Paranoia abound. First off, that he left his computer in another's custody negates their role in search and seizure. Secondly, an investigator makes the final judgment about an actual crime or otherwise.
That the tech was rifling through his photos looking for pictures of his wife or hot 19yo daughter is irrelevant. That is a matter of internal security and policy, and potential prosecution in its own right, but Sodomsky's possession of child pornography should not be tainted by this action.
It is VERY easy to accidentally uncover stuff you don't want or mean to when working with Windows. I have more than once stumbled upon private information while working with a customer's computer by simply way of the folder previews in Windows XP. You open a folder with pictures and there's thumbnails all over the place.
Most techs have some kind of ethical standard, written or unwritten, which prevents them from engrossed reading of personal documents and unnecessary browsing of media, as well as not divulging or discussing private information found in the course of normal work.
In Florida, as soon as you come across what you even think is child porn on a client computer, that computer and all around it immediately become a crime scene and cops must be called immediately. No arrests or charges are made until authorities investigate and make a final decision.
If the investigation deems necessary, an arrest is made and the whole thing can go to court where the accused has the right to proclaim his innocence and the prosecution has the burden of proving guilt. If the investigation determines that the media is not of concern, the customer is miffed, but life goes on. If the case goes to trial and the accused is exonerated, then only the court of public opinion lays judgment.
If the cops are dumb enough to arrest you without testing the substance in the vehicle, which they can due at that point to reasonable suspicion, then they deserve to be sued.
And that's just it. The reason advertisers are pushing for the use of this kind of technology is because billboards and other forms have become so commonplace that we can easily ignore them. As are the adverts running on the WalMart Television Network, well except for the tweaters with the piercing high frequencies (aside, I stopped going to the local WalMart even for quick in-and-out items until they got rid of this system.) Newspaper ads, just the same. Even the ads on the walls of the hockey arena are just as easily ignored.
But, no! They won't ignore this! Ads beamed directly into their skulls! I'm surprised we don't read about accidents caused by this particular advertisement: people walking into the street, wrecking bikes, tripping over strollers, and so on because they're startled by this. I wonder how it interferes with people talking on cell phones. Sure, give it long enough and enough penetration into the world and we'll barely notice them (this will only hurt for a minute.) Then what's the next step? What is the next type of advertisement that we cannot habituate?
"LightSpeed Briefs" (anyone?)
DAMMIT. The whole thing makes me angry... I know when I need something, and generally I know where to find it. If I don't, I'll ask someone, or look it up online. We're not in the information dark ages anymore, we can find information when we need it. Maybe I'm living in the wrong society: I don't mind being advertised to, but God-dammit, don't ram it down my throat.
"The sound isn't rattling your skull, it's not penetrating you, it's not doing anything nefarious at all. It's just like having a flashlight vs. a light bulb," he said.
It is penetrating my space purposefully and unavoidably to sell me a product that I do not want. And even if I *did* want it, I will no longer thanks to this intrusive form of advertising. And yes, it is like a flashlight: directly in my eyes from which I cannot turn away.
No no no no no. Direct audio advertising like this is a Bad Thing(tm).
This really is not about privacy. If I am in public and an advertising in playing, I can generally avoid or ignore that ad. Having it beamed to my ear directly is a nuisance I cannot escape.
Friday I received my replacement phone from SE. It was able to create and post to a new blog. I then used the provided token to claim the blog and merge it into my original. I'm thinking that the problem was related to Blogger having locked the old device in their system, but not copping to it.
Ah, well. I guess that's the kind of support you can expect from a free service. I just hope it doesn't happen again.
In regards to the proxy info, I pretty much only use that profile for the built-in NetFront browser and MMS. I create another Data Account which uses the isp.cingular APN and no proxy. Their proxy seems to block all the protocols I need for various functions like FTP, IMAP, SMTP (especially,) and so one. So I reference this new data account with a wap profile, then assign that profile to the Java Internet profile, and so on. I also tell the email client to use that profile to connect.
I know from experience as I have used non-Cingular/AT&T devices for a few years now. Most recently is the Sony Ericsson K790a, soon to be the K850i. And they are VERY quick to blame any problems on your device.
