have windows or the ability to emulate. This would mean that they are missing out on 1/2500 of the market (0.004 * 0.10). Assuming they expected to get 2 million subscribers, then they could expect to get an extra 800 or so subscribers per month from linux. 800 * 15 = $12,000/month.
Proceeding along an expected 2 million users per month (they probably have a lot more now), that would be 30 million per month. IS that extra $12,000 per month in revenue really worth the effort of supporting and maintaining a linux fork? Obviously, I'm just pulling numbers out of my ass, but it's not hard to see why a mainstream gaming company might not want to support linux.
There's a difference between having something run on an OS and making sure it runs well enough and continues to run well enough for massive distribution. It wouldn't take much for that +$12,000/month to become -$12,000/month.
Going a step further... Blizzard is a dominant player in the PC (read windows) gaming market. If linux gains significant marketshare, the PC gaming market could get shaken up. At the very least, Blizzard may have to start supporting Linux. From this traditional conservative perspective, it would seem that Blizzard is better off with the existing OS monoculture. If Blizzard supports Linux now, this may improve the popularity of the OS, which could disrupt Blizzard's marketshare in the future.
All coding in Perl and PHP amounts to "load module A, load module B, use builtin feature C, use A with B".
If this were true, it would be true for all programming languages. Just because these languages have powerful free libraries and lots of built-in features doesn't mean that you can not learn to program using them. If anything, it means that enormous numbers of practicing programmers are using these languages and enhancing their programming expertise while doing so.
Intro programming is about variables, loops, if-then-else, functions, and logic. You can teach that while building something useful like a text editor or you can teach it while building something useless and dull like a sorting function. You can teach it in php, a language where students can actually do useful things, or you can teach it in a language like C++ where it will take them years to become productive.
If you completely remove student motivations from the equation, then I think C++ or Java would be much better languages. However, if you remove student motivations from the equation, you've already lost the game.
The ability to create something useful provides motivation for learning. By providing libraries, languages like php and perl provide the ability to create something useful with a relatively low cost in terms of skills. If you show someone they can build something useful like a text editor, they will then see/want to make enhancements.
Nothing is more boring than writing BubbleSort in C++, then QuickSort in C++, then MergeSort in C++, the InsertionSort in C++ (was that the same as Bubble?). As a computer science student, I think my three biggest programming assignments were all some variant of make-a-compiler-or-interpretter. Talk about incredibly dull.
For me the excitement comes out of taking those different libraries and putting them together to form something useful, and then finding more and more efficient ways to do it so that the time between creating an idea and realizing it shrinks to nil.
The end is the motivation for learning the means to the end. Most programming courses forget this.
Many people I know didn't really blossom as programmers until they were engrossed in real world programming problems. I've always suspected that this blossoming can happen earlier if students are introduced to languages that allow them to do complicated useful things more easily: perl, php, etc.
However, there is some merit to this notion of teaching some programming fundamentals that these loosely typed script languages are ill suited to address.
The kinds of things that are taught in an intro programming classs first tend to be things like variable usage, loop syntax, if-then-else, switch/case, and procedures/functions. For the purpose of teaching these concepts, most languages are comparable. Admitedly, there are going to be distinct differences with things like declarations and typing, but this is perhaps not so important at an early stage.
The kinds of things taught in a second level programming course tend to be things like OO design, pointers, recursion, and the like. For this kind of stuff it can be more useful to have a language like C++ or Java.
So maybe the answer is to teach intro to programming in a scripted language (1st semester) and then advanced programming with a more traditional language (2nd semester). The intro course could be pitched as a generally accessible class while the second term could be pitched as a more in depth study of programming.
From a different perspective, if you assume that rudimentary programming skills are going to become more necessary in the workplace, then it makes sense to teach light weight programming languages in the intro courses because these are the languages that the broadest audience can use and the intro courses are the only place you can hope to hit that broad audience.
Regardless, anything that requires a grid mousepad is a significant step away from today's optical mice. A significant advantage of optical mice is that they work on virtually any surface. The mouse you describe not only requires a mousepad, but a special kind of mouse pad.
Is it unreasonable to expect headlines like "Local ISPs across the country doomed"?
Maybe the owners of many news agencies have investments in things like major ISPs. Take Time Warner for example. Could any of that news be coming over from a source like Yahoo as in SBC/Yahoo DSL?
That sounded crazy at first, but I like it. If you can't take the bribery out of the system, then you have to devise a system of representation that accounts for bribery. Of course, one question is, would it be easier to account for bribery or eliminate/reduce it. I have the feeling that the lobbyist powers would be resistant to both kinds of changes.
Yeah, that sounds right. That said, here's another perspective demonstrating why "suspicious behavior" should not necessarily be accepted as acknowledgement of unauthorized use.
Many years ago in the dorms, I had a friend who was threatened with physical violence for accessing an open network share. All he was doing was browsing the network. The idiots had some tool that told them which computers were connected to theirs and one of them decided that the connected computers were trying to hack them. My friend's computer shared his name so they were able to form a possy and track him down.
