How do you propose to do wireless without EM interference? Sound waves? Gravity waves?
Re:The submitter of the article was an idiot
on
Looking at Longhorn
·
· Score: 1
So, if it had hit after Longhorn, SQL-Slammer would not merely have attacked database servers, but every Windows machine with a "future" filesystem? Be afraid.
I don't see how this is substantially different from the RIAA or others going on the offensive against users downloading music illegally. Yet Slashdoters jeer these poor jerks who are stealing cable (in the third person), but cheer the freedom-loving Americans who download copyrighted music (should be in the first person).
Don't get me wrong -- I think the RIAA is paddling the wrong way on a roaring river, but the fact is copying music is pretty much the same crime as stealing PPV.
Dr. Jeffery Race's proposal on NANOG
on
IETF to Look at Spam
·
· Score: 3, Informative
A participant in the NANOG (North American Network Operators' Group) mailing list recently posted a Best Current Practice proposal regarding spam to that list. He was fairly heavily flamed by some of the frequent posters on the list, but his idea (which has a basis in sociology) does have some merit.
He uses the idea of emergent structure. To quote, " if all (or even most) players expect other players to
act in a certain way, a predictable pattern of behavior emerges
which becomes compelling for all players. This is the way all
organizations work."
Slashdotters should love Alice's Registry. It's a bit expensive, but that money goes to support open source software. Anyone have experience with them?
It seems that the clueful are 100% anti-spam, and 99.9% against anti-spam legislation. It seems inevitable that legislation will be passed eventually, be that next year or 20 years from now. Would the clueful community be better served by putting its creative energies toward designing effective legislation instead of participating in technological one-upsmanship with the spammers? What might that legislation look like?
My cheap desk is a large piece of frosted glass intended as a tabletop, supported by two tripods. I got it from IKEA. I believe the glass was $80 and the tripods $25 ea. I have a dual-head system, but they're both flat panels, so I still have lots of space.
Show me a C++ program - and I mean a full application, GPL'd and all - that has a clean compile. You'll see twisted typecasts everywhere, and each typecast is a signal that the type system was in conflict with the needs of the programmer. Type systems are so restrictive as to cause lots of trouble in all practical cases, for limited gain. The fact is, there are just as many non-typesafe "correct" programs as there are typesafe "incorrect" programs. Type safety and correctness are completely orthogonal.
Most teacher-certification programs now have a continuing-ed technology requirement (one course every couple years, basically). So there's a surfeit of courses being offered to educators out there. I've had co-workers take many of these courses. *all* of them are geared around exactly that -- rote memorization of sequences of clicks and keys. Where instructors are innovative enough to talk about concepts, their comments are often shallow and/or misguided, and the students pretty much ignore them as "fluff" (which leads to a greater discussion of more general problems with the ed-school system, but I digress).
If you're in with a university, *go* to the ed department and offer to teach or TA such a class. Or at least sit in on one for a day. Let's turn this trend around at its origin.
People who are both tech-expert and seriously interested in education are a comparatively rare breed. However, there have been a number of stories by, for, and about us here recently, including Education Research by a Consulting Firm?.
I think there will be a natural and unavoidable shift toward more tech-capable teachers as older teachers retire and younger teachers (who have grown up with the Internet) come on board. As that happens, I think sites like yours will become more popular.
Currently, however, the tech-expert + education crowd needs cohesion -- there's an awful lot of redundant research, speculation, and experimentation going on out there. Further, a lot of the research is done by people who are not tech experts, and their results are pretty outlandish. So currently I would cater to that crowd, with the expectation that use by non-expert educators will come in due time.
An unrelated suggestion: given the virulent anti-advertising attitude of most readers here, it might be a good idea to separate the public-participation stuff from the consulting stuff you do. Sourceforge might be a good model -- banner ads and whatnot make sure you're aware of it, but also make it clear what is commercial and what is public-participation.
