Shit, the company should be embarassed if their net filtering software lets employees download child pornography.
I'm going to hold in my opinions about using net filtering software at all, and just say this. How the heck do you know he didn't ssh into his home computer and download it from there? Or go to an ftp site? Or download the thing using any method that doesn't use a browser, thus bypassing the net filter?
Not to mention the guy getting caught was a professor...I'm willing to bet he had admin rights to his computer, and could disable all sorts of net filtering software
but if it's a crime and you feel like it should be reported then why go to the boss first?
Because it just might save the company a lot of embarrasment if the employee committing the crime is fired before he's arrested. Now, if after you report it to your boss nothing happens, you might feel ethically compelled to ask about why nothing has happened, and then, when you see that nothing will be done about it, you call the police.
Of course, that's not what happened in this article...they did follow the chain of command and were penalized anyway.
...opened a folder on a faulty PC last June only to discover thumbnail images of naked young girls in sexually explicit positions. The IT colleagues reported the finding to their manager, setting off a chain of events that resulted in the arrest of the professor who used the computer and, last month, his guilty plea.
They did go through the proper channels, ie, their manager. Read the article before posting people--and responding to the obvious reply, no, I'm not that new here:)
why do you not help them and fix some problems, and/or report some problems to us (I am slowing helping out now)
You're slowing helping out? Is that a job in tech support that I was unaware of? How do you do that? Do you ask the people reporting the problem obvious questions? Do you refer them to useless documentation that doesn't relate to your problem? Darn!!! That's why microsoft's tech support doesn't work...I keep reaching the people hired to slow the helping out, rather than help.
Why not use donated brain tissue from humans? If research like this is really promising, I'd find it hard to believe that at least other scientists in the field wouldn't be willing to have theirs used in the event of their death by natural or accidental causes. It would also provide a better model for what this is supposed to be used for eventually.
Why go through the extra trouble? When you create something new, there's a lot of trial and error involved so you wouldn't really get a "better model" right off the bat (I'm assuming the "future use" you refer to is control of prosthetic limbs and the such). Right now, interface of any mechanics with any organic neurons is enough of a step forward...they don't even yet know if the thing is going to actually learn and become better at its tasks, they just hope it will.
The difference between DivX files and XviD files is the FourCC ("Four Character Code" or something).
DivX and XviD are just differernt encoders, not different formats.
True enough, although certain features of mpeg4 encoding can be, at any one time, implemented in one, and not the other. I haven't been keeping up with the progress of either xvid or divx lately, but I know that at one point xvid was ahead in B-frames support, which caused some compatibility problems between it and divx.
Of course, all that aside, even if they are completely compatible with each other, if you're talking about a person who doesn't know how to install XviD, do you really want to recommend to that person that he should try changing the FourCC code? I assume not, since you later said:
That's why I think, the people who encoded the video file should change the FourCC to DIVX, try to decode the file using DivX, and (if it works without problems) release the file with the DIVX FourCC.
Which, I guess if you test before-hand, would work just fine. Still, I don't know if I agree with your manner of thinking, and many encoders might disagree also. Why wouldn't you ask instead that divx encoders change the FourCC to XVID? Because divx is more popular? Well, that's a great disservice to the xvid developers, who could use the extra help in making *their* codec more popular by causing more people to download it. After all, I personally prefer the open source xvid to divx...The divx 5 team actually tries to charge you for the "pro" version of their codec which has enhanced features for encoding.
many people don't even know or want to know how to install XviD
Right up to the point where they download their first XviD video file. Then, like anyone else, they'll pay the price and install the darn codec (after posting on countless message boards asking why the heck their video won't play).
It's a necessity thing. Nobody wants to install what they don't need. However, the people who *make* videos experiment all the time to get the best quality they can...and once that happens, the others are forced to follow. Heck, if I can be made to install RealOne on my computer, anybody can be made to install anything. It was the hardest compromise of my principles I've ever made.
For instance if I would give my computer a hard kick, would it be affected in any way?
You mean our non nano-level computers shouldn't be affected if I give it a hard kick? Dang!!! Shouldn't have trusted that guy when I tried to RMA my Dell...
I used windows as an example, but it's not just windows. Just about any commercial software you buy has 1.0 or above slapped as the version number...just about any software you buy have bugs, but the newbie user has learned to accept bugs as normal.
