With the low price of storage devices, the latter (destruction) is probably preferable ...and with the environmental cost of land fill, the former (sensible erasure policy) is much more preferable.
Hmmm, let's see, slashdot's audience consists of how many readers now? And the disposal of how many hard disks would they have control over or a say in?
The amount of waste that was promoted in that one sentence is left as an exercise for the reader.
So I got suspended from school for a week. For turning up the brightness. Looking back on it now, I can see that I deserved *something* for disobeying a direct order... detention perhaps, or losing computer privileges for a week...
You can? Really? You think it's fair to waste someones time with detention or denying them access to what they use to learn, because they misunderstood that the instructions extended beyond not touching the mouse or keyboard, and then applied their brain to solving a trivial problem using the experience you had with computers knowing full well that you would not be causing harm?
Unless you had history of defying the teacher, I really don't understand how this warrants anything more than a stern look and an explanation that you should've checked with the teacher first.
On a side note, how many times do sys admins/help desk staff complain about having "fix" a computer for a clueless loser with that (or an equally trivial) problem - no wonder you have to do it for them, when there's a school system that teaches you that fixing problems yourself is misbehaviour worthy of suspension.
With a school system like this, sometimes I'm surprised it produces anyone capable of independent thinking or innovation at all!
The parent post is right on the money. You cannot enforce respect, you can only enforce obedience, but you will get even less respect for it. The teachers that stand out in my mind from my high school years are those that treated the class with respect, and so they got respect for it from a lot of the class - and they were the ones I most cared about if I got in trouble from them because I felt bad that they might think less of me. The teachers at the other end of the spectrum I didn't give a rats how many times they busted me because I didn't care what they thought of me.
Well given this recent slashdot article http://www.inventgeek.com/Projects/poormansraid/po ormansraid.aspx It seems that upgrading your server shouldn't be too prohibitive. If you've got a friend or relative with high speed internet, perhaps you could both build a backup server and come to a mirroring agreement?
Obviously don't mirror the initial 200GB over the internet, but after that it might be feesible if you're new data rate isn't too high.
Honestly - I work in the industry, and I'm still amazed at the lengths content providers will go to to try to prevent a single D-to-A, A-to-D conversion.
I can't believe "civilisation" has come to a point where content providers can go to such lengths to annoy legit customers and still stay in business.
We now have:
eBooks that can only be read in one place
DVD's that stop you from fast forwarding trailers or copyright warnings - every, single, time you watch them (why do you need to warn someone who's already purchased your content not to pirate anyway?!?)
DVD's that don't play in other countries.
DVD's that deliberately attempt to stop multi-region players from playing them.
But the capper:
CD's that don't play in CD "ligitimate" players
And as comments in this article are suggesting, we will soon have
DVD's that won't play in "legitimate" DVD players!
My mind still boggles that all of this can be a good business practice.
And if he was just stupid and gets locked up for 25 years, I doubt his daughter will be thanking the Government for taking her father away from her. Strike 1 more off the list of patriots.
(i can't believe I just wrote a "what about the children" post)
Meteorite: A stony or metallic mass of matter that has fallen to the earth's surface from outer space. I.E. Fallen onto the Earth. It's what you may find if you're either lucky, or very observant.
So if you happen to be standing exactly where it lands, when it lands, does that make you lucky or observant?
Now all you need to do is to have them add the steps on how to verify the binary to the installation instructions...
Unfortunately many coders/designers will not get this joke, as they still haven't realised the simple truth of writing interfaces for humans - don't give them instructions on how to do something when you can give them software that does it for them. If you don't, then they just won't do it.
Get Mozilla to grab the signature and verify it for the user. Then Mozilla can have it's pretty little dialog and users can have a warm fuzy feeling about trust.
Moderators: The parent is not insightful - read the blurb: "Tougher copyright laws linked to the Australia-US free trade agreement (FTA)"
Much as I agree that US politicians should keep their noses the hell out of our parliament and our business, our government signed an agreement with the US to pass certain laws - if those laws are then watered down, the governement is in breach of that agreement - so it is every bit the US's business in this case.
