Part of what's being measured, I would argue, is the athlete's ability to cope with the stress of a single, winner-take-all event. In many events, some people go to pieces (did you see the women's marathon? The runner from GB quite literally went to pieces emotionally toward the end of the race...)
I'm not sure they would want to throw the wheel balance off even the tiniest bit. After all, those track cyclists are riding $35k bikes. I don't know about you, but if I take out a second mortgage to buy a race bike, I want the damn thing balanced perfectly if only for psychological reasons.
I might be wrong about this, but I actually was looking at the women's 100m yesterday and noticed that the wires leading to the speakers on the inside tracks have more wire coiled up then the ones stretched out to the outside tracks. It makes sense that they're not going to custom-cut a bunch of cables for that particular usage, they're going to get a dozen 25-footers and use them. So they're all the same length, I think.
Somehow, I don't think this is an issue for the players. More viewers means more ad revenue means more money for everyone, them included.
Plus, it's still a step up from the original Olympics, where it was men only and everyone was naked. I wonder if those women wear sunscreen...it seems like it'd make the volleyball slippery so it wouldn't be allowed.
So...does this mean that when a runner's foot (with the RFID) crosses the finish line, that's the time that's counted? That seems wrong to me...they ought to pin it to their chest (unless the chip crossing the line isn't noted by the computers as the time).
Come to think of it, what do the Olympic rules say about this? What part of a runner's body stops the clock?
The main difference between spam and this is that this is not free...not unless time is free. With spam, you set it up and hammer out billions of emails per day. Time invested per additional email once initial setup is complete: 0.
Now that this genius has infected all the world's webcams, who's going to go through the infected list and troll for skin? Especially when you can just hook up to any of the available netmeeting type applications and find pervs galore?
Anyone have any idea where these infected machines are listed? Can we get a peek? Cuz I just know that like 90% of unsuspecting hot women like to undress in front of their web cams!
This is an idiotic virus, isn't it? Didn't the author take into account that way more than 99% of the time, webcams aren't pointed at anything interesting?
This was immediately my thought as well. I can understand that many are worried that such an approach would make encryption illegal...but I have a question. How does the government or anyone else know that a message is encrypted? I mean, of course they know know, but from the standpoint of legal provability, couldn't the participants involved simply say they were sending each other meaningless garbage? How can anyone prove otherwise?
This reminds me of an encryption principle I learned while studying discrete mathematics. Any ciphertext can be decrypted into any other sequence of characters given the appropriate key. That is to say, even if the government found a way to crack the encryption and decipher it, the parties involved could still claim that they simply discovered a particular key that happened to yield a meaningful message.
Well, of course the education industry isn't necessarily more or less moral than any other industry based on making money. I wasn't really addressing in my post the corruption (if you want to call it that...it seems a little strong though) in the system itself.
I've done some thinking about this because I the university I attended was a research institution that often rewarded professors for bringing in research funds and wouldn't punish them for being terrible professors. At first I expected nothing but the highest ethical standard of judgment of my professors by the administration...but the more I thought about it, the more I was glad that there was some focus on research money. I realized that it's the influx of money that made all of the good aspects of my college experience possible.
So should you pass a foreign student that can't speak English? In a perfect world, no, but what if such a policy would mean the school simply couldn't afford to hire you in the first place? What if adhering to such a high ethical standard in the marketplace would cause the school itself to have to fold? This might be a case of the greater good (it also might not be...I don't know the details of your particular situation at the time).
I had a Russian lit prof in college that had a standard retest policy for anyone that didn't like their midterm grade in the class. All you had to do was email her with a retest request and you'd be allowed to replace your midterm grade with an essay test. The essay test consisted of one unreasonably long essay and two insanely long essays. She'd email you the topic for the unreasonably long essay on Friday at 7pm and you had until 10pm to email back the result. Then Saturday at 10am you'd receive the next essay topic and you were responsible for sending that one back by 8pm and likewise on Sunday. The length requirements were absolute and would keep you writing pretty much the entire weekend.
