It's because of the "almost". There are a lot of people who, right or wrong, believe that they can only get by with whatever Windows-only "Program X" provides. For these people, "close" is not "close enough". When the gearheads who like Linux need to support these applications, virtualizing a Windows instance on Linux makes a lot of sense.
Even for a pure MS shop, virtualization introduces a lot of flexibility, so that too would be a reason to virtualize.
I am a former tech coordinator for a public school district. One of my last projects before I left was to develop a district-wide communication upgrade plan. Unless you have a lot of time on your hands and/or have a local vendor who can support it an Asterix-based solution is probably not a good idea. There are a lot of vendors out there that are experimenting with it, but I have yet to see one that has a solution I would call "fully baked". Whatever you go with, a proven track record and a local vendor who is certified to support your gear (and also has a good track record) is paramount. Nothing will make you look worse than a phone system that is a pain to use or is flaky. People have very high expectations when it comes to the behavior of phones, and absolutely will not tolerate the kind of BS they up with from their computers.
- A Cisco system or Shortel system -- Education budgets vary wildly from year to year and reoccurring cost have to be kept down.
I find it laughable that you mention keeping costs down and Cisco or Shoretel in the same sentence. I have a Shoretel system in my office at my current employer, and it's very nice. However, it is also very expensive, and it's less costly than than Cisco... You are factoring in handset costs and extension licensing when you look at the cost of the system, right? Right? You are, right?
The best solution I found (and the one I recommended before I left) is the Rauland Telecenter VI. It gives great bang for the buck and is a highly integrated complete comm system designed for schools, so if you have bell, intercom, and clock systems that need to be upgraded as well, you get to do that nearly for free. It also lets you use Voip phones where you need big feature sets and $10 analog phones where you need "just a phone". Handsets are where a huge portion of the expense of a big phone system deployment go, after all. There also is no per-handset licensing, if I remember correctly. http://www.rauland.com/education/tc6/tc6_home.htm
Whoopdi-freaking-do. Other than the capacity, this describes the file server I've been running at home for the last 2 years. The title of this article might as well be "Capricorn makes obvious product using COTS components". Unless they're doing something novel in terms of management or presentation of large logical volumes that span nodes (which it doesn't look like they are) this is hardly newsworthy...
Buy an audio player from Cowon. http://www.cowon.com/ . It sounds like they will meet your needs much better than an ipod, and the U3 line (which I own 2 of) is at least as durable as an iPod, likely moreso since it is solid-state.
As much as Apple would hate people to know it, they are not the only option, and for many people, they aren't even a good option...
The others are lower, primarily due to extended power failures, but the average (Amongst 16 servers) seems to be about a year. Compared to that, I have to reboot my windows servers at least once a month, if not for updates for clearing random "odd" behavior that crops up after awhile...
So yeah, yet another "report" that doesn't really prove anyhting.
It works fine down to 800x600... I can't imagine doing a general desgin for a site like slashdot for a resolution smaller than that. If there is a need for a design that works at a resolution lower than that, it really should specifcally for low-res devices.
2. One other than the principals involved in a transaction: I pay rent to a third party, not directly to the landlord.
What interests us here is the #2. The "principals involved in a transaction" in this case are Nintendo and the Player. Nintendo is the 1st party and the Player is the 2nd party.
Which party is which depends on your point of view, which is part of the reason that legal documents always define precisely who is which party. It also depends on what transaction you are looking at.
It's always been my understanding that in the context of game system sales and development, the console company is the first party. Second party devs have strong enough ties to the console company and/or console that they can be considered a principal. Third party developers are third party because though they develop for the console they are not tied up in it sufficiently to be considered a principal involved in the development and/or sales of the console. So, from that context, it fits the definition.
The names are derived from the process of making ths consoles and games, not selling them.
True, but if you at things in the right "relativity", the people who exercise any number of rights that we have is a small list. That's part of the reason they become taken for granted. Just becuase I'm not exercising some privelege I have now is no reason that I should let it be taken away.
Most people don't care. Most people won't care. They'll simply label their machines, players, tracks as "broken" and go get them "fixed" at their nearest hardware shop/music vendor/online vendor. Do you think the music industry hasn't researched this.
If Aunt Tillies music collection locks her out, she will ring up, pay a bill and go on being fleeced. That's the way it's going to be and the entertainment industry knows it.
