It's not a case like that. They were telling lawyer jokes in line, people around them were laughing, but a lawyer didn't like it, so he had them arrested. End of story.
There's plenty of info on this story out there, but you have to be willing to read, not just post.
Actually, the MPAA lawsuits weren't an example of evilness. Travis Kalanick (whose last name sounds suspiciously like "colonic") is a turncoat, and that's what was evil:
In March, Kalanick...was far more conciliatory to the competing technology.... "I don't want to fight BitTorrent," he said....
A few months on, and Kalanick's opinion has apparently modified very slightly. Choosing to speak on the MPAA's behest at the very event where they decided to take on BitTorrent, his new take appeared to be: I don't *want* to fight BitTorrent, but if publicizing my product involves cutting a deal with some guys who'd want to kill it, shave it, and parade it naked through the village - well okay then.
I'd suggest you go back and read the whole article. It mentions the MPAA lawsuit, but not as its point, rather as a supporting point about Kalanick's evilness. I know you want to see/.ers as a bunch of morons who can't see past the constant hum of anti-*AA dogma, but this is not an example of that. It's becoming instead an example of the many/.ers who, at every conceivable opportunity, uncork a trite, moderately off-topic, well-rehearsed rant about their favorite topic, be it the fabled/. hatred of Microsoft or the applicability of the law, or any other of a dozen favorite topics.
I stopped reading at "RIAA suing BitTorrent Trackers" [sic]...
It shows. TFA never said the RIAA shouldn't sue the trackers, it said they were. Period. Fact.
What's more, the article isn't even about the RIAA's lawsuits. The author mentions that in order to talk about Travis Kalanick.
It's obvious to me that the knee-jerkery is firmly on you, who started to RTFA and then quit because it pushed one of your buttons, so you ran back to/. and threw up an off-topic post with your rant-du-jour.
I know I can't expect/.ers to RTFA, but I should at least be able to expect those who do to exhibit a minimum of comprehension.
We use Avocent in a mixed environment of Solaris, Linux (three flavors), Mac OS X, and Windows. Very nice solution. We've had some problems when installing Linux (it detects the monitor resolution incorrectly), but other than that, it works great for maintenance, installation, anything you can throw at it.
I agree that is a failing with PHP. Until recently, though, I had worked only with MySQL backends, so it wasn't much of an issue. Now, though, I'm finding that I'm dealing with Oracle (two different interfaces, totally different from each other and from the MySQL interface) and might have to start dealing with PostgreSQL as well. I haven't dealt with the Perl DBI much -- barely any, really -- but I still find the PHP interface much simpler, if less sane. The comfort of five years' use? Maybe, I'll admit it.
...quite a bit. I used to be a web programmer before I started sysadminning, so I'm still more comfortable in PHP than in Perl. Consequently, I use it especially for automating database management tasks; I just find those easier to write in PHP than in Perl. For most simple administrivia, I'll just bang out a quick Perl script, but for those areas where I think PHP is stronger -- such as DBA tasks -- I'll switch into it.
Although it could potentially teach you the basics of the language, it will be more likely to become an addiction not because of that fact, but because it's a fun game.
I think that's precisely why it shows promise. You "trick" people into learning language while they're playing a fun game. TFA mentioned the archetypal bad edutainment game: you have to answer a question or conjugate a verb before you get to blast some sketchy aliens in a Galaga rip-off. Those games are ineffective for the very reasons The Sims is effective: they're boring, and not addictive at all.
Thus the section titles TFA: "You're not studying, you're playing The Sims." It's learning sneakily disguised as addictive video-gaming.
What you (and everyone else who posted the same thing) don't seem to grasp is that the author doesn't claim that The Sims is a magic bullet for language learning. Rather, he explictly states that he used it in conjunction with several other fun ways to integrate language learning into everyday life -- things like his random vocabulary browser "throbber," and loading a Pimsleur course onto his cell phone.
And all of this was to supplement -- not replace -- classroom learning. The Sims was intended to reinforce the vocabulary learned in class, plus introduce some new vocabulary and grammatical constructions that might not otherwise be learned. It is uniquely suited to this given the necessity of communication within the game and the exigency of deciphering the in-game messages. (Cf. Doom III, where you shoot things.)
Furthermore, as you progress, you can start turning off or ignoring the glosses, much as a fluent speaker can ignore subtitles. It provides a feeling of accomplishment when you can fly through parts of the game that were previously possible only with constant reference to a dictionary. The vocabulary doesn't get more advanced, but the reinforcement remains constant. Remember: The Sims is not proposed as the language teacher, but as a language teacher.
Finally, I fail to see how it could be bad to be addicted to something that is teaching you a life skill that you want to learn. The health implications of smoking include lung cancer. The health implications of an addiction to The Sims in German include learning German. Heavens, no.
Gee, that's really useful, since Google doesn't cache pictures, people! It never has, and probably never will, which makes it largely useless for stories like this.
Did you ever consider that we're not regressing, but rather standing on the shoulders of giants? Admitting, as it were, that perhaps people who didn't live in the past twenty years had something valuable to contribute?
