See, I thought this was relevant until I dug in further and discovered that it's probably a different Clear, in a different country, from the one I use.
The downside to doing this kind of thing is that then so many students fail the test that the teacher gets done for incompetence, compared to the other teachers who aren't checking so carefully:)
Stop spending money on anti-cheating technologies. Spend money on improving the methods of education.
One method of education is to get things to a point where the student realises that actually learning the material is the best way to succeed.
With low risk of getting caught, many many students decide that cheating is the best way to pass/get good grades/graduate for minimal effort. And it probably is if you're not interested in learning and just want a good grade, to get a good job.
Raising the cost/risk of cheating and thus pushing more students to learn the material is quite a valid education method.
My opinion is that if you post personally identifiable information to a public website, and expect that information to be kept from all the world's eyeballs, you're being incredibly foolish.
The problem is you can't control what other people post.
I create an account with just my name and use it to keep in touch with my friends and family.
It doesn't take long before someone posts a photo from my birthday party and annotates my name. A quick grab of my friends list reveals some workmates, one of whom has a map of the office.
so without me doing anything but putting up my name and a list of friends, anyone can now work out where I live, work, when my birthday is, and what I look like.
I deleted my FB profile a while back and am glad I did.
If it can run java applets near full-screen then I don't see why you can't implement a whole heap of stuff that way. Sure, no VoIP or offline games, but I can't see why you couldn't run SSH clients or custom internet based apps that way.
Sure I'm not interested in a device costing that much that I can't write stuff that runs offline for (and in NZ it'll cost $unfeasible to use our shitty mobile networks), but there looks like *some* ability there to run custom apps.
I see it as more similar to getting locks on the doors of your home and closing windows before you go out.
Is it fair you have to go to this extra hassle and cost? no. Are the crooks really to blame? yes. Will blaming them and leaving your door unlocked solve the problem? no! Will catching the occasional crook solve the problem? no!
The Internet is a really big place. Crime happens. It sucks, it's the fault of the bad guys. But you still need to lock your front door. (or run a secure desktop)
In the bad old days, I used to see multiple icons encoded as one large GIF, then a bit of javascript to unpack it and display the right things in the right places.
I suspect browser incompatibilities killed that off, but maybe it's do-able again.
> He says a flood of undiscriminated traffic to and from Youtube, Coldplay, and Victoria's Secret will bring down the Internet
So he's saying that people accessing the sites they want to access is wrong, and we should stop them?
The Internet is too complex for emergency services to be relying on anyway, even if they did get priority, there are far too many components that can break.
If the problem is that with big popular video sites there is more traffic than the end users are paying for, then perhaps we should charge the people who *initiate* that traffic - ie. the end user.
I agree that with the theoretical "free market" this problem would solve itself, but I'm not actually aware of any "free markets" in reality, especially not in telecommunications.
Given the choice between a "free" iPod and having better teaching staff, I'd go for the college who spent *my* money on improving the education they can give me. If I was a music or media student then maybe an iPod would be a plus. Otherwise it's just a waste of my hard earned fees.
The Napster stuff is absolutely horrendous. To me, universities are the *last* place that should be bowing to corporate bullying and selling its students as dumb consumers. Especially using the students money to do so.
A good wireless network would seem to me to be a better alternative to larger computer labs, and I'd say that generally is a good thing.
I went to University to learn and have fun learning. Sure, I love iPods, but I'd rather have had more textbooks, or more teaching staff, or better equipment in the labs.
I've had several more cases of "security" patches breaking my systems through changes to things not related to the security issue than I have of being hacked/infected/spywared.
So I couldn't in good faith recommend auto-update on any system where the supplier has a history of this.
Maybe when the software industry is mature enough to release security patches that *only* contain a security patch I'd think about it. I expect I'll be a long time waiting.
Ok, so some free *nix distros do, and that's nice, but these generally aren't the ones getting infected all over the place.
Plus, as someone else mentioned, having an auto-updater interrupt the one game of UT2004 you've managed to fit in this week is just not on.
I don't understand how certain software suppliers are finding this so hard. Release a patch that fixes the security issue. Only the security issue. Make it small. Make auto-updaters check for updates when the screensaver kicks in. Duh.
