Well, maybe if you looked at more reliable alternatives you wouldn't need a dozen people to maintain such a small number of computers.
Dude, you're out of touch here. We've got a dozen people. That's for *everything*. Very few actually do "fix the computer" support- the help desk is three people. I do instructional technology. That means faculty training, custom programming and CMS maintenance. (Since I went with an Open Source CMS over Blackboard over WebCT, I spend far more of my time on it than I would on a nice packaged solution.) We've got one network guy. One server guy. Two custom programmers, one who also runs the phone system. Two application support specialists- and no, I'm not talking Word, I'm talking about our student information system, accounting packages, etc. Add in a boss and a media specialist, and that's it.
We already support a far, far larger variety of applications than a typical company with fewer people overall. Not many companies get calls about accounting programs, SPSS and a quantum chemistry program in rapid succession, alongside the requests for custom video editing, dialup modem support and integration of a commercial eReserve package with an open source course management system. (My next big project)
You think two good people can do that? Gimme a break. We've got some damn good people here despite the salaries. Yes, some of the apps we have to use suck and it would be better if we could start with something good from the start- but we can't.
Well, that's why adhering to standards from the start is a good idea.
That's so nice that you get to choose every application you run. We've got a significant number of Windows applications that we have to rely on. The mods we make are standard, but the apps themselves aren't. Sure we can switch- got a spare million dollars to install an alternative SIS? We don't.
The intelligent support is a single sheet of paper with the pertinent info: any experienced Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris or FooOS user will know how to get his box working from that data.
BWAHAHWAHAWHHAWHAWHAWA! Oh man, you kill me. You've clearly never done help desk work. 95% of the people coming to the help desk can barely find icons on their desktop- why even bother putting together "intelligent support" documents?
Add to that, the "intelligent" users are the worst. People who know exactly what they are doing somehow manage to trash their machines routinely. Guess who is supposed to pick up the pieces?
You seem to have the idea that intelligent users will look up the info, set everything up and then not bother anyone else. These people do not exist. You may think they do, but they don't. Most will try and follow the docs, fail at step 2 and then expect you to do it for them. ("What's an IP address? I don't know. Well, my boyfriend said that Linux is great and he set everything up for me so I have to use it!") The few people who actually have the technical chops to do this are the ones that bug you mercilessly when their odd configuration doesn't quite work on your system. ("What do you mean the firewall blocks port 4980?? I absolutely must have WizzyFoo 4.965 working you pathetic losers! No, I will not upgrade to WizzyFoo 5.01- it costs $25! Make it work today or I'll call you every five minutes for the next month!")
Better question is how come that money isn't spent equally on diverse platforms (i.e. Mac, Linux, Sun, whatever). Instead, MS buys out the entire college.
Speaking as someone who works in IT at a very small school (750 FTE), we simply can't afford to support multiple platforms well.
We've got a dozen staff, who have to do everything from keeping ~500 computers up and running, email, 50 classrooms with projectors and various stuff, keeping the network running well, supporting (and customizing) a dozen critical applications, squashing P2P filesharing, training faculty, videotaping soccer games... Oh yeah, and running a full time help desk to answer the flood of questions.
We can't pay a lot- we're in academia, remember? Tell me where you can find someone willing to do good PC support, good Mac support and good Linux support for what we can pay. It has to be the same person- we can't afford to have a dedicated Mac or Linux tech. We've got a few Macs around, mostly for video stuff, but I have given up supporting them- it's not my job, and I have to do my job first. Nobody else here is expert enough to do more than basic setup and maintenence- we do send them to basic Mac tech school, but it's not a substitute for years of experience. We've got some Linux machines on the backend, but only a few of us techs deal with them. No way is the help desk going to answer questions for someone with a Linux machine.
Oh yeah, and as soon as we let a Linux machine into the hands of someone and claim we'll support them, we suddenly have another entire platform to test all of our custom applications against.
Would I like a campus full of a variety of machines? Sure. Is it going to happen? No.
I've read that the paper has been withdrawn , but I can't find a link to it right now. (The links I gave are a few months old.)
