It was drown by noise: spammers, pirates, binaries, and even great readers like slrn and excellent filters couldn't make the signal to noise ratio manaegable.
I find it interesting that your definition of noise includes binaries.
Usenet is an incredibly wonderful way of distributing binaries. It's pretty darn easy to keep binaries and discussion separate, depending on how you want to set up your server, your reader, your group. While massposting of binaries that are off-topic to a group does create terrible noise, that's deliberate vandalism. Usenet is not proof against vandalism. Neither is the web, web forums, various feeds and pushes, or, well, any communications technology. I imagine people were tapping into and sending crap on telegraph wires back in the day. I can deal with occasional vandalism in other parts of life. I feel the same way about usenet. The things about it that work are so wonderful that I'll put up with the bad stuff.
I guess I came along too long after usenet started up. I never corresponded with kibo. I actually consider binary distribution to be a reasonable use of the technnology for commerical providers and assume that specialty or *.edu providers will simply eschew the entire alt.binaries.* hierarchy in favor of setting up their own groups where they can filter binaries at the server. Hell, I've got a copy of the
chicken book at home and I fully intend to set up a server of my own as a bit of a hobby after I retire in a few years.
I just don't think usenet has been "driven out" in any meaningful way for folks who appreciate the things it does so wonderfully well. Discussions of the viability of usenet cannot yet reasonbly lump usenet in with Veronica and Gopher. I think it will be a long time before such is the case.
I agree that the iPad is overpriced. I bought one, anyway, and found that it does the following, the sum of which makes it worth the money for me.
- YouTube vids until I get sleepy, then I put it on the shelf next to my alarm clock. Much more convenient than sitting up in bed watching TV, for a variety of reasons.
- My disabled, mostly bedridden sister uses it for games and email.
- Minimally useful in specific situation for taking notes at work.
- Browsing at public wifi spots. I use it as my morning paper, more or less, on the weekends when I go somewhere for breakfast.
- Easy, quick checks of my webmail accounts, traffic web site, and weather forecast before I leave for work each morning. Much simpler and faster than starting up my main machine each morning when I'm pressed for time.
- Play a level of Doom while I'm waiting for whatever machine I'm working on to reboot. I used to feel that half my work life was spent waiting for machines to reboot. Given the standard image and network authentications required at my employer, a properly running machine boots to a useful desktop in 8 (never less than 7) minutes. That's not long enough for me to get up, go back to my desk, get something done, and return. It used to be wasted time. Now, it's still wasted time but it seems to go much faster.
DO NOT allow security to mitigate mission performance!
You say that like it's an absolute. It's not. All security measures mitigate mission performance. It's just a matter of how much you're willing to stand and where you're willing to draw the line.
I think most of us are willing to lock the building doors at night and run AV software. Both of those security measures mitigate against highest possible mission performance, as when low-level employees without keys can't come in to get some work done during off hours or a virus starts killing machines.
I'm willing to bet that you are actually willing to accept some mitigation of mission performance in the name of security. You can't be as nuts as your post made you sound, can you?
And if that's the case, making your position by overstating it as in your post does more harm than good. Non-IT folks who insist that NO mitigation is acceptable contribute mightily to unnecessarily high tension between the IT folks (who just want to help them get their work done while avoiding some screwup that causes the whole organization to stumble) and their customers. I've known of cases where system monitoring found a really nasty virus or trojan on a laptop and immediately took it off the domain. Then I've seen the executive to whom that laptop was issued DEMAND that their computer be immediately placed back on the domain because they had work to do. Like you posted, he would "...NOT allow security to mitigate mission performance!" (well, HIS performance, anyway, and screw everybody else).
Absolutism like that is just stupid. So tell us where you draw your lines. That would be a much more helpful insight than what you've provided thus far.
I'm a lowly IT support tech - the guy who plugs in your monitor. I dress in an issued golf shirt over these cargo pants. The back pockets are very wide - from the side seam on the leg all the way across to the center-line seam at my spine. That means that (back_pocket_width)==(waist_measurement)/4. The back pockets are also deep, running all the way from waist to crotch level.
Anyone with pants like that who's at least 40 inches in the waist can put an iPad in their back pocket. You could actually be a lot smaller and the iPad would still fit but it would be stressed/broken by trying to conform to the contour of the hip/backside.
A 7" tablet, that actually fits in a coat pocket, would be just about perfect. 10" (9.7 actually) is too big. You might as well carry a notebook.
I live in a warm climate and never wear a coat. My iPad fits in my back pants pocket just fine. I carry it there all the time. I just have to remember not to sit on it.