Hold music is great for when there's a sudden surprise jump in the number of calls, but it seems to be common practice just to make the customer give up and leave from boredom. Very few calls seem to be answered quickly these days.
I guess it cuts down on the number of complaints (that get through).
But I'm a paying (or potential) customer. Telling me my time isn't important to you is a great way to lose my custom.
I swore off Sierra games after far too many bad experiences.
I don't think I've ever bought one that actually worked without hundreds of mb of patch downloads.
To me the "Sierra" logo on a game box is a clear sign that it will give me hours of trouble just to get it to run. Then it'll probably crash part way through and lose my save file. Doesn't even seem to matter if they wrote it themselves or not.
And of course you can't return them because somehow computer software isn't covered by consumer guarantees type acts seemingly.
> DRM does not prevent data sharing. > It prevents you from sharing data which you don't have the authority to share...or using something you have legally purchased without paying lots of extra money to the local monopolist...or forwarding DRMed spam to the senders ISPs...or watching that cool DVD your mum bought you while on holiday in the UK.....or sending a copy of a fraudulent copy of your *own* media to the police...
Presumably you could use some form of range finder - laser or something attached to the camera. Fiddly, but I wouldn't have thought it'd be *too* hard.
However, one of the problems is that in stereoscopic vision your eyes see slightly different things. The left eye will see slightly further round an object to the left, and the right eye to the right. This is especially noticeable when there's something thin like a pole in front of a light. One eye sees the light, the other sees the pole.
There's more information needing to be transferred than you can fit in a 2d frame without using colour/brightness/polarisation hacks. So just adding a depth coordinate isn't IMHO enough.
> I'm just not sure what it is about GUI toolkits and window > managers that exert this constant allure on geeks, compelling them to constantly develop > new ones, the vast majority of which never develop critical mass.
Personally I'm glad they do.
Otherwise we'd be stuck with the visual appeal of Athena and the efficiency of Motif.
Today's QT is yesterdays Tk.
Yes the cost of rapid improvement seems to be UI inconsistency. To me that's worth the price.
While this is a really neat idea and it's cool to see someone get it working, I'm not very comfortable with it.
Why would a company let people install Linux natively when they can just run it under Windows? I can certainly see my own workplace putting up exactly this argument.
Doesn't that mean we'll now have a less stable Linux that's slower and has all the Windows security vulnerabilities present?
Will Linux developers have to put up with complaints from people because the Windows end of things is breaking their software?
I don't like it. I can see where it might be useful, but for me the losses outweight the gains by a significant margin.
Most of the womens magazines are just like this too. Full of skimpily clad supermodels. The difference is they are also full of articles telling women how imperfect they are physically and why they *could* achieve a perfect body if only they weren't so lazy.
At least the ones targetted at men usually have articles about cars or sport or computer games.
>Another thing is they go against IRC servers; I have no clue why. Why not block public FTP servers, streaming audio or game servers for the bandwidth? Do IRC servers get attacked that often?
Yes, they do.
Running an IRC server on a major IRC network is just asking for regular (D)DoS attacks and exploit attempts.
Slashdot Mirror
The fine print in Borders' privacy policy does seem to allow this.
But if it hadn't, I don't see how this'd be different from buying a bankrupt
parking lot and claiming ownership of all the cars still parked in it.
- MugginsM
See, I thought this was relevant until I dug in further and discovered that it's probably a different Clear, in a different country,
from the one I use.
You don't own the entire planet yet, you know.
The downside to doing this kind of thing is that then so many students fail the test that the teacher :)
gets done for incompetence, compared to the other teachers who aren't checking so carefully
- MugginsM
Stop spending money on anti-cheating technologies. Spend money on improving the methods of education.
One method of education is to get things to a point where the student realises
that actually learning the material is the best way to succeed.
With low risk of getting caught, many many students decide that cheating is
the best way to pass/get good grades/graduate for minimal effort. And it probably is
if you're not interested in learning and just want a good grade, to get a good job.
Raising the cost/risk of cheating and thus pushing more students to learn the
material is quite a valid education method.
