These statistics are really lousy and does not say anything about if an expensive card will really increase the player performance.
1. The "low" frame rate is 120 fps which would not by any means be considered "low" by most gamers.
2. They only asses GPUs and do not include displays and other hardware or network lag. They have no idea of which frame rates are actually experienced by the players. There is even a graph to show that the more expensive cards are helpful even on 60 fps screens, despite that all studied GPUs produce much more than 60 fps.
3. As many have pointed out, this is very likely a skewed data set to start with. The serious gamers buy more expensive cards. Nivida actually have the data to confirm or refute this but don't show it. They could show the distribution of hours played per week, grouped per GPU type. They don't show it which is cause for concern.
There is little reason to believe gamers would experience any significant improvement going from a 120 fps to 200 fps system. That would be equivalent of reducing absolute worst case lag from 8.3 ms to 5.0 ms (on average it would actually be half those numbers). Then consider that the human reaction time to visual stimuli is around 120-150 ms in ideal setups.
Please correct the text, the referenced study is about neotame only and does not investigate the other mentioned molecules or products. The CNBC article is probably to blame as it is misleading on which results were obtained in which study.
Human DNA is the most impressive software ever written. It uses extremely complex feedback control structures, analog and digital. It has also lent its name to "genetic algorithms". It is a simple construct but so complex that we have barely understood the outlines of it after five decades of global research. It may not be "written", but that's another story.
Stuxnet on the other hand is a rather short piece of code that based its success on using secrets obtained from external sources. A good example of cross-domain collaboration and a masterpiece in its own domain. But hardly the most sophisticated piece of code ever written.
Based on all the "if it ain't open source it's rotten"-shouting seen on this forum over the years, the relevant and realistic comments received so far must be deliberate misinformation posted here by your jealous competitors. Thus my advice is that you open-source all your algorithms and software and immediately notify your competitors.
It seems to me that all you need is descriptive statistics (change from last month, mean, min, max, etc and probably graphing). Using a general spreadsheet application like Excel or Calc will do the job just fine. Remember that Excel is designed to support business calculations and what you are asked to provide is exactly that! Using a dedicated statistics software for this task (in your environment) is a waste of resources. Full stop.
However, the solution may not be straight-forward to solve in Excel or any other program. In my experience there are two main reasons:
1. The request for data is unclear. Why do they "increasingly want data on various aspects of our activities"? It could be that the data you have provided so far has not provided support to decisions. Are the questions they really want answered possible to support with the data you can provide? Meet up with the actual decision makers or at least someone who knows what the statistics are actually used for and ask them WHY they need it. Is it used to support resourcing? Is it used to describe changes? Not even a university administration creates statistics for no reason. Most likely, what they really want to know is a handful of numbers like "change from last month", "overall sum", "hours spent on teaching vs information searches".
Do this with an open mind. You will probably learn that many of the imperfections you see in the details are less important to them. When you know their true needs, suggest a package of data, graphs, free-text report or whatever is suitable. If some parts are easy to provide, be clear about that. If something is more difficult to produce, tell them that it is is possible but time-consuming and costly. Get their buy-in before you spend time on producing the output.
2. The raw data is not optimally formatted for the calculations First of all, if raw data quality can be improved, do that first. Update forms used for feedback, ask for output in a specific format etc. Then arrange the data and calculations in Excel to make it flexible and easy to read and troubleshoot. The trick is to use structure your data and calculations in Excel in a way that is easy to follow visually and logically. In my experience it is very useful to use different tabs for data entry, data analysis and presentation.
It seems from your examples that your input will come from a variety of sources, both manually entered and output from other systems. To get it into Excel, create separate source data tabs where you can enter or paste your raw data. For each source data tab, create a "clean up and calculate" tab where you rearrange source data and make most of the calculations. If raw data is very far from optimal or calculations are complex you may want to use several tabs or even several workbooks for this. Then create presentation tabs where you present the results from calculations in a useful format.
I'm convinced you are suffering from both these problems. Attack them in numeric order and you are well on your way. And by all means, sign up for a course in advanced Excel that is suitable for your application. Best of luck!
I'll just cite the Quote of the day, at the bottom of this page: "In any formula, constants (especially those obtained from handbooks) are to be treated as variables."
