Correct. `Vibrate then ring' is a wonderful thing: heck, it's even pretty good if the two happen simultaneously (as with my replacement for the Motorola, the Siemens SL45).
However, I'm worried about misuse of this noise. If I'm on an oil-rig and hear some static kind of noise like this, turn to look at the mobile, think "oh, wasn't the mobile, must be an emergency then" then I've lost a few precious seconds.
IOW, don't use it for *everything*. Work on expanding your braincell to cope with different noises for different things. (How many folks here have per-caller ringtones, but never actually *use* them preferring the visual instead??) ~Tim
-- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
It's far from impossible to make money by having something worth selling, rather than setting up an artificial and discriminatory price/availability gradient across the world so that the US gets everything first.
All their methods do is *try* to force the issue; they seem unwilling to understand that it only takes one person to crack an "encryption" method and the secret's out, while it takes a whole world-full of folks to adhere to it "because we're nice and wouldn't want to deprive you of the money". Far better to abandon the whole idea in the first place and make the product worth *buying*. Then you'll find people will be willing to pay for it - and surprisingly enough, the population would probably buy more if they were cheaper, too. ~Tim
-- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
> they can now improve service by restricting
> service?
Sounds like it. Ever heard of `relay'ing? It's not hard. It means you send email from/to a non-local domain through a server. It's a good way to increase the amount of spam, to allow relaying....
My initial reactions are along the lines of `what's this doing here? closing down an open relay is a damned good thing!'.
Two thoughts, then, that I should've been clearer about.
First, the printing of `don't copy this, please' has to be done by the copyright holder, who would ideally be the original owner.
Second, I can see both "share first, then restrict" and "restrict first, then permit some sharing" approaches, and think both are less than ideal. That's why I'm saying I would choose neither, given half a chance. ~Tim
-- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
There is no grey area. You just have to learn to read copyright agreements - and some idiot is going to have to tell the Them, The Lawyers where to get off on all the legalese speech, too.
That way, you can just say "this CD is not to be copied" - if everyone *reads* what it says, no more problem.
As for your college friend, maybe they could've done things a bit differently: how about publicizing a few tracks of their own as freely redistributable tasters, then educate the rest of the world to point to said tasters instead of redistributing *everything*? ~Tim
-- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
That's a combination of distro availability and user (in)eptitude level. Some hoops are inevitable.
> the sound doesn't work,
I think we've established this. Without reading the original article yet, I wonder about DMA powerbook sound support in a custom kernel?
> and it's only got one mouse button.
Oh, FFS, grow up. My USB iBall has 2 buttons and a ball to make you envious; having one button on the box itself is hardly a problem when you've got alt/fn/ctrl/apple-key combinations to emulate a couple more buttons as well. ~Tim
-- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
> This is a nice hobbyist project, and certainly getting the new hardware supported by Linux is a good thing. But it's a lousy use for a new iBook.
So I take it you're actively advocating the Open-Source route to your application vendors? Besides, isn't there an Open Office, KOffice, and a shed load of other things, and that's assuming you *want* an office suite in the first place?
I can, and do, run Debian GNU/Linux/PPC on my old Powerbook (Lombard). I must admit to loving it to bits; the hardware has survived a year of me throwing it around, which beats the ASS off any x86-klone (the last of those I had lasted 3 months before the HD went soft), Debian is my choice of distro, seeing as they actually *bother* supporting non-intel architectures at all unlike most other people, and software wise, I have everything I need (Xemacs being a big component here).
Office suites are for people who can't spell `.txt', let alone `.sgml'. ~Tim
-- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Re:We do not need YET ANOTHER scripting language
on
Why not Ruby?
·
· Score: 1
> Just because some clown learned to write an interpreter at school, he decides to convert the world to yet another scripting language.
Which would you rather have, a generation of programmers who know how to write interpreters, or a generation of IT consultants who can't?
*Duh*. ~Tim
-- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Yes. You're right, you need a lot of factors in deciding how much to weight each particular (developer,location) line in the graph.
Things like:
* Mass of the developer
* Cost of travel to airport
* ease of locating power supply adapters
* networking connectivity available at function HQ and also in nearby cheapo hotels
* Time taken to travel to airport
* Amount of time wasted hanging around waiting for connecting flights
* Whether said developer thinks yankee Budweiser is watered down, yankeeland sucks and Scotland is wonderful, etc etc.