This is absolutely and sadly true. All the more reason that people who do know and care need to do what they can to raise the awareness of others so that they will understand the situation better when it happens. Perhaps they will be motivated to do something about it, even if it is something small, rather than forking over money again and again. Maybe they will still fork over the money, but at least then they will be making an informed decision.
And why should they care? DRM isn't keeping them from enjoying the content they've paid for. It isn't an issue for "Joe Public".
That is true. If you ignore the people who want to make backups of their DVD's so the kids don't scratch up the originals, but can't. And if you ignore the people who want to format shift their music from CD's to some other player, but can't, or run the risk of having their computer disabled by buggy DRM software. And if you ignore all the people who buy eBooks and then want to view them on a device other than which it was orginally purchased on, but can't. And if you ignore the people who buy music online and then want to move it to another computer, but can't.
If I thought harder, the list could get longer. And if Big Media gets its way, it will get a lot longer. This isn't an issue for the majority of the Joe Publics out there, but there are some, and it will be a big issue if we stay on the course we are on now. However, most people will just accept those limitations once they are in place, forcing all of us to live to the lowest common denominator. Also, don't forget about all the interesting gadgets that may never be in an environment where media is so tightly controlled. There is a strong argument that the diversity and low prices that we now enjoy with DAPs would have never been created if the controls that Big Media propose now were in place 5 or 10 years ago.
That's why public awareness needs to be raised now, so that this trend can be stopped. It's easier to prevent negative changes than it is to reverse them. It is short-sighted to assume that just because something isn't a problem now, or isn't a problem for you that it isn't a problem. I want my kids to enjoy at least as much freedom as I do, if not more. That's why things like this are important, and that's why trends like this need to be fought.
Start the semester without one. Make them use a text editor and do everything "the hard way". Then about half or 3/4 of the way through, introduce IDE's that have nice features for what you will be making them do.
How is Ubuntu more a more corporate-friendly face for Debian than Progeny was (supposed to be)?
Simply put, they're already established and have significant inertia. Progeny never really got past the "boot strap" phase, IIRC. I'd wager that it had a lot to do with sticking too closely to the Debian Way, and not being responsive enough to user requests, but that's just my opinion / conjecture. The significant amount $$$ that Shuttleworth and Canonical have been throwing at Ubuntu helps a lot too...
Can anyone tell me why a person would want to use Ubuntu on a server, as opposed to just using Debian?
I've been a big fan of Debian since I first started using Linux 10 years ago. I really respect their attitudes towards a lot of things, and yet, I hardly ever use it. There a couple factors behind this, most notably their tradtionally huge lag behind current development, and their adherence to "the Debian way" even if it is less convenient for no good technical reason. One example of this is lacking a "local" startup file by default. It is relatively trivial to add one, but there's no reason not to have a template for that in place out of the box, like every other distro I have ever worked with. For me, the Debian experience is sort of a death of 1000 cuts where there are no major deal breakers, but a lot of minor annoyances. For a lot of people, this is offset by the other things they do well, but for even more people, it is not. Ubuntu takes all the stuff that Debian does right, and then removes a lot of the painful little annoyances. That's a big part of the reason that I run Ubuntu on servers as well as desktops. MAybe a lot of this will be fixed by the new leadership that Debian has, but only time will tell. I know a lot of people don't see these as problems to be fixed, but I think those people are the typical "vocal minority" that is so common in the FOSS world. The users don't always know best, but if they are complaining, it's a good sign that a change should at least be seriously considered. Hanging onto dogma is not good just for its own sake, there have to be sound technical or (sometimes) philosophical reasons behind it.
I also run a highly heterogenous environment, and I find it easier to have everything I touch be either completely the same or totally different. Having a number of machines that behave nearly the same is harder for me because of the "close but not quite"-ness of it. Moving between a Fedora machine and an Ubuntu machine is easier than moving from a Debian and an Ubuntu. There's a clearer differentiation, which makes it easier to "change gears". It's like moving between different versions of windows, things are close enough you expect them to be the same, but different enough to be really annoying. This is probably just me though.
Make it so that it feels like I am playing against / with other other humans. Some of them are good, some are bad. Some are utterly clueless, some strategize well. Some have very good aim, some are pretty poor. Everything should have some random element to it so that even very good AI's can botch, and even poor ones can make that one in a million shot. Make most of them "average" in skill. Make them adaptive, so that they learn my habits and change tactics to counter / complement them. DON'T allow them to do (seemingly) impossible things with a high level of regularity, and don't have one NPC's skill level vary widely within a session, like the "comeback king" drivers mentioned in another post.
