I have one TV in the house that my room mate watches. I don't make a conscious effort to not watch TV, I just don't have time for it. When I do turn it on, it usually means that it is college football season and there is a CU game on. Other than that, every once in a while I watch HBO signature shows (6 ft under, Band of Bros).
I don't fee any more elite, I just have more time to do other things - whatever they may be. And it isn't all that bad not knowing or caring what people are talking about at the office the next day. There are so many TV shows on now (especially if you have cable) that almost no one is watching the same show as you, so it has become less of a conversation piece for the following day and more of an entertainment supplement.
I was thinking of an idea similar to this a while ago and thinking how to get people to get people on a system and how a company could profit from a system such as this. The idea that I came up with is as follows (and granted, this is very much a rough outline):
Sell computers at or just above cost to consumers in a package that provides all the necessary hardware / software. The end user will be forced to sign an agreement that will provide for them the DSL / cable line at a reduced cost and the computer for the end user. They must also agree (stated within the terms of service, that their computer should always remain on (when reasonable) and when not being used is subject to being used by my company (we'll call it MyCo).
Now, to offset the costs of the reduced price of computers and the reduced cost of cable / dsl - MyCo then can sell a client to a larger corporation who is interested in large scale computing without having to purchase one. For those of you who are familiar with the supercomputer environment, it isn't uncommon to lease out cycles on a larger scale computer to other entities to help offset the cost of some of the larger super computers. By leasing out the number crunching abilities of the distributed network of computers, this would be able to cover the costs of selling consumer hardware / packages and would allow for large-ish companies to harness the power of a distributed number crunching system.
Like I said, this is all very preliminary and more of just a thought than anything, but I think that something like this might attract more than just the "geek novelty" users. It would allow consumers to benefit, and would allow other companies to piggy-back on the system without having to make the large investment into a "supercomputer."
I guess that I did come off as a little snotty in my original post, but to me (and this is purely my opinion); for them to ask for ideas as opposed to having an open channel where the users can constantly contribute ideas seems suspect to me.
I have no problem contibuting ideas so long as it doesn't involve an "act now for this limited time offer" clause attached to it.
Free Software has never had marketing before and hasn't needed it. I just don't want to see things cheapened and see Free / Open Software get turned into an infomercial. Unless this is Google sticking their feet in the water...if they are going to be a Free company, then they should go ahead and do it and not be half hearted about it.
sorry for the ramble - it's late, Im tired and have a serious case of "code head."
Re:Free ideas and free code development for Google
on
Google Programming Contest
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
While I am all for Free Software, I have to agree with the poster of this comment, at least in principal. 10k is a small price to pay for tons of ideas. While Im sure the majority of the ideas will not be worth the time spent reviewing them, there will always be that precious gem buried somewhere.
For once, I just might agree with a binary only submission. That way if Google is truly interested they can license the code from the developer or have some sort of other agreement / arrangement.
It isn't like Google is offering up their source to the rest of the world, so I don't see why it is unreasonable to only offer up a binary to them. At the risk of sounding like a "me too" post - I still think that this would be something fun to be involved in if I had the creativity or the passion to persue something of this sort.
Thank you - I was not clear on what a JFS did, thus the question. I am a programmer, but tend not to get my hands dirty in OS level type involvements, thus I didn't really grasp the concept of a JFS.
Ok, Im going to show my (extreme) ignorance here, but what is the difference between what the Ask Slashdot is asking for and a Journaling File System? I don't claim to know anything about JFS, so any insight to this would be great. Thanks in advance.
correction - it was 16 students and didn't warrant a TA. And it happened almost 3 years ago, so it is over and done with. I have since moved on to greener pastures. I just wanted to share my story with the/. crowd as an example that even with "cheat detection software" there are still gray areas. I also appreciate your feedback and wish that I had you as the prof and not the one that I had, you seem much more reasonable than he.
Ok, I guess that I will go into more detail on this matter so as to clarify my position. And to further clarify my position, this is a very gray issue - and took over three months to resolve, involved a session of the academic standards committee and had some students threatening lawsuits over the matter.
