I know that search on Windows has been terrible for years, but what exactly is major difference between this and, say, the instantaneous hash-based searching of OS9? Is it just that the search is now fuzzy? Is it the find-in-files ability that has been around for years in 3rd party apps? Is it the stacking?
I'm just trying to understand why this is suddenly revolutionary, on either platform.
And, what is that "reference number" that appears in all of the Longhorn screenshots? And please tell me that Aero design is stand-in... While XP was a big step forward in terms of appearance and a small step forward in terms of usability, so far those screenshots look like a step backwards in both.
Pretty much all of the game companies I've worked for have patented something. A lot of these were looked upon as either "We're going to be terribly rich" in the heat of the moment, then ignored later on, or are just kept around in case someone else starts a patent war. And, of course, nobody knows about it, and everyone does it, because who would think someone would have a patent on a character playing silly sound effects when you click on it repeatedly?
And that's really the problem: people are getting more and more bigger and bigger legal guns pointed at eachother's heads through this system. Everyone knows that despite their mandate, the patent office doesn't check these things. So more people get more and more of these guns. It's mutually assured destruction on an industry-wide scale, and it's foolish. It's basically asking for the same trouble as the mutual defense treaties of world war 1... once a shot is fired, everyone's guns are going to start going off.
I can't believe congress is having hearings on Major League Baseball when real problems as gaping as this exist in the system.
Oddly enough, I've always had the opposite problem. Virtual money, neat and tidy and accountable for, has always been easier for me to ascribe value to than cash. If it's cash and in your hand, it's expendable. 250 dollars is a lot of money: it will buy you two magic shields, or a blue ring. But 25 pieces of paper? What good is paper going to do you?
In my undergraduate days if I had recieved a reasoned response like that from my school's network infrastructure department, I probably would have understood and abided by it. Knowing myself I would still have run that external network from window to window to play Descent on, but we certainly wouldn't have been as hard on the dormatory network as we were.
My "living within" example wasn't meant as living within the restrictions of not using bittorrent or not downloading large files. I had meant that it would be impossible to live within the boundaries of using network access exclusively for directly educational activities. But it looks like you already have that in mind, and have measured what you can provide.
Still, though, you will probably get more sympathetic responses to a policy of "We are attempting to provide students with everything they want, but are under certain rather extreme bandwidth limitations," rather than "unless you are doing something that is specifically related to university studies, we really couldn't care less if you succeed or fail." Even if the latter is true, it's still likely to cause more trouble in the long run than less. Having been in the position myself of dealing with the public for a small ISP, I know that it's tough not getting bitter when some jerk is giving you a lecture because you cut of the network access which his kid was using to port scan and own every unpatched windows box he could find. But the message does need to be earnest no matter what, or even more users will misbehave.
I do tend to think there will be a day when.torrent has become the accepted way to distribute all files over the internet... that your firewall download will only come in.torrent form, or XP SP3. The bandwidth costs to the host are just so overwhelming that once torrent clients become ubiquitous they would be fools not to rely upon it. Already many of the smaller sites have switched over, with a few of the larger ones offering.torrents as a download alternative.
I find the idea of blocking.torrents problematic for this reason. P2P... if you can't throttle it, block it. Videogames... I'd take half the dorms and give them full videogame access, The other half I'd block, and after two years I'd compare the drop-out rates for each. You might even get funding for the research. I suspect the results would just encourage you to block it. But torrents? While there is a lot of bandwidth being taken up by torrents, I can't consider the protocol illegitimate. Some P2P, like IM, is very legitimate. Some, like Kazaa, is extremely illegitimate. But.torrents have checks and ID's involved in the system to, theoretically anyway, make piracy even more difficult. You still have to host the file yourself, you have to stay hosting the file, you have to be 100% traceable, and you have to actually publish / advertise the file through a different medium like the web. Blocking.torrents seems like blocking FTP access because there are a lot of Warez sites. Then again, you have access to the numbers, you probably know how much of the.torrent traffic is currently legitimate, and if that turns around you can unblock.
Would it be possible to coordinate with a 2nd party to provide internet access to individuals in your student dormatories? When I had arrived in the dorms (about 8 years ago), I was shocked to find cable TV jacks in every room. Would the local cable provider be willing to install the extra infrastructure necessary to provide cable internet service the students that wanted it? Having a secondary provider might ease some of the pressure on your main network...
This is one of those things which I always found odd at a university: the bandwidth in the student housing is home. And there are certain amenities which while serving no legitimate educational use are still basically required to survive. The amenities include restrooms, showers, electricity, beds, telephone service, and yes, internet access. The ability to communicate with a bank or a family member may not serve a "legitimate educational use," but it's pretty much essential to survival in the modern world.
Schools can say that they're just there for the educational value. And that's a great ideal. It's grossly innacurate, if you look at the corporate takeover of our higher education systems, but still a great ideal. However, the school system is also selling students housing, a baseline that includes a lot of things. And nearly all of them advertise network access as a part of that rather expensive package. To then cop out and say that the network only functions to let you check your university e-mail is definitely misleading, arguably bait-and-switch, and clearly going to make your students' lives more difficult.
Try to live within those restrictions for four years yourself. You'll find yourself running for the nearest cyber cafe or open wireless network nearly constantly for little things like e-mailing your family begging for enough money to get your telephone turned back on, and for larger things like downloading Knoppix furiously in an attempt to get a Hyperterminal that functions in 7 bit ASCII to communicate with an obscure piece of hardware for a project due the following day. Obviously you're not living like that now, as you just posted to Slashdot. No one has ever accused Slashdot of serving a legitimate educational purpose.
