We do have atonomous weapon AI, right now. They're just not particularly bright. And so far, for the most part we've adhered to the "human must give green light to fire" principal, except in automated defence systems.
How's this set of principles:
Automated systems can fire on other automated systems willy-nilly, assuming no people are likely to be in the fire zone.
Automated systems can fire on people, but only if that person is pointing a weapon at the machine or at the people the machine is there to protect.
Automated systems cannot fire on people whom it cannot readily identify as containing a weapon, and as such must fall back on human operators then.
The weapons system must use two forms of verification to identify friend or foe.
All these laws are flexible depending upon the situation, such that an automated system trying to protect an area from a careening car bomb could open fire on the wheels of the vehicle, or a ship-to-ship missile defence system could fire on a careening object, be it manned or unmanned.
If you don't agree to the EULA, then don't use Windows. It's that simple.
If you don't agree to the EULA, don't abide by it. Write letters, make noise, RETURN COPIES OF THE SOFTWARE TO THE STORE, and generally make a big, fat mess of things. Nothing will change unless you do.
Companies need to know that they don't own the things that they've already sold. That once they've made their money, the usage of it is out of their hands. Putting terms and conditions into an introduction written on the inside of a box that everyone knows you can't return does not make for a legal contract or moral agreement.
Make a mess of things, or things won't get better.
It's possible to run multiple monitors under both Linux and Windows without any problems.
For me, Windows Media Player seems to crash if you run it on a multiple graphics card/multiple monitor setup. All other video playback was questionable depending on if it used WMP to play back or not. YMMV, but it didn't work that well for me.
While I agree with your general point, you're oversimplifying. Schools have always existed in a constitutional grey area... it's not a total free speech zone, but it is an enforced government area that is therefore afforded certain protections under the law. Most of these protections and rules are outside of certain constitutionally defined boundaries, because it was never necessary to define what those boundaries are in a constitutional amendment.
For example, so long as there isn't a negative impact on education, courts have repeatedly ruled that students have a right to distribute their independent newspapers on school grounds, although the various districts have a right to limit the times of the distributions so as not to cause disruption. You have the right to organize any student group that doesn't contradict the educational mission of the HS. You have the right to protest.
Check the following link for more information about your rights as a student. It's California specific, but other states follow similar rules.
The trouble is, people have been expanding the DMCA to cover things like ink cartridges and garage door openers when it actually is very limited in scope. The DMCA prevents you from making or distributing technological means of circumventing a copyright protection schema. This specifically means that it would cover the case of someone trying to duplicate the client CD's. It does not cover cheating.
Blizzard / Vivendi is trying to extend the DMCA to mean that any application scripting and macroing is illegal. This means that not only would you be banned for doing something the game developer doesn't like, but that their decrees would have a jail sentence behind it. This seems wrong to me, both morally and legally.
Now, as a game developer, I think WoW cheaters should be hit hard and fast with the banstick, and think that MMO's should consider gathering together to create clustered bans... I.E. get banned from one MMO, and you're out of most of them. I hate online cheaters with a passion reserved for those who have to deal with them. But I don't think that constitutes legal grounds to send people to jail for the DMCA-specified term of 10 years.
You have the right to script your computer. And they have the right to never let you play their game again. But they don't have the right to incarcerate you for years for it. So guard your rights, or any time any company asks you not to do something they'll be able to throw you in jail for it.
Can anyone update an old timer as to the state of calculator development? When I was getting out of these things, it looked like TI and HP were going to have a duel to the death. With color LCD's on the verge of availability and the Power PC line of low-power chips set to overtake the world, it looked like a bright future of powerful visualizations.
Fifteen years on, it looks like the high-end calculator market has all but been abandoned to mathematica. Prices for the calculators haven't budged a dollar, while the price of all of the components have dropped to next to nothing.
Who is still making these things? Who, if anyone, is still competing?
Well, say it takes 5 seconds to switch between applications. Say you do that 10 times an hour. Add in the information that you need to see in one application vs another, with, say, 60 seconds of time to do so, which happens 4 times a day. That's 640 seconds per day, or an additional 10 minutes of productivity. With a cheap CRT costing 50 bucks, the productivity gain on the above lightest-case scenario pays for itself in the first week easily.
