Uh, I guess I just proved my own point. It makes me dumb and insightful all at once! From now on I'm going to start reading my spam that says I'm continuously broadcasting an IP number. Yikes, that sounds scary.
After reviewing the arguments, I've concluded this is a good thing. Maybe even a necessary thing. Here's why:
Have you ever tried to explain to an end user what a virus is and how it works? Few have a decent understanding of what viruses are all about. Even folks with a technical background have a hard time keeping up with them, and knowing all the types.
As operating systems and viruses get more complicated, this gap will only get wider. I saw that article/paper arguing that as computers becom almost biological in complexity, they must be able to fix their own minor problems. Same type thing.
I agree. Screw the naysayers. I've watched a roomba in action...pretty neat.
This is also important because of the aging population. As my parents get older, I watch everyday tasks become increasingly difficult. This makes a mainstream product of this sort more than just "cool" or "neat".
Cost....The school wants every student to purchase a laptop ($800-1000 new, but possibly reused old laptops from mom & dad)to save the school how much paper? Costing how much money? That brings up questions of class and having to buy access to a public education.
As far as I know, paper mills use electricity, and some chemical by-products to manufacture their product, but I think hundreds of laptops would create much more pollution/environmental impact than saving some paper. How environmentally damaging is a landfill full of wasted paper anyway? When I throw out a piece of paper, its not like I'm throwing out a couple of AA batteries (I recycle those).
People might even use more paper. There has to be some mechanism to track the school's paper usage. There also has to be a mechanism to figure out whether kids are learning more/better. That's the school's reason to be there in the first place.
Look at why the school might want to do this. Maybe the school has to pay for their paper directly, but IT purchases come from a state budget. Maybe this bold initiative is being pushed by an outside vendor that would love to fill your school with WAPs
The recycling issue isn't really about IT, though. There are plenty of ways to get old equipment recycled. The owners are responsible for getting rid of it appropriately.
In the end, I'm afraid you'll end up with something like: xyz school district wants to spend (insert 5-figure number) and students to collectively spend (insert 6-figure number) so we can cut our paper usage by $2000 per year. If this is the way to go for the sake of your education, great. But look at the big picture. It doesen't look like you're getting a "bang for the buck" in any sense
Right...I think the "best option" is flexibility, and the ability to reshuffle things. If you've got a good conduit situation that makes it easy to run new wires through the attic (or whatever) you could go with cat 5/6 now....but if fiber or some other medium was needed in a few years, it would just be a saturday afternoon project.
How many times have you seen this at your workplace: the physical location of network wiring & electricity dictates where your servers or other equipment will go in a building. That's like the tail wagging the dog.
A combination of wired and wireless solutions seems to be the best idea, though.
Whatever you do, give your machines as much ram as you can get your hands on.
I have a 120mhz pentium machine with 128 megs of ram; It can run kde on redhat 7.3 (although very slowly). By comparison, I also have pentium II class machine with 48 megs of ram; Its hard drive will thrash continously under similar loads.
Everyone knows how doubling your ram will make a modern machine perform; I think the difference is greater when you use low-end hardware with modern software.
However, as deep space hacking targets get farther away, high latency will not provide hackers with immediate gratification. Also, authorities can prosecute the 15-year-old as an adult! (due to 3 year delivery time for his malicious payload)
I agree. While msn, yahoo, etc. try to scare up a gigantic consortium to figure this out, I've noticed that many small isp's and e-mail providers have already figured out the points you mentioned. For instance, my small isp put a photo of their spam-filtering server on their home page. I thought it was cool. I really think big carriers could make enormous strides very quickly. This just sounds like PR.
Discovery is something that goes on during a trial; not by computer-generated letters to ISP's. The RIAA wants to have its cake and eat it too. They want to reduce what should be a court case to just mailing requests for people's personal information. If they acually had to sue people, it would horrible public relations, and very very costly.
They want the personal identity of the suspected infringer revealed just because they say so. Once they get it, they'll do anything they want with it. Maybe they will call your university, or sue you, or whatever.
