I would invite you to take a good look at Penn State in how it functions and how it looks. No, the service is not completely free, it takes a bit out of the standard Computing Fee charged to all students. This fee increases a few dollars every year to cover inflation and flux in tech prices. What is happening here is cost is being reallocated from another area covered by this IT fund. Yes students are still paying for it, but the cost increase to them is negligable.
In terms of site licenses for higher-end specialized software. This is covered on a need basis by individual departments. It does not make sense to have a 2,000 unit license for Oracle if only a few hundred will ever use it. Things like that typically come out of faculty research money (most of which comes from outside the Univ).
I don't completely understand the amount of railing people are doing against this service. It is providing students with a *legal* way to listen to music (yes, I know, provided you're on a Windows PC), and a minimal cost to them to burn it to a CD or load it into an MP3 player.
Very few students think it's really free, there's been a lot of back and forth in the school paper and in school-affiliated message boards on the actual cost of this new service. Students really aren't as dumb as people tend to think.
Would you rather the RIAA go after every student who has MP3s on their machine? Bringing in an army of lawyers against the University which would incur huge legal fees, causing for further hikes in tuition? Or would you prefer an incremental increase in the Tech Services fee, and the RIAA turning a blind eye?
PSU gets Napster because they initiated a deal with the RIAA to keep the legal hounds at bay. In exchange for working on this service, PSU students were largely spared the music industry crack-down.
All Universities have the option to develop similar programs to this, but this one specifically was an initiative conducted by PSU.
This is a really bad time to be graduating from college with a degree in CS or IT. There's a huge humber of unemployed *experienced* workers going after everything from the senior to entry level positions. Jobs that were once mainly left to recent college grads are being snatched up by industry veterans. Add onto this the outsourcing of IT workers to India and China, shrinking the job market that's already flooded with workers.
What makes matters worse is that the people who went into college in IT and CS majors with dreams of money when dot-coms were in their prime, are just starting to graduate, so you have an abnormally high number of graduates the past year or so, adding more workers to the already large pool of shrinking jobs. Those who have no or little real-world experience are the ones who are going to hurt the most for all of this.
I love being told by people hiring for entry level positions that I need more experience to be hired. How does one gain job experience if you need experience to get said job? A nice catch-22
I wouldn't be surprised if XMMS suddenly got a whole lot of new talent on the dev team and it suddenly becomes the defacto media player if WinAmp is left to die.
Has it ever occured to you that I am actively working on that problem (among many others currently)? I was making a comment regarding his interview response, and looking for some suggestions from people who have already dealt with this problem.
Part of solving a problem is knowing when to ask for help
I like how he totally breezed over the educational institution questions, which were of particular interest to me as a net admin at a big 10 univ who also has RedHat machines to maintain that will soon be completely unsupported. I need to maintain a lab of computers that dual-boot to Linux and WinXP, and RH9 is the best desktop Linux solution out there currently. I don't have the budget to get the Enterprise edition, so what am I supposed to do when the support runs out?
In light of France's refusal to go along with US action in Iraq, there was a public and governmental outcry against all things French. We had "freedom fries" and French wine and cheese was thrown out. Many people here directly criticized these actions as stupid, even the Slashdot editors voiced their opinions through commentary and "department" titles for articles. The sentiment was that it was stupid to blame the rank and file French citizen or French business for the actions of its government.
The same thing should apply here. Why blame the rank-and-file employee of a company whose management is doing something unpopular? Does Joe Programmer have any influence on the legal machinations of his company? No, he just churns out code for a paycheck. And saying "Well, he should quit his job because his employer is doing those things" is just plain ridiculous and doesn't take reality into consideration. The need to eat and possibly support a family generall trumps most personal beliefs.
Just as you can't expect someone to renounce French citizenship because their government does something you don't like, you can't expect an employee to quit because their company does something you don't like. We are putting the burden on the people who can't do anything about the problem. Blacklisting SCO employees does nothing to the people who actually matter in this case, if they don't give a crap about 90% of the IT industry, I bet they don't care about their own employees.
If you worked for a University and some group was doing research that was highly controversial and that you disagreed with on moral or ethical reasons, would you quit because the organization you also happen to work for allows that sort of thing to go on? Should a math professor quit in protest of some experiment going on in the biology department? Should the actions of the company or larger employer actually be held against the little people who work for them?