I had become the ring leader of what was initially viewed as a group of "rouge" students (the professors word of choice) - how I became this "ring leader" Im not exactly certain, the only thing that I can point to was the fact that I had the highest grade amongst those involved. The professor failed all of the students involved without any prior indication. Seeing as how the professor had no idea where anyone in the class stood grade wise at any point in the semester this lead me to the conclusion that he sat on all of our assignments until the 11th hour. Had he looked at them when they were turned in (about a third of the way through the semester) he would have noticed this earlier.
The professor was also aware that all of the students and myself were all working together. We would often all go into his office together with questions, we would all be in the study lounges together before exams sharing notes and thoughts on the upcoming exam and we all took similarly scheduled classes. It was no secret that we all worked together.
In regard to your bullet points:
1. The professor did have an academic dishonesty policy, as well as the university's blanket policy on dishonesty.
2. Collaboration was permitted, but was not detailed as to the extent of collaboration. We would often grab 2 computers between the 5 of us so that we all could solve the problems together. Having much "real world" experience I found "extreme programming" to be effective in solving small, yet difficult problems. I suggested this approach to the group that I worked with.
3. There was no involuntary sharing. All was known to be amongst the same group and stayed within that group
4. There was no discussion or mention prior to the assigning of grades of plagarism.
It was known that I was the originator of forming the group, however from there the group became it's own entity - we all used it to solve the problems that we were given (and lets face it - a 200 level course that is expected to write a compiler is a daunting task, especially considering that compilers is the class that typically follows programming languages - one is the theory, the other is the application. This prof seemd to forget about teaching theory and threw us the application).
I am all for academic honesty and making students prove that they can handle the work load, however when the work load is unreasonable or expectations are outlandish, I don't think that it is unfair to seek out answers from your peers who are in the same boat when your professor refuses to acknowledge that his work load is unfair and his methods are poor.
It is definately an ugly situation - and the resolution came by all of the students involved having to retake the class and their grades were withdrawn. *sigh* I think that covers it.
I personally have had experience being accused of cheating in a computer science class. At the uni that I attended, the prof for the Programming Languages class was in his tenure and had already (mentally) retired. His concern for the class was minimal at best. An example of this was the time that myself and another student went into his office to talk to him because he was late to class and we had some questions on an assignmnet that was due the following class. When we poked our heads in his office he was in his chair - asleep. If that isn't enough - he completely forgot to show up for the final exam.
I don't claim to be a model student by any means, but in this class of 16 I had the highest grade in the class and had done every assignment to the best of my abilities. It came as quite a shock to me when I got my grades and noticed that there was an F for my Programming Languages class.
I promptly called the professor and he said that this was an issue that was best dealt with in a face to face manner - so I went to his office and he claimed that myself and 3 other students in the class had cheated. He pulled up the source code and showed the very striking similarities. When I explained him that some of the problems that were assigned were out of the scope of this class and that he offered no help, I informed him that I had worked with these students to get a solution to the problem. We did not copy any prior works, and all worked together to complete a tough assignment. I admitted that we shared code, only because we had shared ideas and had all come to the solution together.
To make an already long story short (Im forcing myself to leave out details), it ended up getting appealed and overturned, and the professor is now on probation and only teaching 100 level courses
The moral - cheating and sharing of ideas are different concepts and should be handled seperately. I don't agree with programs that flag cheating based on similarities in code because sharing of ideas is typically encouraged in a university setting as long as they are obtained legitimately - a program as such cannot sufficiently distinguish the two.
What does this article have to do with the "anti-communist messages" that were found in Win 95? There is a one sentence blurb in this article. And after searching google all I came up with was a couple of board postings that were from an e-mail that was from a guy who has a dog....
Sorry for the cynicisism, but if there is any truth to this there is little credibility behind it.
hmm, maybe this is a bad idea, but what if the courts had mandated that MS unbundle their OS and forced them to open it up (as in a nice cold open can of speech)?
Im speculating here, but - imagine if the OS was free, but they were still able to sell everything else - IE, Defrag, notepad (yeach) etc.
This would have a two fold effect of still allowing MS to make money off of some of their other bigger products (Office, SQL Server) and would also allow people the choice.