And as a side note, you actually force graduate students to request access for large downloads, "sit them down" in a DMZ, and watch them download things? You do realize you have become an impediment to people getting things done, not a facilitator, right? Ever see the movie "Falling Down?"
Contracts by their nature are negotiable. Otherwise it wouldn't be a mutual agreement by two parties on equal footing.
There are a lot of great places that you can black out portions of a contract before signing. If it's one of those meaningless contracts, like this one, everyone lets them through. Just whip out your sharpie and let it go. Sign it, and give it back.
If it's a more meaningful contract, you should negotiate with your employer. Explain your concerns, get them worried about their contract, and they'll usually accomodate in some way.
But the university "contracts" are the greatest. You can usually find the full text of what you are agreeing to. In a disused building. In the basement. With no elevator or stairs. Or lights. In a locked filing cabnet marked "Beware of the Leopard."
In the grand scheme of things the accessability of most University contracts are one step above the dead sea scrolls. Sure, some people have seen some of them, and everyone seems to think that all of them are around there somewhere, but has anyone you know read even one piece?
It's a bad name because it's not representative of the function of the position to people at large. People know pretty much what the president of a campus does. They know what their Dean is and does (or doesn't do). They know that to pay tuition they go to the tuition office. They know if they want to learn Japanese, they take a course in Japanese. If they are having health problems, they go to the department of student services or possibly the department of student health.
If the majority of people on a campus don't know what a word means, it's a poor choice for communication. Period. I don't know why this is a hard concept. You can and should teach meanings of unfamiliar words, and you should expose people to parts of the language that they may be unfamiliar with. But your essential services must be named in the most clear and unambiguous terms. Otherwise you're allowing a foolish sense of elitism to get in the way of your higher goal of creating an educated populous.
The defenition of the word "meaning" includes the concept of conveyance: you don't have a meaning, you convey a meaning. In this case, as I have seen very few US High Schools which teach Swedish or old Norse, and as such chances are Ombudsman is meaningless to most incoming freshmen.
It's a bad name, period. The time to be digging through the list of people employed by your college and looking up their job titles on Wikipedia is not generally the sort of desperate times one would need an ombudsman. That's like having a department called "Hilfeanbietenman." It means something to someone but come on, call a help desk a help desk.
Actually, the file downloads without DRM normally, which is then encrypted on your machine. They do this to offload work from the servers, as encrypting the file is a rather intensive task to be doing on a server for hundreds of thousands of concurrent users.
Exactly. A real apple product is usually something that people look at and go "why didn't I think of that." In reality they didn't think of it because there were already people selling such thing, but they were being held back by bad design or implementation.
Personally, I'm waiting for apple to revolutionize servers. I bet a series of stackable, sideways interconnectable hexagonal computing cubes which recieved power from eachother and sent data through eachother would not only make volume web hosting easier, but it would make it much more sturdy too. Server farming screams for a standard way to pass power, air, and data between a large group of machines that are self-contained and free standing. All you need is an elegant form factor and a company willing to try to revolutionize hosting.
If someone told you that the PSP is a portable gaming device, shoot these people. The PSP is not a portable gaming device, it is really a convergent portable entertainment device.
And going with a brand new disk standard that nobody has and nobody sells as a medium for selling movies? It's a brilliant maneuver from some of the industry's best minds.
I should say that the Sony reps I've worked with about other things have been completely with it and didn't lose sight of reality. So what happened to this guy?
But Windows Media Player is playing embedded documents. The host application playing back the stream is a codec that decodes the stream for any application that may want it, including Media Player. This is why you can download a DIVX codec and have it available in any application that may have an embedded media file marked for DIVX. Windows Media player is just a shell.
Do this... Install Quicktime from Apple. Delete the quicktime player.exe file. Can Media Player still play the file? You betcha.
You are right in that this would be an easy demonstration to fake. But it would take longer to fake than to do the real thing.
A better analogy would be like Microsoft purposely sabotoging their own document format to make it impossible for other word processors to legally interoperate with it.
Wait no, A better analogy would be like Microsoft serving up broken web pages to the browsers of competitors.
No, wait. A better analogy would be like suggesting Microsoft would break Windows so that it would refuse to run under a competitor's version of DOS.
Maybe it's like Microsoft shipping a browser that has the option to uninstall other software vendor's browsers. Or Microsoft forcing OEM's to pay them a fee for every computer they ship, with or without Windows installed. Perhaps it's like Microsoft hiding crucial API's from everyone but themselves, and when forced to expose them for all to see defining "all" as anyone who can pony up 50 thousand dollars plus additional fees. Or Microsoft attempting to ship broken versions of Java to destroy the standard. Or forcing OEM vendors to carry Microsoft ads, and only Microsoft ads, on all desktops sold. Or negotiating with another company for a year only to steal their technology. And then refusing a court order to turn over all e-mails from that period.
But all of this is metaphorical: Microsoft would never do anything like this. This is all speculative fantasy. And besides everyone in this country is innocent until proven guilty in at least 4 different courts of law.
Let's see if I can reconstruct my sources. BTW, my post wasn't intended to be a paper or taken as fact. It's a post on Slashdot. Let me repeat that: it's a post on Slashdot. I would hope interested readers would look it up for themselves.