Needless to say, the time you had to invest to correct a bad midterm grade was not worth it to most students. The time she had to invest in grading those essays, compared to what the student spent writing them, was not very high.
So, I think the point was that the administration might want you to do x, y, and z, but ultimately you're still in control of the student. If they complain about their grade you can give them that second chance, but just make the workload so insane that they're sorry they didn't just take the fail. Sure you ultimately have to still pass them, but they don't know that.:)
Re:Blah Blah not everyone's school is as perfect..
on
Cheating Made Easy
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· Score: 1
I have to admit...I didn't bother reading your entire post above before hitting the reply button. I read the first sentence and I can easily classify it as a standard "I'm going to shoot my mouth off without reading the entire post" post.
Here are some random facts about my original post that are in no way related to anything you've said after your first sentence (since I didn't read past that, it would be impossible for me to respond to anything else you said):
I did not go to private high school. I went to a fairly good public high school. I went to a very good private college.
I think you are probably the type of person who put off doing your work until you ran out of time, then felt justified in plagiarizing others' work into your papers. You probably still don't see anything wrong with that behavior.
I never said things were better "[w]hen *I* went to things"...whatever that means.
Technology has not allowed teachers to spot a cheater more easily "then [sic] before". The point of my post is simply to say that tech has made no difference whatsoever in this regard...lazy teachers who don't really care about the integrity of their students will miss cheaters, teachers that care will catch them.
Ah, never mind. Most of what I'm saying here probably misses the point of what you were trying to say. I still want the +5 insightful...I just hope that the moderators grade this post on the curve and take into account I didn't read your post.
I suppose I don't disagree that with an unbiased reading of the original work and development of my own interpretation before reading secondary materials could possibly mean I might gain some insight into the work. I suppose that would be more "legitimate" in the educational sense. But when you're in a time crunch, education for the student can be very much like a business...the idea being to get the best understanding of the source material in the shortest period of time. It would be nice to spend days and days reading word by word and pontificating on each subtle nuance of the language used, but not very practical.
Besides, I think you missed a main point of what I said. You're comparing what I ended up knowing to what I could have known had I read the primary source without influence from others' understanding, in a vacuum with no time constraints. What you ought to be comparing is what I ended up knowing to what everyone else ended up knowing about the work (that's what the professors did). Chances are, given the time I had, my understanding would actually have been more limited than it was had I not simply dismissed the original work from my reading list.
Who said I plagiarized anything? I didn't pass off others' ideas as my own...I had my own ideas based on my understanding of the work through secondary sources.
Also, I wonder if your definition of plagiarism is too strict. Let's assume for a moment that I did push someone else's ideas in my in-class essays, for instance. If I understood that argument and could support it well with evidence from the primary source, and I happened to agree with that argument, what's wrong with putting it forth as long as it's in my own words? Is it plagiarism if there's real understanding behind it?
I think the standard that every viewpoint must be totally original on any particular topic is too stringent. The fact is, even most professors share a common idea when it comes to interpreting a particular work. For thinking similarly and understanding the work/author similarly, are they plagiarizing the first guy to come up with that interpretation?
Yea, I have to agree with you. Talk about lazy students...how about pointing out the lazy teachers? I only had a few teachers up through high school and only ONE professor in college where these rip-off papers would have worked.
For one, my high school teachers quizzed us in two different ways. One, our ability to analyze a story, as in term papers, in-class essays, etc. Two, our ability to read a story. Usually this was simply a daily quiz on what we were supposed to have read the night before hitting several factual minor points that no summary would include. We were told this would be the case, and we were told ahead of time that we should read with a notebook open and take notes on anything we thought might be covered (we were free to use our notes on the quizzes). Some teachers that used this technique didn't want to waste class time so they'd give us the quizzes to take home. They still worked really well.
