(also, don't make false bomb threats. They're stupid)
I work at a University. You can always tell when the exam periods have started by the fact that you are constantly seeing fire engines on campus.
Students do the most stupid things to get out of doing an exam they have not prepared for.
I have also seen fake student IDs so someone else can sit the exam and other dodgey dealings. It sucks for the staff (I have lost count of the amount of times I have had to evacuate the data centre/office due to a fire alarm) and also screws over the other students since they often need to resit the exam. It also costs the university money since they get charged for every fire department response.
The most common reason I usually get from non-technical people on why they want or why they purchased an iPhone (or iPad) was because they are 'cool' or 'trendy'. None of them has been able to tell me why or what features it has or does better than any of its competitors. Simply put, they didn't give a damn about how well their device functions when they use it, just the image they can reflect or inherit by owning one.
One of the linked articles mentioned a Chinese student placing a 120Gb at a Sydney TAFE but when you look at the location database map option, it is pinned to a location which is about 30-40km's from where it really is. It shows it as being in Western Sydney when it should be showing it as being in/near to the Sydney CBD. If you look at the photos one of them shows a sign for Harris street which is a main road the TAFE is located next to in/near the Sydney CBD. Not sure how it ended up so far away on the map.
As an aside, I wonder how many of these drives are now infected with malware etc by now.
I saw this article on gamingonlinux.com last night. I was interested in one when I first saw the article. The casing was OK and you could get some decent hardware configurations, on top of that the pricing listed (for the American market) made the product a reasonable option. So I decided to see what was available for the Australian market and the price was one of the two points I made on why I would pass. The other was the fact that on the Australian Dell Alien page, there was no option for Ubuntu when I looked.
Because I live in an apartment block and have in the past had packages dumped at the communal front door of the apartment block and I work in an industrial type complex where all the delivery people seem to get lost and either don't deliver the package and I have to pick it up from their depo on the other side of the city or it gets delivered to the wrong building and I am lucky to every see it.
Something like this would be great for me since it means I know that it will be delivered safetly and and be secured until I pick it up at my time of choosing.
I work at a place that has a similar policy. Doesn't stop us from using way to many proprietary solutions that are actually worse than the Open Source solution. A lot of that is down to OS religion and people not actually understanding what Open Source is. We have managers (and directors) that believe the software needs to be a shrink wrapped solution from a proprietary vendor like Microsoft to be a decent solution and to be able to get 'Enterprise' level support. Many don't realise that just because you can get an Open Source solution for free that; It is just as good as the non Open Source solution and if you really feel you need to pay for 'Enterprise' support and if this is something you need then for a large number of the solutions you would be realistically looking at, that is supplied as well. For the ones I have investigatedt, support has usually worked out to be cheaper than the closed source solution as well.
I wanted to buy spore and I would like to buy SimCity but the DRM is just ridiculous. I have had varied problems with other DRM based games and I am over it. Give me a game I can play and also make the saves to my local machine if I want to and I will buy it (if I like it of course). Bundle the game with crippling DRM, not interested. Simple as that.
Slackware for home, Crunchbang for a few of my older devices and currently moving from Ubunutu to Mint at work. I have found Ubunutu becoming less apealing over the last few years as well as less friendly with the Linux world which has caused me a few problems.
Server wise, if I have a choice I go Debian, otherwise if I do have to have an enterprise distro, I go RHEL. The long release cycles of Debian are annoying so if they can get that sorted out, I would be pretty happy and there is a good chance I would start looking at that for my desktop environments again.
There is a simple reason for this. Once you buy the book, you own the book and the only cost you then have is the housing of the book.
A large number of the books a university would need a digital copy of, you need to license said copy. This incurs a yearly fee and ends up costing a small fortune.
Don't worry. The US is not alone with not using the metric system. You get to share the honor of not officially using the metric system with Burma and Liberia. Both of which are classified as third world countries.