"Hopefully, politics be damned, he will show that schools which teach abstinence-only sexual education have significantly higher rates of teenage pregnancy than districts with real sexual education courses" What source did you get this information from? What is defined as 'real sexual education courses'?
The latest example I've heard of came out of england a few months ago. NPR did a pretty substantial segment on it. But I've read it many places and many sources throughout the years. The American Medical Association and Planned Parenthood both have official negative stances on Abstinence-only education for this very reason.
I'm defining "real sex education courses," as one whose primary goal is to educate about sex. Education in this context is to provide a broad spectrum of information that a person will need to make informed choices. Abstinence-only isn't an education because it isn't providing information about the activity, it's just a policy to try to swear people off of it. Like how "Rock the vote" isn't really voter education, it's a get-out-the-vote drive.
"Or even that 50% of high school students are already sexually active" What source did you get this information from?
That's a pretty widely known statistic, man: sources abound. Here's one, from the department of Health and Human Services.
"Of course, it might be stepping over the line to point out that the bible belt has the highest rates of teenage pregnancy, higher than the hedonistic blue states" What source did you get this information from?
While I respect almost anyone's comments don't be so hasty to bash the religious yet neglect the "scientific superiority" of cited sources. The well known and well-cited 'they' always come back to haunt you.
Whenever someone doesn't cite their sources, google it. There is a wealth of information out there at your fingertips.
However, the distinction does become a bit finer. It's not just a question of whether the decision was forced on the person, but how the person came to that decision. If a person decides not to do, say, LSD because they've done a thorough investigation of the effects of LSD, they know the rate of people who become insane on it, they know how situations can turn bad and how to deal with them, and the risk just isn't worth the payoff, then they are making a quite informed decision, and have enough information at their fingertips that if they do decide to indulge one day they're not going to do so while driving a car in a foreign country on a raised highway. On the other hand, another person may have simply heard that LSD is bad for you, used that as a weight in their decision making process, and come to the conclusion that drugs are bad 'mkay and that they are going to never do drugs. It's not just personal choice, it's the degree of knowledge people have about these things. To make an accurate choice, some people gain quite a strong working knowledge of the process, and that serves them quite well.
But to a lot of people, making a decision is the end of the knowledge gathering process. Do say "I will never have sex," is to say "I will never have to learn about having sex, because I'm not going to have it." Even if they come to the decision on their own, and even if that decision isn't as hollow as some of the examples I've used so far, to a lot of people that's the end of the learning process. I can tell you that the early-withdrawl method gives you zero protection against STD's, but is that common knowledge amongst people who aren't planning on having sex? If they were thorough in their investigative process before making their decision, some of they may. If they were like so many people and based their decision on what little data was presented to them, then no. Both of these people have made their own decisions, and both think that decision is based on the facts of the subject, but one of them may do something really stupid when they're put in a human situation and decide to explore.
And sex is, of course, a bit different than drugs (I probably shouldn't have generalized as much as I did), because everyone has sex at some point in their lives. Saying that you're not going to have sex is like saying you're not going to eat: it's a basic human drive, and everyone does it. People can be drug-free, and apparently 50% of Americans manage that for their entire lives. But almost nobody dies a virgin. And almost nobody gets married a virgin either, ensuring that nearly everybody who makes an "Abstinence before marriage" pledge will either change their minds or fall off the wagon. Either way, no good will come of their pledge.
I don't think Gwen Stefani is the fault of legacy in the recording industries. Gwen always said she wanted to be rick and famous. And when she was poor and playing small groups in clubs and fairgrounds, it was cute, sad... she said she wanted to be one of those annoying and famous people with her name and lights, but she basically lived out of the back of a van playing crappy gigs in traditional musician fashion. You had to empathize with her, because everyone knows musicians in that situation. And you have to admit, Tragic Kingdom had some original and interesting tracks on it.
But Gwen is now exactly who she wanted to be. She has become the rich, famous, self-centered girl she always was, only now she's actually rich and famous. That which allowed her fans to empathize with her, and her with her fans, is gone. And in it's place are terrible covers of If I Were a Rich Man (I didn't think It's My Life was that bad), and vaccuous cameos in Kid Rock videos. I don't think this happened because she lost control over her music, so much as the change in lifestyle which comes with money made her lose connection with her audience.
A similar problem struck Alanis Morisette. Radio overplay aside, Alanis had always composed music because she was unhappy. And her audience responded to this. Enough people responded, that soon she was rich, successful, and gave her the power to solve her problems and make herself happy. Which she did. And she lost the drive to make music. Eventually she found it again (she gives a great interview about this), but because she was no longer singing about being tortured, she lost the audience that had that connection with her.
Most artists don't survive the transition from poor no-name slob to rich superstar simply because they sing about their experiences, and their experiences go from things everyone can relate to, to experiences very few people on the planet have. What would Bill Gates sing about that any of us here would connect to? Compiler woes? Kobain was highly relatable up until the end simply because he suffered the entire time. Dr Dre still raps about the kids in the hood and yelling at his grandma on the front porch, despite the fact that he owns million dollar mansions and essentially lives like an investment banker for talent.
The point is that the problems with the music industry that you had pointed out are not so much with legacy, but money. Too much money and too much success will destroy pretty much any artist. Even overthrowing the big 5 wouldn't change that.