As long as the newbie user is getting the features, the bugs will be accepted, be it windows, aol, printshop, or the latest learn to type program.
Scenario: newbie installs unfinished 1.0. Newbie gets frustrated by a buggy, incomplete product. Newbie thinks that Linux is trash and never installs it again.
Scenario: newbie installs "finished" winMe. Newbie gets frustrated by blue screens of death. Newbie thinks this is normal, and reboots.
Unlike the Itanium, AMD's 64-bit procs are not emulating 32bit compatibility...so there shouldn't be any decrease in performance there, it's supporting those natively. That doesn't mean decrease in performance with current 32bit chips, it means extremely large decrease in performance between 64bit apps and 32bit apps, such as what happens with the Itanium. Comparison with current chips depends on how good the new architecture is, and whatnot.
64-bit specific code is just a matter of recompiling existing code with a compiler that is aware of the newer architecture features, I've done that for my work at the university I study. Thus, I think Linux early adopters are going to see many more advantages than Windows early adopters because of all the open source software we can just recompile.
Then again, in a purely monetary view, it's always best to wait instead of buying things as soon as they come out. It's always way too expensive in the beginning.
And how are you going to do things such as the repairs and upgrades to hubble? Sure, maybe you could automate a few experiments, but much of our space research is dependent on having actual people up there.
But in the end, if you really love your child, you should be willing to go to any lengths to make sure they grow up right, even if it means hitting them.
It's really impossible for me to prove this, but in my opinion hitting them won't do anything. You're right, for some situations, positive reinforcement just won't cut it. Not everything I got from my parents involved that...some of the things that I did as a child, needed a type of punishment to mark the point. Most of them involved loss of privileges (which works surprisingly well).
I once remember having this talk with a guy in 4th grade, when I told him that I wasn't allowed to have anybody over that week to play any video games, he told me..."dang...I actually prefer to take a beating...it's over in 2 minutes. Now you have to go an entire week suffering for this."
Even assuming you don't consider pain inflicting abusing your child (I'd disagree with that as well, but again, I don't have strong enough arguments), if you don't hurt them enough to injure them, eventually they're just going to get used to it, and they'll learn to handle it.
And I guess you could argue that since I'm not a parent, I don't know enough about the subject to argue. This is all based on how I was raised, and in my case, I'd say I turned out alright.
You're right...when kids are afraid of the parent's "hit with stick time", they wouldn't do this...they'd wait until they're bigger, and then become criminals after they're finished with school.
Hitting a child is abuse, and for good reason. Criminals often blame their behaviors on childhood abuse, and while it doesn't excuse their behavior, it might explain something about how their minds got to where it is now. After all, if you're taught that you can hit a child that can't hit you back, then you just might become coward enough to threaten people with a gun, who have no way to defend themselves
Will "quiet time" do it. No one thing will help. It's a combination of many things, which includes positive reinforcement. My parents never hit me in my life...I mean never. Today, I'm in my senior year in college, with academic honors, accepted to a Ph.D. program in electrical engineering. I'm a geek, but I never even considered going after my old school's tormenters with a gun...and part of why that idea sounds ridiculous to me, is because I was never exposed to any type of violence...why would I use it?
So what did my parents do right to get me to become successful? Well...that positive reinforcement I talked about is one. As a kid, I never cared much about school, so my parents started paying me $5 per A in my report cards. Believe me, my grades went to all A's in no time.
Ethics and discipline is all well and good, and you're right...it should come from your parents. But hitting a child only works while they're smaller than you. They'll do what you tell them right up until they realize they're stronger than you are. And then you see parents who are afraid of being hit by their children on your next Oprah. Ethics and discipline comes from example. My mom didn't want me to smoke, so she quit smoking...she didn't say, "I'm going to beat you senseless if I ever see you with one of these" while lighting a cigarette.
So you turned out alright even though you went through "beat with a stick" time. Well, it's my guess that you learned a lot from the actions of your parents as well...they were probably good, ethical people. Heck, you learned so much from them, you're advertising "hit with stick time."
There's no single answer to parenting...but hitting a kid doesn't solve problems. If you're lucky, it just may not get in the way in the rest of the parenting process.