It's like blaming the White House janitorial staff for the bad policy decisions made by the President and refusing to hire them because they happened to previously work there.
It's stuff like this that makes me realize that for all the screaming about morals and ethics and fair-play that many people do here, that it's mostly an act, one that they discard as soon as it goes against what they like.
How would ChrisD and the rest of the slashdot editors react if a company posted that they would not hire any programmers connected with X Y or Z open source projects?
SCO can just patch support back in should something like that happen. What would be more effective is if developers and project maintainers coded in checks to their programs that prevents them from compiling or running on SCO systems. That would be far more effective as it takes a LOT more time and energy to patch hundreds of programs than it is to patch GCC.
When they eventually are forced to reveal their IP in Linux... I expect them to show a print out of the entire damn kernel, claiming they wrote it themselves, because that's the ONLY way they could justify charging even half of that amount.
For a single-seat license, Windows costs less than that, and you're paying for everything from the main OS, to the GUI, to Spider Solitare. You are paying for a complete system, not just a few lines of code burried deep down in the system.
Since they plan on upping the price to $1400 in a few months, my guess is they're using this as a scare tactic to get people to license now in case the courts find in favor of SCO. If SCO loses, they still have all the money from those suckers who paid before. If they win, they then get a LOT more money from everyone else who is forced to pay up. While it's dirty business, SCO is guaranteed to at least get some money out of us before it's all over.
I've been going through the same strife the past few weeks with my family. In late December I ordered a new computer for my mom, and when it got in I installed the basic software and got it ready for the Internet. Special softare items to remember:
-FileMaker Pro 4.0 (Mom does some database work for my Dad) -Canon Digital Camera Software (Sister got a camera for Christmas)
Ok, so I set everything up and a week later I get a call from Dad asking why he can't install Norton Antivirus 2003 (I had already installed a licensed copy from the University), but he ignored me initially telling him that so he went out and bought it anyway. He was mad at me and wanted me to pay him for the Norton CD he bought.
A week after that I get an e-mail from my sister who suddenly can't download pictures from her camera and it's because of something I did to it (keep in mind it's been 2 weeks since I last touched the computer and the day I left she was downloading pictures happily). So it's all my fault that it's not working and I have to fix it IMMEDIATELY so she can get the latest picture of her boyfriend posted on her desktop. It turns out she had been neglecting to turn the camera on when trying to download and she expected me to fix it so the camera wouldn't have to be turned on to download pics from it.
Ok, now let's fast-forward 2 weeks to a paniced call from my mother telling me she can't type on her computer, none of the keys work and they had worked the day before. Turns out dad had just blindly clicked through error messages the day before and enabled the FilterKeys program, blocking ALL keystrokes. I said this and dad proceeded to tell me it was my fault for leaving that program on the computer.... grrr
One other general problem with the computer was on the previous machine mom had the thumb button configured as double-click, which she never told me about and expected me to just know about and that I should have set it up from the get-go, this produced several weeks of grumbling for her saying I didn't know what I was doing (because I didn't have the foresight to install a program she wanted that she never told me about).
At this point I told them they can fix the problems on their own and they all quickly started apologizing...
This is more frustrating than any tech job I've ever done:-P
A lot of people are attacking this author over his stance that Linux should come down to the level of Joe User. The most common response I see is "Well, Joe User should come to Linux! Not Linux to Joe!" That is just idiotic. Computer geeks make up a very small chunk of the overall computer using populace, it's Joe who makes up the majority, and if we want a technology to become popular and successful on the desktop, we have to bring it to Joe... because Joe doesn't know, nor does he have the patience to figure it out otherwise.
The point of technology is for it to serve users, to make tasks easier for them to accomplish. If you want Linux to succeed on the desktop, it has to become as easy and mindless to use as MacOS or Windows, otherwise it will always be a niche OS useful only on servers and for geeks who have the time and knowledge to mess with it.
Face it, when it comes to widespread success, we are not the people who decide what lives and what dies... it's the people who know far less and need far less out of their computers, because they are the majority.
It doesn't work like that. University departments can only purchase through the University ordering center for MS Software. Before you shoot off your mouth, you may want to consider that there are rules and limitations to purchasing for educational institutions. MS is forcing everyone towards XP, and PSU is no exception... We are limited by the terms of our contract with them.
