Try easynews.com I used them years ago, and they had cool features such as downloading files by http/ftp as a zip file, as well as fast speeds and good completion.
I can't agree that software engineering is inherently non-rigorous. It's just still too new, and the rigor isn't enforced. We've been building bridges for thousands of years, but software for less than a century. Most management and consumers don't understand it.
Good programming requires creative problems solving, but without discipline, even extremely talented "artists" will produce absolutely unusable and worthless code. While there is still some room for the lone cowboy coders to create a world-changing application, that's not the norm. Most software is part of a large and complex system. Without BOTH the creativity and the discipline, the results will be lackluster - and that's what you see in most organizations. Maybe that's just because society demands far more software than there are talented developers to produce it.
Off the top of my head, perhaps either having a proxy computer running that software and bridging it to your real computer, or running that software in a virtual machine, as others have suggested.
Also, until you figure out a more sensible solution, I'd suggest keeping all sensetive data on an encrypted drive (such as truecrypt or freecrypt) and only decrypting that volume after killing the university spyware (after unplugging if needed). While I'd suggest having an encrypted drive regardless, you also need a working solution that isn't a pain in the neck every single day. Good luck.
Here are a few tools I keep on hand for the less catastrophic problems:
-Knoppix - live linux boot, can mount NTFS and flash drives and has a number of standard linux tools
-Gparted - excellent graphical partition tool - useful in setting up a staging disk and in copying partitions, but it's unhappy if your NTFS drive is severely busted
-Ultimate Boot CD - This disc has many tools (filesystem, hardware, etc) you shouldn't be without
My recent drive crash (with backups a month old, oops) involved copying one partition with ntfsclone from the gparted disk (manually run to ignore errors). Chkdsk and some other tinkering was enough to restore the clone. In the end, the other partition required commercial software which worked despite my scepticism.
Unfortunately, most publicly available medical science in this realm (alternative or mainstream) seems to suffer from this lack of precision. You can read all about hundreds of chemicals and products that are bad for you, but you'll be hard pressed to find out *how* bad. As an engineer, I would prefer some real data to decide if the problem is bad enough to warrant the cost of avoiding it. For instance, it's somewhat difficult to avoid all plastics in the microwave, but I don't even know how dangerous they are. For all I know, my health is more adversely affected by the air pollution in my city and the toxins in the air in my office.
If I avoided everything that was "bad" for me, I'd live in a bubble and probably die from something caused by said bubble. That said, I've been leisurely transitioning my water bottles away from BPA-ambiguous containers on the optimistic notion that the alternatives are healthier.
Worse, I had the exact same reaction when an article on this server came up a few months ago. Despite having already been fooled once, I didn't realize I had misread the title until I read your comment...
I understand that you don't want to read 5000 pages right now to get up to speed, but I suggest that you're aiming low if you think you're going to get all of your management knowledge from one book. Consider one book now to get you on track for your current effort, but to really get good at it you will probably need to absorb (and process) information from several sources to come up with all of the detail you need in your unique environment.
that the solution to spam (and malware) is the marines. Nothing takes a spammer off of the net faster than lead. Kindof shakes up that risk-reward balance a bit.
I could not possibly see myself going back to a brick and mortar institution for an advanced degree
Nor could I have seen myself getting my bachelor's degree online. I took some graduate classes online, and while they were great as a working professional they wouldn't have been right for undergraduate work - at least not for me.
I didn't talk to the teacher, ask questions, or meet any classmates in those online classes. I watched up to 8 lectures in a row when I got behind. I learned because I was interested and genuinely wanted to, and because I had the discipline (mostly, except for the previous admission) to make it work. I don't know that most 18 year old students have those attributes.
I don't deny that there is much room for integration here, I just suggest that it doesn't necessarily matter if students don't want to go to class. They also may want to goof off all day. The abandonment of classrooms should be done because they're no longer needed, not just because learning is inconvenient.
What you describe sounds like a viable alternative. However, the OP question involved the service doing the search, which should send off all kinds of warning bells - that would require unencrypted access for the server to at least part of the data.
Modern folks think they are required to have air conditioning, sure.
This is reflected in the absence of swamp(evaporative) coolers in modern Arizona homes. So air conditioning is somewhat required when the ambient air temperature in the shade passes 115 degrees F.
Swamp coolers blow cool (but more moist) air through the house at a tiny fraction of the cost of air conditioning. This works great in Arizona where it is usually extremely dry. In college we used the swamp cooler extensively after the first $300 AC bill.