So you're saying that pointing out the fundamental flaws in DRM is being a dick, because other people have knee-jerk reactions to it?
Now the chip-in-your computer analogy is ridiculous. Nobody is going to force application developers to sign their executables. For one, they change far too frequently. For another, downloaded software would cease to function. For a third, it would be grossly anticompetitive in a way that even the US government would ignore. And if you don't sign your executables... what's the point?
Second, how would a secure computing platform work? You would still need virtualization capabilities. And once you can virtualize a platform, you can do pretty much whatever you want with it.
Third, how would a remote computer connecting to mine even realize that I was on a trusted computer or not? It's all information sent back over TCP-IP packets, packets that can be faked. If the key is in the hardware, and the hardware is running an SSH tunnel to the server, well we just hack the hardware, figure out what key it is using, and setup our own SSH tunnels in an application no more invasive than this one. Depending on the type of protection, there is a always a viable counterattack because information sufficient to decrypt the stream must be present on the host machine. Even if the host machine itself attmpts to deny access to itself it can be run virtually, and the important bits picked out directly. Even if it is hardware based you can listen to the pins. And ultimately none of this results in the end-user needing to do anything more than install a small piece of software to bypass once the protection system's keys are known.
DeCSS is exactly the same as you're proposing. It was a hardware implementation of trusted computing. And if failed miserably because even if you offload the knowledge to the hardware, the hardware still has to know how to decrypt a file or it won't work.
The fact of the matter is DRM in it's current incarnation is fundamentally flawed.
I work in an industry where DRM has been a fact of life for many, many years, and the best a DRM system can hope to do is delay the inevitable crack by two weeks. But that's enough for game developers, and we continue on. The music and movie industries will have to live with the idea that their content is going to be cracked, and that is just a cost of doing business.
You have to remember that publishers aren't the greatest at economic theory, even if it is their field. No offense to a lot of the great publishers I've worked with in the past, and I have worked with some good people, but some of them used to be toothbrush salesmen. They're not likely to see a price drop as advantageous if they just spent 100 million in licensing. The whole concept of sunk costs isn't as prevalent as it should be, and the natural instinct is to raise prices when you've invested more... in this case probably a lot more than they should have. You need to recover your cost, so you raise prices, sales curve be damned.
If this doesn't effect consumer price, it will more than likely effect quality. At 400 million dollars for 6 years at 6 companies, that's 11 million dollars per game. If these games already had 20 million dollar budgets (and here's a hint: they didn't), that leaves 9 million to actually develop them.
The pledging group was also less likely to use condoms during their first sexual experience or get tested for STDs, the researchers found.
This is one of those sad realities that you see day in and day out, even with otherwise well balanced people. If there is an activity that you swear off, and promise never to do, invariably it will be done and it will be done irresponsibly. The people in college who really burned out their brains on drugs were the ones in High School who swore they would never do any. The people didn't use condoms were the ones who swore they would never have premarital sex. By swearing off an activity, these people weren't mentally prepared to engage in the activity in a rational fashion. When people fall off the wagon, they fall hard.
To pull this back towards topic, hopefully this is the kind of controversial reasearch that Bill Nye will tackle. Hopefully, politics be damned, he will show that schools which teach abstinence-only sexual education have significantly higher rates of teenage pregnancy than districts with real sexual education courses, even accounting for things like income disparity and location. Or even that 50% of high school students are already sexually active, and educational programs should be tailored to this fact. Of course, it might be stepping over the line to point out that the bible belt has the highest rates of teenage pregnancy, higher than the hedonistic blue states, but no fact should be too controversial for Bill Nye.
Please, please let no fact be too controversial for Bill Nye. Please tell me he doesn't have to cut a story on life forms in aquatic thermal vents because it makes passing reference to evolution.
Tell this guy to take his "subsidized rates" and shove 'em.
Tell this guy to take his "subsidized rates" and raise'em. You're the only developer, so you're the only one who knows how their system works. That makes you extremely valuable, at least in the short term.
Dirt-cheap on call computer support (like me) is generally 50 dollars an hour. Good techies who know their stuff should be about 100. People who have extra special knowledge, like being the only person on the planet who knows how that server works, can easily get 200 or more.
Your employer can't not let you go. They can't demand that you stay six weeks. The fact that they're so admant about keeping you for as long as possible should show you how much power you have in this situation.
I'd say that if they've been great to you, of course be nice when leaving and maybe even do some light on-call stuff over the phone for free. But if they were being nice to you they wouldn't have tripled your workload... they would have hired people to replace the developers they lost.
Of course, you could go another route. What are the chances that they would agree to letting you drop down to 20 hours per week at the same salary? It happened to a very close friend of mine, who suddenly had both the money and the time to enjoy her life. It could happen to you too.
Assuming an industrial oil drum in a light-industrial zone is 200 square feet, or a square of roadway, then yes, about 200 feet per block sounds about right. The bigger question is, of course, how many sims can attend your convention, and will it work without water and power?
Slashdot Mirror
I know that search on Windows has been terrible for years, but what exactly is major difference between this and, say, the instantaneous hash-based searching of OS9? Is it just that the search is now fuzzy? Is it the find-in-files ability that has been around for years in 3rd party apps? Is it the stacking?
I'm just trying to understand why this is suddenly revolutionary, on either platform.