How do you figure that? The ordering center here no longer offers me the option to purchase Windows 2000 CDs or licenses for my department, only XP. This was changed a few months ago and I'm trying to find a way to get licenses short of paying out the arse for them.
As a system admin and tech support guy for a department at my University, this is going to be a massive pain in the arse as I have several dozen PhDs to deal with who buy new computers fairly regularly... but they want the machines to talk to all of their specialized equipment... but the equipment vendors don't support XP. Already, I can't purchase additional copies or licenses of 2000 from the Univ. software store, so we're already starting to run into limits...
What are those of us who HAVE to support and use 2k supposed to do if it's no longer an available option?
If they're claiming that Bnetd stole code, they may employ a particularly nasty trick to convince the judge that the code is in fact stolen from blizzard...
All they have to do, is take the bnetd source code (which I'm sure they have safely tucked away somewhere as "evidence"), make minor cosmetic changes to it, and integrate it into a special copy of one of their games for the purpose of presenting during the trial. When they pull out the code... surprise surprise, it looks damn near identical down to some of the most basic levels.
This would definitely suck, as there's no way for the Bnetd people to prove otherwise. It's Blizzard's word against theirs, and we all know the court system will believe a corporation over a bunch of college-age computer junkies.
Unfortunately it's in the middle of one of the most boring, empty and pointless states in the US... (yes, I have spent considerable time on OH, even in Columbus and Westerville which is a town just outside of the suburbs of Columbus)
Ohio... where on the turnpike, the Toledo exit is ALWAYS 9 miles away...
I'm both a student (undergrad) and an employee of my University, and I've watched with interest the bandwidth problems we've experienced over the past year and a half. As a student in the dorms, last fall I watched as the dorm internet connection went to shit. Now, at first I was rather ticked off that I couldn't download all my songs movies and games, but then I went to work one afternoon and found that the ENTIRE Univ network was nerfed.
I spent some time calling around to various computer and network services groups on campus to find out what was going on, and I got the same answer every time; "The ResNet is flooding the entire network offline" This wasn't cool, not in the least... It wasn't just the students who were being hit hard by this, the entire University was unable to conduct normal work.
Now, even though I couldn't surf the web for the latest news on whatever game I was waiting for at the time or IM my friends to see what was going on that night, what was more of an irritation was the fact that I couldn't get my work done. And I had to deal with tons of users who didn't understand that it wasn't within my power to restore net service.
I've been dealing with fellow students for the past year who do nothing but bitch and complain about the net connection being slow. All I hear is people blaming the University for not giving students the bandwidth they're paying for (The semester fee of $50 goes toward reshall connections, lab use, technical support, network maint. etc...) and so on. Students need to realize that they aren't the end-all-be-all of the Univ system, granted they're the primary source of income, but they have to also realize that their chat privledges and music downloading does NOT take precidence over legitmate academic work.
So, in response to problems, the Univ has capped the max speed of the reshalls (50mbs total) and set 1.5GB upload and 1.5GB download limits that only apply to traffic that leaves the network. Students need to learn how to use their net connection with fairness and responsibility. I've heard complaints about the download limits from people yelling things like "What if I want to download several Linux ISOs?" They don't realize we have a mirror server that has all the latest files on the internal network.
To all students who are currently fuming over whatever their university is doing, until you have the proper technical background to be able to suggest viable solutions to the problem, sit down, and kindly shut up as you're doing nothing but flooding the network admins inboxes with emails that they have to read when they would be better off working on the problem.
-Z
...not of sight and sound... but of mind...
on
New Years Marathons
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· Score: 1
Since WPIX (well, now it's the WB) no longer does its Twilight Zone marathon... going out and renting a bunch of episodes myself and letting the twisted images soak into, what by tonight will be, my wine and champange (sp?) clouded mind;-)
I got EVERYTHING but gtkhtml to compile and install... To do this I had to symlink things all over the place. Slack puts gnome in a really really dumb place (/opt/gnome) that none of the programs are by default told to look in for libraries and all that stuff.
If you want Ximian Gnome to work properly on your slackware install, be prepared to totally rework your gnome install and a lot of programs and links associated with it.
In the end I don't think it's worth it just for a desktop environment (I use and love Enlightenment) or an email client.
Reading the FSF article, and then many of the responses here on Slashdot, I can only say that I think many of you are over-reacting. VA has provided the Open Source community with a wonderful and FREE resouce to use... no strings attached... no clauses saying in order to use the service you sign over your first-born child (or worse... your source code).
