486s go for around $2.50 at the Goodwill around here (granted, this is in a college town, where I literally couldn't give away an ~150 MHz Pentium with monitor this past spring). It's great to say that we should just send all of our old PCs overseas, except that the cost of the logistics of testing each machine (many systems of that era will have a bad part or two), installing the software on a diverse set of hardware, and shipping them gets to be greater than the cost of just making millions of $SOMETHINGNEW such as this proposal.
Even if you simply ship bulk old PCs with no testing to where the labour is cheaper, the cost of collecting and packing the systems is substantial, not to mention the legal issues of shipping systems whose hard drives haven't been wiped of software.
This is too much time to fix something. I can agree with some delayed disclosure but not anything above a month.
The CNET article states that they didn't report it to Microsoft until Dec 22. Which is close enough to the holidays that a substantial part of many businesses staff are out until the 1st of Jan.
Anything that modifies core memory access/rights such as this needs extensive testing. It's most likely an easy fix, but you should be well aware of the outrage that would occur if they released a fix that ended up breaking things. Recall the rushed fix to OpenSSH that was distributed only to be replaced days later with a proper fix, leading to all manner of confusion as to which versions were vulnerable and not?
Given that this is a relatively minor problem - the attacker would have to have another sucessful attack vector to be able to use this, I'm glad Microsoft is [theoretically] taking the time to do this right. If you're really that worried about it, you can run the software provided by a mostly unknown Russian company that they freely admit will affect the system negatively. And pray that there's no bugs in their code and that it's not malicious...
as soon as we let them on the internet to "validate" their copy of Windows and download the patch
Other people have pointed out that patches will still be downloadable so you can burn the CDs and send them to the people who need it. But FYI, [at least in the enterprise OEM editions I've used] there is an option to validate systems over the phone. It's a pain and an annoyance, but it is occassionally useful.
Really the only thing that would be better is if they could devise a way to make it impossible for people to install their software in a manner that violates the license.
So, you think that bringing people who disregard licenses over to the open source world is a good thing? So how long do you think it would be until some of them (granted, a small group of them would actually be programmers) before they decided the restrictions of the GPL/BSD/whatever license didn't suit their fancy any more than Microsoft's and start abusing the code? Will you be spewing with rightious indignation when that happens?
Let me introduce you to a concept: Not everyone has much money. There are working people in the United States who can't scrape together $400 for the Dell uber-cheap of the month, but who can get an old Pentium from the thrift store for $5. There are millions of people in Africa who make many times less in a day than the lowest paid burger flipper in the United States makes in an hour. Get some perspective.
so that people can use to play and deal with quicktime video on linux.
Just as a note, porting QuickTime to Linux is a little more complicated than porting something like Real. QuickTime is much more of a multimedia environment - there's a fairly powerful scripting language involved - which makes it much more complicated than just bringing over a codec. It would be nice though.
I don't know how they're handling it, but personally I'd consider having the "streaming" database analysis machine on the same network as a file based server with an ethernet card set to promiscuous mode sniffing the packets aimed at the file server. (With the switch set to route the packets to both machines, of course.) That way you could have multiple file servers (assuming your flow of data was so great that it could bog down a single server) and have the real time server analyzing the incoming flow of data without the client connections ever having to know they were talking to more than one server.
And you can specify relations with a simple micro-language in the class declaration (that's based out of ruby syntax).
Could you point me toward where I can find documentation on handling normalization? Doing a site search with google on the documentation site turned up nothing.
But the request to the CA is only asking for (signed) data about cancelled certs. You can't use it to issue your own certs, that's not how it works.
User sends a request via https for www.somebank.com. My server pretends to be any site out there. So it does a request to the same site, and re-presents the same data to the client from its own web server with its own SSL cert. As far as the client computer knows, it's talking to the bank and just got a security cert from Thawte (or whoever). The client checks with what it thinks is Thawte, the rogue CA, which happily confirms that the site is indeed somebank. The attacking server sits there and sends the data back and forth on behalf of the client and the server without ever letting either one talk to the other directly.
