Anyone who's interested in whether it would actually be possible to become a superhero would probably enjoy this episode of This American Life.
The second act discusses the life of a woman who named herself Zora and decided to, from an early age, learn all the skills needed to become a comic book style superhero. She achieves her goals but then learns that there are very few job opportunities that require all the skills that she now possesses. It's well worth listening to.
I'm an American so when I first heard that the British Monarchy had authority over your country I honestly didn't beleive it. Then I discovered that United States also had a problem with the British Monarchy at some stage. We recognised it as a problem and we fixed it. We are no longer run by the British royal family. Does any other democracy on earth still have a king or queen? Is it impossible for Australians to recognise a problem and fix it without ballsing it up? It just seems you have all these parasites gaming your political process and you do nothing about it. You know how everyone knows that Queen Elizabeth can appoint the governor general? Well, here in the US, it's illegal for the Queen of England to strike down our laws. It's like that in the rest of the world too right? So why can't Australians recognise something that's so straight forward and simple (the people shouldn't be under the thumb of a decrepit royal family) and do something about it?
It is News Radio. A brilliant show with the best comic talent assembled in one show since the good days of SNL. It is also very well written, the characters all compliment the actors abilities. Also, it has the only woman character ever to appear on American TV that is both sexy and intelligent.
What I loved about the show was that with the exception of Beth and Matthew, all of the characters were very intelligent. It was a continuous struggle between Dave, Jimmy, Lisa, and Bill as each person tried to increase their influence in the office and hold onto their own territory. It was such a welcome change from the traditional sitcom where characters get in a jam simply because their too stupid to figure out a simple solution.
I've been wanting a good media player for my home entertainment system for a long time now. I'm convinced a good solution will appear in the next year or so but my advice for the moment is to wait.
The most exciting development is that companies have started supporting the UPnP Media Server standard. The idea is that any UPnP media client can automatically detect every UPnP media server that's on the local network and automatically play the shared media - video and audio. What makes UPnP Media superior to pretty much everything else is that it's a completely open standard that's being supported by multiple companies.
There are only three UPnP video players on that market currently that are worth mentioning (though there are a pile of audio players); the DLink DSM-320 and the Philips Streamium SL300i/SL400i. From what I read it sounds like the Streamiums are slightly superior to the DLink but their stats are very similiar. They both play mp3/mp4/divX/XVid, etc.
There are some great UPnP media servers out there if you're running a Windows media box. Microsoft even released their own recently. Unfortunately there really isn't any good option if you're running a non Windows server, buying a copy of Twonkyvision seems to be the current best choice for those of us running Linux/BSD. I've heard rumors that Philips software uses a Java core and might be made to run anywhere.
I'm disappointed actually that UPnP media technology is currently being ignored by the OSS community. You really couldn't ask for a standard that's easier to write for. But I suspect some programmers will eventually tire of their frankenbox video servers and they'll start writing software to support the increasing number of small, sleek, and cheap boxes that are appearing on retailers' store shelves.
Even if the card supports 5.1 surround by analog jacks, e.g., the SB Audigy, it will not encode your digital signal in anything other than 2-channel PCM; except when you are directly passing it raw AC3 or DTS digital data (say, from a DVD or an AC3 encoded file.)
Annoying ain't it? I know more than one person who would love to be able to buy a multichannel soundcard that did realtime AC3 encoding. I believe the now defunct nVidia motherboard was the only way you could do get this type output in a PC and I suspect that only came into existance because they needed the technology for the XBox.
Realtime AC3/DTS encoding will probably be in all three of the next generation consoles but there's nothing on the horizon that I've heard of for PCs. I'm starting to wonder if it's a conspiracy, if the powers that be have decided that no one should want to hook their PC directly up to their entertainment system
All they know is that there must be growth, growth, growth. So here they found something where they believed it would promise growth and wealthiness beyond imagination -- and for a short period of time they were right. Because they pumped money in like mad.
I worked for Epidemic.com in a technical capacity during it's brief bolide existance and though I didn't sit in on all the high level meetings I walked out of there with a sense that the whole company had been conned. It was obvious to everyone in the company that we were blowing stupid amounts of money but I really think this was due less to management incompetence than pressure from the investors to spend everything we got.
The plan was, I believe, to create a pile of small companies, drive them to IPO, and make a ton on the stock. The investors knew exactly what they were doing and it was never their intention to create long term businesses. And it worked - the controlling forces made tons of cash, the general public got screwed out of money, and some corporate officers got handcuffed to a sinking ship.
