> > This only affects senders of bulk emails (mailing lists and spammers). >
Well, I work in a.edu IT department, and I know that our Admissions staff sends out lots of email to prospective students. You know, teen-agers at home on Mom & Dad's PC -- many of whom have a sub-account off their parents' AOL account.
So now all the colleges should pay AOL to send out their acceptance letters and other announcements (much less all the other stuff that our adminstration wants moved from paper mail to email, like grades, class rosters, payment confirmaityon, &c., in order to cut costs and improve delivery time)? *snort* If Slashdotters got mad when SBC wanted companies and consumers to pay for preferrential service, why doesn't this make them mad? Is it just that AOL is so déclassé? And how come no one thinks there could possibly be a legitimate use of bulk email besides mailing lists? Sheesh.
Mark MF-WN wrote: > > Don't forget the enormous amount of money [Bill Gates] donates to the WHO... >
What with them all going deaf and all, it's no surprise they've had to look to philanthropic organizations for help. Can you see Roger Daltrey with a hearing ear dog or a little trained spider monkey on his shoulder or something, during an autograph session? Awwwesome.
Yeah, he passed away on Tuesday, I think. There was an email that went out to the STA community that was forwarded to me. [I'm a Cretin-Derham Hall alum after having been a Middle Squirrel at STA.] ---------- Sent: Tue 1/24/2006 3:24 PM Subject: Faculty Member Dave Bassett Passes - STA Community Grieves
The flag in front of Saint Thomas Academy is flying at half staff in honor of Professor David M. Bassett, longtime Saint Thomas Academy faculty member, who passed away from cancer today.
A 1962 graduate of Saint Thomas Military Academy, Dave returned to the Academy in 1975 as a faculty member teaching various areas of the science curriculum. He was a teacher, mentor, advisor, and friend to the thousands of students who passed through his science labs and the halls of the Academy.
His colleagues remember Dave for his quick wit, stories, magic tricks, talent at the piano, and compassion.
His father, D. Marvin Bassett, taught at STA from 1945 to 1977. Dave had been on medical leave since April, 2005, and will be missed by the many thousands of people who were honored to know him. ---------
I know that I feel lucky to have known him. He was among my top five teachers ever. A good man, a very good man.
We saw it, too: I was in 8th grade at STA Middle School in the suburban Twin Cities, and it was during Mr. Bassett's "Model Rocketry and Aeronautics" class. (A highly-desireable elective, by the way: the teacher *ruled,* and making & flying paper airplanes and model rockets -- like Chris Ginther's six-foot monster -- so close to the MSP flight paths entailed a great thrill of danger.)
Mr. Bassett silently rolled in the giant TV-on-a-five-foot-cart and switched it on. We'd never seen him do this during class before -- he usually slipped into the passage behind the whiteboard to sneak sips of coffee, but I think this time he just stalked out into the halway and returned with the A/V cart -- so we all stopped. We watched them replay it over and over, no longer paying attention to the model rockets and paper airplanes on the tables in front of us.
Looking back, it seems almost contrived, but that's what happened.
Mr. Bassett died this past weekend, and he was one of the finest teachers I ever had. Mentioning his death in conjuction with the anniversary of this tragedy also seems contrived, but he was a warm, funny, and smart man and a fine teacher, and he will be sorely missed.
arivoanov wrote: > >...and if it did not allow babybells to grow back to mabell size... >
Are "babybell" and "mabell" new units of measurement? Units of what, corporate arrogance (years of potential prison time per million dollars of CEO compensation), or cost of data throughput ($ per Mb per sec), or what?
"My RBOC gets forty rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!"
skyshock21 wrote of the new magnetized power cables on the MacBookPros: > > Yeah, they've only had those on deep fryers for around 10 years now. I was wondering > when the computer industry would catch on! >
Sorry, but most of the time IT->fast food is a one-way transition. Not a lot of informaiton leaks back over the wall, you know?
What about legitimate downloads, like from emusic.com?
I'm not shilling for them, I just tried out a 100-free-track promotion once and certainly found one hundred songs that I wanted. When the promo month ended, I cancelled my membership -- but I still have those hundred tracks. And they're good stuff, too.