It might be a pain to get it to work perfectly and would prolly be complete overkill for the purpose, given that anyone with half a clue can get all kinds of identity theft stuff on IRC with little effort. But it could be highly interesting to park a box with that setup near your competator's office.
Even if you check the certificate and everything looks OK (Sane information in text fields) you still can't be sure that it's valid unless you compare the signature of the SSL certificate with a known-good one.
If I wanted to be really evil, I'd just set up a CA that masqueraded as the default CAs that IE includes (use DNS to route all requests to CAs to the evil one). Then set up a system that takes https requests, and does a man in the middle shuffle of the data, syphoning off the form information in the process.
OS X can be just as bad. If you've ever excepted 'Linksys' as an access point (not me, but using friend's APs who have no desire to change anything about it), OS X will happily join any 'linksys' without asking you.
How do you distinguish between a genuine rolex dealer and a spamming rolex dealer? Between an actual mortgage company and a spamming mortgage company? And so on.
yet still retain that same level of piracy protection, whatever it's actually worth
What exactly is it worth? The Amiga fanbase at this point is down to the die hard enthusiasts who are typically the people willing to put money into the platform. I doubt piracy will be a huge issue, while the need to buy expensive specialized hardware will certainly put off potential users. An operating system whose web browsers can't render CSS properly and lacks a word processor that can read/write MS Word flawlessly is not something that Joe Sixpack (or even Rob Macuser) is going to be running out to pirate regardless of whether it will run on a computer they already have.
Besides the fanatics, the only real target market for this is geeks like me that enjoy interesting things to play with. I certainly can't justify paying $700 for a computer that a four year old Mac will outperform. Particularly one that doesn't bother keeping up with basic standards. No gigabit ethernet? No high speed USB or firewire? No, not everyone in the fan base needs them, but the fact is that they're cheap enough that the could have been added at very little additional cost.
And well, I hate USB locks. Everyone I know hates them. There's plenty of other interesting and unusual projects for me to poke at to bother. Pissing off customers (and potential customers) is a very poor strategy for companies, particularly small ones, to persue.
Because Google has 8,058,044,651 pages indexed. That's an anwful lot of data to try to search through, particularly given that pages are often frequently updated.
On top of that, it means that anything with comments could be spammed into unsearchability. Spam e-mail is bayesian searchable because it doesn't piggyback on information you actually want to get. Wikis/comment filled pages could have 75% valid content and 25% spam. How would you propose to handle that?
although they cover themselves by editing the HIG every time they do something stupid, like brushed metal.
Except for times they don't even bother. iMovie drives me batty, as the program quits the moment you close the main window, which is different than every other Apple program I've dealt with. Sigh. It also drives me crazy that QuickTime has separate chapter and fastforward buttons but DVD Player combines them into one. Go to skip a little bit backward, accidentally go to the beginning of the chapter...
that evolution seems to fit with the facts as science is best capable of recording it, and that there are some failures which we cannot explain yet but which alternative theories, including creationism might possibly explain.
The insane guy who rants on the street might have an alternate theory that could explain the existance of everything. So does Terry Pratchet. Does that mean that they should be mentioned in school as well? Being less silly, what about Bhuddist and Hindi creation stories? African and Indian ledgends? Do you decide which ones to mention by popularity, by the background of students in the class, or by all inclusiveness?
The place for the alternate theories (as you put it) to be explained is in the church, not the school. I'm pretty sure that 99.9% of high school students are aware of their religion's views on the creation of everything by the time they get to high school, and they are perfectly capable of seeking out council that can help them determine what they want to believe (creationism, guided evolution, metaphor, whatever).
Why is it that Apple fanboys get so worked up over slot loading drives? If my Dell laptop's CD drive dies, they can send me a replacement and I can pop it in. When my 12"'s CD drive died, I had to send the entire unit in to get a relatively minor unit repaired. I have three Xserves, and I've never once considered their slot loading drives to be a good feature. It's a comfort to know that if one of my non-Apple servers' CD drives goes bad I can pop in any standard drive in and be back in business.