Could be quite complicated - looks like an integration over the surface of the planet is called for, or something pretty perverse. ~Tim
-- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Yeah, I noticed it, but I must admit I'm not all that fussed by that RPROMPT at all, myself. Took ages to find out how to get rid of it (when I was starting with zsh).
Still, whatever floats your boat:8)
Correct, they're lusers, who don't know how to handle identd properly. Probably best to go have a look at and work it out for yourself.
But more to the point.. *why must* an FTP server run identd? To help debug what user connected? Well diddums, most machines don't run identds these days, not unless you're connecting to IRC all the time. The first thing that's wrong is bothering with identd checks on the FTP server; the next thing is having borked firewalls, and lastly, having lusers who use said borked firewalls. Save the whole issue, don't request the blinking lookup! ~Tim
-- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
I did a simple benchmark of _boa_ versus apache the other day. On the same box, delivering the regular static page that is Debian's splash-screen, I got twice as many hits per second and twice as much traffic per second using boa than I did with apache.
I suspect the reason is that all this `pool of servers' and particularly the `how well am I doing? oops, must throttle back, kill these daemons' concepts mean it spends all its time sorting its act out and not so long actually delivering results.
I'm of the opinion that something other than apache, for static pages, with proxy-pass back to apache for php/cgi would be the best way to go. Gimme the raw speed except where I don't expect it. ~Tim
-- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
This is why the concept of `supporting a linux distro' is bogus.
Release the sources, let people install it on their own boxes, sell them fluffy hats or something. Or just get a support department with a CLUE!
Maybe that's what's happened; all the linux users are too clueful to need this rather misnamed `Freedom' thing anyway, and disable cookies in our browsers and block doubleclick.net in our proxies? Naaaaaah, no way;^) ~Tim
-- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Truly. Not only is it nothing new, but also
a) the concept of `standard distributions' is totally bogus; there is no reason why software should be constrained to the contents of RH CD1 for compatibility;
b) the whole GNU/Linux scene has not evolved this far by sticking to distributions;
c) developers seem to be able to keep track of what version of what file they have installed where, including multiple versions for debugging etc, with fair amount of ease (I envy the blighters! I tend to fall back on a package manager for that, and heaven help me when I'm writing anything like code);
d) If you have a decent distribution where software is indeed correctly regarded as a big pool with ever-flowing version numbers, tracking this sort of thing is not exactly a problem.
In short, somehow, before you label me a Debian freak for suggesting `man apt-get` is a useful thing, remember that the whole point of this comment is to draw attention to the existence of apt as *FREE SOFTWARE* for whaever distro/platform you choose, not as a `Debian thing'. Use the source, Luke. Source is all; categorizing things into versions is like the Matrix compared to reality. ~Tim
-- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
"Fact of the matter is that many of them have never done any serious work in an IDE using a higher level language such as C++, Java or Python."
Of course, that depends on whether you think these languages are any higher-level than C, and why you've omitted to mention any functional languages like the assorted lisps & schemes.
It also makes it blindingly obvious that you don't know your emacs modes from your elbow, too. ~Tim
-- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
> The problem is when you have to install and
> upgrade programs.
It's not as though this is any easier in the windoze world though - and you have to reboot just for things to take effect there, too!
> DEB isn't much better - from my experience,
> it'll b0rk completely if it can't find some
> mythical lib like libpakistanicalender.so.1.2.
Now that's just too much. Debian has no aspirations to be one thing (server) or another (desktop) orientated. Of course there are more-"together" offerings around there, like the *BSDs, of course - their ports system rocks - but frankly you sound like you've been tracking unstable and couldn't quite keep up, because I know that in a couple of years' solid use as a desktop system here, tracking unstable, there's never yet been a Debian-specific glitch I couldn't solve.
That said, bear in mind that my idea of desktop use is that I really don't give a fig about 3D-FX cards and the latest wizzo-graphics game, although I know life can be fun when you start trying to work around Mesa and all the assorted OpenGL packages. Feel free to go work on this:8]
> I wouldn't recommend Linux to a newbie for
> anything more advanced than
I wouldn't recommend Linux to a newbie, full-stop.