In my opinion, the only thing they should be allowed to do is take you to court.
I don't like to use analogies, but here goes: If the local supermarket thinks they saw me on a survalince camera shoplifting, they can only detain me briefly and call the cops. They can't snoop around and find out my identity for their own purposes, and harass me after I've left the parking lot.
I recently read about a kiddie-porn case in the UK being dismissed because the guy's computer had a trojan he might have inadvertently downloaded. IIRC, his defense was that the trojan could have been accessing the illegal websites.
So, If you leave your WAP semi-open, and you're running a proxy, would that be a defense? You could tell the judge "sure, illegal activity came from 11.11.11.11, but it could have been anyone"
Sounds like they managed to screw up the best idea they've had in a long time (although terminal services isn't new). I thought Mira might have a turned into a killer app for the home...small simple terminals in the house around a super-fast PC.
And what's this crap about locking out the "server" from being used? Why a licensing issue, if you've paid for both copies of Windows?
I've used LTSP, and it's simply awesome with just the smallest amount of tweaking. Definitely an area where linux wins hands down.
I agree with you completely. Opera must have taken the idea that the web browser is so central to the computing expeience that they would test the limits of what a browser could do.
A co-worker of mine asked me why I would use this thing over IE. I showed him a few features like opening all bookmarks in a selected folder, in paned windows
I explained that to exploit these features, there was a definite need for the user to read the tutorials, and that it was well worth it. He agreed.
Not that there aren't other good/great browsers out there, but Opera is my favorite. BTW Opera even displays my online banking website properly now...it didn't before.
I second that. Last year I got a 2-3 spam e-mails in the course of a week. Their support staff sent all subscribers a notice apoligizing for the incident. Absolutely unbeleiveable since I'm not paying any money for the service. It seems there was a glitch with their filter.
Since then I've not received one single spam. BTW, It's a testbed for Novell's Netmail product.
People will say what they want about windows suckage, but i've experienced only about 1/10th the problems with 2000 & xp as I ever did with previous windows versions.
Every time people ask me about some silly driver issue or dll or whatever that they can't fix, I always find out they're using windows 98.
It's still hard to make people beleive that modern operating systems (linux, osx, windows 2k etc) solve most if not all the problems they describe. Do some people need computer drama? If that chick in the marketing department couldn't complain that her 'computer doesen't work', what would she do?
everyone's in this boat...just different...
on
Family Tech Support
·
· Score: 1
My situation is kind of strange. My mother who has no tech background is pretty easy to work with. She actually listens to instructions and can research problems.
On the other hand, my father who is supposedly technically competent has a harder time. It's kind of strange, because I remember going to work with him on saturdays when I was a little geek (8-9 yrs old). He let me play with mainframes, I made smiley faces on monochrome monitors. I loved to play with old punch cards and especially those rechargable tape-rewinder thingies with the 3 prongs. Fast forward to modern times....my dad can't seem to grasp the whole idea of a PC. He also can't understand how networks function, either.
The worst thing about family tech support, is that you are forever associated with every subsequent problem that arises with that machine. It's yours for life.
Not so fast....naysayers in 1985 could have said about the VCR: "At $900 each, I don't see these things in eveyrone's home". Now they're less than 1/10 that price, and every home has at least one. Besides that, $900 in 1985 dollars was a friggin huge purchase. I'm too lazy to find out what they would be in 2003 dollars.
Really. When you call somebody, do you really expect to get them on the phone? I sure don't. What I do expect is five layers of monotone voicemail, and the recipient's skill at evading calls.
Personally, I think e-mail creates more time for face-to-face, because trivial/menial communications can be easily batched.
To me, the real tyrany comes from people who duck voicemails, and deny face-to-face conversations never happened. Or they misrepresent the real tone of a conversation. These people should be shot, honestly.
With e-mail, the recipient can either act appropriately, or have their misdeeds archived forever. This cuts both ways, so the sender has to behave him/herself, too. I personally love seeing people get slammed because they ignore e-mail. Most PHB's know that "I didn't get the e-mail" is not an excuse.