There were other problems as well. For example, no informed consent of the people taking part in the study. Speaking as an ex-infertility patient, I would have been highly offended if I had been one of the ones included in the study without the authors asking.
As for the supernatural: there was at least one double blind study which showed that prayer affected IVF success rates - the IVF was done in a hospital in Korea, the prayers were done by people in the US who only had the photos of those prayed for- the people in the hospital didn't know who was being prayed for - not even sure if most knew a study was being done. Whether it proves there is a God is another thing - coz it could just prove that some people can effect supernatural powers if they do certain things. But it was an interesting result to me - coz it seemed quite properly done (better than most other scientific studies I've seen on various things).
It was not even remotely correctly done. One of the authors has left Columbia and can't be contacted, one refuses to comment other than that he only did editorial work, and the main author is a well known con man who's going to jail for fraud in an unrelated case. The journal has withdrawn the paper and Columbia is looking into how it got published.
A couple of links:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/news/20040614/04/ http://www.valleyskeptic.com/Prayer_Study_Flawed_a nd_Fraud.html
There's no way in hell that software is going to replace a good manager, not now, not in 100 years. Good management is all about people skills, understanding the interactions and politics in a workplace, keeping your workers happy and motivated, etc. Computers can't even understand simple written text, despite 40 years of AI work into doing just that- there's no way they could handle a good manager's job. (I insert good there a lot- computers could duplicate a PHB pretty well)
Typical "geek" stuff, on the other hand, gets easier every day. People used to joke about trying to record something on a VCR- now we have Tivos. Programming used to involve hex dumps- now you can buy totally visual, drag+drop programming environments. Yes, there will always be complex problems, but the ability of easy-to-use tools to do those complex problems is increasing rapidly. (Although I don't see a computer understanding human speech coming any time soon- see above:^)
Another thing I have learned from using a mouse on a desktop surface for years is that the little feet on the bottom of the mouse wear out quicker, causing the mouse's action to not feel very smooth.
Scotch tape. Use the good stuff, not the cheap imitations. Just put fresh pieces over all the feet every day or so and it feels nice and smooth again.
Eric
Yes. SciAm just had an article on this. (I'd link but the site's throwing a wierd error)
Basically, you fly a satellite which is a conducting tether with some great big batteries in the hubs. Run the tether through a strong magnetic field like that around Jupiter and you get instant power.
Of course, you also get drag since the energy is coming from the motion of the satellite through the magnetic field, so you lower your orbit. Later, run a current through the wire at the correct time using the stored power and you can boost your orbit.
Effectively, you get orbital manuvering capability for free- no fuel needed.
Until you hit a compiler bug that causes your code to misbehave when there's a printf() in it...
Spent a day once on that back in my grad school days. My quantum chemistry code had a bug. (The app was very simple from a CS standpoint: vanilla ANSI C, batch text input/output, no user interaction.) Insert printf near where I think the bug was. Get wierd output, but then notice where original bug was. Fix original bug.
Oops, code now has even stranger error. Stare at it for a long time. Add more printfs(), run under debugger, etc. Bug still appears.
Finally ended up deleting the offending printf() while tearing my hair out. Everything magically works again. Put printf() back- everything goes wonky. Move the printf() to two lines later- everything works. GCC clearly was generating bad code for some reason, but why a printf() would cause it is beyond me- I'm just a chemist.
You're flaming a guy for a mispelling on a blog in a Slashdot post? I seem to recall some old saying about tossing heavy things you find on the ground while dwelling in amorphous silica domiciles.
Personally, I'm amazed when I come here and find that Taco's spelled his name correctly. Then again, I shouldn't be so harsh: the Error 500 message is spelled fine...
Let me disagree with this. I just finished with updates to a 25-page tutorial for our course management system in Word. I ran the usual grammar and spelling check at the end of editing, and went through the roughly thirty grammar suggestions Word made.
Not one was correct. Some were pointless, most were laughably wrong. The best was flagging subject/verb agreement as incorrect because I used the plural form for both.