- MugginsM
how would the ISP inform the customer that they've been infected?
obviously web or email would just open them up to the usual phishing.
My opinion is that if you post personally identifiable information to a public website, and expect that information to be kept from all the world's eyeballs, you're being incredibly foolish.
The problem is you can't control what other people post.
I create an account with just my name and use it to keep in touch with my friends and family.
It doesn't take long before someone posts a photo from my birthday party and annotates my name. A quick grab of my friends list reveals some workmates, one of whom has a map of the office.
so without me doing anything but putting up my name and a list of friends, anyone can now work out where I live, work, when my birthday is, and what I look like.
I deleted my FB profile a while back and am glad I did.
- Muggins
So how powerful is the inbuilt web browser?
If it can run java applets near full-screen then I don't see why you can't implement a whole
heap of stuff that way. Sure, no VoIP or offline games, but I can't see why you couldn't run
SSH clients or custom internet based apps that way.
Sure I'm not interested in a device costing that much that I can't write stuff that runs offline for (and in NZ
it'll cost $unfeasible to use our shitty mobile networks), but there looks like *some* ability there
to run custom apps.
- MugginsM
I see it as more similar to getting locks on the doors of your home and closing windows before you go out.
Is it fair you have to go to this extra hassle and cost? no.
Are the crooks really to blame? yes.
Will blaming them and leaving your door unlocked solve the problem? no!
Will catching the occasional crook solve the problem? no!
The Internet is a really big place. Crime happens. It sucks, it's the fault of the bad guys. But you
still need to lock your front door. (or run a secure desktop)
- MugginsM
The lesson?
If you insist on running insecure desktop software, it isn't safe to use the Internet.
But will it be learned?
20 years and it hasn't yet.
- MugginsM
In the bad old days, I used to see multiple icons encoded as one large GIF, then a bit of
javascript to unpack it and display the right things in the right places.
I suspect browser incompatibilities killed that off, but maybe it's do-able again.
- MugginsM
> How much money would your workplace lose if it was out for an hour or an entire day?
For some of us, we'd probably make massive *gains* in productivity.
- MugginsM
> He says a flood of undiscriminated traffic to and from Youtube, Coldplay, and Victoria's Secret will bring down the Internet
So he's saying that people accessing the sites they want to access is wrong, and we should stop them?
The Internet is too complex for emergency services to be relying on anyway, even if they did get priority, there are
far too many components that can break.
If the problem is that with big popular video sites there is more traffic than the end users are paying for,
then perhaps we should charge the people who *initiate* that traffic - ie. the end user.
I agree that with the theoretical "free market" this problem would solve itself, but I'm not actually aware of
any "free markets" in reality, especially not in telecommunications.
- MugginsM
> But the one answer Science always fails is; What (or who) started it all? The creator is still a fully plausible explanation.
No it isn't because then you have to ask who started the creator?
If the creator can somehow be allowed to have existed all along or magically popped into existence all by itself, then why can't we?
- MugginsM
Given the choice between a "free" iPod and having better teaching staff, I'd go for the college who spent *my* money on improving the education they can give me. If I was a music or media student then maybe an iPod would be a plus. Otherwise it's just a waste of my hard earned fees.
The Napster stuff is absolutely horrendous. To me, universities are the *last* place that should be bowing to corporate bullying and selling its students as dumb consumers. Especially using the students money to do so.
A good wireless network would seem to me to be a better alternative to larger computer labs, and I'd say that generally is a good thing.
I went to University to learn and have fun learning. Sure, I love iPods, but I'd rather have had more textbooks, or more teaching staff, or better equipment in the labs.
Or cheaper fees.
- MugginsM
> "graphics programmers should focus on computer-generated-looking stuff and games should never visually strive for realism"
Actually I'd argue that one of the reasons movies like Shrek are so good is that they *don't* go for realism.
I wasn't aware that there was all that much music left, game or otherwise, that did only use "real" acoustic instruments.
Even the 80's metal I'm listening to at the moment is hardly "pure" acoustic guitar and drum sounds.
- Muggins the Mad
I've had several more cases of "security" patches breaking my systems through changes to things not related to the security issue than I have of being hacked/infected/spywared.
