Some CompSci guru (Dijkstra?) once posted some code with the disclaimer that it may not work, as he had only proven it correct, not tested it.
A proof is in no way protection against bugs - it simply is a proof of the algorithmic integrity of the software. It, of neccesity, doesn't account for any errors outside of the software algorithms (in libraries, the OS, the hardware) and any issues that may arise from those, and more importantly it doesn't actually show that your software actually makes any sense - it's absolutely possible to have proven correct software that does not in fact do the correct thing. The actual usefullness of mathematical proofs in producing bug-free, highly reliable software is somewhat questionable. If you choose to factor in cost-benefit analysis, it becomes *really* questionable.
In the context of the TFA, it seems that he's saying he's not worried about VoIP competition because all of thier customers will be paying him for connectivity. It doesn't seem to be that he's worried about getting paid twice.
The fairly sad thing is that Windows does have a perfectly good system for privileges, it's just not supported or (at least expected to be) used in anything less than a corporate environment.
Sorry, I was referring to the mechanism for running an application as another user. There's nothing as simple as sudo (or gtksudo) in Windows. The Windows "Run As" dialog is hidden from the user and obnoxious to use at the best of times.
Almost all games (including Blizzards, and I believe they do this on purpose - if you don't have admin rights, you shouldn't be playing games, is the reasoning I think), and many, many, many software installers. The biggest problems are ones that want to read & write from "system" areas (like C:\Program Files\Whatever and the HKEY_SYSTEM registry branch), and there are still many, many, many of these, even though. The culture of single-user windows is still with us today, and the OS lack of support for simple privledge granting still means that many people who know better still run with admin privledges. The people who don't know better run that way because thats the default.
The technical issues to changing this on the MS side are pretty trivial, its the cultural and behaviorial issues that are blocking it.
but it sounds to me like you're saying that disabled users shouldn't ask for improvements simply so the anti-MS Slashdot crowd can continue to put anything related to Microsoft in an evil light.
Of course not. But the desires (not needs) of blind people are *not* the only factor to be considered. Catering to disabilities does not mean that you drop everything and make the convenience of the disabled person the only priority - you make reasonable accomodation to enable them to do thier work. Wheelchair ramps aren't as good as powered lifts, but both are acceptable. The needs and wants of a disabled person aren't any more important or special than the needs and wants of any other person doing their job. I need a chair to sit at my desk, so I get a chair. I don't get a $2000 hydraulic customized chair. I need a workspace, so I get a cubicle with a desk, not an office. Now, if the accessibility features in OO.o are simply *incapable* of supporting blind workers, thats a different issue, but I'm working under the assumption that it's acceptable but not ideal. Nobody bats an eye when an IT decision or upgrade or change or whatever inconveniences (without actually incapacitating) regular workers happens. Screaming "oh noes the blind people" is just patronizing.
They shouldn't forgoe improvements just to "get the man". But on the other hand, the very real concerns of document access and retention, not to mention the budget savings, of the entire state shouldn't hinge on thier convenience either. Blind and disabled people aren't any different than any other user - they find something that works for them and don't want to change. I haven't seen anywhere, not here, not in the article, any list of areas or features that OO.o is missing, that Office supports, and what the problem with the difference in features is missing. Until and unless someone can provide that, I think that all the assumptions that this change will neccesarily screw over blind people is greatly overrated.
Our installation of Access 2003, as configured by our corporate IT department, cannot do this. So I suppose it might just them being retards (it's happened before).
I have to agree. We've lost more time dealing with Access issues than we've ever saved by using Access over a real database (not neccesarily open source) implementation.
Can you list the accessiblity features Office 95 had that OO.o does not? If not, then theres not much of a reason to pay attention to you is there?
And yes, if Y was good enough then X should also be good enough. Thats not to say that theres not a reason to work on improving what we have, or that Office isn't better, but if disabled workers could work with Office 95, then they can also work with OpenOffice. Bear in mind that Massachusetts is only legally obligated to the extent of section 508 support.