What is probably going to happen is that kids in schools today will be taught (slowly as not to draw attention to it) that it is good and proper for the government to watch its citizens, that there is no such thing as a "right to privacy" etc...
This is the unfortunate consequence of a completely docile population. Which a consequence of the unavoidable goal of a government-run educational institution: to create and maintain a docile population. Think about it: (US) schools do not exist to produce optimal democratic citizens; they exist to teach unquestioning adherence to rules and regulations, and bureaucratic mechanisms for trying to effect change (student government).
Yes, that is to say that my job is, in as many words, to keep the man down. That's probably why I'm no good at it.
Scavhunt has also included successful procurement of such fantastic items as a fully-suited hazmat team, live elephants, weapons-grade uranium (before The War On Terror(tm) started; IIRC it was made from the insides of flourescent light bulbs), and such trivialities as goldfish consumed alive, survivor islands on the quads, etc.
For a campus that prides itself of being bookish, and where Kant and Freud are a discussion topic at every party, scavhunt is a chance to get out in the bitter cold of Chicago and be, well, flamboyantly bookish:-)
SASIxp is pretty horrific. Can anyone tell me why it doesn't use a real database backend? It seems to be file-based, with file-locking (e.g., no central server except a file server). This just doesn't make any sense to me.
I was WingSpan (now BankOne). WingSpan did a good job with security, and was fairly compatible. When it was taken over by BankOne, they actively *reduced* the security of the site -- limiting password length to 5 characters, reducing browser requirements, and messing up a whole bunch of transactions for me (several bill-pays were paid late, double-billed, etc.)
So I switched to USAA. Got to be military or military-family, but if you are it's worth it. Excellent browser support, standards-compliant implementation, good security mechanisms, and generally easy to use. The time's I've had questions or comments (at one point a piece of their JavaScript didn't work in Mozilla), they took my information, and their tech people *actually called me back* to get more information about the problem. It was fixed shortly thereafter. Good folks.
There are a few major current problems with technology in education:
Little/no IT support
Lots of expenditure without training
Most training does not support teaching and learning
Very few programs specifically, directly support teaching and learning
If what you're doing does not directly support teaching and learning (emphasis on learning), it's not your job. And with a 25-hour job (that's first year teaching with training; I didn't even know what a lesson plan on my first day in my own classroom!), anything that is "not your job" is something you should not, cannot, and ultimately will not do.
I highly recommend the Jere Confrey et al.'s "A Framework for Quality in Educational Technology Programs" in the May-June 2002 Educational Technology and Fulton and Honey's "Emerging technologies in education" in the July-August 2002 volume of same. These articles provide a good background and rubric with which to judge technology ideas, projects, programs, and implementations.
Research your ideas first. If they're good ideas, others will help you with them (this is a new field, starved for truly good ideas and overrun with mediocre to bad ones). If they're bad ideas, you'll find out.
I'm a new middle school teacher, and while I heartily encourage you and hope you the best of success, be *very* careful not to focus too much on the technology. Several times, I've gone to some length to develop a technological solution to a perceived problem, and discovered later that I had wasted quite a bit of (valuable) time because of some misperception of the problem or some deficiency in the technology in my district. As a tech person, it's very easy to focus on large technical solutions to small problems.
That said, I've very successfully taught small kids to build computers from spare parts and installed Linux on them. I then started bringing them up on, what else, Python. We used donated computers, which we stripped for parts. We then tested parts and built new, working computers which the students then took home with them. This was in a summer program, but I see no reason you couldn't do the same with your kids.
I'm interested in hearing the ideas you have for effective use of computers in the classroom. Remarkably, this is a very new idea and you're likely to be on the forefront of ed-tech innovation if you have good, workable ideas.
The most important points seem to revolve around using the correct SSH client (from ssh.com) and getting the RSA key (e.g., no password entry) authentication working. That's pretty specific to version of windows and installation technique, and is pretty well covered in the docs, so I'll leave you there.