What poor people need more than cheap bandwidth is computer literacy. Some poor people can't read, much less read a computer or software manual. Even highly literate people won't take the time to read their manuals.
I think any such program should be accompanied by training on basic computer use. Great idea, though.
In a way, this seems similar to the Verizon case because it puts a middle entity between two clearly guilty parties, and burdens them with the responsibility for some "Bad Thing".
In this case, the people who produce and consume kiddie porn are in clear violation of the law. I say "go after them", and don't waste resources in a futile attempt to make sure nobody can see the kiddie porn.
State AG's could go after the smaller pool of large backbone carriers and get them to filter offending material at the IP level, but that would be more expensive for the states to pursue (I beleive). Instead, pick on the zillions of smaller ISPs
Anyway, expect p2p traffic to get this treatment first, because kiddie porn doesen't put a dent in AOLTW's or Sony's bottom line.
Hey look, I don't censor or filter anything myself. Nor did I say I wanted it. Parents do, though. Nor am I a teacher. I did some more checking myself, and found all kids of birth control advice, political dissent, etc. etc. In fact, the filtering system appears to be even more lenient than I had previously thought.
In fact, it appears the ACs are misinformed. Consider the fact that I'm not a liar, and you were just wrong. That's why I posted in the first place. I thought the portrayal of this act didn't reflect my reality. Maybe the act is being implemented more agressively in other places. I dunno.
Now, If you'll excuse me, I found a few copies of To Kill a Mocking Bird that escaped my original round of burning. Bye, now!
Slashdot Mirror
hey, stop carping about his career choices!
Uh, I guess I just proved my own point. It makes me dumb and insightful all at once! From now on I'm going to start reading my spam that says I'm continuously broadcasting an IP number. Yikes, that sounds scary.
After reviewing the arguments, I've concluded this is a good thing. Maybe even a necessary thing. Here's why:
Have you ever tried to explain to an end user what a virus is and how it works? Few have a decent understanding of what viruses are all about. Even folks with a technical background have a hard time keeping up with them, and knowing all the types.
As operating systems and viruses get more complicated, this gap will only get wider. I saw that article/paper arguing that as computers becom almost biological in complexity, they must be able to fix their own minor problems. Same type thing.
I agree. Screw the naysayers. I've watched a roomba in action...pretty neat.
This is also important because of the aging population. As my parents get older, I watch everyday tasks become increasingly difficult. This makes a mainstream product of this sort more than just "cool" or "neat".
Cost....The school wants every student to purchase a laptop ($800-1000 new, but possibly reused old laptops from mom & dad)to save the school how much paper? Costing how much money? That brings up questions of class and having to buy access to a public education.
As far as I know, paper mills use electricity, and some chemical by-products to manufacture their product, but I think hundreds of laptops would create much more pollution/environmental impact than saving some paper. How environmentally damaging is a landfill full of wasted paper anyway? When I throw out a piece of paper, its not like I'm throwing out a couple of AA batteries (I recycle those).
People might even use more paper. There has to be some mechanism to track the school's paper usage. There also has to be a mechanism to figure out whether kids are learning more/better. That's the school's reason to be there in the first place.
Look at why the school might want to do this. Maybe the school has to pay for their paper directly, but IT purchases come from a state budget. Maybe this bold initiative is being pushed by an outside vendor that would love to fill your school with WAPs
The recycling issue isn't really about IT, though. There are plenty of ways to get old equipment recycled. The owners are responsible for getting rid of it appropriately.
In the end, I'm afraid you'll end up with something like: xyz school district wants to spend (insert 5-figure number) and students to collectively spend (insert 6-figure number) so we can cut our paper usage by $2000 per year. If this is the way to go for the sake of your education, great. But look at the big picture. It doesen't look like you're getting a "bang for the buck" in any sense
Right...I think the "best option" is flexibility, and the ability to reshuffle things. If you've got a good conduit situation that makes it easy to run new wires through the attic (or whatever) you could go with cat 5/6 now....but if fiber or some other medium was needed in a few years, it would just be a saturday afternoon project.