And, what is that "reference number" that appears in all of the Longhorn screenshots? And please tell me that Aero design is stand-in... While XP was a big step forward in terms of appearance and a small step forward in terms of usability, so far those screenshots look like a step backwards in both.
I've often wondered when this would come up.
Pretty much all of the game companies I've worked for have patented something. A lot of these were looked upon as either "We're going to be terribly rich" in the heat of the moment, then ignored later on, or are just kept around in case someone else starts a patent war. And, of course, nobody knows about it, and everyone does it, because who would think someone would have a patent on a character playing silly sound effects when you click on it repeatedly?
And that's really the problem: people are getting more and more bigger and bigger legal guns pointed at eachother's heads through this system. Everyone knows that despite their mandate, the patent office doesn't check these things. So more people get more and more of these guns. It's mutually assured destruction on an industry-wide scale, and it's foolish. It's basically asking for the same trouble as the mutual defense treaties of world war 1... once a shot is fired, everyone's guns are going to start going off.
I can't believe congress is having hearings on Major League Baseball when real problems as gaping as this exist in the system.
Oddly enough, I've always had the opposite problem. Virtual money, neat and tidy and accountable for, has always been easier for me to ascribe value to than cash. If it's cash and in your hand, it's expendable. 250 dollars is a lot of money: it will buy you two magic shields, or a blue ring. But 25 pieces of paper? What good is paper going to do you?
In my undergraduate days if I had recieved a reasoned response like that from my school's network infrastructure department, I probably would have understood and abided by it. Knowing myself I would still have run that external network from window to window to play Descent on, but we certainly wouldn't have been as hard on the dormatory network as we were.
.torrent has become the accepted way to distribute all files over the internet... that your firewall download will only come in .torrent form, or XP SP3. The bandwidth costs to the host are just so overwhelming that once torrent clients become ubiquitous they would be fools not to rely upon it. Already many of the smaller sites have switched over, with a few of the larger ones offering .torrents as a download alternative.
.torrents problematic for this reason. P2P... if you can't throttle it, block it. Videogames... I'd take half the dorms and give them full videogame access, The other half I'd block, and after two years I'd compare the drop-out rates for each. You might even get funding for the research. I suspect the results would just encourage you to block it. But torrents? While there is a lot of bandwidth being taken up by torrents, I can't consider the protocol illegitimate. Some P2P, like IM, is very legitimate. Some, like Kazaa, is extremely illegitimate. But .torrents have checks and ID's involved in the system to, theoretically anyway, make piracy even more difficult. You still have to host the file yourself, you have to stay hosting the file, you have to be 100% traceable, and you have to actually publish / advertise the file through a different medium like the web. Blocking .torrents seems like blocking FTP access because there are a lot of Warez sites. Then again, you have access to the numbers, you probably know how much of the .torrent traffic is currently legitimate, and if that turns around you can unblock.
My "living within" example wasn't meant as living within the restrictions of not using bittorrent or not downloading large files. I had meant that it would be impossible to live within the boundaries of using network access exclusively for directly educational activities. But it looks like you already have that in mind, and have measured what you can provide.
Still, though, you will probably get more sympathetic responses to a policy of "We are attempting to provide students with everything they want, but are under certain rather extreme bandwidth limitations," rather than "unless you are doing something that is specifically related to university studies, we really couldn't care less if you succeed or fail." Even if the latter is true, it's still likely to cause more trouble in the long run than less. Having been in the position myself of dealing with the public for a small ISP, I know that it's tough not getting bitter when some jerk is giving you a lecture because you cut of the network access which his kid was using to port scan and own every unpatched windows box he could find. But the message does need to be earnest no matter what, or even more users will misbehave.
I do tend to think there will be a day when
I find the idea of blocking
Would it be possible to coordinate with a 2nd party to provide internet access to individuals in your student dormatories? When I had arrived in the dorms (about 8 years ago), I was shocked to find cable TV jacks in every room. Would the local cable provider be willing to install the extra infrastructure necessary to provide cable internet service the students that wanted it? Having a secondary provider might ease some of the pressure on your main network...
you can just as well download it at home.
This is one of those things which I always found odd at a university: the bandwidth in the student housing is home. And there are certain amenities which while serving no legitimate educational use are still basically required to survive. The amenities include restrooms, showers, electricity, beds, telephone service, and yes, internet access. The ability to communicate with a bank or a family member may not serve a "legitimate educational use," but it's pretty much essential to survival in the modern world.
Schools can say that they're just there for the educational value. And that's a great ideal. It's grossly innacurate, if you look at the corporate takeover of our higher education systems, but still a great ideal. However, the school system is also selling students housing, a baseline that includes a lot of things. And nearly all of them advertise network access as a part of that rather expensive package. To then cop out and say that the network only functions to let you check your university e-mail is definitely misleading, arguably bait-and-switch, and clearly going to make your students' lives more difficult.
Try to live within those restrictions for four years yourself. You'll find yourself running for the nearest cyber cafe or open wireless network nearly constantly for little things like e-mailing your family begging for enough money to get your telephone turned back on, and for larger things like downloading Knoppix furiously in an attempt to get a Hyperterminal that functions in 7 bit ASCII to communicate with an obscure piece of hardware for a project due the following day. Obviously you're not living like that now, as you just posted to Slashdot. No one has ever accused Slashdot of serving a legitimate educational purpose.