The point here is some people are really dumb. If I was using an open AP, and someone saw me with my laptop and gave me the evil eye but did not say anything, I might respond by quickly, suspiciously closing up the case and possibly moving on. However, I don't know that I'd consider an evil eye from someone who may or may not even be the AP owner as deauthorization.
Well, you might say, why not just ask the person if it's ok to use the AP? I've personally seen the messenger killed far too many times to consider this a safe or desirable course of action. If someone has an open AP, and is giving you the evil eye for using it, they are already knocked down a few steps on the evolutionary flagpole of computer knowledge and that evil eye does not indicate a peacable nature.
Anyways, I agree with you that an open AP will eventually be considered an OPEN AP. I would think this notion of knowing whether or not one was authorized would only come into play in situations when there was not a clear means of determining whether or not a person was authorized and wireless tech provides such a means. Today, even though such a method exists, it is apparently not yet clear to the public at large. Furthermore, court cases that decide against users of open APs probably go a long way to keeping the issue unclear.
Your right, Creationism and ID have nothing to do with being an exstermist.... As a baptist who is educated in biology, there isn't a single reason why anyone should not beleive in evolution.
I'm not up on my approved Theory of Intelligent Design (tm) guidelines... but are the idea of intelligent design and the theory of evolution really mutually exclusive. For all we know, the path of evolution was a foreseeable consequence of some seed state arranged by an omnipotent or near omnipotent intelligent designer.
After all, we can find evidence or counter evidence for the theory of evolution. If it is true, we can find enough evidence that we can eventually consider it a law, a proven truth. One of the main problems with Intelligent Design is that it can never be disproven. If evolution and intelligent design were mutually exclusive, then proving evolution would be a way of disproving intelligent design.
When it comes down to it, believing in intelligent design does not by itself make you any more of an extremist or indicate any poorer an education than if you are a christian who believes in god.
Intelligent Design is not just unproven, it is inherently unprovable. Intelligent Design is not a science in any sense, but a theology, and as such, its place is in the church/mosque/synagogue/whatever, not in the classroom.
Not disagreeing so much as adding to the conversation... Because something is unprovable does not mean it should not be taught. It means that if it is taught, it should be taught within the context that it is unprovable. To take this arugment a step further, I think major religions of the world should be mandatory classes in high school. There could be a year long course divided into 4 (or however many) quarters. Each quarter would cover a different major world religion and be taught by an active practioner. There would obviously be some practical problems making an idea like this work.
Another question to ask, is Intelligent Design really unprovable? I mean, God could show up on our door step and say, "Yeah, that was me, my bad," and then give us a mountain of evidence backing up his claim. He could even say, "here, let me take you back in time and show you how I did it."
Another example, an intelligent designer might very well leave comments in the source code whether you are talking about something like DNA or Pi. /* human.reproduce - Perpetuates species [note from developer] prerequisites for procreation very complex. Schedule for code review and consider a rewrite if time allows. */
Maybe there are other things an intelligent designer would do that evolution would not.
I think what you mean to say is that Intelligent Design can not be disproven. No matter what evidence we come up with showing evolution or a big bang, there is no way we can say, this is not all part of some intelligent plan that started before the universe of which we are aware.
This kind of thing should not be taught as fact or as science, but society would benefit if more religious perspectives were thrust upon us all. if nothing else, Intelligent Design would make an excellent discussion for a philosphy class.
it didn't tell him if the AP's owner knowingly and explicitly intended for the AP to be open
This same argument can be made for virtually anything in the computer world: a web site, an ftp site, a network share. If automatic authorization does not imply consent, then everyone is a criminal.
The owner initially had no wireless network. Then he purchased and set up an open wireless network. He could have set up a private wireless network. He didn't.
Anyways, very few people have open wireless networks and do not realize it if for no other reason than the fact that they know they didn't have to enter any credentials or do anything special in order to connect. I know a number of people with wireless networks and none who don't know whether or not theirs is open... and we're not talking about IT professionals here.
If I program my robot to allow anonymous guests to enter, must my guests be burdened with requesting manual human authorization simply because you can not be bothered to spend the hour required to configure your robot.
But no, I imagine you'd feel much safer relying on a legal system that has about a 0.001% chance of catching an offender. It's much better to allow those 99.999% of "unauthorized" guests to enter and access your private resources without being "caught" and to inconvenience me and my guests by requiring human authorization than it would be to just spend an hour configuring the robot which you went through the trouble of purchasing and installing.
This isn't really the same thing. A store that has an open sign is actively inviting people into the store. It's the accepted purpose of the sign to begin with. The same thing with your bus example. A bus is a public form of transportation, so when the door is open, it's common knowledge that it's okay to walk onto the bus.
You're arguing about established/accepted behaviors with a new technology. There are currently no/few established behaviors with open APs. So to figure out what the behavior should be, one has to draw on comparable kinds of interactions. The parent had the right idea.
