Worth noting that it took almost 20 years for PCs in the corporate environment to actually have a positive impact on productivity; might the same be true in education?
The reason why PCs boost productivity in the corporate environment is that we offload our work to students nowadays. Hence students do worse;)
In the NPR vein, I highly recommend On Point with Tom Ashbrook. I listen to it most nights. Unfortunately, downloads are limited to streams (unless you have a stream ripper), but I sometimes just set my computer to record off the air. It's a great way to spend a couple of hours. Even with topics that I am not particularly interested in, I feel like I've spent the time well.
If you have a legal bent, you can listen to U.S. Supreme Court arguments at oyez.org. The nerd side of you should love hearing Lawrence Lessig argue in Eldred v. Ashcroft. Lots of other great stuff here, going all the way back to the 1950's. I've listened to a lot of this on my iPod during my 3-hour (rountrip) commute. You'd be surprised how much more interesting law can be when you hear it this way.
Wait until you switch from your Mac/Windows box to a Linux box. See how free you feel when your music won't play on your new platform. I didn't know that I was going to switch over until after I already had a fairly large collection of protected-AAC music files. Without PlayFair/Hymn I wouldn't be able to listen to the music I legally purchased.
I was under the impression that all, or nearly all, of Yahoo!'s content was served up by FreeBSD machines. What kind of perversion went on that they decided to put IE-only content on these boxes? Maybe their press release confusion is an indicator of other weirdness in the company, too.
Re:As a woman in IT, I somewhat agree with the par
on
Women Leaving I.T.
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· Score: 1
Wow! Are you real? I just _know_ that you're some pimply-faced teenager, leading us into the false hope that there are geeky women out there, somewhere...;)
But was your problem necessarily related to MUDs, or was it a symptom of something else? Heroin, for instance, is truly addictive. The addictiveness is inherent in the thing. I don't think you could say the same for MUDs. (Disclaimer: I, myself, was a rabid MUD user in the early 90's, but long-distance phone bills are what kept it at bay)
I don't at all mean to belittle your past with MUDs, but I always have the impression that the point of these studies is actually to stigmatize the "addiction" in question. I think they exist to say, "look, that's the problem!" and shift the blame. Yes, there are people who exhibit addictive behavior, but is the problem really the Internet?
Secondly, he is showing how Linux is portable. The PPC versions run just as well as x86. So now people can say "But how do you know it works on Mac platforms?"
For PPC users, this is great. Around the time that Linus switched hardware, all of a sudden I was able to build the vanilla sources on PPC. Before that, I always had to use someone's patchset. I'm not sure if the one thing is directly related to the other, but it makes a lot of sense to me.
Now my only problem is not being able to run Flash. Of course, with all the Flash ads out there, I'm probably better off...
Yes, but how is the rate calculated? If the tracked machine is only sending out timestamps with the packet, then the person trying to find a fingerprint has to calculate the rate himself. Synching your clock via NTP might not change the calculated skew rate enough to throw off the fingerprinter, but you could probably modify the TCP/IP stack to introduce enough variability in there to throw them off.
Of course, you wouldn't want your timestamps to vary too much, because then you'd stick out. And since the article says that the timestamp feature is optional you could just disable that portion of your TCP/IP stack, assuming that there are enough devices out there that do the same thing. Otherwise you'd stick out again. Oh, and forget about it if you're not using modifiable network code.
Actually so can Dell's. My experience with Dell server hardware has been nothing but positive. You can even get a non-OS dependent boot disk to flash BIOS (we run OpenBSD). Maybe ordinary consumer hardware is different, I don't know.
OK, how about this-- I bought Microsoft Office 2003. Aren't I entitled to updates for this product, even if I'm running it through WINE?
If I'm not mistaken, interoperability with their products and open documentation of their APIs was one of the specific terms that Microsoft had to accept as a part of their settlement with the DOJ. How can they get around this? As far as I am concerned, sabotaging WINE users' ability to update their Microsoft products amounts to monopolistic abuse.