In particular, the Blogger function of the K790a is not working for me anymore. Blogger says it's my carrier, AT&T says it's Sony Ericsson's fault, and they won't help me to even troubleshoot to provide info to SE since it's not one of their phones.
My next step is to lie to them and say it's a phone which runs the same OS just to get some help.
I keep a Cingular-branded T637 on hand so when I have problems I can swap back to it and prove that the issue is not my phone. They'll support that even though I bought it on eBay. It just has to be Cingular/AT&T branded. I went through that with my voice mail during the Cingular-to-AT&T transition, during which my voice mail would ring and never pick up or be busy. This made me miss a good number of customer calls. FRUSTRATING.
She was fired for having an opinion. Amazing. Correct me if I am wrong, but does it not require an opinion on a matter to better a system, to move forward so that we do not stagnate?
I mean, someone at some point had to assert an opinion to put (un)intelligent design at the top of the chain. Was that person fired?
This whole country is going right down the shitter because of policies like this. I also believe that draconian enforcement of this ilk is what causes people to be even louder and more obnoxious about their perspectives. This is a one-upmanship power struggle.
Accusations of judicial corruption are extremely bold. To make such an accusation without any kind of evidence could land him in even more trouble.
I have no doubt he'll be disbarred. But he won't lose his livelihood -- people like him cannot be silenced without more extreme measures. He'll take to the media, whore himself out as an "expert" in the field, go on the speaking circuit, and find other ways to corrupt to issue. If only his powers could be used for Good.
He'll probably start his own church, piss of the Scientologists, and sudden disappear...:)
Anyone ever get the feeling that we are going to really muck things up by trying to "fix" things? We introduce new species of animal or bacteria to an environment to control naturally occurring beings, then these predators completely take over and become a problem in and of themselves. So and on so forth.
I have to believe sometimes that we as humans are simply not smart enough, or perhaps do not see enough of the big picture, to understand the intricacies of the world or the universe to implement such grand scale processes.
"File-sharing and illegally downloading of music has devastated a once-booming music industry. Some observers say the industry is just trying to protect itself."
Correct me if I am wrong, but I am of the opinion that this has never been proven conclusively and that what "has devastated a once-booming music industry" is the industry itself.
Also, for the grammar pedantic, should that be "illegal downloading of music"?
I'm just happy that new installations of Windows XP will now be MUCH MUCH faster. A clean installation of Windows XP with SP2 can take several hours due to over 280MB of additional update downloads, even with off-line update CDs and so on. And that's on a fairly recent computer with decent specs!
I might have to kill a Dell hard drive so I can get a Dell XP SP3 OEM CD with the replacement (I could probably slipstream, but I want to see what color the SP3 CD will be.)
Funny. I was in school 15 to 20 years ago, and I remember the rule being quite the same as today. I would be interested to see a grammar text from the day.
None of the questions presented here matter, even if they are serious. Amiga has produced nothing of value since OS3.9 several years ago. Bill McEwen went on the record a while back saying that he put a great deal of his own personal money into making sure that OS3.9 was released. If that is true, then that is the last act of heroism we have seen from the Amiga camp. OS4 is working but stuck in litigation. OS5 will be free from the shackles of hardware dependence, so they say. But we all know that nothing from Amiga ever materializes.
Re:Another shining example of failure to adapt
on
Why AnywhereCD Failed
·
· Score: 1
I like to use my parents as a metering stick in a lot of situations like these. My father was dumbfounded by the notice that he could not play his John Wayne DVD on his computer because the video card had TV output which did not have Macrovision protection and could not be disabled. Before then he really did not care about all of this DRM crapola. Now he is a little more wiser.
I observe this shift in other people, albeit gradually. People are realizing that they are not getting value by having to purchase the same song again and again for multiple purposes.
Another shining example of failure to adapt
on
Why AnywhereCD Failed
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I have to agree with his biggest point, that people WANT the music, but they also insist on value. This is an area where The Labels have failed to grasp onto the idea of adapting to the medium of the day: the Internet.
Isn't there a theory about failing to adapt and thus failing to survive? Sounds familiar for some reason. (Though, in this unfortunate case, failing to adapt to lack of adaptation lead to demise. Sounds soooo bass akwards!)
