I know a guy who loved the fiber connections, all the way from the university server right up to the dorm's hallway router. Loved 'em so much that a few months after he moved out into an apartment, he cancelled the lease and moved back into the dorms. Stayed there until he graduated.
It's definitely one big advantage over the typical residence... that and the 18-year-old girls in spring were my two big joys during my college days.:-)
...had nothing to do with privacy, or consumer preference tracking, or software copy-protection.
It was to give the system support people an easy way of doing inventory, even remotely. Accounting wants to know what happened to that new expensive machine? Ask the network where processor #foo is, and find out.
(For those of you who think that's a completely stupid idea, I not-so-respectfully suggest you try working for an organization that requires equipment inventories. The ID scheme would have done away with those stupid little tags that get stuck on computers.)
It was only when the marketing groups of the world got hold of the idea and said, "Hey, what else can we track besides inventory... people! People and their purchases! Neat!" that the idea went downhill.
Elbereth speaks the truth; hardware addresses are already unique.
I would have loved to have read the FAQ, if the browser had stayed running that long. It gets about half the images loaded and then goes byebye. (Thanks, glibc.)
If I were as lazy as you suggest, I wouldn't have visted their page at all.
All I can see from their homepage is that they're vaguely ISP-looking. But I have a personal policy of Not Bothering With Flashy Graphics-Laden Web Pages, so I didn't push any further through the morass.
From the context of the previous play-by-play article, I take it Exodus provides physical storage space and connectivity for your machines, and not much else...?
But I believe it is wishful thinking to assume any company that has standardized on Outlook will demand that Microsoft fix Outlook or threaten to switch to another client. Microsoft has leveraged its monopoly so well that it now commands almost all the software used on the desktop.
And not just companies. The U.S. Air Force has also chosen Exchange/Outlook ("ooo, shiny! buy it!") as the "corporate-wide" mail system. (This is hardly new information; just look at any Received: header that passes through an.af.mil system, and you get the version of Exchange they're running.) Each time they get horked over by a Visual Basic script, they react just as this article has described... Once the base-wide services finally get rebooted.
But rather than telling MS to fix their software, the USAF pulls up its pants and goes back to business as usual, as Petreley notes. Isn't it nice to know that Microsoft has such control over the military? Insert conspiracy theory here.
Yeah, MS's dedication to certain standards is pretty impressive...
When I read the/. article and came to the link "beat up in the press," I was amused to see that the press doing the beating was LinuxWorld. That's one step away from saying "after MS was beat up in/. discussion boards."
You'd think that with a statement like that, "the press" would have referred to something a little more... mainstream. Of COURSE a Linux mag is going to beat up on Microsoft.
I've already seen HTML transcripts of the entire trilogy. (The three-volume trilogy, not the five-volume trilogy.:-) I already owned all the books and have read them enough to recall whole scenes, so no, I didn't bookmark the site and thus have no URL to give you for proof.
I'm worried that only the first few words of DMA's answer to this question will be read, at which point/. will drop him into whatever predefined slots they've already defined for famous people.
The recent novel Distraction (by Bruce Sterling, IIRC) has some great observations about this, both the music and the software.
Spoiler warning!
In his future, America kept threatening China over the software piracy thing, just like we are now. China calls America's bluff and releases every single copy of every single software product they have onto the net. America's software industry goes belly-up, followed by the rest of America's economy, followed by the rest of America, period. The state of Wyoming spends most of the book on fire.:-)
Instead of, or in addition to, "none of the above," add a new column. You get one vote for a candidate, and one vote against. Apply minimum thresholds to win, kinda like a new newsgroup on Usenet: at least X people must have voted, at least M for and mo more than N against, winning by at least a margin of..., etc, etc.
Some of the more respectable C++ journals have recently done some good article and interviews about Extreme Programming. I highly recommend looking into it; even if you adopt none of its practices, the concepts raise good points.
I can read for hours and not get a sore wrist. I can curl up in a chair, or on a couch, or -- DEAR GOD NO, NOT THE SHINY BRIGHT YELLOW THING -- even go outside and catch some sun.
But even if I'm just clicking my way through a PDF or HTML file, indoors, in a chair, it's the exact same clicky-clicky motions I make all day. It still causes stress on the wrists.