Is there any kind of automated system that would ease this, or is it the Hard drive equivelant of "Remove tape, insert new tape".
First, I'll redirect you to this post I made and its parent. My backup server is on a physical timer so it's actually only online a couple of hours each night. It would be possible for a malicious hacker to penetrate my first system and wait around for the backup system to come online so he could attack that but it seems unlikely to me.
Regarding your concerns of physical damage, I could easily move my backup server to someone elses home and backup over the Internet. One reason I don't do this is that I like to check my backup server occasionally and make sure it's still working, something I probably wouldn't do if it was located somewhere else.
This command mirrors everything in/your_directory_to_backup to user@other_host:/backup/current/ and in addition to that keeps all the changes you did to that directory in a seperate 'dated' directory like/backup/2005-01-15, so you can also recover files that you deleted some days ago. Some other posters seem to have missed the '--backup' option, which is why I repost the rsync trick.
I would like to second this technique, I use it with some slight modifications. I have a complete second computer with a 250GB hard drive that's responsible for backing up a 100GB server. The backup machine is on a timer so it only switches on each night to do a full replication.
This is a very good solution because it's cheap, entirely automated, and provides incremental backups. Short of my whole house burning down I'm protected from pretty much any virtual disaster.
I had to do something similiar to this, I pull episodes of This American Life so I can listen to them while jogging or biking. The product that can do this for you is mplayer. Be warned: it takes some doing to get it setup so that it can decode Realmedia streams but once that's done you can use the following commands:
Do you run rsync with --delete? If not, how do you deal with moved files? If so, how do you deal with accidental deletion?
I use the --backup option in rsync. Whenever it determines that a file needs to be replaced or deleted it moves the current copy to a datemarked directory. This only works of course if your backup machine has a lot more space than what you're backing up. It does cover you in cases where the data is accidentally corrupted.
Unfortunately, I can't remember for the life of me what the judge ruled on this motion, but it is very similar to what we're dealing with here.
Your post would've been that much more worth reading if you could have remembered. The supreme court ruled that infared cameras and similiar uses of technology required the use of a warrant.
Are you French? It was in a Paris airport that I first had some kid holding a rifle come up to me and ask if that was my bag. I don't understand why the US's upgrade to European level security is such a stain on the country.
Of course they'd either have to be safe for consumption or have the beverage container's opening be filtered with a mesh so they couldn't be swallowed.
Look up the Japanese soft drink Lamune. It used a particularly unique design in which the drink was sealed by a marble stuck in the neck of the bottle. To open you pushed the marble down into the bottle. If you wanted to save a little for later you could flip the bottle upside down and suck on it, the marble would fall down and reseal the bottle.
One problem about this concept is that you have to fully dedicate to the concept and not start off with a city or town that already has cars going through it. Case in point: Boulder, Colorado, USA.
Boulder is a good example of why public transportation can't be forced down people's throats with the expectation, "If we build it, they will come." Their bus system is laughable as public transportation; quite often it is faster to walk rather than wait for one of those busses to get around to showing up. The only ones who use it are poor college students who have no choice, anybody who has a car is far better off driving. And I don't see it improving anytime soon because the people who do use it (poor college students) aren't the kind of people who complain to the city that the service sucks.
Now Boulder does have a wonderful selection of parks and trails and the city should definately be held as a model of what serious greenbelts can do. But bike trails aren't public transportation.
This is not a device that can form an image from an object at a non-trivial distance from the display - this is a device that only images an object placed against it.
The best illustration of this use is probably Sun's Starfire video. It's an amusing short film of what the future will look like, at least according to Sun. The centerpiece of the movie is a large, wraparound console that is not only touch sensitive but will automatically scan anything that is placed on it.
There would appear to be a copy of the movie here for anyone interested.
One of the best resources I've found for general healthy skeptism is skepdic.com. Here's their entry on cattle mutilations. The site is effectively a catalogue of all kinds of phenomenon; I suspect even non skeptics would enjoy browsing through it.
In regards to skepticism in general, I have a thought on that. The first thing skeptics do is question the essentials of any situation. In the vast majority of cases, it is simply the initial information that is wrong and the impossible scenario never occured, at least not how others believe it did. People like to tell interesting stories and they usually aren't very happy when a skeptic begins questioning aspects of their tale. Hence we make a bad impression.
Now if someone could explain the Joplin Spook Light I would be eternally grateful.
I bought an Audiotron recently and I am quite pleased with it. It comes off as a self contained professional product that is still open to a little hacking and tweaking.
