Alice starts out as fun which is a great hook and quickly changes to a programming environment as you want to build more complex worlds. Once students understand all the abstract concepts of programming then you can spring C, C++, Java, or whatever. Alice is nice because you only have to learn one level of the abstraction at a time and not wrestle with programming syntax. Having to deal with two abstractions (syntax + programming concepts) will lead to disinterest because it is HARD, even for people who like it.
I also recommend getting a Lego Mindstorms NXT. You can run nearly any language on it.
I agree, the new glossy screens are horrible. There are a couple of other reasons to pick the Thinkpad as well. The keyboard layout (including the back/forward) buttons located about the cursor keys, and of course the THINKLIGHT. Comparing the my T-Series to my work provided HP-Compaq, the Thinkpad wins out everytime. I miss the trackpoint the most.
There were these guys that made this ship that was "unsinkable" which on its maiden voyage ran into an iceberg and sank. Compromising the BIOS in this case is analogous to the iceberg. "Unsinkable, Unhackable, Waterproof." BTW, isn't the Thinkpad supposed to work underwater?
I agree. Ever since the Timex Sinclair (blanked the screen when you typed on the membrane keyboard), the Apple ][ (produced in Woz's garage), the Commodore 64 (I/O was scary), and PONG (somehne it worked) the mantra has always been "Good Enough". As technologists we know, the underpinnings of modern technology is scary. The amount of error-detection, error-correction, cache-errors, pci-bus errors, thermal throttling, in a modern CPU in-and-of itself is scary. I won't even continue on to the scariness of higher level code.
However, we merrily chant "Good Enough" and keep on building new stuff in the hopes that the low-level scary stuff isn't going to bite us and crash a car/airplane/nuclear reactor due to a "kernel panic", or BSOD. (Have you ever read the JAVA terms and conditions?)
My question to you is the XBOX 360 "good enough" with a nearing 50% RROD failure rate? If yes, expect more "good enough" systems to be produced.
Answer to your question.:
PeteGriffin@Google (Google Employee) + 3 other people say this answers the question: From a sales standpoint, I would recommend turning the question around and asking them what steps they are currently taking to be compliant with the relevant compliance-acronym (HIPAA, SOX, FERPA, PCI, etc). Understand what steps they currently take to be compliant, and what their current solution is. You'll be able to quickly discover if it's a real showstopping requirement and be able to move on, if it's something that can be addressed by Google Apps... or if they are horribly un-compliant and they're hoping that Google Apps will solve all of their problems (and more!).
No solution by itself is going to be the silver bullet; organizations (especially small and medium businesses) have extremely varied IT infrastructure and policies, with information flowing in different ways for different reasons. Google doesn't certify or identify Google Apps as being compliant with any specific set of regulations. It's really up to the organization to determine if a solution meets their compliance needs for their specific situation.
Google Apps has a very impressive set of features that are extremely helpful when dealing with prospects with compliance needs. The Postini component of Google Apps (referred to as Google Message Security) allows for very granular control of email content (in and out). There are additional email archiving and retention components available. Google Apps is SAS 70 Type II certified. We have also made a good deal of information available about Google's security policies when it comes to our network of data centers through a hefty white paper.
I've been using this setup for quite a while and it seems to work pretty well for me. My partner, who is a totally non-tech person, also uses a similar setup on her Mac, and she finds it usable. So, I guess it's not as geeky as it might sound.
Very strange... why would someone become transgendered and then turn lesbian? Wouldn't it be easier just to stay male in the first case? Maybe s/he is going for a high level of personal security through gender virtualization.
Yes you are correct.. for the virus vector, there is no difference. The best thing to do is turn off autorun on USB devices and run truecrypt to secure your data in the event of loss.
I totally agree, however this is an old consulting adage which sums it all up:
If you're not a part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem.
and the problem in this case would be the initial bad decision.:)
Further I agree that is is a horrid solution, but humans as a species don't necessarily make the best decisions with respect to resource management. I will spare you examples, but simply look around at the personal lifestyle choices that people make, what are they optimizing? Maximum debt and obesity? How can you expect a country that can't make solid personal decisions to govern/manage any better?
Sound decision making and thinking skills are not widely valued. Society tends to value fame, greed, stupidity, and excess. So give me a new whiz bang phone system NOW!
This is actually less true than you may think. Sometimes people start with the premise,
"We need a new phone system, because the old one is old and has some annoying problem."
and then move onto "How much is it going to cost me to replace it."
and then move onto "Can we do it for X dollars."