I know it's not exactly politically correct, but there is a limit to the extent of accomodation for disabled users. They should have the best tools available, yes, but within the limits of reason - if OO.o is sufficent for work, even if it's not the best, and there are other reasons to use OpenOffice, then the simple convenience (as opposed to neccesity) of individual users should not hold up a migration with other pressing reasons. Its exactly the same reason why we don't give every office worker 23 inch hi def plasma displays and $10k workstations, or why everyone doesn't have thier own office.
You haven't worked much in government or other really big organizations, have you? In any case, we would have moved earlier if they hadn't messed up the 97->2000 compatability.
You would be wrong. Access in particular has absolutely shitty backwards compatability - we're currently in the middle of a huge effort at work to upgrade from Access 97. If you even *open* an Access 97 db from Access 2000, it can't be accessed from 97 anymore (which is why we never did a full migration before). Access 2003 can't open 97 databases at all, and Access 2003 refuses (or at least corp. IT can't figure out how) to co-exist with 97 on the same machine the way 2000 can.
Complex Word documents often have layout/macro issues - pretty much the same level of compatability as the OSS filters, really - though the conversion is very good and the fast majority of users will see no problems, just as with OO imports.
I think it's pretty clear to everyone that this is MS pulling out its political guns - think we'd be having these sort of hearings if they were moving servers from UNIX or Linux to Windows? The accessibility issue is real, and I'm not disabled and haven't done an intensive study, but OO.o does have accessibility support, even if it's not as good as what Office has. Previous versions of Office (97 and the like) have worse accessibility, so if they were good enough for workers then OO.o should be too, especially if funding can be found to sponser accessibility work in OO.o. The quotes don't sound to me like any has actually reviewed the alternatives and is familiar with the level of support in OO.o. It's not 100% correct, either. Makers of screen reader software and braille readers have specifically supported Office at the expense of other applications - an example of the harm the Office monopoly causes - and screen magnifiers work with whatever software you use. I think we're seeing a lot of people with vested political interests, or even just people that MS and MS backers have political access to, trying to toss thier 2 cents in to break a project that means a signifigant loss of revenue for MS.
All of this wouldn't matter in the slightest is MS implemented support for OpenDocument, of course, and I imagine there are plenty of people in Massechusets who would simply jump all over the chance to give MS 3 times the money they'd otherwise spend.
I know this is going to sound bizzare, and possibly get me flamed into oblivion, but what if this is a genuine change in the way MS is thinking about business?
MS seems to be claiming this, especially the Office guys who blog. It'd be pretty cool if this were the case, but I remain extremely skeptical and submit that MS has a severe burden of proof to overcome before it's reasonable to grant them the benefit of the doubt here. They have a long history of embrace/extend, of one-may migration techniques, of specifically targetting Open Source competition (license documentation that specifically excludes the GPL, for example), and an enormous history and culture of creating, maintaining, and leveraging thier Office and Windows monopolies. I believe that Microsoft could complete quite well in an open market, but they couldn't do so nearly as easily, as heavy-handed, or as profitably as they can now.
I would love it if they did - IBM has left its market leader/monopolist days behind it, and seems to genuinely embrace the open market and competition.
Price controls are historically a terrible idea and a failure.
On the other hand, all these other companies controlling the price of our oil are nationalized, so the free market isn't really providing the US with the best advantage there, is it?
You want some buddy of the president in charge of domestic oil?
And thats different from now how, exactly?:P
How do you know it's fuelled by gouging and speculation?
Because the ratio of supply to demand hasn't grown by 3x in the last year, even with Chinas increased demand. Of course, since (most) of the supply is controlled by relatively few people, it's hard to say what the "real" supply is.
It's interesting to note that every time someone (a liberal, of course) yells about our dependency on foreign oil and how we have to reduce it (generally via alternate energy sources, and buying less SUVs), the "party line" is that we have signifigant domestic stocks of oil, stop being Chicken Little, consumerism is American, blah blah blah. But whenever the issue is controlling the price of crude, the "party line" is supply and demand, OPEC are the bad guys, etc, etc. Surely there is some sort of discrepency somewhere? Is there a reason, beyond political cronyism and/or idealism that we haven't nationalized our oil reserves like everyone else? If we really essentially have to eat a 300% increase in oil price in *one year*, the vast majority of which is fuelled by gouging and speculation, isn't that a *really good reason* to take a long look at our energy usage and policies?