I don't doubt that it called itself that, but like American Intercontinental "University" or DeVry "University," I still believe from your description that it was a vocational school in disguise. Care to tell us the name of the place?
I am curious, though rhetorically, what in my statement makes you think that I attended such an institution, for which you seem to hold much disdain.
Quite frankly, Troll, I am not obligated to provide such information to you or anyone else. However, as I have hung my credibility on the legitimacy of my claims, I first attended Troy State University, then later attended Florida State University.
Now you may commence with the "a college in Alabama is hardly a college," or "FSU isn't a real school, you should have gone to UF" or whatever useless argument you may compose in light of your initial assumption being proven incorrect. Believe me, I have heard most of them already and they make little difference to the current amount of my success. Have fun talking to yourself.
Actually, I attended a full university, then a community college, then another full university, all divided between two states. I am sorry to have to tell you that there really is not much difference between them aside from the student population. As oft maligned as community colleges are, even the CC I attended was approaching critical mass on population and now has an amazing campus size which rivals some universities and ranks 24th in the nation.
And I did mention that it was my high-level math classes, by which I meant the classes at the core of my major taken at the university.
Irrespective of my educational experiences, I still stand by my statement. While the concepts of typing, spell-checking, printing and so on may translate between word processors, more intricate tasks such as formatting, tables, and so on do not translate so well. If you do not believe me, try switching work between Word, WordPerfect, StarOffice, and Lotus sometime. The procedures for the same concepts are not the same between products. (Or for that matter, even the same between different versions of WordPerfect.) I would speculate that this partly due to fear of litigation for violating look-and-feel or some unknown patent on a process, or simply because one company thinks its way of doing something is better than another's.
None the less, the driving force right now is Microsoft products. You do not have to be limited to only Microsoft products, but you damn well better know them. If you do not believe me, go to any state agency job listing in Florida and find me a job worth a darn which does not require Microsoft Office knowledge. I would hazard that this is the same in most other states as well, and even federal.
Being that we are living in a world of alternatives in software, teachers would be well-advised to know more than just one product. Though it is not always feasible. I remember being taught word processing in elementary and junior high on Atari 800s and Apple ][s, and I had a teacher who used Mac. At home I used a TI, and a number of my friends used Commodore. Many times the lament was that teaching word processing would be so much easier if only there were a single standard.
I cannot for the life of me remember on which of those computers we learned spreadsheets (I want to say it was the Atari as I swear I remember the character set.) In later years (high school, right about the time my school got a PC lab put together) we were using an Apple ProDOS-based word processor and spreadsheet application. Just the differences there make me cringe if we had to do them between all the different platforms.
I will admit that for having learned across so many platforms, I feel much more rounded than today's Microsoft-numbed brains. I especially feel lucky to have been present during the time of maturation of such products and processes. But in the end of it all, one product and one process has been selected as the standard, and we had all better at least know how to use it. Learn how to use other products at the same time as you can, and enough of you might be able to make a difference later on down the road.
Personally, I do not care which or whose product or process comes out on top. I would just prefer a single product that lends itself to ease-of-use rather than beating the user to death over simple things like a margin change for one paragraph destroying the formatting of an entire document. Such a seemingly simple situation was my indoctrination to Word after using geoWrite for so long.
For the sake of noting it, I never had an English class software requirement until later years when we were submitting documents to the instructors. In fact, I made it through many years of high school and college using geoWrite on the Commodore 128 and then WordPerfect on the Amiga. In the last couple of years when I was required to submit documents, I mostly did them in StarOffice and exported the docs to Word format for submission.
AH HA! Oh, man, did you write that one yourself? Can I give you one of the "Troll" mods I was given by a fan-boy for my OP?
Actually, I did attend a real university, thanks (or as you put it, "an college." I apparently came out better than I thought.) As a "late bloomer" my experience far exceeded my education making it very difficult for me to stomach a number of classes, as well as having to balance between class work and a growing, very demanding career. I tutored a good number of students from the graduating class the year I was tossed from CS and eventually I dropped out to run my business. Now that I have exposed myself I am sure you will be happy to continue the spanking.
You are over-thinking the statement. Since the courses were geared around the TI, there was a small amount of time in different parts of the course reserved for teaching how to operate the calculator. The functions and the results are the same between the TI and the Casio I used, however the operations to get to those results are different.