How many times have you seen this at your workplace: the physical location of network wiring & electricity dictates where your servers or other equipment will go in a building. That's like the tail wagging the dog.
A combination of wired and wireless solutions seems to be the best idea, though.
Whatever you do, give your machines as much ram as you can get your hands on.
I have a 120mhz pentium machine with 128 megs of ram; It can run kde on redhat 7.3 (although very slowly). By comparison, I also have pentium II class machine with 48 megs of ram; Its hard drive will thrash continously under similar loads.
Everyone knows how doubling your ram will make a modern machine perform; I think the difference is greater when you use low-end hardware with modern software.
However, as deep space hacking targets get farther away, high latency will not provide hackers with immediate gratification. Also, authorities can prosecute the 15-year-old as an adult! (due to 3 year delivery time for his malicious payload)
I agree. While msn, yahoo, etc. try to scare up a gigantic consortium to figure this out, I've noticed that many small isp's and e-mail providers have already figured out the points you mentioned. For instance, my small isp put a photo of their spam-filtering server on their home page. I thought it was cool. I really think big carriers could make enormous strides very quickly. This just sounds like PR.
Discovery is something that goes on during a trial; not by computer-generated letters to ISP's. The RIAA wants to have its cake and eat it too. They want to reduce what should be a court case to just mailing requests for people's personal information. If they acually had to sue people, it would horrible public relations, and very very costly.
They want the personal identity of the suspected infringer revealed just because they say so. Once they get it, they'll do anything they want with it. Maybe they will call your university, or sue you, or whatever.
In my opinion, the only thing they should be allowed to do is take you to court.
I don't like to use analogies, but here goes: If the local supermarket thinks they saw me on a survalince camera shoplifting, they can only detain me briefly and call the cops. They can't snoop around and find out my identity for their own purposes, and harass me after I've left the parking lot.
I recently read about a kiddie-porn case in the UK being dismissed because the guy's computer had a trojan he might have inadvertently downloaded. IIRC, his defense was that the trojan could have been accessing the illegal websites.
So, If you leave your WAP semi-open, and you're running a proxy, would that be a defense? You could tell the judge "sure, illegal activity came from 11.11.11.11, but it could have been anyone"
Sounds like they managed to screw up the best idea they've had in a long time (although terminal services isn't new). I thought Mira might have a turned into a killer app for the home...small simple terminals in the house around a super-fast PC.
And what's this crap about locking out the "server" from being used? Why a licensing issue, if you've paid for both copies of Windows?
I've used LTSP, and it's simply awesome with just the smallest amount of tweaking. Definitely an area where linux wins hands down.
I agree with you completely. Opera must have taken the idea that the web browser is so central to the computing expeience that they would test the limits of what a browser could do.
A co-worker of mine asked me why I would use this thing over IE. I showed him a few features like opening all bookmarks in a selected folder, in paned windows
I explained that to exploit these features, there was a definite need for the user to read the tutorials, and that it was well worth it. He agreed.
Not that there aren't other good/great browsers out there, but Opera is my favorite. BTW Opera even displays my online banking website properly now...it didn't before.
I wanted just such a tool, and also wondered why there were so few offerings.
I found xmms-control, and it did quite nicely: http://www.joethielen.com/xmms-control/
Basically you need a linux/apache/php web server, xmms, and xmms-shell to pass commands to the player.
You'll need to take care of some security issues, though. The web interface is a bit spartan, but you can easily modify it to your liking.
However, some other posters listed projects I never found. I'll be sure to check those out.
I second that. Last year I got a 2-3 spam e-mails in the course of a week. Their support staff sent all subscribers a notice apoligizing for the incident. Absolutely unbeleiveable since I'm not paying any money for the service. It seems there was a glitch with their filter.
Since then I've not received one single spam. BTW, It's a testbed for Novell's Netmail product.
People will say what they want about windows suckage, but i've experienced only about 1/10th the problems with 2000 & xp as I ever did with previous windows versions.
Every time people ask me about some silly driver issue or dll or whatever that they can't fix, I always find out they're using windows 98.
