What I prefer are the "Special Advertising Sections" (as written in 6-point white-on-lightblue type) in magazines ranging from the NY Times Magazine to PC World. All of a sudden, you're reading a magazine and bam, the paper feels glossier, the typeface and layout changes dramatically, and there are lots of smiley people and marketing buzzwords all over the place.
I guess they're picking on people too lazy or stupid to know the difference between an "advertorial" (your term, I like it) and a real review. Of course, in cases like ZDNet, sometimes the line blurs a bit.
Schools get sued if they post the 10 commandments or let students pray at graduation.
Forgive me if I'm starting yet another flamewar in this thread, but the schools get sued if they sanction student prayer, i.e. "Welcome to the Smithville High School graduation. Before we start, let us pray."
I'm as cynical as the rest of them about censorship in schools, but students can pray whenever they want. Schools can't force them, but I've known a few kids who prayed in (public) schools without any (major, prolonged) outcry.
...could a discussion about a violent video game escalate into a discourse on why eating meat and animal-related products is wrong, even before a comment is posted.
Napster does NOT store songs or a song database on their servers.
You're half-right. While Napster itself doesn't hold songs, it does host a directory of who has what. When you run Napster for the first time, it scans the directories that you're sharing and sends a list of files to the server. Searches are sent to and received back from the server, and only _then_ can a user download directly from you.
Contrast this with Gnutella, where every search hits every user individually. While this eliminates the central server (and as such can't be shut down from any one point) there are people messing with the network. Already, script kiddies run programs generating porn-redirect HTML files based on every search that bounces their way.
I do believe that the news organizations drop the ball on this regularly -- I cringe when I hear Napster referred to as a "web site" implying that the file transfers take place over the web.
Yeah, but that guy used the same phony personal info for each of his 30,000 votes. A simple find took care of him.
Besides, have you seen the _real_ All-Star balloting? They have stacks of ballots that you mark by punching out holes. Nobody checks to see whether you vote multiple times; even I've voted several times without any repercussions. Some simple machinery could be used to punch patterns of holes in thousands of ballots, should the need arise. The balloting is almost as silly as the All-Star game itself (and I consider myself to be a baseball fan, BTW).
Elections are different. I'm certain that people had to use some sort of unique identifier to vote exactly once. If they notice 30,000 votes coming from one person or one IP, with bogus info, then they'll throw those votes out no questions asked.
Oh, come now. When DDOS attacks were hitting major web sites, they took down sites regardless of OS. And if you read Slashdot frequently, you'll notice many news stories about vulnerabilities, exploits, and security holes in Windows NT.
The main reason why UNIX-like systems are featured in stories like this is because there's an element of suspense as the cracker types many commands, and the superuser can look at every move he makes. Even NT's Event Logger doesn't catch every damaging command, and from the exploits I've seen it's possible to take down a poorly safeguarded NT box without even logging into it.
The scene of watching and dealing with a cracker is good drama, at least to Slashdot-reading geeks like myself.
I disagree that kiddies drive the marketplace. The whole idea is fundamentally flawed: simply stated, companies don't market to 14-year-old kids downloading GaMeZ on their parents' Compaqs. If they did, we'd have seen services like ISDN becoming a lot more affordable many years ago. Instead, getting an ISDN line in, say, 1994 cost upwards of $80 per month plus per-minute charges, even for local calls! Yes, I'm buying into buzzword hype, but it appears that technologies like digital audio and video on demand are the reason why broadband access is taking off so well. (Like many aspects of the Internet, this started out on the high-speed networks of large universities.)
These kiddies are not pushing the limits of security: more often than not, they merely write (or leech) scripts that exploit weaknesses that are publicly known. Perhaps one might conclude that this encourages admins to download the latest security patches, but it is very rare to see a script-kiddie-induced attack trigger a major security breach.
Network admins will always be necessary, if only to meet the demands of constantly upgrading software and dealing with user and technical problems. (Some programs break without any script intervention, thank you very much.) Script kiddies keep network admins frustrated and angry, something I think we can all live without.
In my opinion, script kiddies aren't moral or immoral -- they're amoral. Systems are just toys to them. Just like software, music, and movies, they feel "entitled" to take control of any system they like, because hey, it's out there. Even the Wall Street Journal called their generation (Generation "Y") the "entitlement generation."
The aura of arrogance that these kiddies have is really quite shocking. They have no perception of what it is like to actually run a system and defend it against real hackers/crackers. They just get their kicks by annoying hardworking people, and wasting their time and money.