Note: I'm not accusing you personally of hypocricy on this issue.
Re:Why not just evaluate the issue technically?
on
OpenOffice Bloated?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Benchmarking obviously should be done in as cut and dry a method as possible, but it is *critical* to remember when publishing and evaluating benchmarks that they are synthetic and do not neccesarily generalize to actual performance. They are, at best, indicators.
This is especially important in an article like this one, where the author clearly has an agenda. For example, he characterizes (in his summary) OO.o as performing 98x worse than Office - clearly not supported either by the his benchmarks result (he's describing the worst case as the general case), or by good benchmarking practice in general - he's generalizing from one result on one system with one data set to a general case.
I don't want to imply that benchmarks are useless - they aren't. But *in this context*, they pretty much are. Certainly articles of this type, and in a publication like zdnet, are not the best candidates for objective performance testing. These are flame-generating hit-generators, even when the underlying basis (that OO.o is general case slower and consumes more memory than Office) are defensible.
This is exactly my point, and the previous responded did in fact misunderstand or misrepresent my point. It has nothing to do with Linux apology, and has nothing to do with the relative performance of the application. It's an explanation (there are other contributing factors) for the different experiences of users.
Re:Why not just evaluate the issue technically?
on
OpenOffice Bloated?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The short answer is that speed is not a simple, easily measurable property. It's extremely open to subjective interpertation, which means that absolute measures can be misleading, and more importantly, it's extremely difficult to quantify and measure in an agnostic way. This is why artifical benchmarks are, at best, only casual predictors of real performance. However, they remain extremely popular, especially against those with an axe to grind, because it *looks* like a hard, concrete measurement.
All this is not to say that benchmarking isn't usefull, or that it cannot show real performance differences, but it's extremely naive to treat any benchmark as a concrete indicator of general case performance.
As an aside, in my experience OO.o often beats Office for speed, but in ways that won't generally show on a benchmark. For example, in one install (but not all - another reason benchmarks aren't generic) opening the Find dialog in Excel took about 5 seconds. Every time. Thats a very real percieved performance deficit. Office, especially Excel again, will often lock up as I resize or move columns around. This is a non-determenistic thing (related to Offices internal memory management, I suspect) and thus difficult to benchmark, but is real. It is extremely possible, even likely that someone in a different environment will see the opposite effects.
Re:"Essentially" the same data?
on
OpenOffice Bloated?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
One common cause for this discrepency is that Windows does pre-caching and pre-binding for commonly used applications. When you first install Firefox or OO, it will be slower, but if you don't use IE or Office for 6 months, while you use the alternatives regularly, the Microsoft apps will be slower after a while. IE takes *forever* to load on my laptop on the rare (once or twice a year) occasions I fire it up.
My point was that if you have two programmers each with the same
"knows how to program" indexes, the one the knows the command line/
text editor/make ( or automake, or autoconf ) will be effective in
an IDE environment faster than the one who knows only the IDE would
be in a command line/text editor/( build tool de jure ) environment.
Thats true, to a degree (many command line programmers have a huge amount of trouble figuring out how to tell Visual Studio what to do), but the article, and many of the posts about, are drawing a value judgment from that - that if you only know VS, you're a worse programmer than if you know the 4 different languages and environments you need to use GNU autotools correctly. Another person might ask why you spent a good portion of your "programming" learning time figuring out how to use tools only tangentally related to programming, and why you think it's a sign of superiority that you use autotools in all it's horrible glory instead of a single tool. Now, there is no reason at all for many programmers to use autotools - they develop with and on Visual Studio. They learned that tool. It has no bearing whatsoever on programming per se, and even less on computer science in general. I do not believe that learning m4 will grant you any insights into concepts that generalize to your general experience as a programmer.