The dark ages were characterized by a total lack of scholarship and invention. The Englightenment, you may recall, occurred not when people donned blinders to the past and started looking forward, but when they were willing to look further back than others had done. And, by building on Greek and Roman scholarship that was thousands of years old, they were able to usher in the environment of inventiveness that helped create the Industrial Revolution.
Hell, we still learn things from Plato. Or would you consider that "regression" as well?
He didn't say he would isolate himself. In the very next response, he says:
People who know Solaris better than I do will tell me and other people about the great things they offer. To try to figure it out on my own would be a waste of time.
In other words, he's going to delegate that to people who are familiar with Solaris rather than trying to be the font of all that is Linux himself. This is called "effective leadership," not "isolation."
These guys have held a few very successful LAN parties near me, and have even written a piece of OS software (Automated LAN Party, or ALP) to help smooth things out. I'm sure that if you ask around in your area, you'll find people with similar experience.
One caveat, though: I don't know anyone who has profited from a LAN party. Usually, it's considered a stellar success if they break even. However, since yours is for an educational institution, you might be able to work the sponsorship angle extra hard and make a few bucks.
It's not pretty, but it's reality because the number one job of any government is to protect it's own citizens.
Where do you live? I'd like to move there. Every government I ever met believed its number one job was to walk the fine line between grabbing more power for itself and the corporations that are its constituency, and keeping the masses anaesthetizd and productive.
That's a good call. I also work in IT at a university, and the department was kind of toothless until our network got hosed for a week last year after a *major* infection of two viruses simultaneously. Since then, we haven't had many complaints about things being locked down.
Nonetheless, you'll still run into professors who are just plain averse to change. We give shell access to one of our academic servers, and earlier this year, I shut down telnet access in favor of ssh. A small change, but with more people using wireless, I thought it wise. Even though, for most people, the change amounted to choosing a different protocol from a drop-down menu, several fought it as hard as they could. Direct quote: "Well, my username has never been hacked. I don't see why you need to do this." The notion of being "proactive" on security completely escapes some people.
Q: How many professors does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: CHANGE?!?!?!?
So, in summary, as another user said, lock 'em down and don't take any flak. If they share their password, change it for them. (They should thank you for your diligent service.) If they insist on running IE with no security, put Firefox on everything as a "security initiative." (Better yet, MOSAIC.) If they don't like being denied access to certain resources, tell them that you'll give them access to it -- in return for the right to publish their home directory or "My Documents" folder on the web. After all, other people are denied access as well!
Remeber: Fearmongering isn't just for the media and the government anymore. When George Tenet makes wacko comments about limiting access to the Internet because the terrorists will come in through your fiber, turn that into a campus-wide announcement. Forward every "new virus" announcement you get to all the professors. Once their quaking in their Birkenstocks, they'll be much happier to hand some control over to you.
Disclaimer: I'm only half serious about most of this.
Hmm, that's strange. My mail server is Solaris, but my personal box is SuSE 9.1; both have the uptime description that I copied out. However, I've also got a RHEL box that seems to mirror the description that you gave. It just seems annoying that something like that would be distro-dependant.
First, in Blackboard 6, the digital drop box has been complemented (and largely superceded) by other much smoother functionality built in to the assignments sections, so that uploaded files are actually associated with assignments.
Secondly, if you can't preview classes, that's due to the way that your admin has set up Blackboard. It certainly contains that functionality. In fact, some schools use it as their web registration -- browse, find the class you like, enroll yourself.
Um, that's not what that means. My personal box runs at an uptime of high twos, sometimes as high as three, because both processors are going constantly crunching SETI numbers. top reveals that I'm using 100% of both processors. In fact, if you'd even read the man page for uptime, you'd know how wrong you were:
Print the current time, the length of time the system has been up, the number of users on the system, and the average number of jobs in the run queue over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes.
I just did a quick test on my mail server (~2500 users) to bounce only the spam that our filtering system identifies as 90% probability or higher. That's about 45-50% of the spam we get. Here are the results:
There's a fair amount of info out there on Mark X. Mullin, who is apparently a Dallas-based business reorganization and bankruptcy lawyer with Haynes-Boone. In the year 2000, his rates were $320/hour. He currently serves as president of his local Inn of Court.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not a case like that. They were telling lawyer jokes in line, people around them were laughing, but a lawyer didn't like it, so he had them arrested. End of story.
There's plenty of info on this story out there, but you have to be willing to read, not just post.
What's more, the article isn't even about the RIAA's lawsuits. The author mentions that in order to talk about Travis Kalanick.
It's obvious to me that the knee-jerkery is firmly on you, who started to RTFA and then quit because it pushed one of your buttons, so you ran back to /. and threw up an off-topic post with your rant-du-jour.
I know I can't expect /.ers to RTFA, but I should at least be able to expect those who do to exhibit a minimum of comprehension.
We use Avocent in a mixed environment of Solaris, Linux (three flavors), Mac OS X, and Windows. Very nice solution. We've had some problems when installing Linux (it detects the monitor resolution incorrectly), but other than that, it works great for maintenance, installation, anything you can throw at it.