Some teachers didn't like this because they thought it overtly communicated mistrust to the students. Instead, they opted for the multiple draft process for term papers. No paper was simply written and handed in. It was drafted, corrected by the teacher with suggestions, handed back for rewrite. This process would usually go three or four times, and you'd be asked to analyze how your thesis applied to specific small events in the book, again, not covered by any summaries. By the time you were done writing the paper, if you had tried initially to avoid reading the book you eventually had to go into it pretty deeply. Using the custom-written papers on these rip-off sites would cost several thousand dollars, one custom paper per draft. (And how would you communicate with the paper writer what they were supposed to do? Would you fax in the first draft with all of the teacher's margin notes?)
Finally, there was a teacher who I did not personally have but taught in my high school that required students to compose one essay per reading that was more or less primarly composed of direct quotations strung together. This sounds silly, but it was a very good way of seeing if your thesis held water against the actual text of the book. At the beginning of his course, something like 90% of the theses handed in were rejected and rewritten because it would be painfully obvious that the student didn't have a clear idea of what the author was saying (after all, not a lot of interpretive wiggle room when it comes to using direct quotes).
Yet another technique, the in-class creative essay. The teacher would simply ask the students to write an essay that compared/contrasted some element of two specific readings. Try to do this based on cliff notes of both works and you'll see it doesn't really work that well...the success of this kind of essay requires a knowledge of the texts more intimate than summaries provide.
These are just the ways I've actually had teachers ensure that students read the material. I could probably think of a dozen more if say, oh I don't know...it was MY JOB. What exactly are we paying teachers for if they can't solve this fairly simple problem?
Having said that, I will say that I have used what I considered to be ethical techniques that my classmates did not consider ethical (though I doubt my professors would have had a problem with it). I found it works particularly well for philosophy courses for some reason, but I see no reason why it wouldn't work just as well in literature for most people. Before I read anything for a particular college level philosophy course, I'd go to the library and do some background research on the philosopher, what he thought, what he was trying to say, and then do the same kind of research on the particular work itself. This way, I'd know what all of the later philosophers, professors, and graduate students thought about various aspects of the work. I found this much research was often sufficient to gain a true understanding of the material without having to read the material itself, which was very useful when I was in a ti
Someday, insurance companies will implant GPS trackers in our heads at birth. Wouldn't that be funny if the tinfoil hat people turn out to be right after all?
Darnit! I was all set to run out and by DDR today instead of getting a gym membership...now I have to sit on the couch and eat potato chips until March!
I'm sad that you posted this AC. I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't clicked the "under threshold" link--I usually browse at +1.
Anyway, you've realized exactly the problem. It's worth money to save time. As soon as die hard linux-heads realize that... (Actually, that's not quite fair, they've made great strides in this direction over the last 5 years or so.)
I think that linux has a good shot at taking over the home market...after all, it's free. At the very least, if it becomes popular, users will be able to buy machines cheaper with Linux preinstalled. It has a few very important hurdles to overcome first, though. Check out my journal entry on the problems with linux if you want to know my thoughts on it.
I recently installed Mandrake 10.0 and I have to say I was disappointed. It's been about three years since I ran up any new distro on a machine that could hack it (I've got a couple of old boxes that I can't really call valid installs for modern distros) and I was expecting a lot from Mandrake. The installation went on in under an hour, cleanly, but then I immediately started having problems. I wanted to hook it up to a Windows domain, and right off the bat Samba was very difficult to configure for both-way filesharing. I played around with menudrake and rpmdrake, both of which were not very good tools. rpmdrake is very unintuitive to use and in all the -drake tools message popups keep showing up in either the upper left or upper right of the screen...very annoying. With menudrake, I had to manually add shortcuts to see apps I'd just installed, and then I couldn't get/find the icons appropriate to the apps I'd installed (both Limewire and Firefox), so they just have the generic little system app boxes next to them. Again, very annoying.