Lack of OGG or FLAC support. And TB has stated that the current Audiotron won't have it either, because it doesn't have the CPU power. Yeah, I know someone has a plugin to convert any format to WAV on-the-fly, but it requires more CPU power than would be present in my network server(s). Realistically, I'm most interested in FLAC.
There is a solution but it's an unsupported do-it-yourself hack that I haven't tried myself. The newest version of Samba allows file translation and you can use this to realtime convert from ogg or flac to wav. There is more information here.
The second issue, which I'm not sure is still an issue, is that I've heard that the AT has a small "silence" between tracks
I haven't observed that problem but I don't remember listening to anything that would have caused me to notice such a fault. I have heard occasional audio glitches but these can always be traced back to some badly encoded mp3 that was probably downloaded from Kazaa. The Audiotron isn't as forgiving as Winamp.
Bear in mind that the Audiotron and its ilk are nearly first generation products and are guaranteed to have glitches that you might not like. If you demand perfection from your audio system then you'd best give the current generation of players a miss.
Users saved files anywhere they could with no restrictions. Other users who 'claimed' parts of the server space as their own threw out files that appeared there from other users.
This is an excellent point. Many users have no concept of a directory structure and save files in almost random locations. When I was a network administrator we spent time locking down the users' NT boxes; not for any security reason, but to prevent the users from saving files anywhere but on the server.
Now instead of before where a user would call and the support person would change their password (a fairly easy problem to diagnose and correct), your support people are going to spend the first few minutes of any conversation trying to determine who the user is even logged in as. Account swapping is going to be a whole new fun area of technical support as users just use each other's accounts to accomplish tasks rather than deal with problems with their own accounts.
If your management isn't impressed with security concerns, maybe this line of reasoning will help. I guarantee you that your employees are already trading passwords and accounts in a limited fashion to get work done, removing passwords will cause an explosion of support issues. Good luck to you.
I am not too sure what the distinction is between a racket and a scam.
The dictionary doesn't draw a very wide distinction between these two words. I would say that a scam is a situation where you're paying too much for too little or nothing at all. A racket is when you do get return on your money but it's something you shouldn't have had to pay for to begin with
You definately do get something with the Qwest inline plan. You get protection from $80 charges popping up on your bill.
Inline Plus is an 'insurance policy' the phone company will always try to sell you (monthly fee of $3.95 or so). It's supposed to 'protect' you in case your wiring fails inside your house and needs to be repaired by the phone company. If you are a renter, then there's no risk of you bearing the expense of fixing telephone wiring, so there's NO NEED for inline plus. If you are a home-owner, it's highly unlikely that you'll encounter a (phone) wiring problem you can't fix yourself.
I don't know if I'd call it a scam, it's more of a racket. I'm serviced by Qwest and their policy is that they charge $80 per visit if it turns out the problem was with your wiring and you're not paying that fee. What this means is that every time one has phone problems they're supposed to take a phone out to their D-Mark and check it there or risk the $80 fine.
This is a pretty major thing to ask most people to do. Plus even if it's Qwest's fault, the technician may not find the problem and add the $80 charge anyway. So effectively they're charging you if they can't find the problem.
I've had a good deal of fun with these rules personally. Despite various problems, including not actually having a D-Mark, I've managed to get by without paying that inline fee. But it's involved spending some time on the phone disputing charges and sitting out in the rain with a pair of alligator clips trying to find my line in a mess of wires. That's really too much to expect for most people.
I suspect that's not too big of an issue. There was a post here a few days ago where somebody was heralding European phones since he could switch between 3 fashionable phones as the situation dictated. It may be that people are more tempted to upgrade in Europe to the latest and greatest with the rationale that you can't have too many phones.
Did they send the email out to the account they'd just disabled or were they smarter than that?
Our school used its own brew of mail system. Each student chose a home for their email and all email from all systems would flow into the student's mailbox on their home account. So whether you were able to receive the message from the CS department was dependant on whether your CS account was your mail home. So ironically, it was probably the die hard CS students that got it worst.
I think a good rule of thumb for college admins is to never do ANYTHING during finals. Just do it during break or at the start of the next semester.
My university had a some sort of automated cracking script running weekly. If it cracked your password you were sent an email telling you your password had been cracked by their script. You were then instructed to change your password within 3 days (or something) or else your account would automagically be disabled.