There are several factors - Hearing aids are medical devices, regulated by FDA. This means that companies have to spend time and money to get their devices approved. Quality assurance, traceability, reliability of components etc contribute to the higher cost of medical devices. - Some really clever engineering, algorithms, materials and manufacturing are required to make a modern hearing aid. Not many companies can make an original design that is competitive. - Not only processing power is limited in the small size, power consumption also needs to be minimized. I wouldn't be surprised if batteries cost more than the appliance over a few years time. - You also pay for a professional to personalize the hearing aid, to adapt it to your specific hearing loss - The performance increase per dollar is small in the premium range. The best performing hearing aids can charge much more than the second best ones, even if performance is only slightly better in normal situations.
However, I doubt that the fact that insurance companies often pay would impact the price. They are extremely cost-aware and would demand a cheaper device providing the same performance if it were available (or limit their contribution to the cost of the cheaper competitor if it was as good).
This post is simply wrong. The poster has completely distorted the message in the original text by using unfair citing methods. If you actually read the article, it defines the openness continuum as the range *between* "freely [---] accessed, reused and shared" and "non-documented, proprietary software". Not very groundbreaking or controversial. Boring.
On the other hand, it is obvious that nearly all responders with strong opinions on the matter also have not bothered to read the article. Interesting?
Get outside and expose your laptop (and maybe even yourself) to the sun for a couple of hours!
In many parts of the world, the sunlight contains enough UV radiation to kill off influenzae virus in reasonable time http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/php/2007/00000083/00000005/art00034 (up to several days in the winter). This will of course depend on your location, time of year and weather. Of viruses in visible (irradiated) parts of your computer will be killed, but other parts are probably not touched by other users anyway.
Note that viruses are sensitive to UV radiation. Other "bugs" may still be active.
When VxWorks today was reported to be the premier operating system on Mars, Microsoft officials immediately announced that the next version of Windows, codenamed "Longhorn", is developed specifically for Uranus.
Choosing GPL as license is in itself a pretty strong political statement. GPL is restrictive for many uses (e.g. compared with BSD/MIT/Apache licenses) so I don't find it strange if someone would add another paragraph.
Something like
No part of this software can be used for research, manufacture or use of nuclear power, nuclear, chemical or biological warfare or in states sanctioned by United Nations embargos or blockades.
That's very much like GPL's idea "It can't be used as a part of products that don't share our ideas about software licensing".
Many people in this discussion seem to think that "freedom" in the true sense means "the user's freedom to do whatever he wants" when actually "the authors freedom and right to be respected for his work" is a more important basis of freedom (and GPL).
Maybe the war in Iraq (soon on a theatre near you) is a too hot issue to be a good example. But show me someone that would be proud of seeing their free software enabling the genocide in Rwanda. GPL is already a lot about ideas, ethics and moral so anybody choosing GPL for their project should be articulate enough to decide for themselves which uses are acceptable. Choosing GPL just because "it is the ultimately cool freedom thing" is not what GNU is about.
It has the feel of a hoax. Citations like "First, all p2p-serving software on the machine is infected", "all media on the machine is cataloged, and the full list is sent back to the RIAA headquarters" and "Snort, RealSecure, Dragon, NFR, and all that other crap cannot detect this attack, or this type of attack." are clear signs of chain letters and hoaxing (or humor if you prefer).
Gobbles claim that 95% of all p2p-participating hosts are infected. To achieve that number, exploits must exist for Mac, Win and Linux clients. I'm sure that there are exploits available, but making them work on all platforms and avoiding detection by anti-virus programs would require far more than 17 full-time persons.
We can rest assured that not only RIAA but also Symantec, F-Secure and other anti-virus companies are keeping close track of the p2p traffic patterns. Anyone trying to collect complete information of the contents on something like 50 million hosts (check the number of downloads on Download.com if you don't belive this) would not escape anybodys attention. 50 bytes per file times 100 files per computer times 100 million hosts = 500 GB. The shear volume of traffic to RIAAs computers would be noticed even if RIAA used several hundred separate IP blocks to spread the traffic. And, as said, this would require more than 17 volonteers spread over the world. Somebody would leak...
However - as many have pointed out already - it may seem unlikely, but it is definitely possible to similar things and you should protect your computer even more after this. An essential read for anyone that is still in doubt about the possibilities of doing this is:
Notice how regioning makes it (for practical purposes) impossible for USians to mail-order e.g. European/region 2 movies, TV shows
But it has a twist: From the start, DVD region codings were designed to avoid leakage of Hollywood movies to Europe and Asia.
Imagine a scenario where Lexmark sells copy-protected cartridges in the US and non-protected in Europe. I will laugh out loud when the US customers protest becuase they can't buy the cheap European and Asian non-competition-hindered stuff because of the DMCA ?