So wouldn't my D/Ls count? What about CDs I rip that i borrow fro the library, hypothetically?
And yes, the emusic tracks are stored on my second iPod, which is a lot of spending for a guy with three kids whose disposable income approaches $zero per month.:7)
vhold wroite: > > Intelligence is next to nothing without creativity. The benefits of being a couple years ahead > of your peers academically diminish greatly as you age. Missing out on the freetime of youth > is something very difficult to make up for >
I was in a gifted & talented program grades 4-6, and the chief virtue as I see it, years later was the opportunity to be among _real peers_.
Having a classroom full of other kids meant not having to wander from classroom to classroom the way I did in "normal" school (i.e., grades 1-3, when I had Reading class with the kids two years older and Math with the kids one year older). There was a broad spectrum of types who actually got to follow their inclinations, from an introverted future MITRE Corp. guy to some relative jocks to arty chicks to a couple of metal heads. Since we weren't all herded into a single narrow social group, everyone actually got to enjoy the "freetime of youth" you mention.
"Taking up more of a kid's time"? Well, we were in school, you know? We had to go to class the same as the other kids. But we also played soccer better than anyone esle, and we enjoyed a game of dodgeball or Kill The Man With The Ball at recess as much as the next bunch of eleven-year olds -- but we also watched slideshows and learned the history of art, and we had a philosopher [hello, Peter Shea!] in for an hour every Wednesday, and we learned to do those logic puzzles with the giant grids of possible combinations, and we learned German, and...and I never would have seen any of that stuff but for the program I was in. (I certainly didn't see anything of comparable challenge, clear through the end of college.)
Of course, since then, the program's been dismantled, presumably for its "elitist" admittance criteria, and the kids who would've gone there are toiling away...who knows? Poor little bastards...
Anyway, gifted & talented programs are a wonderful place to spend society's money: the bored kid napping through school now could miss the stimulation that makes him become tomorrow's genetecist/programmer/ethical patent attorney. (OK, that last one is exaggeration.)
I think that means that if you're going to use this for profit -- say, by a company -- they want you to send them money for the old, pre-Google-style Urchin product with its associated support plans (which, I should point out, are pretty good). You know, that old "money is exchanged for goods or services" angle that makes an economy an economy.:7)
We have had Urchin for a while, and its charts-n-graphs are quite popular with web artistes, management types, and the departmental end users whose web pages are posted on our main site. It's good stuff.
I believe that the ATABeast's cover has to come off before the drives can come out, as they pull straight up.
Tangentially related, in the box we found a fearsomely sharp, translucent red plastic thing that looks like it's a tool for gutting deer, or like it fell off a superhero costume or something. The manual didn't mention it, but I guessed it's for grabbing hold of drives and yanking them up-and-out when they need to be replaced.
Anyway, go, Beast, go!
We use a Beast or two for disk-based backups (under a VTL, virtual tape library), and we likes them. They're pretty cheap, and pretty easy. Mind you, I htink it has to be unracked to add a disk, but them's the breaks. Oh, and they do SATA now, I hear.
>> >> One mans -1 Troll is another mans +1 Funny. >> >One man's sig-line is another man's glaring, offensive typo. >
Well, _two_ glaring, offensive typographical errors really, if you count each missing apostrophe. (Lord knows I did.) And if anyone scoring at home wants to give extra credit for missing quotation marks around the moderation tags, feel free to count each one of those separately, too.
I opened a LibraryThing account last month, and I mailed the guy a ten-spot in an envelope. In fact, I sent him an email to that effect and he approved my account immediately! Did I use Paypal? No, thanks, I save more time NOT sorting through all the Phishing emails than I could conceivably save making electronic payments. How about a credit card? He doesn't take them because He's Just This Guy, You Know? But good old folding money did the trick.
Would I mail someone a dollar? You bet, it's the closest to a micropayment I'll ever get -- but the same kind of process that uses it as a gating mechanism won't trust me to put it in the mail, so it fails.
Now, I am willing to do st00pid, repetitive things several times (like decipher a captcha), but that's been pooh-pooh'ed in another post.