My guess is that they figure they'll just do whatever they want, loopholes in the settlement aside, since the DOJ has proved that it could really care less if MS was punished anyhow.
Exactly, look at what is happening with QuarkXPress right now. We've had to deal with their licensing bullshit for years (DONGLE!!!), but NOW corporate customers (site licensees) have to run a dedicated server to hand out licenses to their clients (Quark License Administrator). And as if that wasn't bad enough, the server is notoriously buggy-- crashes all the time.
Now our design department is saying, "Hey, InDesign is a lot cheaper, it has a useable interface, and it already works with my other tools..." And site licenses with Adobe are a piece of cake.
I personally think that mass piracy of Quark is what made it the industry standard in the first place. Sure, it had a quite a few features that you couldn't find in PakeMaker at the time, but its interface was (and still is) horrible. So in some ways Quark owes their success to piracy.
Yes. We are using LaCie 250's to do backups now with UltraBac. We were using Veritas, but after waiting on the phone for 3 hours for help on a restore (with a paid support contract, no less!), we decided that Veritas could piss off.
The UltraBac interface is definitely a bit clunky, but their phone support is great. I even get forwarded to their developers when I find potential bugs. (on that note, wait a bit to go with UB8, UB7 works great). UltraBac even claims to have a UNIX agent, although we only use UB for Windows backups. We then clone our backup drives and take those copies off-site.
For our OpenBSD machines, we only do bare-metal backups, since there is little changing data on them (mail gateways, FTP, etc). For those, I just boot up with the OpenBSD boot CD, and dd everything to an external SCSI drive. I can usually backup a 36GB RAID-5 in about 12 minutes.
Man, you're an idiot. This is an old post, but I have to respond.
First of all, I was talking about Darfour, not the tsunami.
Sencond: hey free-market fanboy, the opposite of free-market doesn't have to be socialist. Have you ever noticed the government monopoly on road construction and maintenance? Holy shit! Call out the guns! Communism must be taking over!
Maybe it's because free-market road construction would only pave roads where money could be had paving roads. Now do you get it? I'm trying to point your nimble little brain into seeing why free-market news fails to provide complete news coverage.
Gimme a break! We're talking about genocide! I'm not asking them to report everything, but you'd think thousands of people dying -- and not just dying, being hacked to pieces -- would take a little fucking precedence over the Crown Prince of England's future wife! If this isn't "news", then "news" is a sham.
The fact is, a free market economy isn't very good at providing news because it caters to the whims of the consumer. We have to demand coverage and accuracy. So you're telling me that demanding more from our news services is irresponsilbe? I'm sorry, that's just totally fucked.
OK, so the problem is with the American public? I think this is clearly a problem with a system of news delivery that depends on ad revenue-- whatever is the most popular is what gets the most coverage. Maybe there's no way around the fact that commerical news will cater to the whims of the masses, but it is most certainly their fault that it's not covered. Without the extreme efforts of journalists like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, would we have ever known about Watergate? How can the American public begin to care unless they know. I've never once seen a front-page story about Darfour, but I've seen countless front-page stories about the baseball and football playoffs.
The worst part is that we already know what will happen if we don't do anything. Nine-hundred-thousand people! Yes, the tsunami was a terrible thing, and sure, it's not the "fault" of the tsunami that no one hears about Darfour, but compared to the human cost in Rwanda the tsunami's damage was relatively small.
At its SCO Forum event in August 2003, for example, the company said that using pattern recognition matching technology it had identified 1.1 million lines of code from 1,549 files of derivative works that had been donated to Linux by Unix licensees.
In other news, SCO will be moving forward using its pattern-matching software to identify travellers' faces during airport screening...
How is this flamebait? It's a good point. The other thing that the American media forgot about, in the wake of the Tsunami, is the current situation in Darfour. The fact is the vast majority of American media is terrible. We talk about this all the time on Slashdot. How is this flamebait?