Give me a hand-held PDF reader with a decent battery life that won't cost me my left testicle, and I'll throw out the paper and sit outside with that instead. But until then...
Another very effective technique keys on the fact that it's a computer that's actually doing the calling. If your telephone picks up and starts talking constantly, then the computer knows it has an answering machine and disconnects.
But if your telephone picks up, says something brief ("Hello?") and waits, then the computer knows it has reached a victi^H^H^H^H^Hhuman, and transfers the line over to a human telemarketer. The time it waits for silence plus the transfer time is just over two seconds.
So pick up your phone, say hello, and if you don't get an answer in two seconds, hang up. I've been doing this for months and have never had any complaints from friends about accidentally hanging up on them -- two seconds in which to respond is a lot longer than it sounds. Every human-to-human call I've ever had has started off within that window of time.
Is this rude to the telemarketers? Fuck 'em; they're the ones interrupting my dinner, my shower, my time with friends. (If I/do/ get trapped into talking with one, I am polite enough to say, "No thanks, I'm not interested," etc.)
There are so many fun ideas you can come up with when doing a crossover story -- what if used a plot involving the Teela Brown gene?
Anyhow, the big difference between Jar-Jar and Teela (and between Jar-Jar and <any other major character anywhere>) is that Teela (and Luke and Obi-Wan) eventually grows into a mature person. They all realize that they can be something better.
As a minor supporting role, Jar-Jar hasn't exhibited any of this character growth; he just gets clumsier and clumsier. It'll be interesting to see what happens to him in Ep 2. (Hopefully the Teela Brown gene fails miserably and the little fscker gets pasted, but that's just my opinion.)
P.S.- Yeah, the first edition Ringworld mistake was hilarious. I met Niven once; he tells great stories about his early days. I'd love to get my hands on a first edition Ringworld.
...this chapter alone is worth the price of the book. It's both hilarious and disturbingly insightful. (The title is a play off of the closing sentences of the previous chapter.)
Indeed, ask the people teaching the teachers!
on
Laptops In Education
·
· Score: 2
Qualifications for posting: my mother is Director of Education Technology for the city schools back home; that means she calls the shots on which hardware/software gets purchased and deployed, and in what ratios, to a half-dozen elementary schools, a junior-high, and a high school (big district). She and I talk shop a lot.
It's of no use whatsoever giving every kid a computer if the teacher doesn't understand computers. I'm not expecting every teacher to be a programmer, but they need a decent grasp of what computers are and are not, as well as what they can and can't do if they want to use computers effectively in the classroom.
Exactly. And the teachers don't even have to "understand" the computer to make it an effective teaching aid. The real problem comes from those teachers who see the computer as competition or replacement rather than as a tool.
(It's either ironic or disgusting that we've had this discussion on/. before.:-)
On a different subject:
Her instinctive belief is that I understand computers, therefore I know every application every written inside out.
That's going to happen to anyone who ever does any kind of "tech support" for friends or family. The truth is that even though we don't know ActiveFoo98 and don't care to, we know how that breed of programs work and can deduce the right answer faster than it would take for them to read the docs.
One of the things I/really/ don't like about QT is that you don't download the actual product from their anonymous sites. You can only download an "installer" executable. They won't be opensourcing it for this reason, I'll bet.
Running the installer then prompts you for what extras you want, connects you to Apple, retrieves what you've asked for, uploads fsck-only-knows what kinds of information, and drops the programs and registry entries directly in place.
If you have a dozen machines to install, you have to download it from Apple each time. If you're behind a firewall or completely isolated, you can't put your favorite utilities on a CD and take them with you. Wherever you go, you must always connect to Apple's sites to re-download the same thing.
(If anyone knows of a way to capture the real installation binary (you know, a setup.exe), I'd love to hear about it. I doubt that they'll be opensourcing QT because then we'd immediately disable this and Apple couldn't keep as close a tab on us.)
Exactly! I simply have my bank do some (not all, not even most) of my bill paying. It was set up before my bank even had a website.
Now that they have one, I can log in, check my balance, shuffle funds around, etc, etc. It's all free, and it's all tracable since it's the actual bank.
Paying a third party electronically and then having them cut a paper cheque just sucks.