And if they still won't let you have it, just pick one up off the street and bring it in from home. Mark it as personal hardware, and tell the bean counters to sod off.
I don't think I'm giving too much away when I say that these prices aren't EB accidentally releasing info early. They really are complete out-of-the-blue guesses on their part.
I really wish they'd wait until they had solid information before taking people's money. Oh well, that's their business model and it doesn't look to be changing any time soon.
IANAL, and this might have been a canadian ruling, but I believe the courts ruled that the uploader was making the copy, and the downloader was merely the recipient of that copy. Of course, US courts have said that making something available is the same as making copies even if nobody ever downloaded it, so YMMBCFU.
That having been said, I just came back from a week-long vacation where two of us had good cameras. We took about 7GB of photos and video between us, all of which will be uploaded to a backup server. I've also downloaded 3GB of operating systems this month (SkyOS, TriangleOS, and SyllableOS's I believe), and perhaps 5GB of game demos (at about 1 GB each).
5GB total is tiny. You'll get about that if you're downloading cumulative XP patches, or streaming music a lot.
I distinctly remember TMNT on the NES hitting slow down on the first level, and basically whenever there were multiple enemies on-screen and any of them were attacking. Likewise, things would flicker more or less whenever a turtle would swing their weapon, as well as whenever you had multiple enemies on-screen. The controls were pretty consistent if you could take the slowdown into account, but it always ran poorly.
I wish Nintendo wouldn't emulate the slow-down for most games. Sure, it fit, but it really wasn't the good bit of the experience.
Blaster Master was reasonable if you mapped passages yourself, and kept logs of where opportunities for climbing / diving / etc might show up, when you got powers later. Navigation is the main problem of that game, rather than survival.
If you are feeling low, enemies disappear and re-appear as you scroll from screen to screen. Just find a good spot, and scroll back and forth killing stuff until you've refilled your power, then keep going.
It takes a while to find out where all you need to go, but it's totally worth the playthrough.
There is also the problem of fairness in a 3d world with limited visible information. If you're playing a 2D sidescrolling game... Kid Icarus, for example. If you're playing that little gem of impossible difficulty, and you happen to hit a descending stream of little grim reapers while jumping across a pit, you believe the hit was fair because you could have known it was there and avoided it. In a 3D world, you can't guarantee the player will see the object which may damage them, thus making the hit too cheap. Tighten that difficulty level too high, and you're ensuring that a player will die repeatedly from cheap shots rather than tactical mistakes.
Likewise, in a true 3D world the collision detection is necessarily quite fuzzy, as are the controls. If you were playing with a character in the 3rd person who has a 3 foot sword he lunges with, you'd never know if you're close enough to hit an object, about to go sailing past everything, or if you're just lost. Look at the swords in God of War... they hit almost everything within about 50 feet in front of you. Now look at the sword you carried in Rush 'n Attack (another bloody hard game). it was about 8 pixels long, and you used that throughout the entire game. If that level of precision and range were carried over to 3d, you'd die repeatedly from mis-judging distanced.
As a third bit, games back in the day needed to rely upon difficulty and skill because there were few other ways to keep the player going. These days, you can give the player abilities, drive the story forwards, switch between playable characters, give the player main and sub-goals with corresponding achievements, reward them with stats upgrades, or what have you. If you rotate through all of the hooks that you have, you never have to pad the game by forcing the player to a high degree of mastery. You simply use the tools at hand to create a compelling experience. Metroid Prime was the perfect example of this, but many others exist.
It was a little understood and little played TG16 game, where you combine the adventuring, leveling, and equipment elements of a traditional RPG, but with a sidescrolling world. It was a lot like zelda II, but done right and without an overworld map.
If adventure games are your thing, I recommend playing this frequently overlooked gem.
I had a sad realization today, reading an earlier Slashdot post. To beat Windows (much less Mac OS) on the desktop of people who are not early adopters, Linux does not have to be as good -- as I believe it is, on balance. Rather, it has to be better, and conspicuously better.