After about 10 hours of working on the box, I decided to throw Firefox on it. I've been using Firefox on my main Windows machine now for about 2 months, so I thought this'll be easy. Immediately after the install I got it up and running, but the next time I booted the machine and ran Firefox it would act like it was starting up, and then go away and not come back. I ran it from the prompt and saw that there was some kind of library missing. I reinstalled it, and got the same as before...browser came up until I logged out and logged back in, then the library issue.
When I see stuff like that I just shut down mentally. It's not that I can't solve the problem, it's that I shouldn't have to. I realized it was time to blow off the Mandrake installation for once and for all when I had to check my email and print something out because I was late for an appointment. I booted the linux box, ran up Konqueror, and couldn't read my email through my provider's web-based email client. I ran up Firefox and discovered the library problem. I ran up Mozilla (which came installed) and couldn't get my inbox to open up. Finally, noting the time was getting even later, I ran up a Windows box, got the email, printed it, and was on my way.
On Windows, I've used IE, Mozilla, Opera, and Firefox to open and read email through my provider's web email client, so it's definitely not a problem that is solely browser-specific. (Also, I noted that to access the settings for Firefox on linux, for the few minutes I had access to the app, it's under Edit -> Preferences, not Tools -> Options as it is on Windows. Why the different UI for different platforms?)
So, I'm waiting with baited breath for the moment I can install any distro of linux, get all the security and good features that linux has over Windows, but not have to memorize a list of acronyms like cups and lpr to print, or crack open text files to manually configure apps.
What could save TiVo is if they made it easy to get video content off the device onto your home computer. Does anyone know of a cheap/free and easy way to do this? I researched it about 6 months ago and I hit upon a few leads, but I had no time to follow up on them.
You're misunderstanding me. I'm simply saying that if you go around expecting respect, you're not going to get it. I'm of the opinion that one even ought to expect to have to earn respect "as a person" (whatever that means).
Do I automatically respect people? I give 'em the benefit of the doubt until I get to know them. And I usually learn that 90% of the people I have to work with, when they talk tech, don't say anything useful 90% of the time. I've forced myself into the habit of being mostly quiet unless I'm pretty well-informed about something and can demonstrate an improvement.
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Part of what's being measured, I would argue, is the athlete's ability to cope with the stress of a single, winner-take-all event. In many events, some people go to pieces (did you see the women's marathon? The runner from GB quite literally went to pieces emotionally toward the end of the race...)
I'm not sure they would want to throw the wheel balance off even the tiniest bit. After all, those track cyclists are riding $35k bikes. I don't know about you, but if I take out a second mortgage to buy a race bike, I want the damn thing balanced perfectly if only for psychological reasons.
I might be wrong about this, but I actually was looking at the women's 100m yesterday and noticed that the wires leading to the speakers on the inside tracks have more wire coiled up then the ones stretched out to the outside tracks. It makes sense that they're not going to custom-cut a bunch of cables for that particular usage, they're going to get a dozen 25-footers and use them. So they're all the same length, I think.
Not, of course, that it matters... :-)
Somehow, I don't think this is an issue for the players. More viewers means more ad revenue means more money for everyone, them included.
Plus, it's still a step up from the original Olympics, where it was men only and everyone was naked. I wonder if those women wear sunscreen...it seems like it'd make the volleyball slippery so it wouldn't be allowed.
I've been taping the wrong Olympic coverage...when and what channel is the Miss Universe Olympic event on!?
Oh wait...now I get it...
So, what do the rules say on that? If you accidentally kill your opponent, is that an automatic win for you, or what? (I just have to know.)
How ultrasensitive could they be? The water doesn't set them off...unless it uses galvonic skin response or something like that...
So...does this mean that when a runner's foot (with the RFID) crosses the finish line, that's the time that's counted? That seems wrong to me...they ought to pin it to their chest (unless the chip crossing the line isn't noted by the computers as the time).
Come to think of it, what do the Olympic rules say about this? What part of a runner's body stops the clock?
The main difference between spam and this is that this is not free...not unless time is free. With spam, you set it up and hammer out billions of emails per day. Time invested per additional email once initial setup is complete: 0.