I bought an I-opener on eBay to make a digital picture frame before those became commonly available (and affordable). I got a late revision - by the end they were trying to lock down the OS (no loophole to get down to root after it connected to the main service, unable to modify bios settings to change boot order, etc).
It was a fun engineering challenge, mostly aided by patience in chipping the epoxy off of the bios chip and buying a flashed one so I could boot an external drive and continue the process.
I still use it when I remember to turn it on. I like it better than ones you can buy today, but that's probably because of the time I spent repurposing it.
Use televisions or other modern electronics as an example. While televisions produced a few decades ago lasted decades, newer components are designed with the explicit expectation that they will only last a few years. You simply can't buy very many products with the same longevity anymore, and expecting to have the exact same experience is setting yourseslf up for disappointment.
If it costs 25M to port an old game to the new system, they're doing something wrong.
On the other hand, maybe they're not porting the right games to the Wii - I had to buy gamecube controllers and some used games to get my multiplayer-shooter-on-the-same-screen fix.
Business travel is awful.
I disagree. It can certainly be rough, but I thoroughly enjoy getting vital things done that cannot be done at home (and possibly not by anyone else on the project). I had a lot of fun and got a lot done on my overseas trips. On the other hand, I haven't travelled for a bit, and I'm enjoying the calm. I think enjoyment depends on the kind of trip, and where you are in your life. And how frequent it is...
Security is only a problem with nefarious things are intended
That's not correct at all. While in this case it might be possible to open up only the features needed for this software to run, it's highly likely it will only work if you open up the gates for other malware to enter as well. Adding the site to the trusted zone may only resolve some of the problems (did you read the firewall bit?). Software that isn't designed with security in mind (read: most software) is often so sloppy that finding all of the inappropriate liberties it wants to take requires several rounds of troubleshooting. It seems that the virtualization suggestions in this discussion are well warranted.
Or, to throw another twist into that: Indoor air quality is sometimes worse than outdoor due to reducing building breathing (to increase heating/cooling efficiency) and all sorts of toxic materials (off-gassing plastics, misc. fibers, dust from the cat box, etc.). Maybe just being sedentary inside is a sufficient cause for decreased lung ability.
Independent (and not malware-supported) antivirus comparisons have found McAfee and Norton to be consistently not at the top for performance or for ability to detect a sufficient number of viruses. Try one or more of the free products, such as Avira AntiVir, Avast! antivirus, or AVG. The reason I and many others have such distaste for McAfee is that while we've moved on to superior products at home, many workplaces stick with those two well-known ones simply due to name recognition. The performance of both Norton and McAfee is completely unacceptable.
I wonder how long it will be until a particular program updates a virus definition list or something similar to remove all other competing malware programs as they come into existence
Such a malware product exists... it's called McAfee, and while it's not very good it does convince lots of people to pay money for it.
Do you seriously think that CBS would make more money on its Evening News with Katie Couric if its stopped broadcasting it for free and made it solely pay-per-view? Think about it.
If you thought a little deeper you might remember that those news sources make money from advertisements. Even if not directly, it trickles up from the local broadcasters to the content providers. With AP, the problem is that they make NO money from advertisement displayed by redistributors. So, if Google shows you the story, Google gets the ad revenue. What the news agencies are talking about by making the redistributors pay for the content, which can be used to generate views (and therefore ad revenue). Your analogy is incorrect - If you wanted it to make sense you would have to talk about the parent organization charging the affiliates for the content - which I believe they already do.
Why the need to buy games at launch?
That's kindof the point - vendors want you to buy the games when they're launched (among other reasons they get the money, not the reseller they dumped unsold copies onto). If they can figure out a way to convince customers to buy then, they'll make more money.
If the price curve is less steep (going from $30 new to $20 in the bargain bin rather than from $60 to $20), more customers might find it worth the extra $10 to get the game now with all of the benefits that might entail (instant gratification, active community, online content, pop-culture integration, etc.).
I am continually frustrated with lack of support for managing knowledge in an organization. If you can get the ball rolling and keep it supported, that's awesome!
Here are some criteria I would suggest for your project:
Find a way to encourage those who posess the knowledge to document it (even informally)
Have someone responsible to assemble, massage, and manage all the documented knowledge
Use something that can be migrated - anything that can't be output to text or html might result in lost data when you upgrade to new software
Work to develop a culture that uses this knowledge and generates more - it's hard to encourage people to document when management places no value on it (vs. getting work done)
I think the tool is the least difficult part of such an endeavor - changing culture is difficult.