...Lets say that event A would typically be considered harmful to the child... ...Lets say event A is about neglect... Yes, I would agree that this is bad - as would most people here I expect.
Lets say event A is anything else? Like the topic of debate here - a photo of a naked man? Or two naked men having sex?
Why believe the brain of a child will cope with atypical stimuli (for what we usually measure as the average child's statistically normal experiences) any differently? Because in this case it is a different type of stimuli. You've shown me that neglect and violence would typically be considered harmful, but you haven't shown me that a photo of gay porn would be.
If you can't prove that the stimuli meets your initial requirements, then you can't draw the same conclusion.
That is to say, my point was obvious to people with a measurable IQ Yes, your point was obvious. A well reasoned backing of that point was less obvious, nor have you made it any more obvious by insulting me.
To but it in terms for us morons - you are comparing apples and oranges.
Yes, I agree, exposing kids to violence is a bad thing, and: studies have been done on children in war-torn countries like Afghanistan backs that up well.
Find me a study that shows that kids who see porn grow into sex crazed perverts (or that it is anywhere near as harmful as violence) and I might start to take your obvious point seriously.
While you go looking for such studies, I suggest you also have a quick look at the statistics for sexual offences in more sexually liberal places, like Amsterdam, and compare them with such statistics more conservative parts of the world, like the US or Australia.
As a result, I would rather Bigpond redirects users in the short term then getting a whole lot of parents jumping up and down demanding that the Internet be censored. But Telstra's doing that on parents behalf, the article said as well as censoring the site, they've lodged a complaint with the ABA - which I think boils down to requesting the site be censored in Australia.
So based on studies that concluded that the extream violence children are exposed to in Afghanistan turning them into warlords, you've concluded that your children seeing gay porn will also turn them into warlords?
What basis do you have to equate violance to porn? How do you know it will have the same effect? Perhaps it will have a completely different effect. Perhaps it will prevent them from becoming conservative homophobics.
I've just been trying some LiveCD's and wasn't that impressed with Mepis. For a multimedia CD you'd think it would do a better job at detecting video drivers, on a (somewhat old, but) relatively standard piece of office hardware and it by default booted into a mode that the monitor didn't support - forcing it into power savings mode. I had to play with the boot options to get it up.
On the other hand the SUSE 9.2 KDE Live CD looks very impressive, takes around the same time as Windows 2000 to boot (yes CD access is a bit slower for desktop running as someone pointed out), but it basically looks like Windows - which is nice and familiar for a normal user - it has a pretty background with green grass, blue skies and water, and all the things they would want to use - Word Processor (Open Office), Mozilla and media players are there.
I'm hoping this film will inspire some sequels, too!
I'm not! How often do you see a sequel that does justice to the original? Especially when the original that we all know and love is "a non visual original that appealed only to a niche market."
Only a huge mainframe could cope with the vast numbers of bludgers and scoungers Centerlink caters for;)
Even a huge mainframe cannot make up for the vast numbers of bludgers and unemployables Centerlink employs.
I have never been more frustrated and met more incompetence than in my encounters (as a student) with Centerlink.
If you have a case that is even slightly out of the ordinary, you will get a different response from every single person you speak with. Conseuqently claims will take longer to process because people get confused, forms get lost/ignored. I have rung centrelink and been told to bring certain forms/documents with me, and then gone in and been sent home because the forms I was told to bring were not the right ones!
And on top of that, some of these retards have the gall to talk down to you, or to assume that everyone getting a payment is a bigger bludger than them and treat them as such.
I am not surprised when I see or hear of the police being called to Centrelink, I'm only surprised that it doesn't happen more often.
If only the money spent on the server upgrade could be spent on a staff upgrade!
The University dialup installed an authenticating proxy to track peoples web downloads, after this I couldn't get Quicken's share download to work. So before we called their pay for support line, I rang their sales and asked if it would work with an authenticating proxy - yes. So then I rang "tech support" who tried many random things, including trying to get me to configure it to dial the modem, even though I explained that the modem was on another computer which was connected via LAN. No matter what happened though, quicken would not authenticate to the proxy. They started trying to convince me that the Uni was blocking the quicken update URL - what a coincidence, they started blocking it just when they switched over to the proxy!
