It's become like hearing about every murder in the newspaper. I know they happen, there's not much I can do about it, and hearing about it only upsets me. We all know the patent laws are screwed up here on slashdot, do we really need to hear about every new stupid thing that should never have been issued a patent?
You're smoking weed. Wheaton has weird restrictions like this because of their extremist religious beliefs, not because a few idiots can't handle alchohol. This isn't a ban on just alcohol, it's a ban on "indecent behavior" blah blah blah. As far as the "quality" of the graduates, I'm sure it turns out some fine drones.
I've been running SA since February, and have had a grand total of ONE false positive out of a few thousand emails. The message was from a new account, very short, and in HTML. That address has since been added to my autowhitelist. SA couple with Amavisd-new and clamav has reduced my spam volume by about 95%, and my virus emails to zero. It's a great product and I'm looking forward to 3.0.
If you had been fair about things instead of changing the subject to that of your personal dislike of policies designed to foster a community where education and personal growth are given utmost priority, you would have acknowledged that the question *was* relevant.
This question was taken out of context. This didn't happen at a normal university where people are treated like adults, it happened at a small religious college with a history of repression of students. If this kind of thing was happening at a public university, it'd be a different thing.
I find it kind of like joining the Nazi party, and complaining about rules requiring the nazi salute. I mean, what'd the guy expect from a college that tries to control students "moral behavior" off campus?
I'd argue that this is really just another factor in their decision. The majority of the students are legally adults, and their parents can't force them to go to this school
In a legal, and technical sense you're right. Practicality is quite a different thing. Until you're 24 you still have to count your parents income as far as financial aid is involved. With the ever rising costs of tuition at even public institutions, most 18-23 year olds have no ability to pay for college on their own without parental help, or loans. Is a choice between no college, and ultra-restrictive religious college really much of a choice when you're all of 18?
It's not prison I suppose, I just think colleges putting these restrictions on students is, well, evil. No one can really grow as an individual if you're sheltered by your parents, then your college.
You've missed the point. Should you really be whining about software being required to be installed on your computer, to the point you post an "ask slashdot" (that convienently hides the institution you attend), when your school puts restrictions on you like legal adults not being allowed to drink?
In other words: most of the students made their choice, paid their money, and are attending Wheaton because they would rather be there than somewhere else.
It's not really relevant to the conversation, but many students are heavily influenced by their parents to attend restrictive religious institutions like this. It's either that, or the parents won't pay, or maybe even support the kid.
And replying to my own post, here's a couple more restrictions:
* Wheaton College and all Wheaton College-related functions will be alcohol-free and tobacco-free. This means that the possession or consumption of alcohol or the use of tobacco in any form will be prohibited in, on, or around all campus properties, owned or leased. The same prohibition applies to all Wheaton College vehicles, whether on or off campus, and to all Wheaton College events or programs, wherever they may be held.
While enrolled in Wheaton College, undergraduate members of the community will refrain from the consumption of alcohol or the use of tobacco in all settings.
Other adult members of the College community will use careful and loving discretion in any use of alcohol. They will avoid the serving or consumption of alcohol in any situation in which undergraduate members of the Wheaton College family are or are likely to be present.
* On-campus dances will take place only with official College sponsorship. All members of the Wheaton College community will take care to avoid any entertainment or behavior, on or off campus, which may be immodest, sinfully erotic, or harmfully violent (Eph. 4:1-2, 17-24; I Tim. 5:2; Gal. 5:22-23).
As I said in another post, the College in question is Wheaton, a christian school in IL. They're no stranger to controlling students lives in unusual ways. From their website:
Housing 88% of students live on-campus in dormitories or college-owned apartments and houses. Those who do not, live with parents or spouse, or have obtained special permission to live off-campus. Housing is available on- and off-campus for married students.
The restrictions on PCs become a lot more relevant since this restrictive college sounds like they basically force people to live on campus. Kinda odd, don't you think?