And don't argue that the problem is admins leaving their systems unsecured -- if you notice someone left their door unlocked, it's not your duty to go inside, rearrange all the furniture, and leave cryptic notes saying how you "0wn3d" his house.
Gnutella works over a standard modem connection, but it's patently obvious that the protocol wasn't designed to run over such a connection. Dropped packets start appearing in droves after you get about 4 connections open, and at that point you're too busy routing packets to download anything at more than, say, 1 KB/sec. Napster, on the other hand, off-loads all this processing to a server so that modem users aren't burdened by constant packet routing.
That's where not using Windows comes in handy. Only once have I seen a fake-widget ad that looked like Motif or anything *nixy... and that was on Slashdot. On rare occasion I'll see ads that look like bastardized versions of the Win32 or MacOS widgets, which leads me to wonder what kind of people they were trying to fool.
So don't story the information in one large (mail, whatever) file. Story individual items individually, and come up with a good search mechanism for them.
This has been done. When I used OS/2, my mail program (MR/2) stored each message as its own file. Before I deleted the partition, I backed up all of my existing mail files. This came in EXTREMELY handy because I could simply use grep to find something like a long-lost order number or serial number (purchasing downloadable software is not without its pitfalls).
The main downside: even with the most current file systems, you waste some space by creating often thousands of files. Not to mention that trying to open the directory in any sort of graphical file browser proved a rather tedious exercise in futility.
14. The important challenge in computing today is to spend computing power, not horde it.
16. The future is dense with computers. They will hang around everywhere in lush...
That's all well and good, but have we advanced to the point where the number 15 isn't necessary any more, except for explaining how many years have elapsed since major strides in technology?
Designing for the color blind is fairly straightforward -- in the case of Aqua, use shape and position clues to tell which button does which. In the case discussed here, the environment might make slightly different visual cues (shapes and positions) to construe different messages, in addition to sound and color feedback. That way you touch all the bases.
The Sims uses Pie menus. Click on a character, and various actions you can do pop up around his/her head. Clicking on an action sometimes brings up a second, similarly styled menu. Aside from the excessive use of Comic Sans MS font, The Sims has an interface that's very easy on the eyes and very easy to use.
True, although the computer can only provide so much help. There is no provision for teaching kids to ask the teacher for further assistance. If the computer provides all the help needed, the student quickly learns that his/her teacher is not needed and is of minimal assistance.
Not to mention the fact that as we can see in this thread, most teachers are idiots with regard to technology. Students learn to respect the computer more than their teachers in classes where technology is overused.
how many of you had computer classes in school that consisted of playing "oregon trail"?
Dude, that game changed my life. One summer my family drove out to Oregon with nothing but the clothes on our backs, a shotgun, 1000 bullets, and a cooler that could hold 2000 pounds of freshly shot bison.
When I was in kindergarten, I had already learned the basics of reading before my classmates. So my teacher, in her infinite wisdom, sent me up one day a week to practice reading with the 3rd graders in the school's computer lab. The procedure was simple: I was given a color-coded disk (different colors meant different levels) which contained a story to read and then some comprehension questions. That way, students could read on their own and get instant feedback on their progress.
The program worked well, even given the basic hardware specs (Apple II's or XT's). There was no problem with me understanding the material -- even illustrations and hyperlinked definitions of "hard words" were available. However, the comprehension questions were a different story. Students who gave a wrong answer to the multiple-choice questions were prompted with a reassuring "Try Again!" and a chance to choose from the remaining options. Although the total score went down as a result of second-guessing and the usage of "hints" (eliminating incorrect answer choices a la "Who Wants To Be a Millionaire"'s 50-50) the teachers rarely paid attention and merely were on hand to dispense disks.
What does this teach children? If you're asked a question, choose any answer. If you're not correct, don't worry -- the computer will guide you in the right direction. The computer does all the processing, while the students exist to push buttons. Anything requiring cognition and thought, or (gasp!) an answer in some form other than multiple choice, is neglected completely. Of course, the lack of human interaction and group thinking also come into play.
Bottom line: computers are certainly very useful in education, but they should not replace teaching methods that involve more than just pushing buttons and getting responses.
Ever read the "Talkback" posted to a ZDNet story about Windows or Linux? Microsoft zealots on ZDNet are just about as vocal as Linux zealots on Slashdot. The main difference is that ZDNet's comments are even more disorganized since there's no way to view them in any sort of threaded or flat mode.