I'm a highly tech-savvy teacher (gave up a tech career to spend my days dealing with 13 year olds, yadda yadda) in a district that's, well, not so tech savvy. Tech savvy people are rare in K-12, and they usually don't last long. They just don't work very well within the "establishment" -- just look at the comments on this post..
One thing I will say: teachers are not your enemies. Sure, they're mostly clueless technophobes, but they're also human beings who get kicked around and treated like dirt by everyone, on a daily basis: students, parents, administration, district, and state officials are all guilty. Don't get me wrong -- complain as we might, most of us think it's worth the pain (and the rest quit). But we don't like it.
You'll have much better luck working with the teachers. I'm sure they all notice how slow the network is. Meet with them, discuss their priorities -- it will come up. When it does, tell them you've noticed a lot of software downloads.. name the programs, talk about what they do, and say "those are tying up our limited resource. Sometimes they're useful, but for the most part we don't need them at a school. If you can spread the word that teachers should avoid using these things during school hours, we can all enjoy a faster connection immediately." Remember, teachers sacrifice daily for the greater good. We know what that's about. You'll find this method to be more effective than you might expect.
I think you'll find your life much easier if you present yourself as an ally of the teachers, instead of an adversary. With an easier job, you'll be more effective. That might net you a promotion ("might" because this is gov't, after all), and with that promotion better ability to make and modify policy. And so on.
Funny, yes, but torturing people? Over spam? C'mon..
In the grand scheme of things, in the long litany of all human woes, spam doesn't even rank in the top 10,000. If spam makes you angry enough to (even jokingly) speak of torturing or executing people, find a better cause!
That 'tutorial' is mostly wrong and in fact has probably contributed to the problem described in the toplevel post. The tutorial's wrong both about the structure of DNS, and about the details of client/server interactions in WinDDNS. If you want to understand DNS, I suggest you go read an authoritative book on the subject, e.g., Albitz and Liu's DNS and BIND and perhaps the relevant RFCs. May I specifically recommend RFC1304, RFC1305, and RFC2136.
The best part is at the end of the tutorial:
Win2K uses DNS names that use the underscore character.
Never mind mentioning that this is specifically verbotten in the DNS RFC's..
The technical legal difference between the two is that an MS EULA is a contract (legally binding agreement for mutual consideration), whereas the GPL is only a licence (permission to do something the grantee couldn't previously do without anything in return) I understand the contract/licence nature of the GPL is still a matter of some debate, but if a law were passed saying "no clauses excluding liability in contracts for the sale of software", then we could probably catch the EULAs and leave the GPL and other open source licences intact where the GPL'd or OSL'd software was provided gratis . At any rate, I think it should be possible somehow to distinguish the two on a "you pay for one, you don't pay for the other" basis.
And suddenly every corporation's legal department has another,stronger argument against using GPL'd/OSL'd software! Legal knows that Acme doesn't have the manpower to review every line of open source, so they're not willing to assume the liability for the open source software.
Slashdot Mirror
How do you propose to do wireless without EM interference? Sound waves? Gravity waves?
So, if it had hit after Longhorn, SQL-Slammer would not merely have attacked database servers, but every Windows machine with a "future" filesystem? Be afraid.
I hope somebody takes the time to audit the VM. No, I hope a lot of people take the time to audit the VM.
I don't see how this is substantially different from the RIAA or others going on the offensive against users downloading music illegally. Yet Slashdoters jeer these poor jerks who are stealing cable (in the third person), but cheer the freedom-loving Americans who download copyrighted music (should be in the first person).
Don't get me wrong -- I think the RIAA is paddling the wrong way on a roaring river, but the fact is copying music is pretty much the same crime as stealing PPV.
He uses the idea of emergent structure. To quote, " if all (or even most) players expect other players to act in a certain way, a predictable pattern of behavior emerges which becomes compelling for all players. This is the way all organizations work."
Slashdotters should love Alice's Registry. It's a bit expensive, but that money goes to support open source software. Anyone have experience with them?