A little investigation reveals Mr Sanford (dancedance) goes to Wheaton College in IL. Why are you so vague about which college is doing this Mr Sanford?
This is the danger of taking a line out of context. Really what that line means is a guy locked in a room for an indefinite period, and at some theoretical time in the future he releases his code to everyone else on the team and it magically works, and works well.
It works fine if you're the only developer, it works horribly if you've got an entire team developing the software. People on a team need to touch base, and if there's just "guys in rooms" that aren't showing progress, taking criticism, etc, the whole thing can implode.
You're right that linux was initially written by Linus, but he also wasn't working as part of a team at the time.
That means there is a memory error on a 512MB PC--on average--every 90 minutes!
No, that means if you're running an extremely intensive memory tester that's changing ALL the memory every few seconds you'll have a memory error every 90 minutes. To interpret the memtest86 results you have to understand a bit about how memtest86 works, and how memory failures occur. From the memtest86 readme:
Memory chips consist of a large array of tightly packed memory cells, one for each bit of data. The vast majority of the intermittent failures are a result of interaction between these memory cells. Often writing a memory cell can cause one of the adjacent cells to be written with the same data. An effective memory test attempts to test for this condition.
In other words you can't extend the results of memtest86 to the real world. Most of the time all of your memory isn't being constantly written to, it just maintains its current state.
Oh I don't know, the fact that it's a 3 wheeled death trap. It has all the dangers of a motorcycle, and none of the range or fun. It costs as much as a hybrid car. Going out 20 to 30 miles (and more realistically 15-25 miles for a good safety margin) before you have to head back and recharge for 4 hours (minimum) isn't very practical.
I guess it might be good for going to the grocery store to get a bag of groceries, but hope you don't need to drive anyone anywhere. It's also ugly as sin and you're suddenly identified as that weird guy with the freak-boy car. Umm.. no, I think I'll pass.
While by its very nature, DNA provides for some sanity checks on what's viable
And why is what's viable "good", and what's not viable "bad"? Bufotoxin and anthrax will kill you dead, though they're completely natural and organic. What survives in its own environment has nothing to do with if it's good or bad for you. Evolution doesn't produce "good", it produces what survives.
Look at the panacea antibiotics once were, and now look at how royally screwed up the situation now is.
So we never should have developed anti-biotics? The problem with anti-biotics is they're over prescribed and put in animal feed, not that we "don't understand what's going on". They still really are a panacea, it's not as if they've become useless. There's some problems with resistant strains of TB, etc, but it's not really a catastrophe.
There's no personal relationship between thousands of people. Common courtesy? He's already extended common courtesy by giving the damn hosting away for free. He's also going to provide the data to anyones blog to the owners. That's not enough for you?
I honestly do believe that the blog is as trivial as free candy. All the whiners who "have my whole life in that blog" need to get a life. It's just text, and it's mostly just crappy text. They sound like people whining about their Everquest character.
That just isn't the same thing and you know it. What you describe in your analogy are social rules between two people. This isn't a social situation between two people, it's one guy giving away service to thousands. There's no personal relationship between this guy and his multitude of users. No friendship, nada. It's more like I'm giving away free candy every day to anyone that shows up at the door. Thousands of people take me up on the offer. One day I decide it's too much of a burden and stop offering the free candy.
Shouldn't you be greatful that someone offered you free candy and not whine about what a rotten person they are for not bothering to tell you ahead of time?
Analogies don't prove anything of course, but they do illustrate a point. I guess if people get used to something being free (and free services in general) then some tend to forget that the free thing is provided at the will of the provider, and is not an expectation.
In this case since it's a free service no one should have any expectations of anything. Why did he take it down so quickly? Maybe because he didn't want to be tempted to keep it going, didn't want to listen to whining people, whatever. It's his damn website, his bandwidth, etc.
The audio recording says he got backed into a corner moving sites onto a new server, and he didn't want to spend any more time on the project. Welcome to free services.