Right now, on tdlp.org, there's 458 HOW-TO's and mini HOW-TO's, 826k of man pages (gzipped), and many various other faq's and articles.
Part of being self-sufficient involves the knowledge that you don't go looking into the FAQ to setting up your wheel mouse when you want to set up your network.
Google matches about 4 million records for "linux help".,
If you type in "linux help" google finds every single web page with the words linux and the word help. In fact, you only need to get to google listing page 46 to start getting things like tucows download (software for linux and a help page somewhere). If you actually enclose "linux help" in quotes, then you get around 70,000 pages, but that's also not a fair search...I don't think the number of pages google gives you is a fair estimate for the amount of documentation.
OSDN claims 8.8 million unique visitors (probably a good number to use for the people that are "self-sufficient")
I'm actually still sort of a newbie, and I never even heard of OSDN before you mentioned it in this post, and I went to check it out. I still consider myself self-sufficient, and have found information about things I need to do in a bunch of other places...most of which from the documentation included with the software I download and want to install
Is it really fair to expect those 596 million people to read all that documentation? Do you think they read everything on msdn.microsoft.com when they installed windows?
No, it's not. But I don't go sending microsoft tech support e-mails everytime something goes wrong in windows without first running a search on msdn. And I don't read msdn articles in alphabetical order until I find something that helps. Remember, you don't need to read the whole owner's manual to find out how to set the time on your clock radio...just the page with that information, and there's usually an index.
To be fair though, I think you misunderstand my point, and probably the point of the original poster who started this discussion. I like mandrake. I use mandrake...I think easy setup is a wonderful thing, and when I saw that xine was working with my system with 5.1 surround and SPDIF passthrough right after mandrake install, I thought that was AWESOME...it's the way to go. This is what I understand sc00p's post to mean:
Normal linux users/developers/whatnot are most of the time happy to help the new users. Complaints that experienced users are "elitists" come from those users that expect a free ride...examples of free rides would be that idiot who posts something to the effect of, "Your software is broken...this is the compiler error I get from gcc 3.2" when there's a warning in the readme install file, probably right at the top that says "compiles only with gcc 2.95". People who will post and ask for help the first time something doesn't work without first at least trying to see if the problem and fix is described...it's annoying...and it's a waste of time.
If your car broke, and you took it to a mechanic, and he refused to do any service on it - even though he knew exactly what was wrong - until you read the engineering spec manuals for all the parts he had to replace, how happy would you be?
I think he means self-sufficient enough to figure out things they *should* be able to figure out for themselves. If you need to take a car to the mechanic because something's wrong with it, he should fix it. If you take your car to the mechanic because you don't know how to change the time in the radio and haven't bothered to read the owner's manual, there's a problem.
Likewise, bother the developers when something doesn't work as advertised, or when an "owner's manual" is not given. Not when it works, and you just haven't searched through the provided documentation to find out how to do what you want it to do.
This isn't really a joke, but knowing it's a true story makes it funny.
When I was working a summer job, I overheard my supervisor complain her laptop no longer worked...she called the IT department, and upon arriving, he looked at the ground, saw the fallen power cord, and plugged it back into the laptop.
"Your battery was drained," he explained.
"Oh...I didn't know it had one."
The tech guy laughed politely, and joked, "well...you may be a fast typist, but I don't think you're fast enough to power this thing on kinetic energy."
Luckly, she couldn't fire him...not her department
I wonder if the number in the estimate has anything to do with the pages it displays...does that mean that depending on which dataserver you reach, you don't get to see those extra 10,000 or 20,000 pages, assuming you actually went that far? Or are the search hits accurate, and just the count an estimate?
Oh well...Google is still beating my photo album...I searched for pictures of mountains, and only found 3. And two of those are debatable. I'd classify one as a photo of an airplane, with a mountain on the background, and the other wasn't a mountain at all...it was a hill.
If there were any challenges in enforcing the GPL it would have been tested in court by now.