The link between the two is getting thicker every day. Try logging into AOL Instant Messenger using your ICQ user number as your "screen name." AOL owns ICQ, so ICQ users can no longer feel all warm and elitist about their choice of messaging software.
So kids will now have to lie to get an account on ICQ. Big deal. Out of curiosity (and desperation, I know) I visited Yahoo! Personals to see just what kind of women place personal ads on-line. Apparently two kinds do:
People advertising pornography, and
Women under the age of 18.
Per their terms of service, Yahoo! doesn't allow users under 18 to post personal ads. However, a lot of the non-porn ads state that the woman's age is 18 in the header, and then the first sentence of the body is "hi im actually 16/f but they wouldn't let me put 16."
Unless they start doing age verification through more trusted sources (can you say privacy invasion?) on the Internet, nobody will know you're a minor.
They're not going to ban Telnet and FTP, and the article doesn't call for that. What the article is calling for is to ban the practice of unsecured Telnet and FTP, something highly advised at schools such as mine.
According to the article, many colleges don't set proper access restrictions on log files containing vital information, so those files may even be indexed when a user does a search on the school's web site. That's just stupid, as any admin can see. Furthermore, most students, even at privacy-minded schools like mine, don't bother with using encrypted Telnet or FTP sessions. They figure nobody's out to get them, and so they don't need to authenticate. My next-door neighbor, before getting effectively kicked out of the school, wound up sniffing all of the passwords of everyone on our subnet who even once logged in unencrypted. While he didn't use that data for malicious purposes, a more unscrupulous character could easily publish them.
Around 800 dollar for the three year plan, minus 400 for the rebate, equals about 400 for 3 years of internet access, or a little over 10 dollars a month
Nope. $800 for the PC, minus $400 for the rebate, equals $400 for the PC after rebate. The Internet access costs $21.95 per month (apparently AOL sets the trend for such things) for three years, which you must pay even if you never use it or decide to go with DSL instead. The $400 rebate winds up saving you negative $390.20 after you pay for your 36 months of Internet service.
Slashdot Mirror
What I prefer are the "Special Advertising Sections" (as written in 6-point white-on-lightblue type) in magazines ranging from the NY Times Magazine to PC World. All of a sudden, you're reading a magazine and bam, the paper feels glossier, the typeface and layout changes dramatically, and there are lots of smiley people and marketing buzzwords all over the place.
I guess they're picking on people too lazy or stupid to know the difference between an "advertorial" (your term, I like it) and a real review. Of course, in cases like ZDNet, sometimes the line blurs a bit.
Schools get sued if they post the 10 commandments or let students pray at graduation.
Forgive me if I'm starting yet another flamewar in this thread, but the schools get sued if they sanction student prayer, i.e. "Welcome to the Smithville High School graduation. Before we start, let us pray."
I'm as cynical as the rest of them about censorship in schools, but students can pray whenever they want. Schools can't force them, but I've known a few kids who prayed in (public) schools without any (major, prolonged) outcry.
...could a discussion about a violent video game escalate into a discourse on why eating meat and animal-related products is wrong, even before a comment is posted.
Napster does NOT store songs or a song database on their servers.
You're half-right. While Napster itself doesn't hold songs, it does host a directory of who has what. When you run Napster for the first time, it scans the directories that you're sharing and sends a list of files to the server. Searches are sent to and received back from the server, and only _then_ can a user download directly from you.
Contrast this with Gnutella, where every search hits every user individually. While this eliminates the central server (and as such can't be shut down from any one point) there are people messing with the network. Already, script kiddies run programs generating porn-redirect HTML files based on every search that bounces their way.
I do believe that the news organizations drop the ball on this regularly -- I cringe when I hear Napster referred to as a "web site" implying that the file transfers take place over the web.
Yeah, but that guy used the same phony personal info for each of his 30,000 votes. A simple find took care of him.
Besides, have you seen the _real_ All-Star balloting? They have stacks of ballots that you mark by punching out holes. Nobody checks to see whether you vote multiple times; even I've voted several times without any repercussions. Some simple machinery could be used to punch patterns of holes in thousands of ballots, should the need arise. The balloting is almost as silly as the All-Star game itself (and I consider myself to be a baseball fan, BTW).
Elections are different. I'm certain that people had to use some sort of unique identifier to vote exactly once. If they notice 30,000 votes coming from one person or one IP, with bogus info, then they'll throw those votes out no questions asked.