Slashdot Mirror
Try easynews.com I used them years ago, and they had cool features such as downloading files by http/ftp as a zip file, as well as fast speeds and good completion.
I can't agree that software engineering is inherently non-rigorous. It's just still too new, and the rigor isn't enforced. We've been building bridges for thousands of years, but software for less than a century. Most management and consumers don't understand it.
Good programming requires creative problems solving, but without discipline, even extremely talented "artists" will produce absolutely unusable and worthless code. While there is still some room for the lone cowboy coders to create a world-changing application, that's not the norm. Most software is part of a large and complex system. Without BOTH the creativity and the discipline, the results will be lackluster - and that's what you see in most organizations. Maybe that's just because society demands far more software than there are talented developers to produce it.
Off the top of my head, perhaps either having a proxy computer running that software and bridging it to your real computer, or running that software in a virtual machine, as others have suggested.
Also, until you figure out a more sensible solution, I'd suggest keeping all sensetive data on an encrypted drive (such as truecrypt or freecrypt) and only decrypting that volume after killing the university spyware (after unplugging if needed). While I'd suggest having an encrypted drive regardless, you also need a working solution that isn't a pain in the neck every single day. Good luck.
Here are a few tools I keep on hand for the less catastrophic problems:
-Knoppix - live linux boot, can mount NTFS and flash drives and has a number of standard linux tools
-Gparted - excellent graphical partition tool - useful in setting up a staging disk and in copying partitions, but it's unhappy if your NTFS drive is severely busted
-Ultimate Boot CD - This disc has many tools (filesystem, hardware, etc) you shouldn't be without
My recent drive crash (with backups a month old, oops) involved copying one partition with ntfsclone from the gparted disk (manually run to ignore errors). Chkdsk and some other tinkering was enough to restore the clone. In the end, the other partition required commercial software which worked despite my scepticism.
Unfortunately, most publicly available medical science in this realm (alternative or mainstream) seems to suffer from this lack of precision. You can read all about hundreds of chemicals and products that are bad for you, but you'll be hard pressed to find out *how* bad. As an engineer, I would prefer some real data to decide if the problem is bad enough to warrant the cost of avoiding it. For instance, it's somewhat difficult to avoid all plastics in the microwave, but I don't even know how dangerous they are. For all I know, my health is more adversely affected by the air pollution in my city and the toxins in the air in my office.
If I avoided everything that was "bad" for me, I'd live in a bubble and probably die from something caused by said bubble. That said, I've been leisurely transitioning my water bottles away from BPA-ambiguous containers on the optimistic notion that the alternatives are healthier.
Worse, I had the exact same reaction when an article on this server came up a few months ago. Despite having already been fooled once, I didn't realize I had misread the title until I read your comment...
And they only made one Matrix movie
Just don't use ZZ Top's Velcro Fly or the town could turn out like Lud.
I understand that you don't want to read 5000 pages right now to get up to speed, but I suggest that you're aiming low if you think you're going to get all of your management knowledge from one book. Consider one book now to get you on track for your current effort, but to really get good at it you will probably need to absorb (and process) information from several sources to come up with all of the detail you need in your unique environment.
that the solution to spam (and malware) is the marines. Nothing takes a spammer off of the net faster than lead. Kindof shakes up that risk-reward balance a bit.
I could not possibly see myself going back to a brick and mortar institution for an advanced degree
Nor could I have seen myself getting my bachelor's degree online. I took some graduate classes online, and while they were great as a working professional they wouldn't have been right for undergraduate work - at least not for me.
I didn't talk to the teacher, ask questions, or meet any classmates in those online classes. I watched up to 8 lectures in a row when I got behind. I learned because I was interested and genuinely wanted to, and because I had the discipline (mostly, except for the previous admission) to make it work. I don't know that most 18 year old students have those attributes.
I don't deny that there is much room for integration here, I just suggest that it doesn't necessarily matter if students don't want to go to class. They also may want to goof off all day. The abandonment of classrooms should be done because they're no longer needed, not just because learning is inconvenient.
What you describe sounds like a viable alternative. However, the OP question involved the service doing the search, which should send off all kinds of warning bells - that would require unencrypted access for the server to at least part of the data.
Modern folks think they are required to have air conditioning, sure.