It seems that the clueful are 100% anti-spam, and 99.9% against anti-spam legislation. It seems inevitable that legislation will be passed eventually, be that next year or 20 years from now. Would the clueful community be better served by putting its creative energies toward designing effective legislation instead of participating in technological one-upsmanship with the spammers? What might that legislation look like?
My cheap desk is a large piece of frosted glass intended as a tabletop, supported by two tripods. I got it from IKEA. I believe the glass was $80 and the tripods $25 ea. I have a dual-head system, but they're both flat panels, so I still have lots of space.
Show me a C++ program - and I mean a full application, GPL'd and all - that has a clean compile. You'll see twisted typecasts everywhere, and each typecast is a signal that the type system was in conflict with the needs of the programmer. Type systems are so restrictive as to cause lots of trouble in all practical cases, for limited gain. The fact is, there are just as many non-typesafe "correct" programs as there are typesafe "incorrect" programs. Type safety and correctness are completely orthogonal.
If you're in with a university, *go* to the ed department and offer to teach or TA such a class. Or at least sit in on one for a day. Let's turn this trend around at its origin.
People who are both tech-expert and seriously interested in education are a comparatively rare breed. However, there have been a number of stories by, for, and about us here recently, including Education Research by a Consulting Firm?.
I think there will be a natural and unavoidable shift toward more tech-capable teachers as older teachers retire and younger teachers (who have grown up with the Internet) come on board. As that happens, I think sites like yours will become more popular.
Currently, however, the tech-expert + education crowd needs cohesion -- there's an awful lot of redundant research, speculation, and experimentation going on out there. Further, a lot of the research is done by people who are not tech experts, and their results are pretty outlandish. So currently I would cater to that crowd, with the expectation that use by non-expert educators will come in due time.
An unrelated suggestion: given the virulent anti-advertising attitude of most readers here, it might be a good idea to separate the public-participation stuff from the consulting stuff you do. Sourceforge might be a good model -- banner ads and whatnot make sure you're aware of it, but also make it clear what is commercial and what is public-participation.
Dustin
This is the unfortunate consequence of a completely docile population. Which a consequence of the unavoidable goal of a government-run educational institution: to create and maintain a docile population. Think about it: (US) schools do not exist to produce optimal democratic citizens; they exist to teach unquestioning adherence to rules and regulations, and bureaucratic mechanisms for trying to effect change (student government).
Yes, that is to say that my job is, in as many words, to keep the man down. That's probably why I'm no good at it.
Dustin
Scavhunt has also included successful procurement of such fantastic items as a fully-suited hazmat team, live elephants, weapons-grade uranium (before The War On Terror(tm) started; IIRC it was made from the insides of flourescent light bulbs), and such trivialities as goldfish consumed alive, survivor islands on the quads, etc.
For a campus that prides itself of being bookish, and where Kant and Freud are a discussion topic at every party, scavhunt is a chance to get out in the bitter cold of Chicago and be, well, flamboyantly bookish :-)
SASIxp is pretty horrific. Can anyone tell me why it doesn't use a real database backend? It seems to be file-based, with file-locking (e.g., no central server except a file server). This just doesn't make any sense to me.
So I switched to USAA. Got to be military or military-family, but if you are it's worth it. Excellent browser support, standards-compliant implementation, good security mechanisms, and generally easy to use. The time's I've had questions or comments (at one point a piece of their JavaScript didn't work in Mozilla), they took my information, and their tech people *actually called me back* to get more information about the problem. It was fixed shortly thereafter. Good folks.
- Little/no IT support
- Lots of expenditure without training
- Most training does not support teaching and learning
- Very few programs specifically, directly support teaching and learning
If what you're doing does not directly support teaching and learning (emphasis on learning), it's not your job. And with a 25-hour job (that's first year teaching with training; I didn't even know what a lesson plan on my first day in my own classroom!), anything that is "not your job" is something you should not, cannot, and ultimately will not do.I highly recommend the Jere Confrey et al.'s "A Framework for Quality in Educational Technology Programs" in the May-June 2002 Educational Technology and Fulton and Honey's "Emerging technologies in education" in the July-August 2002 volume of same. These articles provide a good background and rubric with which to judge technology ideas, projects, programs, and implementations.