Face it, guys, sometimes to be a user you have to have a clue. And I'd much rather say `you're an idiot, forget it' than water-down something good and geeky to fit the thickest moron on the planet, any day.
>And to think that people actually get paid to >be this dumb. I use the DUL and RSS and greatly >enjoy the assistance they give me in filtering >out eroneous and illegitimate mail. I've even >considered the use of RBL or ORBS from time to >time.
I think you're on the right track, although I wouldn't have used quite so much sarcasm myself.
Personally, I despise the `guilty by default' that the DUL applies to email; I don't spam folks and I don't expect my IP# to be blocked. However, I do use the RBL in a filtering capacity within exim, just about everywhere I implement it. That works fine by me; I can configure procmail and/or my MUA to drop mail with an RBL-Warning header into the appropriate bit-bucket.
As for extending it to routing... well you have to weigh up the trust you have for the folks who put stuff in the RBL against the chances of you losing any legitimate traffic and against the crime (in a moral sense - go sort your laws out if you disagree) of sending spam.
Me, I also despise Flash and all these other poxy plugins; the web is a content-dissemination medium, so if a site requires me to watch some constipated frog spinning in a blender, it can just bog off.
ProxyBlock macromedia.com
is my fwend(TM). ~Tim
-- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Just a friendly word or two, then: beware of complacency.
I've been on a site where I specced out the firewall rules with the native sysadmin; between us, none of *our* boxes ever got cracked in the last 18 months. However, that didn't stop some schmuck sticking a RH6.x box with rpc.statd on a public IP# - give it a week, *boom*.
3hrs' turnaround including a forensics copy, custom build of RH and restoring data, I was quite proud of me. And it's never been cracked again, either. And then I finally found a writeup of a similar incident, and read `check for kernel modules', took another look at the forensics copy, and felt very small...
Maybe another statistic to add to `expected time to (between) cracks' would be `expected turnaround time' as well - part of your security strategy has to be having a spare box to replace anything with. ~Tim
-- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Well, as you go on to say, it *might* be, it doesn't have to be.
If I were to feel inclined to write a paper tomorrow, I'd go to the library, get a list of resources, maybe photocopy interesting pages, go home, crank up Xemacs and start typing. And I'd be using a regular method to cite all the authors I could, wherever possible - either footnotes or parentheses, one style or the other.
My point is, there are only a finite number of styles. If you were to take a sentence such as `well could they say they had an annus horribilis', for example, then bounce around the number of ways you can re-say that same meaning amongst 500-700 odd people, you could expect a 9-word phrase to be identical in large numbers of these texts; more so if they'd had access to a record of me saying it in a library book.
Anyway, this deviates somewhat. My point was that the article is making a massive jump to a conclusion that it needn't do, except for publicity purposes. I hope the professor has more sense. ~Tim
-- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
"This article is a good illustration of the failures of the current university system."
Let me draw your attention to a factor no-one seems to have commented on here so far.
The article relies on two unfounded assumptions: one, that choice of identical phrases means plagiarism, and two, that there is some permissible proportion (NOTE: *unnamed*) which this instance supposedly exceeds.
There is a vast difference between plagiarism, being the original author of a piece (which is one reason correctly picked up on) and everyone having permitted access to a common source.
Let's look at this another way. You get me 20 school kids with a homework assignment: provide free buses for them to get to the library as well. Now say what amount of `identical phrases' you can *expect* back - because they all cheated? Because exactly half of them did? Or, just perhaps, because they all went to the library and had a look at the same books, one after another.
s/library/internet/, now re-run the above program.
I suggest realizing where the article excesses on hype and where it jumps to conclusions are good things to be doing right now, especially if you're a professor at the university in question. ~Tim
-- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
How does it manage to claim to be `open-source' when the download page will not let me proceed without agreeing to a discriminatory statement? ~Tim
-- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Slashdot Mirror
Correct. `Vibrate then ring' is a wonderful thing: heck, it's even pretty good if the two happen simultaneously (as with my replacement for the Motorola, the Siemens SL45).
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
However, I'm worried about misuse of this noise. If I'm on an oil-rig and hear some static kind of noise like this, turn to look at the mobile, think "oh, wasn't the mobile, must be an emergency then" then I've lost a few precious seconds.