It's still hard to make people beleive that modern operating systems (linux, osx, windows 2k etc) solve most if not all the problems they describe. Do some people need computer drama? If that chick in the marketing department couldn't complain that her 'computer doesen't work', what would she do?
My situation is kind of strange. My mother who has no tech background is pretty easy to work with. She actually listens to instructions and can research problems.
On the other hand, my father who is supposedly technically competent has a harder time. It's kind of strange, because I remember going to work with him on saturdays when I was a little geek (8-9 yrs old). He let me play with mainframes, I made smiley faces on monochrome monitors. I loved to play with old punch cards and especially those rechargable tape-rewinder thingies with the 3 prongs. Fast forward to modern times....my dad can't seem to grasp the whole idea of a PC. He also can't understand how networks function, either.
The worst thing about family tech support, is that you are forever associated with every subsequent problem that arises with that machine. It's yours for life.
Not so fast....naysayers in 1985 could have said about the VCR: "At $900 each, I don't see these things in eveyrone's home". Now they're less than 1/10 that price, and every home has at least one. Besides that, $900 in 1985 dollars was a friggin huge purchase. I'm too lazy to find out what they would be in 2003 dollars.
Really. When you call somebody, do you really expect to get them on the phone? I sure don't. What I do expect is five layers of monotone voicemail, and the recipient's skill at evading calls.
Personally, I think e-mail creates more time for face-to-face, because trivial/menial communications can be easily batched.
To me, the real tyrany comes from people who duck voicemails, and deny face-to-face conversations never happened. Or they misrepresent the real tone of a conversation. These people should be shot, honestly.
With e-mail, the recipient can either act appropriately, or have their misdeeds archived forever. This cuts both ways, so the sender has to behave him/herself, too. I personally love seeing people get slammed because they ignore e-mail. Most PHB's know that "I didn't get the e-mail" is not an excuse.
The problem with technology in education is that the technology often duplicates what is already being taught with textbooks (and taught pretty well).
If the laptops could displace the purchase of expensive textbooks, it might put a dent in the $37m price tag
The private sector spends on technology to increase productivity and decrease costs.
No, but around every turn there was this guy in a spiffy dark suit leaving the room.
What poor people need more than cheap bandwidth is computer literacy. Some poor people can't read, much less read a computer or software manual. Even highly literate people won't take the time to read their manuals.
I think any such program should be accompanied by training on basic computer use. Great idea, though.
I second that. It's pretty offensive to suggest that poor people are poor because they somehow "deserve" to be, or they're just plain lazy
Personally, I turned out OK, but I grew up in suburbia, in a two-parent household, with a stay-at-home mother.
I didn't have to pay my way through college...my parents did. Call me crazy, but there just might be a relationship there.
In a way, this seems similar to the Verizon case because it puts a middle entity between two clearly guilty parties, and burdens them with the responsibility for some "Bad Thing".
In this case, the people who produce and consume kiddie porn are in clear violation of the law. I say "go after them", and don't waste resources in a futile attempt to make sure nobody can see the kiddie porn.
State AG's could go after the smaller pool of large backbone carriers and get them to filter offending material at the IP level, but that would be more expensive for the states to pursue (I beleive). Instead, pick on the zillions of smaller ISPs
Anyway, expect p2p traffic to get this treatment first, because kiddie porn doesen't put a dent in AOLTW's or Sony's bottom line.
Hey look, I don't censor or filter anything myself. Nor did I say I wanted it. Parents do, though. Nor am I a teacher. I did some more checking myself, and found all kids of birth control advice, political dissent, etc. etc. In fact, the filtering system appears to be even more lenient than I had previously thought.
In fact, it appears the ACs are misinformed. Consider the fact that I'm not a liar, and you were just wrong. That's why I posted in the first place. I thought the portrayal of this act didn't reflect my reality. Maybe the act is being implemented more agressively in other places. I dunno.
Now, If you'll excuse me, I found a few copies of To Kill a Mocking Bird that escaped my original round of burning. Bye, now!