To me, the iPad is the right size because it's big enough to read and slim enough to be portable. A notebook or netbook wouldn't work as well since even the thinnnest is still too thick for me to be willing to carry around in a pocket.
If a cc company doesn't like your product, for whatever reason, they'll institute policies banning you and everyone else in your business. Is it legal to buy marijuana in your location? It doesn't matter if you live in one of the many places where it is, cc companies won't knowingly give those merchants accounts. Want to buy pictures of "child models"? Those sites can't get cc companies to work with them simply because their product is icky (not illegal in most countries, just really icky).
Sell something, do something, say something that the cc companies think will make them look bad and they'll cut you off. This is a surprise?
What's surprising to me is that the cc companies have decided that "pirate" sites (or however they define this subset of customers that they're going to cut off) are a sufficiently serious source of bad press that it's worthwhile to cut them off. More people every day are becoming more educated about media distribution, how evil some of the companies involved are, and how not-necessarily-immoral is the whole notion of downloading media. They might derive some public-image profit in the short term among the uneducated but I have to believe that in the long term most of their customers are going to understand this was a really dumb move.
If you're actually innocent and you have the opportunity, pass on the jury. They convict too often on too flimsy evidence because your public defender is overworked to the point of incompetence and the prosecutor will happily withhold exculpatory evidence, fabricate the stuff that damns, and orate like a banana-republic dictator in the absence of either.
If you're actually guilty, go for the jury. Sometimes they can be swayed by irrelevant evidence, unimportant procedural error as evidence of something sinister, or sheer emotion (e.g., Orinthal James).
Just 8 lines of lousy poetry is all the words it takes to make a hit song. I find that interesting especially since there are so many hits out there with far fewer words than this, even. It never ceases to amaze me how simple and simpleminded hit pop songs, even the really catchy ones, can be.
Re:When PS2 is better - one example
on
Goodbye, VGA
·
· Score: 1
USB legacy support is turned on as a part of our standard builds. The problem still happens. Interesting that all the replies so far have pointed to the same cause. I think I'll add a line to our troubleshooting checklist to check that BIOS setting, anyway, just in case we've made some setup errors.
When PS2 is better - one example
on
Goodbye, VGA
·
· Score: 1
In my organization, all computers run full disk encryption with a pre-boot screen that pops up to enter a password. We use both Guardian Edge and WinMagic products for this purpose. We've found that in one fairly common failure mode seen while Guardian Edge Hard Disk disk encryption is used, when we need to type in an admin account name and password to unlock machines, the machines simply don't recognize USB devices. Plug in a PS2 keyboard, reboot, and then we can log on and fix 'em.
I'm pretty clueless about why this is the case but I also know I'll be keeping a couple of PS2 keyboards around until I retire in 5 years.
I'd guess that if this is the case with us, there are probably other "pre-boot" situations where PS2 is usable but USB is not.
Anyone who actually understands this mechanism and is willing to explain it - please chime in.
I think most people who actually buy any quantity of photo equipment online, who want to shop at a camera store (not a "we got everything" place like Amazon), and who have been in the game for a while eventually restrict their purchases to B&H PhotoVideo, Adorama, and maybe J&R. For high-end product, there's Calumet. There are also a few specialty shops (I really miss Zone VI) and some used dealers (e.g. Keh).
That's about it.
Those thousands of other shops that you've never heard of but who offer screaming deals? There's a 99% probability that they're a ripoff.
Not entirely correct. While there is no groping except under incredibly rare circumstances, in the aftermath of the OKC bombing, we DID put up checkpoints. Until then, almost no federal building that did business with large numbers of the general public had any formal checkpoints. After the bombing, metal detectors went up at nearly all of them. I go through the dumb things a dozen times a day.
I would love to see the statistics showing how effectively the metal detectors have been at catching people trying to smuggle 5000 pounds of fuel oil and fertilizer in their briefcases. The detectors always struck me as eqivalent to installing radon detectors in your house to make sure the horses don't escape the barn.
And as a sad, side note - wait till you see some of the utterly pointless crap that will soon be installed as a result of that guy who flew his plane into the IRS office in Austin. That little stunt got lots of money put into physical security budgets, money that won't be spent on anything even halfway useful.
If you're old enough to remember, I had in mind those "urge to kill" thought balloons that used to appear in the daily newspaper comic strip
There Oughta Be A Law. I'm not as talented as that artist, though, and it didn't come off quite right.
...I think it's the only thing he could have done at this point to have restored any value to the work that the diligent students did.