The musicians don't want to be in control of getting their songs sold or booking performances. They want the "industry".
Where do you get these "data"? How many musicians do you know personally? I know quite a few, and none of them would touch an RIAA contract with a ten foot pole, despite labels courting them.
Face it, music is full of people who would be homeless and broke despite their talent
It's also full of people who are multimillionaires despite their lack of talent. If you're good, you'll get gigs.
The only one's that don't
You should have paid more attention in class, son.
You pretty much hit the nail on the head.
At a previous job of mine, I was having a conversation with the office manager (looks after office affairs like stationary etc the exciting stuff). Turns out he was a drummer in a band which had 'made it'. They had top 40 hits, toured internationally etc. He admitted that they made very little from each CD sale and that most of it went to the label and other entities. To offset this and make enough money to survive, you have to go on tours.
In the end, he gave up the band and took up his current job at the time since he made just as much money if not more as an office manager and he got to spend time with his family instead of spending 6+ months a year on tour. He said the whole inducstry was quite soul destroying since the ones making the money (the musicians) rarely got to see much of it.
I was thinking Andre Norton myself. She is not an author people tend to mention very often but I feel she should be.
The first book of hers I read was 'The Iron Cage' and it really captured my imagination and touched on a number of points which are still relevant in today's world. As you state, yes she did do some pulpy SciFi but she also did a number of great books which were also thought provoking and of a number of different styles.
The other point I feel which needs to be mentioned is the fact that she released her books under the pseudonym of Andre Norton, due to the difficulty of women writers of SciFi being taken seriously by both the publishing houses and the audience of the times.
If your company has WiFi for you to connect to there is a good chance this is already happening to you without you even knowing it. The WiFi monitoring system my company uses also has a location tracking solution built into it. If you sign into your works WiFi then chances are you are being tracked.
The common excuse for this solution is if the employee is hurt, security can find them. http://www.arubanetworks.com/solutions/by-application/location-and-tracking/ I came across this friendly feature after upgrading the WiFi monitoring server for the networking team, I was surprised to see it and that you can also see where the person has been over a specified time period.
Worried about this technology being brought into your work place? Chances are it is already there.
But your missing the point. Departments like sales are revenue producing whereas all the IT based departments cost the company money to run with no return in investment so what you are asking for is just not practical. You also need to show more loyalty to the company in these difficult times.
And I worked for a company that thought they could move the South East Asian data centre to the UK based on your assumption. Guess what, that extra 200-300ms latency caused job queues to blow out by a good 1-2 hours during peak times since the system wasn't able to get and process the jobs in a reasonable manner since all the timings were based on a LAN environment.
Management decided that all we needed to do was buy fatter pipes which took a number of network engineers some time to explain to them that fatter pipes does not equal faster speeds since the system slow down was latency and not band width based.
It's all about horses for courses. Just because latency doesn't affect you, you can not assume it does not affect other people or complex systems.
I work for an organisation in Australia which follows the same rules which the US government is complaining about. It's not about giving the US government the ability to 'spy' onm Australian business but more about the fact that as soon as the data is on US shores it comes under US law ie. The Patriot act etc. and as layed out by the Commissioner is that you also lose a certain amount of control over your own data as soon as it leaves your shores and goes to another country.
Slashdot Mirror
(also, don't make false bomb threats. They're stupid)
I work at a University. You can always tell when the exam periods have started by the fact that you are constantly seeing fire engines on campus.
Students do the most stupid things to get out of doing an exam they have not prepared for.
I have also seen fake student IDs so someone else can sit the exam and other dodgey dealings. It sucks for the staff (I have lost count of the amount of times I have had to evacuate the data centre/office due to a fire alarm) and also screws over the other students since they often need to resit the exam. It also costs the university money since they get charged for every fire department response.
The most common reason I usually get from non-technical people on why they want or why they purchased an iPhone (or iPad) was because they are 'cool' or 'trendy'. None of them has been able to tell me why or what features it has or does better than any of its competitors. Simply put, they didn't give a damn about how well their device functions when they use it, just the image they can reflect or inherit by owning one.