The theory in games is not that you have to be conspicuously better, but that you have to do ONE THING which the other systems do not do. That it isn't the cumulative value of all of the little upgrades, but one significant bit of functionality that a person would want which makes a person switch.
In that way, Linux doesn't need to be conspicuously better overall. It needs to be massively better in a specific way that matters to the person in question.
Mac and PC sit outside a doctor's office wearing white robes. Linux walks by, then turns around to look.
Mac and PC shuffle uncomfortably and look away.
"Hi mac, Hi PC."
"Oh, hi Linux" they mumble.
"What are you guys doing here?"
"Oh, I, Errrr..." they mumble for a few seconds.
"What's wrong?"
"Look" says Windows "I've got 97,467 viruses."
OSX and Linux both back away from Windows. "That's terrible" says Mac "How did that happen?"
"Years of old code, the rush to the market, some fast programming, you know. Aren't you here for the same?"
"Symantec said I should come get checked out. They think it's just a matter of time before I'm sick as a dog. Shouldn't you get tested too, Linux."
Linux, now seriously creeped out and edging away. "I've got thousands of people around the world checking me out and making sure I'm well built and healthy. And I'm gonna stay that way. So if you don't mind, I'll see you later."
They watch her go. Windows lifts his head to Mac "That could have gone better."
Unfortunately, without tactile feedback as to the position of your fingers on the keys, it's pretty easy to get lost. You use the edges of the keys to calibrate your fingers on a moment-to-moment basis, even if you don't realize it. And the deceleration of a rubber mat is a lot more forgiving on your fingers than tapping away on a cheap particle board desktop.
So it's a good idea, but in practice it falls a little short.
It's quite different over here. It's not just a question of experimenting with OSS, it's a combination of seeing the job as deciding between presentations from different vendors and being averse to taking personal risks.
As I mentioned, it seems like people have stopped doing their own research and now mainly choose between different schpiels from different vendors. Vendor 1 selling you something for 100,000 dollars, and vendor 2 selling it to you for 50,000? Clearly if you go with vendor 2, you've saved the company 50,000 dollars a year. No need to point out vendor 3, who doesn't have a substantial sales team but who sells something identical for 5,000 dollars per year, or an OSS solution which might need 1,000 dollars per year worth of tweaks. Or maybe it makes sense for you to write your own. We generally have a 2-vendor solution, and nobody can fault you for choosing the better of the two, right?
The risk-aversion deepens. In corporate US if you create a product that everyone else is making, your job is reasonably safe even if it tanks. And, in fact, simply because everyone else is making it, it's likely to tank. On the other hand, if you create something original (i.e. something with an open market) and it tanks, it's more likely that your career will bear the brunt of that mistake. OSS is currently viewed a lot like that. Taking risks is largely regarded as a negative, and certainly regarded as a dangerous career move.
One does not experiment with OSS, because one does not experiment. One either knows for sure, or one contracts a vendor who will bear the brunt of the responsibility when things might go wrong.
Caveat: I've always wanted to get into educational gaming, but never have.
Fundamentally, gaming can teach one thing: the game. Number munchers was very good at teaching how to quickly solve math problems while avoiding ghosts. Sim City taught resource management in a constrained system, as well as the civic arrangements that the city bothered to model.
In other words, gaming teaches you HOW to do something. And if how you do something requires knowing facts, ala Carmen San Diego, then those facts can be levereged in as a secondary learning effect. Or your implements that you use might require knowledge... what they do, why they're there, etc. But gaming is not about facts, largely. It's about optimizing for a viable solution when an optimal solution is not apparent. In other words, if you wanted to teach airflow to kids, you could show them diagrams and sheets and stuff, or you could have them build an airplane in software and see how far they all fly. In the former case, they might memorize the theory. In the latter, they'll gain an intuitive sense for the forces involved.