All that is not to say that knowing autotools isn't valuable, simply because it's so common. Of course, it's equally important to understand how to work Visual Studio, because Windows is more common and the huge majority of Windows development uses VS. The idea that using VS makes you "less" of a programmer, or even that not knowing or using any specific build tool makes you stupider or more "brain rotted" than someone who does is the classical kind of masochistic technical arrogance that should not be tolerated.
You're confusing "knows how the make utilty works" with "knows how to program". And, of course, just cause you know make doesn't mean you know automake. And just because you know automake doesn't mean you know autoconf. And just because you know any of those, doesn't mean that you don't know any of the dozens of tools invented because all those tools suck. I don't understand why people bitch about VS being obfuscated or "hiding" stuff from you when they use a build system made up of at least 2 and sometimes as many as 6 layers of indirection and abstraction, with *every single* layer using a different toolchain and a different language set.
In any case, knowing make is not the same as knowing fractions - it's not a fundamental building block on which to extend knowledge. It's a single (albeit widespread and popular) tool.
I have to agree. Anyone who claims that Intellisense makes you a poor coder, or (by extension) that a source browser is for dumb people is being stubborn and crusty. Visual Studio is an excellent IDE - it's code introspection abilities are powerful (but VisualAssist makes them incredible), it's project management is adequate and far simpler than autotools, especially for simple projects, and it's compiler (in recent versions) is excellent. People who focus in the form designer (it's lousy in C++ versions, which are only used to edit embedded Windows dialog resources, and only adequate for.NET forms) are completely missing the point.
More honored in the breach than in the observance these days, but theres a (not unreasonable) belief that in addition to not actively suppressing our rights, the government has a duty to actively support our expression of those rights. Of course, it's a delicate balancing act for where one persons rights begin and anothers end, but blanket statements like "You don't have any rights on anyone elses property" are simply wrong-headed - it's tantamount to claiming that you don't have any rights at all.
It might be worth knowing that clauses like that tend to be extremely weak, especially if you can actually prove malfeasance on the part of the school. If they didn't perform regular maintenance and thier smoke detectors didn't work (a violation of a large number of school regulations and building codes), you'd have an excellent chance of winning a lawsuit no matter what kind of disclaimer they have.
Sure. But you have to break it down into steps that are suitable for a learning curve. I suppose a mentor would be helpful. Hardware virtualization is hard stuff, so stay away from that for now, but setting up a local DHCP server is pretty straightforward. You're doing this to learn how to program, though, so don't just install a pre-built server and use that (it would solve your problem, though).
Network programming isn't really that difficult, especially in high level languages. I suggest Ruby or Python. Read/skim http://diveintopython.org/ and http://poignantguide.net/ruby/. These two languages have very different cultures and the styles of the turorials reflect that, so stick with the one that appeals to you the most.
You'll be able to set up a simple send/receive network client quickly. Once you've got that, it's time to start learning about DHCP - see if someones written a library for it already (I don't know of any off hand, but check Google and/or Rubyforge), read the docs for it and study the code. You shouldn't be too far away from getting a simple, probably buggy, half-working implementation up. If theres not one, you'll need to write your own, which will require some fairly advanaced knowldge fo the standard. Look on this as a challenge.
By this point you should know if you actually are interested in programming, and if you are, you probably already have your own motivation to continue. Refine your knowledge of programming and your chosen language and environment. This will progress fairly naturally from there. You'll find yourself wanting to learn C so that you can interoperate better with Windows, and you will hate C but you will use it anyway. You may become frustrated by the limitations of whatever language you started with and branch off - good! Your little DHCP server will suck and have a lousy UI and is probably riddled with bugs and broken standards - as those bother you more and more you'll start filing them off, learning what you have to along the way. 10 years will go by and you'll be answering questions like this on Slashdot;)
Actually re-editing a movie is something that needs to be done in the studio, and can't be done by automated duplication equipment. Further, the point of these screeners is for critics to rate the movie, and messing with the movie "as intended" could easily have consequences for that.
Really, the simplest way is something done on VHS screeners for years - scrolling text acrosss the video during key parts of the movie. If they're willing to spend the money to do a custom burn/press for each person (for the personalized DVD players), then they wouldn't have any trouble trailing the recipients name & id.