I think that people who say that everything should be opened up are unrealistic, it's one thing to make it look like you are trying to kill a giant, it's another to let the giant kill itself.
At the very least all APIs should have been opened up. This post isn't really going anywhere, I just had a thought that I wanted to throw out there and see if anyone had any expansion on it (good and bad please).
Hmm, this article seems a little light on details. To me (very much not a know it all) it sounds like it is an exploit in the MIME type headers for a page - if that's the case is IE really the only one that can be exploited or does it lie more in the way that IE handles MIME type headers?
More detail would be nice. (and no, I don't want to know more abou tit so I can exploit, just so that I can learn from it and other's mistakes)
I remember the first time I played Wolf3D was also the first time that I had ever heard Ministry (In Case You Didn't Feel Like Showing Up) - ever since that day I can't surpass the adrenaline rush and I can't play a FPS without some hard core industrial.
Half Life came close, but it didn't own me like that game did with that soundtrack. Screw Trent Reznor and his lame Quake sound track, gimmie some Al Jorgensen (back when he was still doing heroine please, not his new crap) and some huge pixels >:)
I don't live in the UK, but I am a clubber here in the states and cant stand Jules (looks like R1 replaced him with Fergie this year and Im still trying to figure out who is worse) - I laughed out loud when he remarked that it doesn't respond to the crowd - like he is even remotely aware that there is a crowd that he is playing to. Seems like his sets are based on the biggest anthems of the moment.
I think that a Dj who used this as a suggestion device would be interesting. A lot of good DJs are planning their set 3-5 songs ahead of the one that is currently playing - if the device could be used to offer up suggestions (like something the DJ may have in their crate that they haven't played in a while) it could be interesting. I can see this being used as another tool behind the decks (ban the beat counters), but can't really see something like this completely replacing DJs.
Im not suggesting either way, that Mr Tosatti would or wouldn't be the best person to fit the position. However I would like to challenge him to convince me - in his own words - that he should be the person to fill the position. As I said before, if he is going to be the person to maintain the kernel current kernel path, I would like him to justify why he is qualified, and why I (as a linux user) should trust him with my OS of choice.
Im sure that there are others who are interested and others that would do a very good job at such a position. I want to know what makes him special - if anything.
I say it's "mine" as in the collective "mine" - as in we are free to use our kernel as we please. Possesive in the public domain sense, not as in the singular sense.
This is not intended as a flame or a troll, more of an interview style question. I figure since we are the people who are putting our trust in this person to handle *our* kernel, that this should also be our chance to learn about the person responsible.
What makes you think that you can handle maintaining the Linux Kernel? What qualifications do you have and why should we (the people) trust you with the Linux kernel.
I realize that this is actually two questions, but they more or less go together in one answer.
in an ideal world I would agree with the Libertarian point of view, however the one loop hole that I see in the argument is the one of a monopoly, I know that it is going to seem like the typical slashbot case of Microsoft, but I think that in this situation it is legitimate.
Who would step in to take on a monopoly that is the size of Microsoft (or Ma Bell, or Std Oil) and has a proven track record of being a bully if there were no government? I know that there are some that would argue "well, the consumers *did* decide because Microsoft has a better product." There are people who would (quite passionately) argue that Microsoft is NOT the better product, they just have the marketing budget to sway opinions.
Even taking Linux and BSD out of the picture (two products that IMHO are better products than MS) and another product came along truly WAS better than Microsoft. How would it compete?
My point is that the government does have a role, however they have taken their role too far and reached to deep into the pockets of business. Our government is a business, and it needs to stop trying to be one. I think that the liberitarians have it backwards - they want to remove the government from business, personally I think that we should take the business out of government. Make it into the regulatory comittee that it is suppossed to be, and not try to make it a for-profit organization. I think then you will see that business will want to have nothing to do with a government. First step - remove all "contributions" in any form from any government agency.
And for those of you who do pay attention to.sigs - yes I know that I have a Bill Maher quote, yes I know that he is a Libertarian, yes I do agree with *some* of what he says. It takes listening to a lot of point of views to find one you agree with. Limiting yourself to a follower of a party limits your points of view. As the good Dr Timothy Leary once said, "think for yourself, question authority."