Research your ideas first. If they're good ideas, others will help you with them (this is a new field, starved for truly good ideas and overrun with mediocre to bad ones). If they're bad ideas, you'll find out.
That said, I've very successfully taught small kids to build computers from spare parts and installed Linux on them. I then started bringing them up on, what else, Python. We used donated computers, which we stripped for parts. We then tested parts and built new, working computers which the students then took home with them. This was in a summer program, but I see no reason you couldn't do the same with your kids.
I'm interested in hearing the ideas you have for effective use of computers in the classroom. Remarkably, this is a very new idea and you're likely to be on the forefront of ed-tech innovation if you have good, workable ideas.
http://cvsgui.sourceforge.net/ssh.html
The most important points seem to revolve around using the correct SSH client (from ssh.com) and getting the RSA key (e.g., no password entry) authentication working. That's pretty specific to version of windows and installation technique, and is pretty well covered in the docs, so I'll leave you there.The data was slightly bigger than a breadbox, and longer than 3 football fields. Duh!
s/communist/terrorist/g
Dustin
I'm a highly tech-savvy teacher (gave up a tech career to spend my days dealing with 13 year olds, yadda yadda) in a district that's, well, not so tech savvy. Tech savvy people are rare in K-12, and they usually don't last long. They just don't work very well within the "establishment" -- just look at the comments on this post..
One thing I will say: teachers are not your enemies. Sure, they're mostly clueless technophobes, but they're also human beings who get kicked around and treated like dirt by everyone, on a daily basis: students, parents, administration, district, and state officials are all guilty. Don't get me wrong -- complain as we might, most of us think it's worth the pain (and the rest quit). But we don't like it.
You'll have much better luck working with the teachers. I'm sure they all notice how slow the network is. Meet with them, discuss their priorities -- it will come up. When it does, tell them you've noticed a lot of software downloads.. name the programs, talk about what they do, and say "those are tying up our limited resource. Sometimes they're useful, but for the most part we don't need them at a school. If you can spread the word that teachers should avoid using these things during school hours, we can all enjoy a faster connection immediately." Remember, teachers sacrifice daily for the greater good. We know what that's about. You'll find this method to be more effective than you might expect.
I think you'll find your life much easier if you present yourself as an ally of the teachers, instead of an adversary. With an easier job, you'll be more effective. That might net you a promotion ("might" because this is gov't, after all), and with that promotion better ability to make and modify policy. And so on.
Keep at it. K-12 needs you.
Funny, yes, but torturing people? Over spam? C'mon..
In the grand scheme of things, in the long litany of all human woes, spam doesn't even rank in the top 10,000. If spam makes you angry enough to (even jokingly) speak of torturing or executing people, find a better cause!
Yeah, and crash their town hall PBX (running WinPBX?), too.
That 'tutorial' is mostly wrong and in fact has probably contributed to the problem described in the toplevel post. The tutorial's wrong both about the structure of DNS, and about the details of client/server interactions in WinDDNS. If you want to understand DNS, I suggest you go read an authoritative book on the subject, e.g., Albitz and Liu's DNS and BIND and perhaps the relevant RFCs. May I specifically recommend RFC1304, RFC1305, and RFC2136.
The best part is at the end of the tutorial:
- Win2K uses DNS names that use the underscore character.
Never mind mentioning that this is specifically verbotten in the DNS RFC's..And suddenly every corporation's legal department has another,stronger argument against using GPL'd/OSL'd software! Legal knows that Acme doesn't have the manpower to review every line of open source, so they're not willing to assume the liability for the open source software.
Nope, bad idea.