Frankly, I don't know if anything has happened in court, I'm not informed in that manner...but I do know there's always suspicion that one company or another ripped GPL'ed code and used it in their closed-source software. Now it's Castle, and their RISC OS, for example. So if the GPL hasn't been tested in court (and I don't know if it has, anyone that knows otherwise, care to post?), maybe that's because of one of the extra challenges. Copyright cases go to court everyday
If you take a look at the gnu site, you see that they're extremely careful with the wording of the license...they recommend that you do not translate the GPL to your own language for fear that a mistranslation will cause the license to be invalid...they remind you that they have gone through it with a fine comb. Now, if I'm writing an essay for example, in many countries, including the US, I don't have to do anything to get my copyright...it's mine. If somebody plagiarizes, I can get technically sue them. So what about the GPL makes it more difficult? Why isn't it just one line? "You can use/modify/distribute this as you see fit just as long as you do allow everyone else to use/modify/distribute as they see fit"?
If I didn't routinely download large amounts of files, ie upgrades to linux distros, game demos, movie trailers...I wouldn't need broadband. 1GB may sound like a lot, but these days, when we have 400mb demos such as the divine divinity demo, it's really not that much at all...
Slashdot Mirror
By replacing the words "lock down" with "trusted computing"
I'm going to hold in my opinions about using net filtering software at all, and just say this. How the heck do you know he didn't ssh into his home computer and download it from there? Or go to an ftp site? Or download the thing using any method that doesn't use a browser, thus bypassing the net filter?
Not to mention the guy getting caught was a professor...I'm willing to bet he had admin rights to his computer, and could disable all sorts of net filtering software
Because it just might save the company a lot of embarrasment if the employee committing the crime is fired before he's arrested. Now, if after you report it to your boss nothing happens, you might feel ethically compelled to ask about why nothing has happened, and then, when you see that nothing will be done about it, you call the police.
Of course, that's not what happened in this article...they did follow the chain of command and were penalized anyway.
From article:
They did go through the proper channels, ie, their manager. Read the article before posting people--and responding to the obvious reply, no, I'm not that new here :)
You're slowing helping out? Is that a job in tech support that I was unaware of? How do you do that? Do you ask the people reporting the problem obvious questions? Do you refer them to useless documentation that doesn't relate to your problem? Darn!!! That's why microsoft's tech support doesn't work...I keep reaching the people hired to slow the helping out, rather than help.
Why go through the extra trouble? When you create something new, there's a lot of trial and error involved so you wouldn't really get a "better model" right off the bat (I'm assuming the "future use" you refer to is control of prosthetic limbs and the such). Right now, interface of any mechanics with any organic neurons is enough of a step forward...they don't even yet know if the thing is going to actually learn and become better at its tasks, they just hope it will.
Hmm...considering you're restating Illston's question...I'm going out on a limb and say you're not the first to think of it.
It's a good point though...and I guess she didn't explicitly state it in the same way as you did :)
That is, get radio listeners to be called thieves for skipping commercials
True enough, although certain features of mpeg4 encoding can be, at any one time, implemented in one, and not the other. I haven't been keeping up with the progress of either xvid or divx lately, but I know that at one point xvid was ahead in B-frames support, which caused some compatibility problems between it and divx.
Of course, all that aside, even if they are completely compatible with each other, if you're talking about a person who doesn't know how to install XviD, do you really want to recommend to that person that he should try changing the FourCC code? I assume not, since you later said:
That's why I think, the people who encoded the video file should change the FourCC to DIVX, try to decode the file using DivX, and (if it works without problems) release the file with the DIVX FourCC.Which, I guess if you test before-hand, would work just fine. Still, I don't know if I agree with your manner of thinking, and many encoders might disagree also. Why wouldn't you ask instead that divx encoders change the FourCC to XVID? Because divx is more popular? Well, that's a great disservice to the xvid developers, who could use the extra help in making *their* codec more popular by causing more people to download it. After all, I personally prefer the open source xvid to divx...The divx 5 team actually tries to charge you for the "pro" version of their codec which has enhanced features for encoding.
Right up to the point where they download their first XviD video file. Then, like anyone else, they'll pay the price and install the darn codec (after posting on countless message boards asking why the heck their video won't play).
It's a necessity thing. Nobody wants to install what they don't need. However, the people who *make* videos experiment all the time to get the best quality they can...and once that happens, the others are forced to follow. Heck, if I can be made to install RealOne on my computer, anybody can be made to install anything. It was the hardest compromise of my principles I've ever made.