We often sit here on our high-horses looking down our noses at non-free software... but think about it for a second. With the exception of RedHat, how many companies based on open-source software have managed to be profitable? I know I haven't really heard of any. You can not make money off of software you give away... you need to provide some additional service or product that you can't just get off the net for the cost of several hours of downloading.
Free is all well-and-good... and it works for people doing smaller projects on their free time, where they're not expending millions of dollars on development, equipment, network maintenance, high speed connections and all the other expenses a company like VA has.
I support the free software movement and community... I think it's a great effort and may someday prove to be viable economically, but in today's market it really doesn't work.
If close-sourcing SF and selling it commercially is one of the things VA has to do to make some money to continue to provide us with the resources we take for granted (OSDN, Slashdot, Freshmeat, ThinkGeek etc...), then I say let them do it. Still got a bee up your bonnett? Then take the 2.5 code and refine it and deploy your own system for project management. Don't attack a company for doing what it needs to do to stay alive.
I got the game the other day as well, and after spending many hours playing, I can say that this is EXACTLY like the other Civ games, only a bit more complex... Here's why it's still the same (for me at least)
1)It sucks away hours upon hours of my time that I need to spend studying
2)In the end, it still soundly beats me to a pulp.
I wish there were more configuration options when starting a game, like setting default tech level... Dunno about anyone else, but I find it very hard to get up to the modern tech age.
IST? You wouldn't happen to be somehow affiliated with PSU would you? Just curious on the matter considering IST is my major, and I'm unaware of any other universities using that acronym for a major.
-Z
Let's just drag Roddenberry's name thru the mud...
on
Andromeda
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· Score: 1
I've had the unfortunate displeasure of watching a few episodes of Andromeda... and boy howdy did I regret it. The acting is laughable, the story is one we've heard before in dozens of sci-fi novels, computer games and fan fic... the only plus I've found is that sometimes the CG is pretty cool.
It's a bit sad to see Roddenberry's name attached to this show... this is the kind of show I'd expect the Sci-Fi Channel to churn out... Roddenberry shouldn't be credited with this nasty little show, it would be better credited as: "Gene Roddenberry's Napkin Sketching At 2am; Andromeda"
In the name of all that is sacred and holy in the world of sci-fi... please stop trying to milk Gene's notes for another series... there's a reason he never followed thru on this series I'm guessing.
Slashdot Mirror
Same thing happened to me... was it the MMGM Server?
I would invite you to take a good look at Penn State in how it functions and how it looks. No, the service is not completely free, it takes a bit out of the standard Computing Fee charged to all students. This fee increases a few dollars every year to cover inflation and flux in tech prices. What is happening here is cost is being reallocated from another area covered by this IT fund. Yes students are still paying for it, but the cost increase to them is negligable.
In terms of site licenses for higher-end specialized software. This is covered on a need basis by individual departments. It does not make sense to have a 2,000 unit license for Oracle if only a few hundred will ever use it. Things like that typically come out of faculty research money (most of which comes from outside the Univ).
I don't completely understand the amount of railing people are doing against this service. It is providing students with a *legal* way to listen to music (yes, I know, provided you're on a Windows PC), and a minimal cost to them to burn it to a CD or load it into an MP3 player.
Very few students think it's really free, there's been a lot of back and forth in the school paper and in school-affiliated message boards on the actual cost of this new service. Students really aren't as dumb as people tend to think.
Would you rather the RIAA go after every student who has MP3s on their machine? Bringing in an army of lawyers against the University which would incur huge legal fees, causing for further hikes in tuition? Or would you prefer an incremental increase in the Tech Services fee, and the RIAA turning a blind eye?
PSU gets Napster because they initiated a deal with the RIAA to keep the legal hounds at bay. In exchange for working on this service, PSU students were largely spared the music industry crack-down.
All Universities have the option to develop similar programs to this, but this one specifically was an initiative conducted by PSU.
This is a really bad time to be graduating from college with a degree in CS or IT. There's a huge humber of unemployed *experienced* workers going after everything from the senior to entry level positions. Jobs that were once mainly left to recent college grads are being snatched up by industry veterans. Add onto this the outsourcing of IT workers to India and China, shrinking the job market that's already flooded with workers.