Slashdot Mirror
A proof is in no way protection against bugs - it simply is a proof of the algorithmic integrity of the software. It, of neccesity, doesn't account for any errors outside of the software algorithms (in libraries, the OS, the hardware) and any issues that may arise from those, and more importantly it doesn't actually show that your software actually makes any sense - it's absolutely possible to have proven correct software that does not in fact do the correct thing. The actual usefullness of mathematical proofs in producing bug-free, highly reliable software is somewhat questionable. If you choose to factor in cost-benefit analysis, it becomes *really* questionable.
In the context of the TFA, it seems that he's saying he's not worried about VoIP competition because all of thier customers will be paying him for connectivity. It doesn't seem to be that he's worried about getting paid twice.
The fairly sad thing is that Windows does have a perfectly good system for privileges, it's just not supported or (at least expected to be) used in anything less than a corporate environment. Sorry, I was referring to the mechanism for running an application as another user. There's nothing as simple as sudo (or gtksudo) in Windows. The Windows "Run As" dialog is hidden from the user and obnoxious to use at the best of times.
The technical issues to changing this on the MS side are pretty trivial, its the cultural and behaviorial issues that are blocking it.
Of course not. But the desires (not needs) of blind people are *not* the only factor to be considered. Catering to disabilities does not mean that you drop everything and make the convenience of the disabled person the only priority - you make reasonable accomodation to enable them to do thier work. Wheelchair ramps aren't as good as powered lifts, but both are acceptable. The needs and wants of a disabled person aren't any more important or special than the needs and wants of any other person doing their job. I need a chair to sit at my desk, so I get a chair. I don't get a $2000 hydraulic customized chair. I need a workspace, so I get a cubicle with a desk, not an office. Now, if the accessibility features in OO.o are simply *incapable* of supporting blind workers, thats a different issue, but I'm working under the assumption that it's acceptable but not ideal. Nobody bats an eye when an IT decision or upgrade or change or whatever inconveniences (without actually incapacitating) regular workers happens. Screaming "oh noes the blind people" is just patronizing.
They shouldn't forgoe improvements just to "get the man". But on the other hand, the very real concerns of document access and retention, not to mention the budget savings, of the entire state shouldn't hinge on thier convenience either. Blind and disabled people aren't any different than any other user - they find something that works for them and don't want to change. I haven't seen anywhere, not here, not in the article, any list of areas or features that OO.o is missing, that Office supports, and what the problem with the difference in features is missing. Until and unless someone can provide that, I think that all the assumptions that this change will neccesarily screw over blind people is greatly overrated.
Our installation of Access 2003, as configured by our corporate IT department, cannot do this. So I suppose it might just them being retards (it's happened before).
I have to agree. We've lost more time dealing with Access issues than we've ever saved by using Access over a real database (not neccesarily open source) implementation.
And yes, if Y was good enough then X should also be good enough. Thats not to say that theres not a reason to work on improving what we have, or that Office isn't better, but if disabled workers could work with Office 95, then they can also work with OpenOffice. Bear in mind that Massachusetts is only legally obligated to the extent of section 508 support.
I know it's not exactly politically correct, but there is a limit to the extent of accomodation for disabled users. They should have the best tools available, yes, but within the limits of reason - if OO.o is sufficent for work, even if it's not the best, and there are other reasons to use OpenOffice, then the simple convenience (as opposed to neccesity) of individual users should not hold up a migration with other pressing reasons. Its exactly the same reason why we don't give every office worker 23 inch hi def plasma displays and $10k workstations, or why everyone doesn't have thier own office.
You haven't worked much in government or other really big organizations, have you? In any case, we would have moved earlier if they hadn't messed up the 97->2000 compatability.
Complex Word documents often have layout/macro issues - pretty much the same level of compatability as the OSS filters, really - though the conversion is very good and the fast majority of users will see no problems, just as with OO imports.