You are assuming a logical world where people do CBO (Cost Benefit Analysis) and look at TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). Sometimes people just want a "New d*mn phone system" and really don't care that the old one could be fixed up very inexpensively with parts from an Ebay phone system recycler.
The same thing can be said for software systems. If you change management, they typically want *NEW* software since it gives them a since of control and ownership. It doesn't matter if the old systems work fine since this puts the *NEW* management at a disadvantage. They would rather replace the old system with something that is familiar to them or even worse, simply to do it to make it appear as progress is being made. Typically these *NEW* top managers hire all of their buddies, who get in over their heads and can't deliver, but are very personable and loyal. Near the end the consultants step in to save the day and finish the heavy lifting and settling internal squabbles. Every top manager (who cares about his paycheck) when faced with a disaster will gladly spend money on a consultant who can keep his large project from becoming a failure.
The world is a very screwed up, reactionary, illogical place. People have simple questions, "How much will it cost?", "Can I afford it?", "Oh something bad happened to a system, what can I do to replace it or make sure this well never happen again? e.g. virus attack, hacker attack, website defacement, security software circumvention, we failed in some compliance area (ISO9000, Government Spec) how can we quickly remediate this?, the boss couldn't access the LAN from his house while backups were running at 2AM, blah blah blah.
As a consultant, you can make very good money orchestrating possible solutions to any of these problems. The keyword is orchestrating:)
It's very true, people will pay for good games. Just looking in my pile I see Civilization 1-4, Sim City, Sim City 2000, Sim Earth, Starcraft Battlechest.... I agree, good games are absolutely worth the price.
LAN support is what makes StarCraft (classic) the best game ever. You can get a bunch of people together in a computer lab and play 4vs4 or in my case 7vs1. BNET access will be blocked from most schools so the multiuser experience will be eliminated since schools and libraries are some of the only places you can find rooms full of 25 PCs. Also, the LAN doesn't LAG like battle net.
So how is this going to play out? If SCII is any good, the community will just produce a local battle net server e.g. (bnetd) for playing games on the LAN. Blizzard is making very a bad, short-sighted move. As for piracy, everyone I know owns at least one copy of the Blizzard Battle Chest, which costs $20 or less for SC and BW. It is the best entertainment one can buy for under $20. The mega mineral maps require internet access though:)
If anyone from Blizzard reads Slashdot, please go up and smack your management in the head and tell them to make SCII LAN playable. If they don't build it, someone else will and writing a small server to emulate BNET isn't going to be that hard. Even with encrypted session, it will be reverse engineered, just ask Sony about ShowEQ and their futile attempt the encrypt Everquest Traffic. Everyone on planet earth is going to buy the game the day it hits the shelf. Please go smack them in the back of the head now.
For whatever reason, I find that an overload of diet pop, specifically diet mountain dew can cause cognitive/concentration problems. Diet pop seems to rob me of my mental clarity. Also, try cleaning off your desk (down to the bare desk), turning off the radio/mp3 player, turning off the phone, closing the door, and turning off the computer. Get yourself a pencil and some paper and start designing e.g. (ERD, database layouts, flow chart,).
Get a cell phone docking station and plug your house wiring into the cell phone. There are several available: Dock-N-Talk, Cell Socket. Example:
Cell Docking Station. Simply google "cell socket" to get more results.
Come on, China has stolen every single US military secret since we started keeping records. They have it on file and I think their darknets now support searchable torrents. Just search "USA Trident Missle" and download the ISOs.
Just think, if they can figure out how this works or at least how to exploit it. You could use these for secure long distance communication. No more cell towers, just entangle some particles, put one in a rack and the other in the cell phone.
I am curious to know if this "spooky action at a distance" as Einstein referred to it, is faster than light communication. We won't know this until we put one in a Mars rover and launch it. I would also be interested to know if these particles are entangled in another dimension outside of space time. I hope this can be figured out in our lifetime.
I've had similar problems lately and used these two tools to get my XP back without reloading. http://systemexplorer.mistergroup.org/ SE can do realtime performance of I/O Reads/Writes by process. When windows gets I/O bound the system can grind to a halt and become unusable because of the way the windows XP kernel operates.