When I was in school, our CS department did something similiar. A few admins would get done with finals and run a password cracking program against their user base. If a password was cracked, they would disable the account and send out an email. If you had a poorly chosen password and a major project due at the end of the semester, this meant that your account would automagically be disabled at the worst possible time. I assume that your admins were smarter (or nicer) than ours.
I've been using Front Range Internet [frii.com] for over 2 years now, and I'm very happy with their service and support.
I agree. I've been using them for 2-3 years now and have been quite pleased. Reasonably fast DSL and 5 static IPs for not that much more than Qwest DSL. The only caveat is that if you opt for static IPs, you will be charged for using more than ~3gB of bandwidth in a month. It's a tradeoff I'm willing to make so I can run my own servers hassle free, check them out if you're into that sort of thing.
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The second act discusses the life of a woman who named herself Zora and decided to, from an early age, learn all the skills needed to become a comic book style superhero. She achieves her goals but then learns that there are very few job opportunities that require all the skills that she now possesses. It's well worth listening to.
I'm an American so when I first heard that the British Monarchy had authority over your country I honestly didn't beleive it. Then I discovered that United States also had a problem with the British Monarchy at some stage. We recognised it as a problem and we fixed it. We are no longer run by the British royal family. Does any other democracy on earth still have a king or queen? Is it impossible for Australians to recognise a problem and fix it without ballsing it up? It just seems you have all these parasites gaming your political process and you do nothing about it. You know how everyone knows that Queen Elizabeth can appoint the governor general? Well, here in the US, it's illegal for the Queen of England to strike down our laws. It's like that in the rest of the world too right? So why can't Australians recognise something that's so straight forward and simple (the people shouldn't be under the thumb of a decrepit royal family) and do something about it?
It is News Radio. A brilliant show with the best comic talent assembled in one show since the good days of SNL. It is also very well written, the characters all compliment the actors abilities. Also, it has the only woman character ever to appear on American TV that is both sexy and intelligent.
What I loved about the show was that with the exception of Beth and Matthew, all of the characters were very intelligent. It was a continuous struggle between Dave, Jimmy, Lisa, and Bill as each person tried to increase their influence in the office and hold onto their own territory. It was such a welcome change from the traditional sitcom where characters get in a jam simply because their too stupid to figure out a simple solution.
I've been wanting a good media player for my home entertainment system for a long time now. I'm convinced a good solution will appear in the next year or so but my advice for the moment is to wait.
The most exciting development is that companies have started supporting the UPnP Media Server standard. The idea is that any UPnP media client can automatically detect every UPnP media server that's on the local network and automatically play the shared media - video and audio. What makes UPnP Media superior to pretty much everything else is that it's a completely open standard that's being supported by multiple companies.
There are only three UPnP video players on that market currently that are worth mentioning (though there are a pile of audio players); the DLink DSM-320 and the Philips Streamium SL300i/SL400i. From what I read it sounds like the Streamiums are slightly superior to the DLink but their stats are very similiar. They both play mp3/mp4/divX/XVid, etc.
There are some great UPnP media servers out there if you're running a Windows media box. Microsoft even released their own recently. Unfortunately there really isn't any good option if you're running a non Windows server, buying a copy of Twonkyvision seems to be the current best choice for those of us running Linux/BSD. I've heard rumors that Philips software uses a Java core and might be made to run anywhere.
I'm disappointed actually that UPnP media technology is currently being ignored by the OSS community. You really couldn't ask for a standard that's easier to write for. But I suspect some programmers will eventually tire of their frankenbox video servers and they'll start writing software to support the increasing number of small, sleek, and cheap boxes that are appearing on retailers' store shelves.
Annoying ain't it? I know more than one person who would love to be able to buy a multichannel soundcard that did realtime AC3 encoding. I believe the now defunct nVidia motherboard was the only way you could do get this type output in a PC and I suspect that only came into existance because they needed the technology for the XBox.
Realtime AC3/DTS encoding will probably be in all three of the next generation consoles but there's nothing on the horizon that I've heard of for PCs. I'm starting to wonder if it's a conspiracy, if the powers that be have decided that no one should want to hook their PC directly up to their entertainment system
I worked for Epidemic.com in a technical capacity during it's brief bolide existance and though I didn't sit in on all the high level meetings I walked out of there with a sense that the whole company had been conned. It was obvious to everyone in the company that we were blowing stupid amounts of money but I really think this was due less to management incompetence than pressure from the investors to spend everything we got.
The plan was, I believe, to create a pile of small companies, drive them to IPO, and make a ton on the stock. The investors knew exactly what they were doing and it was never their intention to create long term businesses. And it worked - the controlling forces made tons of cash, the general public got screwed out of money, and some corporate officers got handcuffed to a sinking ship.