Slashdot Mirror
I have one TV in the house that my room mate watches. I don't make a conscious effort to not watch TV, I just don't have time for it. When I do turn it on, it usually means that it is college football season and there is a CU game on. Other than that, every once in a while I watch HBO signature shows (6 ft under, Band of Bros). I don't fee any more elite, I just have more time to do other things - whatever they may be. And it isn't all that bad not knowing or caring what people are talking about at the office the next day. There are so many TV shows on now (especially if you have cable) that almost no one is watching the same show as you, so it has become less of a conversation piece for the following day and more of an entertainment supplement.
he can have mine ;)
I was thinking of an idea similar to this a while ago and thinking how to get people to get people on a system and how a company could profit from a system such as this. The idea that I came up with is as follows (and granted, this is very much a rough outline):
Sell computers at or just above cost to consumers in a package that provides all the necessary hardware / software. The end user will be forced to sign an agreement that will provide for them the DSL / cable line at a reduced cost and the computer for the end user. They must also agree (stated within the terms of service, that their computer should always remain on (when reasonable) and when not being used is subject to being used by my company (we'll call it MyCo).
Now, to offset the costs of the reduced price of computers and the reduced cost of cable / dsl - MyCo then can sell a client to a larger corporation who is interested in large scale computing without having to purchase one. For those of you who are familiar with the supercomputer environment, it isn't uncommon to lease out cycles on a larger scale computer to other entities to help offset the cost of some of the larger super computers. By leasing out the number crunching abilities of the distributed network of computers, this would be able to cover the costs of selling consumer hardware / packages and would allow for large-ish companies to harness the power of a distributed number crunching system.
Like I said, this is all very preliminary and more of just a thought than anything, but I think that something like this might attract more than just the "geek novelty" users. It would allow consumers to benefit, and would allow other companies to piggy-back on the system without having to make the large investment into a "supercomputer."
I guess that I did come off as a little snotty in my original post, but to me (and this is purely my opinion); for them to ask for ideas as opposed to having an open channel where the users can constantly contribute ideas seems suspect to me.
I have no problem contibuting ideas so long as it doesn't involve an "act now for this limited time offer" clause attached to it.
Free Software has never had marketing before and hasn't needed it. I just don't want to see things cheapened and see Free / Open Software get turned into an infomercial. Unless this is Google sticking their feet in the water...if they are going to be a Free company, then they should go ahead and do it and not be half hearted about it.
sorry for the ramble - it's late, Im tired and have a serious case of "code head."
While I am all for Free Software, I have to agree with the poster of this comment, at least in principal. 10k is a small price to pay for tons of ideas. While Im sure the majority of the ideas will not be worth the time spent reviewing them, there will always be that precious gem buried somewhere.
For once, I just might agree with a binary only submission. That way if Google is truly interested they can license the code from the developer or have some sort of other agreement / arrangement.
It isn't like Google is offering up their source to the rest of the world, so I don't see why it is unreasonable to only offer up a binary to them. At the risk of sounding like a "me too" post - I still think that this would be something fun to be involved in if I had the creativity or the passion to persue something of this sort.
Thank you - I was not clear on what a JFS did, thus the question. I am a programmer, but tend not to get my hands dirty in OS level type involvements, thus I didn't really grasp the concept of a JFS.
Ok, Im going to show my (extreme) ignorance here, but what is the difference between what the Ask Slashdot is asking for and a Journaling File System? I don't claim to know anything about JFS, so any insight to this would be great. Thanks in advance.
correction - it was 16 students and didn't warrant a TA. And it happened almost 3 years ago, so it is over and done with. I have since moved on to greener pastures. I just wanted to share my story with the /. crowd as an example that even with "cheat detection software" there are still gray areas. I also appreciate your feedback and wish that I had you as the prof and not the one that I had, you seem much more reasonable than he.