(But of course I will sympathize with the consumers that have to pay too high prices. I'm not that evil:-)
Apart from the obvious issues that are mentioned in the OpenBSD FAQ, some things are seldom explained fully.
Port upgrades. Installation of third party software with the ports/packages system are often explained but I have yet to see an explanation on how to effeciently keeping you ports/packages tree up-to-date. Upgrading a package that many other packages depend on is virtually impossible without breaking one thing or another.
Keyboard setup for international users. Setting your keyboard is superficially simple with wconsctl, but you just go ahead and try mg from the console, ssh and X sessions and you will be in trouble. X and KDE setup can be described on a "get it installed" basis but deeper explanations are better left to other books.
GSAP - Good System Administration Practice. The BSD:s all have a homogeneity that can actually be used in a very efficient and secure way. The toolbox is much more homogenous than it is in for example Linux. Thus, the new (or seasoned) sysadmin has a chance to learn not only technical details but can also afford the time to learn the "politics" on system administration. Some ideas are to show the actual examples (walk-throughs) for:
Using sudo in practice. For example, the ports tree is only writable to root by default and ports should not be compiled as root. I bet that many admins compile as root because it is easier.
The philosophy behind the directory tree (that differs from Linux on some substantial points).
Installing patches. Most OpenBSD installations are chosen because of security, so applying updates in a controlled fashion should be first priority.
Webserving. Many sites will also use OpenBSD/Apache as an out-of-the-box secure webserver. What is important to keep it secure? What is different from the official Apache? How to configure websites without loosing the on-machnine Apache manual?
Java. Several choices exist and it is quite obvious from notes scattered around the web that Java and OpenBSD doesn't mix very well (at least not a year ago). Recommend one way of setting it up. How to set Jakarta/Tomcat up to run not as root.
Secure networking. How does the ISAKMPD configuration really work? So many "example configs" exist but really few explanations of what the sections mean and how to think if you want to understand it bottoms-up.
Packet filter. What is needed is not a pf syntax sheet and some example configs. What is really needed is an explanation of how a filter travels through different stages of the filter engine. Why is NAT rules applied first? What principles are behind the antispoof keyword? Nice ways of remotely (and with sudo, remember?) changing pf rules without risking being locked-out.
Conclusions
There is a plethora of good man-pages and a FAQ that explains the administrative commands. A book about philosophy, or how to think and rationalize your actions would probably be more helpful to OpenBSD admins than it would to most other OS:s. Focus on the "why":s and not so much on the "how":s. The "how":s that are addressed, however, should be thorougly explained with full printouts.
Why is it that most/.-writers suggest violent and explosive chemistry experiements?
I have visited (and performed in) several science demonstrations where the kids in the audience where frightened of explosions and fire. Scaring off you audience is a bad performance...
I honestly don't think that the kids that like explosions the most will be the best scientists later on! And it is rather obvious that the kids that DON'T like explosions might be the very ones that need to be reminded of the fun-ness of science.
Furthermore, the original question is about a workshop and not a demonstration/lecture. So I recomend:
* Do experiments that are easy to relate to for the kids.
* Do experiments with everyday things
* Do at least some experiments that are possible to fully understand for the kids (molecules and chemical reactivie are usually not part of kids view of the world)
Some suggestions:
* Battery from a lemon
* Eggs float in salt water but not in sweet
* Use BTB or other pH-indicator indicators to check the pH in various foods
* Paper chromatograpy on colour pencils
* Various kind of magnets (U-shaped, straight and stick-a-note-on-the-fridge type) and their effect on iron dust. Are all metals magnetic? Try coins, cans, keys etc.
* Catalysis - does sugar burn? How can you set fire to a sugar-cube? I bet my fellow/.-ers don't know the answer? Go find out! (and bring the contents of your local ashtray to experiment with...)
Quit the current job and try the new one.
Get raise.
Current employer says they are interested and want you to stay.
Go anyway but say that they can call you in three months time if they still want you. (If the old company really wants you to stay they will accept keeping you as a non-payed employee during that time.)
After three months, meet your old employer and discuss again. You have probably changed views on what you want to do at work and how you want your work to be organized. Tell them what you have found. They might like it.
Let them give you a new offer.
Decide.
The problem about deciding before you have actually changed jobs is that you only know how your current situtation is. To make an informed decision you have to try both places.
Change jobs first and then decide if it was a good choice. That is the only way of avoiding the "Maybe should have accepted that offer I got..." thoughts most people get later on.
After writing an even loooonger discussion about the site and having it all
erased in a system crash, this will be a short version. (On the second reading:
ha-ha).