Now that this genius has infected all the world's webcams, who's going to go through the infected list and troll for skin? Especially when you can just hook up to any of the available netmeeting type applications and find pervs galore?
Who rated this a troll? They must have thought it said "+1 Droll".
Anyone have any idea where these infected machines are listed? Can we get a peek? Cuz I just know that like 90% of unsuspecting hot women like to undress in front of their web cams!
This is an idiotic virus, isn't it? Didn't the author take into account that way more than 99% of the time, webcams aren't pointed at anything interesting?
This was immediately my thought as well. I can understand that many are worried that such an approach would make encryption illegal...but I have a question. How does the government or anyone else know that a message is encrypted? I mean, of course they know know, but from the standpoint of legal provability, couldn't the participants involved simply say they were sending each other meaningless garbage? How can anyone prove otherwise?
This reminds me of an encryption principle I learned while studying discrete mathematics. Any ciphertext can be decrypted into any other sequence of characters given the appropriate key. That is to say, even if the government found a way to crack the encryption and decipher it, the parties involved could still claim that they simply discovered a particular key that happened to yield a meaningful message.
And then there's always the one about the Ford Pindejo...
Well, of course the education industry isn't necessarily more or less moral than any other industry based on making money. I wasn't really addressing in my post the corruption (if you want to call it that...it seems a little strong though) in the system itself.
I've done some thinking about this because I the university I attended was a research institution that often rewarded professors for bringing in research funds and wouldn't punish them for being terrible professors. At first I expected nothing but the highest ethical standard of judgment of my professors by the administration...but the more I thought about it, the more I was glad that there was some focus on research money. I realized that it's the influx of money that made all of the good aspects of my college experience possible.
So should you pass a foreign student that can't speak English? In a perfect world, no, but what if such a policy would mean the school simply couldn't afford to hire you in the first place? What if adhering to such a high ethical standard in the marketplace would cause the school itself to have to fold? This might be a case of the greater good (it also might not be...I don't know the details of your particular situation at the time).
I had a Russian lit prof in college that had a standard retest policy for anyone that didn't like their midterm grade in the class. All you had to do was email her with a retest request and you'd be allowed to replace your midterm grade with an essay test. The essay test consisted of one unreasonably long essay and two insanely long essays. She'd email you the topic for the unreasonably long essay on Friday at 7pm and you had until 10pm to email back the result. Then Saturday at 10am you'd receive the next essay topic and you were responsible for sending that one back by 8pm and likewise on Sunday. The length requirements were absolute and would keep you writing pretty much the entire weekend.
Needless to say, the time you had to invest to correct a bad midterm grade was not worth it to most students. The time she had to invest in grading those essays, compared to what the student spent writing them, was not very high.
So, I think the point was that the administration might want you to do x, y, and z, but ultimately you're still in control of the student. If they complain about their grade you can give them that second chance, but just make the workload so insane that they're sorry they didn't just take the fail. Sure you ultimately have to still pass them, but they don't know that. :)
I have to admit...I didn't bother reading your entire post above before hitting the reply button. I read the first sentence and I can easily classify it as a standard "I'm going to shoot my mouth off without reading the entire post" post.
Here are some random facts about my original post that are in no way related to anything you've said after your first sentence (since I didn't read past that, it would be impossible for me to respond to anything else you said):
Ah, never mind. Most of what I'm saying here probably misses the point of what you were trying to say. I still want the +5 insightful...I just hope that the moderators grade this post on the curve and take into account I didn't read your post.
I suppose I don't disagree that with an unbiased reading of the original work and development of my own interpretation before reading secondary materials could possibly mean I might gain some insight into the work. I suppose that would be more "legitimate" in the educational sense. But when you're in a time crunch, education for the student can be very much like a business...the idea being to get the best understanding of the source material in the shortest period of time. It would be nice to spend days and days reading word by word and pontificating on each subtle nuance of the language used, but not very practical.