You mean our non nano-level computers shouldn't be affected if I give it a hard kick? Dang!!! Shouldn't have trusted that guy when I tried to RMA my Dell...
Yes.
As long as the newbie user is getting the features, the bugs will be accepted, be it windows, aol, printshop, or the latest learn to type program.
Scenario: newbie installs "finished" winMe. Newbie gets frustrated by blue screens of death. Newbie thinks this is normal, and reboots.
Unlike the Itanium, AMD's 64-bit procs are not emulating 32bit compatibility...so there shouldn't be any decrease in performance there, it's supporting those natively. That doesn't mean decrease in performance with current 32bit chips, it means extremely large decrease in performance between 64bit apps and 32bit apps, such as what happens with the Itanium. Comparison with current chips depends on how good the new architecture is, and whatnot.
64-bit specific code is just a matter of recompiling existing code with a compiler that is aware of the newer architecture features, I've done that for my work at the university I study. Thus, I think Linux early adopters are going to see many more advantages than Windows early adopters because of all the open source software we can just recompile.
Then again, in a purely monetary view, it's always best to wait instead of buying things as soon as they come out. It's always way too expensive in the beginning.
And how are you going to do things such as the repairs and upgrades to hubble? Sure, maybe you could automate a few experiments, but much of our space research is dependent on having actual people up there.
It's really impossible for me to prove this, but in my opinion hitting them won't do anything. You're right, for some situations, positive reinforcement just won't cut it. Not everything I got from my parents involved that...some of the things that I did as a child, needed a type of punishment to mark the point. Most of them involved loss of privileges (which works surprisingly well).
I once remember having this talk with a guy in 4th grade, when I told him that I wasn't allowed to have anybody over that week to play any video games, he told me..."dang...I actually prefer to take a beating...it's over in 2 minutes. Now you have to go an entire week suffering for this."
Even assuming you don't consider pain inflicting abusing your child (I'd disagree with that as well, but again, I don't have strong enough arguments), if you don't hurt them enough to injure them, eventually they're just going to get used to it, and they'll learn to handle it.
And I guess you could argue that since I'm not a parent, I don't know enough about the subject to argue. This is all based on how I was raised, and in my case, I'd say I turned out alright.
Hitting a child is abuse, and for good reason. Criminals often blame their behaviors on childhood abuse, and while it doesn't excuse their behavior, it might explain something about how their minds got to where it is now. After all, if you're taught that you can hit a child that can't hit you back, then you just might become coward enough to threaten people with a gun, who have no way to defend themselves
Will "quiet time" do it. No one thing will help. It's a combination of many things, which includes positive reinforcement. My parents never hit me in my life...I mean never. Today, I'm in my senior year in college, with academic honors, accepted to a Ph.D. program in electrical engineering. I'm a geek, but I never even considered going after my old school's tormenters with a gun...and part of why that idea sounds ridiculous to me, is because I was never exposed to any type of violence...why would I use it?
So what did my parents do right to get me to become successful? Well...that positive reinforcement I talked about is one. As a kid, I never cared much about school, so my parents started paying me $5 per A in my report cards. Believe me, my grades went to all A's in no time.
Ethics and discipline is all well and good, and you're right...it should come from your parents. But hitting a child only works while they're smaller than you. They'll do what you tell them right up until they realize they're stronger than you are. And then you see parents who are afraid of being hit by their children on your next Oprah. Ethics and discipline comes from example. My mom didn't want me to smoke, so she quit smoking...she didn't say, "I'm going to beat you senseless if I ever see you with one of these" while lighting a cigarette.
So you turned out alright even though you went through "beat with a stick" time. Well, it's my guess that you learned a lot from the actions of your parents as well...they were probably good, ethical people. Heck, you learned so much from them, you're advertising "hit with stick time."
There's no single answer to parenting...but hitting a kid doesn't solve problems. If you're lucky, it just may not get in the way in the rest of the parenting process.
Right now, on tdlp.org, there's 458 HOW-TO's and mini HOW-TO's, 826k of man pages (gzipped), and many various other faq's and articles.
Part of being self-sufficient involves the knowledge that you don't go looking into the FAQ to setting up your wheel mouse when you want to set up your network.