One of the nice things about working in an academic environment is having lots of grammar nazis around to make certain that it's Word's problem. The head of the Writing Center was one of the people who got that document. When she says that it was well written, I know I can ignore Word.
Really, why must people be forced to abide by this "rule" that civil disobedience means you have to accept the punishment for some bogus crime? Would it have been more noble or correct if George Washington et al. had meekly submitted themselves to be executed for treason? Should all those slaves who escaped from their plantations have willingly surrendered themselves and gone back to face the lash to fit these immutable laws of protest that you are subscribing to?
Who said anything about surrendering meekly? You're free to hire the best lawyers you can afford in the country to defend you in court. The battleground here is legal, and you can fight using any legal means you choose.
However, whining about possibly losing doesn't do you any good. Washington would have been executed for treason if he was caught. He accepted that risk when he signed the declaration of independence. You accept the risk of being sued if you let people leech your MP3s.
Being allowed to the pants off of people for garden variety mp3 sharing is a perversion of justice, everybody knows it, and whether or not the act itself is improper, average citizens shouldn't have to fear facing bankruptcy for doing it.
Ahh, but this is part of how civil disobedience works. Think the RIAA has as good a name as they did before they started suing 12 year olds and grandmothers without computers? The higher the penalties and the stupider the actions, the more people will give up on RIAA music.
Then again, maybe they won't. People might decide listening to music under the RIAA yoke is better than the alternatives. That's their choice. Civil disobedience only works when enough other people are willing to disobey.
The Gandhi model is not the only model for social change. We Americans tend to prefer the Prohibition era "You pigs can't arrest us all!" method.
???? That basically is the Ghandi model. "We're just not going to listen to what you tell us to do. Go ahead, arrest all of us- you'll run out of jails before we run out of protestors."
Of course, jail construction is a huge growth industry in the US- we jail more citizens per capita than any other democracy.
I get so tired of the groupthink whining here at/. about the evil RIAA, the horrible costs of CDs and how piracy really isn't theft anyway.
Don't like the RIAA's tactics? Don't like how they rip off artists and sue their customers? Then don't buy from them. It's simply not that hard- buy used CDs if you must, get freely downloadable music from any of a dozen sources, go listen to a local unsigned band and buy their CDs. I've bought exactly one RIAA album in the last three years, and that was because I was curious about iTunes. I still get to listen to interesting new stuff all the time.
As far as file sharing, folks, as the law as written, file sharing of copyrighted works is illegal. No matter how you spin it (It's not theft, it's not wrong...), it's still illegal. If you think this is wrong, you have two options
Don't do it
Do it and take your lumps. That may mean losing your house when the RIAA sues you into oblivion. Too bad- you're engaged in civil disobedience, and that has consquences. If enough people disobey, eventually the laws will change, but that doesn't mean people don't get hurt. For far more serious examples, look up the US civil rights movement or Ghandi's struggle against the British.
I installed Fedora Core 2 the other day on a workstation and a server. I'm not sure of the total size of the patches, but it wasn't much smaller than that. RPM "Resolving dependency" checks took well over an hour on two fast machines using up2date.
And of course, I got to file a Bugzilla critical bug report- connecting to a SNAP server over SMB will crash FC2 hard. As in, hit the power switch- it won't respond to anything up to and including C-A-D. But hey- we don't see any blue screen.
The player may be widely distributed but it won't run on Linux on my AMD64 machine (or a Mac, or a number of other architectures)
That's funny- my (OSX) Mac runs Flash just fine. It also runs Flash fine in Classic emulation mode Not only that, I've got the MX development kit for it, which is indistinguishable from the PC version.
Or do you mean Flash isn't available for Linux running on a Mac? I'm sure all 3 of you must be very unhappy. If you're using odd combinations of hardware, don't expect to get much commercial support.
It's odd. My school makes a very big deal about empowering women. Many of the faculty are women, the president is a woman, the head of IT (My boss) is a woman, and women are almost 50% of the IT department. (6 of 13)
They don't offer a CS degree. They don't even have a CS department- the Math faculty teach the half a dozen CS courses we offer. (IMHO, not a bad thing) Explain that to me. I've asked people and never gotten a coherent answer beyond "We don't think that it would be a big enough major to justify the expense." Meanwhile, less than 10 miles away another women's college has 5% of their students graduate with CS degrees.