And as a side note, you actually force graduate students to request access for large downloads, "sit them down" in a DMZ, and watch them download things? You do realize you have become an impediment to people getting things done, not a facilitator, right? Ever see the movie "Falling Down?"
Contracts by their nature are negotiable. Otherwise it wouldn't be a mutual agreement by two parties on equal footing.
There are a lot of great places that you can black out portions of a contract before signing. If it's one of those meaningless contracts, like this one, everyone lets them through. Just whip out your sharpie and let it go. Sign it, and give it back.
If it's a more meaningful contract, you should negotiate with your employer. Explain your concerns, get them worried about their contract, and they'll usually accomodate in some way.
But the university "contracts" are the greatest. You can usually find the full text of what you are agreeing to. In a disused building. In the basement. With no elevator or stairs. Or lights. In a locked filing cabnet marked "Beware of the Leopard."
In the grand scheme of things the accessability of most University contracts are one step above the dead sea scrolls. Sure, some people have seen some of them, and everyone seems to think that all of them are around there somewhere, but has anyone you know read even one piece?
It's a bad name because it's not representative of the function of the position to people at large. People know pretty much what the president of a campus does. They know what their Dean is and does (or doesn't do). They know that to pay tuition they go to the tuition office. They know if they want to learn Japanese, they take a course in Japanese. If they are having health problems, they go to the department of student services or possibly the department of student health.
If the majority of people on a campus don't know what a word means, it's a poor choice for communication. Period. I don't know why this is a hard concept. You can and should teach meanings of unfamiliar words, and you should expose people to parts of the language that they may be unfamiliar with. But your essential services must be named in the most clear and unambiguous terms. Otherwise you're allowing a foolish sense of elitism to get in the way of your higher goal of creating an educated populous.
The defenition of the word "meaning" includes the concept of conveyance: you don't have a meaning, you convey a meaning. In this case, as I have seen very few US High Schools which teach Swedish or old Norse, and as such chances are Ombudsman is meaningless to most incoming freshmen.
It's a bad name, period. The time to be digging through the list of people employed by your college and looking up their job titles on Wikipedia is not generally the sort of desperate times one would need an ombudsman. That's like having a department called "Hilfeanbietenman." It means something to someone but come on, call a help desk a help desk.
So that's what the Ombudsman does! Man, that guy's really trapped in a meaningless name.
Actually, the file downloads without DRM normally, which is then encrypted on your machine. They do this to offload work from the servers, as encrypting the file is a rather intensive task to be doing on a server for hundreds of thousands of concurrent users.
I would even dare say that it's a necessity to question the competence of our leaders
I don't think there is any question about the competence of our leaders.
That's like questioning if ice is hot or Gigli was a good movie.
Apparently a company just released a watch that monitors your sleep cycles and wakes you up when you're at the lightest point in your sleep cycle.
Does anyone know if there are other implementations of this? Devices which are designed to wake you up when you hit the lightest part of your cycle?
Exactly. A real apple product is usually something that people look at and go "why didn't I think of that." In reality they didn't think of it because there were already people selling such thing, but they were being held back by bad design or implementation.
Personally, I'm waiting for apple to revolutionize servers. I bet a series of stackable, sideways interconnectable hexagonal computing cubes which recieved power from eachother and sent data through eachother would not only make volume web hosting easier, but it would make it much more sturdy too. Server farming screams for a standard way to pass power, air, and data between a large group of machines that are self-contained and free standing. All you need is an elegant form factor and a company willing to try to revolutionize hosting.
Sure. Collect the others that people have said, and get a get a snowballing post going.
If someone told you that the PSP is a portable gaming device, shoot these people. The PSP is not a portable gaming device, it is really a convergent portable entertainment device.
Right, because the history of convergent entertainment devices is long and illustrious. They would be fools to not want some of this action.
And going with a brand new disk standard that nobody has and nobody sells as a medium for selling movies? It's a brilliant maneuver from some of the industry's best minds.
I should say that the Sony reps I've worked with about other things have been completely with it and didn't lose sight of reality. So what happened to this guy?
But Windows Media Player is playing embedded documents. The host application playing back the stream is a codec that decodes the stream for any application that may want it, including Media Player. This is why you can download a DIVX codec and have it available in any application that may have an embedded media file marked for DIVX. Windows Media player is just a shell.
.exe file. Can Media Player still play the file? You betcha.
Do this... Install Quicktime from Apple. Delete the quicktime player
You are right in that this would be an easy demonstration to fake. But it would take longer to fake than to do the real thing.
That's not really a good analogy.
A better analogy would be like Microsoft purposely sabotoging their own document format to make it impossible for other word processors to legally interoperate with it.
Wait no, A better analogy would be like Microsoft serving up broken web pages to the browsers of competitors.
No, wait. A better analogy would be like suggesting Microsoft would break Windows so that it would refuse to run under a competitor's version of DOS.
Maybe it's like Microsoft shipping a browser that has the option to uninstall other software vendor's browsers. Or Microsoft forcing OEM's to pay them a fee for every computer they ship, with or without Windows installed. Perhaps it's like Microsoft hiding crucial API's from everyone but themselves, and when forced to expose them for all to see defining "all" as anyone who can pony up 50 thousand dollars plus additional fees. Or Microsoft attempting to ship broken versions of Java to destroy the standard. Or forcing OEM vendors to carry Microsoft ads, and only Microsoft ads, on all desktops sold. Or negotiating with another company for a year only to steal their technology. And then refusing a court order to turn over all e-mails from that period.