What makes matters worse is that the people who went into college in IT and CS majors with dreams of money when dot-coms were in their prime, are just starting to graduate, so you have an abnormally high number of graduates the past year or so, adding more workers to the already large pool of shrinking jobs. Those who have no or little real-world experience are the ones who are going to hurt the most for all of this.
I love being told by people hiring for entry level positions that I need more experience to be hired. How does one gain job experience if you need experience to get said job? A nice catch-22
I wouldn't be surprised if XMMS suddenly got a whole lot of new talent on the dev team and it suddenly becomes the defacto media player if WinAmp is left to die.
Has it ever occured to you that I am actively working on that problem (among many others currently)? I was making a comment regarding his interview response, and looking for some suggestions from people who have already dealt with this problem.
Part of solving a problem is knowing when to ask for help
I like how he totally breezed over the educational institution questions, which were of particular interest to me as a net admin at a big 10 univ who also has RedHat machines to maintain that will soon be completely unsupported. I need to maintain a lab of computers that dual-boot to Linux and WinXP, and RH9 is the best desktop Linux solution out there currently. I don't have the budget to get the Enterprise edition, so what am I supposed to do when the support runs out?
-Mike
In light of France's refusal to go along with US action in Iraq, there was a public and governmental outcry against all things French. We had "freedom fries" and French wine and cheese was thrown out. Many people here directly criticized these actions as stupid, even the Slashdot editors voiced their opinions through commentary and "department" titles for articles. The sentiment was that it was stupid to blame the rank and file French citizen or French business for the actions of its government.
The same thing should apply here. Why blame the rank-and-file employee of a company whose management is doing something unpopular? Does Joe Programmer have any influence on the legal machinations of his company? No, he just churns out code for a paycheck. And saying "Well, he should quit his job because his employer is doing those things" is just plain ridiculous and doesn't take reality into consideration. The need to eat and possibly support a family generall trumps most personal beliefs.
Just as you can't expect someone to renounce French citizenship because their government does something you don't like, you can't expect an employee to quit because their company does something you don't like. We are putting the burden on the people who can't do anything about the problem. Blacklisting SCO employees does nothing to the people who actually matter in this case, if they don't give a crap about 90% of the IT industry, I bet they don't care about their own employees.
If you worked for a University and some group was doing research that was highly controversial and that you disagreed with on moral or ethical reasons, would you quit because the organization you also happen to work for allows that sort of thing to go on? Should a math professor quit in protest of some experiment going on in the biology department? Should the actions of the company or larger employer actually be held against the little people who work for them?
It's like blaming the White House janitorial staff for the bad policy decisions made by the President and refusing to hire them because they happened to previously work there.
It's stuff like this that makes me realize that for all the screaming about morals and ethics and fair-play that many people do here, that it's mostly an act, one that they discard as soon as it goes against what they like.
How would ChrisD and the rest of the slashdot editors react if a company posted that they would not hire any programmers connected with X Y or Z open source projects?
-Z
SCO can just patch support back in should something like that happen. What would be more effective is if developers and project maintainers coded in checks to their programs that prevents them from compiling or running on SCO systems. That would be far more effective as it takes a LOT more time and energy to patch hundreds of programs than it is to patch GCC.
-Z
When they eventually are forced to reveal their IP in Linux... I expect them to show a print out of the entire damn kernel, claiming they wrote it themselves, because that's the ONLY way they could justify charging even half of that amount.
For a single-seat license, Windows costs less than that, and you're paying for everything from the main OS, to the GUI, to Spider Solitare. You are paying for a complete system, not just a few lines of code burried deep down in the system.
Since they plan on upping the price to $1400 in a few months, my guess is they're using this as a scare tactic to get people to license now in case the courts find in favor of SCO. If SCO loses, they still have all the money from those suckers who paid before. If they win, they then get a LOT more money from everyone else who is forced to pay up. While it's dirty business, SCO is guaranteed to at least get some money out of us before it's all over.
-Z
I've been going through the same strife the past few weeks with my family. In late December I ordered a new computer for my mom, and when it got in I installed the basic software and got it ready for the Internet. Special softare items to remember:
:-P
-FileMaker Pro 4.0 (Mom does some database work for my Dad)
-Canon Digital Camera Software (Sister got a camera for Christmas)
Ok, so I set everything up and a week later I get a call from Dad asking why he can't install Norton Antivirus 2003 (I had already installed a licensed copy from the University), but he ignored me initially telling him that so he went out and bought it anyway. He was mad at me and wanted me to pay him for the Norton CD he bought.