In 5-10 years, an open AP will generally be regarded as an invitation provided that rtfm-impaired reactionaries don't cripple us all by effectively outlawing open APs. Open APs already have big signs on them that say available for public use, it's just that a large portion of the populace is illiterate. This will change... just like people learned to use the web, to use ftp, to use network shares, and to not click on the ClickOnMe.exe email attachment.
or invading someone else's samba shared files via an open network (that they probably intended to be network private) are off limits, of course
This seems logically inconsistent to me. Why should your open wireless be open but your open shares be closed? Password protect them or something if you don't want them to be open. There are many environments (like dorms) where people are used to seeing shares as deliberately public resources. If I was in a neighboring apartment, I might assume you meant your shares to be public especially if I knew you meant your wireless to be public.
And of course there's this whole issue that often only a technically educated person will stop and think that maybe a person does not want me to access XYZ.
Just because someone else hasn't spent years learning all about computers
Where I live there are three wireless APs. Two, maintained by non tech average joe adults are secure. One, maintained by me, an IT professional, is deliberately open for public use. It doesn't take a network engineer to set up a wireless access point. An open access point is often deliberate.
... doesn't mean you have to leech, steal and generally take advantage of them.
Where is the theft? I am systems administrator and a software developer and the mechanism by which an open access point lets a host on the network looks an awful lot like authorization to me. This is the way it would be treated with the web, with ftp, with windows shares, and so on. And let's not hear any crap about the web being a public medium. It doesn't get any more public than the signals from the AP that are passing through the air and through my brain in an unregulated public spectrum.
The real problem is that people don't really understand wireless as well as they should. But this will change. I knew people who reacted the same when they found out people were accessing their shares in the dorms, but these people have slowly learned. They're a lot fewer idiots opening random email attachments now than there used to be. In 5-10 years, people will understand wireless to the point that they will no longer be burdened with the excruciating task of spending an hour reading their manual.
Because it IS your fault by not informing them.
I am not my brothers keeper. In my experience, most people know their XYZ is open and don't care. If they don't know and do care, and you tell them, they tend to kill the messenger.
you're not expected to be a plumber to put in your own washing machine, or be a car mechanic able to build your own car before you get in one
What, so you are not responsible for configuring anything you ever buy? If you buy a garbage disposer, don't you need the ability to install it under the sink? If you buy a new cd player for your car, don't you need to know how to put it in and program it? Suggesting that turning on security in a wireless access point is a job for network engineers is like suggesting that changing a tire is a job for an automobile designer. It's borderline insulting.
The SELFISH thing to do is take advantage and say
The selfish thing to do is propose new legislation and misinterpret existing legislation to protect people who can't be bothered to understand the most basic functions of a device they purchased and installed. The selfish thing to do is to make it practically impossible for people like me to share my resources freely with others.
the guy messed up because, when the network owner approached him, he hid his laptop and acted, well, guilty. He clearly knew he wasn't authorised to access that point.
Either the guy was authorized to use the access point or he wasn't.
This would seem to be independent of the issue of whether or not he thought he was authorized to use the access point. If you think you might be speeding but are not speeding, you have committed no crime.
It could also be argued that it is independent of whether or not he thought the person approaching him thought he was authorized to use the access point. Who knows who that guy is?
It could also be argued that whether or not the owner thought the individual was authorized was irrelevant. Eg, consider the case where a person is unknowingly hosting a network share, ftp site, or web page. I am not guilty of a crime for visiting their site.
My point is, either the access was authorized or it wasn't.
common sense/experience tell you that in most cases they probably don't want to share their private info with the world, but exposed it unwittingly.
Many people would not leap to this conclusion. For example, in some neighborhoods, it may be common for people to have open access points available to anyone who wants to use it. In my immediate area, there are three wireless access points. The one owned by the IT professional (me) is open. The other two owned by non-it students/young professionals are secured. Looking at this limited sampling, it would appear that it doesn't take an IT guy to secure a wireless network and if a wireless network is open, it is meant to be used. I don't know a lot of people with wireless, but those I do know tend to operate this way. The point isn't that this is a representative sampling, just that you can not assume people will not assume an open wireless point is misconfigured.
If you have the knowledge required to buy an appropriate wireless router and set up a basic wireless network, it doesn't take that much more effort to add some kind of basic security if you don't want it to be available to the public. It's not as if some mysterious force magically set up a wireless network without the owner's knowledge. The person had to read up on access points, buy one, set it up, and then decide to leave it "Open".
This whole stink reminds me of a few situations I ran into 7-8 years ago in the dorms. We had a great network in the dorms. On the second day of our freshman year, a group of 4 guys ran into our room angrily asking to know who/where my room mate brian was. He poked his head out and asked what the problem was. They accused him of hacking into their computers and were ready to start beating the crap out of him/calling the police/whatever. As it turns out, he had simply been browsing network neighborhood and looking at files people had shared. The thugs had somehow been smart enough to look at some tool that told you which computers were connected to your own computer, but stupid enough to not realize that this was ok. My room mate's computer was named after himself. The thugs eventually left after he talked them down, but it was a close call with stupidity.