This machine is what every geek needs.
[Insert flamebait here]
Oh wait, here's some:
Also it has Macosx, which is bY FAR the best OS on the planet.
So, you do know that Safari has spellcheck built in, right?
Grow up. There is no such thing as "the best." Different problems and people have different solutions. Use the one that works for you, but don't proclaim that it's what everyone needs.
The question is, since we live in a land of capitalism and the cell phone market has tremendous competition, why hasn't the price of SMS messaging dropped?
Part of it is that the industry uses extras such as ringtones and SMS to foot the bill for the rest of their expenses. Building the GSM networks that sprang out of nowhere in the US couldn't have been cheap. And the phones themselves have always been a loss leader for the companies. Personally, I'm happy to let people who want to indulge in silly ring tones subsidize my service.
As far as competition, a company could break from the crowd and do free ringtones or whatever, but they'd either have to come up with additional sources of income or boost the price of their monthly plan, and history has shown time and time again that consumers will go for the cheapest looking thing regardless of hidden costs.
If they did it right (including playing mp3s as well as Apple store stuff), there might be a market in people like me who commute via short (~20 minute) walks or bus trips. I wouldn't mind having some music to listen to on said journeys but haven't bothered to get _yet_another_gadget_ to do so. If I could have a craddle at home and at work that would charge the battery and swap songs, I might pay a little extra for a phone that would do so.
if you are tired of new features taking up battery life, then don't use the feature or buy a phone with[out] it.
I would have been happy to keep using my StarTac indefinitely except for the fact I couldn't get parts for it when they started wearing out. There wasn't anything like it on the market when I got a replacement. The LG I ended up with is slower, has taken wear and tear far worse, and doesn't offer any real improvements. The damn thing doesn't even have a ringer that sounds anything like a phone.
I mean, how cool would it be if you had to point to where you wanted the smithing hammer to strike
Um, not very to me personally, but I find most games to be pretty dull. It would be about as interesting as a Burger King simulator where you have to click to flip the burgers. The relatively few times I play games is to escape the mundanity of life, not to recreate some mundane activity. If I really started craving metalwork, I'd just go to a forge and learn how to create something in real life.
So everyone who's ever done poorly should be excluded from job matches? I hope I never work at a company that you run. (Actually, my GPA apparently guarantees that.)
You need a first pass filter that cuts the total number of possibilities down as much as possible without much risk that the number of hireable candidates drops below your threshold. That's all.
You seem to be asuming that all hirable candidates are equal. When I hire, I don't look for hirable cadidates, I look for the best candidates. Many of the best programmers/sysadmins I know have less than ideal GPAs.
GPAs makes a poor metric of future performance. They are a poor measurement for new graduates, because it doesn't reflect how the student will function in the real world with real projects. It's a poor measurement for experienced workers because it doesn't show what they've learned since graduation or how well they've actually worked. Nor does it measure anything other than how that particular school rates its students against its internal system - my prep high school gave significantly higher grades for the same quality of work compared to the public school I also went to. The difference was that the prep school was getting paid thousands of dollars by the parents to get junior into college.
As an aside, I'd place far more trust in the QCA from the last 60 hours of classes than I would overall QCA.
I can visually scan a resume in about 5 seconds to see if it's worth looking into. 500 seconds isn't a whole lot of time to spend on the task, given how much a poor worker/team player can drag down a project/team. I'll give a student with 3 solid looking internships/summer jobs, some kind of leadership position, and a 2.5 as much of a chance as a student with a 3.8 who spent all their time studying and never experienced anything. The same with a CS degree with a 2.5 from Stanford compared to a 3.5 from a university with a poor CS department.
What someone's done is generally far more indicative of how they'll function in the workplace than what grades they got. If I'm hiring for a computer position, I want someone who's interesting in computers rather than someone who got a CS degree because they heard you can make a lot of money with one. QCA doesn't tell you if someone'e eyes will light up if you describe a problem and start thinking of solutions. A googlestalking of the ones that pass the 5 second visual inspection gives a much better indication of that.