I've looked into an UP MBA program in tech management. Why?
I'm at a point where I have to decide on my career path. (I'm in academic technology) Right now most "better" jobs have a lot more management in them- my chemistry PhD and self-taught computer skills don't always give me the background I need.
I've already been to a few shorter management training workshops. Management is a skill- it can be learned like any other, and there's a lot I don't know about it.
I've got a full-time job and a family. Spending a lot of time shuttling back and forth to a physical campus doesn't really excite me, and I can pace the courses to my schedule.
I could stay in my current job for a long time if I wanted, but I need to think about what to do in the future. More education is never a bad thing.
...killing civil rights demonstrators, blowing up black girls attending churches and like as right wing violence your stats are pretty good. Oh yeah, and shooting abortion doctors, bombing the Olympics, killing Jewish schoolchildren, attacking gays, the OKC bombing....
Until I can be sure I can still read the book in 5, 50 or 500 years I don't want it. (Ok, maybe the latter is a bit much...) I've got a preprint first edition (1950) "Effects of Atomic Weapons"- perfectly useable and quite horrifying in how badly long term radiation exposure was misunderstood. My wife has dozens of children's books from the early 1900s- she still enjoys reading them. I've got a chemistry textbook from 1850 that has a proof for the existence of the luminous ether, but is still readable. (And most of the chemistry works fine.)
Some more professional examples. I just bailed on referreeing a paper for J. Chem Ed in which the most recent reference was Einstein, 1905- most of the rest were ~1850. (My small college library doesn't stock the references, and I didn't have time for a loan) But with time I could have gotten all of them. Our library here has been digitizing an illuminated Qu'ran from ~1500, and we'll do a ~1300 Book of Hours soon.
Do you have computer data 20 years old? Can you still read it?
As a long,long,long term gamer of most of the turn-based strategy games, I'm amazed to hear that you can save turns. I mean, I knew it intellectually, but there was always one more tech to research, one more city to take, one more hut to grab, one more...damn, is it 3AM already?
You can't carry enough fuel on the probe to match the orbital velocity and still launch on a small rocket. Mercury's orbital speed is about 47.9 km/sec, Earth's is 29.8 km/sec- you've got to get about 20km/sec (~40,000 mph) from somewhere, and chemical rockets aren't feasible.
However, you can steal energy from planets using gravity assists. JPL is amazingly good at doing these.
<tinfoilhat> We do need to worry that JPL is slowly robbing orbital energy from the planets they use. I've been worried about our profligate use of this irreplaceable resource for a long time. Worse, JPL seems to be totally blase about using Earth as one of their prime engines- enough gravity assists and the earth will fall into the sun!
Join the League to Conserve the Angular Momemtum of Planets today!
Intelligence always adaptive? Nope. Any organism is a trade off between a huge variety of factors- which you spend your energy budget on depends on your overall survival strategy. A perfectly good evolutionary strategy is to simply breed like crazy and not worry much about survival of any one offspring- why bother with brains when your gonads work well?
You only need to be smart enough to survive until you can breed. Look around among your fellow humans- it don't take much to reach that point.
It's worse than that- it's an inverted *spin*, if it's the same shirt I have. There's a turn coordinator ball at the bottom of that horizon and it ain't exactly centered.
Got the T-shirt, but never done that, thank the powers that be.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, maybe if you looked at more reliable alternatives you wouldn't need a dozen people to maintain such a small number of computers.
Dude, you're out of touch here. We've got a dozen people. That's for *everything*. Very few actually do "fix the computer" support- the help desk is three people. I do instructional technology. That means faculty training, custom programming and CMS maintenance. (Since I went with an Open Source CMS over Blackboard over WebCT, I spend far more of my time on it than I would on a nice packaged solution.) We've got one network guy. One server guy. Two custom programmers, one who also runs the phone system. Two application support specialists- and no, I'm not talking Word, I'm talking about our student information system, accounting packages, etc. Add in a boss and a media specialist, and that's it.