* The web service provider www.truepath.com/
has been online since September 1997. They are definitely for real and serves
many, many other cristian sites. Let's not scan or bomb them. They are doing
a great job handling the slashdot effect - we have seen many other sites
choke immediately.
It all looks very, very much like a real site. Some glitches point in the
hoax-direction however:
* On the member
page, it is very hard to find any evidence of any pastors or doctors
on the web. However, searching for '"Tim
Allmon" baptist' on Google returns two hits.
-The
Digital Missourian: Citing
"Tim Allmon, 22, plans to vote for Bush. But the Southern Methodist University
student says he is tired of candidates "putting on the fake happy face, shaking
hands and kissing babies.""
There is acutally a guy called Tim Allmon, about the age (24) of the portrait
on the member page, studying at the Southern Methodist University. Sounds
OK to study at the Methodist Univeristy if you are ultra christian, but I
guess there are 10.000 other students there that are not, on the other hand...
The second link is not about our guy anyway.
* The bible verses they have chosen are good reading.
Tim Allmon, the treasurer, chose Mattew 22:17-22... (bible citations from
bible.gospelcom.net)
"Tell us then, what is your opinion? Is it right
to pay taxes to Caesar or not?" But Jesus, knowing their evil intent, said,
"You hypocrites, why are you trying to trap me? Show me the coin used for
paying the tax." They brought him a denarius, and he asked them, "Whose portrait
is this? And whose inscription?" "Caesar's," they replied. Then he said to
them, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's." When
they heard this, they were amazed. So they left him and went away."
Too good to be true? You judge. But the femnine looking Peggy Miller's choice
is Luke 11:21:
""When a strong man, fully armed, guards his
own house, his possessions are safe."
Pastor Jose Rosas is also surprising. Claiming to work in "the ecumenical
Catholic Outreach Baptist Ministries" is exceedingly hard to believe for
me. If the catholic and baptist acutally had any collaborations, we would
find it on Google... Wouldn't we? Again, we are directed to Objective as
the first link... Corinthians
8:1-13 is not that obvious either...
Kyle Goodman then. His story is almost too good to be true... We can read
in the Google cache (to save his Geocities accound from flooding) that he
was salvaged by Jim Carlson of the Objective site. He first was a "bad guy"
with a webpage against Jim Carlson and pro Landover. Now he has changed and
is against Landover. It is hard to know if he is serious. Would anybody changing
mind so drastically still keep their old web page that insulted what you
now believe in? (His pages are still up on Geocities, but they are
often overloaded so use the Google cache
instead.
There is some really good reading in Kyles guestbook.
I especially like a comment (KirthGersen - 11/22/00 06:05:12):
"Taking parody to the razor's edge... The fact that you left your old site
up shows you are faking your conversion. The fact that those idiots at Shutdown
Landover believe you shows that they are really, really dumb. Congrats on
your parody - it's quite convincing. Can't wait till you suddenly fall from
grace - should be hilarious!"
Furthermore, Kyle Goldman is a very uncommon
name in Google. Most hits points into golf result tables. Some link actually
points to the Faith Presbyterian Church
in Huntsville, Alabama, were they have posted the participants in the cermon
(how about that privacy?). Actually Melissa Goldman also participated. This
seem strange as Kyle have chocked his jewish parents when converting as the
Objective site says. Maybe this Kyle Goldman is not the one we are looking
for...
One
of the links points to a sermon that was held the 15th of October 2000,
which is only two days after Kyle's last note on his Geocities webpage. It
seems normal to me that a young newcomer in a presbyterian congregation would
be asked to lead the prayers.
The golf-playing Kyle was a freshman in Temple Highschool in Bell County,
Texas in 1997 (See this
link, and this directory
listing). Is he the same Kyle Goldman? There also seems to be a horse-riding
and -judging Kyle Goldman that originates from Washington in Wilkes county,
Georgia. Btw, his horse is named Cookie.
Aaaarghhh. I want to know the truth!
Conclusion
It is harder for me to believe that someone spends the enormous amount of
work on a site likeObjective for fun rather
than if they do believe in it. (On the other hand it may be hard for people
to believe that someone spent the time to write this:-) The only obvious
people that could do it "for fun" is the Landover crew (and they are probably
overloaded with that site, plus they specialize in sharp and clear irony)
and Kyle Goldman that has a very different style on his other webpage. Faking
the artwork on the Objective site would also take lots of skill and time.