It's really not that hard to define.
All that being said, make sure whatever is done is appropriate for the game. Games where one is pitted against a clock, or has an "obstacle course" sort of feel would likely not benefit a lot from having a real "human" AI. The repeatability of the challenge is core to the replayability of the game.
Don't short-sighted. That sort of thinking is exactly why this sort of problem exists. If they build scalability and support for silly high-end impractical things into the more pedestrian standard, it creates the forces neccesary for those silly high-end things to take hold, become popular, and then finally become affordable for normal people. Being involved in computers enough to be reading/., you should know better than to assume that just because something is expensive and "fringy" today that it will be that way for long.
Surely this is a sign of the end times! Seriously though, it's nice to see Debian responding to the requests of what seems to be the majority of their userbase. I know I have avoided Debian because they seemed to do releases on a geologic time scale. I admire their insistance on quality, stability, and security, but most people would like to have some modernity as well. Here's to hoping they manage to strike or more widely appealing balance.
"Normal" bookmarks are faster than using some other site and I'm not adding a dependency to my my ability to retrieve my bookmarks. If delicious is unreachable, so are my bookmarks. That's not acceptable to me. I use a FF plugin to keep my multiple machines' bookamrks in sync, which has the side-effect of making them also available to me from other computers should _need_ to access them from a computer owned by someone other than me.
I work with kids and tech everyday, and I can tell you definitively that there are two primary reasons for this:
1- As far as kids are concerned, computers are now toys, not tools. Even the "upper crust" tech kids I work with see them this way primarily. The primary uses of computers are for consuming media, playing games, and socializing. All the tools to do these things already exist, so there is little impetus to create something new unless you are into computers for their own sake.
2- 99% of the "technology" classes taught at school have nothing to do with the technology itself. They're all about how to be good little Office and Dreamweaver drones. It's all about using the computers as an office tool, nto the tech behind them. So, this is in direct opposition to #1, isn't it. Well, I am _constantly_ asked how we can make something easier / simpler / more fun. Even when using them as a tool, people still think of them as toys, and expect that using them should not be hard, which in their world translates to "requires thought".
Those two things combined make it so that by and large people who are not interested in computers for their own sake never even consider writing a program themselves. It just never enters their consciousness until they are out of HS, and the educational system is doing damn near nothing to fight this, in fact, they are _encouraging_ it.
That leaves the "computer geeks". Well, 99% of them are the kind where if it can't be pointed and clicked, it must be impossible. A lot of them talk big about running Linux at home and blah blah. Most of them have it installed on a box that sits turned off next to their "real computer" that they use to play Counter Strike. Of the few who actually _use it_ for anything, most are running a special firewall distro that has a web interface. That hardly counts.
Some other interesting bits. In order to meet a percieved need at my HS (about 1000 students) for some "real" CS content, I started up a program for the "high flying" tech kids. I setup a sandbox server, gave them shell accounts, and I am there to help them program and basically do whatever they want on it in terms of a project. Of the 6 that were interested initially, 4 hung around. Of the 4, 3 are doing webby "I learned CSS" and "I got phpBB working" class stuff. ONE is doing anything that even remotely resembles computer science.
I really think that this is largely because the wonderment and accessibility of computers has been so hidden by the glitz and hand-holding. How can they explore options that they never even know exist? Hopefully we can catch them younger and still get that spark started because it gets quashed by mainstream ideas about computers. Hopefully in the next school year, I'll be able to have some intro to programming classes at the middle school...
Whoever is behind this is likely to make a killing at this. There are so many people who hate their jobs but are so afraid to just take the dive, they'd likely be willing to pay a _lot_ to do this. Personally, I don't think this is a particularly useful metric of what another job would be like. As "the tech guy" in an educational institution, I've had numerous students job shadow me, and rarely do I have "typical" days when they are there. Invariably it gets scheduled for days when interesting, but low-impact projects are happening, or when something comes up, "I have a job shadow today, I probably should wait on that until tomorrow" gets said since a lot of my work requires relative quiet and concentration. Who knows though, maybe three days back to back will show a more relevant sample.
The idea of giving the FCC more control over things they probably shouldn't control doesn't make me happy, but missing a chance to explicitly prohibit a tiered Internet is kind of a bummer... Oh well, in cases like this consumer always gets screwed one way or another, it's just a question of who's doing the screwing...