It doesn't make sense to offload some things onto gaming. The raw facts of history, for example, is generally poorly taught by gaming. Just look at all of the world war 2 games out there, and how little the players understand the intricacies of that political and physical conflict. But by the same token one only has to look as far as Sim City players to see people beginning to come to grips with the intricacies of local politics. And no matter how many training videos you show someone, they're really not going to become good drivers unless you put them in front of a simulator.
Really, the question should be "how applicable is this particular subject / piece of information to teaching this subject." If you wanted to teach how a nuclear power plant works, a videogame about a nuclear meltdown would be entirely appropriate. If you wanted to teach about immigration patterns in the US in the 1700's, videogaming would be less useful.
Gaming is the ability to poke at something and have that change the outcome. Again, this is perfect for finding out how something works. This is not so useful for learning what happened. If that's your goal, just make / use a video.
To those who say that the kids never remembered the extra historical facts from Oregon Trail: How much of the other junk you learned at that time do you remember?
Why isn't the software that manages your medical history public domain, given that the public healthcare system funded it.
True. That should be too.
That said, why isn't that medical history itself public domain? While we're on that, why am I not able to walk into a public library and read your driver's license, birth records, marriage records, medical history, criminal records, and so forth?
Actually, a lot of that winds up in court records, at least here in the US. You can walk in and read any public court records that you like, with certain restrictions on classified information and children and the like.
Oh, that's right, because being funded by public money does NOT automatically entail public ownership.
I think the point is that unless necessary to protect security or privacy, it probably should be public. Certainly, there isn't a particularly compelling argument why software tools like this shouldn't be made public. And with certain things, like drug patents developed entirely with public money, one could argue a moral imperative that it be accessible and usable by anyone. Most software doesn't rise to that level, but now Sweden has funded the development of a piece of software which is now exclusively at the whims of an American company, in exchange for some paltry income. Was the software developed to be an income source, or to help people?
Or possibly they start to accept that torture is probably being done in our current anti-terrorism efforts, which many people still don't believe. Or maybe it shows them how easy it is to do, and the sort of safeguards we would need against it.
The glorification aspects is troubling, but people can be so fundamentally blind to what is going on out there, any sort of exposure seems somehow helpful. Now we just need The Seige to be required watching on NBC primetime.
If you put your servers physically in the hands of an attacker, there is nothing you can do to stop them quite by definition.
Of course there is. You can encrypt drives, encrypt information, use secure Mobos, etc.
As responsible for the integrity of your network, you're also responsible to let people know the level of physical security your network requires. As the article mentions, the servers were password-protected and expected to be secure. With physical access, the hackers got a suprisingly high level of penetration into the system without actually breaking it.
It seems that the only way to win this competition on the defensive would have been to re-install the latest fedora core on all four machines, and setup services that you trust instead of MS services, then hunker down and physically guard the boxes.
There was no way to "win" on the offensive. The offense wasn't being tested. The test was to see, basically, which group of sysadmins could outsurvive the rest. It wasn't an unfair competition between hackers and defenders. It was a task guaranteed to take out boxes, to see which team could best slow down the inevitable onslaught.
In a production environment you don't necessarily get to set the policy on what servers you are running, and off of what boxes. You inherit a messed up pile of old systems, legacy software that nobody can update anymore, buggy drivers, and Windows users installing trojans and giving their passwords away to the first person who comes along with a YourCompanySecurity username on AIM. The fact that they took the end users out of the equation was a huge blessing to the sysadmins.
Notice that they made damned sure that none of these computers were attached to the internet at the time of the task. These weren't the best of the best hackers the competition could find. These were a small pool of good hackers vs a small pool of sysadmins. If they had actually put these things on the internet, like production environments face every day, they would not have survived.
You spent forty four thousand, four hundred fourty two dollars, with no less than eight hard drives, forty-eight gigs of ram, and three years of onsite gold enterprise level support... But you cheaped out on the DVD drive?
Slashdot Mirror
We do have atonomous weapon AI, right now. They're just not particularly bright. And so far, for the most part we've adhered to the "human must give green light to fire" principal, except in automated defence systems.
How's this set of principles:
Automated systems can fire on other automated systems willy-nilly, assuming no people are likely to be in the fire zone.