Google matches about 4 million records for "linux help".,
If you type in "linux help" google finds every single web page with the words linux and the word help. In fact, you only need to get to google listing page 46 to start getting things like tucows download (software for linux and a help page somewhere). If you actually enclose "linux help" in quotes, then you get around 70,000 pages, but that's also not a fair search...I don't think the number of pages google gives you is a fair estimate for the amount of documentation.
OSDN claims 8.8 million unique visitors (probably a good number to use for the people that are "self-sufficient")
I'm actually still sort of a newbie, and I never even heard of OSDN before you mentioned it in this post, and I went to check it out. I still consider myself self-sufficient, and have found information about things I need to do in a bunch of other places...most of which from the documentation included with the software I download and want to install
Is it really fair to expect those 596 million people to read all that documentation? Do you think they read everything on msdn.microsoft.com when they installed windows?
No, it's not. But I don't go sending microsoft tech support e-mails everytime something goes wrong in windows without first running a search on msdn. And I don't read msdn articles in alphabetical order until I find something that helps. Remember, you don't need to read the whole owner's manual to find out how to set the time on your clock radio...just the page with that information, and there's usually an index.
To be fair though, I think you misunderstand my point, and probably the point of the original poster who started this discussion. I like mandrake. I use mandrake...I think easy setup is a wonderful thing, and when I saw that xine was working with my system with 5.1 surround and SPDIF passthrough right after mandrake install, I thought that was AWESOME...it's the way to go. This is what I understand sc00p's post to mean:
Normal linux users/developers/whatnot are most of the time happy to help the new users. Complaints that experienced users are "elitists" come from those users that expect a free ride...examples of free rides would be that idiot who posts something to the effect of, "Your software is broken...this is the compiler error I get from gcc 3.2" when there's a warning in the readme install file, probably right at the top that says "compiles only with gcc 2.95". People who will post and ask for help the first time something doesn't work without first at least trying to see if the problem and fix is described...it's annoying...and it's a waste of time.
I think he means self-sufficient enough to figure out things they *should* be able to figure out for themselves. If you need to take a car to the mechanic because something's wrong with it, he should fix it. If you take your car to the mechanic because you don't know how to change the time in the radio and haven't bothered to read the owner's manual, there's a problem.
Likewise, bother the developers when something doesn't work as advertised, or when an "owner's manual" is not given. Not when it works, and you just haven't searched through the provided documentation to find out how to do what you want it to do.
When I was working a summer job, I overheard my supervisor complain her laptop no longer worked...she called the IT department, and upon arriving, he looked at the ground, saw the fallen power cord, and plugged it back into the laptop.
"Your battery was drained," he explained.
"Oh...I didn't know it had one."
The tech guy laughed politely, and joked, "well...you may be a fast typist, but I don't think you're fast enough to power this thing on kinetic energy."
Luckly, she couldn't fire him...not her department
Oh well...Google is still beating my photo album...I searched for pictures of mountains, and only found 3. And two of those are debatable. I'd classify one as a photo of an airplane, with a mountain on the background, and the other wasn't a mountain at all...it was a hill.
Frankly, I don't know if anything has happened in court, I'm not informed in that manner...but I do know there's always suspicion that one company or another ripped GPL'ed code and used it in their closed-source software. Now it's Castle, and their RISC OS, for example. So if the GPL hasn't been tested in court (and I don't know if it has, anyone that knows otherwise, care to post?), maybe that's because of one of the extra challenges. Copyright cases go to court everyday
If you take a look at the gnu site, you see that they're extremely careful with the wording of the license...they recommend that you do not translate the GPL to your own language for fear that a mistranslation will cause the license to be invalid...they remind you that they have gone through it with a fine comb. Now, if I'm writing an essay for example, in many countries, including the US, I don't have to do anything to get my copyright...it's mine. If somebody plagiarizes, I can get technically sue them. So what about the GPL makes it more difficult? Why isn't it just one line? "You can use/modify/distribute this as you see fit just as long as you do allow everyone else to use/modify/distribute as they see fit"?
What do you feel is the greteast challenge in enforcing the GPL vs. other more conventional copyrights?
If I didn't routinely download large amounts of files, ie upgrades to linux distros, game demos, movie trailers...I wouldn't need broadband. 1GB may sound like a lot, but these days, when we have 400mb demos such as the divine divinity demo, it's really not that much at all...