I remember not being allowed to use calculators in earlier classes. I wish it were still the same. There are a lot of knuckle heads coming out of math courses that cannot do anything unless they have their battery powered brain in their pocket. And God forbid that a calculation comes out wrong because chances are it will not be noticed.
There are a lot of things in college courses these days which would make people cry.
True, but if Office 2007 is what the kids will be learning at school, then Office 2007 is what they need to be using.
In college all of our high-level math courses were geared around the TI calculators. They are great machines, and I finally got my hands on a couple of them, including the TI-92. However, at the time I borrowed a friend's Casio, because I was dirt friggen poor. Guess what? I spent a LOT more time translating operations between the calculators than I spent on the course work.
I use Microsoft Office and StarOffice (Sun's commercial OO.o) and interact with customers in the two formats frequently. There are pluses for each one, but I lose a good bit of formating between the two, especially conditional formating and certain complex formulas. I work with it because I am familiar and comfortable, but in a learning environment one should spend more time learning the curriculum than how to work differently. If you want to use FOSS alternatives in school, pick a different school, or try to convince your school (or instructors) to use them.
The idea of corporations switching to software like OO.o instead of Office (or The Gimp instead of PhotoShop, etc.) is not highly likely. What is taught in school, especially at the college or vocational technology level, does not frequently drive what happens in the corporate world. A massive shift from corporate standards at the learning level would be a disservice to students: you enter college with the expectation that you will leave with universally marketable skills.
A better approach might be to offer alternative software courses which would count as elective courses towards a degree. Or even make such a class a requirement in programs like CS, IS, or MIS, so that students come out with a more rounded approach and understanding. I believe that would be more likely to induce a shift at the corporate level than a sudden change by attrition.
Blah blah blah, yak yak yak. Pull your head out of the sand. I'm sure security experts already know of what can happen with this, and my rattling and speculation isn't going to cause a catastrophe. Crackers didn't just read my post and go "holy shit, that's a GREAT idea!" They've already thought of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Paranoia abound. First off, that he left his computer in another's custody negates their role in search and seizure. Secondly, an investigator makes the final judgment about an actual crime or otherwise.
That the tech was rifling through his photos looking for pictures of his wife or hot 19yo daughter is irrelevant. That is a matter of internal security and policy, and potential prosecution in its own right, but Sodomsky's possession of child pornography should not be tainted by this action.
It is VERY easy to accidentally uncover stuff you don't want or mean to when working with Windows. I have more than once stumbled upon private information while working with a customer's computer by simply way of the folder previews in Windows XP. You open a folder with pictures and there's thumbnails all over the place.
Most techs have some kind of ethical standard, written or unwritten, which prevents them from engrossed reading of personal documents and unnecessary browsing of media, as well as not divulging or discussing private information found in the course of normal work.
In Florida, as soon as you come across what you even think is child porn on a client computer, that computer and all around it immediately become a crime scene and cops must be called immediately. No arrests or charges are made until authorities investigate and make a final decision.
If the investigation deems necessary, an arrest is made and the whole thing can go to court where the accused has the right to proclaim his innocence and the prosecution has the burden of proving guilt. If the investigation determines that the media is not of concern, the customer is miffed, but life goes on. If the case goes to trial and the accused is exonerated, then only the court of public opinion lays judgment.
I fail to see a problem with this system.
If the cops are dumb enough to arrest you without testing the substance in the vehicle, which they can due at that point to reasonable suspicion, then they deserve to be sued.
And that's just it. The reason advertisers are pushing for the use of this kind of technology is because billboards and other forms have become so commonplace that we can easily ignore them. As are the adverts running on the WalMart Television Network, well except for the tweaters with the piercing high frequencies (aside, I stopped going to the local WalMart even for quick in-and-out items until they got rid of this system.) Newspaper ads, just the same. Even the ads on the walls of the hockey arena are just as easily ignored.
But, no! They won't ignore this! Ads beamed directly into their skulls! I'm surprised we don't read about accidents caused by this particular advertisement: people walking into the street, wrecking bikes, tripping over strollers, and so on because they're startled by this. I wonder how it interferes with people talking on cell phones. Sure, give it long enough and enough penetration into the world and we'll barely notice them (this will only hurt for a minute.) Then what's the next step? What is the next type of advertisement that we cannot habituate?