3.0 forget it, not worth my time because you shouldn't have been in college if you can't maintain a high-B low-A average.
So how does your system handle people who did poorly their first year, left, did something useful, came back and excelled? One bad year can easily drop a person out of running in your view. Our society encourages many people who shouldn't be in college yet to go, which can often result in a bad first year.
In my (biased) view, a student that takes some time off to regroup and actually gets some useful experience in the world can be a better candidate compared to a straight through student. I did poorly (and fully admit that I shouldn't have been in college at that point), took time off and got a good job. That turned into a series of oportunities during breaks after I returned to school such that by the point that people I started with were graduating, I had real world experience in banking (personally being in charge of trading millions of dollars of loans, not working a counter), media (newspapers/radio stations), accounting, HR, government consulting, training, support, management, etc. But by your criteria, I wouldn't be worth looking at, despite an extensive CV.
I'm not disputing that companies need some kind of filter, but discarding anyone who had a bad year for whatever reason means that you'd miss many of the amazingly smart and productive computer geeks that I've met.
Well, how evil exactly were the old Caribbean pirates of yore?
But of all that gold and silver that was flowing back to Europe from Central and South America, who mined it? The natives or slaves.
So the fact that the gold/silver was ill gotten justifies attacking and killing the poor and largely innocent people that happen to carrying it? The vast majority of the sailors that were manning the ships that were attacked were poor or slaves themselves.
There's this wonderful thing known as reading the article that you might want to consider sometime. Let's see what the article says:
First, I co-founded Wikipedia and played a key role in setting up some of the community standards that it still follows, and though am no longer associated with it nor have I worked on it for a few years...
Does he edit information about himself? Sure he does - most people who are involved with the infrastructure of major websites and accademia make sure that information on them stays current.
Slashdot Mirror
486s go for around $2.50 at the Goodwill around here (granted, this is in a college town, where I literally couldn't give away an ~150 MHz Pentium with monitor this past spring). It's great to say that we should just send all of our old PCs overseas, except that the cost of the logistics of testing each machine (many systems of that era will have a bad part or two), installing the software on a diverse set of hardware, and shipping them gets to be greater than the cost of just making millions of $SOMETHINGNEW such as this proposal.
Even if you simply ship bulk old PCs with no testing to where the labour is cheaper, the cost of collecting and packing the systems is substantial, not to mention the legal issues of shipping systems whose hard drives haven't been wiped of software.
This is too much time to fix something. I can agree with some delayed disclosure but not anything above a month.
The CNET article states that they didn't report it to Microsoft until Dec 22. Which is close enough to the holidays that a substantial part of many businesses staff are out until the 1st of Jan.
Anything that modifies core memory access/rights such as this needs extensive testing. It's most likely an easy fix, but you should be well aware of the outrage that would occur if they released a fix that ended up breaking things. Recall the rushed fix to OpenSSH that was distributed only to be replaced days later with a proper fix, leading to all manner of confusion as to which versions were vulnerable and not?
Given that this is a relatively minor problem - the attacker would have to have another sucessful attack vector to be able to use this, I'm glad Microsoft is [theoretically] taking the time to do this right. If you're really that worried about it, you can run the software provided by a mostly unknown Russian company that they freely admit will affect the system negatively. And pray that there's no bugs in their code and that it's not malicious...
as soon as we let them on the internet to "validate" their copy of Windows and download the patch
Other people have pointed out that patches will still be downloadable so you can burn the CDs and send them to the people who need it. But FYI, [at least in the enterprise OEM editions I've used] there is an option to validate systems over the phone. It's a pain and an annoyance, but it is occassionally useful.
Really the only thing that would be better is if they could devise a way to make it impossible for people to install their software in a manner that violates the license.