And if these initial ABC programs are popular, who knows what else from Disney's stable of media properties may hit the web? ESPN, anyone? (Hey, if His Steveness can take on the music cartels, maybe he can beat down the MLB owners, too!)
What else does Disney own, anyway? Lemme see here... Wow: http://corporate.disney.go.com/corporate/overview. html
There's a lot there to choose from.
Malachi Constant wrote: > >...but if a squid [battlign a whale] surfaced it would die unless maybe it did it very, very slowly. >
Did you ever consider the possibility that, with a brain as big as a Volkswagen Microbus, the whale might _know_ that?!
Childhood memories of "Jaws" scared me away from the ocean for life -- and now thinking about how whales have already planned out how to use water pressure differences to battle their enemies....spooky.
Henk Postma wrote: > > Seriously, I love linux for the fact that I can use 'old hardware', but why do I have to wait QUADRATICALLY > longer to start the same basic application? >
TimeCube guy, is that you?
Former SSE illumin8 writes: > > [Sun support] are truly on the level of IBM Global Services and > only a couple others when it comes to knowledgeable onsite support. >
Amen: field engineers -- Decision One employees in my area, I understand it, as well as the actual Sun employee I've dealth with, the miracle-working SSE Paul Connell -- are teh amazing.
The phone support people, however, are uniformly, jaw-droppingly bad. An embrassment. An affront to anyone who takes pride in their work. A near-sub-contractual waste of my employer's money. Destructive to Sun's corporate image and reputation. "SHAMEFUL, SIR!" as they say in the House of Lords, or "preliterate," as I told one of them to his face last week, when he left my case in limbo for 14 hours overnight after _calling_ me when I specified twice that I wanted only email communication since I'd be without a phone. A finite number of monkeys with Plantronics headsets working out Kafka on my dime, if you will.
The outsoured phone shops want only to dot Is and cross Ts, and care nothing for actually solving customer problems. Even Gold contract calls, occasinally even handled domestically, still don't elicit actual fixes on time, every time.
Oh the joy when someone finally shows up at my data center with a box of parts and some paperwork: I know my ship has come in! But those chimps on the phone: they're really wearing me down.
illumin8 wrote: > > Sun's hardware support is second to none. They guarantee that a box you buy now will continue to be supported up until 5 years after the product is EOL... >
*ahem* I bought an L25 (2-drive, 20-tape SDLT library) with only one drive in it. When I got budget for a second drive, Sun had switched the unit from LVD to HVD. I was told that buying a new drive that would be covered under my existing support contract (vs. just buying one off EBay or a gray market reseller) would require actually junking the unit and buying a whole new library and two drives.
Uh, what?
"HP on line two, sir. Somethign about a new tape library?"
And I'm a Sun fanboy.
Some ACs are people who need _anonymity_. Perhaps their posts could be moderated (though it'd take quite a bit of work to separate the tiny kernels of wheat from the piles of chaff).
thefon wrote: > > A universal constructor is a machine that can replicate itself > and - in addition - make other industrial products. Such a > machine would have a number of interesting characteristics, > such as being subject to Darwinian evolution, increasing in > number exponentially, and being extremely low-cost >...A list which pretty much adds up to the plot of any Fred Saberhagen "Berserker" paperback.
jrcamp wrote: > > I have always been told you go to school to learn how to learn. >
Would that it were so, but too many kids come to school underfed, underdisciplined, and undertaught in previous years. (It's a loop, I think.:7) The "popularity" of Head Start programs speaks to the first two, as does the presence of metal detectors at high school doors.
These days, kids go to school to get much of the care they didn't get at home -- though, oddly, many of those same homes likely have a game console and a cable TV subscription... > > The point is to teach them the concepts so that they are confident enough later in life to adapt to new things. >
Exactly -- but a lot of kids can't hear their teachers over their growling tummies.
Slashdot Mirror
> .edu IT department, and I know that our Admissions staff sends out lots of email to prospective students. You know, teen-agers at home on Mom & Dad's PC -- many of whom have a sub-account off their parents' AOL account.
2 002/01/02/BU166284.DTL&nl=biz
> This only affects senders of bulk emails (mailing lists and spammers).