This has largely turned out to be a study if the people named above really
exist. It is hard to determine that using only the Internet, and it gets
even harder when the persons are not supposed to use the 'net because of
its low moral. It is next to impossible as the pages in discussion lack real-world
adresses. Even if that is a sign of a hoax, nobody that tried leaving their
mail adress on a page like that would do it again. They may be misinformed,
but they are not stupid...
So, I choose to believe that there acutally are people different enough and
determined to set up a site like Objective because they do believe in it
for real. If anybody have hard evidence of the opposite, I welcome it.
I can't wait until something like this happens the next time and they have upgraded to Windows XP instead of Windows 2000.
As earlier posts noted, using VNC and Windows XP is not allowed according to the Microsoft XP license.
A close shave, using Win2000 this time, that is.
They should also be thankful that VNC cannot even be run without the password being set. Somehow it didn't help as the (new) site has helplessly been displaying an empty page the last few hours.
Slashdot Mirror
These statistics are really lousy and does not say anything about if an expensive card will really increase the player performance.
1. The "low" frame rate is 120 fps which would not by any means be considered "low" by most gamers.
2. They only asses GPUs and do not include displays and other hardware or network lag. They have no idea of which frame rates are actually experienced by the players. There is even a graph to show that the more expensive cards are helpful even on 60 fps screens, despite that all studied GPUs produce much more than 60 fps.
3. As many have pointed out, this is very likely a skewed data set to start with. The serious gamers buy more expensive cards. Nivida actually have the data to confirm or refute this but don't show it. They could show the distribution of hours played per week, grouped per GPU type. They don't show it which is cause for concern.
There is little reason to believe gamers would experience any significant improvement going from a 120 fps to 200 fps system. That would be equivalent of reducing absolute worst case lag from 8.3 ms to 5.0 ms (on average it would actually be half those numbers). Then consider that the human reaction time to visual stimuli is around 120-150 ms in ideal setups.
Nivida claims that "pros in our labs have been able to consistently discern and see benefits from even a handful of milliseconds of reduced latency". That may be true, but it just proves that the handful of milliseconds that you could possibly gain can only be discerened by pro players on extremely high-performing systems in controlled environments.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. In this case Nividia does not even produce ordinary evidence.
This is purely a marketing ploy.
Please correct the text, the referenced study is about neotame only and does not investigate the other mentioned molecules or products. The CNBC article is probably to blame as it is misleading on which results were obtained in which study.
Human DNA is the most impressive software ever written. It uses extremely complex feedback control structures, analog and digital. It has also lent its name to "genetic algorithms". It is a simple construct but so complex that we have barely understood the outlines of it after five decades of global research. It may not be "written", but that's another story.
Stuxnet on the other hand is a rather short piece of code that based its success on using secrets obtained from external sources. A good example of cross-domain collaboration and a masterpiece in its own domain. But hardly the most sophisticated piece of code ever written.
Obviously, it should be nano-thermite.
You can still do the work and refuse payment!
Or consider CUDA coding for charities. YMMV.
Based on all the "if it ain't open source it's rotten"-shouting seen on this forum over the years, the relevant and realistic comments received so far must be deliberate misinformation posted here by your jealous competitors. Thus my advice is that you open-source all your algorithms and software and immediately notify your competitors.
It seems to me that all you need is descriptive statistics (change from last month, mean, min, max, etc and probably graphing). Using a general spreadsheet application like Excel or Calc will do the job just fine. Remember that Excel is designed to support business calculations and what you are asked to provide is exactly that! Using a dedicated statistics software for this task (in your environment) is a waste of resources. Full stop.
However, the solution may not be straight-forward to solve in Excel or any other program. In my experience there are two main reasons:
1. The request for data is unclear.
Why do they "increasingly want data on various aspects of our activities"? It could be that the data you have provided so far has not provided support to decisions. Are the questions they really want answered possible to support with the data you can provide? Meet up with the actual decision makers or at least someone who knows what the statistics are actually used for and ask them WHY they need it. Is it used to support resourcing? Is it used to describe changes? Not even a university administration creates statistics for no reason. Most likely, what they really want to know is a handful of numbers like "change from last month", "overall sum", "hours spent on teaching vs information searches".
Do this with an open mind. You will probably learn that many of the imperfections you see in the details are less important to them. When you know their true needs, suggest a package of data, graphs, free-text report or whatever is suitable. If some parts are easy to provide, be clear about that. If something is more difficult to produce, tell them that it is is possible but time-consuming and costly. Get their buy-in before you spend time on producing the output.