So, you think that bringing people who disregard licenses over to the open source world is a good thing? So how long do you think it would be until some of them (granted, a small group of them would actually be programmers) before they decided the restrictions of the GPL/BSD/whatever license didn't suit their fancy any more than Microsoft's and start abusing the code? Will you be spewing with rightious indignation when that happens?
This is insightful?
Let me introduce you to a concept: Not everyone has much money. There are working people in the United States who can't scrape together $400 for the Dell uber-cheap of the month, but who can get an old Pentium from the thrift store for $5. There are millions of people in Africa who make many times less in a day than the lowest paid burger flipper in the United States makes in an hour. Get some perspective.
so that people can use to play and deal with quicktime video on linux.
Just as a note, porting QuickTime to Linux is a little more complicated than porting something like Real. QuickTime is much more of a multimedia environment - there's a fairly powerful scripting language involved - which makes it much more complicated than just bringing over a codec. It would be nice though.
I don't know how they're handling it, but personally I'd consider having the "streaming" database analysis machine on the same network as a file based server with an ethernet card set to promiscuous mode sniffing the packets aimed at the file server. (With the switch set to route the packets to both machines, of course.) That way you could have multiple file servers (assuming your flow of data was so great that it could bog down a single server) and have the real time server analyzing the incoming flow of data without the client connections ever having to know they were talking to more than one server.
And you can specify relations with a simple micro-language in the class declaration (that's based out of ruby syntax).
Could you point me toward where I can find documentation on handling normalization? Doing a site search with google on the documentation site turned up nothing.
But the request to the CA is only asking for (signed) data about cancelled certs. You can't use it to issue your own certs, that's not how it works.
User sends a request via https for www.somebank.com. My server pretends to be any site out there. So it does a request to the same site, and re-presents the same data to the client from its own web server with its own SSL cert. As far as the client computer knows, it's talking to the bank and just got a security cert from Thawte (or whoever). The client checks with what it thinks is Thawte, the rogue CA, which happily confirms that the site is indeed somebank. The attacking server sits there and sends the data back and forth on behalf of the client and the server without ever letting either one talk to the other directly.
It might be a pain to get it to work perfectly and would prolly be complete overkill for the purpose, given that anyone with half a clue can get all kinds of identity theft stuff on IRC with little effort. But it could be highly interesting to park a box with that setup near your competator's office.
Even if you check the certificate and everything looks OK (Sane information in text fields) you still can't be sure that it's valid unless you compare the signature of the SSL certificate with a known-good one.
If I wanted to be really evil, I'd just set up a CA that masqueraded as the default CAs that IE includes (use DNS to route all requests to CAs to the evil one). Then set up a system that takes https requests, and does a man in the middle shuffle of the data, syphoning off the form information in the process.
I think that Windows XP, when looking for a WAP
OS X can be just as bad. If you've ever excepted 'Linksys' as an access point (not me, but using friend's APs who have no desire to change anything about it), OS X will happily join any 'linksys' without asking you.
How do you distinguish between a genuine rolex dealer and a spamming rolex dealer? Between an actual mortgage company and a spamming mortgage company? And so on.
yet still retain that same level of piracy protection, whatever it's actually worth
What exactly is it worth? The Amiga fanbase at this point is down to the die hard enthusiasts who are typically the people willing to put money into the platform. I doubt piracy will be a huge issue, while the need to buy expensive specialized hardware will certainly put off potential users. An operating system whose web browsers can't render CSS properly and lacks a word processor that can read/write MS Word flawlessly is not something that Joe Sixpack (or even Rob Macuser) is going to be running out to pirate regardless of whether it will run on a computer they already have.
Besides the fanatics, the only real target market for this is geeks like me that enjoy interesting things to play with. I certainly can't justify paying $700 for a computer that a four year old Mac will outperform. Particularly one that doesn't bother keeping up with basic standards. No gigabit ethernet? No high speed USB or firewire? No, not everyone in the fan base needs them, but the fact is that they're cheap enough that the could have been added at very little additional cost.
