When a professor calls with a computer problem, it's generally because the printer isn't turned on. Maybe coke got spilled in a keyboard.
When a student calls with a computer problem, it's because he's gotten his computer infected with a virus or deleted KERN32.DLL while cleaning out his hard drive ("I never used it, so I assumed I didn't need it!").
Unfortunately, that is the case. Most public schools aren't going to put out the money for someone who can administer a Linux network.
Plus, retraining the teachers will be hard. I think most teachers have this natural inability to learn computers. Granted, this inability is mostly born of fear, but it's still there.
And there are the bits of Linux that are still hard to deal with, such as printing or running a lot of educational software.
I know this is the case for Win98 and Win2k, because we do it at work, too. Unfortunately, I don't think cloning hard drives or using Ghost is acceptable with Windows XP, even if a large pile of licenses or a site license is purchased. I'm not in charge of maintaining the XP boxen, but I haven't seen Ghost running lately. . .
Apple makes their money by doing what's best for the users.
You're saying that a company that just released an imcomplete version of their latest OS, then finished the stuff they didn't finish the first time and released it but made the users who bought the incomplete version pay for the upgrade does what's best for the users? I realize that Apple may have had to do that to cover the costs, but it's certainly not very friendly to the users.
Similar feelings for the Color Classic, the Performa series, the insistence that function must follow form, which seems to invariably lead to shit like super-expensive circular motherboards and the like, and the first production run of PowerMacs.
If a cell phone user keeps it quiet, what the hell is the problem?
I think that's the crux of the problem. (Well, that and the custom ringtone. As far as I'm concerned, the 0.01% of cell phone users who like to sit in restaurants and play all their ring tones at full volume to their friends to show off their new phones are enough justification to make custom ringtones be punishable by lethal injection.) There seems to be some sort of natural instinct to speak loudly to someone you can't see, because most cell phone users I know (to my chagrin, I must admit that group includes me) will immediately raise the volume of their voice when entering a cell phone conversation.
The SoMo1 is an interesting, if not entirely humane, solution to the problem. Maybe a more marketable solution would be one where the phone discourages speaking too loudly by actually getting more quiet in response to the user increasing his/her speech volume above a given threshold. Make it the person on the other end's responsibility to determine how loud your voice needs to be using the handy-dandy volume control.
I'd be more interested in having one that uses some sort of electromagnetic pulse to destroy the speaker on any phone with a "Larger than Life" ringtone.
Why such long command names? You'd think they could at least truncate the command DIFFERENCES to something like DIFF (or, if that's too unixy, DIFFS), DIRECTORY to DIR, etc.
SmartCard security, ATM cards, and a host of other security solutions (not just along the card theme) already employ the "Something you have, something you know" security scheme in which sensitive things can only be accessed if you have both a device (usually containing some sort of identifier) as well as a password.
Another interesting version of this system involves a keychain or some similar device that contains a computer whose only job is to take some encryption key and scramble it every n time interval. The central sever is doing the same thing. The end result is that the user has to know two passwords - his normal password, plus a key that changes every minute or what have you.
Since when do state governments maintain the Internet?
The US government doesn't own the Internet, it just thinks it does. If we had to say anyone owns and maintains the Internet, it would be MCI, AT&T, et al.
Granted, I'm not an expert on lawsuits, but this one seems more complicated than most people see it.
I don't think SearchKing is trying to get Google to undo the changes it made to its PageRank algorithm. I think SearchKing is trying to use the fact that Google changed its PageRank in order to get a massive settlement out of court.
The CEO of SearchKing is trying to force Google into a position where they will either have to give him a huge stack of cash or they will have to reveal more detailed secrets about the workings of PageRank in court. Google's entire business depends on PageRank remaining a trade secret. If I were Google, I'd fork over the cash if it looked like it might come down to that.
I'm in college, and I can tell you for a fact that all the attractive college students, male or female, wear clothes. The naked people are kinda funny looking - they got all these floppy bits on 'em.
If you're talking about a Color NextStation, I seem to remember that Sun's computers at least used to use the same kind of monitor. If you search for ways to get a VGA monitor hooked up to a Sun workstation, you will probably have more luck.
So true. . without the software and documentation, hardware can often be useless.
I have a NextStation slab and monitor, but no cable. With documentation, I got a step closer to getting it turned on by building my own monitor cable, but still can't boot it because nobody seems to have copies of the OS anymore.
I have two - an original slab and an original Cube, plus one of the monitors. They are really interesting computers, although often in some seriously annoying ways.