This is almost invariably catastrophic - contractors have different agendas from scientists, and once the contract is secured, they often don't want to do more than the absolute minimum necessary to fulfil it.
If you replace "scientists" with "government customers" in general, then I'd have to say that this is true, again, in the general case. I myself am a contractor, and while I put in a lot of long hours and have occasionally been whacked by my supervisors for giving the customer "too much," I have known contractors who look forward to delivering a buggy-as-hell product.
They know that the government will turn around and say, "Well, gosh, that sucked, but we know you can do better if we give you more money and let you try again." (In this respect, they're no different from any big computer vendor (Microsoft, Sun, RedHat) and their customers -- the vendor can ship crap and the customers will keep paying for it.)
Having said that, no, I don't believe that NASA knew about it in advance either. They have too much to lose by doing so, and not enough to gain. I have no problem believing that some of their contractors tried, however.
First, I think there needs to be a domain specifically for personal Websites. In past posts I've suggested ".sum" which is Latin for "I am," fits into three letters, and is gramatically correct ("Millennium.sum" translates to "I am Millennium" if I'm not mistaken).
Hasn't this idea been knocked around for a long time? And for a lot more than just "Websites" as well. I think ".nom" was the first suggestion I saw, as in "nom de plume" or "nom de guerre," to mean a domain for an individual.
"Furthermore, they [MCSE's] seemed genuinely puzzled that I would expect decent service and documentation without having paid mucho extra money for it. One or two even suggested that the more problems the better, as it meant more billable hours for them. I've concluded that being an NT sysadmin requires a level of cynicism so breathtaking that relatively few can achieve it. "Hey dude -- bugs are money!" If you can't muster up this much gleeful nihilism first thing every Monday morning, I suppose you could come to the same conclusion by a combination of ignorance, lack of aesthetic sense, and terminal herdthink."
-Joyce Park, "Small Business Server Upgrade"
But FWIW, the same is also true of U.S. military contractors -- the buggier the product, the more follow-on money you get -- so the terminal herdthink disease is hardly confined to the field of MCSE.
Slashdot Mirror
...and I understand that it was cross-platform, too. Spread to MacOS and Novell Netware within a few hours.
Nasty.
I know a guy who loved the fiber connections, all the way from the university server right up to the dorm's hallway router. Loved 'em so much that a few months after he moved out into an apartment, he cancelled the lease and moved back into the dorms. Stayed there until he graduated.
:-)
It's definitely one big advantage over the typical residence... that and the 18-year-old girls in spring were my two big joys during my college days.
...had nothing to do with privacy, or consumer preference tracking, or software copy-protection.
It was to give the system support people an easy way of doing inventory, even remotely. Accounting wants to know what happened to that new expensive machine? Ask the network where processor #foo is, and find out.
(For those of you who think that's a completely stupid idea, I not-so-respectfully suggest you try working for an organization that requires equipment inventories. The ID scheme would have done away with those stupid little tags that get stuck on computers.)
It was only when the marketing groups of the world got hold of the idea and said, "Hey, what else can we track besides inventory... people! People and their purchases! Neat!" that the idea went downhill.
Elbereth speaks the truth; hardware addresses are already unique.
I would have loved to have read the FAQ, if the browser had stayed running that long. It gets about half the images loaded and then goes byebye. (Thanks, glibc.)
If I were as lazy as you suggest, I wouldn't have visted their page at all.
Who/what exactly is Exodus?
All I can see from their homepage is that they're vaguely ISP-looking. But I have a personal policy of Not Bothering With Flashy Graphics-Laden Web Pages, so I didn't push any further through the morass.
From the context of the previous play-by-play article, I take it Exodus provides physical storage space and connectivity for your machines, and not much else...?
But I believe it is wishful thinking to assume any company that has standardized on Outlook will demand that Microsoft fix Outlook or threaten to switch to another client. Microsoft has leveraged its monopoly so well that it now commands almost all the software used on the desktop.
And not just companies. The U.S. Air Force has also chosen Exchange/Outlook ("ooo, shiny! buy it!") as the "corporate-wide" mail system. (This is hardly new information; just look at any Received: header that passes through an .af.mil system, and you get the version of Exchange they're running.) Each time they get horked over by a Visual Basic script, they react just as this article has described... Once the base-wide services finally get rebooted.