"LightSpeed Briefs" (anyone?)
DAMMIT. The whole thing makes me angry... I know when I need something, and generally I know where to find it. If I don't, I'll ask someone, or look it up online. We're not in the information dark ages anymore, we can find information when we need it. Maybe I'm living in the wrong society: I don't mind being advertised to, but God-dammit, don't ram it down my throat.
It is penetrating my space purposefully and unavoidably to sell me a product that I do not want. And even if I *did* want it, I will no longer thanks to this intrusive form of advertising. And yes, it is like a flashlight: directly in my eyes from which I cannot turn away.
No no no no no. Direct audio advertising like this is a Bad Thing(tm).
This really is not about privacy. If I am in public and an advertising in playing, I can generally avoid or ignore that ad. Having it beamed to my ear directly is a nuisance I cannot escape.
Friday I received my replacement phone from SE. It was able to create and post to a new blog. I then used the provided token to claim the blog and merge it into my original. I'm thinking that the problem was related to Blogger having locked the old device in their system, but not copping to it.
Ah, well. I guess that's the kind of support you can expect from a free service. I just hope it doesn't happen again.
In regards to the proxy info, I pretty much only use that profile for the built-in NetFront browser and MMS. I create another Data Account which uses the isp.cingular APN and no proxy. Their proxy seems to block all the protocols I need for various functions like FTP, IMAP, SMTP (especially,) and so one. So I reference this new data account with a wap profile, then assign that profile to the Java Internet profile, and so on. I also tell the email client to use that profile to connect.
I know from experience as I have used non-Cingular/AT&T devices for a few years now. Most recently is the Sony Ericsson K790a, soon to be the K850i. And they are VERY quick to blame any problems on your device.
In particular, the Blogger function of the K790a is not working for me anymore. Blogger says it's my carrier, AT&T says it's Sony Ericsson's fault, and they won't help me to even troubleshoot to provide info to SE since it's not one of their phones.
My next step is to lie to them and say it's a phone which runs the same OS just to get some help.
I keep a Cingular-branded T637 on hand so when I have problems I can swap back to it and prove that the issue is not my phone. They'll support that even though I bought it on eBay. It just has to be Cingular/AT&T branded. I went through that with my voice mail during the Cingular-to-AT&T transition, during which my voice mail would ring and never pick up or be busy. This made me miss a good number of customer calls. FRUSTRATING.
She was fired for having an opinion. Amazing. Correct me if I am wrong, but does it not require an opinion on a matter to better a system, to move forward so that we do not stagnate?
I mean, someone at some point had to assert an opinion to put (un)intelligent design at the top of the chain. Was that person fired?
This whole country is going right down the shitter because of policies like this. I also believe that draconian enforcement of this ilk is what causes people to be even louder and more obnoxious about their perspectives. This is a one-upmanship power struggle.
What was Leia's comment to Tarkin?
Accusations of judicial corruption are extremely bold. To make such an accusation without any kind of evidence could land him in even more trouble.
:)
I have no doubt he'll be disbarred. But he won't lose his livelihood -- people like him cannot be silenced without more extreme measures. He'll take to the media, whore himself out as an "expert" in the field, go on the speaking circuit, and find other ways to corrupt to issue. If only his powers could be used for Good.
He'll probably start his own church, piss of the Scientologists, and sudden disappear...
Anyone ever get the feeling that we are going to really muck things up by trying to "fix" things? We introduce new species of animal or bacteria to an environment to control naturally occurring beings, then these predators completely take over and become a problem in and of themselves. So and on so forth.
I have to believe sometimes that we as humans are simply not smart enough, or perhaps do not see enough of the big picture, to understand the intricacies of the world or the universe to implement such grand scale processes.
FTA:
"File-sharing and illegally downloading of music has devastated a once-booming music industry. Some observers say the industry is just trying to protect itself."
Correct me if I am wrong, but I am of the opinion that this has never been proven conclusively and that what "has devastated a once-booming music industry" is the industry itself.
Also, for the grammar pedantic, should that be "illegal downloading of music"?