A year or so later, I was browsing the network and saw a girl in a neighboring suite, one of our friends, had shared several of her papers. I read through one. Half way through I found myself thinking, this seems a bit personal. I didn't think much of it, because I myself had put some of my papers on the web and some of them had personal content. Later that day, I complemented her on the paper. It turns out that she didn't mean to have the files shared. She was angry with me. I politely showed her what she was sharing and how to turn it off. After that, she didn't talk to me for a week, and she permanently lost some degree of trust in me.
Keep in mind here, that virtually everyone who had a computer in the dorm was familiar with the notion of sharing documents on the network because they accessed other people's shares on a regular basis.
In the above situation, people who didn't understand that they were sharing things routinely accessed other people's shares without getting permission. I imagine many people who own and maintain open wireless access points, yet do not intend for others to use them, often use other access points without getting permission. There is a common theme here where the "victim" often wants no accountability for themselves on both the receiving and providing ends.
Also, there's all sorts of situations when it is impossible to determine whether or not you are supposed to be allowed to acccess a wireless network. If you walk into a coffee shop, how do you know if the wireless signal is coming from the residental housing above the shop or from the shop itself? If you are in a library, how do you know if the wireless is theirs or if it is bleeding over from a neighboring business. In a business lobby, how d
Exactly, I work in the administrative offices for a large public university. Most IT services tend to be decentralized or only partially centralized. Some offices hire grad assistants to do most of their IT work. Many offices just have one fulltime IT guy and there is no central IT orientation or anything. We may have policies in place that cover end of life data security, but they are not enforced, and at least half of the admins probably don't know what they are.
Obviously most government institutions don't rely on graduate assistants for IT work, but I imagine there are a very large number of independent departmentalized offices that have no idea what the policies are.
Say the Burlington office of unemployment counseling division is a small work group of 8 computers managed by someone who happens to know enough to keep them running. Generally speaking, they are not going to understand end of life data security needs.
And then there's probably a whole group of smart knowledgeable people who understand the need for data security but who think a quick format will take care of everything. A quick format blows away tables but leaves data intact. Anyone with a hex editor can still extract oodles of data.
Or you leave the company, and some poor unsuspecting sucker with Perl on their resume gets hired and handed your old code as a by-the-way and then they end up spending every waking moment plotting your demise. I'm not bitter.
That hardly seems like a carrot. Or rather, when the company drastically reduces their packaging and distribution costs, I expect a big chunk of that benefit to be passed on to the consumer. At least, that's what I would expect to happen in a competitive market.
Great idea. Everyone I've shown knoppix too has been impressed. It would probably be good to test Knoppix out on as many of the machines as possible before hand as it doesn't always "just work". At least, I've occassionally had problems: weird network cards, some new dells, maybe serial ata.
Seriously, this might not be wind surfing fun, but people might like it. I gave a firefox demo a year ago for our small office. They got to see the major features like tabbed browsing, pop up blocking, and javascript controls. They got to see a few different extensions like one of the translators and one of the adblockers. They also got a little of the history of the browser from it's origins with Netscape to the modern day. Anyways, most people seemed to like it and about half the office uses firefox today.
If you want to introduce the concepts of open source software, few people are going to care even if you find a fun game in which to convey those concepts. However, if you demo something like firefox, you can sneak in some tidbits about open source while giving people something they can actually use and appreciate. The presentation/demo wouldn't necessarily be "fun" in the short term, but the outcome, converting to firefox, would be quite pleasant.
If you absolutely must have fun, there are some game extensions like pong, but it seems somewhat counter productive to focus on non-professional features when trying to encourage work place adoption.
Pong Extension
Slashdot Mirror
You're right in that I should have. However, as a freshman or sophomore, I wasn't really clever enough to realize what the university was offering wasn't what I wanted. It also doesn't help that the classes you took (in our program) the first year and a half all tended to be mostly about development or programming. Going into junior and senior years I was naive enough to consider the possibility that the classes I was taking in things like formal languages and automata were an efficient use of my educational dollar with respect to my goals.
The school I went to was Ohio State, which I think is the second largest university in the US. As a senior in high school, I also looked at Ohio University and possibly Miami at Oxford. I don't think any of them had Software Development programs... or at least if they did, they were all named "computer science." So yes it was a stupid choice on my part, but at the time (97), there weren't any other obvious options at the places I looked at.
That said, I think the computer science program at OSU has become more friendly to would be developers than it used to be. This probably has something to do with an infusion of new young blood and a gradual response to student demand.
I have a bachelor's in CS and did a year in grad school after spending a few years in industry and I can confidently say the people who designed the CS curriculum have their heads up their asses. Considering most people wanted to go into fields like software development, the program spent entirely too much time on subjects like hardware circuits, non deterministic turing machines, the halting problem, axiomatic semantics.
Meanwhile, it spent no time or virtually no time on some of the most important problems in the field of software development: interface design, usability, and software testing methodologies. Furthermore, the curriculum and assignments were geared in a manner that steered students away from experimentation with important tools like data persistence, logging, or security frameworks. In other words, code reuse was often restricted to simplistic data structures.
What problem?
The problem is that 90% of the programs out there teach computer science when 90% of the students out there want a program that teaches something like software development.