If you school accepts or applies for Federal E-rate monies then you must comply with CIPA (Child's Internet Protection Act). Minimally you need filtering software installed on all the laptops since they are school computers. Filtering "offensive material" means, no chats, no blogs, no Myspace, no gaming chat sites, etc... Also, teenage girls (7-8th grade) are incredibly adept at getting themselves in trouble online and then confessing to their parents when it spins way out of control. Typically they teenage girls pose online as a 24-year old playboy bunnies and it all hits the fan when the child predator shows up at their house for sex. Never underestimate the trouble that teenage girls can get themselves into online. It happens everyday and you don't want it happening on your computers, since this sort of trouble creates really bad press for the school district not to mention resistance to any further adoption of technology.
Wow, I'm shocked! Last I checked MTV had gone to 7x24x365 of uncensored reality trash TV. I had no idea they were still showing videos. I am even more shocked to learn that MTV has censors.
This channel spews so much vulgar garbage and stupidity that I don't even have it programmed on the channel list to prevent it lowering my IQ if I should happen to pause while channel surfing.
Hey Kids! It's acceptable to have sex, do drugs, and abuse alcohol, but by golly we here at MTV have to draw the line at filesharing. Sorry.
Sarah Palin has made it clear that Joe-Six-Pack only needs to count to SIX! Also, hockey mom's don't need much math since the scores at hockey games are usually in the single digits.
Technically, no, partitions share a common partition table and are aware of each other. This is a case of formatting the same disk twice making sure that one format didn't overwrite the other.
Really, I am not pushing FUD on the VISTA release. It was a pretty front end, built on unfinished software. The manager who usually got these projects over the finish line bailed out leaving an unfinished code-base and leadership vacuum. To me this was evident in VISTA. Additionally, all of Microsoft's side deals to cripple.control functionality on media playback and the annoying security pop-ups made VISTA annoying and slow performing.
Slashdot Mirror
http://praetorianprefect.com/archives/2010/01/the-aurora-ie-exploit-in-action/
Yawn, another unpatched MS browser exploit.
I hear there are several more for sale...
I am sure someone has already posted it by now, but this about this.
What is the goal of programming?
To learn about objects, methods, functions, variables, loops, arrays, program flow, statefulness, events, design, and concurrency (threads).
You can do all of this in Alice from CMU. http://alice.org/
Alice starts out as fun which is a great hook and quickly changes to a programming environment as you want to build more complex worlds. Once students understand all the abstract concepts of programming then you can spring C, C++, Java, or whatever. Alice is nice because you only have to learn one level of the abstraction at a time and not wrestle with programming syntax. Having to deal with two abstractions (syntax + programming concepts) will lead to disinterest because it is HARD, even for people who like it.
I also recommend getting a Lego Mindstorms NXT. You can run nearly any language on it.
I agree, the new glossy screens are horrible. There are a couple of other reasons to pick the Thinkpad as well. The keyboard layout (including the back/forward) buttons located about the cursor keys, and of course the THINKLIGHT. Comparing the my T-Series to my work provided HP-Compaq, the Thinkpad wins out everytime. I miss the trackpoint the most.
There were these guys that made this ship that was "unsinkable" which on its maiden voyage ran into an iceberg and sank. Compromising the BIOS in this case is analogous to the iceberg. "Unsinkable, Unhackable, Waterproof." BTW, isn't the Thinkpad supposed to work underwater?
I agree. Ever since the Timex Sinclair (blanked the screen when you typed on the membrane keyboard), the Apple ][ (produced in Woz's garage), the Commodore 64 (I/O was scary), and PONG (somehne it worked) the mantra has always been "Good Enough". As technologists we know, the underpinnings of modern technology is scary. The amount of error-detection, error-correction, cache-errors, pci-bus errors, thermal throttling, in a modern CPU in-and-of itself is scary. I won't even continue on to the scariness of higher level code.
However, we merrily chant "Good Enough" and keep on building new stuff in the hopes that the low-level scary stuff isn't going to bite us and crash a car/airplane/nuclear reactor due to a "kernel panic", or BSOD. (Have you ever read the JAVA terms and conditions?)
My question to you is the XBOX 360 "good enough" with a nearing 50% RROD failure rate? If yes, expect more "good enough" systems to be produced.
Source: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Apps%20Partner/thread?tid=4d6f74d03de056c7&hl=en
Answer to your question.:
PeteGriffin@Google (Google Employee) + 3 other people say this answers the question:
From a sales standpoint, I would recommend turning the question around and asking them what steps they are currently taking to be compliant with the relevant compliance-acronym (HIPAA, SOX, FERPA, PCI, etc). Understand what steps they currently take to be compliant, and what their current solution is. You'll be able to quickly discover if it's a real showstopping requirement and be able to move on, if it's something that can be addressed by Google Apps... or if they are horribly un-compliant and they're hoping that Google Apps will solve all of their problems (and more!).