We already support a far, far larger variety of applications than a typical company with fewer people overall. Not many companies get calls about accounting programs, SPSS and a quantum chemistry program in rapid succession, alongside the requests for custom video editing, dialup modem support and integration of a commercial eReserve package with an open source course management system. (My next big project)
You think two good people can do that? Gimme a break. We've got some damn good people here despite the salaries. Yes, some of the apps we have to use suck and it would be better if we could start with something good from the start- but we can't.
Well, that's why adhering to standards from the start is a good idea.
That's so nice that you get to choose every application you run. We've got a significant number of Windows applications that we have to rely on. The mods we make are standard, but the apps themselves aren't. Sure we can switch- got a spare million dollars to install an alternative SIS? We don't.
The intelligent support is a single sheet of paper with the pertinent info: any experienced Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris or FooOS user will know how to get his box working from that data.
BWAHAHWAHAWHHAWHAWHAWA! Oh man, you kill me. You've clearly never done help desk work. 95% of the people coming to the help desk can barely find icons on their desktop- why even bother putting together "intelligent support" documents?
Add to that, the "intelligent" users are the worst. People who know exactly what they are doing somehow manage to trash their machines routinely. Guess who is supposed to pick up the pieces?
You seem to have the idea that intelligent users will look up the info, set everything up and then not bother anyone else. These people do not exist. You may think they do, but they don't. Most will try and follow the docs, fail at step 2 and then expect you to do it for them. ("What's an IP address? I don't know. Well, my boyfriend said that Linux is great and he set everything up for me so I have to use it!") The few people who actually have the technical chops to do this are the ones that bug you mercilessly when their odd configuration doesn't quite work on your system. ("What do you mean the firewall blocks port 4980?? I absolutely must have WizzyFoo 4.965 working you pathetic losers! No, I will not upgrade to WizzyFoo 5.01- it costs $25! Make it work today or I'll call you every five minutes for the next month!")
Better question is how come that money isn't spent equally on diverse platforms (i.e. Mac, Linux, Sun, whatever). Instead, MS buys out the entire college.
Speaking as someone who works in IT at a very small school (750 FTE), we simply can't afford to support multiple platforms well.
We've got a dozen staff, who have to do everything from keeping ~500 computers up and running, email, 50 classrooms with projectors and various stuff, keeping the network running well, supporting (and customizing) a dozen critical applications, squashing P2P filesharing, training faculty, videotaping soccer games... Oh yeah, and running a full time help desk to answer the flood of questions.
We can't pay a lot- we're in academia, remember? Tell me where you can find someone willing to do good PC support, good Mac support and good Linux support for what we can pay. It has to be the same person- we can't afford to have a dedicated Mac or Linux tech. We've got a few Macs around, mostly for video stuff, but I have given up supporting them- it's not my job, and I have to do my job first. Nobody else here is expert enough to do more than basic setup and maintenence- we do send them to basic Mac tech school, but it's not a substitute for years of experience. We've got some Linux machines on the backend, but only a few of us techs deal with them. No way is the help desk going to answer questions for someone with a Linux machine.
Oh yeah, and as soon as we let a Linux machine into the hands of someone and claim we'll support them, we suddenly have another entire platform to test all of our custom applications against.
Would I like a campus full of a variety of machines? Sure. Is it going to happen? No.
There were other problems as well. For example, no informed consent of the people taking part in the study. Speaking as an ex-infertility patient, I would have been highly offended if I had been one of the ones included in the study without the authors asking.
As for the supernatural: there was at least one double blind study which showed that prayer affected IVF success rates - the IVF was done in a hospital in Korea, the prayers were done by people in the US who only had the photos of those prayed for- the people in the hospital didn't know who was being prayed for - not even sure if most knew a study was being done. Whether it proves there is a God is another thing - coz it could just prove that some people can effect supernatural powers if they do certain things. But it was an interesting result to me - coz it seemed quite properly done (better than most other scientific studies I've seen on various things).