Classic example. My program spent lots of time on topics that are irrelevant 99.9% of the time like np-completeness and axiomatic semantics. Meanwhile, it spent no time on topics like end user interface design which is relevant most of the time.
There is this peculiar notion in academia that the world of computing consists of computer scientists and the lowly computer tradesman whose craft is unworthy of a college degree. Software development, like mechanical engineering, is a discipline that requires extensive study and software developers are in far more demand than the lofty computer scientists.
Personally, I've always suspected that the real problem lies in the accreditation process which has created a static set of standards for this holy computer science program before the computer field itself has had the opportunity to mature. Hence colleges are restricted from experimenting with curriculum. Hence curriculums do not change to meet student and industry demands. What is it that they say about premature optimization?
Blizzard had enough problems initially without having to worry about supporting a half dozen linux distributions. I use linux regularly at home and at work and they didn't alienate me.
Anyways, if the linux user is more likely to play WoW than other users, it's not because they run linux. It would be because they were tech users and early adopters. Most people I know that fit this description and play games also run windows or can do emulation.
My guess is they developed a cross platform version to help keep the code clean and to keep their options open. At the beginning of a three (?) year development project with an estimated lifespan of 5-6 (?) years, you don't want to be elimating markets that are poised for massive growth if you can avoid it. Eg, at the start of development, linux could have a 0.3% (?) home user desktop market share, but at 9 years later at the product's end of life, it could have a 20% market share.
When they were approaching a release, they probably observed that after x years of development, linux home user desktop marketshare had grown from 0.3% to 0.4%. Next they probably assumed that all but 10% of them have windows or the ability to emulate. This would mean that they are missing out on 1/2500 of the market (0.004 * 0.10). Assuming they expected to get 2 million subscribers, then they could expect to get an extra 800 or so subscribers per month from linux. 800 * 15 = $12,000/month.
Proceeding along an expected 2 million users per month (they probably have a lot more now), that would be 30 million per month. IS that extra $12,000 per month in revenue really worth the effort of supporting and maintaining a linux fork? Obviously, I'm just pulling numbers out of my ass, but it's not hard to see why a mainstream gaming company might not want to support linux.
There's a difference between having something run on an OS and making sure it runs well enough and continues to run well enough for massive distribution. It wouldn't take much for that +$12,000/month to become -$12,000/month.
Going a step further... Blizzard is a dominant player in the PC (read windows) gaming market. If linux gains significant marketshare, the PC gaming market could get shaken up. At the very least, Blizzard may have to start supporting Linux. From this traditional conservative perspective, it would seem that Blizzard is better off with the existing OS monoculture. If Blizzard supports Linux now, this may improve the popularity of the OS, which could disrupt Blizzard's marketshare in the future.
All coding in Perl and PHP amounts to "load module A, load module B, use builtin feature C, use A with B".
If this were true, it would be true for all programming languages. Just because these languages have powerful free libraries and lots of built-in features doesn't mean that you can not learn to program using them. If anything, it means that enormous numbers of practicing programmers are using these languages and enhancing their programming expertise while doing so.
Intro programming is about variables, loops, if-then-else, functions, and logic. You can teach that while building something useful like a text editor or you can teach it while building something useless and dull like a sorting function. You can teach it in php, a language where students can actually do useful things, or you can teach it in a language like C++ where it will take them years to become productive.
If you completely remove student motivations from the equation, then I think C++ or Java would be much better languages. However, if you remove student motivations from the equation, you've already lost the game.
The ability to create something useful provides motivation for learning. By providing libraries, languages like php and perl provide the ability to create something useful with a relatively low cost in terms of skills. If you show someone they can build something useful like a text editor, they will then see/want to make enhancements.
Nothing is more boring than writing BubbleSort in C++, then QuickSort in C++, then MergeSort in C++, the InsertionSort in C++ (was that the same as Bubble?). As a computer science student, I think my three biggest programming assignments were all some variant of make-a-compiler-or-interpretter. Talk about incredibly dull.
For me the excitement comes out of taking those different libraries and putting them together to form something useful, and then finding more and more efficient ways to do it so that the time between creating an idea and realizing it shrinks to nil.
The end is the motivation for learning the means to the end. Most programming courses forget this.
Many people I know didn't really blossom as programmers until they were engrossed in real world programming problems. I've always suspected that this blossoming can happen earlier if students are introduced to languages that allow them to do complicated useful things more easily: perl, php, etc.
However, there is some merit to this notion of teaching some programming fundamentals that these loosely typed script languages are ill suited to address.
The kinds of things that are taught in an intro programming classs first tend to be things like variable usage, loop syntax, if-then-else, switch/case, and procedures/functions. For the purpose of teaching these concepts, most languages are comparable. Admitedly, there are going to be distinct differences with things like declarations and typing, but this is perhaps not so important at an early stage.
The kinds of things taught in a second level programming course tend to be things like OO design, pointers, recursion, and the like. For this kind of stuff it can be more useful to have a language like C++ or Java.