>
Well, I work in a
In early 2002, Harvard sent out acceptance letters via email, and "between 75 and 100" were blocked because harvard.edu wasn't on the AOL whitelist. See:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/
So now all the colleges should pay AOL to send out their acceptance letters and other announcements (much less all the other stuff that our adminstration wants moved from paper mail to email, like grades, class rosters, payment confirmaityon, &c., in order to cut costs and improve delivery time)? *snort* If Slashdotters got mad when SBC wanted companies and consumers to pay for preferrential service, why doesn't this make them mad? Is it just that AOL is so déclassé? And how come no one thinks there could possibly be a legitimate use of bulk email besides mailing lists? Sheesh.
Mark MF-WN wrote:
>
> Don't forget the enormous amount of money [Bill Gates] donates to the WHO...
>
What with them all going deaf and all, it's no surprise they've had to look to philanthropic organizations for help. Can you see Roger Daltrey with a hearing ear dog or a little trained spider monkey on his shoulder or something, during an autograph session? Awwwesome.
Yeah, he passed away on Tuesday, I think. There was an email that went out to the STA community that was forwarded to me. [I'm a Cretin-Derham Hall alum after having been a Middle Squirrel at STA.]
----------
Sent: Tue 1/24/2006 3:24 PM
Subject: Faculty Member Dave Bassett Passes - STA Community Grieves
The flag in front of Saint Thomas Academy is flying at half staff
in honor of Professor David M. Bassett, longtime Saint Thomas
Academy faculty member, who passed away from cancer today.
A 1962 graduate of Saint Thomas Military Academy, Dave returned to
the Academy in 1975 as a faculty member teaching various areas of
the science curriculum. He was a teacher, mentor, advisor, and
friend to the thousands of students who passed through his
science labs and the halls of the Academy.
His colleagues remember Dave for his quick wit, stories, magic
tricks, talent at the piano, and compassion.
His father, D. Marvin Bassett, taught at STA from 1945 to 1977.
Dave had been on medical leave since April, 2005, and will be
missed by the many thousands of people who were honored to
know him.
---------
I know that I feel lucky to have known him. He was among my top five teachers ever. A good man, a very good man.
We saw it, too: I was in 8th grade at STA Middle School in the suburban Twin Cities, and it was during Mr. Bassett's "Model Rocketry and Aeronautics" class. (A highly-desireable elective, by the way: the teacher *ruled,* and making & flying paper airplanes and model rockets -- like Chris Ginther's six-foot monster -- so close to the MSP flight paths entailed a great thrill of danger.)
Mr. Bassett silently rolled in the giant TV-on-a-five-foot-cart and switched it on. We'd never seen him do this during class before -- he usually slipped into the passage behind the whiteboard to sneak sips of coffee, but I think this time he just stalked out into the halway and returned with the A/V cart -- so we all stopped. We watched them replay it over and over, no longer paying attention to the model rockets and paper airplanes on the tables in front of us.
Looking back, it seems almost contrived, but that's what happened.
Mr. Bassett died this past weekend, and he was one of the finest teachers I ever had. Mentioning his death in conjuction with the anniversary of this tragedy also seems contrived, but he was a warm, funny, and smart man and a fine teacher, and he will be sorely missed.
arivoanov wrote: ...and if it did not allow babybells to grow back to mabell size...
>
>
>
Are "babybell" and "mabell" new units of measurement? Units of what, corporate arrogance (years of potential prison time per million dollars of CEO compensation), or cost of data throughput ($ per Mb per sec), or what?
"My RBOC gets forty rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!"
skyshock21 wrote of the new magnetized power cables on the MacBookPros:
>
> Yeah, they've only had those on deep fryers for around 10 years now. I was wondering
> when the computer industry would catch on!
>
Sorry, but most of the time IT->fast food is a one-way transition. Not a lot of informaiton leaks back over the wall, you know?
What about legitimate downloads, like from emusic.com? :7)
I'm not shilling for them, I just tried out a 100-free-track promotion once and certainly found one hundred songs that I wanted. When the promo month ended, I cancelled my membership -- but I still have those hundred tracks. And they're good stuff, too.
So wouldn't my D/Ls count? What about CDs I rip that i borrow fro the library, hypothetically?