And well, I hate USB locks. Everyone I know hates them. There's plenty of other interesting and unusual projects for me to poke at to bother. Pissing off customers (and potential customers) is a very poor strategy for companies, particularly small ones, to persue.
Because Google has 8,058,044,651 pages indexed. That's an anwful lot of data to try to search through, particularly given that pages are often frequently updated.
On top of that, it means that anything with comments could be spammed into unsearchability. Spam e-mail is bayesian searchable because it doesn't piggyback on information you actually want to get. Wikis/comment filled pages could have 75% valid content and 25% spam. How would you propose to handle that?
although they cover themselves by editing the HIG every time they do something stupid, like brushed metal.
Except for times they don't even bother. iMovie drives me batty, as the program quits the moment you close the main window, which is different than every other Apple program I've dealt with. Sigh. It also drives me crazy that QuickTime has separate chapter and fastforward buttons but DVD Player combines them into one. Go to skip a little bit backward, accidentally go to the beginning of the chapter...
that evolution seems to fit with the facts as science is best capable of recording it, and that there are some failures which we cannot explain yet but which alternative theories, including creationism might possibly explain.
The insane guy who rants on the street might have an alternate theory that could explain the existance of everything. So does Terry Pratchet. Does that mean that they should be mentioned in school as well? Being less silly, what about Bhuddist and Hindi creation stories? African and Indian ledgends? Do you decide which ones to mention by popularity, by the background of students in the class, or by all inclusiveness?
The place for the alternate theories (as you put it) to be explained is in the church, not the school. I'm pretty sure that 99.9% of high school students are aware of their religion's views on the creation of everything by the time they get to high school, and they are perfectly capable of seeking out council that can help them determine what they want to believe (creationism, guided evolution, metaphor, whatever).
and a slot loading drive
Why is it that Apple fanboys get so worked up over slot loading drives? If my Dell laptop's CD drive dies, they can send me a replacement and I can pop it in. When my 12"'s CD drive died, I had to send the entire unit in to get a relatively minor unit repaired. I have three Xserves, and I've never once considered their slot loading drives to be a good feature. It's a comfort to know that if one of my non-Apple servers' CD drives goes bad I can pop in any standard drive in and be back in business.
This machine is what every geek needs.
[Insert flamebait here]
Oh wait, here's some:
Also it has Macosx, which is bY FAR the best OS on the planet.
So, you do know that Safari has spellcheck built in, right?
Grow up. There is no such thing as "the best." Different problems and people have different solutions. Use the one that works for you, but don't proclaim that it's what everyone needs.
The question is, since we live in a land of capitalism and the cell phone market has tremendous competition, why hasn't the price of SMS messaging dropped?
Part of it is that the industry uses extras such as ringtones and SMS to foot the bill for the rest of their expenses. Building the GSM networks that sprang out of nowhere in the US couldn't have been cheap. And the phones themselves have always been a loss leader for the companies. Personally, I'm happy to let people who want to indulge in silly ring tones subsidize my service.
As far as competition, a company could break from the crowd and do free ringtones or whatever, but they'd either have to come up with additional sources of income or boost the price of their monthly plan, and history has shown time and time again that consumers will go for the cheapest looking thing regardless of hidden costs.
If they did it right (including playing mp3s as well as Apple store stuff), there might be a market in people like me who commute via short (~20 minute) walks or bus trips. I wouldn't mind having some music to listen to on said journeys but haven't bothered to get _yet_another_gadget_ to do so. If I could have a craddle at home and at work that would charge the battery and swap songs, I might pay a little extra for a phone that would do so.
if you are tired of new features taking up battery life, then don't use the feature or buy a phone with[out] it.
I would have been happy to keep using my StarTac indefinitely except for the fact I couldn't get parts for it when they started wearing out. There wasn't anything like it on the market when I got a replacement. The LG I ended up with is slower, has taken wear and tear far worse, and doesn't offer any real improvements. The damn thing doesn't even have a ringer that sounds anything like a phone.