IOW, don't use it for *everything*. Work on expanding your braincell to cope with different noises for different things. (How many folks here have per-caller ringtones, but never actually *use* them preferring the visual instead??)
~Tim
--
"The developers were excited about having a professional RAD platform for linux, of which NONE is available from the open source community."
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
D'OH! By some definitions, how can you hope to have a "professional" anything from an open-source community?
Said community writes code. It don't tart it up and stick it in the box-sets.
~Tim
--
Your analogies are well broken.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
It's far from impossible to make money by having something worth selling, rather than setting up an artificial and discriminatory price/availability gradient across the world so that the US gets everything first.
All their methods do is *try* to force the issue; they seem unwilling to understand that it only takes one person to crack an "encryption" method and the secret's out, while it takes a whole world-full of folks to adhere to it "because we're nice and wouldn't want to deprive you of the money". Far better to abandon the whole idea in the first place and make the product worth *buying*. Then you'll find people will be willing to pay for it - and surprisingly enough, the population would probably buy more if they were cheaper, too.
~Tim
--
> they can now improve service by restricting
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
> service?
Sounds like it. Ever heard of `relay'ing? It's not hard. It means you send email from/to a non-local domain through a server. It's a good way to increase the amount of spam, to allow relaying....
My initial reactions are along the lines of `what's this doing here? closing down an open relay is a damned good thing!'.
PS 2+2=4. This is not rocket-science.
~Tim
--
Two thoughts, then, that I should've been clearer about.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
First, the printing of `don't copy this, please' has to be done by the copyright holder, who would ideally be the original owner.
Second, I can see both "share first, then restrict" and "restrict first, then permit some sharing" approaches, and think both are less than ideal. That's why I'm saying I would choose neither, given half a chance.
~Tim
--
> When does the grey area start and stop.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
There is no grey area. You just have to learn to read copyright agreements - and some idiot is going to have to tell the Them, The Lawyers where to get off on all the legalese speech, too.
That way, you can just say "this CD is not to be copied" - if everyone *reads* what it says, no more problem.
As for your college friend, maybe they could've done things a bit differently: how about publicizing a few tracks of their own as freely redistributable tasters, then educate the rest of the world to point to said tasters instead of redistributing *everything*?
~Tim
--
> Of course they could outlaw birds too.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Lends a new meaning to packets getting eaten in the network...
~Tim
--
> You have to jump through install hoops,
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
That's a combination of distro availability and user (in)eptitude level. Some hoops are inevitable.
> the sound doesn't work,
I think we've established this. Without reading the original article yet, I wonder about DMA powerbook sound support in a custom kernel?
> and it's only got one mouse button.
Oh, FFS, grow up. My USB iBall has 2 buttons and a ball to make you envious; having one button on the box itself is hardly a problem when you've got alt/fn/ctrl/apple-key combinations to emulate a couple more buttons as well.
~Tim
--
> This is a nice hobbyist project, and certainly getting the new hardware supported by Linux is a good thing. But it's a lousy use for a new iBook.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
So I take it you're actively advocating the Open-Source route to your application vendors? Besides, isn't there an Open Office, KOffice, and a shed load of other things, and that's assuming you *want* an office suite in the first place?
I can, and do, run Debian GNU/Linux/PPC on my old Powerbook (Lombard). I must admit to loving it to bits; the hardware has survived a year of me throwing it around, which beats the ASS off any x86-klone (the last of those I had lasted 3 months before the HD went soft), Debian is my choice of distro, seeing as they actually *bother* supporting non-intel architectures at all unlike most other people, and software wise, I have everything I need (Xemacs being a big component here).
Office suites are for people who can't spell `.txt', let alone `.sgml'.
~Tim
--
> Just because some clown learned to write an interpreter at school, he decides to convert the world to yet another scripting language.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Which would you rather have, a generation of programmers who know how to write interpreters, or a generation of IT consultants who can't?
*Duh*.
~Tim
--
Yes. You're right, you need a lot of factors in deciding how much to weight each particular (developer,location) line in the graph.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Things like:
* Mass of the developer
* Cost of travel to airport
* ease of locating power supply adapters
* networking connectivity available at function HQ and also in nearby cheapo hotels
* Time taken to travel to airport
* Amount of time wasted hanging around waiting for connecting flights
* Whether said developer thinks yankee Budweiser is watered down, yankeeland sucks and Scotland is wonderful, etc etc.