Automated systems can fire on people, but only if that person is pointing a weapon at the machine or at the people the machine is there to protect.
Automated systems cannot fire on people whom it cannot readily identify as containing a weapon, and as such must fall back on human operators then.
The weapons system must use two forms of verification to identify friend or foe.
All these laws are flexible depending upon the situation, such that an automated system trying to protect an area from a careening car bomb could open fire on the wheels of the vehicle, or a ship-to-ship missile defence system could fire on a careening object, be it manned or unmanned.
If you don't agree to the EULA, then don't use Windows. It's that simple.
If you don't agree to the EULA, don't abide by it. Write letters, make noise, RETURN COPIES OF THE SOFTWARE TO THE STORE, and generally make a big, fat mess of things. Nothing will change unless you do.
Companies need to know that they don't own the things that they've already sold. That once they've made their money, the usage of it is out of their hands. Putting terms and conditions into an introduction written on the inside of a box that everyone knows you can't return does not make for a legal contract or moral agreement.
Make a mess of things, or things won't get better.
It's possible to run multiple monitors under both Linux and Windows without any problems.
For me, Windows Media Player seems to crash if you run it on a multiple graphics card/multiple monitor setup. All other video playback was questionable depending on if it used WMP to play back or not. YMMV, but it didn't work that well for me.
While I agree with your general point, you're oversimplifying. Schools have always existed in a constitutional grey area... it's not a total free speech zone, but it is an enforced government area that is therefore afforded certain protections under the law. Most of these protections and rules are outside of certain constitutionally defined boundaries, because it was never necessary to define what those boundaries are in a constitutional amendment.
For example, so long as there isn't a negative impact on education, courts have repeatedly ruled that students have a right to distribute their independent newspapers on school grounds, although the various districts have a right to limit the times of the distributions so as not to cause disruption. You have the right to organize any student group that doesn't contradict the educational mission of the HS. You have the right to protest.
Check the following link for more information about your rights as a student. It's California specific, but other states follow similar rules.
http://www.comdsd.org/pdf/hs_1.pdf
Generally, the case in video games is that prices are set by the publisher, not the developer.
Just sayin'...
The trouble is, people have been expanding the DMCA to cover things like ink cartridges and garage door openers when it actually is very limited in scope. The DMCA prevents you from making or distributing technological means of circumventing a copyright protection schema. This specifically means that it would cover the case of someone trying to duplicate the client CD's. It does not cover cheating.
Blizzard / Vivendi is trying to extend the DMCA to mean that any application scripting and macroing is illegal. This means that not only would you be banned for doing something the game developer doesn't like, but that their decrees would have a jail sentence behind it. This seems wrong to me, both morally and legally.
Now, as a game developer, I think WoW cheaters should be hit hard and fast with the banstick, and think that MMO's should consider gathering together to create clustered bans... I.E. get banned from one MMO, and you're out of most of them. I hate online cheaters with a passion reserved for those who have to deal with them. But I don't think that constitutes legal grounds to send people to jail for the DMCA-specified term of 10 years.
You have the right to script your computer. And they have the right to never let you play their game again. But they don't have the right to incarcerate you for years for it. So guard your rights, or any time any company asks you not to do something they'll be able to throw you in jail for it.
Can anyone update an old timer as to the state of calculator development? When I was getting out of these things, it looked like TI and HP were going to have a duel to the death. With color LCD's on the verge of availability and the Power PC line of low-power chips set to overtake the world, it looked like a bright future of powerful visualizations.
Fifteen years on, it looks like the high-end calculator market has all but been abandoned to mathematica. Prices for the calculators haven't budged a dollar, while the price of all of the components have dropped to next to nothing.
Who is still making these things? Who, if anyone, is still competing?
If WoW gold is a taxable value exchange, can I pay my taxes with it?
Well, say it takes 5 seconds to switch between applications. Say you do that 10 times an hour. Add in the information that you need to see in one application vs another, with, say, 60 seconds of time to do so, which happens 4 times a day. That's 640 seconds per day, or an additional 10 minutes of productivity. With a cheap CRT costing 50 bucks, the productivity gain on the above lightest-case scenario pays for itself in the first week easily.