Millions of dollars down the drain because the pointy-headed academic administrators can't lead their way out of a wet paper bag.
More like foolish top management believed Peoplesoft was the way to go rather than develop their own system in-house. The peoplesoft problem doesn't exist in just acadamia, it's everywhere. Acadamia is just more transparent about it since they can't hide everything under a thick rug like Big Business can. The whole idea that you can make a single system payroll/accounting/registration/etc system for ALL BUSINESSES and just add custom features is a foolish one.
The tranisitions for academic institutions has been even more problematic, to the point where several of the large institutions were considering suing the pants off Peoplesoft a number of years ago due to the whole system not working. They decided not to sue simply because they feared Peoplsoft would collapse under the weight of a lawsuit, and they'd be more screwed than before.
The real thing that irks me about this project is that IT'S NOT ART.
I've never fully understood why it's important to determine if something is art or not. I don't care if this thing is "art" or not, I just think it sucks-ass. Something having attained the status of "art" gives it no special status.
Who's We?, and why isn't "They" part of "We". I was strangely under the impression that so called "native americans" were citizens of this country and have the right to vote.
I also don't recall killing anyones ancestors, and I don't know anyone who did. This "we" and "they" crap is missleading. There's no we, and there's no they.
Hardware will cost (but will be cheap), Most software will be "free", support will cost. Currently there's enough open source software that's better than the traditional alternatives to easily run a business on. Open Office is good enough for 90% of the users. Thunderbird is just amazing and kicks the shit out of Outlook. Firebird/Mozilla leaves IE6 in the dust. The only thing stopping the adoption of this software is the costs of changeover, i.e. support.
The biggest cost of software is maintaining it. It used to be that updates didn't really matter since each computer was an island that couldn't be connected to from the outside world. With every computer being connected together, those days are long gone. Also, with software development becoming more and more interdependent on its individual components, updates to operating systems become more and more important. Does anyone wants to pay $200 per workstation for a new OS, $150 for a new office suite every 3 years or so? Ultimately what you want is to keep using your computer and pay someone to make the right decisions for your business.
This practice of releasing software before it's ready is hardly a new one. What do you think Windows 1.0-3.1 were? 3.11 finally was release quality software, though it still stunk. Apple did the same damn thing with OSX. 10.0 was Alpha quality software at best, with 10.1 being beta quality.
The point is that I don't think companies are releasing software any earlier than they used to, they're just being more honest about the quality of it. Google news still being beta means they can mess around with it and not piss anyone off. The article seems to imply there's something wrong with lowering peoples expectations.
Slashdot Mirror
You already have enough ammunition of stupid patents to use to spread to others. More and more being added to your arsenal accomplishes nothing.
It's become like hearing about every murder in the newspaper. I know they happen, there's not much I can do about it, and hearing about it only upsets me. We all know the patent laws are screwed up here on slashdot, do we really need to hear about every new stupid thing that should never have been issued a patent?
You're smoking weed. Wheaton has weird restrictions like this because of their extremist religious beliefs, not because a few idiots can't handle alchohol. This isn't a ban on just alcohol, it's a ban on "indecent behavior" blah blah blah. As far as the "quality" of the graduates, I'm sure it turns out some fine drones.
I've been running SA since February, and have had a grand total of ONE false positive out of a few thousand emails. The message was from a new account, very short, and in HTML. That address has since been added to my autowhitelist. SA couple with Amavisd-new and clamav has reduced my spam volume by about 95%, and my virus emails to zero. It's a great product and I'm looking forward to 3.0.
Plutocracy.
If you had been fair about things instead of changing the subject to that of your personal dislike of policies designed to foster a community where education and personal growth are given utmost priority, you would have acknowledged that the question *was* relevant.
This question was taken out of context. This didn't happen at a normal university where people are treated like adults, it happened at a small religious college with a history of repression of students. If this kind of thing was happening at a public university, it'd be a different thing.
