UNC Chapel Hill has required incoming freshmen to have laptops for at least the last five years. They give a minimum specifications list, but also have a university sponsored laptop program that sells IBM machines along with a nice warranty and insurance policy. Most students opt for the IBMs so they don't have to mess with it, and speaking as someone who works in the IT support department there, it sure makes life easy when you're troubleshooting problems.
I'm sure IBM (Lenovo, now) makes a pretty penny on it, though...
A few of the buildings at UNC Chapel Hill use no-flush urinals. They seem to work pretty well, and do what they are advertised to do--except for one problem. Things splatter. Everything doesn't go right down the drain--the sides of the urinal catch the splatter, which then isn't washed away. And so it starts to stink. It's nothing so terrible you can't go in the bathroom, but it definitely isn't the perfect solution they advertise, either.
Oh, I know the CS program at UNC is good. Great, even. I was admitted as a CS major there (here?) before I changed, realizing that I didn't want my job to be exported to India.
Computer science research being done at a liberal arts university? The universe is going to implode, SCO will run IBM out of business, Google will start selling our life history to terrorists, and George Lucas will make a movie that doesn't suck!
Disclaimer: I'm a tarheel born and bred. And a student at Chapel Hill.
As someone who works his way through college fixing students' spyware-laden computers, I have to strongly disagree. I have seen more computers that were so infested with spyware that it was *far* faster and *far* easier to just blow them away than to spend *days* fiddling with it trying to remove obscure, nasty spyware manually, one by one.
The two are probably correlated because they indicate a certain type of lifestyle. If you are so busy that you dont have enough time to get a full night's sleep, you probably also don't have time to prepare healthy meals or exercise properly. They are probably eating out more, snacking more, and excercising less. Put them together, and yeah, the people that get less sleep are probably going to be fatter.
I know that here at Chapel Hill, the same policy is enforced, and for good reason--there have been too many cases of dumbasses putting unsecured WAPs in dorm rooms (especially those with routers builtin) and disrupting network connectivity for others. I dont see a problem with this--its their network, their dorms, and therefore their rules. They do have a bit of a dont-ask-dont-tell policy for those that know what they are doing, but any WAPs they find will have their owners network connectivity cut off.
Seriously, their house, their rules. This isnt affecting the rights or ability to learn of any of the students.
You are confusing the security of the information and the actual information being secured. The credit card number, SSN, whatever, are what you want to protect. The method of doing so can be open, and therefore protected, but whats the point of any protection if you just leave the information open for any and all to see?
Its would be like the difference between open-sourcing your security methods (public/private keys, physical access security, whatever) and actually just letting anyone and everyone waltz into your data center unchecked and do whatever the hell they please. Im all for open sourcing, but doing away with any and all security I wont agree with. I dont trust people that much.
Many of us seem to suffer from the fallacy that we can prevent every tragedy with a new law or government program. Whether these laws or programs are conservative or liberal in nature, it doesn't seem to matter. Not every social problem can be solved with law. Some have to be solved by society.
That, sir, is about the most insightful thing I have read all month.
Thats a shame. Here at UNC, we have a pretty good email/virus policy. All emails are scanned for spam (and pretty damn well, too--I have gotten a grand total of 6 spam emails in the year I have been there). Instead of locking down the network (ie the firewall you were talking about), they let you police yourself--but if they detect any virus traffic coming from your machine, the network immediately knocks you off, and the user must come to tech support to let them clean the machine and authorize it to be put back on the network.
Fortunately, we have an IT department that takes a fairly hands-off, police yourself approach. They let you use the network for whatever you want, but as soon as it starts to cause any sort of problem, you know about it (usually by being bumped off). I really think this is a better solution than schools with draconian rules about usage--such as limiting badwidth to 1GB a day, putting up huge firewalls, etc.
Being on a university network does have its priveleges--we can do what we want with it. The network does just that, it blocks off all access to any machine spewing traffic of the virus or malware sort (but mostly virus). The user gets a phone call from the ATN department saying what happened and telling them to bring their machine in to be cleaned. They bring it in, it gets cleaned, and they are allowed back on. It works pretty well, and manages to keep viruses from propagating to badly on the network.
Fortunately, other than this, the University is also pretty hands off in terms of what you do with the network. Dont cause them any trouble, and they wont cause you any.