And if they still won't let you have it, just pick one up off the street and bring it in from home. Mark it as personal hardware, and tell the bean counters to sod off.
I don't think I'm giving too much away when I say that these prices aren't EB accidentally releasing info early. They really are complete out-of-the-blue guesses on their part.
I really wish they'd wait until they had solid information before taking people's money. Oh well, that's their business model and it doesn't look to be changing any time soon.
IANAL, and this might have been a canadian ruling, but I believe the courts ruled that the uploader was making the copy, and the downloader was merely the recipient of that copy. Of course, US courts have said that making something available is the same as making copies even if nobody ever downloaded it, so YMMBCFU.
That having been said, I just came back from a week-long vacation where two of us had good cameras. We took about 7GB of photos and video between us, all of which will be uploaded to a backup server. I've also downloaded 3GB of operating systems this month (SkyOS, TriangleOS, and SyllableOS's I believe), and perhaps 5GB of game demos (at about 1 GB each).
5GB total is tiny. You'll get about that if you're downloading cumulative XP patches, or streaming music a lot.
I distinctly remember TMNT on the NES hitting slow down on the first level, and basically whenever there were multiple enemies on-screen and any of them were attacking. Likewise, things would flicker more or less whenever a turtle would swing their weapon, as well as whenever you had multiple enemies on-screen. The controls were pretty consistent if you could take the slowdown into account, but it always ran poorly.
I wish Nintendo wouldn't emulate the slow-down for most games. Sure, it fit, but it really wasn't the good bit of the experience.
Blaster Master was reasonable if you mapped passages yourself, and kept logs of where opportunities for climbing / diving / etc might show up, when you got powers later. Navigation is the main problem of that game, rather than survival.
If you are feeling low, enemies disappear and re-appear as you scroll from screen to screen. Just find a good spot, and scroll back and forth killing stuff until you've refilled your power, then keep going.
It takes a while to find out where all you need to go, but it's totally worth the playthrough.
There is also the problem of fairness in a 3d world with limited visible information. If you're playing a 2D sidescrolling game... Kid Icarus, for example. If you're playing that little gem of impossible difficulty, and you happen to hit a descending stream of little grim reapers while jumping across a pit, you believe the hit was fair because you could have known it was there and avoided it. In a 3D world, you can't guarantee the player will see the object which may damage them, thus making the hit too cheap. Tighten that difficulty level too high, and you're ensuring that a player will die repeatedly from cheap shots rather than tactical mistakes.
Likewise, in a true 3D world the collision detection is necessarily quite fuzzy, as are the controls. If you were playing with a character in the 3rd person who has a 3 foot sword he lunges with, you'd never know if you're close enough to hit an object, about to go sailing past everything, or if you're just lost. Look at the swords in God of War... they hit almost everything within about 50 feet in front of you. Now look at the sword you carried in Rush 'n Attack (another bloody hard game). it was about 8 pixels long, and you used that throughout the entire game. If that level of precision and range were carried over to 3d, you'd die repeatedly from mis-judging distanced.
As a third bit, games back in the day needed to rely upon difficulty and skill because there were few other ways to keep the player going. These days, you can give the player abilities, drive the story forwards, switch between playable characters, give the player main and sub-goals with corresponding achievements, reward them with stats upgrades, or what have you. If you rotate through all of the hooks that you have, you never have to pad the game by forcing the player to a high degree of mastery. You simply use the tools at hand to create a compelling experience. Metroid Prime was the perfect example of this, but many others exist.
It was a little understood and little played TG16 game, where you combine the adventuring, leveling, and equipment elements of a traditional RPG, but with a sidescrolling world. It was a lot like zelda II, but done right and without an overworld map.
If adventure games are your thing, I recommend playing this frequently overlooked gem.
I had a sad realization today, reading an earlier Slashdot post. To beat Windows (much less Mac OS) on the desktop of people who are not early adopters, Linux does not have to be as good -- as I believe it is, on balance. Rather, it has to be better, and conspicuously better.