But all of this is metaphorical: Microsoft would never do anything like this. This is all speculative fantasy. And besides everyone in this country is innocent until proven guilty in at least 4 different courts of law.
Let's see if I can reconstruct my sources. BTW, my post wasn't intended to be a paper or taken as fact. It's a post on Slashdot. Let me repeat that: it's a post on Slashdot. I would hope interested readers would look it up for themselves.
"Hopefully, politics be damned, he will show that schools which teach abstinence-only sexual education have significantly higher rates of teenage pregnancy than districts with real sexual education courses"
What source did you get this information from?
What is defined as 'real sexual education courses'?
The latest example I've heard of came out of england a few months ago. NPR did a pretty substantial segment on it. But I've read it many places and many sources throughout the years. The American Medical Association and Planned Parenthood both have official negative stances on Abstinence-only education for this very reason.
I'm defining "real sex education courses," as one whose primary goal is to educate about sex. Education in this context is to provide a broad spectrum of information that a person will need to make informed choices. Abstinence-only isn't an education because it isn't providing information about the activity, it's just a policy to try to swear people off of it. Like how "Rock the vote" isn't really voter education, it's a get-out-the-vote drive.
"Or even that 50% of high school students are already sexually active"
What source did you get this information from?
That's a pretty widely known statistic, man: sources abound. Here's one, from the department of Health and Human Services.
"Of course, it might be stepping over the line to point out that the bible belt has the highest rates of teenage pregnancy, higher than the hedonistic blue states"
What source did you get this information from?
That would be the CDC.
While I respect almost anyone's comments don't be so hasty to bash the religious yet neglect the "scientific superiority" of cited sources. The well known and well-cited 'they' always come back to haunt you.
Whenever someone doesn't cite their sources, google it. There is a wealth of information out there at your fingertips.
Very true. I should have made that distinction.
However, the distinction does become a bit finer. It's not just a question of whether the decision was forced on the person, but how the person came to that decision. If a person decides not to do, say, LSD because they've done a thorough investigation of the effects of LSD, they know the rate of people who become insane on it, they know how situations can turn bad and how to deal with them, and the risk just isn't worth the payoff, then they are making a quite informed decision, and have enough information at their fingertips that if they do decide to indulge one day they're not going to do so while driving a car in a foreign country on a raised highway. On the other hand, another person may have simply heard that LSD is bad for you, used that as a weight in their decision making process, and come to the conclusion that drugs are bad 'mkay and that they are going to never do drugs. It's not just personal choice, it's the degree of knowledge people have about these things. To make an accurate choice, some people gain quite a strong working knowledge of the process, and that serves them quite well.
But to a lot of people, making a decision is the end of the knowledge gathering process. Do say "I will never have sex," is to say "I will never have to learn about having sex, because I'm not going to have it." Even if they come to the decision on their own, and even if that decision isn't as hollow as some of the examples I've used so far, to a lot of people that's the end of the learning process. I can tell you that the early-withdrawl method gives you zero protection against STD's, but is that common knowledge amongst people who aren't planning on having sex? If they were thorough in their investigative process before making their decision, some of they may. If they were like so many people and based their decision on what little data was presented to them, then no. Both of these people have made their own decisions, and both think that decision is based on the facts of the subject, but one of them may do something really stupid when they're put in a human situation and decide to explore.
And sex is, of course, a bit different than drugs (I probably shouldn't have generalized as much as I did), because everyone has sex at some point in their lives. Saying that you're not going to have sex is like saying you're not going to eat: it's a basic human drive, and everyone does it. People can be drug-free, and apparently 50% of Americans manage that for their entire lives. But almost nobody dies a virgin. And almost nobody gets married a virgin either, ensuring that nearly everybody who makes an "Abstinence before marriage" pledge will either change their minds or fall off the wagon. Either way, no good will come of their pledge.
I don't think Gwen Stefani is the fault of legacy in the recording industries. Gwen always said she wanted to be rick and famous. And when she was poor and playing small groups in clubs and fairgrounds, it was cute, sad... she said she wanted to be one of those annoying and famous people with her name and lights, but she basically lived out of the back of a van playing crappy gigs in traditional musician fashion. You had to empathize with her, because everyone knows musicians in that situation. And you have to admit, Tragic Kingdom had some original and interesting tracks on it.
But Gwen is now exactly who she wanted to be. She has become the rich, famous, self-centered girl she always was, only now she's actually rich and famous. That which allowed her fans to empathize with her, and her with her fans, is gone. And in it's place are terrible covers of If I Were a Rich Man (I didn't think It's My Life was that bad), and vaccuous cameos in Kid Rock videos. I don't think this happened because she lost control over her music, so much as the change in lifestyle which comes with money made her lose connection with her audience.
A similar problem struck Alanis Morisette. Radio overplay aside, Alanis had always composed music because she was unhappy. And her audience responded to this. Enough people responded, that soon she was rich, successful, and gave her the power to solve her problems and make herself happy. Which she did. And she lost the drive to make music. Eventually she found it again (she gives a great interview about this), but because she was no longer singing about being tortured, she lost the audience that had that connection with her.