First, I'll redirect you to this post I made and its parent. My backup server is on a physical timer so it's actually only online a couple of hours each night. It would be possible for a malicious hacker to penetrate my first system and wait around for the backup system to come online so he could attack that but it seems unlikely to me.
Regarding your concerns of physical damage, I could easily move my backup server to someone elses home and backup over the Internet. One reason I don't do this is that I like to check my backup server occasionally and make sure it's still working, something I probably wouldn't do if it was located somewhere else.
I would like to second this technique, I use it with some slight modifications. I have a complete second computer with a 250GB hard drive that's responsible for backing up a 100GB server. The backup machine is on a timer so it only switches on each night to do a full replication.
This is a very good solution because it's cheap, entirely automated, and provides incremental backups. Short of my whole house burning down I'm protected from pretty much any virtual disaster.
I had to do something similiar to this, I pull episodes of This American Life so I can listen to them while jogging or biking. The product that can do this for you is mplayer. Be warned: it takes some doing to get it setup so that it can decode Realmedia streams but once that's done you can use the following commands:
mplayer -dumpstream -dumpfile file.rm rtsp://...
mplayer -ao pcm file.rm
lame -v --resample 44.1 audiodump.wav file.mp3
I use the --backup option in rsync. Whenever it determines that a file needs to be replaced or deleted it moves the current copy to a datemarked directory. This only works of course if your backup machine has a lot more space than what you're backing up. It does cover you in cases where the data is accidentally corrupted.
Unfortunately, I can't remember for the life of me what the judge ruled on this motion, but it is very similar to what we're dealing with here.
Your post would've been that much more worth reading if you could have remembered. The supreme court ruled that infared cameras and similiar uses of technology required the use of a warrant.
Are you French? It was in a Paris airport that I first had some kid holding a rifle come up to me and ask if that was my bag. I don't understand why the US's upgrade to European level security is such a stain on the country.
Of course they'd either have to be safe for consumption or have the beverage container's opening be filtered with a mesh so they couldn't be swallowed.
Look up the Japanese soft drink Lamune. It used a particularly unique design in which the drink was sealed by a marble stuck in the neck of the bottle. To open you pushed the marble down into the bottle. If you wanted to save a little for later you could flip the bottle upside down and suck on it, the marble would fall down and reseal the bottle.
Boulder is a good example of why public transportation can't be forced down people's throats with the expectation, "If we build it, they will come." Their bus system is laughable as public transportation; quite often it is faster to walk rather than wait for one of those busses to get around to showing up. The only ones who use it are poor college students who have no choice, anybody who has a car is far better off driving. And I don't see it improving anytime soon because the people who do use it (poor college students) aren't the kind of people who complain to the city that the service sucks.
Now Boulder does have a wonderful selection of parks and trails and the city should definately be held as a model of what serious greenbelts can do. But bike trails aren't public transportation.
The best illustration of this use is probably Sun's Starfire video. It's an amusing short film of what the future will look like, at least according to Sun. The centerpiece of the movie is a large, wraparound console that is not only touch sensitive but will automatically scan anything that is placed on it.
There would appear to be a copy of the movie here for anyone interested.
One of the best resources I've found for general healthy skeptism is skepdic.com. Here's their entry on cattle mutilations. The site is effectively a catalogue of all kinds of phenomenon; I suspect even non skeptics would enjoy browsing through it.
In regards to skepticism in general, I have a thought on that. The first thing skeptics do is question the essentials of any situation. In the vast majority of cases, it is simply the initial information that is wrong and the impossible scenario never occured, at least not how others believe it did. People like to tell interesting stories and they usually aren't very happy when a skeptic begins questioning aspects of their tale. Hence we make a bad impression.
Now if someone could explain the Joplin Spook Light I would be eternally grateful.
I bought an Audiotron recently and I am quite pleased with it. It comes off as a self contained professional product that is still open to a little hacking and tweaking.
Lack of OGG or FLAC support. And TB has stated that the current Audiotron won't have it either, because it doesn't have the CPU power. Yeah, I know someone has a plugin to convert any format to WAV on-the-fly, but it requires more CPU power than would be present in my network server(s). Realistically, I'm most interested in FLAC.
There is a solution but it's an unsupported do-it-yourself hack that I haven't tried myself. The newest version of Samba allows file translation and you can use this to realtime convert from ogg or flac to wav. There is more information here.