Exactly. And here's something to keep in mind that make it even simpler to understand:
Theft is based in the legal principle of property, whereas copyright infringement is based on the legal principle of limited monopoly. The Constitution makes it very clear that this is not property, and that eventually the copyright holder will relinquish their monopoly for the good of the people. This muddling between theft and infringement on the part of the RIAA/MPAA is intentional.
For excellent further reading/listening on this subject, read Lawrence Lessig's book Free Culture (ISBN: 1594200068), or listen to the oral arguments in Elred v. Ashcroft (audio link on the left side). I think Lessig makes some brilliant points, but he ultimate lost the battle because of the unfortunate shortsightedness of our founding fathers.
I'll buy the argument that this article is simply being alarmist, but leftist? How so? Last time I checked, wanting things to stay the old way was being a conservative, thus, to the right. Your post was interesting until that point.
If there was a PC in her home, there is also a good chance that it was zombie'd. In my role of overseeing a number of mail gateways, I've seen a great deal of machines out on the internet that have probably been compromised. We were getting mailbombed so badly by Bellsouth ADSL customers at one point that I simply had to filter out their netblock. If typical corporate security precautions are any indicator, regular computer users are totally f***ed.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason why PCs boost productivity in the corporate environment is that we offload our work to students nowadays. Hence students do worse ;)
In the NPR vein, I highly recommend On Point with Tom Ashbrook. I listen to it most nights. Unfortunately, downloads are limited to streams (unless you have a stream ripper), but I sometimes just set my computer to record off the air. It's a great way to spend a couple of hours. Even with topics that I am not particularly interested in, I feel like I've spent the time well.
If you have a legal bent, you can listen to U.S. Supreme Court arguments at oyez.org. The nerd side of you should love hearing Lawrence Lessig argue in Eldred v. Ashcroft. Lots of other great stuff here, going all the way back to the 1950's. I've listened to a lot of this on my iPod during my 3-hour (rountrip) commute. You'd be surprised how much more interesting law can be when you hear it this way.
Wait until you switch from your Mac/Windows box to a Linux box. See how free you feel when your music won't play on your new platform. I didn't know that I was going to switch over until after I already had a fairly large collection of protected-AAC music files. Without PlayFair/Hymn I wouldn't be able to listen to the music I legally purchased.
I was under the impression that all, or nearly all, of Yahoo!'s content was served up by FreeBSD machines. What kind of perversion went on that they decided to put IE-only content on these boxes? Maybe their press release confusion is an indicator of other weirdness in the company, too.
Wow! Are you real? I just _know_ that you're some pimply-faced teenager, leading us into the false hope that there are geeky women out there, somewhere... ;)
I don't at all mean to belittle your past with MUDs, but I always have the impression that the point of these studies is actually to stigmatize the "addiction" in question. I think they exist to say, "look, that's the problem!" and shift the blame. Yes, there are people who exhibit addictive behavior, but is the problem really the Internet?
For PPC users, this is great. Around the time that Linus switched hardware, all of a sudden I was able to build the vanilla sources on PPC. Before that, I always had to use someone's patchset. I'm not sure if the one thing is directly related to the other, but it makes a lot of sense to me.
Now my only problem is not being able to run Flash. Of course, with all the Flash ads out there, I'm probably better off...
Of course, you wouldn't want your timestamps to vary too much, because then you'd stick out. And since the article says that the timestamp feature is optional you could just disable that portion of your TCP/IP stack, assuming that there are enough devices out there that do the same thing. Otherwise you'd stick out again. Oh, and forget about it if you're not using modifiable network code.
Actually so can Dell's. My experience with Dell server hardware has been nothing but positive. You can even get a non-OS dependent boot disk to flash BIOS (we run OpenBSD). Maybe ordinary consumer hardware is different, I don't know.
If I'm not mistaken, interoperability with their products and open documentation of their APIs was one of the specific terms that Microsoft had to accept as a part of their settlement with the DOJ. How can they get around this? As far as I am concerned, sabotaging WINE users' ability to update their Microsoft products amounts to monopolistic abuse.