For one, it was not uncommon for the Cubes to have two motherboards - there was an upgrade to put a 68030 CPU in the NeXT Cube, but it came in the form of a whole motherboard. It was possible to plug two mobos into the backplane and use the old one for all sorts of fun tricks. Unfortunately, you couldn't use this trick for multiprocessing. ..
Another neat (but stupid) trick is that the keyboard, mouse, speakers, and microphone all plugged into the monitor - and the monitor had no power cord! Instead, everything ran through a DB19 cable. Of course, the only place where a DB19 cable was ever used was on the original NeXT monitor, and nobody other than NeXT ever made them, so the monitor cables are rare enough to make them more expensive than the monitors themselves. Luckily, it is simple enough to take some DB25 connectors and fashion your own monitor cable.
Incase anyone wasn't paying attention back when Slashdot decided to add subscription service, one of the things Slashdot is now doing is allowing advertisers to write advertisements disguised as articles and put them up with the rest of the articles.
Either start paying the subscription fee or quit whining.
At 12mph, the Segway isn't going to be useful except as a replacement for walking. Maybe it would work as a way to transport stuff like 75lb mailbags that are too much for one person to carry, but with the company advertising it as a way to imporve employee productivity by reducing the time they walk, this seems like the perfect way to make people fat - it's well known that exercise as a part of one's lifestyle, even if it's just walking a lot, is generally more effective than going to the gym - it's certainly more effective if you count the likelihood of a given person sticking to the exercise.
I think that the thing that a lot of corporations who see the Segway as a productivity booster don't see is that this will probably result in a productivity loss - when I'm walking around during work, I'm often doing work such as looking over papers and the like. I don't think that would be happening if I had to be concerned with making sure my Segway isn't bumping into anything. Plus, every extra pound of fat on an employee is more potential money you're spending either on higher insurance premiums or on giving them sick leave for their coronary bypasses and the like.
Slashdot Mirror
(I say humanities because liberal arts isn't a cirriculum so much as a theory of education)
I had a math prof who would give A's, but refused to give a 100% score even on an exam where a student solved each problem perfectly.
Her reason? "Only God is perfect."
A bit out on the stupid end of extreme cases, but such things happen.
You should have tried "-1 Flamebait" or "-1 Troll"
Anecdote:
When a professor calls with a computer problem, it's generally because the printer isn't turned on. Maybe coke got spilled in a keyboard.
When a student calls with a computer problem, it's because he's gotten his computer infected with a virus or deleted KERN32.DLL while cleaning out his hard drive ("I never used it, so I assumed I didn't need it!").
Unfortunately, that is the case. Most public schools aren't going to put out the money for someone who can administer a Linux network.
Plus, retraining the teachers will be hard. I think most teachers have this natural inability to learn computers. Granted, this inability is mostly born of fear, but it's still there.
And there are the bits of Linux that are still hard to deal with, such as printing or running a lot of educational software.
I know this is the case for Win98 and Win2k, because we do it at work, too. Unfortunately, I don't think cloning hard drives or using Ghost is acceptable with Windows XP, even if a large pile of licenses or a site license is purchased. I'm not in charge of maintaining the XP boxen, but I haven't seen Ghost running lately. . .
Apple makes their money by doing what's best for the users.
You're saying that a company that just released an imcomplete version of their latest OS, then finished the stuff they didn't finish the first time and released it but made the users who bought the incomplete version pay for the upgrade does what's best for the users? I realize that Apple may have had to do that to cover the costs, but it's certainly not very friendly to the users.
Similar feelings for the Color Classic, the Performa series, the insistence that function must follow form, which seems to invariably lead to shit like super-expensive circular motherboards and the like, and the first production run of PowerMacs.
If a cell phone user keeps it quiet, what the hell is the problem?
I think that's the crux of the problem. (Well, that and the custom ringtone. As far as I'm concerned, the 0.01% of cell phone users who like to sit in restaurants and play all their ring tones at full volume to their friends to show off their new phones are enough justification to make custom ringtones be punishable by lethal injection.) There seems to be some sort of natural instinct to speak loudly to someone you can't see, because most cell phone users I know (to my chagrin, I must admit that group includes me) will immediately raise the volume of their voice when entering a cell phone conversation.
The SoMo1 is an interesting, if not entirely humane, solution to the problem. Maybe a more marketable solution would be one where the phone discourages speaking too loudly by actually getting more quiet in response to the user increasing his/her speech volume above a given threshold. Make it the person on the other end's responsibility to determine how loud your voice needs to be using the handy-dandy volume control.
I'd be more interested in having one that uses some sort of electromagnetic pulse to destroy the speaker on any phone with a "Larger than Life" ringtone.
Not meaning to flame VMS here, just observing. .