Most artists don't survive the transition from poor no-name slob to rich superstar simply because they sing about their experiences, and their experiences go from things everyone can relate to, to experiences very few people on the planet have. What would Bill Gates sing about that any of us here would connect to? Compiler woes? Kobain was highly relatable up until the end simply because he suffered the entire time. Dr Dre still raps about the kids in the hood and yelling at his grandma on the front porch, despite the fact that he owns million dollar mansions and essentially lives like an investment banker for talent.
The point is that the problems with the music industry that you had pointed out are not so much with legacy, but money. Too much money and too much success will destroy pretty much any artist. Even overthrowing the big 5 wouldn't change that.
What?
So you're saying that pointing out the fundamental flaws in DRM is being a dick, because other people have knee-jerk reactions to it?
Now the chip-in-your computer analogy is ridiculous. Nobody is going to force application developers to sign their executables. For one, they change far too frequently. For another, downloaded software would cease to function. For a third, it would be grossly anticompetitive in a way that even the US government would ignore. And if you don't sign your executables... what's the point?
Second, how would a secure computing platform work? You would still need virtualization capabilities. And once you can virtualize a platform, you can do pretty much whatever you want with it.
Third, how would a remote computer connecting to mine even realize that I was on a trusted computer or not? It's all information sent back over TCP-IP packets, packets that can be faked. If the key is in the hardware, and the hardware is running an SSH tunnel to the server, well we just hack the hardware, figure out what key it is using, and setup our own SSH tunnels in an application no more invasive than this one. Depending on the type of protection, there is a always a viable counterattack because information sufficient to decrypt the stream must be present on the host machine. Even if the host machine itself attmpts to deny access to itself it can be run virtually, and the important bits picked out directly. Even if it is hardware based you can listen to the pins. And ultimately none of this results in the end-user needing to do anything more than install a small piece of software to bypass once the protection system's keys are known.
DeCSS is exactly the same as you're proposing. It was a hardware implementation of trusted computing. And if failed miserably because even if you offload the knowledge to the hardware, the hardware still has to know how to decrypt a file or it won't work.
The fact of the matter is DRM in it's current incarnation is fundamentally flawed.
I work in an industry where DRM has been a fact of life for many, many years, and the best a DRM system can hope to do is delay the inevitable crack by two weeks. But that's enough for game developers, and we continue on. The music and movie industries will have to live with the idea that their content is going to be cracked, and that is just a cost of doing business.
You have to remember that publishers aren't the greatest at economic theory, even if it is their field. No offense to a lot of the great publishers I've worked with in the past, and I have worked with some good people, but some of them used to be toothbrush salesmen. They're not likely to see a price drop as advantageous if they just spent 100 million in licensing. The whole concept of sunk costs isn't as prevalent as it should be, and the natural instinct is to raise prices when you've invested more... in this case probably a lot more than they should have. You need to recover your cost, so you raise prices, sales curve be damned.
If this doesn't effect consumer price, it will more than likely effect quality. At 400 million dollars for 6 years at 6 companies, that's 11 million dollars per game. If these games already had 20 million dollar budgets (and here's a hint: they didn't), that leaves 9 million to actually develop them.
The pledging group was also less likely to use condoms during their first sexual experience or get tested for STDs, the researchers found.
This is one of those sad realities that you see day in and day out, even with otherwise well balanced people. If there is an activity that you swear off, and promise never to do, invariably it will be done and it will be done irresponsibly. The people in college who really burned out their brains on drugs were the ones in High School who swore they would never do any. The people didn't use condoms were the ones who swore they would never have premarital sex. By swearing off an activity, these people weren't mentally prepared to engage in the activity in a rational fashion. When people fall off the wagon, they fall hard.
To pull this back towards topic, hopefully this is the kind of controversial reasearch that Bill Nye will tackle. Hopefully, politics be damned, he will show that schools which teach abstinence-only sexual education have significantly higher rates of teenage pregnancy than districts with real sexual education courses, even accounting for things like income disparity and location. Or even that 50% of high school students are already sexually active, and educational programs should be tailored to this fact. Of course, it might be stepping over the line to point out that the bible belt has the highest rates of teenage pregnancy, higher than the hedonistic blue states, but no fact should be too controversial for Bill Nye.
Please, please let no fact be too controversial for Bill Nye. Please tell me he doesn't have to cut a story on life forms in aquatic thermal vents because it makes passing reference to evolution.
Tell this guy to take his "subsidized rates" and shove 'em.
Tell this guy to take his "subsidized rates" and raise'em. You're the only developer, so you're the only one who knows how their system works. That makes you extremely valuable, at least in the short term.
Dirt-cheap on call computer support (like me) is generally 50 dollars an hour. Good techies who know their stuff should be about 100. People who have extra special knowledge, like being the only person on the planet who knows how that server works, can easily get 200 or more.
Your employer can't not let you go. They can't demand that you stay six weeks. The fact that they're so admant about keeping you for as long as possible should show you how much power you have in this situation.
I'd say that if they've been great to you, of course be nice when leaving and maybe even do some light on-call stuff over the phone for free. But if they were being nice to you they wouldn't have tripled your workload... they would have hired people to replace the developers they lost.
Of course, you could go another route. What are the chances that they would agree to letting you drop down to 20 hours per week at the same salary? It happened to a very close friend of mine, who suddenly had both the money and the time to enjoy her life. It could happen to you too.
Assuming an industrial oil drum in a light-industrial zone is 200 square feet, or a square of roadway, then yes, about 200 feet per block sounds about right. The bigger question is, of course, how many sims can attend your convention, and will it work without water and power?