As an aside, doesn't the whole "tiered Internet" concept that the telco's are trying to float violate the concept of "common carrier"? Anyone know?
Currently we have a national identity system, but instead of having laws protect the people in it, rather we have companies which can do what they like to our identities...For all of the comments that say that identity cards are a 'bad idea(tm)' no one has been able to say what this will enable the government to do that they can't do today.
Not long ago, I would have been against the idea of a national ID card, no questions asked. However, I've given it a lot of thought of late, and this statement sums up my position on this pretty well. If the government wanted to abuse a "national ID system", all the pieces are already in place to do so. SSN's, drivers licenses, birth certifcates, credit reports, passports, etc. All of those are already nearly mandatory, or at least so nearly mandatory that anyone without them is effectively not participating in society. The databases exist, the information is there, and the possibility for abuse is too. Is there any evidence that having yet another ID system would actually make it worse? There is strong evidence that it could make a lot of things better, especially in the US where there are huge numbers of people "milking the system" both on the ID theft and social service sides of the spectrum. The potential to also use these as strong identifying tokens to store personal medical records, or the myriad other uses a "smart" id card could have also make it appealing.
I have a couple big caveats that go along with this, however. First, it absolutely must use some technology that requires physical contact to access ANY of the information. A contactless technology like RFID would, in my mind, make the whole thing useless. Second, it must be only one part of a two-part authentication system. It must have an (arbitrarily long) password that is associated with it. The card and the password are neccesary to do anything important with it. Other concerns focus around specific regulations on how they were used and when they can be legally "required", and also the process to "destroy" and replace lost or stolen ones.
Those constraints would make the system sufficiently abuse resistant and offer enough benefit over the current system that I would support it. In a lot of ways, Big Brother is here, not in the form of government alone, but in the form of Big Business and Big Government. We might as well use what little leverage the government may offer us to protect ourselves from them both.
Slashdot Mirror
It's because of the "almost". There are a lot of people who, right or wrong, believe that they can only get by with whatever Windows-only "Program X" provides. For these people, "close" is not "close enough". When the gearheads who like Linux need to support these applications, virtualizing a Windows instance on Linux makes a lot of sense.
Even for a pure MS shop, virtualization introduces a lot of flexibility, so that too would be a reason to virtualize.
I am a former tech coordinator for a public school district. One of my last projects before I left was to develop a district-wide communication upgrade plan. Unless you have a lot of time on your hands and/or have a local vendor who can support it an Asterix-based solution is probably not a good idea. There are a lot of vendors out there that are experimenting with it, but I have yet to see one that has a solution I would call "fully baked". Whatever you go with, a proven track record and a local vendor who is certified to support your gear (and also has a good track record) is paramount. Nothing will make you look worse than a phone system that is a pain to use or is flaky. People have very high expectations when it comes to the behavior of phones, and absolutely will not tolerate the kind of BS they up with from their computers.
- A Cisco system or Shortel system -- Education budgets vary wildly from year to year and reoccurring cost have to be kept down.
I find it laughable that you mention keeping costs down and Cisco or Shoretel in the same sentence. I have a Shoretel system in my office at my current employer, and it's very nice. However, it is also very expensive, and it's less costly than than Cisco... You are factoring in handset costs and extension licensing when you look at the cost of the system, right? Right? You are, right?
The best solution I found (and the one I recommended before I left) is the Rauland Telecenter VI. It gives great bang for the buck and is a highly integrated complete comm system designed for schools, so if you have bell, intercom, and clock systems that need to be upgraded as well, you get to do that nearly for free. It also lets you use Voip phones where you need big feature sets and $10 analog phones where you need "just a phone". Handsets are where a huge portion of the expense of a big phone system deployment go, after all. There also is no per-handset licensing, if I remember correctly. http://www.rauland.com/education/tc6/tc6_home.htm
Yes.
Whoopdi-freaking-do. Other than the capacity, this describes the file server I've been running at home for the last 2 years. The title of this article might as well be "Capricorn makes obvious product using COTS components". Unless they're doing something novel in terms of management or presentation of large logical volumes that span nodes (which it doesn't look like they are) this is hardly newsworthy...
Buy an audio player from Cowon. http://www.cowon.com/ . It sounds like they will meet your needs much better than an ipod, and the U3 line (which I own 2 of) is at least as durable as an iPod, likely moreso since it is solid-state.