This is reflected in the absence of swamp(evaporative) coolers in modern Arizona homes. So air conditioning is somewhat required when the ambient air temperature in the shade passes 115 degrees F.
Swamp coolers blow cool (but more moist) air through the house at a tiny fraction of the cost of air conditioning. This works great in Arizona where it is usually extremely dry. In college we used the swamp cooler extensively after the first $300 AC bill.
I bought an I-opener on eBay to make a digital picture frame before those became commonly available (and affordable). I got a late revision - by the end they were trying to lock down the OS (no loophole to get down to root after it connected to the main service, unable to modify bios settings to change boot order, etc).
It was a fun engineering challenge, mostly aided by patience in chipping the epoxy off of the bios chip and buying a flashed one so I could boot an external drive and continue the process.
I still use it when I remember to turn it on. I like it better than ones you can buy today, but that's probably because of the time I spent repurposing it.
Use televisions or other modern electronics as an example. While televisions produced a few decades ago lasted decades, newer components are designed with the explicit expectation that they will only last a few years. You simply can't buy very many products with the same longevity anymore, and expecting to have the exact same experience is setting yourseslf up for disappointment.
If it costs 25M to port an old game to the new system, they're doing something wrong.
On the other hand, maybe they're not porting the right games to the Wii - I had to buy gamecube controllers and some used games to get my multiplayer-shooter-on-the-same-screen fix.
Business travel is awful.
I disagree. It can certainly be rough, but I thoroughly enjoy getting vital things done that cannot be done at home (and possibly not by anyone else on the project). I had a lot of fun and got a lot done on my overseas trips. On the other hand, I haven't travelled for a bit, and I'm enjoying the calm. I think enjoyment depends on the kind of trip, and where you are in your life. And how frequent it is...
Security is only a problem with nefarious things are intended
That's not correct at all. While in this case it might be possible to open up only the features needed for this software to run, it's highly likely it will only work if you open up the gates for other malware to enter as well. Adding the site to the trusted zone may only resolve some of the problems (did you read the firewall bit?). Software that isn't designed with security in mind (read: most software) is often so sloppy that finding all of the inappropriate liberties it wants to take requires several rounds of troubleshooting. It seems that the virtualization suggestions in this discussion are well warranted.
Or, to throw another twist into that: Indoor air quality is sometimes worse than outdoor due to reducing building breathing (to increase heating/cooling efficiency) and all sorts of toxic materials (off-gassing plastics, misc. fibers, dust from the cat box, etc.). Maybe just being sedentary inside is a sufficient cause for decreased lung ability.
Independent (and not malware-supported) antivirus comparisons have found McAfee and Norton to be consistently not at the top for performance or for ability to detect a sufficient number of viruses. Try one or more of the free products, such as Avira AntiVir, Avast! antivirus, or AVG. The reason I and many others have such distaste for McAfee is that while we've moved on to superior products at home, many workplaces stick with those two well-known ones simply due to name recognition. The performance of both Norton and McAfee is completely unacceptable.
I wonder how long it will be until a particular program updates a virus definition list or something similar to remove all other competing malware programs as they come into existence
Such a malware product exists... it's called McAfee, and while it's not very good it does convince lots of people to pay money for it.
Do you seriously think that CBS would make more money on its Evening News with Katie Couric if its stopped broadcasting it for free and made it solely pay-per-view? Think about it.
If you thought a little deeper you might remember that those news sources make money from advertisements. Even if not directly, it trickles up from the local broadcasters to the content providers. With AP, the problem is that they make NO money from advertisement displayed by redistributors. So, if Google shows you the story, Google gets the ad revenue. What the news agencies are talking about by making the redistributors pay for the content, which can be used to generate views (and therefore ad revenue). Your analogy is incorrect - If you wanted it to make sense you would have to talk about the parent organization charging the affiliates for the content - which I believe they already do.
Why the need to buy games at launch?
That's kindof the point - vendors want you to buy the games when they're launched (among other reasons they get the money, not the reseller they dumped unsold copies onto). If they can figure out a way to convince customers to buy then, they'll make more money.
If the price curve is less steep (going from $30 new to $20 in the bargain bin rather than from $60 to $20), more customers might find it worth the extra $10 to get the game now with all of the benefits that might entail (instant gratification, active community, online content, pop-culture integration, etc.).
I think the tool is the least difficult part of such an endeavor - changing culture is difficult.
the disruption of TV
A communications disruption can mean only one thing - invasion.