I agree that is a failing with PHP. Until recently, though, I had worked only with MySQL backends, so it wasn't much of an issue. Now, though, I'm finding that I'm dealing with Oracle (two different interfaces, totally different from each other and from the MySQL interface) and might have to start dealing with PostgreSQL as well. I haven't dealt with the Perl DBI much -- barely any, really -- but I still find the PHP interface much simpler, if less sane. The comfort of five years' use? Maybe, I'll admit it.
...quite a bit. I used to be a web programmer before I started sysadminning, so I'm still more comfortable in PHP than in Perl. Consequently, I use it especially for automating database management tasks; I just find those easier to write in PHP than in Perl. For most simple administrivia, I'll just bang out a quick Perl script, but for those areas where I think PHP is stronger -- such as DBA tasks -- I'll switch into it.
That's perfectly acceptable British English. I mean, seriously. If you're going to be a Grammar Nazi, at least put a little effort into it.
Thus the section titles TFA: "You're not studying, you're playing The Sims." It's learning sneakily disguised as addictive video-gaming.
And all of this was to supplement -- not replace -- classroom learning. The Sims was intended to reinforce the vocabulary learned in class, plus introduce some new vocabulary and grammatical constructions that might not otherwise be learned. It is uniquely suited to this given the necessity of communication within the game and the exigency of deciphering the in-game messages. (Cf. Doom III, where you shoot things.)
Furthermore, as you progress, you can start turning off or ignoring the glosses, much as a fluent speaker can ignore subtitles. It provides a feeling of accomplishment when you can fly through parts of the game that were previously possible only with constant reference to a dictionary. The vocabulary doesn't get more advanced, but the reinforcement remains constant. Remember: The Sims is not proposed as the language teacher, but as a language teacher.
Finally, I fail to see how it could be bad to be addicted to something that is teaching you a life skill that you want to learn. The health implications of smoking include lung cancer. The health implications of an addiction to The Sims in German include learning German. Heavens, no.
Luckily, Mirrordot got it.
You must be new here. Of all the people on /., the last ones you should expect to RTFM are the editors.
And someone's a humorless boor.
The dark ages were characterized by a total lack of scholarship and invention. The Englightenment, you may recall, occurred not when people donned blinders to the past and started looking forward, but when they were willing to look further back than others had done. And, by building on Greek and Roman scholarship that was thousands of years old, they were able to usher in the environment of inventiveness that helped create the Industrial Revolution.
Hell, we still learn things from Plato. Or would you consider that "regression" as well?
Luckily, I know just the program.
Problem with that plan: When he dies "mysteriously" of arsenic poisoning, the motive points at you.
One caveat, though: I don't know anyone who has profited from a LAN party. Usually, it's considered a stellar success if they break even. However, since yours is for an educational institution, you might be able to work the sponsorship angle extra hard and make a few bucks.
Nonetheless, you'll still run into professors who are just plain averse to change. We give shell access to one of our academic servers, and earlier this year, I shut down telnet access in favor of ssh. A small change, but with more people using wireless, I thought it wise. Even though, for most people, the change amounted to choosing a different protocol from a drop-down menu, several fought it as hard as they could. Direct quote: "Well, my username has never been hacked. I don't see why you need to do this." The notion of being "proactive" on security completely escapes some people.
Q: How many professors does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: CHANGE?!?!?!?
So, in summary, as another user said, lock 'em down and don't take any flak. If they share their password, change it for them. (They should thank you for your diligent service.) If they insist on running IE with no security, put Firefox on everything as a "security initiative." (Better yet, MOSAIC.) If they don't like being denied access to certain resources, tell them that you'll give them access to it -- in return for the right to publish their home directory or "My Documents" folder on the web. After all, other people are denied access as well!
Remeber: Fearmongering isn't just for the media and the government anymore. When George Tenet makes wacko comments about limiting access to the Internet because the terrorists will come in through your fiber, turn that into a campus-wide announcement. Forward every "new virus" announcement you get to all the professors. Once their quaking in their Birkenstocks, they'll be much happier to hand some control over to you.
Disclaimer: I'm only half serious about most of this.
Hmm, that's strange. My mail server is Solaris, but my personal box is SuSE 9.1; both have the uptime description that I copied out. However, I've also got a RHEL box that seems to mirror the description that you gave. It just seems annoying that something like that would be distro-dependant.
First, in Blackboard 6, the digital drop box has been complemented (and largely superceded) by other much smoother functionality built in to the assignments sections, so that uploaded files are actually associated with assignments.
Secondly, if you can't preview classes, that's due to the way that your admin has set up Blackboard. It certainly contains that functionality. In fact, some schools use it as their web registration -- browse, find the class you like, enroll yourself.
Before bouncing:
After:
No thanks, it's less intensive to just discard it.
There's a fair amount of info out there on Mark X. Mullin, who is apparently a Dallas-based business reorganization and bankruptcy lawyer with Haynes-Boone. In the year 2000, his rates were $320/hour. He currently serves as president of his local Inn of Court.