And yes, the emusic tracks are stored on my second iPod, which is a lot of spending for a guy with three kids whose disposable income approaches $zero per month.
vhold wroite:
>
> Intelligence is next to nothing without creativity. The benefits of being a couple years ahead
> of your peers academically diminish greatly as you age. Missing out on the freetime of youth
> is something very difficult to make up for
>
I was in a gifted & talented program grades 4-6, and the chief virtue as I see it, years later was the opportunity to be among _real peers_.
Having a classroom full of other kids meant not having to wander from classroom to classroom the way I did in "normal" school (i.e., grades 1-3, when I had Reading class with the kids two years older and Math with the kids one year older). There was a broad spectrum of types who actually got to follow their inclinations, from an introverted future MITRE Corp. guy to some relative jocks to arty chicks to a couple of metal heads. Since we weren't all herded into a single narrow social group, everyone actually got to enjoy the "freetime of youth" you mention.
"Taking up more of a kid's time"? Well, we were in school, you know? We had to go to class the same as the other kids. But we also played soccer better than anyone esle, and we enjoyed a game of dodgeball or Kill The Man With The Ball at recess as much as the next bunch of eleven-year olds -- but we also watched slideshows and learned the history of art, and we had a philosopher [hello, Peter Shea!] in for an hour every Wednesday, and we learned to do those logic puzzles with the giant grids of possible combinations, and we learned German, and...and I never would have seen any of that stuff but for the program I was in. (I certainly didn't see anything of comparable challenge, clear through the end of college.)
Of course, since then, the program's been dismantled, presumably for its "elitist" admittance criteria, and the kids who would've gone there are toiling away...who knows? Poor little bastards...
Anyway, gifted & talented programs are a wonderful place to spend society's money: the bored kid napping through school now could miss the stimulation that makes him become tomorrow's genetecist/programmer/ethical patent attorney. (OK, that last one is exaggeration.)
I think that means that if you're going to use this for profit -- say, by a company -- they want you to send them money for the old, pre-Google-style Urchin product with its associated support plans (which, I should point out, are pretty good). You know, that old "money is exchanged for goods or services" angle that makes an economy an economy. :7)
We have had Urchin for a while, and its charts-n-graphs are quite popular with web artistes, management types, and the departmental end users whose web pages are posted on our main site. It's good stuff.
I believe that the ATABeast's cover has to come off before the drives can come out, as they pull straight up.
Tangentially related, in the box we found a fearsomely sharp, translucent red plastic thing that looks like it's a tool for gutting deer, or like it fell off a superhero costume or something. The manual didn't mention it, but I guessed it's for grabbing hold of drives and yanking them up-and-out when they need to be replaced.
Anyway, go, Beast, go!
We use a Beast or two for disk-based backups (under a VTL, virtual tape library), and we likes them. They're pretty cheap, and pretty easy. Mind you, I htink it has to be unracked to add a disk, but them's the breaks. Oh, and they do SATA now, I hear.
>>
>> One mans -1 Troll is another mans +1 Funny.
>>
>One man's sig-line is another man's glaring, offensive typo.
>
Well, _two_ glaring, offensive typographical errors really, if you count each missing apostrophe. (Lord knows I did.) And if anyone scoring at home wants to give extra credit for missing quotation marks around the moderation tags, feel free to count each one of those separately, too.
Through any damn medium I want!
I opened a LibraryThing account last month, and I mailed the guy a ten-spot in an envelope. In fact, I sent him an email to that effect and he approved my account immediately! Did I use Paypal? No, thanks, I save more time NOT sorting through all the Phishing emails than I could conceivably save making electronic payments. How about a credit card? He doesn't take them because He's Just This Guy, You Know? But good old folding money did the trick.
Would I mail someone a dollar? You bet, it's the closest to a micropayment I'll ever get -- but the same kind of process that uses it as a gating mechanism won't trust me to put it in the mail, so it fails.
Now, I am willing to do st00pid, repetitive things several times (like decipher a captcha), but that's been pooh-pooh'ed in another post.
Back to the drawing board, I guess...
> ...the USA is one of the original founding members of the UN...
>
>
*mutters* I got better...