I had become the ring leader of what was initially viewed as a group of "rouge" students (the professors word of choice) - how I became this "ring leader" Im not exactly certain, the only thing that I can point to was the fact that I had the highest grade amongst those involved. The professor failed all of the students involved without any prior indication. Seeing as how the professor had no idea where anyone in the class stood grade wise at any point in the semester this lead me to the conclusion that he sat on all of our assignments until the 11th hour. Had he looked at them when they were turned in (about a third of the way through the semester) he would have noticed this earlier.
The professor was also aware that all of the students and myself were all working together. We would often all go into his office together with questions, we would all be in the study lounges together before exams sharing notes and thoughts on the upcoming exam and we all took similarly scheduled classes. It was no secret that we all worked together.
In regard to your bullet points:
It was known that I was the originator of forming the group, however from there the group became it's own entity - we all used it to solve the problems that we were given (and lets face it - a 200 level course that is expected to write a compiler is a daunting task, especially considering that compilers is the class that typically follows programming languages - one is the theory, the other is the application. This prof seemd to forget about teaching theory and threw us the application).
I am all for academic honesty and making students prove that they can handle the work load, however when the work load is unreasonable or expectations are outlandish, I don't think that it is unfair to seek out answers from your peers who are in the same boat when your professor refuses to acknowledge that his work load is unfair and his methods are poor.
It is definately an ugly situation - and the resolution came by all of the students involved having to retake the class and their grades were withdrawn. *sigh* I think that covers it.
I personally have had experience being accused of cheating in a computer science class. At the uni that I attended, the prof for the Programming Languages class was in his tenure and had already (mentally) retired. His concern for the class was minimal at best. An example of this was the time that myself and another student went into his office to talk to him because he was late to class and we had some questions on an assignmnet that was due the following class. When we poked our heads in his office he was in his chair - asleep. If that isn't enough - he completely forgot to show up for the final exam.
I don't claim to be a model student by any means, but in this class of 16 I had the highest grade in the class and had done every assignment to the best of my abilities. It came as quite a shock to me when I got my grades and noticed that there was an F for my Programming Languages class.
I promptly called the professor and he said that this was an issue that was best dealt with in a face to face manner - so I went to his office and he claimed that myself and 3 other students in the class had cheated. He pulled up the source code and showed the very striking similarities. When I explained him that some of the problems that were assigned were out of the scope of this class and that he offered no help, I informed him that I had worked with these students to get a solution to the problem. We did not copy any prior works, and all worked together to complete a tough assignment. I admitted that we shared code, only because we had shared ideas and had all come to the solution together.
To make an already long story short (Im forcing myself to leave out details), it ended up getting appealed and overturned, and the professor is now on probation and only teaching 100 level courses
The moral - cheating and sharing of ideas are different concepts and should be handled seperately. I don't agree with programs that flag cheating based on similarities in code because sharing of ideas is typically encouraged in a university setting as long as they are obtained legitimately - a program as such cannot sufficiently distinguish the two.
Who watches the watchers?
thank you. Granted I didn't do an extensive search, but I didn't find anything in my google search. Im glad that someone is smarter than I :)
What does this article have to do with the "anti-communist messages" that were found in Win 95? There is a one sentence blurb in this article. And after searching google all I came up with was a couple of board postings that were from an e-mail that was from a guy who has a dog....
Sorry for the cynicisism, but if there is any truth to this there is little credibility behind it.
hmm, maybe this is a bad idea, but what if the courts had mandated that MS unbundle their OS and forced them to open it up (as in a nice cold open can of speech)?
Im speculating here, but - imagine if the OS was free, but they were still able to sell everything else - IE, Defrag, notepad (yeach) etc.
This would have a two fold effect of still allowing MS to make money off of some of their other bigger products (Office, SQL Server) and would also allow people the choice.
I think that people who say that everything should be opened up are unrealistic, it's one thing to make it look like you are trying to kill a giant, it's another to let the giant kill itself.
At the very least all APIs should have been opened up. This post isn't really going anywhere, I just had a thought that I wanted to throw out there and see if anyone had any expansion on it (good and bad please).
if the inventors only knew what they had started :)
Hmm, this article seems a little light on details. To me (very much not a know it all) it sounds like it is an exploit in the MIME type headers for a page - if that's the case is IE really the only one that can be exploited or does it lie more in the way that IE handles MIME type headers?