It was not even remotely correctly done. One of the authors has left Columbia and can't be contacted, one refuses to comment other than that he only did editorial work, and the main author is a well known con man who's going to jail for fraud in an unrelated case. The journal has withdrawn the paper and Columbia is looking into how it got published.
A couple of links:a nd_Fraud.html
http://www.biomedcentral.com/news/20040614/04/
http://www.valleyskeptic.com/Prayer_Study_Flawed_
There's no way in hell that software is going to replace a good manager, not now, not in 100 years. Good management is all about people skills, understanding the interactions and politics in a workplace, keeping your workers happy and motivated, etc. Computers can't even understand simple written text, despite 40 years of AI work into doing just that- there's no way they could handle a good manager's job. (I insert good there a lot- computers could duplicate a PHB pretty well)
Typical "geek" stuff, on the other hand, gets easier every day. People used to joke about trying to record something on a VCR- now we have Tivos. Programming used to involve hex dumps- now you can buy totally visual, drag+drop programming environments. Yes, there will always be complex problems, but the ability of easy-to-use tools to do those complex problems is increasing rapidly. (Although I don't see a computer understanding human speech coming any time soon- see above :^)
Another thing I have learned from using a mouse on a desktop surface for years is that the little feet on the bottom of the mouse wear out quicker, causing the mouse's action to not feel very smooth.
Scotch tape. Use the good stuff, not the cheap imitations. Just put fresh pieces over all the feet every day or so and it feels nice and smooth again. Eric
Basically, you fly a satellite which is a conducting tether with some great big batteries in the hubs. Run the tether through a strong magnetic field like that around Jupiter and you get instant power.
Of course, you also get drag since the energy is coming from the motion of the satellite through the magnetic field, so you lower your orbit. Later, run a current through the wire at the correct time using the stored power and you can boost your orbit.
Effectively, you get orbital manuvering capability for free- no fuel needed.
Spent a day once on that back in my grad school days. My quantum chemistry code had a bug. (The app was very simple from a CS standpoint: vanilla ANSI C, batch text input/output, no user interaction.) Insert printf near where I think the bug was. Get wierd output, but then notice where original bug was. Fix original bug.
Oops, code now has even stranger error. Stare at it for a long time. Add more printfs(), run under debugger, etc. Bug still appears.
Finally ended up deleting the offending printf() while tearing my hair out. Everything magically works again. Put printf() back- everything goes wonky. Move the printf() to two lines later- everything works. GCC clearly was generating bad code for some reason, but why a printf() would cause it is beyond me- I'm just a chemist.
Personally, I'm amazed when I come here and find that Taco's spelled his name correctly. Then again, I shouldn't be so harsh: the Error 500 message is spelled fine...
Not one was correct. Some were pointless, most were laughably wrong. The best was flagging subject/verb agreement as incorrect because I used the plural form for both.
One of the nice things about working in an academic environment is having lots of grammar nazis around to make certain that it's Word's problem. The head of the Writing Center was one of the people who got that document. When she says that it was well written, I know I can ignore Word.
Really, why must people be forced to abide by this "rule" that civil disobedience means you have to accept the punishment for some bogus crime? Would it have been more noble or correct if George Washington et al. had meekly submitted themselves to be executed for treason? Should all those slaves who escaped from their plantations have willingly surrendered themselves and gone back to face the lash to fit these immutable laws of protest that you are subscribing to?
Who said anything about surrendering meekly? You're free to hire the best lawyers you can afford in the country to defend you in court. The battleground here is legal, and you can fight using any legal means you choose.
However, whining about possibly losing doesn't do you any good. Washington would have been executed for treason if he was caught. He accepted that risk when he signed the declaration of independence. You accept the risk of being sued if you let people leech your MP3s.
Being allowed to the pants off of people for garden variety mp3 sharing is a perversion of justice, everybody knows it, and whether or not the act itself is improper, average citizens shouldn't have to fear facing bankruptcy for doing it.
Ahh, but this is part of how civil disobedience works. Think the RIAA has as good a name as they did before they started suing 12 year olds and grandmothers without computers? The higher the penalties and the stupider the actions, the more people will give up on RIAA music.