I think it's pretty clear to everyone that this is MS pulling out its political guns - think we'd be having these sort of hearings if they were moving servers from UNIX or Linux to Windows? The accessibility issue is real, and I'm not disabled and haven't done an intensive study, but OO.o does have accessibility support, even if it's not as good as what Office has. Previous versions of Office (97 and the like) have worse accessibility, so if they were good enough for workers then OO.o should be too, especially if funding can be found to sponser accessibility work in OO.o. The quotes don't sound to me like any has actually reviewed the alternatives and is familiar with the level of support in OO.o. It's not 100% correct, either. Makers of screen reader software and braille readers have specifically supported Office at the expense of other applications - an example of the harm the Office monopoly causes - and screen magnifiers work with whatever software you use. I think we're seeing a lot of people with vested political interests, or even just people that MS and MS backers have political access to, trying to toss thier 2 cents in to break a project that means a signifigant loss of revenue for MS.
All of this wouldn't matter in the slightest is MS implemented support for OpenDocument, of course, and I imagine there are plenty of people in Massechusets who would simply jump all over the chance to give MS 3 times the money they'd otherwise spend.
MS seems to be claiming this, especially the Office guys who blog. It'd be pretty cool if this were the case, but I remain extremely skeptical and submit that MS has a severe burden of proof to overcome before it's reasonable to grant them the benefit of the doubt here. They have a long history of embrace/extend, of one-may migration techniques, of specifically targetting Open Source competition (license documentation that specifically excludes the GPL, for example), and an enormous history and culture of creating, maintaining, and leveraging thier Office and Windows monopolies. I believe that Microsoft could complete quite well in an open market, but they couldn't do so nearly as easily, as heavy-handed, or as profitably as they can now.
I would love it if they did - IBM has left its market leader/monopolist days behind it, and seems to genuinely embrace the open market and competition.
On the other hand, all these other companies controlling the price of our oil are nationalized, so the free market isn't really providing the US with the best advantage there, is it?
You want some buddy of the president in charge of domestic oil?
And thats different from now how, exactly? :P
How do you know it's fuelled by gouging and speculation?Because the ratio of supply to demand hasn't grown by 3x in the last year, even with Chinas increased demand. Of course, since (most) of the supply is controlled by relatively few people, it's hard to say what the "real" supply is.
Note: I'm not accusing you personally of hypocricy on this issue.
This is especially important in an article like this one, where the author clearly has an agenda. For example, he characterizes (in his summary) OO.o as performing 98x worse than Office - clearly not supported either by the his benchmarks result (he's describing the worst case as the general case), or by good benchmarking practice in general - he's generalizing from one result on one system with one data set to a general case.
I don't want to imply that benchmarks are useless - they aren't. But *in this context*, they pretty much are. Certainly articles of this type, and in a publication like zdnet, are not the best candidates for objective performance testing. These are flame-generating hit-generators, even when the underlying basis (that OO.o is general case slower and consumes more memory than Office) are defensible.
This is exactly my point, and the previous responded did in fact misunderstand or misrepresent my point. It has nothing to do with Linux apology, and has nothing to do with the relative performance of the application. It's an explanation (there are other contributing factors) for the different experiences of users.
All this is not to say that benchmarking isn't usefull, or that it cannot show real performance differences, but it's extremely naive to treat any benchmark as a concrete indicator of general case performance.
As an aside, in my experience OO.o often beats Office for speed, but in ways that won't generally show on a benchmark. For example, in one install (but not all - another reason benchmarks aren't generic) opening the Find dialog in Excel took about 5 seconds. Every time. Thats a very real percieved performance deficit. Office, especially Excel again, will often lock up as I resize or move columns around. This is a non-determenistic thing (related to Offices internal memory management, I suspect) and thus difficult to benchmark, but is real. It is extremely possible, even likely that someone in a different environment will see the opposite effects.
One common cause for this discrepency is that Windows does pre-caching and pre-binding for commonly used applications. When you first install Firefox or OO, it will be slower, but if you don't use IE or Office for 6 months, while you use the alternatives regularly, the Microsoft apps will be slower after a while. IE takes *forever* to load on my laptop on the rare (once or twice a year) occasions I fire it up.