The theory in games is not that you have to be conspicuously better, but that you have to do ONE THING which the other systems do not do. That it isn't the cumulative value of all of the little upgrades, but one significant bit of functionality that a person would want which makes a person switch.
In that way, Linux doesn't need to be conspicuously better overall. It needs to be massively better in a specific way that matters to the person in question.
Mac and PC sit outside a doctor's office wearing white robes. Linux walks by, then turns around to look.
Mac and PC shuffle uncomfortably and look away.
"Hi mac, Hi PC."
"Oh, hi Linux" they mumble.
"What are you guys doing here?"
"Oh, I, Errrr..." they mumble for a few seconds.
"What's wrong?"
"Look" says Windows "I've got 97,467 viruses."
OSX and Linux both back away from Windows. "That's terrible" says Mac "How did that happen?"
"Years of old code, the rush to the market, some fast programming, you know. Aren't you here for the same?"
"Symantec said I should come get checked out. They think it's just a matter of time before I'm sick as a dog. Shouldn't you get tested too, Linux."
Linux, now seriously creeped out and edging away. "I've got thousands of people around the world checking me out and making sure I'm well built and healthy. And I'm gonna stay that way. So if you don't mind, I'll see you later."
They watch her go. Windows lifts his head to Mac "That could have gone better."
"Shut up."
Think geek sells the "Laser" keyboard.
Unfortunately, without tactile feedback as to the position of your fingers on the keys, it's pretty easy to get lost. You use the edges of the keys to calibrate your fingers on a moment-to-moment basis, even if you don't realize it. And the deceleration of a rubber mat is a lot more forgiving on your fingers than tapping away on a cheap particle board desktop.
So it's a good idea, but in practice it falls a little short.
It's quite different over here. It's not just a question of experimenting with OSS, it's a combination of seeing the job as deciding between presentations from different vendors and being averse to taking personal risks.
As I mentioned, it seems like people have stopped doing their own research and now mainly choose between different schpiels from different vendors. Vendor 1 selling you something for 100,000 dollars, and vendor 2 selling it to you for 50,000? Clearly if you go with vendor 2, you've saved the company 50,000 dollars a year. No need to point out vendor 3, who doesn't have a substantial sales team but who sells something identical for 5,000 dollars per year, or an OSS solution which might need 1,000 dollars per year worth of tweaks. Or maybe it makes sense for you to write your own. We generally have a 2-vendor solution, and nobody can fault you for choosing the better of the two, right?
The risk-aversion deepens. In corporate US if you create a product that everyone else is making, your job is reasonably safe even if it tanks. And, in fact, simply because everyone else is making it, it's likely to tank. On the other hand, if you create something original (i.e. something with an open market) and it tanks, it's more likely that your career will bear the brunt of that mistake. OSS is currently viewed a lot like that. Taking risks is largely regarded as a negative, and certainly regarded as a dangerous career move.
One does not experiment with OSS, because one does not experiment. One either knows for sure, or one contracts a vendor who will bear the brunt of the responsibility when things might go wrong.
Perfect places for gaming:
Dance Dance Revolution (P.E.)
Driving Games (Driver's Ed)
Sim City (Civics... do they still have that?)
MindRover (Engineering)
Other games might be good for other subjects, but these at least are inarguable and above reproach.
Caveat: I've always wanted to get into educational gaming, but never have.
Fundamentally, gaming can teach one thing: the game. Number munchers was very good at teaching how to quickly solve math problems while avoiding ghosts. Sim City taught resource management in a constrained system, as well as the civic arrangements that the city bothered to model.
In other words, gaming teaches you HOW to do something. And if how you do something requires knowing facts, ala Carmen San Diego, then those facts can be levereged in as a secondary learning effect. Or your implements that you use might require knowledge... what they do, why they're there, etc. But gaming is not about facts, largely. It's about optimizing for a viable solution when an optimal solution is not apparent. In other words, if you wanted to teach airflow to kids, you could show them diagrams and sheets and stuff, or you could have them build an airplane in software and see how far they all fly. In the former case, they might memorize the theory. In the latter, they'll gain an intuitive sense for the forces involved.