Could be quite complicated - looks like an integration over the surface of the planet is called for, or something pretty perverse.
~Tim
--
Yeah, I noticed it, but I must admit I'm not all that fussed by that RPROMPT at all, myself. Took ages to find out how to get rid of it (when I was starting with zsh). :8)
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Still, whatever floats your boat
~Tim
--
zsh, storm 4:21PM tim % echo $prompt
:8)
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
zsh, %m %t %C %#
zsh, storm 4:21PM tim %
Bingo
~Tim
--
Correct, they're lusers, who don't know how to handle identd properly. Probably best to go have a look at and work it out for yourself.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
But more to the point.. *why must* an FTP server run identd? To help debug what user connected? Well diddums, most machines don't run identds these days, not unless you're connecting to IRC all the time. The first thing that's wrong is bothering with identd checks on the FTP server; the next thing is having borked firewalls, and lastly, having lusers who use said borked firewalls. Save the whole issue, don't request the blinking lookup!
~Tim
--
Agreed, for the most part.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
I did a simple benchmark of _boa_ versus apache the other day. On the same box, delivering the regular static page that is Debian's splash-screen, I got twice as many hits per second and twice as much traffic per second using boa than I did with apache.
I suspect the reason is that all this `pool of servers' and particularly the `how well am I doing? oops, must throttle back, kill these daemons' concepts mean it spends all its time sorting its act out and not so long actually delivering results.
I'm of the opinion that something other than apache, for static pages, with proxy-pass back to apache for php/cgi would be the best way to go. Gimme the raw speed except where I don't expect it.
~Tim
--
This is why the concept of `supporting a linux distro' is bogus.
;^)
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Release the sources, let people install it on their own boxes, sell them fluffy hats or something. Or just get a support department with a CLUE!
Maybe that's what's happened; all the linux users are too clueful to need this rather misnamed `Freedom' thing anyway, and disable cookies in our browsers and block doubleclick.net in our proxies? Naaaaaah, no way
~Tim
--
Truly. Not only is it nothing new, but also
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
a) the concept of `standard distributions' is totally bogus; there is no reason why software should be constrained to the contents of RH CD1 for compatibility;
b) the whole GNU/Linux scene has not evolved this far by sticking to distributions;
c) developers seem to be able to keep track of what version of what file they have installed where, including multiple versions for debugging etc, with fair amount of ease (I envy the blighters! I tend to fall back on a package manager for that, and heaven help me when I'm writing anything like code);
d) If you have a decent distribution where software is indeed correctly regarded as a big pool with ever-flowing version numbers, tracking this sort of thing is not exactly a problem.
In short, somehow, before you label me a Debian freak for suggesting `man apt-get` is a useful thing, remember that the whole point of this comment is to draw attention to the existence of apt as *FREE SOFTWARE* for whaever distro/platform you choose, not as a `Debian thing'. Use the source, Luke. Source is all; categorizing things into versions is like the Matrix compared to reality.
~Tim
--
"Fact of the matter is that many of them have never done any serious work in an IDE using a higher level language such as C++, Java or Python."
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Of course, that depends on whether you think these languages are any higher-level than C, and why you've omitted to mention any functional languages like the assorted lisps & schemes.
It also makes it blindingly obvious that you don't know your emacs modes from your elbow, too.
~Tim
--
> The problem is when you have to install and
:8]
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
> upgrade programs.
It's not as though this is any easier in the windoze world though - and you have to reboot just for things to take effect there, too!
> DEB isn't much better - from my experience,
> it'll b0rk completely if it can't find some
> mythical lib like libpakistanicalender.so.1.2.
Now that's just too much. Debian has no aspirations to be one thing (server) or another (desktop) orientated. Of course there are more-"together" offerings around there, like the *BSDs, of course - their ports system rocks - but frankly you sound like you've been tracking unstable and couldn't quite keep up, because I know that in a couple of years' solid use as a desktop system here, tracking unstable, there's never yet been a Debian-specific glitch I couldn't solve.