I'm just happy that new installations of Windows XP will now be MUCH MUCH faster. A clean installation of Windows XP with SP2 can take several hours due to over 280MB of additional update downloads, even with off-line update CDs and so on. And that's on a fairly recent computer with decent specs!
I might have to kill a Dell hard drive so I can get a Dell XP SP3 OEM CD with the replacement (I could probably slipstream, but I want to see what color the SP3 CD will be.)
*yawn* Oh, I'm sorry. Was that the sound of you shoving your apologies in a dark hole?
I digress. I must be missing something as I do not see your point, snide comment aside
Funny. I was in school 15 to 20 years ago, and I remember the rule being quite the same as today. I would be interested to see a grammar text from the day.
None of the questions presented here matter, even if they are serious. Amiga has produced nothing of value since OS3.9 several years ago. Bill McEwen went on the record a while back saying that he put a great deal of his own personal money into making sure that OS3.9 was released. If that is true, then that is the last act of heroism we have seen from the Amiga camp. OS4 is working but stuck in litigation. OS5 will be free from the shackles of hardware dependence, so they say. But we all know that nothing from Amiga ever materializes.
I like to use my parents as a metering stick in a lot of situations like these. My father was dumbfounded by the notice that he could not play his John Wayne DVD on his computer because the video card had TV output which did not have Macrovision protection and could not be disabled. Before then he really did not care about all of this DRM crapola. Now he is a little more wiser.
I observe this shift in other people, albeit gradually. People are realizing that they are not getting value by having to purchase the same song again and again for multiple purposes.
I have to agree with his biggest point, that people WANT the music, but they also insist on value. This is an area where The Labels have failed to grasp onto the idea of adapting to the medium of the day: the Internet.
Isn't there a theory about failing to adapt and thus failing to survive? Sounds familiar for some reason. (Though, in this unfortunate case, failing to adapt to lack of adaptation lead to demise. Sounds soooo bass akwards!)
I don't doubt that it called itself that, but like American Intercontinental "University" or DeVry "University," I still believe from your description that it was a vocational school in disguise. Care to tell us the name of the place?
I am curious, though rhetorically, what in my statement makes you think that I attended such an institution, for which you seem to hold much disdain.Quite frankly, Troll, I am not obligated to provide such information to you or anyone else. However, as I have hung my credibility on the legitimacy of my claims, I first attended Troy State University, then later attended Florida State University.
Now you may commence with the "a college in Alabama is hardly a college," or "FSU isn't a real school, you should have gone to UF" or whatever useless argument you may compose in light of your initial assumption being proven incorrect. Believe me, I have heard most of them already and they make little difference to the current amount of my success. Have fun talking to yourself.
Actually, I attended a full university, then a community college, then another full university, all divided between two states. I am sorry to have to tell you that there really is not much difference between them aside from the student population. As oft maligned as community colleges are, even the CC I attended was approaching critical mass on population and now has an amazing campus size which rivals some universities and ranks 24th in the nation.
And I did mention that it was my high-level math classes, by which I meant the classes at the core of my major taken at the university.
Irrespective of my educational experiences, I still stand by my statement. While the concepts of typing, spell-checking, printing and so on may translate between word processors, more intricate tasks such as formatting, tables, and so on do not translate so well. If you do not believe me, try switching work between Word, WordPerfect, StarOffice, and Lotus sometime. The procedures for the same concepts are not the same between products. (Or for that matter, even the same between different versions of WordPerfect.) I would speculate that this partly due to fear of litigation for violating look-and-feel or some unknown patent on a process, or simply because one company thinks its way of doing something is better than another's.
None the less, the driving force right now is Microsoft products. You do not have to be limited to only Microsoft products, but you damn well better know them. If you do not believe me, go to any state agency job listing in Florida and find me a job worth a darn which does not require Microsoft Office knowledge. I would hazard that this is the same in most other states as well, and even federal.
Being that we are living in a world of alternatives in software, teachers would be well-advised to know more than just one product. Though it is not always feasible. I remember being taught word processing in elementary and junior high on Atari 800s and Apple ][s, and I had a teacher who used Mac. At home I used a TI, and a number of my friends used Commodore. Many times the lament was that teaching word processing would be so much easier if only there were a single standard.