I find it kind of like joining the Nazi party, and complaining about rules requiring the nazi salute. I mean, what'd the guy expect from a college that tries to control students "moral behavior" off campus?
I'd argue that this is really just another factor in their decision. The majority of the students are legally adults, and their parents can't force them to go to this school
In a legal, and technical sense you're right. Practicality is quite a different thing. Until you're 24 you still have to count your parents income as far as financial aid is involved. With the ever rising costs of tuition at even public institutions, most 18-23 year olds have no ability to pay for college on their own without parental help, or loans. Is a choice between no college, and ultra-restrictive religious college really much of a choice when you're all of 18?
It's not prison I suppose, I just think colleges putting these restrictions on students is, well, evil. No one can really grow as an individual if you're sheltered by your parents, then your college.
You've missed the point. Should you really be whining about software being required to be installed on your computer, to the point you post an "ask slashdot" (that convienently hides the institution you attend), when your school puts restrictions on you like legal adults not being allowed to drink?
In other words: most of the students made their choice, paid their money, and are attending Wheaton because they would rather be there than somewhere else.
It's not really relevant to the conversation, but many students are heavily influenced by their parents to attend restrictive religious institutions like this. It's either that, or the parents won't pay, or maybe even support the kid.
The restrictions on PCs become a lot more relevant since this restrictive college sounds like they basically force people to live on campus. Kinda odd, don't you think?
The college in question is DEAD ON topic, and the deliberate vagueness of the article poster calls this post into question.
A little investigation reveals Mr Sanford (dancedance) goes to Wheaton College in IL. Why are you so vague about which college is doing this Mr Sanford?
This is the danger of taking a line out of context. Really what that line means is a guy locked in a room for an indefinite period, and at some theoretical time in the future he releases his code to everyone else on the team and it magically works, and works well.
It works fine if you're the only developer, it works horribly if you've got an entire team developing the software. People on a team need to touch base, and if there's just "guys in rooms" that aren't showing progress, taking criticism, etc, the whole thing can implode.
You're right that linux was initially written by Linus, but he also wasn't working as part of a team at the time.
That means there is a memory error on a 512MB PC--on average--every 90 minutes!
No, that means if you're running an extremely intensive memory tester that's changing ALL the memory every few seconds you'll have a memory error every 90 minutes. To interpret the memtest86 results you have to understand a bit about how memtest86 works, and how memory failures occur. From the memtest86 readme:
In other words you can't extend the results of memtest86 to the real world. Most of the time all of your memory isn't being constantly written to, it just maintains its current state.
What's not to love?
Oh I don't know, the fact that it's a 3 wheeled death trap. It has all the dangers of a motorcycle, and none of the range or fun. It costs as much as a hybrid car. Going out 20 to 30 miles (and more realistically 15-25 miles for a good safety margin) before you have to head back and recharge for 4 hours (minimum) isn't very practical.
I guess it might be good for going to the grocery store to get a bag of groceries, but hope you don't need to drive anyone anywhere. It's also ugly as sin and you're suddenly identified as that weird guy with the freak-boy car. Umm.. no, I think I'll pass.
While by its very nature, DNA provides for some sanity checks on what's viable
And why is what's viable "good", and what's not viable "bad"? Bufotoxin and anthrax will kill you dead, though they're completely natural and organic. What survives in its own environment has nothing to do with if it's good or bad for you. Evolution doesn't produce "good", it produces what survives.
Look at the panacea antibiotics once were, and now look at how royally screwed up the situation now is.
So we never should have developed anti-biotics? The problem with anti-biotics is they're over prescribed and put in animal feed, not that we "don't understand what's going on". They still really are a panacea, it's not as if they've become useless. There's some problems with resistant strains of TB, etc, but it's not really a catastrophe.
There's no personal relationship between thousands of people. Common courtesy? He's already extended common courtesy by giving the damn hosting away for free. He's also going to provide the data to anyones blog to the owners. That's not enough for you?