So maybe the answer is to teach intro to programming in a scripted language (1st semester) and then advanced programming with a more traditional language (2nd semester). The intro course could be pitched as a generally accessible class while the second term could be pitched as a more in depth study of programming.
From a different perspective, if you assume that rudimentary programming skills are going to become more necessary in the workplace, then it makes sense to teach light weight programming languages in the intro courses because these are the languages that the broadest audience can use and the intro courses are the only place you can hope to hit that broad audience.
Regardless, anything that requires a grid mousepad is a significant step away from today's optical mice. A significant advantage of optical mice is that they work on virtually any surface. The mouse you describe not only requires a mousepad, but a special kind of mouse pad.
Is it unreasonable to expect headlines like "Local ISPs across the country doomed"?
Maybe the owners of many news agencies have investments in things like major ISPs. Take Time Warner for example. Could any of that news be coming over from a source like Yahoo as in SBC/Yahoo DSL?
That sounded crazy at first, but I like it. If you can't take the bribery out of the system, then you have to devise a system of representation that accounts for bribery. Of course, one question is, would it be easier to account for bribery or eliminate/reduce it. I have the feeling that the lobbyist powers would be resistant to both kinds of changes.
Yeah, that sounds right. That said, here's another perspective demonstrating why "suspicious behavior" should not necessarily be accepted as acknowledgement of unauthorized use.
Many years ago in the dorms, I had a friend who was threatened with physical violence for accessing an open network share. All he was doing was browsing the network. The idiots had some tool that told them which computers were connected to theirs and one of them decided that the connected computers were trying to hack them. My friend's computer shared his name so they were able to form a possy and track him down.
The point here is some people are really dumb. If I was using an open AP, and someone saw me with my laptop and gave me the evil eye but did not say anything, I might respond by quickly, suspiciously closing up the case and possibly moving on. However, I don't know that I'd consider an evil eye from someone who may or may not even be the AP owner as deauthorization.
Well, you might say, why not just ask the person if it's ok to use the AP? I've personally seen the messenger killed far too many times to consider this a safe or desirable course of action. If someone has an open AP, and is giving you the evil eye for using it, they are already knocked down a few steps on the evolutionary flagpole of computer knowledge and that evil eye does not indicate a peacable nature.
Anyways, I agree with you that an open AP will eventually be considered an OPEN AP. I would think this notion of knowing whether or not one was authorized would only come into play in situations when there was not a clear means of determining whether or not a person was authorized and wireless tech provides such a means. Today, even though such a method exists, it is apparently not yet clear to the public at large. Furthermore, court cases that decide against users of open APs probably go a long way to keeping the issue unclear.
Your right, Creationism and ID have nothing to do with being an exstermist.... As a baptist who is educated in biology, there isn't a single reason why anyone should not beleive in evolution.
I'm not up on my approved Theory of Intelligent Design (tm) guidelines... but are the idea of intelligent design and the theory of evolution really mutually exclusive. For all we know, the path of evolution was a foreseeable consequence of some seed state arranged by an omnipotent or near omnipotent intelligent designer.
After all, we can find evidence or counter evidence for the theory of evolution. If it is true, we can find enough evidence that we can eventually consider it a law, a proven truth. One of the main problems with Intelligent Design is that it can never be disproven. If evolution and intelligent design were mutually exclusive, then proving evolution would be a way of disproving intelligent design.
When it comes down to it, believing in intelligent design does not by itself make you any more of an extremist or indicate any poorer an education than if you are a christian who believes in god.
Intelligent Design is not just unproven, it is inherently unprovable. Intelligent Design is not a science in any sense, but a theology, and as such, its place is in the church/mosque/synagogue/whatever, not in the classroom.
/* human.reproduce - Perpetuates species [note from developer] prerequisites for procreation very complex. Schedule for code review and consider a rewrite if time allows. */
Not disagreeing so much as adding to the conversation... Because something is unprovable does not mean it should not be taught. It means that if it is taught, it should be taught within the context that it is unprovable. To take this arugment a step further, I think major religions of the world should be mandatory classes in high school. There could be a year long course divided into 4 (or however many) quarters. Each quarter would cover a different major world religion and be taught by an active practioner. There would obviously be some practical problems making an idea like this work.
Another question to ask, is Intelligent Design really unprovable? I mean, God could show up on our door step and say, "Yeah, that was me, my bad," and then give us a mountain of evidence backing up his claim. He could even say, "here, let me take you back in time and show you how I did it."
Another example, an intelligent designer might very well leave comments in the source code whether you are talking about something like DNA or Pi.
Maybe there are other things an intelligent designer would do that evolution would not.
I think what you mean to say is that Intelligent Design can not be disproven. No matter what evidence we come up with showing evolution or a big bang, there is no way we can say, this is not all part of some intelligent plan that started before the universe of which we are aware.
This kind of thing should not be taught as fact or as science, but society would benefit if more religious perspectives were thrust upon us all. if nothing else, Intelligent Design would make an excellent discussion for a philosphy class.
it didn't tell him if the AP's owner knowingly and explicitly intended for the AP to be open
This same argument can be made for virtually anything in the computer world: a web site, an ftp site, a network share. If automatic authorization does not imply consent, then everyone is a criminal.