Besides, I think you missed a main point of what I said. You're comparing what I ended up knowing to what I could have known had I read the primary source without influence from others' understanding, in a vacuum with no time constraints. What you ought to be comparing is what I ended up knowing to what everyone else ended up knowing about the work (that's what the professors did). Chances are, given the time I had, my understanding would actually have been more limited than it was had I not simply dismissed the original work from my reading list.
Who said I plagiarized anything? I didn't pass off others' ideas as my own...I had my own ideas based on my understanding of the work through secondary sources.
Also, I wonder if your definition of plagiarism is too strict. Let's assume for a moment that I did push someone else's ideas in my in-class essays, for instance. If I understood that argument and could support it well with evidence from the primary source, and I happened to agree with that argument, what's wrong with putting it forth as long as it's in my own words? Is it plagiarism if there's real understanding behind it?
I think the standard that every viewpoint must be totally original on any particular topic is too stringent. The fact is, even most professors share a common idea when it comes to interpreting a particular work. For thinking similarly and understanding the work/author similarly, are they plagiarizing the first guy to come up with that interpretation?
Yea, I have to agree with you. Talk about lazy students...how about pointing out the lazy teachers? I only had a few teachers up through high school and only ONE professor in college where these rip-off papers would have worked.
For one, my high school teachers quizzed us in two different ways. One, our ability to analyze a story, as in term papers, in-class essays, etc. Two, our ability to read a story. Usually this was simply a daily quiz on what we were supposed to have read the night before hitting several factual minor points that no summary would include. We were told this would be the case, and we were told ahead of time that we should read with a notebook open and take notes on anything we thought might be covered (we were free to use our notes on the quizzes). Some teachers that used this technique didn't want to waste class time so they'd give us the quizzes to take home. They still worked really well.
Some teachers didn't like this because they thought it overtly communicated mistrust to the students. Instead, they opted for the multiple draft process for term papers. No paper was simply written and handed in. It was drafted, corrected by the teacher with suggestions, handed back for rewrite. This process would usually go three or four times, and you'd be asked to analyze how your thesis applied to specific small events in the book, again, not covered by any summaries. By the time you were done writing the paper, if you had tried initially to avoid reading the book you eventually had to go into it pretty deeply. Using the custom-written papers on these rip-off sites would cost several thousand dollars, one custom paper per draft. (And how would you communicate with the paper writer what they were supposed to do? Would you fax in the first draft with all of the teacher's margin notes?)
Finally, there was a teacher who I did not personally have but taught in my high school that required students to compose one essay per reading that was more or less primarly composed of direct quotations strung together. This sounds silly, but it was a very good way of seeing if your thesis held water against the actual text of the book. At the beginning of his course, something like 90% of the theses handed in were rejected and rewritten because it would be painfully obvious that the student didn't have a clear idea of what the author was saying (after all, not a lot of interpretive wiggle room when it comes to using direct quotes).
Yet another technique, the in-class creative essay. The teacher would simply ask the students to write an essay that compared/contrasted some element of two specific readings. Try to do this based on cliff notes of both works and you'll see it doesn't really work that well...the success of this kind of essay requires a knowledge of the texts more intimate than summaries provide.
These are just the ways I've actually had teachers ensure that students read the material. I could probably think of a dozen more if say, oh I don't know...it was MY JOB. What exactly are we paying teachers for if they can't solve this fairly simple problem?
Having said that, I will say that I have used what I considered to be ethical techniques that my classmates did not consider ethical (though I doubt my professors would have had a problem with it). I found it works particularly well for philosophy courses for some reason, but I see no reason why it wouldn't work just as well in literature for most people. Before I read anything for a particular college level philosophy course, I'd go to the library and do some background research on the philosopher, what he thought, what he was trying to say, and then do the same kind of research on the particular work itself. This way, I'd know what all of the later philosophers, professors, and graduate students thought about various aspects of the work. I found this much research was often sufficient to gain a true understanding of the material without having to read the material itself, which was very useful when I was in a ti
Someday, insurance companies will implant GPS trackers in our heads at birth. Wouldn't that be funny if the tinfoil hat people turn out to be right after all?