2. The raw data is not optimally formatted for the calculations
First of all, if raw data quality can be improved, do that first. Update forms used for feedback, ask for output in a specific format etc. Then arrange the data and calculations in Excel to make it flexible and easy to read and troubleshoot. The trick is to use structure your data and calculations in Excel in a way that is easy to follow visually and logically. In my experience it is very useful to use different tabs for data entry, data analysis and presentation.
It seems from your examples that your input will come from a variety of sources, both manually entered and output from other systems. To get it into Excel, create separate source data tabs where you can enter or paste your raw data. For each source data tab, create a "clean up and calculate" tab where you rearrange source data and make most of the calculations. If raw data is very far from optimal or calculations are complex you may want to use several tabs or even several workbooks for this. Then create presentation tabs where you present the results from calculations in a useful format.
I'm convinced you are suffering from both these problems. Attack them in numeric order and you are well on your way. And by all means, sign up for a course in advanced Excel that is suitable for your application. Best of luck!
I'll just cite the Quote of the day, at the bottom of this page:
"In any formula, constants (especially those obtained from handbooks) are to be treated as variables."
... it should not be eligible for trademark any more than "web browser" would be.
Or "app store".
There are several factors
- Hearing aids are medical devices, regulated by FDA. This means that companies have to spend time and money to get their devices approved. Quality assurance, traceability, reliability of components etc contribute to the higher cost of medical devices.
- Some really clever engineering, algorithms, materials and manufacturing are required to make a modern hearing aid. Not many companies can make an original design that is competitive.
- Not only processing power is limited in the small size, power consumption also needs to be minimized. I wouldn't be surprised if batteries cost more than the appliance over a few years time.
- You also pay for a professional to personalize the hearing aid, to adapt it to your specific hearing loss
- The performance increase per dollar is small in the premium range. The best performing hearing aids can charge much more than the second best ones, even if performance is only slightly better in normal situations.
However, I doubt that the fact that insurance companies often pay would impact the price. They are extremely cost-aware and would demand a cheaper device providing the same performance if it were available (or limit their contribution to the cost of the cheaper competitor if it was as good).
This post is simply wrong. The poster has completely distorted the message in the original text by using unfair citing methods.
If you actually read the article, it defines the openness continuum as the range *between* "freely [---] accessed, reused and shared" and "non-documented, proprietary software". Not very groundbreaking or controversial.
Boring.
On the other hand, it is obvious that nearly all responders with strong opinions on the matter also have not bothered to read the article.
Interesting?
In many parts of the world, the sunlight contains enough UV radiation to kill off influenzae virus in reasonable time http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/php/2007/00000083/00000005/art00034 (up to several days in the winter). This will of course depend on your location, time of year and weather. Of viruses in visible (irradiated) parts of your computer will be killed, but other parts are probably not touched by other users anyway.
Note that viruses are sensitive to UV radiation. Other "bugs" may still be active.
When VxWorks today was reported to be the premier operating system on Mars, Microsoft officials immediately announced that the next version of Windows, codenamed "Longhorn", is developed specifically for Uranus.
Choosing GPL as license is in itself a pretty strong political statement. GPL is restrictive for many uses (e.g. compared with BSD/MIT/Apache licenses) so I don't find it strange if someone would add another paragraph.
Something like
No part of this software can be used for research, manufacture or use of nuclear power, nuclear, chemical or biological warfare or in states sanctioned by United Nations embargos or blockades.
That's very much like GPL's idea "It can't be used as a part of products that don't share our ideas about software licensing".
Many people in this discussion seem to think that "freedom" in the true sense means "the user's freedom to do whatever he wants" when actually "the authors freedom and right to be respected for his work" is a more important basis of freedom (and GPL).
Maybe the war in Iraq (soon on a theatre near you) is a too hot issue to be a good example. But show me someone that would be proud of seeing their free software enabling the genocide in Rwanda. GPL is already a lot about ideas, ethics and moral so anybody choosing GPL for their project should be articulate enough to decide for themselves which uses are acceptable. Choosing GPL just because "it is the ultimately cool freedom thing" is not what GNU is about.
This is a hoax... At least partly.
It has the feel of a hoax. Citations like "First, all p2p-serving software on the machine is infected", "all media on the machine is cataloged, and the full list is sent back to the RIAA headquarters" and "Snort, RealSecure, Dragon, NFR, and all that other crap cannot detect this attack, or this type of attack." are clear signs of chain letters and hoaxing (or humor if you prefer).