Thats true, to a degree (many command line programmers have a huge amount of trouble figuring out how to tell Visual Studio what to do), but the article, and many of the posts about, are drawing a value judgment from that - that if you only know VS, you're a worse programmer than if you know the 4 different languages and environments you need to use GNU autotools correctly. Another person might ask why you spent a good portion of your "programming" learning time figuring out how to use tools only tangentally related to programming, and why you think it's a sign of superiority that you use autotools in all it's horrible glory instead of a single tool. Now, there is no reason at all for many programmers to use autotools - they develop with and on Visual Studio. They learned that tool. It has no bearing whatsoever on programming per se, and even less on computer science in general. I do not believe that learning m4 will grant you any insights into concepts that generalize to your general experience as a programmer.
All that is not to say that knowing autotools isn't valuable, simply because it's so common. Of course, it's equally important to understand how to work Visual Studio, because Windows is more common and the huge majority of Windows development uses VS. The idea that using VS makes you "less" of a programmer, or even that not knowing or using any specific build tool makes you stupider or more "brain rotted" than someone who does is the classical kind of masochistic technical arrogance that should not be tolerated.
Thats not 2-factor authentication, isn't new, isn't exciting, and already has better implementations (like SSH key exchange).
In any case, knowing make is not the same as knowing fractions - it's not a fundamental building block on which to extend knowledge. It's a single (albeit widespread and popular) tool.
I have to agree. Anyone who claims that Intellisense makes you a poor coder, or (by extension) that a source browser is for dumb people is being stubborn and crusty. Visual Studio is an excellent IDE - it's code introspection abilities are powerful (but VisualAssist makes them incredible), it's project management is adequate and far simpler than autotools, especially for simple projects, and it's compiler (in recent versions) is excellent. People who focus in the form designer (it's lousy in C++ versions, which are only used to edit embedded Windows dialog resources, and only adequate for .NET forms) are completely missing the point.
More honored in the breach than in the observance these days, but theres a (not unreasonable) belief that in addition to not actively suppressing our rights, the government has a duty to actively support our expression of those rights. Of course, it's a delicate balancing act for where one persons rights begin and anothers end, but blanket statements like "You don't have any rights on anyone elses property" are simply wrong-headed - it's tantamount to claiming that you don't have any rights at all.
It might be worth knowing that clauses like that tend to be extremely weak, especially if you can actually prove malfeasance on the part of the school. If they didn't perform regular maintenance and thier smoke detectors didn't work (a violation of a large number of school regulations and building codes), you'd have an excellent chance of winning a lawsuit no matter what kind of disclaimer they have.
Network programming isn't really that difficult, especially in high level languages. I suggest Ruby or Python. Read/skim http://diveintopython.org/ and http://poignantguide.net/ruby/. These two languages have very different cultures and the styles of the turorials reflect that, so stick with the one that appeals to you the most.
You'll be able to set up a simple send/receive network client quickly. Once you've got that, it's time to start learning about DHCP - see if someones written a library for it already (I don't know of any off hand, but check Google and/or Rubyforge), read the docs for it and study the code. You shouldn't be too far away from getting a simple, probably buggy, half-working implementation up. If theres not one, you'll need to write your own, which will require some fairly advanaced knowldge fo the standard. Look on this as a challenge.
By this point you should know if you actually are interested in programming, and if you are, you probably already have your own motivation to continue. Refine your knowledge of programming and your chosen language and environment. This will progress fairly naturally from there. You'll find yourself wanting to learn C so that you can interoperate better with Windows, and you will hate C but you will use it anyway. You may become frustrated by the limitations of whatever language you started with and branch off - good! Your little DHCP server will suck and have a lousy UI and is probably riddled with bugs and broken standards - as those bother you more and more you'll start filing them off, learning what you have to along the way. 10 years will go by and you'll be answering questions like this on Slashdot ;)
Really, the simplest way is something done on VHS screeners for years - scrolling text acrosss the video during key parts of the movie. If they're willing to spend the money to do a custom burn/press for each person (for the personalized DVD players), then they wouldn't have any trouble trailing the recipients name & id.