Darnit! I was all set to run out and by DDR today instead of getting a gym membership...now I have to sit on the couch and eat potato chips until March!
I'm sad that you posted this AC. I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't clicked the "under threshold" link--I usually browse at +1.
Anyway, you've realized exactly the problem. It's worth money to save time. As soon as die hard linux-heads realize that... (Actually, that's not quite fair, they've made great strides in this direction over the last 5 years or so.)
I think that linux has a good shot at taking over the home market...after all, it's free. At the very least, if it becomes popular, users will be able to buy machines cheaper with Linux preinstalled. It has a few very important hurdles to overcome first, though. Check out my journal entry on the problems with linux if you want to know my thoughts on it.
I recently installed Mandrake 10.0 and I have to say I was disappointed. It's been about three years since I ran up any new distro on a machine that could hack it (I've got a couple of old boxes that I can't really call valid installs for modern distros) and I was expecting a lot from Mandrake. The installation went on in under an hour, cleanly, but then I immediately started having problems. I wanted to hook it up to a Windows domain, and right off the bat Samba was very difficult to configure for both-way filesharing. I played around with menudrake and rpmdrake, both of which were not very good tools. rpmdrake is very unintuitive to use and in all the -drake tools message popups keep showing up in either the upper left or upper right of the screen...very annoying. With menudrake, I had to manually add shortcuts to see apps I'd just installed, and then I couldn't get/find the icons appropriate to the apps I'd installed (both Limewire and Firefox), so they just have the generic little system app boxes next to them. Again, very annoying.
After about 10 hours of working on the box, I decided to throw Firefox on it. I've been using Firefox on my main Windows machine now for about 2 months, so I thought this'll be easy. Immediately after the install I got it up and running, but the next time I booted the machine and ran Firefox it would act like it was starting up, and then go away and not come back. I ran it from the prompt and saw that there was some kind of library missing. I reinstalled it, and got the same as before...browser came up until I logged out and logged back in, then the library issue.
When I see stuff like that I just shut down mentally. It's not that I can't solve the problem, it's that I shouldn't have to. I realized it was time to blow off the Mandrake installation for once and for all when I had to check my email and print something out because I was late for an appointment. I booted the linux box, ran up Konqueror, and couldn't read my email through my provider's web-based email client. I ran up Firefox and discovered the library problem. I ran up Mozilla (which came installed) and couldn't get my inbox to open up. Finally, noting the time was getting even later, I ran up a Windows box, got the email, printed it, and was on my way.
On Windows, I've used IE, Mozilla, Opera, and Firefox to open and read email through my provider's web email client, so it's definitely not a problem that is solely browser-specific. (Also, I noted that to access the settings for Firefox on linux, for the few minutes I had access to the app, it's under Edit -> Preferences, not Tools -> Options as it is on Windows. Why the different UI for different platforms?)
So, I'm waiting with baited breath for the moment I can install any distro of linux, get all the security and good features that linux has over Windows, but not have to memorize a list of acronyms like cups and lpr to print, or crack open text files to manually configure apps.
What could save TiVo is if they made it easy to get video content off the device onto your home computer. Does anyone know of a cheap/free and easy way to do this? I researched it about 6 months ago and I hit upon a few leads, but I had no time to follow up on them.
I thought tech workers already had a kind of union. It's called "stock options".
Wait...that's not the same thing... 8]
You're misunderstanding me. I'm simply saying that if you go around expecting respect, you're not going to get it. I'm of the opinion that one even ought to expect to have to earn respect "as a person" (whatever that means).
Do I automatically respect people? I give 'em the benefit of the doubt until I get to know them. And I usually learn that 90% of the people I have to work with, when they talk tech, don't say anything useful 90% of the time. I've forced myself into the habit of being mostly quiet unless I'm pretty well-informed about something and can demonstrate an improvement.