I cannot for the life of me remember on which of those computers we learned spreadsheets (I want to say it was the Atari as I swear I remember the character set.) In later years (high school, right about the time my school got a PC lab put together) we were using an Apple ProDOS-based word processor and spreadsheet application. Just the differences there make me cringe if we had to do them between all the different platforms.
I will admit that for having learned across so many platforms, I feel much more rounded than today's Microsoft-numbed brains. I especially feel lucky to have been present during the time of maturation of such products and processes. But in the end of it all, one product and one process has been selected as the standard, and we had all better at least know how to use it. Learn how to use other products at the same time as you can, and enough of you might be able to make a difference later on down the road.
Personally, I do not care which or whose product or process comes out on top. I would just prefer a single product that lends itself to ease-of-use rather than beating the user to death over simple things like a margin change for one paragraph destroying the formatting of an entire document. Such a seemingly simple situation was my indoctrination to Word after using geoWrite for so long.
For the sake of noting it, I never had an English class software requirement until later years when we were submitting documents to the instructors. In fact, I made it through many years of high school and college using geoWrite on the Commodore 128 and then WordPerfect on the Amiga. In the last couple of years when I was required to submit documents, I mostly did them in StarOffice and exported the docs to Word format for submission.
Thinking it all over I see a progr
AH HA! Oh, man, did you write that one yourself? Can I give you one of the "Troll" mods I was given by a fan-boy for my OP?
Actually, I did attend a real university, thanks (or as you put it, "an college." I apparently came out better than I thought.) As a "late bloomer" my experience far exceeded my education making it very difficult for me to stomach a number of classes, as well as having to balance between class work and a growing, very demanding career. I tutored a good number of students from the graduating class the year I was tossed from CS and eventually I dropped out to run my business. Now that I have exposed myself I am sure you will be happy to continue the spanking.
You are over-thinking the statement. Since the courses were geared around the TI, there was a small amount of time in different parts of the course reserved for teaching how to operate the calculator. The functions and the results are the same between the TI and the Casio I used, however the operations to get to those results are different.
I remember not being allowed to use calculators in earlier classes. I wish it were still the same. There are a lot of knuckle heads coming out of math courses that cannot do anything unless they have their battery powered brain in their pocket. And God forbid that a calculation comes out wrong because chances are it will not be noticed.
There are a lot of things in college courses these days which would make people cry.
True, but if Office 2007 is what the kids will be learning at school, then Office 2007 is what they need to be using.
In college all of our high-level math courses were geared around the TI calculators. They are great machines, and I finally got my hands on a couple of them, including the TI-92. However, at the time I borrowed a friend's Casio, because I was dirt friggen poor. Guess what? I spent a LOT more time translating operations between the calculators than I spent on the course work.
I use Microsoft Office and StarOffice (Sun's commercial OO.o) and interact with customers in the two formats frequently. There are pluses for each one, but I lose a good bit of formating between the two, especially conditional formating and certain complex formulas. I work with it because I am familiar and comfortable, but in a learning environment one should spend more time learning the curriculum than how to work differently. If you want to use FOSS alternatives in school, pick a different school, or try to convince your school (or instructors) to use them.
The idea of corporations switching to software like OO.o instead of Office (or The Gimp instead of PhotoShop, etc.) is not highly likely. What is taught in school, especially at the college or vocational technology level, does not frequently drive what happens in the corporate world. A massive shift from corporate standards at the learning level would be a disservice to students: you enter college with the expectation that you will leave with universally marketable skills.
A better approach might be to offer alternative software courses which would count as elective courses towards a degree. Or even make such a class a requirement in programs like CS, IS, or MIS, so that students come out with a more rounded approach and understanding. I believe that would be more likely to induce a shift at the corporate level than a sudden change by attrition.
At the very least I can smell a troll. And damn if I didn't feed it. Shoulda seen that coming.
Blah blah blah, yak yak yak. Pull your head out of the sand. I'm sure security experts already know of what can happen with this, and my rattling and speculation isn't going to cause a catastrophe. Crackers didn't just read my post and go "holy shit, that's a GREAT idea!" They've already thought of it.
It works for Dr. Phil :)