That said, bear in mind that my idea of desktop use is that I really don't give a fig about 3D-FX cards and the latest wizzo-graphics game, although I know life can be fun when you start trying to work around Mesa and all the assorted OpenGL packages. Feel free to go work on this
> I wouldn't recommend Linux to a newbie for
> anything more advanced than
I wouldn't recommend Linux to a newbie, full-stop.
Face it, guys, sometimes to be a user you have to have a clue. And I'd much rather say `you're an idiot, forget it' than water-down something good and geeky to fit the thickest moron on the planet, any day.
~Tim
--
>And to think that people actually get paid to >be this dumb. I use the DUL and RSS and greatly >enjoy the assistance they give me in filtering >out eroneous and illegitimate mail. I've even >considered the use of RBL or ORBS from time to >time.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
I think you're on the right track, although I wouldn't have used quite so much sarcasm myself.
Personally, I despise the `guilty by default' that the DUL applies to email; I don't spam folks and I don't expect my IP# to be blocked. However, I do use the RBL in a filtering capacity within exim, just about everywhere I implement it. That works fine by me; I can configure procmail and/or my MUA to drop mail with an RBL-Warning header into the appropriate bit-bucket.
As for extending it to routing... well you have to weigh up the trust you have for the folks who put stuff in the RBL against the chances of you losing any legitimate traffic and against the crime (in a moral sense - go sort your laws out if you disagree) of sending spam.
Me, I also despise Flash and all these other poxy plugins; the web is a content-dissemination medium, so if a site requires me to watch some constipated frog spinning in a blender, it can just bog off.
ProxyBlock macromedia.com
is my fwend(TM).
~Tim
--
Just a friendly word or two, then: beware of complacency.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
I've been on a site where I specced out the firewall rules with the native sysadmin; between us, none of *our* boxes ever got cracked in the last 18 months. However, that didn't stop some schmuck sticking a RH6.x box with rpc.statd on a public IP# - give it a week, *boom*.
3hrs' turnaround including a forensics copy, custom build of RH and restoring data, I was quite proud of me. And it's never been cracked again, either. And then I finally found a writeup of a similar incident, and read `check for kernel modules', took another look at the forensics copy, and felt very small...
Maybe another statistic to add to `expected time to (between) cracks' would be `expected turnaround time' as well - part of your security strategy has to be having a spare box to replace anything with.
~Tim
--
"Which statement in the licencing agreement do you find discriminatory?"
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
The restricted government usage clause.
~Tim
--
"The funny thing is, this is plagiarism!"
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Well, as you go on to say, it *might* be, it doesn't have to be.
If I were to feel inclined to write a paper tomorrow, I'd go to the library, get a list of resources, maybe photocopy interesting pages, go home, crank up Xemacs and start typing. And I'd be using a regular method to cite all the authors I could, wherever possible - either footnotes or parentheses, one style or the other.
My point is, there are only a finite number of styles. If you were to take a sentence such as `well could they say they had an annus horribilis', for example, then bounce around the number of ways you can re-say that same meaning amongst 500-700 odd people, you could expect a 9-word phrase to be identical in large numbers of these texts; more so if they'd had access to a record of me saying it in a library book.
Anyway, this deviates somewhat. My point was that the article is making a massive jump to a conclusion that it needn't do, except for publicity purposes. I hope the professor has more sense.
~Tim
--
"This article is a good illustration of the failures of the current university system."
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Let me draw your attention to a factor no-one seems to have commented on here so far.
The article relies on two unfounded assumptions: one, that choice of identical phrases means plagiarism, and two, that there is some permissible proportion (NOTE: *unnamed*) which this instance supposedly exceeds.
There is a vast difference between plagiarism, being the original author of a piece (which is one reason correctly picked up on) and everyone having permitted access to a common source.
Let's look at this another way. You get me 20 school kids with a homework assignment: provide free buses for them to get to the library as well. Now say what amount of `identical phrases' you can *expect* back - because they all cheated? Because exactly half of them did? Or, just perhaps, because they all went to the library and had a look at the same books, one after another.
s/library/internet/, now re-run the above program.
I suggest realizing where the article excesses on hype and where it jumps to conclusions are good things to be doing right now, especially if you're a professor at the university in question.
~Tim
--
How does it manage to claim to be `open-source' when the download page will not let me proceed without agreeing to a discriminatory statement?
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
~Tim
--