I disagree.
In the lecture, he said that by the end of that week, he'd have a perfect list of who cheated and who didn't. If that's true (and it's not at all clear that it is), then the proper course is to flunk the cheaters. Once that's done, the diligent students not only get their good grades but everybody in the school then knows that they were not only diligent in their coursework but also have some integrity.
I'd call that "restoring value."
The question I'm incompetent to answer (since I haven't been in a universtiy classroom in a quarter-centry) is "What is it about the modern business of higher education that would lead a prof to do anything but flunk those students?"
I agree. Please note that at no point did I say the professor was responsible for the cheating. He failed to anticipate it when he should have. He failed to take steps to prevent it. He utterly failed in every way in his reaction to it.
But the cheating, itself, was certainly not his fault.
On some minor points - As other posters have pointed out, the fact that test banks have escaped into the wild is known and for the prof to get all indignant at the cheating isn't right. He knew or should have known that such was possible and going all "nuclear option" in the aftermath isn't justified. Also, the question of refunds is a toss-up; there's just too much of a fine line to cover on that score.
However, I do take exception to the notion that "teaching from a book" and "doesn't want to argue" are justifications for using the bank. I've been in this situation before, where an answer key or a textbook had errors. Those are teachable moments. Real education requires getting into discussions (I hesitate to use the term "arguments") over such things. That's why you have real people teaching courses instead of just chucking a giant pile of books at incoming students and telling them when to report for the first test.
Further, using banks, textbooks, and instructor knowledge as absolute standards for judging the ability of students to learn is just wrong. It's an "argument from authority" that any student of rhetoric should be able to refute as basis. Good students are students who can find the errors in a textbook or argue with a prof, not those who pass standardized tests maintained by book publishers who are as remote from the classroom as the moon.
So if the goal is education, I think my original post was a mostly reasonable summary of my first impression of the lecture.
On the other hand, if the goal of a university is exchanging sheepskins for money (and the higher the volume, the better), then I'm completely off base.
See
this.
After this post, I'm not going to reply to any more comments on the spelling of that word. I'll leave it to y'all to figure it out for yourselves.
Punishing the innocent to get at the guilty is an act far more despicable than the original cheating. The prof is an idiot and the school that allows him to get away with this crap is not worth attending.
Slashdot Mirror
I think we got on usenet at about the same time. I remember using WordPerfect to stitch together multi-part binaries in the beginning.
Since then I've come so far. Now I use cat. :-)
I find it interesting that your definition of noise includes binaries.
Usenet is an incredibly wonderful way of distributing binaries. It's pretty darn easy to keep binaries and discussion separate, depending on how you want to set up your server, your reader, your group. While massposting of binaries that are off-topic to a group does create terrible noise, that's deliberate vandalism. Usenet is not proof against vandalism. Neither is the web, web forums, various feeds and pushes, or, well, any communications technology. I imagine people were tapping into and sending crap on telegraph wires back in the day. I can deal with occasional vandalism in other parts of life. I feel the same way about usenet. The things about it that work are so wonderful that I'll put up with the bad stuff.
I guess I came along too long after usenet started up. I never corresponded with kibo. I actually consider binary distribution to be a reasonable use of the technnology for commerical providers and assume that specialty or *.edu providers will simply eschew the entire alt.binaries.* hierarchy in favor of setting up their own groups where they can filter binaries at the server. Hell, I've got a copy of the chicken book at home and I fully intend to set up a server of my own as a bit of a hobby after I retire in a few years.
I just don't think usenet has been "driven out" in any meaningful way for folks who appreciate the things it does so wonderfully well. Discussions of the viability of usenet cannot yet reasonbly lump usenet in with Veronica and Gopher. I think it will be a long time before such is the case.
I agree that the iPad is overpriced. I bought one, anyway, and found that it does the following, the sum of which makes it worth the money for me.
- YouTube vids until I get sleepy, then I put it on the shelf next to my alarm clock. Much more convenient than sitting up in bed watching TV, for a variety of reasons.
- My disabled, mostly bedridden sister uses it for games and email.
- Minimally useful in specific situation for taking notes at work.
- Browsing at public wifi spots. I use it as my morning paper, more or less, on the weekends when I go somewhere for breakfast.
- Easy, quick checks of my webmail accounts, traffic web site, and weather forecast before I leave for work each morning. Much simpler and faster than starting up my main machine each morning when I'm pressed for time.