The owner initially had no wireless network. Then he purchased and set up an open wireless network. He could have set up a private wireless network. He didn't.
Anyways, very few people have open wireless networks and do not realize it if for no other reason than the fact that they know they didn't have to enter any credentials or do anything special in order to connect. I know a number of people with wireless networks and none who don't know whether or not theirs is open... and we're not talking about IT professionals here.
If I program my robot to allow anonymous guests to enter, must my guests be burdened with requesting manual human authorization simply because you can not be bothered to spend the hour required to configure your robot.
But no, I imagine you'd feel much safer relying on a legal system that has about a 0.001% chance of catching an offender. It's much better to allow those 99.999% of "unauthorized" guests to enter and access your private resources without being "caught" and to inconvenience me and my guests by requiring human authorization than it would be to just spend an hour configuring the robot which you went through the trouble of purchasing and installing.
This isn't really the same thing. A store that has an open sign is actively inviting people into the store. It's the accepted purpose of the sign to begin with. The same thing with your bus example. A bus is a public form of transportation, so when the door is open, it's common knowledge that it's okay to walk onto the bus.
You're arguing about established/accepted behaviors with a new technology. There are currently no/few established behaviors with open APs. So to figure out what the behavior should be, one has to draw on comparable kinds of interactions. The parent had the right idea.
In 5-10 years, an open AP will generally be regarded as an invitation provided that rtfm-impaired reactionaries don't cripple us all by effectively outlawing open APs. Open APs already have big signs on them that say available for public use, it's just that a large portion of the populace is illiterate. This will change... just like people learned to use the web, to use ftp, to use network shares, and to not click on the ClickOnMe.exe email attachment.
or invading someone else's samba shared files via an open network (that they probably intended to be network private) are off limits, of course
This seems logically inconsistent to me. Why should your open wireless be open but your open shares be closed? Password protect them or something if you don't want them to be open. There are many environments (like dorms) where people are used to seeing shares as deliberately public resources. If I was in a neighboring apartment, I might assume you meant your shares to be public especially if I knew you meant your wireless to be public.
And of course there's this whole issue that often only a technically educated person will stop and think that maybe a person does not want me to access XYZ.
Just because someone else hasn't spent years learning all about computers
... doesn't mean you have to leech, steal and generally take advantage of them.
Where I live there are three wireless APs. Two, maintained by non tech average joe adults are secure. One, maintained by me, an IT professional, is deliberately open for public use. It doesn't take a network engineer to set up a wireless access point. An open access point is often deliberate.
Where is the theft? I am systems administrator and a software developer and the mechanism by which an open access point lets a host on the network looks an awful lot like authorization to me. This is the way it would be treated with the web, with ftp, with windows shares, and so on. And let's not hear any crap about the web being a public medium. It doesn't get any more public than the signals from the AP that are passing through the air and through my brain in an unregulated public spectrum.
The real problem is that people don't really understand wireless as well as they should. But this will change. I knew people who reacted the same when they found out people were accessing their shares in the dorms, but these people have slowly learned. They're a lot fewer idiots opening random email attachments now than there used to be. In 5-10 years, people will understand wireless to the point that they will no longer be burdened with the excruciating task of spending an hour reading their manual.
Because it IS your fault by not informing them.
I am not my brothers keeper. In my experience, most people know their XYZ is open and don't care. If they don't know and do care, and you tell them, they tend to kill the messenger.
you're not expected to be a plumber to put in your own washing machine, or be a car mechanic able to build your own car before you get in one
What, so you are not responsible for configuring anything you ever buy? If you buy a garbage disposer, don't you need the ability to install it under the sink? If you buy a new cd player for your car, don't you need to know how to put it in and program it? Suggesting that turning on security in a wireless access point is a job for network engineers is like suggesting that changing a tire is a job for an automobile designer. It's borderline insulting.
The SELFISH thing to do is take advantage and say
The selfish thing to do is propose new legislation and misinterpret existing legislation to protect people who can't be bothered to understand the most basic functions of a device they purchased and installed. The selfish thing to do is to make it practically impossible for people like me to share my resources freely with others.
the guy messed up because, when the network owner approached him, he hid his laptop and acted, well, guilty. He clearly knew he wasn't authorised to access that point.
Either the guy was authorized to use the access point or he wasn't.
This would seem to be independent of the issue of whether or not he thought he was authorized to use the access point. If you think you might be speeding but are not speeding, you have committed no crime.
It could also be argued that it is independent of whether or not he thought the person approaching him thought he was authorized to use the access point. Who knows who that guy is?
It could also be argued that whether or not the owner thought the individual was authorized was irrelevant. Eg, consider the case where a person is unknowingly hosting a network share, ftp site, or web page. I am not guilty of a crime for visiting their site.
My point is, either the access was authorized or it wasn't.
common sense/experience tell you that in most cases they probably don't want to share their private info with the world, but exposed it unwittingly.