Gobbles claim that 95% of all p2p-participating hosts are infected. To achieve that number, exploits must exist for Mac, Win and Linux clients. I'm sure that there are exploits available, but making them work on all platforms and avoiding detection by anti-virus programs would require far more than 17 full-time persons.
We can rest assured that not only RIAA but also Symantec, F-Secure and other anti-virus companies are keeping close track of the p2p traffic patterns. Anyone trying to collect complete information of the contents on something like 50 million hosts (check the number of downloads on Download.com if you don't belive this) would not escape anybodys attention. 50 bytes per file times 100 files per computer times 100 million hosts = 500 GB. The shear volume of traffic to RIAAs computers would be noticed even if RIAA used several hundred separate IP blocks to spread the traffic. And, as said, this would require more than 17 volonteers spread over the world. Somebody would leak...
However - as many have pointed out already - it may seem unlikely, but it is definitely possible to similar things and you should protect your computer even more after this. An essential read for anyone that is still in doubt about the possibilities of doing this is:
How to 0wn the Internet in your spare time. from the Proceedings of the 11th USENIX Security Symposium (Security '02)
But it has a twist: From the start, DVD region codings were designed to avoid leakage of Hollywood movies to Europe and Asia.
Imagine a scenario where Lexmark sells copy-protected cartridges in the US and non-protected in Europe. I will laugh out loud when the US customers protest becuase they can't buy the cheap European and Asian non-competition-hindered stuff because of the DMCA ?
(But of course I will sympathize with the consumers that have to pay too high prices. I'm not that evil :-)
Apart from the obvious issues that are mentioned in the OpenBSD FAQ, some things are seldom explained fully.
Conclusions
There is a plethora of good man-pages and a FAQ that explains the administrative commands. A book about philosophy, or how to think and rationalize your actions would probably be more helpful to OpenBSD admins than it would to most other OS:s. Focus on the "why":s and not so much on the "how":s. The "how":s that are addressed, however, should be thorougly explained with full printouts.
I have visited (and performed in) several science demonstrations where the kids in the audience where frightened of explosions and fire. Scaring off you audience is a bad performance...
I honestly don't think that the kids that like explosions the most will be the best scientists later on! And it is rather obvious that the kids that DON'T like explosions might be the very ones that need to be reminded of the fun-ness of science.
Furthermore, the original question is about a workshop and not a demonstration/lecture. So I recomend:
* Do experiments that are easy to relate to for the kids.
* Do experiments with everyday things
* Do at least some experiments that are possible to fully understand for the kids (molecules and chemical reactivie are usually not part of kids view of the world)
Some suggestions:
* Battery from a lemon
* Eggs float in salt water but not in sweet
* Use BTB or other pH-indicator indicators to check the pH in various foods
* Paper chromatograpy on colour pencils
* Various kind of magnets (U-shaped, straight and stick-a-note-on-the-fridge type) and their effect on iron dust. Are all metals magnetic? Try coins, cans, keys etc.
* Catalysis - does sugar burn? How can you set fire to a sugar-cube? I bet my fellow /.-ers don't know the answer? Go find out! (and bring the contents of your local ashtray to experiment with...)
Quit the current job and try the new one.
Get raise.
Current employer says they are interested and want you to stay.
Go anyway but say that they can call you in three months time if they still want you. (If the old company really wants you to stay they will accept keeping you as a non-payed employee during that time.)
After three months, meet your old employer and discuss again. You have probably changed views on what you want to do at work and how you want your work to be organized. Tell them what you have found. They might like it.
Let them give you a new offer.
Decide.
The problem about deciding before you have actually changed jobs is that you only know how your current situtation is. To make an informed decision you have to try both places.
Change jobs first and then decide if it was a good choice. That is the only way of avoiding the "Maybe should have accepted that offer I got..." thoughts most people get later on.
After writing an even loooonger discussion about the site and having it all erased in a system crash, this will be a short version. (On the second reading: ha-ha).
:-) The only obvious
people that could do it "for fun" is the Landover crew (and they are probably
overloaded with that site, plus they specialize in sharp and clear irony)
and Kyle Goldman that has a very different style on his other webpage. Faking
the artwork on the Objective site would also take lots of skill and time.
...or maybe I think it is a hoax... :-) /Fredrik
* The web service provider www.truepath.com/ has been online since September 1997. They are definitely for real and serves many, many other cristian sites. Let's not scan or bomb them. They are doing a great job handling the slashdot effect - we have seen many other sites choke immediately.
It all looks very, very much like a real site. Some glitches point in the hoax-direction however:
* On the member page, it is very hard to find any evidence of any pastors or doctors on the web. However, searching for '"Tim Allmon" baptist' on Google returns two hits.