- Play a level of Doom while I'm waiting for whatever machine I'm working on to reboot. I used to feel that half my work life was spent waiting for machines to reboot. Given the standard image and network authentications required at my employer, a properly running machine boots to a useful desktop in 8 (never less than 7) minutes. That's not long enough for me to get up, go back to my desk, get something done, and return. It used to be wasted time. Now, it's still wasted time but it seems to go much faster.
For a single line, that's an awful lot of insight.
You say that like it's an absolute. It's not. All security measures mitigate mission performance. It's just a matter of how much you're willing to stand and where you're willing to draw the line.
I think most of us are willing to lock the building doors at night and run AV software. Both of those security measures mitigate against highest possible mission performance, as when low-level employees without keys can't come in to get some work done during off hours or a virus starts killing machines.
I'm willing to bet that you are actually willing to accept some mitigation of mission performance in the name of security. You can't be as nuts as your post made you sound, can you?
And if that's the case, making your position by overstating it as in your post does more harm than good. Non-IT folks who insist that NO mitigation is acceptable contribute mightily to unnecessarily high tension between the IT folks (who just want to help them get their work done while avoiding some screwup that causes the whole organization to stumble) and their customers. I've known of cases where system monitoring found a really nasty virus or trojan on a laptop and immediately took it off the domain. Then I've seen the executive to whom that laptop was issued DEMAND that their computer be immediately placed back on the domain because they had work to do. Like you posted, he would "...NOT allow security to mitigate mission performance!" (well, HIS performance, anyway, and screw everybody else).
Absolutism like that is just stupid. So tell us where you draw your lines. That would be a much more helpful insight than what you've provided thus far.
Yep. But if you're wearing the right pants, you don't have to be terribly fat. See my post replying to wisdom_brewing.
I'm a lowly IT support tech - the guy who plugs in your monitor. I dress in an issued golf shirt over these cargo pants. The back pockets are very wide - from the side seam on the leg all the way across to the center-line seam at my spine. That means that (back_pocket_width)==(waist_measurement)/4. The back pockets are also deep, running all the way from waist to crotch level.
Anyone with pants like that who's at least 40 inches in the waist can put an iPad in their back pocket. You could actually be a lot smaller and the iPad would still fit but it would be stressed/broken by trying to conform to the contour of the hip/backside.
I live in a warm climate and never wear a coat. My iPad fits in my back pants pocket just fine. I carry it there all the time. I just have to remember not to sit on it.
To me, the iPad is the right size because it's big enough to read and slim enough to be portable. A notebook or netbook wouldn't work as well since even the thinnnest is still too thick for me to be willing to carry around in a pocket.
If a cc company doesn't like your product, for whatever reason, they'll institute policies banning you and everyone else in your business. Is it legal to buy marijuana in your location? It doesn't matter if you live in one of the many places where it is, cc companies won't knowingly give those merchants accounts. Want to buy pictures of "child models"? Those sites can't get cc companies to work with them simply because their product is icky (not illegal in most countries, just really icky).
Sell something, do something, say something that the cc companies think will make them look bad and they'll cut you off. This is a surprise?
What's surprising to me is that the cc companies have decided that "pirate" sites (or however they define this subset of customers that they're going to cut off) are a sufficiently serious source of bad press that it's worthwhile to cut them off. More people every day are becoming more educated about media distribution, how evil some of the companies involved are, and how not-necessarily-immoral is the whole notion of downloading media. They might derive some public-image profit in the short term among the uneducated but I have to believe that in the long term most of their customers are going to understand this was a really dumb move.
Popcorn? Dadgum, thanks for the reminder. I had forgotten that one.
The way I've always heard it is -
If you're actually innocent and you have the opportunity, pass on the jury. They convict too often on too flimsy evidence because your public defender is overworked to the point of incompetence and the prosecutor will happily withhold exculpatory evidence, fabricate the stuff that damns, and orate like a banana-republic dictator in the absence of either.
If you're actually guilty, go for the jury. Sometimes they can be swayed by irrelevant evidence, unimportant procedural error as evidence of something sinister, or sheer emotion (e.g., Orinthal James).
Just 8 lines of lousy poetry is all the words it takes to make a hit song. I find that interesting especially since there are so many hits out there with far fewer words than this, even. It never ceases to amaze me how simple and simpleminded hit pop songs, even the really catchy ones, can be.
USB legacy support is turned on as a part of our standard builds. The problem still happens. Interesting that all the replies so far have pointed to the same cause. I think I'll add a line to our troubleshooting checklist to check that BIOS setting, anyway, just in case we've made some setup errors.