One of the linked articles mentioned a Chinese student placing a 120Gb at a Sydney TAFE but when you look at the location database map option, it is pinned to a location which is about 30-40km's from where it really is. It shows it as being in Western Sydney when it should be showing it as being in/near to the Sydney CBD. If you look at the photos one of them shows a sign for Harris street which is a main road the TAFE is located next to in/near the Sydney CBD. Not sure how it ended up so far away on the map.
As an aside, I wonder how many of these drives are now infected with malware etc by now.
Remember that a hacker won't know which of 5 fingers the owner uses, so that's another layer of security
Actually, many people have up to ten fingers. Personally, I use my big toe.
But this shows that Apple was less than honest in their claims about pulse detection, and sub-surface tissue detection.
I am not sure where you live that has a large number of mutants who have 'up to ten fingers'. Where I live, most people have 8 fingers and two thumbs.
A little off topic I know but I just needed to say that I miss the old themes.org web site.
I saw this article on gamingonlinux.com last night. I was interested in one when I first saw the article. The casing was OK and you could get some decent hardware configurations, on top of that the pricing listed (for the American market) made the product a reasonable option. So I decided to see what was available for the Australian market and the price was one of the two points I made on why I would pass. The other was the fact that on the Australian Dell Alien page, there was no option for Ubuntu when I looked.
Because I live in an apartment block and have in the past had packages dumped at the communal front door of the apartment block and I work in an industrial type complex where all the delivery people seem to get lost and either don't deliver the package and I have to pick it up from their depo on the other side of the city or it gets delivered to the wrong building and I am lucky to every see it.
Something like this would be great for me since it means I know that it will be delivered safetly and and be secured until I pick it up at my time of choosing.
I work at a place that has a similar policy. Doesn't stop us from using way to many proprietary solutions that are actually worse than the Open Source solution. A lot of that is down to OS religion and people not actually understanding what Open Source is. We have managers (and directors) that believe the software needs to be a shrink wrapped solution from a proprietary vendor like Microsoft to be a decent solution and to be able to get 'Enterprise' level support. Many don't realise that just because you can get an Open Source solution for free that; It is just as good as the non Open Source solution and if you really feel you need to pay for 'Enterprise' support and if this is something you need then for a large number of the solutions you would be realistically looking at, that is supplied as well. For the ones I have investigatedt, support has usually worked out to be cheaper than the closed source solution as well.
Just my $0.02.
... buy spore.
I wanted to buy spore and I would like to buy SimCity but the DRM is just ridiculous. I have had varied problems with other DRM based games and I am over it. Give me a game I can play and also make the saves to my local machine if I want to and I will buy it (if I like it of course). Bundle the game with crippling DRM, not interested. Simple as that.
Slackware for home, Crunchbang for a few of my older devices and currently moving from Ubunutu to Mint at work. I have found Ubunutu becoming less apealing over the last few years as well as less friendly with the Linux world which has caused me a few problems.
Server wise, if I have a choice I go Debian, otherwise if I do have to have an enterprise distro, I go RHEL. The long release cycles of Debian are annoying so if they can get that sorted out, I would be pretty happy and there is a good chance I would start looking at that for my desktop environments again.
There is a simple reason for this. Once you buy the book, you own the book and the only cost you then have is the housing of the book.
A large number of the books a university would need a digital copy of, you need to license said copy. This incurs a yearly fee and ends up costing a small fortune.
Came on to say this. Details can be found here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macquarie_University_Library
Video footage of it in action can be found on youtube eg. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thKAS3CPz_c
Zimbra. To a large extent, it's a drop in Exchange replacement which will plug straight into an existing AD environment if you so wish.
Does it come with a free frogurt?
Don't worry. The US is not alone with not using the metric system. You get to share the honor of not officially using the metric system with Burma and Liberia. Both of which are classified as third world countries.