As much as Apple would hate people to know it, they are not the only option, and for many people, they aren't even a good option...
FWIW, here's my current uptime champion:
sla ~ # uptime
11:06:38 up 587 days, 2:11, 1 user, load average: 0.01, 0.02, 0.00
The others are lower, primarily due to extended power failures, but the average (Amongst 16 servers) seems to be about a year. Compared to that, I have to reboot my windows servers at least once a month, if not for updates for clearing random "odd" behavior that crops up after awhile...
So yeah, yet another "report" that doesn't really prove anyhting.
But we just play Soul Calibur 3.... :D
It works fine down to 800x600... I can't imagine doing a general desgin for a site like slashdot for a resolution smaller than that. If there is a need for a design that works at a resolution lower than that, it really should specifcally for low-res devices.
Man, talk about nit-picking...
2. One other than the principals involved in a transaction: I pay rent to a third party, not directly to the landlord.
What interests us here is the #2. The "principals involved in a transaction" in this case are Nintendo and the Player. Nintendo is the 1st party and the Player is the 2nd party.
Which party is which depends on your point of view, which is part of the reason that legal documents always define precisely who is which party. It also depends on what transaction you are looking at.
It's always been my understanding that in the context of game system sales and development, the console company is the first party. Second party devs have strong enough ties to the console company and/or console that they can be considered a principal. Third party developers are third party because though they develop for the console they are not tied up in it sufficiently to be considered a principal involved in the development and/or sales of the console. So, from that context, it fits the definition.
The names are derived from the process of making ths consoles and games, not selling them.
Someone mod the parent up, I don't have any points...
Relatively speaking, it's still a small list.
True, but if you at things in the right "relativity", the people who exercise any number of rights that we have is a small list. That's part of the reason they become taken for granted. Just becuase I'm not exercising some privelege I have now is no reason that I should let it be taken away.
Most people don't care. Most people won't care. They'll simply label their machines, players, tracks as "broken" and go get them "fixed" at their nearest hardware shop/music vendor/online vendor. Do you think the music industry hasn't researched this.
If Aunt Tillies music collection locks her out, she will ring up, pay a bill and go on being fleeced. That's the way it's going to be and the entertainment industry knows it.
This is absolutely and sadly true. All the more reason that people who do know and care need to do what they can to raise the awareness of others so that they will understand the situation better when it happens. Perhaps they will be motivated to do something about it, even if it is something small, rather than forking over money again and again. Maybe they will still fork over the money, but at least then they will be making an informed decision.
And why should they care? DRM isn't keeping them from enjoying the content they've paid for. It isn't an issue for "Joe Public".
That is true. If you ignore the people who want to make backups of their DVD's so the kids don't scratch up the originals, but can't. And if you ignore the people who want to format shift their music from CD's to some other player, but can't, or run the risk of having their computer disabled by buggy DRM software. And if you ignore all the people who buy eBooks and then want to view them on a device other than which it was orginally purchased on, but can't. And if you ignore the people who buy music online and then want to move it to another computer, but can't.
If I thought harder, the list could get longer. And if Big Media gets its way, it will get a lot longer. This isn't an issue for the majority of the Joe Publics out there, but there are some, and it will be a big issue if we stay on the course we are on now. However, most people will just accept those limitations once they are in place, forcing all of us to live to the lowest common denominator. Also, don't forget about all the interesting gadgets that may never be in an environment where media is so tightly controlled. There is a strong argument that the diversity and low prices that we now enjoy with DAPs would have never been created if the controls that Big Media propose now were in place 5 or 10 years ago.
That's why public awareness needs to be raised now, so that this trend can be stopped. It's easier to prevent negative changes than it is to reverse them. It is short-sighted to assume that just because something isn't a problem now, or isn't a problem for you that it isn't a problem. I want my kids to enjoy at least as much freedom as I do, if not more. That's why things like this are important, and that's why trends like this need to be fought.
Start the semester without one. Make them use a text editor and do everything "the hard way". Then about half or 3/4 of the way through, introduce IDE's that have nice features for what you will be making them do.
This does it best:
a l_equiv
http://www.plope.com/Members/chrism/debian_rc_loc
How is Ubuntu more a more corporate-friendly face for Debian than Progeny was (supposed to be)?