Then again, maybe they won't. People might decide listening to music under the RIAA yoke is better than the alternatives. That's their choice. Civil disobedience only works when enough other people are willing to disobey.
???? That basically is the Ghandi model. "We're just not going to listen to what you tell us to do. Go ahead, arrest all of us- you'll run out of jails before we run out of protestors."
Of course, jail construction is a huge growth industry in the US- we jail more citizens per capita than any other democracy.
Don't like the RIAA's tactics? Don't like how they rip off artists and sue their customers? Then don't buy from them. It's simply not that hard- buy used CDs if you must, get freely downloadable music from any of a dozen sources, go listen to a local unsigned band and buy their CDs. I've bought exactly one RIAA album in the last three years, and that was because I was curious about iTunes. I still get to listen to interesting new stuff all the time.
As far as file sharing, folks, as the law as written, file sharing of copyrighted works is illegal. No matter how you spin it (It's not theft, it's not wrong...), it's still illegal. If you think this is wrong, you have two options
And of course, I got to file a Bugzilla critical bug report- connecting to a SNAP server over SMB will crash FC2 hard. As in, hit the power switch- it won't respond to anything up to and including C-A-D. But hey- we don't see any blue screen.
The player may be widely distributed but it won't run on Linux on my AMD64 machine (or a Mac, or a number of other architectures)
That's funny- my (OSX) Mac runs Flash just fine. It also runs Flash fine in Classic emulation mode Not only that, I've got the MX development kit for it, which is indistinguishable from the PC version.
Or do you mean Flash isn't available for Linux running on a Mac? I'm sure all 3 of you must be very unhappy. If you're using odd combinations of hardware, don't expect to get much commercial support.
They don't offer a CS degree. They don't even have a CS department- the Math faculty teach the half a dozen CS courses we offer. (IMHO, not a bad thing) Explain that to me. I've asked people and never gotten a coherent answer beyond "We don't think that it would be a big enough major to justify the expense." Meanwhile, less than 10 miles away another women's college has 5% of their students graduate with CS degrees.
I've looked into an UP MBA program in tech management. Why?
- I'm at a point where I have to decide on my career path. (I'm in academic technology) Right now most "better" jobs have a lot more management in them- my chemistry PhD and self-taught computer skills don't always give me the background I need.
- I've already been to a few shorter management training workshops. Management is a skill- it can be learned like any other, and there's a lot I don't know about it.
- I've got a full-time job and a family. Spending a lot of time shuttling back and forth to a physical campus doesn't really excite me, and I can pace the courses to my schedule.
I could stay in my current job for a long time if I wanted, but I need to think about what to do in the future. More education is never a bad thing.Yeah, the right wing is just *so* peaceful.
Some more professional examples. I just bailed on referreeing a paper for J. Chem Ed in which the most recent reference was Einstein, 1905- most of the rest were ~1850. (My small college library doesn't stock the references, and I didn't have time for a loan) But with time I could have gotten all of them. Our library here has been digitizing an illuminated Qu'ran from ~1500, and we'll do a ~1300 Book of Hours soon.
Do you have computer data 20 years old? Can you still read it?
As a long,long,long term gamer of most of the turn-based strategy games, I'm amazed to hear that you can save turns. I mean, I knew it intellectually, but there was always one more tech to research, one more city to take, one more hut to grab, one more...damn, is it 3AM already?
However, you can steal energy from planets using gravity assists. JPL is amazingly good at doing these.
<tinfoilhat> We do need to worry that JPL is slowly robbing orbital energy from the planets they use. I've been worried about our profligate use of this irreplaceable resource for a long time. Worse, JPL seems to be totally blase about using Earth as one of their prime engines- enough gravity assists and the earth will fall into the sun!
Join the League to Conserve the Angular Momemtum of Planets today!
You only need to be smart enough to survive until you can breed. Look around among your fellow humans- it don't take much to reach that point.
Others include The Economist, Scientific American (going downhill fast), Newsweek and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Got the T-shirt, but never done that, thank the powers that be.