Why such long command names? You'd think they could at least truncate the command DIFFERENCES to something like DIFF (or, if that's too unixy, DIFFS), DIRECTORY to DIR, etc.
I'm guessing the reason why the Unix Rosetta Stone doesn't list VMS is because it only deals with Unix variants.
DEC or non-DEC, I don't think expanding one's Unix knowledge is the fastest way to learn VMS.
The Art of Deception is extremely easy to understand and actually fun to read.
SmartCard security, ATM cards, and a host of other security solutions (not just along the card theme) already employ the "Something you have, something you know" security scheme in which sensitive things can only be accessed if you have both a device (usually containing some sort of identifier) as well as a password.
Another interesting version of this system involves a keychain or some similar device that contains a computer whose only job is to take some encryption key and scramble it every n time interval. The central sever is doing the same thing. The end result is that the user has to know two passwords - his normal password, plus a key that changes every minute or what have you.
Since when do state governments maintain the Internet?
The US government doesn't own the Internet, it just thinks it does. If we had to say anyone owns and maintains the Internet, it would be MCI, AT&T, et al.
1. Expand .NET framework to cater to the 50 or so programmers out there who like both M$ and functional programming.
2. ???????
3. PROFIT!
And playing a game that requires you to barely lift your feet (more like shuffling), is not exercise.
If you're cramming your computer into a narrow slot provided by your desk, I think I might have found the solution to your cooling problems.
Two words: Microsoft Office
Granted, I'm not an expert on lawsuits, but this one seems more complicated than most people see it.
I don't think SearchKing is trying to get Google to undo the changes it made to its PageRank algorithm. I think SearchKing is trying to use the fact that Google changed its PageRank in order to get a massive settlement out of court.
The CEO of SearchKing is trying to force Google into a position where they will either have to give him a huge stack of cash or they will have to reveal more detailed secrets about the workings of PageRank in court. Google's entire business depends on PageRank remaining a trade secret. If I were Google, I'd fork over the cash if it looked like it might come down to that.
He's defending his lawsuit with a speech about the evils of human meddling with the ordering of pages on a search engine to serve a goal!
I'm in college, and I can tell you for a fact that all the attractive college students, male or female, wear clothes. The naked people are kinda funny looking - they got all these floppy bits on 'em.
If you're talking about a Color NextStation, I seem to remember that Sun's computers at least used to use the same kind of monitor. If you search for ways to get a VGA monitor hooked up to a Sun workstation, you will probably have more luck.
So true. . without the software and documentation, hardware can often be useless.
I have a NextStation slab and monitor, but no cable. With documentation, I got a step closer to getting it turned on by building my own monitor cable, but still can't boot it because nobody seems to have copies of the OS anymore.
I have two - an original slab and an original Cube, plus one of the monitors. They are really interesting computers, although often in some seriously annoying ways.
.
For one, it was not uncommon for the Cubes to have two motherboards - there was an upgrade to put a 68030 CPU in the NeXT Cube, but it came in the form of a whole motherboard. It was possible to plug two mobos into the backplane and use the old one for all sorts of fun tricks. Unfortunately, you couldn't use this trick for multiprocessing. .
Another neat (but stupid) trick is that the keyboard, mouse, speakers, and microphone all plugged into the monitor - and the monitor had no power cord! Instead, everything ran through a DB19 cable. Of course, the only place where a DB19 cable was ever used was on the original NeXT monitor, and nobody other than NeXT ever made them, so the monitor cables are rare enough to make them more expensive than the monitors themselves. Luckily, it is simple enough to take some DB25 connectors and fashion your own monitor cable.
Incase anyone wasn't paying attention back when Slashdot decided to add subscription service, one of the things Slashdot is now doing is allowing advertisers to write advertisements disguised as articles and put them up with the rest of the articles.
Either start paying the subscription fee or quit whining.
At 12mph, the Segway isn't going to be useful except as a replacement for walking. Maybe it would work as a way to transport stuff like 75lb mailbags that are too much for one person to carry, but with the company advertising it as a way to imporve employee productivity by reducing the time they walk, this seems like the perfect way to make people fat - it's well known that exercise as a part of one's lifestyle, even if it's just walking a lot, is generally more effective than going to the gym - it's certainly more effective if you count the likelihood of a given person sticking to the exercise.
I think that the thing that a lot of corporations who see the Segway as a productivity booster don't see is that this will probably result in a productivity loss - when I'm walking around during work, I'm often doing work such as looking over papers and the like. I don't think that would be happening if I had to be concerned with making sure my Segway isn't bumping into anything. Plus, every extra pound of fat on an employee is more potential money you're spending either on higher insurance premiums or on giving them sick leave for their coronary bypasses and the like.