And if these initial ABC programs are popular, who knows what else from Disney's stable of media properties may hit the web? ESPN, anyone? (Hey, if His Steveness can take on the music cartels, maybe he can beat down the MLB owners, too!). html
What else does Disney own, anyway? Lemme see here... Wow: http://corporate.disney.go.com/corporate/overview
There's a lot there to choose from.
Malachi Constant wrote: ...but if a squid [battlign a whale] surfaced it would die unless maybe it did it very, very slowly.
>
>
>
Did you ever consider the possibility that, with a brain as big as a Volkswagen Microbus, the whale might _know_ that?!
Childhood memories of "Jaws" scared me away from the ocean for life -- and now thinking about how whales have already planned out how to use water pressure differences to battle their enemies....spooky.
Henk Postma wrote:
>
> Seriously, I love linux for the fact that I can use 'old hardware', but why do I have to wait QUADRATICALLY
> longer to start the same basic application?
>
TimeCube guy, is that you?
You witchcraft types getting publicity from these evil books and perverting young minds -- that's enough of your magic speels!
Former SSE illumin8 writes:
>
> [Sun support] are truly on the level of IBM Global Services and
> only a couple others when it comes to knowledgeable onsite support.
>
Amen: field engineers -- Decision One employees in my area, I understand it, as well as the actual Sun employee I've dealth with, the miracle-working SSE Paul Connell -- are teh amazing.
The phone support people, however, are uniformly, jaw-droppingly bad. An embrassment. An affront to anyone who takes pride in their work. A near-sub-contractual waste of my employer's money. Destructive to Sun's corporate image and reputation. "SHAMEFUL, SIR!" as they say in the House of Lords, or "preliterate," as I told one of them to his face last week, when he left my case in limbo for 14 hours overnight after _calling_ me when I specified twice that I wanted only email communication since I'd be without a phone. A finite number of monkeys with Plantronics headsets working out Kafka on my dime, if you will.
The outsoured phone shops want only to dot Is and cross Ts, and care nothing for actually solving customer problems. Even Gold contract calls, occasinally even handled domestically, still don't elicit actual fixes on time, every time.
Oh the joy when someone finally shows up at my data center with a box of parts and some paperwork: I know my ship has come in! But those chimps on the phone: they're really wearing me down.
illumin8 wrote:
>
> Sun's hardware support is second to none. They guarantee that a box you buy now will continue to be supported up until 5 years after the product is EOL...
>
*ahem* I bought an L25 (2-drive, 20-tape SDLT library) with only one drive in it. When I got budget for a second drive, Sun had switched the unit from LVD to HVD. I was told that buying a new drive that would be covered under my existing support contract (vs. just buying one off EBay or a gray market reseller) would require actually junking the unit and buying a whole new library and two drives.
Uh, what?
"HP on line two, sir. Somethign about a new tape library?"
And I'm a Sun fanboy.
Some ACs are people who need _anonymity_. Perhaps their posts could be moderated (though it'd take quite a bit of work to separate the tiny kernels of wheat from the piles of chaff).
I just installed it on my 15" PowerBook, and it certainly feels snappier.
thefon wrote: ...A list which pretty much adds up to the plot of any Fred Saberhagen "Berserker" paperback.
>
> A universal constructor is a machine that can replicate itself
> and - in addition - make other industrial products. Such a
> machine would have a number of interesting characteristics,
> such as being subject to Darwinian evolution, increasing in
> number exponentially, and being extremely low-cost
>
Can we get a new Moderation, "+1, Trolled" for cases like this? I guess "(Funny)" could be added, too.
jrcamp wrote: :7) The "popularity" of Head Start programs speaks to the first two, as does the presence of metal detectors at high school doors.
>
> I have always been told you go to school to learn how to learn.
>
Would that it were so, but too many kids come to school underfed, underdisciplined, and undertaught in previous years. (It's a loop, I think.
These days, kids go to school to get much of the care they didn't get at home -- though, oddly, many of those same homes likely have a game console and a cable TV subscription...
>
> The point is to teach them the concepts so that they are confident enough later in life to adapt to new things.
>
Exactly -- but a lot of kids can't hear their teachers over their growling tummies.