A week after that I get an e-mail from my sister who suddenly can't download pictures from her camera and it's because of something I did to it (keep in mind it's been 2 weeks since I last touched the computer and the day I left she was downloading pictures happily). So it's all my fault that it's not working and I have to fix it IMMEDIATELY so she can get the latest picture of her boyfriend posted on her desktop. It turns out she had been neglecting to turn the camera on when trying to download and she expected me to fix it so the camera wouldn't have to be turned on to download pics from it.
Ok, now let's fast-forward 2 weeks to a paniced call from my mother telling me she can't type on her computer, none of the keys work and they had worked the day before. Turns out dad had just blindly clicked through error messages the day before and enabled the FilterKeys program, blocking ALL keystrokes. I said this and dad proceeded to tell me it was my fault for leaving that program on the computer.... grrr
One other general problem with the computer was on the previous machine mom had the thumb button configured as double-click, which she never told me about and expected me to just know about and that I should have set it up from the get-go, this produced several weeks of grumbling for her saying I didn't know what I was doing (because I didn't have the foresight to install a program she wanted that she never told me about).
At this point I told them they can fix the problems on their own and they all quickly started apologizing...
This is more frustrating than any tech job I've ever done
Actually, it's being done up for the XBox, not the PS2. Go back and hunt through some game site news postings from E3.
A lot of people are attacking this author over his stance that Linux should come down to the level of Joe User. The most common response I see is "Well, Joe User should come to Linux! Not Linux to Joe!" That is just idiotic. Computer geeks make up a very small chunk of the overall computer using populace, it's Joe who makes up the majority, and if we want a technology to become popular and successful on the desktop, we have to bring it to Joe... because Joe doesn't know, nor does he have the patience to figure it out otherwise.
:P
The point of technology is for it to serve users, to make tasks easier for them to accomplish. If you want Linux to succeed on the desktop, it has to become as easy and mindless to use as MacOS or Windows, otherwise it will always be a niche OS useful only on servers and for geeks who have the time and knowledge to mess with it.
Face it, when it comes to widespread success, we are not the people who decide what lives and what dies... it's the people who know far less and need far less out of their computers, because they are the majority.
And let the flames and negative karma begin
It doesn't work like that. University departments can only purchase through the University ordering center for MS Software. Before you shoot off your mouth, you may want to consider that there are rules and limitations to purchasing for educational institutions. MS is forcing everyone towards XP, and PSU is no exception... We are limited by the terms of our contract with them.
How do you figure that? The ordering center here no longer offers me the option to purchase Windows 2000 CDs or licenses for my department, only XP. This was changed a few months ago and I'm trying to find a way to get licenses short of paying out the arse for them.
As a system admin and tech support guy for a department at my University, this is going to be a massive pain in the arse as I have several dozen PhDs to deal with who buy new computers fairly regularly... but they want the machines to talk to all of their specialized equipment... but the equipment vendors don't support XP. Already, I can't purchase additional copies or licenses of 2000 from the Univ. software store, so we're already starting to run into limits...
What are those of us who HAVE to support and use 2k supposed to do if it's no longer an available option?
If they're claiming that Bnetd stole code, they may employ a particularly nasty trick to convince the judge that the code is in fact stolen from blizzard...
All they have to do, is take the bnetd source code (which I'm sure they have safely tucked away somewhere as "evidence"), make minor cosmetic changes to it, and integrate it into a special copy of one of their games for the purpose of presenting during the trial. When they pull out the code... surprise surprise, it looks damn near identical down to some of the most basic levels.
This would definitely suck, as there's no way for the Bnetd people to prove otherwise. It's Blizzard's word against theirs, and we all know the court system will believe a corporation over a bunch of college-age computer junkies.
-Z
Unfortunately it's in the middle of one of the most boring, empty and pointless states in the US... (yes, I have spent considerable time on OH, even in Columbus and Westerville which is a town just outside of the suburbs of Columbus)
Ohio... where on the turnpike, the Toledo exit is ALWAYS 9 miles away...