Many people would not leap to this conclusion. For example, in some neighborhoods, it may be common for people to have open access points available to anyone who wants to use it. In my immediate area, there are three wireless access points. The one owned by the IT professional (me) is open. The other two owned by non-it students/young professionals are secured. Looking at this limited sampling, it would appear that it doesn't take an IT guy to secure a wireless network and if a wireless network is open, it is meant to be used. I don't know a lot of people with wireless, but those I do know tend to operate this way. The point isn't that this is a representative sampling, just that you can not assume people will not assume an open wireless point is misconfigured.
If you have the knowledge required to buy an appropriate wireless router and set up a basic wireless network, it doesn't take that much more effort to add some kind of basic security if you don't want it to be available to the public. It's not as if some mysterious force magically set up a wireless network without the owner's knowledge. The person had to read up on access points, buy one, set it up, and then decide to leave it "Open".
This whole stink reminds me of a few situations I ran into 7-8 years ago in the dorms. We had a great network in the dorms. On the second day of our freshman year, a group of 4 guys ran into our room angrily asking to know who/where my room mate brian was. He poked his head out and asked what the problem was. They accused him of hacking into their computers and were ready to start beating the crap out of him/calling the police/whatever. As it turns out, he had simply been browsing network neighborhood and looking at files people had shared. The thugs had somehow been smart enough to look at some tool that told you which computers were connected to your own computer, but stupid enough to not realize that this was ok. My room mate's computer was named after himself. The thugs eventually left after he talked them down, but it was a close call with stupidity.
A year or so later, I was browsing the network and saw a girl in a neighboring suite, one of our friends, had shared several of her papers. I read through one. Half way through I found myself thinking, this seems a bit personal. I didn't think much of it, because I myself had put some of my papers on the web and some of them had personal content. Later that day, I complemented her on the paper. It turns out that she didn't mean to have the files shared. She was angry with me. I politely showed her what she was sharing and how to turn it off. After that, she didn't talk to me for a week, and she permanently lost some degree of trust in me.
Keep in mind here, that virtually everyone who had a computer in the dorm was familiar with the notion of sharing documents on the network because they accessed other people's shares on a regular basis.
In the above situation, people who didn't understand that they were sharing things routinely accessed other people's shares without getting permission. I imagine many people who own and maintain open wireless access points, yet do not intend for others to use them, often use other access points without getting permission. There is a common theme here where the "victim" often wants no accountability for themselves on both the receiving and providing ends.
Also, there's all sorts of situations when it is impossible to determine whether or not you are supposed to be allowed to acccess a wireless network. If you walk into a coffee shop, how do you know if the wireless signal is coming from the residental housing above the shop or from the shop itself? If you are in a library, how do you know if the wireless is theirs or if it is bleeding over from a neighboring business. In a business lobby, how d
Exactly, I work in the administrative offices for a large public university. Most IT services tend to be decentralized or only partially centralized. Some offices hire grad assistants to do most of their IT work. Many offices just have one fulltime IT guy and there is no central IT orientation or anything. We may have policies in place that cover end of life data security, but they are not enforced, and at least half of the admins probably don't know what they are.
Obviously most government institutions don't rely on graduate assistants for IT work, but I imagine there are a very large number of independent departmentalized offices that have no idea what the policies are.
Say the Burlington office of unemployment counseling division is a small work group of 8 computers managed by someone who happens to know enough to keep them running. Generally speaking, they are not going to understand end of life data security needs.
And then there's probably a whole group of smart knowledgeable people who understand the need for data security but who think a quick format will take care of everything. A quick format blows away tables but leaves data intact. Anyone with a hex editor can still extract oodles of data.
Or you leave the company, and some poor unsuspecting sucker with Perl on their resume gets hired and handed your old code as a by-the-way and then they end up spending every waking moment plotting your demise. I'm not bitter.
That hardly seems like a carrot. Or rather, when the company drastically reduces their packaging and distribution costs, I expect a big chunk of that benefit to be passed on to the consumer. At least, that's what I would expect to happen in a competitive market.
Great idea. Everyone I've shown knoppix too has been impressed. It would probably be good to test Knoppix out on as many of the machines as possible before hand as it doesn't always "just work". At least, I've occassionally had problems: weird network cards, some new dells, maybe serial ata.
Seriously, this might not be wind surfing fun, but people might like it. I gave a firefox demo a year ago for our small office. They got to see the major features like tabbed browsing, pop up blocking, and javascript controls. They got to see a few different extensions like one of the translators and one of the adblockers. They also got a little of the history of the browser from it's origins with Netscape to the modern day. Anyways, most people seemed to like it and about half the office uses firefox today.
If you want to introduce the concepts of open source software, few people are going to care even if you find a fun game in which to convey those concepts. However, if you demo something like firefox, you can sneak in some tidbits about open source while giving people something they can actually use and appreciate. The presentation/demo wouldn't necessarily be "fun" in the short term, but the outcome, converting to firefox, would be quite pleasant.
If you absolutely must have fun, there are some game extensions like pong, but it seems somewhat counter productive to focus on non-professional features when trying to encourage work place adoption. Pong Extension