In the course of this they mentioned an ini file. Looking at this file, it had the URL's that quicken used for it's share update. I opened one of the links up in explorer, which downloaded it fine, i tried to explain this to the guy
Guy: So the problems fixed, you can download the update. Me: No, I've verified that I can access it, but not with Quicken, Quicken still won't work with the proxy. Guy: Well then I'm afraid your ISP must be blocking the URL. Talk to them about lifting the block and then call us back. Me: No, it's not blocked I can access it... Guy: So the problem's fixed? Me: Not with quicken Guy: Then they're blocking it blocked Me: Look, the Uni hasn't blocked any sites ever, I don't think they're going to start with your share update.
Try as I may, he refused to acknowledge that it wasn't being blocked. Never did find out how quicken was compatible with an authenticating proxy, my family got sick of not being able to connect and setup with a second ISP just for quicken downloads!
So instead of: Computer: To ensure your call is answered as soon as possible, please enter your customer reference number. (enter number, then wait in queue for 10 minutes) Human: Hi welcome to blah. Before we get started can I get your customer reference number.
you'll get
Computer: To ensure your call is answered as soon as possible, please swear your head off. You: BLOODY MACHINES! (then wait in queue for 10 minutes) Human: Hi welcome to blah. Before we get started can I ask you how frustrated you're feeling?
Fire the marketing department. Darn tootin'! Do you think anyone in marketing actually knows what the real purpose of marketing is? Why it actually arose as a job in the first place?
Instead of actually taking products created by people who know what they're doing, they think it's their job to create and design the products.
So we get geniuses who design the new dominos hamburger pizza. Did McDonalds really need to invent a whole new tastes menu, or was that just marketers who needed to do something to justify their existance in a company that was already raking in millions and could comfortably continue doing so? Or my favourite example - Marketing "professionals" on "* Idol" who say "yes, you've got a great voice, but at the end of the day I can't market you". That's right, the marketer can't market a singer that can sing, and that's a problem with the singer!
There are only two ways that a system, no matter how incorrectly it operates, would have a chance of changing a voter's correctly-posted ballot without being detected: (1) printing an incorrect layer and hoping that the voter chooses the other layer;
When Grandma and Grandpa get presented with the choice of layer, they're not going to understand what it's about, and many of the electoral officials I've met, after being asked for the third time will end up responding with "just press 1" which will destroy that random element, so errors could then occur on the 2nd layer, with a much higher likelihood of going undetected. Also, given that as far as most people are concerned, the choice is completely meaningless, is there really a 50% chance of both being picked? Or would people be more likely to just go with the first option they're presented? Anyone know the statistics for this?
That reminds me of a CD drive I had to extract a (data) CD from. Somehow the CD popped out of the tray while it was in there, and got caught inside the drive when the tray was ejected, then fell behind the tray. I didn't have much on hand to get the CD out with. So the techiniques tried were using a very small pair of scissors to grab the CD (yes we had accepted that the CD was expendible), and a paperclip, beant up at the end to grab the cd in the centre. In trying to get the CD out I failed several times, and scratched the CD multimple times, right accross it's radius. But eventually it came out, and I told the owner that the drive should be fine, but they'd have no hope with the CD. Not to be deterred, he put the CD in, and it worked fine! On the other hand, I have CD's with scratches I can't even see that I can't get a thing out of!
Will their virtual machines run operating systems other than Microsoft's?
That's only half the question: will their virtual machine's run on other host OS's other than Microsoft?
That's part of what I really like about vmware - I have a win2k box and a linux box both running vmware and love the uniformity of having (sure the linux version is a bit less user friendly) the same app accross both of them.
Hell, if I feel like it I can shift an entire virtual machine from the linux box to the win2k box (or vice versa) if I don't want to suck up the CPU on the linux box, all I have to do is tweak a couple of parameters in the config - let's see MS's cheap imitation do that!
but this used to crack me up when I had to use VB in MS Access. The help was broken, so if you hit F1, a dialog popped up saying "Cannot open Help". The dialog had two buttons "OK" and "Help"!