More detail would be nice. (and no, I don't want to know more abou tit so I can exploit, just so that I can learn from it and other's mistakes)
Katz should take lessons from this guy
I remember the first time I played Wolf3D was also the first time that I had ever heard Ministry (In Case You Didn't Feel Like Showing Up) - ever since that day I can't surpass the adrenaline rush and I can't play a FPS without some hard core industrial.
Half Life came close, but it didn't own me like that game did with that soundtrack. Screw Trent Reznor and his lame Quake sound track, gimmie some Al Jorgensen (back when he was still doing heroine please, not his new crap) and some huge pixels >:)
I wonder if it splattered on the windsheild.
bah dum bum <crash>
I don't live in the UK, but I am a clubber here in the states and cant stand Jules (looks like R1 replaced him with Fergie this year and Im still trying to figure out who is worse) - I laughed out loud when he remarked that it doesn't respond to the crowd - like he is even remotely aware that there is a crowd that he is playing to. Seems like his sets are based on the biggest anthems of the moment.
I think that a Dj who used this as a suggestion device would be interesting. A lot of good DJs are planning their set 3-5 songs ahead of the one that is currently playing - if the device could be used to offer up suggestions (like something the DJ may have in their crate that they haven't played in a while) it could be interesting. I can see this being used as another tool behind the decks (ban the beat counters), but can't really see something like this completely replacing DJs.
Just my 2 cents.
Im not suggesting either way, that Mr Tosatti would or wouldn't be the best person to fit the position. However I would like to challenge him to convince me - in his own words - that he should be the person to fill the position. As I said before, if he is going to be the person to maintain the kernel current kernel path, I would like him to justify why he is qualified, and why I (as a linux user) should trust him with my OS of choice.
Im sure that there are others who are interested and others that would do a very good job at such a position. I want to know what makes him special - if anything.
I say it's "mine" as in the collective "mine" - as in we are free to use our kernel as we please. Possesive in the public domain sense, not as in the singular sense.
Sorry for any confusion.
This is not intended as a flame or a troll, more of an interview style question. I figure since we are the people who are putting our trust in this person to handle *our* kernel, that this should also be our chance to learn about the person responsible.
What makes you think that you can handle maintaining the Linux Kernel? What qualifications do you have and why should we (the people) trust you with the Linux kernel.
I realize that this is actually two questions, but they more or less go together in one answer.
Author of "Ishmael" and "The Story of B." Not nearly Sci Fi - more like anthropology for dummies, but still great reads none the less.
in an ideal world I would agree with the Libertarian point of view, however the one loop hole that I see in the argument is the one of a monopoly, I know that it is going to seem like the typical slashbot case of Microsoft, but I think that in this situation it is legitimate.
.sigs - yes I know that I have a Bill Maher quote, yes I know that he is a Libertarian, yes I do agree with *some* of what he says. It takes listening to a lot of point of views to find one you agree with. Limiting yourself to a follower of a party limits your points of view. As the good Dr Timothy Leary once said, "think for yourself, question authority."
Who would step in to take on a monopoly that is the size of Microsoft (or Ma Bell, or Std Oil) and has a proven track record of being a bully if there were no government? I know that there are some that would argue "well, the consumers *did* decide because Microsoft has a better product." There are people who would (quite passionately) argue that Microsoft is NOT the better product, they just have the marketing budget to sway opinions.
Even taking Linux and BSD out of the picture (two products that IMHO are better products than MS) and another product came along truly WAS better than Microsoft. How would it compete?
My point is that the government does have a role, however they have taken their role too far and reached to deep into the pockets of business. Our government is a business, and it needs to stop trying to be one. I think that the liberitarians have it backwards - they want to remove the government from business, personally I think that we should take the business out of government. Make it into the regulatory comittee that it is suppossed to be, and not try to make it a for-profit organization. I think then you will see that business will want to have nothing to do with a government. First step - remove all "contributions" in any form from any government agency.
And for those of you who do pay attention to
rant mode = off