No solution by itself is going to be the silver bullet; organizations (especially small and medium businesses) have extremely varied IT infrastructure and policies, with information flowing in different ways for different reasons. Google doesn't certify or identify Google Apps as being compliant with any specific set of regulations. It's really up to the organization to determine if a solution meets their compliance needs for their specific situation.
Google Apps has a very impressive set of features that are extremely helpful when dealing with prospects with compliance needs. The Postini component of Google Apps (referred to as Google Message Security) allows for very granular control of email content (in and out). There are additional email archiving and retention components available. Google Apps is SAS 70 Type II certified. We have also made a good deal of information available about Google's security policies when it comes to our network of data centers through a hefty white paper.
If anyone has experiences dealing with situations like this, please feel free to share your thoughts. Tony Safoian over at SADA Systems has some good thoughts around this:
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Apps+Partner/thread?tid=2ce6b0904f65ac44&hl=en
Very strange... why would someone become transgendered and then turn lesbian? Wouldn't it be easier just to stay male in the first case? Maybe s/he is going for a high level of personal security through gender virtualization.
Hey... that's not FAIR, to take away FAIR USE. :)
Yes you are correct.. for the virus vector, there is no difference. The best thing to do is turn off autorun on USB devices and run truecrypt to secure your data in the event of loss.
I totally agree, however this is an old consulting adage which sums it all up:
:)
If you're not a part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem.
and the problem in this case would be the initial bad decision.
Further I agree that is is a horrid solution, but humans as a species don't necessarily make the best decisions with respect to resource management. I will spare you examples, but simply look around at the personal lifestyle choices that people make, what are they optimizing? Maximum debt and obesity? How can you expect a country that can't make solid personal decisions to govern/manage any better?
Sound decision making and thinking skills are not widely valued. Society tends to value fame, greed, stupidity, and excess. So give me a new whiz bang phone system NOW!
I can envision it already... smart kids with nothing but time will figure out the algorithms and then manipulate them for humorous purposes.
This is actually less true than you may think. Sometimes people start with the premise,
:)
"We need a new phone system, because the old one is old and has some annoying problem."
and then move onto "How much is it going to cost me to replace it."
and then move onto "Can we do it for X dollars."
You are assuming a logical world where people do CBO (Cost Benefit Analysis) and look at TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). Sometimes people just want a "New d*mn phone system" and really don't care that the old one could be fixed up very inexpensively with parts from an Ebay phone system recycler.
The same thing can be said for software systems. If you change management, they typically want *NEW* software since it gives them a since of control and ownership. It doesn't matter if the old systems work fine since this puts the *NEW* management at a disadvantage. They would rather replace the old system with something that is familiar to them or even worse, simply to do it to make it appear as progress is being made. Typically these *NEW* top managers hire all of their buddies, who get in over their heads and can't deliver, but are very personable and loyal. Near the end the consultants step in to save the day and finish the heavy lifting and settling internal squabbles. Every top manager (who cares about his paycheck) when faced with a disaster will gladly spend money on a consultant who can keep his large project from becoming a failure.
The world is a very screwed up, reactionary, illogical place. People have simple questions, "How much will it cost?", "Can I afford it?", "Oh something bad happened to a system, what can I do to replace it or make sure this well never happen again? e.g. virus attack, hacker attack, website defacement, security software circumvention, we failed in some compliance area (ISO9000, Government Spec) how can we quickly remediate this?, the boss couldn't access the LAN from his house while backups were running at 2AM, blah blah blah.
As a consultant, you can make very good money orchestrating possible solutions to any of these problems. The keyword is orchestrating
It's very true, people will pay for good games. Just looking in my pile I see Civilization 1-4, Sim City, Sim City 2000, Sim Earth, Starcraft Battlechest .... I agree, good games are absolutely worth the price.
Starcraft 1 isn't balanced between the races. Get BroodWars :)
LAN support is what makes StarCraft (classic) the best game ever. You can get a bunch of people together in a computer lab and play 4vs4 or in my case 7vs1. BNET access will be blocked from most schools so the multiuser experience will be eliminated since schools and libraries are some of the only places you can find rooms full of 25 PCs. Also, the LAN doesn't LAG like battle net.