Slashdot Mirror
With the low price of storage devices, the latter (destruction) is probably preferable
...and with the environmental cost of land fill, the former (sensible erasure policy) is much more preferable.
Hmmm, let's see, slashdot's audience consists of how many readers now? And the disposal of how many hard disks would they have control over or a say in?
The amount of waste that was promoted in that one sentence is left as an exercise for the reader.
Surely you couldn't have asked for a better incentive for her not to slack off - the computer and the sounds stay until you've finished the therapy!
So I got suspended from school for a week. For turning up the brightness. Looking back on it now, I can see that I deserved *something* for disobeying a direct order... detention perhaps, or losing computer privileges for a week...
You can? Really? You think it's fair to waste someones time with detention or denying them access to what they use to learn, because they misunderstood that the instructions extended beyond not touching the mouse or keyboard, and then applied their brain to solving a trivial problem using the experience you had with computers knowing full well that you would not be causing harm?
Unless you had history of defying the teacher, I really don't understand how this warrants anything more than a stern look and an explanation that you should've checked with the teacher first.
On a side note, how many times do sys admins/help desk staff complain about having "fix" a computer for a clueless loser with that (or an equally trivial) problem - no wonder you have to do it for them, when there's a school system that teaches you that fixing problems yourself is misbehaviour worthy of suspension.
With a school system like this, sometimes I'm surprised it produces anyone capable of independent thinking or innovation at all!
The parent post is right on the money. You cannot enforce respect, you can only enforce obedience, but you will get even less respect for it.
The teachers that stand out in my mind from my high school years are those that treated the class with respect, and so they got respect for it from a lot of the class - and they were the ones I most cared about if I got in trouble from them because I felt bad that they might think less of me.
The teachers at the other end of the spectrum I didn't give a rats how many times they busted me because I didn't care what they thought of me.
Well given this recent slashdot articleo ormansraid.aspx
http://www.inventgeek.com/Projects/poormansraid/p
It seems that upgrading your server shouldn't be too prohibitive.
If you've got a friend or relative with high speed internet, perhaps you could both build a backup server and come to a mirroring agreement?
Obviously don't mirror the initial 200GB over the internet, but after that it might be feesible if you're new data rate isn't too high.
I can't believe "civilisation" has come to a point where content providers can go to such lengths to annoy legit customers and still stay in business.
We now have:
But the capper:
- CD's that don't play in CD "ligitimate" players
And as comments in this article are suggesting, we will soon haveMy mind still boggles that all of this can be a good business practice.
And if he was just stupid and gets locked up for 25 years, I doubt his daughter will be thanking the Government for taking her father away from her. Strike 1 more off the list of patriots.
(i can't believe I just wrote a "what about the children" post)
Meteorite:
A stony or metallic mass of matter that has fallen to the earth's surface from outer space.
I.E. Fallen onto the Earth. It's what you may find if you're either lucky, or very observant.
So if you happen to be standing exactly where it lands, when it lands, does that make you lucky or observant?
Now all you need to do is to have them add the steps on how to verify the binary to the installation instructions...
Unfortunately many coders/designers will not get this joke, as they still haven't realised the simple truth of writing interfaces for humans - don't give them instructions on how to do something when you can give them software that does it for them. If you don't, then they just won't do it.
Get Mozilla to grab the signature and verify it for the user.
Then Mozilla can have it's pretty little dialog and users can have a warm fuzy feeling about trust.
Moderators: The parent is not insightful - read the blurb:
"Tougher copyright laws linked to the Australia-US free trade agreement (FTA)"
Much as I agree that US politicians should keep their noses the hell out of our parliament and our business, our government signed an agreement with the US to pass certain laws - if those laws are then watered down, the governement is in breach of that agreement - so it is every bit the US's business in this case.
...Lets say that event A would typically be considered harmful to the child...
...Lets say event A is about neglect...
Yes, I would agree that this is bad - as would most people here I expect.
Lets say event A is anything else?