My guess is that they figure they'll just do whatever they want, loopholes in the settlement aside, since the DOJ has proved that it could really care less if MS was punished anyhow.
Anyone have a link to the settlement terms?
Now our design department is saying, "Hey, InDesign is a lot cheaper, it has a useable interface, and it already works with my other tools..." And site licenses with Adobe are a piece of cake.
I personally think that mass piracy of Quark is what made it the industry standard in the first place. Sure, it had a quite a few features that you couldn't find in PakeMaker at the time, but its interface was (and still is) horrible. So in some ways Quark owes their success to piracy.
The UltraBac interface is definitely a bit clunky, but their phone support is great. I even get forwarded to their developers when I find potential bugs. (on that note, wait a bit to go with UB8, UB7 works great). UltraBac even claims to have a UNIX agent, although we only use UB for Windows backups. We then clone our backup drives and take those copies off-site.
For our OpenBSD machines, we only do bare-metal backups, since there is little changing data on them (mail gateways, FTP, etc). For those, I just boot up with the OpenBSD boot CD, and dd everything to an external SCSI drive. I can usually backup a 36GB RAID-5 in about 12 minutes.
Yup.
First of all, I was talking about Darfour, not the tsunami.
Sencond: hey free-market fanboy, the opposite of free-market doesn't have to be socialist. Have you ever noticed the government monopoly on road construction and maintenance? Holy shit! Call out the guns! Communism must be taking over!
Maybe it's because free-market road construction would only pave roads where money could be had paving roads. Now do you get it? I'm trying to point your nimble little brain into seeing why free-market news fails to provide complete news coverage.
Yeah, I read it that way, too, and all I have to say is whatever, man.
The fact is, a free market economy isn't very good at providing news because it caters to the whims of the consumer. We have to demand coverage and accuracy. So you're telling me that demanding more from our news services is irresponsilbe? I'm sorry, that's just totally fucked.
The worst part is that we already know what will happen if we don't do anything. Nine-hundred-thousand people! Yes, the tsunami was a terrible thing, and sure, it's not the "fault" of the tsunami that no one hears about Darfour, but compared to the human cost in Rwanda the tsunami's damage was relatively small.
In other news, SCO will be moving forward using its pattern-matching software to identify travellers' faces during airport screening...
How is this flamebait? It's a good point. The other thing that the American media forgot about, in the wake of the Tsunami, is the current situation in Darfour. The fact is the vast majority of American media is terrible. We talk about this all the time on Slashdot. How is this flamebait?
Theft is based in the legal principle of property, whereas copyright infringement is based on the legal principle of limited monopoly. The Constitution makes it very clear that this is not property, and that eventually the copyright holder will relinquish their monopoly for the good of the people. This muddling between theft and infringement on the part of the RIAA/MPAA is intentional.
For excellent further reading/listening on this subject, read Lawrence Lessig's book Free Culture (ISBN: 1594200068), or listen to the oral arguments in Elred v. Ashcroft (audio link on the left side). I think Lessig makes some brilliant points, but he ultimate lost the battle because of the unfortunate shortsightedness of our founding fathers.
We all knew this already, but I wonder if we should worry more now that they've admitted it.
Maybe they finally got around to watching Dr. Strangelove.
Strangelove: Yes, but the... whole point of the doomsday machine... is lost... if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, eh?
um... er... GAH!
I'll buy the argument that this article is simply being alarmist, but leftist? How so? Last time I checked, wanting things to stay the old way was being a conservative, thus, to the right. Your post was interesting until that point.
If there was a PC in her home, there is also a good chance that it was zombie'd. In my role of overseeing a number of mail gateways, I've seen a great deal of machines out on the internet that have probably been compromised. We were getting mailbombed so badly by Bellsouth ADSL customers at one point that I simply had to filter out their netblock. If typical corporate security precautions are any indicator, regular computer users are totally f***ed.