Over my Christmas break, I bent under the pressure of my father to get MythTV installed and running. He bought the hardware (we got a 160GB HDD, and some old cards off of eBay--total cost, $200). I then proceeded to install MythTV. I decided to go with the KnoppMyth distro (www.mysettopbox.tv), which is a Knoppix install customized for MythTV--it is nice to have something autodetect and install all your hardware.
Fast forward about two weeks, and I had finally gotten it running. After all sorts of odd problems (ALSA always muting on reboot, XMLTV looping itself indefinitely, and a host of others), it ran. It certainly was NOT something to do if you havent used Linux before, or if you arent looking for a project. I had and was, so it was good for me. That said, I was most impressed with MythTV. I was expecting to be in a sort of perpetual beta state, never looking polished or done--but it broke that mold. It was very well done, looked great, ran great... I had no complaints. I am now looking at building another one to bring with me to school.
Having said all of this, personally I'm not a fan of web based plagairism detection services. I would much rather have a local tool that can check submitted assignments against themselves and a search engine, so that the University maintains control of the assignments.
And therein lies the problem. I agree with you, the professors should have an easy way to check their students' papers for plaigerism. However, this solution should be an internal one, either built for or licensed to the university. The papers that these students wrote should not become the property of some third-party company to keep and make money off of--in fact, I suspect that practice could easily go against the honor codes that so many Universities implement.
I learned on an old Nikkormat FN (I believe that was the model). Great little camera, and quite inexpensive. Built like a tank--I dropped it down the stairs once, and all it did was tear up the stairs. There are also tons of lenses out there, to be had for a song. Just go to your local photo shop and poke around their used section, they should have plenty.
Oh yeah, Nikon and Nikkormat are basically the same thing.
An engineer, physicist, and computer scientist are on a drive in the mountains when suddenly the brakes on their car fail. The car rockets down the side of the mountain. When it gets to the bottom, they all get out. The engineer immediately gets under the car, checking the brakes to see if something was wrong with them. The physicist sits down with a pad and pen and starts working out the forces that were at work on the car. The computer scientists looks at it for a second and then says "Lets take it back up to the top and see if it does the same thing again."
In the dorms in my school (UNC), next to every desk in the dorms are 4 outlets. This is generally enough to run all the computer equipment you can throw at it (I am running two boxes, a laptop, a monitor, a stereo setup, my switch, an external HDD, my printer, two lights, and still have one of them open to use for things like charging my cell phone). In addition, there are two sets of two plugs elsewhere in the room. I did make sure to plug the refrigerator and the microwave onto different plugs (thank goodness for extension cords). There are also 2 gigabit ethernet ports and a coax cable port. It *is* a pain to run the ethernet cables around the floor of the room to get to the far desk, but its not too bad. The dorms are also all wireless, but the reception on the fringes of the dorms, where my room is, is a little less than stellar, so I just use wired ethernet.
So far we havent really had any problems with power going out. Someone tripped one of the breakers a couple of months ago, but apparently only the two sets of two plugs were on them--both of the quad plugs still had power.
But I've been wondering, lately, whether a nice camera like a digital SLR might allow me to take better pictures, which might in turn inspire me to take more pictures.
Its the other way around. Having digital will allow you to shoot more images since there is no marginal cost, which will in turn increase the probablity of your getting a good photo. It also will help develop your skills better since you will be shooting more.
Shit... My books (also at UNC!) were $500 this semester. And this is for first semester, freshman year stuff. Its a joke. And all but two of them were used. My introductory German textbook cost me $150 alone.
The problem with this assumption is that the RIAA is looking for files that people are sharing, and openly allowing others to look at. By using that SubSeven kit (or any other such approach) you are accessing information that the owner of the computer had deemed as private (to a degree at least). These files that these people are being sued for are openly and publicly available for others to look at and download.
Slashdot Mirror
UNC Chapel Hill has required incoming freshmen to have laptops for at least the last five years. They give a minimum specifications list, but also have a university sponsored laptop program that sells IBM machines along with a nice warranty and insurance policy. Most students opt for the IBMs so they don't have to mess with it, and speaking as someone who works in the IT support department there, it sure makes life easy when you're troubleshooting problems.