Like the topic of debate here - a photo of a naked man? Or two naked men having sex?
Why believe the brain of a child will cope with atypical stimuli (for what we usually measure as the average child's statistically normal experiences) any differently?
Because in this case it is a different type of stimuli. You've shown me that neglect and violence would typically be considered harmful, but you haven't shown me that a photo of gay porn would be.
If you can't prove that the stimuli meets your initial requirements, then you can't draw the same conclusion.
That is to say, my point was obvious to people with a measurable IQ
Yes, your point was obvious. A well reasoned backing of that point was less obvious, nor have you made it any more obvious by insulting me.
To but it in terms for us morons - you are comparing apples and oranges.
Yes, I agree, exposing kids to violence is a bad thing, and:
studies have been done on children in war-torn countries like Afghanistan
backs that up well.
Find me a study that shows that kids who see porn grow into sex crazed perverts (or that it is anywhere near as harmful as violence) and I might start to take your obvious point seriously.
While you go looking for such studies, I suggest you also have a quick look at the statistics for sexual offences in more sexually liberal places, like Amsterdam, and compare them with such statistics more conservative parts of the world, like the US or Australia.
As a result, I would rather Bigpond redirects users in the short term then getting a whole lot of parents jumping up and down demanding that the Internet be censored.
But Telstra's doing that on parents behalf, the article said as well as censoring the site, they've lodged a complaint with the ABA - which I think boils down to requesting the site be censored in Australia.
So based on studies that concluded that the extream violence children are exposed to in Afghanistan turning them into warlords, you've concluded that your children seeing gay porn will also turn them into warlords?
What basis do you have to equate violance to porn? How do you know it will have the same effect? Perhaps it will have a completely different effect.
Perhaps it will prevent them from becoming conservative homophobics.
I've just been trying some LiveCD's and wasn't that impressed with Mepis. For a multimedia CD you'd think it would do a better job at detecting video drivers, on a (somewhat old, but) relatively standard piece of office hardware and it by default booted into a mode that the monitor didn't support - forcing it into power savings mode.
I had to play with the boot options to get it up.
On the other hand the SUSE 9.2 KDE Live CD looks very impressive, takes around the same time as Windows 2000 to boot (yes CD access is a bit slower for desktop running as someone pointed out), but it basically looks like Windows - which is nice and familiar for a normal user - it has a pretty background with green grass, blue skies and water, and all the things they would want to use - Word Processor (Open Office), Mozilla and media players are there.
I'm hoping this film will inspire some sequels, too!
I'm not! How often do you see a sequel that does justice to the original? Especially when the original that we all know and love is "a non visual original that appealed only to a niche market."
Only a huge mainframe could cope with the vast numbers of bludgers and scoungers Centerlink caters for ;)
Even a huge mainframe cannot make up for the vast numbers of bludgers and unemployables Centerlink employs.
I have never been more frustrated and met more incompetence than in my encounters (as a student) with Centerlink.
If you have a case that is even slightly out of the ordinary, you will get a different response from every single person you speak with. Conseuqently claims will take longer to process because people get confused, forms get lost/ignored. I have rung centrelink and been told to bring certain forms/documents with me, and then gone in and been sent home because the forms I was told to bring were not the right ones!
And on top of that, some of these retards have the gall to talk down to you, or to assume that everyone getting a payment is a bigger bludger than them and treat them as such.
I am not surprised when I see or hear of the police being called to Centrelink, I'm only surprised that it doesn't happen more often.
If only the money spent on the server upgrade could be spent on a staff upgrade!
The University dialup installed an authenticating proxy to track peoples web downloads, after this I couldn't get Quicken's share download to work.
So before we called their pay for support line, I rang their sales and asked if it would work with an authenticating proxy - yes.
So then I rang "tech support" who tried many random things, including trying to get me to configure it to dial the modem, even though I explained that the modem was on another computer which was connected via LAN.
No matter what happened though, quicken would not authenticate to the proxy.
They started trying to convince me that the Uni was blocking the quicken update URL - what a coincidence, they started blocking it just when they switched over to the proxy!