Simply put, they're already established and have significant inertia. Progeny never really got past the "boot strap" phase, IIRC. I'd wager that it had a lot to do with sticking too closely to the Debian Way, and not being responsive enough to user requests, but that's just my opinion / conjecture. The significant amount $$$ that Shuttleworth and Canonical have been throwing at Ubuntu helps a lot too...
Can anyone tell me why a person would want to use Ubuntu on a server, as opposed to just using Debian?
I've been a big fan of Debian since I first started using Linux 10 years ago. I really respect their attitudes towards a lot of things, and yet, I hardly ever use it. There a couple factors behind this, most notably their tradtionally huge lag behind current development, and their adherence to "the Debian way" even if it is less convenient for no good technical reason. One example of this is lacking a "local" startup file by default. It is relatively trivial to add one, but there's no reason not to have a template for that in place out of the box, like every other distro I have ever worked with. For me, the Debian experience is sort of a death of 1000 cuts where there are no major deal breakers, but a lot of minor annoyances. For a lot of people, this is offset by the other things they do well, but for even more people, it is not. Ubuntu takes all the stuff that Debian does right, and then removes a lot of the painful little annoyances. That's a big part of the reason that I run Ubuntu on servers as well as desktops. MAybe a lot of this will be fixed by the new leadership that Debian has, but only time will tell. I know a lot of people don't see these as problems to be fixed, but I think those people are the typical "vocal minority" that is so common in the FOSS world. The users don't always know best, but if they are complaining, it's a good sign that a change should at least be seriously considered. Hanging onto dogma is not good just for its own sake, there have to be sound technical or (sometimes) philosophical reasons behind it.
I also run a highly heterogenous environment, and I find it easier to have everything I touch be either completely the same or totally different. Having a number of machines that behave nearly the same is harder for me because of the "close but not quite"-ness of it. Moving between a Fedora machine and an Ubuntu machine is easier than moving from a Debian and an Ubuntu. There's a clearer differentiation, which makes it easier to "change gears". It's like moving between different versions of windows, things are close enough you expect them to be the same, but different enough to be really annoying. This is probably just me though.
So, yeah, that's why. For me anyway.
Make it so that it feels like I am playing against / with other other humans. Some of them are good, some are bad. Some are utterly clueless, some strategize well. Some have very good aim, some are pretty poor. Everything should have some random element to it so that even very good AI's can botch, and even poor ones can make that one in a million shot. Make most of them "average" in skill. Make them adaptive, so that they learn my habits and change tactics to counter / complement them. DON'T allow them to do (seemingly) impossible things with a high level of regularity, and don't have one NPC's skill level vary widely within a session, like the "comeback king" drivers mentioned in another post.
It's really not that hard to define.
All that being said, make sure whatever is done is appropriate for the game. Games where one is pitted against a clock, or has an "obstacle course" sort of feel would likely not benefit a lot from having a real "human" AI. The repeatability of the challenge is core to the replayability of the game.
Don't short-sighted. That sort of thinking is exactly why this sort of problem exists. If they build scalability and support for silly high-end impractical things into the more pedestrian standard, it creates the forces neccesary for those silly high-end things to take hold, become popular, and then finally become affordable for normal people. Being involved in computers enough to be reading /., you should know better than to assume that just because something is expensive and "fringy" today that it will be that way for long.
Surely this is a sign of the end times! Seriously though, it's nice to see Debian responding to the requests of what seems to be the majority of their userbase. I know I have avoided Debian because they seemed to do releases on a geologic time scale. I admire their insistance on quality, stability, and security, but most people would like to have some modernity as well. Here's to hoping they manage to strike or more widely appealing balance.
"Normal" bookmarks are faster than using some other site and I'm not adding a dependency to my my ability to retrieve my bookmarks. If delicious is unreachable, so are my bookmarks. That's not acceptable to me. I use a FF plugin to keep my multiple machines' bookamrks in sync, which has the side-effect of making them also available to me from other computers should _need_ to access them from a computer owned by someone other than me.
I work with kids and tech everyday, and I can tell you definitively that there are two primary reasons for this:
1- As far as kids are concerned, computers are now toys, not tools. Even the "upper crust" tech kids I work with see them this way primarily. The primary uses of computers are for consuming media, playing games, and socializing. All the tools to do these things already exist, so there is little impetus to create something new unless you are into computers for their own sake.