I'm sure IBM (Lenovo, now) makes a pretty penny on it, though...
A few of the buildings at UNC Chapel Hill use no-flush urinals. They seem to work pretty well, and do what they are advertised to do--except for one problem. Things splatter. Everything doesn't go right down the drain--the sides of the urinal catch the splatter, which then isn't washed away. And so it starts to stink. It's nothing so terrible you can't go in the bathroom, but it definitely isn't the perfect solution they advertise, either.
Perhaps if they can solve the splatter problem...
Oh, I know the CS program at UNC is good. Great, even. I was admitted as a CS major there (here?) before I changed, realizing that I didn't want my job to be exported to India.
Computer science research being done at a liberal arts university? The universe is going to implode, SCO will run IBM out of business, Google will start selling our life history to terrorists, and George Lucas will make a movie that doesn't suck!
Disclaimer: I'm a tarheel born and bred. And a student at Chapel Hill.
As someone who works his way through college fixing students' spyware-laden computers, I have to strongly disagree. I have seen more computers that were so infested with spyware that it was *far* faster and *far* easier to just blow them away than to spend *days* fiddling with it trying to remove obscure, nasty spyware manually, one by one.
The two are probably correlated because they indicate a certain type of lifestyle. If you are so busy that you dont have enough time to get a full night's sleep, you probably also don't have time to prepare healthy meals or exercise properly. They are probably eating out more, snacking more, and excercising less. Put them together, and yeah, the people that get less sleep are probably going to be fatter.
Damn, thats a lot of porn...
Um, given that he said he once ended up in the hospital because of it, I think he understands that.
I know that here at Chapel Hill, the same policy is enforced, and for good reason--there have been too many cases of dumbasses putting unsecured WAPs in dorm rooms (especially those with routers builtin) and disrupting network connectivity for others. I dont see a problem with this--its their network, their dorms, and therefore their rules. They do have a bit of a dont-ask-dont-tell policy for those that know what they are doing, but any WAPs they find will have their owners network connectivity cut off.
Seriously, their house, their rules. This isnt affecting the rights or ability to learn of any of the students.
Is that any parent that is running Linux on all their home machines is going to
A) Realize that the very idea of net filtering is pretty futile
B) Be able to implement a decent version themselves if they so deem it necessary.
I mean, seriously... Where is the market for this?
You are confusing the security of the information and the actual information being secured. The credit card number, SSN, whatever, are what you want to protect. The method of doing so can be open, and therefore protected, but whats the point of any protection if you just leave the information open for any and all to see?
Its would be like the difference between open-sourcing your security methods (public/private keys, physical access security, whatever) and actually just letting anyone and everyone waltz into your data center unchecked and do whatever the hell they please. Im all for open sourcing, but doing away with any and all security I wont agree with. I dont trust people that much.
Many of us seem to suffer from the fallacy that we can prevent every tragedy with a new law or government program. Whether these laws or programs are conservative or liberal in nature, it doesn't seem to matter. Not every social problem can be solved with law. Some have to be solved by society.
That, sir, is about the most insightful thing I have read all month.
Thats a shame. Here at UNC, we have a pretty good email/virus policy. All emails are scanned for spam (and pretty damn well, too--I have gotten a grand total of 6 spam emails in the year I have been there). Instead of locking down the network (ie the firewall you were talking about), they let you police yourself--but if they detect any virus traffic coming from your machine, the network immediately knocks you off, and the user must come to tech support to let them clean the machine and authorize it to be put back on the network.
Fortunately, we have an IT department that takes a fairly hands-off, police yourself approach. They let you use the network for whatever you want, but as soon as it starts to cause any sort of problem, you know about it (usually by being bumped off). I really think this is a better solution than schools with draconian rules about usage--such as limiting badwidth to 1GB a day, putting up huge firewalls, etc.
Being on a university network does have its priveleges--we can do what we want with it. The network does just that, it blocks off all access to any machine spewing traffic of the virus or malware sort (but mostly virus). The user gets a phone call from the ATN department saying what happened and telling them to bring their machine in to be cleaned. They bring it in, it gets cleaned, and they are allowed back on. It works pretty well, and manages to keep viruses from propagating to badly on the network.