But rather than telling MS to fix their software, the USAF pulls up its pants and goes back to business as usual, as Petreley notes. Isn't it nice to know that Microsoft has such control over the military? Insert conspiracy theory here.
I remember hearing about a new TLD, ".orb", for things in orbit. At the time, it was "shuttle.orb" for communicating with STS missions.
Yeah, MS's dedication to certain standards is pretty impressive...
/. article and came to the link "beat up in the press," I was amused to see that the press doing the beating was LinuxWorld. That's one step away from saying "after MS was beat up in /. discussion boards."
When I read the
You'd think that with a statement like that, "the press" would have referred to something a little more... mainstream. Of COURSE a Linux mag is going to beat up on Microsoft.
I've already seen HTML transcripts of the entire trilogy. (The three-volume trilogy, not the five-volume trilogy. :-) I already owned all the books and have read them enough to recall whole scenes, so no, I didn't bookmark the site and thus have no URL to give you for proof.
/. will drop him into whatever predefined slots they've already defined for famous people.
I'm worried that only the first few words of DMA's answer to this question will be read, at which point
The recent novel Distraction (by Bruce Sterling, IIRC) has some great observations about this, both the music and the software.
Spoiler warning!
In his future, America kept threatening China over the software piracy thing, just like we are now. China calls America's bluff and releases every single copy of every single software product they have onto the net. America's software industry goes belly-up, followed by the rest of America's economy, followed by the rest of America, period. The state of Wyoming spends most of the book on fire. :-)
Instead of, or in addition to, "none of the above," add a new column. You get one vote for a candidate, and one vote against. Apply minimum thresholds to win, kinda like a new newsgroup on Usenet: at least X people must have voted, at least M for and mo more than N against, winning by at least a margin of..., etc, etc.
Some of the more respectable C++ journals have recently done some good article and interviews about Extreme Programming. I highly recommend looking into it; even if you adopt none of its practices, the concepts raise good points.
I can read for hours and not get a sore wrist. I can curl up in a chair, or on a couch, or -- DEAR GOD NO, NOT THE SHINY BRIGHT YELLOW THING -- even go outside and catch some sun.
But even if I'm just clicking my way through a PDF or HTML file, indoors, in a chair, it's the exact same clicky-clicky motions I make all day. It still causes stress on the wrists.
Give me a hand-held PDF reader with a decent battery life that won't cost me my left testicle, and I'll throw out the paper and sit outside with that instead. But until then...
Yeah, but... that summary was written by IBM. Of /course/ it's going to give more for less. :-)
Insert "Big Blue Dot" jokes here.
(Odd, too -- Sun's E10K, or "Starfire" box, kicks ass. Copious amounts of ass. I'm surprised they switched.)
Another very effective technique keys on the fact that it's a computer that's actually doing the calling. If your telephone picks up and starts talking constantly, then the computer knows it has an answering machine and disconnects.
/do/ get trapped into talking with one, I am polite enough to say, "No thanks, I'm not interested," etc.)
But if your telephone picks up, says something brief ("Hello?") and waits, then the computer knows it has reached a victi^H^H^H^H^Hhuman, and transfers the line over to a human telemarketer. The time it waits for silence plus the transfer time is just over two seconds.
So pick up your phone, say hello, and if you don't get an answer in two seconds, hang up. I've been doing this for months and have never had any complaints from friends about accidentally hanging up on them -- two seconds in which to respond is a lot longer than it sounds. Every human-to-human call I've ever had has started off within that window of time.
Is this rude to the telemarketers? Fuck 'em; they're the ones interrupting my dinner, my shower, my time with friends. (If I
There are so many fun ideas you can come up with when doing a crossover story -- what if used a plot involving the Teela Brown gene?
Anyhow, the big difference between Jar-Jar and Teela (and between Jar-Jar and <any other major character anywhere>) is that Teela (and Luke and Obi-Wan) eventually grows into a mature person. They all realize that they can be something better.
As a minor supporting role, Jar-Jar hasn't exhibited any of this character growth; he just gets clumsier and clumsier. It'll be interesting to see what happens to him in Ep 2. (Hopefully the Teela Brown gene fails miserably and the little fscker gets pasted, but that's just my opinion.)