2- 99% of the "technology" classes taught at school have nothing to do with the technology itself. They're all about how to be good little Office and Dreamweaver drones. It's all about using the computers as an office tool, nto the tech behind them. So, this is in direct opposition to #1, isn't it. Well, I am _constantly_ asked how we can make something easier / simpler / more fun. Even when using them as a tool, people still think of them as toys, and expect that using them should not be hard, which in their world translates to "requires thought".
Those two things combined make it so that by and large people who are not interested in computers for their own sake never even consider writing a program themselves. It just never enters their consciousness until they are out of HS, and the educational system is doing damn near nothing to fight this, in fact, they are _encouraging_ it.
That leaves the "computer geeks". Well, 99% of them are the kind where if it can't be pointed and clicked, it must be impossible. A lot of them talk big about running Linux at home and blah blah. Most of them have it installed on a box that sits turned off next to their "real computer" that they use to play Counter Strike. Of the few who actually _use it_ for anything, most are running a special firewall distro that has a web interface. That hardly counts.
Some other interesting bits. In order to meet a percieved need at my HS (about 1000 students) for some "real" CS content, I started up a program for the "high flying" tech kids. I setup a sandbox server, gave them shell accounts, and I am there to help them program and basically do whatever they want on it in terms of a project. Of the 6 that were interested initially, 4 hung around. Of the 4, 3 are doing webby "I learned CSS" and "I got phpBB working" class stuff. ONE is doing anything that even remotely resembles computer science.
I really think that this is largely because the wonderment and accessibility of computers has been so hidden by the glitz and hand-holding. How can they explore options that they never even know exist? Hopefully we can catch them younger and still get that spark started because it gets quashed by mainstream ideas about computers. Hopefully in the next school year, I'll be able to have some intro to programming classes at the middle school...
Whoever is behind this is likely to make a killing at this. There are so many people who hate their jobs but are so afraid to just take the dive, they'd likely be willing to pay a _lot_ to do this. Personally, I don't think this is a particularly useful metric of what another job would be like. As "the tech guy" in an educational institution, I've had numerous students job shadow me, and rarely do I have "typical" days when they are there. Invariably it gets scheduled for days when interesting, but low-impact projects are happening, or when something comes up, "I have a job shadow today, I probably should wait on that until tomorrow" gets said since a lot of my work requires relative quiet and concentration. Who knows though, maybe three days back to back will show a more relevant sample.
The idea of giving the FCC more control over things they probably shouldn't control doesn't make me happy, but missing a chance to explicitly prohibit a tiered Internet is kind of a bummer... Oh well, in cases like this consumer always gets screwed one way or another, it's just a question of who's doing the screwing...
As an aside, doesn't the whole "tiered Internet" concept that the telco's are trying to float violate the concept of "common carrier"? Anyone know?
Currently we have a national identity system, but instead of having laws protect the people in it, rather we have companies which can do what they like to our identities...For all of the comments that say that identity cards are a 'bad idea(tm)' no one has been able to say what this will enable the government to do that they can't do today.
Not long ago, I would have been against the idea of a national ID card, no questions asked. However, I've given it a lot of thought of late, and this statement sums up my position on this pretty well. If the government wanted to abuse a "national ID system", all the pieces are already in place to do so. SSN's, drivers licenses, birth certifcates, credit reports, passports, etc. All of those are already nearly mandatory, or at least so nearly mandatory that anyone without them is effectively not participating in society. The databases exist, the information is there, and the possibility for abuse is too. Is there any evidence that having yet another ID system would actually make it worse? There is strong evidence that it could make a lot of things better, especially in the US where there are huge numbers of people "milking the system" both on the ID theft and social service sides of the spectrum. The potential to also use these as strong identifying tokens to store personal medical records, or the myriad other uses a "smart" id card could have also make it appealing.
I have a couple big caveats that go along with this, however. First, it absolutely must use some technology that requires physical contact to access ANY of the information. A contactless technology like RFID would, in my mind, make the whole thing useless. Second, it must be only one part of a two-part authentication system. It must have an (arbitrarily long) password that is associated with it. The card and the password are neccesary to do anything important with it. Other concerns focus around specific regulations on how they were used and when they can be legally "required", and also the process to "destroy" and replace lost or stolen ones.
Those constraints would make the system sufficiently abuse resistant and offer enough benefit over the current system that I would support it. In a lot of ways, Big Brother is here, not in the form of government alone, but in the form of Big Business and Big Government. We might as well use what little leverage the government may offer us to protect ourselves from them both.