Fortunately, other than this, the University is also pretty hands off in terms of what you do with the network. Dont cause them any trouble, and they wont cause you any.
http://hrothgar.mine.nu/dedrms.txt
A temporary mirror to the code. It wont be up more than a week, so dont bookmark it.
Its amazing to think that search engine used to run on just that.
Id be interested to see what their current hardware is like.
Over my Christmas break, I bent under the pressure of my father to get MythTV installed and running. He bought the hardware (we got a 160GB HDD, and some old cards off of eBay--total cost, $200). I then proceeded to install MythTV. I decided to go with the KnoppMyth distro (www.mysettopbox.tv), which is a Knoppix install customized for MythTV--it is nice to have something autodetect and install all your hardware.
Fast forward about two weeks, and I had finally gotten it running. After all sorts of odd problems (ALSA always muting on reboot, XMLTV looping itself indefinitely, and a host of others), it ran. It certainly was NOT something to do if you havent used Linux before, or if you arent looking for a project. I had and was, so it was good for me. That said, I was most impressed with MythTV. I was expecting to be in a sort of perpetual beta state, never looking polished or done--but it broke that mold. It was very well done, looked great, ran great... I had no complaints. I am now looking at building another one to bring with me to school.
Having said all of this, personally I'm not a fan of web based plagairism detection services. I would much rather have a local tool that can check submitted assignments against themselves and a search engine, so that the University maintains control of the assignments.
And therein lies the problem. I agree with you, the professors should have an easy way to check their students' papers for plaigerism. However, this solution should be an internal one, either built for or licensed to the university. The papers that these students wrote should not become the property of some third-party company to keep and make money off of--in fact, I suspect that practice could easily go against the honor codes that so many Universities implement.
I learned on an old Nikkormat FN (I believe that was the model). Great little camera, and quite inexpensive. Built like a tank--I dropped it down the stairs once, and all it did was tear up the stairs. There are also tons of lenses out there, to be had for a song. Just go to your local photo shop and poke around their used section, they should have plenty.
Oh yeah, Nikon and Nikkormat are basically the same thing.
An engineer, physicist, and computer scientist are on a drive in the mountains when suddenly the brakes on their car fail. The car rockets down the side of the mountain. When it gets to the bottom, they all get out. The engineer immediately gets under the car, checking the brakes to see if something was wrong with them. The physicist sits down with a pad and pen and starts working out the forces that were at work on the car. The computer scientists looks at it for a second and then says "Lets take it back up to the top and see if it does the same thing again."
In the dorms in my school (UNC), next to every desk in the dorms are 4 outlets. This is generally enough to run all the computer equipment you can throw at it (I am running two boxes, a laptop, a monitor, a stereo setup, my switch, an external HDD, my printer, two lights, and still have one of them open to use for things like charging my cell phone). In addition, there are two sets of two plugs elsewhere in the room. I did make sure to plug the refrigerator and the microwave onto different plugs (thank goodness for extension cords). There are also 2 gigabit ethernet ports and a coax cable port. It *is* a pain to run the ethernet cables around the floor of the room to get to the far desk, but its not too bad. The dorms are also all wireless, but the reception on the fringes of the dorms, where my room is, is a little less than stellar, so I just use wired ethernet.
So far we havent really had any problems with power going out. Someone tripped one of the breakers a couple of months ago, but apparently only the two sets of two plugs were on them--both of the quad plugs still had power.
But I've been wondering, lately, whether a nice camera like a digital SLR might allow me to take better pictures, which might in turn inspire me to take more pictures.
Its the other way around. Having digital will allow you to shoot more images since there is no marginal cost, which will in turn increase the probablity of your getting a good photo. It also will help develop your skills better since you will be shooting more.
Shit... My books (also at UNC!) were $500 this semester. And this is for first semester, freshman year stuff. Its a joke. And all but two of them were used. My introductory German textbook cost me $150 alone.
The problem with this assumption is that the RIAA is looking for files that people are sharing, and openly allowing others to look at. By using that SubSeven kit (or any other such approach) you are accessing information that the owner of the computer had deemed as private (to a degree at least). These files that these people are being sued for are openly and publicly available for others to look at and download.
9 months from December, we'll see a sharp decline in the number of babies born.
/. crowd has much influence over the number of babies being conceived.
That won't be much of a concern. Somehow I doubt the