P.S.- Yeah, the first edition Ringworld mistake was hilarious. I met Niven once; he tells great stories about his early days. I'd love to get my hands on a first edition Ringworld.
...this chapter alone is worth the price of the book. It's both hilarious and disturbingly insightful. (The title is a play off of the closing sentences of the previous chapter.)
Qualifications for posting: my mother is Director of Education Technology for the city schools back home; that means she calls the shots on which hardware/software gets purchased and deployed, and in what ratios, to a half-dozen elementary schools, a junior-high, and a high school (big district). She and I talk shop a lot.
It's of no use whatsoever giving every kid a computer if the teacher doesn't understand computers. I'm not expecting every teacher to be a programmer, but they need a decent grasp of what computers are and are not, as well as what they can and can't do if they want to use computers effectively in the classroom.
Exactly. And the teachers don't even have to "understand" the computer to make it an effective teaching aid. The real problem comes from those teachers who see the computer as competition or replacement rather than as a tool.
(It's either ironic or disgusting that we've had this discussion on /. before. :-)
On a different subject:
Her instinctive belief is that I understand computers, therefore I know every application every written inside out.
That's going to happen to anyone who ever does any kind of "tech support" for friends or family. The truth is that even though we don't know ActiveFoo98 and don't care to, we know how that breed of programs work and can deduce the right answer faster than it would take for them to read the docs.
One of the things I /really/ don't like about QT is that you don't download the actual product from their anonymous sites. You can only download an "installer" executable. They won't be opensourcing it for this reason, I'll bet.
:-)
Running the installer then prompts you for what extras you want, connects you to Apple, retrieves what you've asked for, uploads fsck-only-knows what kinds of information, and drops the programs and registry entries directly in place.
If you have a dozen machines to install, you have to download it from Apple each time. If you're behind a firewall or completely isolated, you can't put your favorite utilities on a CD and take them with you. Wherever you go, you must always connect to Apple's sites to re-download the same thing.
(If anyone knows of a way to capture the real installation binary (you know, a setup.exe), I'd love to hear about it. I doubt that they'll be opensourcing QT because then we'd immediately disable this and Apple couldn't keep as close a tab on us.)
Just my paranoid two timeslices.
Exactly! I simply have my bank do some (not all, not even most) of my bill paying. It was set up before my bank even had a website.
Now that they have one, I can log in, check my balance, shuffle funds around, etc, etc. It's all free, and it's all tracable since it's the actual bank.
Paying a third party electronically and then having them cut a paper cheque just sucks.
This is almost invariably catastrophic - contractors have different agendas from scientists, and once the contract is secured, they often don't want to do more than the absolute minimum necessary to fulfil it.
If you replace "scientists" with "government customers" in general, then I'd have to say that this is true, again, in the general case. I myself am a contractor, and while I put in a lot of long hours and have occasionally been whacked by my supervisors for giving the customer "too much," I have known contractors who look forward to delivering a buggy-as-hell product.
They know that the government will turn around and say, "Well, gosh, that sucked, but we know you can do better if we give you more money and let you try again." (In this respect, they're no different from any big computer vendor (Microsoft, Sun, RedHat) and their customers -- the vendor can ship crap and the customers will keep paying for it.)
Having said that, no, I don't believe that NASA knew about it in advance either. They have too much to lose by doing so, and not enough to gain. I have no problem believing that some of their contractors tried, however.
This theory:
:-)
http://home.xnet.com/~raven/Sysadmin/UNIX.html
says it very well. "People are confusing dying with age," and that brief article has a good idea why Unix will still be around for a long time.
(It was written shortly after Lose95 was released.
First, I think there needs to be a domain specifically for personal Websites. In past posts I've suggested ".sum" which is Latin for "I am," fits into three letters, and is gramatically correct ("Millennium.sum" translates to "I am Millennium" if I'm not mistaken).
Hasn't this idea been knocked around for a long time? And for a lot more than just "Websites" as well. I think ".nom" was the first suggestion I saw, as in "nom de plume" or "nom de guerre," to mean a domain for an individual.
...generally follows this comment:
But FWIW, the same is also true of U.S. military contractors -- the buggier the product, the more follow-on money you get -- so the terminal herdthink disease is hardly confined to the field of MCSE.