Oh, come now. When DDOS attacks were hitting major web sites, they took down sites regardless of OS. And if you read Slashdot frequently, you'll notice many news stories about vulnerabilities, exploits, and security holes in Windows NT.
The main reason why UNIX-like systems are featured in stories like this is because there's an element of suspense as the cracker types many commands, and the superuser can look at every move he makes. Even NT's Event Logger doesn't catch every damaging command, and from the exploits I've seen it's possible to take down a poorly safeguarded NT box without even logging into it.
The scene of watching and dealing with a cracker is good drama, at least to Slashdot-reading geeks like myself.
I disagree that kiddies drive the marketplace. The whole idea is fundamentally flawed: simply stated, companies don't market to 14-year-old kids downloading GaMeZ on their parents' Compaqs. If they did, we'd have seen services like ISDN becoming a lot more affordable many years ago. Instead, getting an ISDN line in, say, 1994 cost upwards of $80 per month plus per-minute charges, even for local calls! Yes, I'm buying into buzzword hype, but it appears that technologies like digital audio and video on demand are the reason why broadband access is taking off so well. (Like many aspects of the Internet, this started out on the high-speed networks of large universities.)
These kiddies are not pushing the limits of security: more often than not, they merely write (or leech) scripts that exploit weaknesses that are publicly known. Perhaps one might conclude that this encourages admins to download the latest security patches, but it is very rare to see a script-kiddie-induced attack trigger a major security breach.
Network admins will always be necessary, if only to meet the demands of constantly upgrading software and dealing with user and technical problems. (Some programs break without any script intervention, thank you very much.) Script kiddies keep network admins frustrated and angry, something I think we can all live without.
In my opinion, script kiddies aren't moral or immoral -- they're amoral. Systems are just toys to them. Just like software, music, and movies, they feel "entitled" to take control of any system they like, because hey, it's out there. Even the Wall Street Journal called their generation (Generation "Y") the "entitlement generation."
The aura of arrogance that these kiddies have is really quite shocking. They have no perception of what it is like to actually run a system and defend it against real hackers/crackers. They just get their kicks by annoying hardworking people, and wasting their time and money.
And don't argue that the problem is admins leaving their systems unsecured -- if you notice someone left their door unlocked, it's not your duty to go inside, rearrange all the furniture, and leave cryptic notes saying how you "0wn3d" his house.
Gnutella works over a standard modem connection, but it's patently obvious that the protocol wasn't designed to run over such a connection. Dropped packets start appearing in droves after you get about 4 connections open, and at that point you're too busy routing packets to download anything at more than, say, 1 KB/sec. Napster, on the other hand, off-loads all this processing to a server so that modem users aren't burdened by constant packet routing.
That's where not using Windows comes in handy. Only once have I seen a fake-widget ad that looked like Motif or anything *nixy... and that was on Slashdot. On rare occasion I'll see ads that look like bastardized versions of the Win32 or MacOS widgets, which leads me to wonder what kind of people they were trying to fool.
So don't story the information in one large (mail, whatever) file. Story individual items individually, and come up with a good search mechanism for them.
This has been done. When I used OS/2, my mail program (MR/2) stored each message as its own file. Before I deleted the partition, I backed up all of my existing mail files. This came in EXTREMELY handy because I could simply use grep to find something like a long-lost order number or serial number (purchasing downloadable software is not without its pitfalls).
The main downside: even with the most current file systems, you waste some space by creating often thousands of files. Not to mention that trying to open the directory in any sort of graphical file browser proved a rather tedious exercise in futility.
14. The important challenge in computing today is to spend computing power, not horde it.
...
16. The future is dense with computers. They will hang around everywhere in lush
That's all well and good, but have we advanced to the point where the number 15 isn't necessary any more, except for explaining how many years have elapsed since major strides in technology?
Not true! Babelfish now does Russian to English!
d00d, i ju$t dl'ed the 3rd IS0 for D!@bl0 ii... t1m3 t0 burN '3m @nd k!ck som @$$...
:) :) :) :) :) :)
!t 0nly t00k twelve d@yz on my A0L c0nnexion to g3t em al1, bu7 i7 w@z WORTH IT
Designing for the color blind is fairly straightforward -- in the case of Aqua, use shape and position clues to tell which button does which. In the case discussed here, the environment might make slightly different visual cues (shapes and positions) to construe different messages, in addition to sound and color feedback. That way you touch all the bases.