In the course of this they mentioned an ini file. Looking at this file, it had the URL's that quicken used for it's share update.
I opened one of the links up in explorer, which downloaded it fine, i tried to explain this to the guy
Guy: So the problems fixed, you can download the update.
Me: No, I've verified that I can access it, but not with Quicken, Quicken still won't work with the proxy.
Guy: Well then I'm afraid your ISP must be blocking the URL. Talk to them about lifting the block and then call us back.
Me: No, it's not blocked I can access it...
Guy: So the problem's fixed?
Me: Not with quicken
Guy: Then they're blocking it blocked
Me: Look, the Uni hasn't blocked any sites ever, I don't think they're going to start with your share update.
Try as I may, he refused to acknowledge that it wasn't being blocked. Never did find out how quicken was compatible with an authenticating proxy, my family got sick of not being able to connect and setup with a second ISP just for quicken downloads!
So instead of:
Computer: To ensure your call is answered as soon as possible, please enter your customer reference number.
(enter number, then wait in queue for 10 minutes)
Human: Hi welcome to blah. Before we get started can I get your customer reference number.
you'll get
Computer: To ensure your call is answered as soon as possible, please swear your head off.
You: BLOODY MACHINES!
(then wait in queue for 10 minutes)
Human: Hi welcome to blah. Before we get started can I ask you how frustrated you're feeling?
Fire the marketing department.
Darn tootin'!
Do you think anyone in marketing actually knows what the real purpose of marketing is? Why it actually arose as a job in the first place?
Instead of actually taking products created by people who know what they're doing, they think it's their job to create and design the products.
So we get geniuses who design the new dominos hamburger pizza.
Did McDonalds really need to invent a whole new tastes menu, or was that just marketers who needed to do something to justify their existance in a company that was already raking in millions and could comfortably continue doing so?
Or my favourite example - Marketing "professionals" on "* Idol" who say "yes, you've got a great voice, but at the end of the day I can't market you".
That's right, the marketer can't market a singer that can sing, and that's a problem with the singer!
--
What was the thread topic again?
When Grandma and Grandpa get presented with the choice of layer, they're not going to understand what it's about, and many of the electoral officials I've met, after being asked for the third time will end up responding with "just press 1" which will destroy that random element, so errors could then occur on the 2nd layer, with a much higher likelihood of going undetected.
Also, given that as far as most people are concerned, the choice is completely meaningless, is there really a 50% chance of both being picked? Or would people be more likely to just go with the first option they're presented? Anyone know the statistics for this?
That reminds me of a CD drive I had to extract a (data) CD from. Somehow the CD popped out of the tray while it was in there, and got caught inside the drive when the tray was ejected, then fell behind the tray.
I didn't have much on hand to get the CD out with.
So the techiniques tried were using a very small pair of scissors to grab the CD (yes we had accepted that the CD was expendible), and a paperclip, beant up at the end to grab the cd in the centre.
In trying to get the CD out I failed several times, and scratched the CD multimple times, right accross it's radius. But eventually it came out, and I told the owner that the drive should be fine, but they'd have no hope with the CD.
Not to be deterred, he put the CD in, and it worked fine!
On the other hand, I have CD's with scratches I can't even see that I can't get a thing out of!
Will their virtual machines run operating systems other than Microsoft's?
That's only half the question: will their virtual machine's run on other host OS's other than Microsoft?
That's part of what I really like about vmware - I have a win2k box and a linux box both running vmware and love the uniformity of having (sure the linux version is a bit less user friendly) the same app accross both of them.
Hell, if I feel like it I can shift an entire virtual machine from the linux box to the win2k box (or vice versa) if I don't want to suck up the CPU on the linux box, all I have to do is tweak a couple of parameters in the config - let's see MS's cheap imitation do that!
they're only open-sourcing Microsoft's codecs, not their own :-)
maybe MS will pay them back by reverse engineering and open sourcing real's codecs?
but this used to crack me up when I had to use VB in MS Access.
The help was broken, so if you hit F1, a dialog popped up saying "Cannot open Help".
The dialog had two buttons "OK" and "Help"!