I honestly do believe that the blog is as trivial as free candy. All the whiners who "have my whole life in that blog" need to get a life. It's just text, and it's mostly just crappy text. They sound like people whining about their Everquest character.
That just isn't the same thing and you know it. What you describe in your analogy are social rules between two people. This isn't a social situation between two people, it's one guy giving away service to thousands. There's no personal relationship between this guy and his multitude of users. No friendship, nada. It's more like I'm giving away free candy every day to anyone that shows up at the door. Thousands of people take me up on the offer. One day I decide it's too much of a burden and stop offering the free candy.
Shouldn't you be greatful that someone offered you free candy and not whine about what a rotten person they are for not bothering to tell you ahead of time?
Analogies don't prove anything of course, but they do illustrate a point. I guess if people get used to something being free (and free services in general) then some tend to forget that the free thing is provided at the will of the provider, and is not an expectation.
In this case since it's a free service no one should have any expectations of anything. Why did he take it down so quickly? Maybe because he didn't want to be tempted to keep it going, didn't want to listen to whining people, whatever. It's his damn website, his bandwidth, etc.
The audio recording says he got backed into a corner moving sites onto a new server, and he didn't want to spend any more time on the project. Welcome to free services.
Millions of dollars down the drain because the pointy-headed academic administrators can't lead their way out of a wet paper bag.
More like foolish top management believed Peoplesoft was the way to go rather than develop their own system in-house. The peoplesoft problem doesn't exist in just acadamia, it's everywhere. Acadamia is just more transparent about it since they can't hide everything under a thick rug like Big Business can. The whole idea that you can make a single system payroll/accounting/registration/etc system for ALL BUSINESSES and just add custom features is a foolish one.
The tranisitions for academic institutions has been even more problematic, to the point where several of the large institutions were considering suing the pants off Peoplesoft a number of years ago due to the whole system not working. They decided not to sue simply because they feared Peoplsoft would collapse under the weight of a lawsuit, and they'd be more screwed than before.
The real thing that irks me about this project is that IT'S NOT ART.
I've never fully understood why it's important to determine if something is art or not. I don't care if this thing is "art" or not, I just think it sucks-ass. Something having attained the status of "art" gives it no special status.
Who's We?, and why isn't "They" part of "We". I was strangely under the impression that so called "native americans" were citizens of this country and have the right to vote.
I also don't recall killing anyones ancestors, and I don't know anyone who did. This "we" and "they" crap is missleading. There's no we, and there's no they.
Government work has half the margins of private sector work, its slum and the companies that take it suck.
Riiight, except if you win a no-bid contract like Halliburton did, and then ream the goverment at every chance you get.
Hardware will cost (but will be cheap), Most software will be "free", support will cost. Currently there's enough open source software that's better than the traditional alternatives to easily run a business on. Open Office is good enough for 90% of the users. Thunderbird is just amazing and kicks the shit out of Outlook. Firebird/Mozilla leaves IE6 in the dust. The only thing stopping the adoption of this software is the costs of changeover, i.e. support.
The biggest cost of software is maintaining it. It used to be that updates didn't really matter since each computer was an island that couldn't be connected to from the outside world. With every computer being connected together, those days are long gone. Also, with software development becoming more and more interdependent on its individual components, updates to operating systems become more and more important. Does anyone wants to pay $200 per workstation for a new OS, $150 for a new office suite every 3 years or so? Ultimately what you want is to keep using your computer and pay someone to make the right decisions for your business.
This practice of releasing software before it's ready is hardly a new one. What do you think Windows 1.0-3.1 were? 3.11 finally was release quality software, though it still stunk. Apple did the same damn thing with OSX. 10.0 was Alpha quality software at best, with 10.1 being beta quality.
The point is that I don't think companies are releasing software any earlier than they used to, they're just being more honest about the quality of it. Google news still being beta means they can mess around with it and not piss anyone off. The article seems to imply there's something wrong with lowering peoples expectations.