The musicians don't want to be in control of getting their songs sold or booking performances. They want the "industry".
Where do you get these "data"? How many musicians do you know personally? I know quite a few, and none of them would touch an RIAA contract with a ten foot pole, despite labels courting them.
Face it, music is full of people who would be homeless and broke despite their talent
It's also full of people who are multimillionaires despite their lack of talent. If you're good, you'll get gigs.
The only one's that don't
You should have paid more attention in class, son.
You pretty much hit the nail on the head.
At a previous job of mine, I was having a conversation with the office manager (looks after office affairs like stationary etc the exciting stuff). Turns out he was a drummer in a band which had 'made it'. They had top 40 hits, toured internationally etc. He admitted that they made very little from each CD sale and that most of it went to the label and other entities. To offset this and make enough money to survive, you have to go on tours.
In the end, he gave up the band and took up his current job at the time since he made just as much money if not more as an office manager and he got to spend time with his family instead of spending 6+ months a year on tour. He said the whole inducstry was quite soul destroying since the ones making the money (the musicians) rarely got to see much of it.
...like a Guy Fawkes effigy on bonfire night.
I was thinking Andre Norton myself. She is not an author people tend to mention very often but I feel she should be.
The first book of hers I read was 'The Iron Cage' and it really captured my imagination and touched on a number of points which are still relevant in today's world. As you state, yes she did do some pulpy SciFi but she also did a number of great books which were also thought provoking and of a number of different styles.
The other point I feel which needs to be mentioned is the fact that she released her books under the pseudonym of Andre Norton, due to the difficulty of women writers of SciFi being taken seriously by both the publishing houses and the audience of the times.
It was Commodore mismanagement which killed the Amiga. In the end days, not improving their hardware was just a symptom of that mismanagement.
An examples that quickly comes to mind is the A3000+ with the AGA chipset http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/prototypes/a3000plus.html where they had the technology ready but put off releasing it for 2-3 years.
.. Futurama where they keep collecting huge blocks of ice from Halley's comet and dump it into the ocean? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqVyRa1iuMc
Agreed.
If your company has WiFi for you to connect to there is a good chance this is already happening to you without you even knowing it. The WiFi monitoring system my company uses also has a location tracking solution built into it. If you sign into your works WiFi then chances are you are being tracked.
The common excuse for this solution is if the employee is hurt, security can find them. http://www.arubanetworks.com/solutions/by-application/location-and-tracking/ I came across this friendly feature after upgrading the WiFi monitoring server for the networking team, I was surprised to see it and that you can also see where the person has been over a specified time period.
Worried about this technology being brought into your work place? Chances are it is already there.
But your missing the point. Departments like sales are revenue producing whereas all the IT based departments cost the company money to run with no return in investment so what you are asking for is just not practical. You also need to show more loyalty to the company in these difficult times.
And I worked for a company that thought they could move the South East Asian data centre to the UK based on your assumption. Guess what, that extra 200-300ms latency caused job queues to blow out by a good 1-2 hours during peak times since the system wasn't able to get and process the jobs in a reasonable manner since all the timings were based on a LAN environment.
Management decided that all we needed to do was buy fatter pipes which took a number of network engineers some time to explain to them that fatter pipes does not equal faster speeds since the system slow down was latency and not band width based.
It's all about horses for courses. Just because latency doesn't affect you, you can not assume it does not affect other people or complex systems.
....by James Blish (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cities_in_Flight).
This is where the city has supercomputers regulate the day to day life of a city. How long until we reach that point in time?
I work for an organisation in Australia which follows the same rules which the US government is complaining about. It's not about giving the US government the ability to 'spy' onm Australian business but more about the fact that as soon as the data is on US shores it comes under US law ie. The Patriot act etc. and as layed out by the Commissioner is that you also lose a certain amount of control over your own data as soon as it leaves your shores and goes to another country.