The Sims uses Pie menus. Click on a character, and various actions you can do pop up around his/her head. Clicking on an action sometimes brings up a second, similarly styled menu. Aside from the excessive use of Comic Sans MS font, The Sims has an interface that's very easy on the eyes and very easy to use.
True, although the computer can only provide so much help. There is no provision for teaching kids to ask the teacher for further assistance. If the computer provides all the help needed, the student quickly learns that his/her teacher is not needed and is of minimal assistance.
Not to mention the fact that as we can see in this thread, most teachers are idiots with regard to technology. Students learn to respect the computer more than their teachers in classes where technology is overused.
Um, that "back" image doesn't _quite_ seem like trade-show material...
how many of you had computer classes in school that consisted of playing "oregon trail"?
Dude, that game changed my life. One summer my family drove out to Oregon with nothing but the clothes on our backs, a shotgun, 1000 bullets, and a cooler that could hold 2000 pounds of freshly shot bison.
When I was in kindergarten, I had already learned the basics of reading before my classmates. So my teacher, in her infinite wisdom, sent me up one day a week to practice reading with the 3rd graders in the school's computer lab. The procedure was simple: I was given a color-coded disk (different colors meant different levels) which contained a story to read and then some comprehension questions. That way, students could read on their own and get instant feedback on their progress.
The program worked well, even given the basic hardware specs (Apple II's or XT's). There was no problem with me understanding the material -- even illustrations and hyperlinked definitions of "hard words" were available. However, the comprehension questions were a different story. Students who gave a wrong answer to the multiple-choice questions were prompted with a reassuring "Try Again!" and a chance to choose from the remaining options. Although the total score went down as a result of second-guessing and the usage of "hints" (eliminating incorrect answer choices a la "Who Wants To Be a Millionaire"'s 50-50) the teachers rarely paid attention and merely were on hand to dispense disks.
What does this teach children? If you're asked a question, choose any answer. If you're not correct, don't worry -- the computer will guide you in the right direction. The computer does all the processing, while the students exist to push buttons. Anything requiring cognition and thought, or (gasp!) an answer in some form other than multiple choice, is neglected completely. Of course, the lack of human interaction and group thinking also come into play.
Bottom line: computers are certainly very useful in education, but they should not replace teaching methods that involve more than just pushing buttons and getting responses.
Ever read the "Talkback" posted to a ZDNet story about Windows or Linux? Microsoft zealots on ZDNet are just about as vocal as Linux zealots on Slashdot. The main difference is that ZDNet's comments are even more disorganized since there's no way to view them in any sort of threaded or flat mode.
The link between the two is getting thicker every day. Try logging into AOL Instant Messenger using your ICQ user number as your "screen name." AOL owns ICQ, so ICQ users can no longer feel all warm and elitist about their choice of messaging software.
Per their terms of service, Yahoo! doesn't allow users under 18 to post personal ads. However, a lot of the non-porn ads state that the woman's age is 18 in the header, and then the first sentence of the body is "hi im actually 16/f but they wouldn't let me put 16."
Unless they start doing age verification through more trusted sources (can you say privacy invasion?) on the Internet, nobody will know you're a minor.
They're not going to ban Telnet and FTP, and the article doesn't call for that. What the article is calling for is to ban the practice of unsecured Telnet and FTP, something highly advised at schools such as mine.
According to the article, many colleges don't set proper access restrictions on log files containing vital information, so those files may even be indexed when a user does a search on the school's web site. That's just stupid, as any admin can see. Furthermore, most students, even at privacy-minded schools like mine, don't bother with using encrypted Telnet or FTP sessions. They figure nobody's out to get them, and so they don't need to authenticate. My next-door neighbor, before getting effectively kicked out of the school, wound up sniffing all of the passwords of everyone on our subnet who even once logged in unencrypted. While he didn't use that data for malicious purposes, a more unscrupulous character could easily publish them.
Around 800 dollar for the three year plan, minus 400 for the rebate, equals about 400 for 3 years of internet access, or a little over 10 dollars a month
Nope. $800 for the PC, minus $400 for the rebate, equals $400 for the PC after rebate. The Internet access costs $21.95 per month (apparently AOL sets the trend for such things) for three years, which you must pay even if you never use it or decide to go with DSL instead. The $400 rebate winds up saving you negative $390.20 after you pay for your 36 months of Internet service.