-Z
I'm both a student (undergrad) and an employee of my University, and I've watched with interest the bandwidth problems we've experienced over the past year and a half. As a student in the dorms, last fall I watched as the dorm internet connection went to shit. Now, at first I was rather ticked off that I couldn't download all my songs movies and games, but then I went to work one afternoon and found that the ENTIRE Univ network was nerfed.
I spent some time calling around to various computer and network services groups on campus to find out what was going on, and I got the same answer every time; "The ResNet is flooding the entire network offline" This wasn't cool, not in the least... It wasn't just the students who were being hit hard by this, the entire University was unable to conduct normal work.
Now, even though I couldn't surf the web for the latest news on whatever game I was waiting for at the time or IM my friends to see what was going on that night, what was more of an irritation was the fact that I couldn't get my work done. And I had to deal with tons of users who didn't understand that it wasn't within my power to restore net service.
I've been dealing with fellow students for the past year who do nothing but bitch and complain about the net connection being slow. All I hear is people blaming the University for not giving students the bandwidth they're paying for (The semester fee of $50 goes toward reshall connections, lab use, technical support, network maint. etc...) and so on. Students need to realize that they aren't the end-all-be-all of the Univ system, granted they're the primary source of income, but they have to also realize that their chat privledges and music downloading does NOT take precidence over legitmate academic work.
So, in response to problems, the Univ has capped the max speed of the reshalls (50mbs total) and set 1.5GB upload and 1.5GB download limits that only apply to traffic that leaves the network. Students need to learn how to use their net connection with fairness and responsibility. I've heard complaints about the download limits from people yelling things like "What if I want to download several Linux ISOs?" They don't realize we have a mirror server that has all the latest files on the internal network.
To all students who are currently fuming over whatever their university is doing, until you have the proper technical background to be able to suggest viable solutions to the problem, sit down, and kindly shut up as you're doing nothing but flooding the network admins inboxes with emails that they have to read when they would be better off working on the problem.
-Z
Since WPIX (well, now it's the WB) no longer does its Twilight Zone marathon... going out and renting a bunch of episodes myself and letting the twisted images soak into, what by tonight will be, my wine and champange (sp?) clouded mind ;-)
Happy new year all!
-Z
If you want Ximian Gnome to work properly on your slackware install, be prepared to totally rework your gnome install and a lot of programs and links associated with it.
In the end I don't think it's worth it just for a desktop environment (I use and love Enlightenment) or an email client.
-Z
We often sit here on our high-horses looking down our noses at non-free software... but think about it for a second. With the exception of RedHat, how many companies based on open-source software have managed to be profitable? I know I haven't really heard of any. You can not make money off of software you give away... you need to provide some additional service or product that you can't just get off the net for the cost of several hours of downloading.
Free is all well-and-good... and it works for people doing smaller projects on their free time, where they're not expending millions of dollars on development, equipment, network maintenance, high speed connections and all the other expenses a company like VA has.
I support the free software movement and community... I think it's a great effort and may someday prove to be viable economically, but in today's market it really doesn't work.
If close-sourcing SF and selling it commercially is one of the things VA has to do to make some money to continue to provide us with the resources we take for granted (OSDN, Slashdot, Freshmeat, ThinkGeek etc...), then I say let them do it. Still got a bee up your bonnett? Then take the 2.5 code and refine it and deploy your own system for project management. Don't attack a company for doing what it needs to do to stay alive.
-Z
I got the game the other day as well, and after spending many hours playing, I can say that this is EXACTLY like the other Civ games, only a bit more complex... Here's why it's still the same (for me at least)
1)It sucks away hours upon hours of my time that I need to spend studying
2)In the end, it still soundly beats me to a pulp.
I wish there were more configuration options when starting a game, like setting default tech level... Dunno about anyone else, but I find it very hard to get up to the modern tech age.
Still a great game tho...
-Z
IST? You wouldn't happen to be somehow affiliated with PSU would you? Just curious on the matter considering IST is my major, and I'm unaware of any other universities using that acronym for a major.
-Z
It's a bit sad to see Roddenberry's name attached to this show... this is the kind of show I'd expect the Sci-Fi Channel to churn out... Roddenberry shouldn't be credited with this nasty little show, it would be better credited as:
"Gene Roddenberry's Napkin Sketching At 2am; Andromeda"
In the name of all that is sacred and holy in the world of sci-fi... please stop trying to milk Gene's notes for another series... there's a reason he never followed thru on this series I'm guessing.