The second issue, which I'm not sure is still an issue, is that I've heard that the AT has a small "silence" between tracks
I haven't observed that problem but I don't remember listening to anything that would have caused me to notice such a fault. I have heard occasional audio glitches but these can always be traced back to some badly encoded mp3 that was probably downloaded from Kazaa. The Audiotron isn't as forgiving as Winamp.
Bear in mind that the Audiotron and its ilk are nearly first generation products and are guaranteed to have glitches that you might not like. If you demand perfection from your audio system then you'd best give the current generation of players a miss.
This is an excellent point. Many users have no concept of a directory structure and save files in almost random locations. When I was a network administrator we spent time locking down the users' NT boxes; not for any security reason, but to prevent the users from saving files anywhere but on the server.
Now instead of before where a user would call and the support person would change their password (a fairly easy problem to diagnose and correct), your support people are going to spend the first few minutes of any conversation trying to determine who the user is even logged in as. Account swapping is going to be a whole new fun area of technical support as users just use each other's accounts to accomplish tasks rather than deal with problems with their own accounts.
If your management isn't impressed with security concerns, maybe this line of reasoning will help. I guarantee you that your employees are already trading passwords and accounts in a limited fashion to get work done, removing passwords will cause an explosion of support issues. Good luck to you.
I am not too sure what the distinction is between a racket and a scam.
The dictionary doesn't draw a very wide distinction between these two words. I would say that a scam is a situation where you're paying too much for too little or nothing at all. A racket is when you do get return on your money but it's something you shouldn't have had to pay for to begin with
You definately do get something with the Qwest inline plan. You get protection from $80 charges popping up on your bill.
Inline Plus is an 'insurance policy' the phone company will always try to sell you (monthly fee of $3.95 or so). It's supposed to 'protect' you in case your wiring fails inside your house and needs to be repaired by the phone company. If you are a renter, then there's no risk of you bearing the expense of fixing telephone wiring, so there's NO NEED for inline plus. If you are a home-owner, it's highly unlikely that you'll encounter a (phone) wiring problem you can't fix yourself.
I don't know if I'd call it a scam, it's more of a racket. I'm serviced by Qwest and their policy is that they charge $80 per visit if it turns out the problem was with your wiring and you're not paying that fee. What this means is that every time one has phone problems they're supposed to take a phone out to their D-Mark and check it there or risk the $80 fine.
This is a pretty major thing to ask most people to do. Plus even if it's Qwest's fault, the technician may not find the problem and add the $80 charge anyway. So effectively they're charging you if they can't find the problem.
I've had a good deal of fun with these rules personally. Despite various problems, including not actually having a D-Mark, I've managed to get by without paying that inline fee. But it's involved spending some time on the phone disputing charges and sitting out in the rain with a pair of alligator clips trying to find my line in a mess of wires. That's really too much to expect for most people.
I suspect that's not too big of an issue. There was a post here a few days ago where somebody was heralding European phones since he could switch between 3 fashionable phones as the situation dictated. It may be that people are more tempted to upgrade in Europe to the latest and greatest with the rationale that you can't have too many phones.
There was an NPR commentary a year ago on this phenomenon. It's an interesting listen.
Did they send the email out to the account they'd just disabled or were they smarter than that?
Our school used its own brew of mail system. Each student chose a home for their email and all email from all systems would flow into the student's mailbox on their home account. So whether you were able to receive the message from the CS department was dependant on whether your CS account was your mail home. So ironically, it was probably the die hard CS students that got it worst.
I think a good rule of thumb for college admins is to never do ANYTHING during finals. Just do it during break or at the start of the next semester.
My university had a some sort of automated cracking script running weekly. If it cracked your password you were sent an email telling you your password had been cracked by their script. You were then instructed to change your password within 3 days (or something) or else your account would automagically be disabled.
When I was in school, our CS department did something similiar. A few admins would get done with finals and run a password cracking program against their user base. If a password was cracked, they would disable the account and send out an email. If you had a poorly chosen password and a major project due at the end of the semester, this meant that your account would automagically be disabled at the worst possible time. I assume that your admins were smarter (or nicer) than ours.
I agree. I've been using them for 2-3 years now and have been quite pleased. Reasonably fast DSL and 5 static IPs for not that much more than Qwest DSL. The only caveat is that if you opt for static IPs, you will be charged for using more than ~3gB of bandwidth in a month. It's a tradeoff I'm willing to make so I can run my own servers hassle free, check them out if you're into that sort of thing.