In my organization, all computers run full disk encryption with a pre-boot screen that pops up to enter a password. We use both Guardian Edge and WinMagic products for this purpose. We've found that in one fairly common failure mode seen while Guardian Edge Hard Disk disk encryption is used, when we need to type in an admin account name and password to unlock machines, the machines simply don't recognize USB devices. Plug in a PS2 keyboard, reboot, and then we can log on and fix 'em.
I'm pretty clueless about why this is the case but I also know I'll be keeping a couple of PS2 keyboards around until I retire in 5 years.
I'd guess that if this is the case with us, there are probably other "pre-boot" situations where PS2 is usable but USB is not.
Anyone who actually understands this mechanism and is willing to explain it - please chime in.
I think most people who actually buy any quantity of photo equipment online, who want to shop at a camera store (not a "we got everything" place like Amazon), and who have been in the game for a while eventually restrict their purchases to B&H PhotoVideo, Adorama, and maybe J&R. For high-end product, there's Calumet. There are also a few specialty shops (I really miss Zone VI) and some used dealers (e.g. Keh).
That's about it.
Those thousands of other shops that you've never heard of but who offer screaming deals? There's a 99% probability that they're a ripoff.
What's at the top of your list?
Not entirely correct. While there is no groping except under incredibly rare circumstances, in the aftermath of the OKC bombing, we DID put up checkpoints. Until then, almost no federal building that did business with large numbers of the general public had any formal checkpoints. After the bombing, metal detectors went up at nearly all of them. I go through the dumb things a dozen times a day.
I would love to see the statistics showing how effectively the metal detectors have been at catching people trying to smuggle 5000 pounds of fuel oil and fertilizer in their briefcases. The detectors always struck me as eqivalent to installing radon detectors in your house to make sure the horses don't escape the barn.
And as a sad, side note - wait till you see some of the utterly pointless crap that will soon be installed as a result of that guy who flew his plane into the IRS office in Austin. That little stunt got lots of money put into physical security budgets, money that won't be spent on anything even halfway useful.
A little over the top, I guess. :-)
If you're old enough to remember, I had in mind those "urge to kill" thought balloons that used to appear in the daily newspaper comic strip There Oughta Be A Law . I'm not as talented as that artist, though, and it didn't come off quite right.
LOL! Thanks. I needed that.
I disagree.
In the lecture, he said that by the end of that week, he'd have a perfect list of who cheated and who didn't. If that's true (and it's not at all clear that it is), then the proper course is to flunk the cheaters. Once that's done, the diligent students not only get their good grades but everybody in the school then knows that they were not only diligent in their coursework but also have some integrity.
I'd call that "restoring value."
The question I'm incompetent to answer (since I haven't been in a universtiy classroom in a quarter-centry) is "What is it about the modern business of higher education that would lead a prof to do anything but flunk those students?"
I agree. Please note that at no point did I say the professor was responsible for the cheating. He failed to anticipate it when he should have. He failed to take steps to prevent it. He utterly failed in every way in his reaction to it.
But the cheating, itself, was certainly not his fault.
You make good points but I must disagree.
On some minor points - As other posters have pointed out, the fact that test banks have escaped into the wild is known and for the prof to get all indignant at the cheating isn't right. He knew or should have known that such was possible and going all "nuclear option" in the aftermath isn't justified. Also, the question of refunds is a toss-up; there's just too much of a fine line to cover on that score.
However, I do take exception to the notion that "teaching from a book" and "doesn't want to argue" are justifications for using the bank. I've been in this situation before, where an answer key or a textbook had errors. Those are teachable moments. Real education requires getting into discussions (I hesitate to use the term "arguments") over such things. That's why you have real people teaching courses instead of just chucking a giant pile of books at incoming students and telling them when to report for the first test.
Further, using banks, textbooks, and instructor knowledge as absolute standards for judging the ability of students to learn is just wrong. It's an "argument from authority" that any student of rhetoric should be able to refute as basis. Good students are students who can find the errors in a textbook or argue with a prof, not those who pass standardized tests maintained by book publishers who are as remote from the classroom as the moon.
So if the goal is education, I think my original post was a mostly reasonable summary of my first impression of the lecture.
On the other hand, if the goal of a university is exchanging sheepskins for money (and the higher the volume, the better), then I'm completely off base.
Aw, crap, another one.
See this. After this post, I'm not going to reply to any more comments on the spelling of that word. I'll leave it to y'all to figure it out for yourselves.
Punishing the innocent to get at the guilty is an act far more despicable than the original cheating. The prof is an idiot and the school that allows him to get away with this crap is not worth attending.
Super insightful.