I mean, how cool would it be if you had to point to where you wanted the smithing hammer to strike
Um, not very to me personally, but I find most games to be pretty dull. It would be about as interesting as a Burger King simulator where you have to click to flip the burgers. The relatively few times I play games is to escape the mundanity of life, not to recreate some mundane activity. If I really started craving metalwork, I'd just go to a forge and learn how to create something in real life.
That's just it - the system doesn't have to.
So everyone who's ever done poorly should be excluded from job matches? I hope I never work at a company that you run. (Actually, my GPA apparently guarantees that.)
You need a first pass filter that cuts the total number of possibilities down as much as possible without much risk that the number of hireable candidates drops below your threshold. That's all.
You seem to be asuming that all hirable candidates are equal. When I hire, I don't look for hirable cadidates, I look for the best candidates. Many of the best programmers/sysadmins I know have less than ideal GPAs.
GPAs makes a poor metric of future performance. They are a poor measurement for new graduates, because it doesn't reflect how the student will function in the real world with real projects. It's a poor measurement for experienced workers because it doesn't show what they've learned since graduation or how well they've actually worked. Nor does it measure anything other than how that particular school rates its students against its internal system - my prep high school gave significantly higher grades for the same quality of work compared to the public school I also went to. The difference was that the prep school was getting paid thousands of dollars by the parents to get junior into college.
As an aside, I'd place far more trust in the QCA from the last 60 hours of classes than I would overall QCA.
I can visually scan a resume in about 5 seconds to see if it's worth looking into. 500 seconds isn't a whole lot of time to spend on the task, given how much a poor worker/team player can drag down a project/team. I'll give a student with 3 solid looking internships/summer jobs, some kind of leadership position, and a 2.5 as much of a chance as a student with a 3.8 who spent all their time studying and never experienced anything. The same with a CS degree with a 2.5 from Stanford compared to a 3.5 from a university with a poor CS department.
What someone's done is generally far more indicative of how they'll function in the workplace than what grades they got. If I'm hiring for a computer position, I want someone who's interesting in computers rather than someone who got a CS degree because they heard you can make a lot of money with one. QCA doesn't tell you if someone'e eyes will light up if you describe a problem and start thinking of solutions. A googlestalking of the ones that pass the 5 second visual inspection gives a much better indication of that.
3.0 forget it, not worth my time because you shouldn't have been in college if you can't maintain a high-B low-A average.
So how does your system handle people who did poorly their first year, left, did something useful, came back and excelled? One bad year can easily drop a person out of running in your view. Our society encourages many people who shouldn't be in college yet to go, which can often result in a bad first year.
In my (biased) view, a student that takes some time off to regroup and actually gets some useful experience in the world can be a better candidate compared to a straight through student. I did poorly (and fully admit that I shouldn't have been in college at that point), took time off and got a good job. That turned into a series of oportunities during breaks after I returned to school such that by the point that people I started with were graduating, I had real world experience in banking (personally being in charge of trading millions of dollars of loans, not working a counter), media (newspapers/radio stations), accounting, HR, government consulting, training, support, management, etc. But by your criteria, I wouldn't be worth looking at, despite an extensive CV.
I'm not disputing that companies need some kind of filter, but discarding anyone who had a bad year for whatever reason means that you'd miss many of the amazingly smart and productive computer geeks that I've met.
Well, how evil exactly were the old Caribbean pirates of yore?
But of all that gold and silver that was flowing back to Europe from Central and South America, who mined it? The natives or slaves.
So the fact that the gold/silver was ill gotten justifies attacking and killing the poor and largely innocent people that happen to carrying it? The vast majority of the sailors that were manning the ships that were attacked were poor or slaves themselves.
There's this wonderful thing known as reading the article that you might want to consider sometime. Let's see what the article says:
First, I co-founded Wikipedia and played a key role in setting up some of the community standards that it still follows, and though am no longer associated with it nor have I worked on it for a few years...
Does he edit information about himself? Sure he does - most people who are involved with the infrastructure of major websites and accademia make sure that information on them stays current.