It doesn't make sense to offload some things onto gaming. The raw facts of history, for example, is generally poorly taught by gaming. Just look at all of the world war 2 games out there, and how little the players understand the intricacies of that political and physical conflict. But by the same token one only has to look as far as Sim City players to see people beginning to come to grips with the intricacies of local politics. And no matter how many training videos you show someone, they're really not going to become good drivers unless you put them in front of a simulator.
Really, the question should be "how applicable is this particular subject / piece of information to teaching this subject." If you wanted to teach how a nuclear power plant works, a videogame about a nuclear meltdown would be entirely appropriate. If you wanted to teach about immigration patterns in the US in the 1700's, videogaming would be less useful.
Gaming is the ability to poke at something and have that change the outcome. Again, this is perfect for finding out how something works. This is not so useful for learning what happened. If that's your goal, just make / use a video.
To those who say that the kids never remembered the extra historical facts from Oregon Trail: How much of the other junk you learned at that time do you remember?
Why isn't the software that manages your medical history public domain, given that the public healthcare system funded it.
True. That should be too.
That said, why isn't that medical history itself public domain? While we're on that, why am I not able to walk into a public library and read your driver's license, birth records, marriage records, medical history, criminal records, and so forth?
Actually, a lot of that winds up in court records, at least here in the US. You can walk in and read any public court records that you like, with certain restrictions on classified information and children and the like.
Oh, that's right, because being funded by public money does NOT automatically entail public ownership.
I think the point is that unless necessary to protect security or privacy, it probably should be public. Certainly, there isn't a particularly compelling argument why software tools like this shouldn't be made public. And with certain things, like drug patents developed entirely with public money, one could argue a moral imperative that it be accessible and usable by anyone. Most software doesn't rise to that level, but now Sweden has funded the development of a piece of software which is now exclusively at the whims of an American company, in exchange for some paltry income. Was the software developed to be an income source, or to help people?
Or possibly they start to accept that torture is probably being done in our current anti-terrorism efforts, which many people still don't believe. Or maybe it shows them how easy it is to do, and the sort of safeguards we would need against it.
The glorification aspects is troubling, but people can be so fundamentally blind to what is going on out there, any sort of exposure seems somehow helpful. Now we just need The Seige to be required watching on NBC primetime.
If you put your servers physically in the hands of an attacker, there is nothing you can do to stop them quite by definition.
Of course there is. You can encrypt drives, encrypt information, use secure Mobos, etc.
As responsible for the integrity of your network, you're also responsible to let people know the level of physical security your network requires. As the article mentions, the servers were password-protected and expected to be secure. With physical access, the hackers got a suprisingly high level of penetration into the system without actually breaking it.
It seems that the only way to win this competition on the defensive would have been to re-install the latest fedora core on all four machines, and setup services that you trust instead of MS services, then hunker down and physically guard the boxes.
There was no way to "win" on the offensive. The offense wasn't being tested. The test was to see, basically, which group of sysadmins could outsurvive the rest. It wasn't an unfair competition between hackers and defenders. It was a task guaranteed to take out boxes, to see which team could best slow down the inevitable onslaught.
In a production environment you don't necessarily get to set the policy on what servers you are running, and off of what boxes. You inherit a messed up pile of old systems, legacy software that nobody can update anymore, buggy drivers, and Windows users installing trojans and giving their passwords away to the first person who comes along with a YourCompanySecurity username on AIM. The fact that they took the end users out of the equation was a huge blessing to the sysadmins.
Notice that they made damned sure that none of these computers were attached to the internet at the time of the task. These weren't the best of the best hackers the competition could find. These were a small pool of good hackers vs a small pool of sysadmins. If they had actually put these things on the internet, like production environments face every day, they would not have survived.
Hence, the pre-installed keyloggers.
You spent forty four thousand, four hundred fourty two dollars, with no less than eight hard drives, forty-eight gigs of ram, and three years of onsite gold enterprise level support... But you cheaped out on the DVD drive?
Man, spend the extra twenty bucks!