So I couldn't in good faith recommend auto-update on any system where the supplier has a history of this.
Maybe when the software industry is mature enough to release security patches that *only* contain a security patch I'd think about it. I expect I'll be a long time waiting.
Ok, so some free *nix distros do, and that's nice, but these generally aren't the ones getting infected all over the place.
Plus, as someone else mentioned, having an auto-updater interrupt the one game of UT2004 you've managed to fit in this week is just not on.
I don't understand how certain software suppliers are finding this so hard. Release a patch that fixes the security issue. Only the security issue. Make it small. Make auto-updaters check for updates when the screensaver kicks in. Duh.
- MugginsM
How about just answering the phone?
Hold music is great for when there's a sudden surprise jump in the number of calls, but it seems to be common practice just to make the customer give up and leave from boredom. Very few calls seem to be answered quickly these days.
I guess it cuts down on the number of complaints (that get through).
But I'm a paying (or potential) customer. Telling me my time isn't important to you is a great way to lose my custom.
- MugginsM
I swore off Sierra games after far too many bad experiences.
I don't think I've ever bought one that actually worked without hundreds of mb of patch downloads.
To me the "Sierra" logo on a game box is a clear sign that it will give me hours of trouble just to get it to run. Then it'll probably crash part way through and lose my save file. Doesn't even seem to matter if they wrote it themselves or not.
And of course you can't return them because somehow computer software isn't covered by consumer guarantees type acts seemingly.
Give me Id or LucarArts any day. Those just work.
- MugginsM
Change the student password every hour. Have the teacher easily able to see what the password is.
Write the password on the blackboard at the start of the class. Possibly have several different passwords with different levels of access.
- Muggins the Mad
> DRM does not prevent data sharing. ..or using something you have legally purchased without paying lots of extra money to the local monopolist. ..or forwarding DRMed spam to the senders ISPs. ..or watching that cool DVD your mum bought you while on holiday in the UK... ..or sending a copy of a fraudulent copy of your *own* media to the police...
> It prevents you from sharing data which you don't have the authority to share.
Ok, hardly essential functions of society,
But still very annoying.
- MugginsM
Presumably you could use some form of range finder - laser or something attached to the camera. Fiddly, but I wouldn't have thought it'd be *too* hard.
However, one of the problems is that in stereoscopic vision your eyes see slightly different things. The left eye will see slightly further round an object to the left, and the right eye to the right. This is especially noticeable when there's something thin like a pole in front of a light. One eye sees the light, the other sees the pole.
There's more information needing to be transferred than you can fit in a 2d frame without using colour/brightness/polarisation hacks. So just adding a depth coordinate isn't IMHO enough.
- Muggins
> I'm just not sure what it is about GUI toolkits and window
> managers that exert this constant allure on geeks, compelling them to constantly develop
> new ones, the vast majority of which never develop critical mass.
Personally I'm glad they do.
Otherwise we'd be stuck with the visual appeal of Athena and the efficiency of Motif.
Today's QT is yesterdays Tk.
Yes the cost of rapid improvement seems to be UI inconsistency. To me that's worth the price.
- MugginsM
While this is a really neat idea and it's cool to see someone get it working, I'm not very comfortable with it.
Why would a company let people install Linux natively when they can just run it under Windows?
I can certainly see my own workplace putting up exactly this argument.
Doesn't that mean we'll now have a less stable Linux that's slower and has all the Windows security vulnerabilities present?
Will Linux developers have to put up with complaints from people because the Windows end of things is breaking their software?
I don't like it. I can see where it might be useful, but for me the losses outweight the gains by a significant margin.
- MugginsM
Most of the womens magazines are just like this too. Full of skimpily clad supermodels. The difference is they are also full of articles telling women how imperfect they are physically and why they *could* achieve a perfect body if only they weren't so lazy.
At least the ones targetted at men usually have articles about cars or sport or computer games.
- MugginsM
>Another thing is they go against IRC servers; I have no clue why. Why not block public FTP servers, streaming audio or game servers for the bandwidth? Do IRC servers get attacked that often?
Yes, they do.
Running an IRC server on a major IRC network is just asking for regular (D)DoS attacks and exploit attempts.
- Colin