-The Digital Missourian: Citing
"Tim Allmon, 22, plans to vote for Bush. But the Southern Methodist University student says he is tired of candidates "putting on the fake happy face, shaking hands and kissing babies.""
There is acutally a guy called Tim Allmon, about the age (24) of the portrait on the member page, studying at the Southern Methodist University. Sounds OK to study at the Methodist Univeristy if you are ultra christian, but I guess there are 10.000 other students there that are not, on the other hand...
The second link is not about our guy anyway.
* The bible verses they have chosen are good reading.
Tim Allmon, the treasurer, chose Mattew 22:17-22... (bible citations from bible.gospelcom.net)
"Tell us then, what is your opinion? Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not?" But Jesus, knowing their evil intent, said, "You hypocrites, why are you trying to trap me? Show me the coin used for paying the tax." They brought him a denarius, and he asked them, "Whose portrait is this? And whose inscription?" "Caesar's," they replied. Then he said to them, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's." When they heard this, they were amazed. So they left him and went away."
Too good to be true? You judge. But the femnine looking Peggy Miller's choice is Luke 11:21:
""When a strong man, fully armed, guards his own house, his possessions are safe."
Pastor Jose Rosas is also surprising. Claiming to work in "the ecumenical Catholic Outreach Baptist Ministries" is exceedingly hard to believe for me. If the catholic and baptist acutally had any collaborations, we would find it on Google... Wouldn't we? Again, we are directed to Objective as the first link...
Corinthians 8:1-13 is not that obvious either...
Kyle Goodman then. His story is almost too good to be true... We can read in the Google cache (to save his Geocities accound from flooding) that he was salvaged by Jim Carlson of the Objective site. He first was a "bad guy" with a webpage against Jim Carlson and pro Landover. Now he has changed and is against Landover. It is hard to know if he is serious. Would anybody changing mind so drastically still keep their old web page that insulted what you now believe in? (His pages are still up on Geocities, but they are often overloaded so use the Google cache instead.
There is some really good reading in Kyles guestbook. I especially like a comment (KirthGersen - 11/22/00 06:05:12):
"Taking parody to the razor's edge... The fact that you left your old site up shows you are faking your conversion. The fact that those idiots at Shutdown Landover believe you shows that they are really, really dumb. Congrats on your parody - it's quite convincing. Can't wait till you suddenly fall from grace - should be hilarious!"
Furthermore, Kyle Goldman is a very uncommon name in Google. Most hits points into golf result tables. Some link actually points to the Faith Presbyterian Church in Huntsville, Alabama, were they have posted the participants in the cermon (how about that privacy?). Actually Melissa Goldman also participated. This seem strange as Kyle have chocked his jewish parents when converting as the Objective site says. Maybe this Kyle Goldman is not the one we are looking for...
One of the links points to a sermon that was held the 15th of October 2000, which is only two days after Kyle's last note on his Geocities webpage. It seems normal to me that a young newcomer in a presbyterian congregation would be asked to lead the prayers.
The golf-playing Kyle was a freshman in Temple Highschool in Bell County, Texas in 1997 (See this link, and this directory listing). Is he the same Kyle Goldman? There also seems to be a horse-riding and -judging Kyle Goldman that originates from Washington in Wilkes county, Georgia. Btw, his horse is named Cookie.
Aaaarghhh. I want to know the truth!
Conclusion
It is harder for me to believe that someone spends the enormous amount of work on a site likeObjective for fun rather than if they do believe in it. (On the other hand it may be hard for people to believe that someone spent the time to write this
This has largely turned out to be a study if the people named above really exist. It is hard to determine that using only the Internet, and it gets even harder when the persons are not supposed to use the 'net because of its low moral. It is next to impossible as the pages in discussion lack real-world adresses. Even if that is a sign of a hoax, nobody that tried leaving their mail adress on a page like that would do it again. They may be misinformed, but they are not stupid...
So, I choose to believe that there acutally are people different enough and determined to set up a site like Objective because they do believe in it for real. If anybody have hard evidence of the opposite, I welcome it.
I can't wait until something like this happens the next time and they have upgraded to Windows XP instead of Windows 2000. As earlier posts noted, using VNC and Windows XP is not allowed according to the Microsoft XP license. A close shave, using Win2000 this time, that is. They should also be thankful that VNC cannot even be run without the password being set. Somehow it didn't help as the (new) site has helplessly been displaying an empty page the last few hours.