:)
So how is this going to play out? If SCII is any good, the community will just produce a local battle net server e.g. (bnetd) for playing games on the LAN. Blizzard is making very a bad, short-sighted move. As for piracy, everyone I know owns at least one copy of the Blizzard Battle Chest, which costs $20 or less for SC and BW. It is the best entertainment one can buy for under $20. The mega mineral maps require internet access though
If anyone from Blizzard reads Slashdot, please go up and smack your management in the head and tell them to make SCII LAN playable. If they don't build it, someone else will and writing a small server to emulate BNET isn't going to be that hard. Even with encrypted session, it will be reverse engineered, just ask Sony about ShowEQ and their futile attempt the encrypt Everquest Traffic. Everyone on planet earth is going to buy the game the day it hits the shelf. Please go smack them in the back of the head now.
For whatever reason, I find that an overload of diet pop, specifically diet mountain dew can cause cognitive/concentration problems. Diet pop seems to rob me of my mental clarity. Also, try cleaning off your desk (down to the bare desk), turning off the radio/mp3 player, turning off the phone, closing the door, and turning off the computer. Get yourself a pencil and some paper and start designing e.g. (ERD, database layouts, flow chart,).
Get a cell phone docking station and plug your house wiring into the cell phone. There are several available: Dock-N-Talk, Cell Socket. Example: Cell Docking Station. Simply google "cell socket" to get more results.
Come on, China has stolen every single US military secret since we started keeping records. They have it on file and I think their darknets now support searchable torrents. Just search "USA Trident Missle" and download the ISOs.
Just think, if they can figure out how this works or at least how to exploit it. You could use these for secure long distance communication. No more cell towers, just entangle some particles, put one in a rack and the other in the cell phone.
I am curious to know if this "spooky action at a distance" as Einstein referred to it, is faster than light communication. We won't know this until we put one in a Mars rover and launch it. I would also be interested to know if these particles are entangled in another dimension outside of space time. I hope this can be figured out in our lifetime.
I've had similar problems lately and used these two tools to get my XP back without reloading.
http://systemexplorer.mistergroup.org/
SE can do realtime performance of I/O Reads/Writes by process.
When windows gets I/O bound the system can grind to a halt and become unusable because of the way the windows XP kernel operates.
To eliminate bad spyware, this utility works great
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/home/index.html
-Enjoy!
If you school accepts or applies for Federal E-rate monies then you must comply with CIPA (Child's Internet Protection Act). Minimally you need filtering software installed on all the laptops since they are school computers. Filtering "offensive material" means, no chats, no blogs, no Myspace, no gaming chat sites, etc... Also, teenage girls (7-8th grade) are incredibly adept at getting themselves in trouble online and then confessing to their parents when it spins way out of control. Typically they teenage girls pose online as a 24-year old playboy bunnies and it all hits the fan when the child predator shows up at their house for sex. Never underestimate the trouble that teenage girls can get themselves into online. It happens everyday and you don't want it happening on your computers, since this sort of trouble creates really bad press for the school district not to mention resistance to any further adoption of technology.
Wow, I'm shocked! Last I checked MTV had gone to 7x24x365 of uncensored reality trash TV. I had no idea they were still showing videos. I am even more shocked to learn that MTV has censors. This channel spews so much vulgar garbage and stupidity that I don't even have it programmed on the channel list to prevent it lowering my IQ if I should happen to pause while channel surfing.
Hey Kids! It's acceptable to have sex, do drugs, and abuse alcohol, but by golly we here at MTV have to draw the line at filesharing. Sorry.
Sarah Palin has made it clear that Joe-Six-Pack only needs to count to SIX! Also, hockey mom's don't need much math since the scores at hockey games are usually in the single digits.
Technically, no, partitions share a common partition table and are aware of each other. This is a case of formatting the same disk twice making sure that one format didn't overwrite the other.
No really, VISTA was released in BETA.
Brian Valentine, Senior Vice President at Microsoft shoved VISTA out the door so he could get his singing bonus when he quit Microsoft and hired on at Amazon prior to the VISTA release.
Really, I am not pushing FUD on the VISTA release. It was a pretty front end, built on unfinished software. The manager who usually got these projects over the finish line bailed out leaving an unfinished code-base and leadership vacuum. To me this was evident in VISTA. Additionally, all of Microsoft's side deals to cripple.control functionality on media playback and the annoying security pop-ups made VISTA annoying and slow performing.