While you are correct in your assertion that one should think before one writes, it seems that you are not familiar with SmartBoards. You use them *just like regular blackboards (including erasing)* only you can save the lecture/edit it for later. This allows you to post the lecture to the web, hand it out to students who missed class (for any number of reasons, and generally have a record of your lectures for the purposes of review and class planning for the future. Additionally they are more hygenic as there's no dust (from chalk) or alcohol smell (from dry erase). The former always keeps me sneezing and cold prone during the school year and the latter is just irritating.
I did want to point out that there is a *recent* article in Linux Journal about how they used Linux to produce all the Shrek movies. The truth about the software used is as usual some blending of what has been argued over on/.:
Why don't the movie studios contribute some of their millions of lines of Linux code to open source? Many studios have developed proprietary Linux video playback and editing software, an area where open source is deficient. Could they give that to open source? Today's treacherous patent landscape is one obstacle, but beyond that is the cost to maintain it. For example, ILM found it more work to open the OpenEXR image format than expected. The studios are busy making movies.
The film industry does sometimes sponsor outside open-source efforts, such as deep paint support for GIMP in 1999. Unfortunately, 16-bit per channel paint was never released as part of GIMP. It did later see the light of day as CinePaint [an OSS project I lead]. But rather than use CinePaint and have to retrain Photoshop users, DreamWorks Animation, Disney and Pixar provided some funding to CodeWeavers to make Windows Photoshop work on Linux under Wine in 2003.
The film industry may not like open source that cuts too close to its domain. The open-source renderer BMRT, developed by former employees of Pixar, was discontinued as part of an infringement settlement in 2002 between Pixar and NVIDIA (which had acquired a more sophisticated version of the BMRT render technology from the company Exluna to support Cg GPU rendering).
So in truth, CinePaint was used in the past, but PhotoShop is used in the present (ON LINUX), and most of the other stuff is proprietary coding that you or I will never see (also done on Linux).
I just want to respond to your layers comment. Last time I did animations in the Gimp, I used layers, so I'm not certain where you're coming from. Generally to create animations you make a series of layers, input the time delay for each in ms, and then click Filter|Animations to view/adjust.
Hmm... I just submitted a paper to "The Physics Teacher" in Word Format, and one to "Gait and Posture" (biomechanics) in PDF. Some of my colleagues in the math department where I currently work use LaTeX. I think that the format is largely dependent on the journal and not on the field. But that's just my 2 cents.
And yet in actual practice, we have yet to encounter said bugs where I work. NeoOffice works just fine on the couple of Macs we have, thank you and should be quite a bit more than what 99.9% of students need. In practice when I used to be stuck on Windows, MS Office crashed if you removed the floppy disk before closing the document, or if you inserted pictures into nested tables, etc. Please don't get me started on Micro -Blue Screen of Death-Soft's stability issues. NeoOffice is an excellent alternative for the under-supported MacOS environment.
I could be wrong, but it looked to me like said nitwit had flashing lights on his/her car. I was going to comment on the impressive speed of first response until I realized that most toll-booths have cop cars at the ready.
Dateline NBC did a story on this problem this very week and found that with the full cooperation of the credit card companies, it was still quite time consuming to run down the real perps.
Here's what they did:
Got the credit card companies to issue bogus credit cards - with real credit lines of $1000 - for them to sell online.
Sold the cards via certain IRC channels and monitored how quickly such funds were spent.
Set up a bogus electronics good web site that was advertised via said IRC channels where perps could spend their hard earned cash.
Set up a bogus shipping company to deliver the goods to the addresses listed
Found that in a large number of cases, the goods were:
Dropped at vacationers' houses
Dropped at the houses of dupes who were convinced that they were participating in real business deals on behalf of their absentee "fiancees".
In short there were no direct connections reported. None of these folks were that stupid apparently. Most of the goods were then shipped out of country to places where US law does not apply and then resold in the retail market.
Personally, I suspect that the reason the credit card companies don't do anything is because the people in charge (not the techies or sysadmins) really don't understand the internet because it doesn't fit into the age old business model. As there is no understanding, there is no drive to fix the problem.
While it was no walk in the park, so long as you were neither Jewish nor Romani, life was quite a lot better under German occupation than under Russian occupation. (Jews and Romani had it as bad in Estonia under the Nazis as anywhere in occupied Europe.) Here in the West, we view Hitler as the arch villain. In Estonia, it is Stalin who is viewed as such. Therefore when you make a statement alluding to how "millions of soldiers died fighting the Nazis and protecting Estonia" you display an ignorance of history. It is like saying that the wolf is protecting the rabbit when it drives off the hawk. Truly the Estonians wanted neither the Russians NOR the Germans as overlords.
As an Estonian-American, I can confirm that we Estonians are a might bit riled up about the Russians. On June 13-14, 1941 huge numbers of Estonians were forcibly deported to Siberia. Another deportation occurred in 1949. Then Russians were imported to re-occupy many of the vacant households. Estonians view this as a sort of ethnic cleansing. Estonians were forced to speak Russian in the school system and all traces of their former nationalism were banned. To put it bluntly, many Estonians viewed the occupations under Stalin (and later) as being the worst thing to ever happen to the country (including the Nazi occupation). Putting up Russian war monuments on Estonian soil was insulting to boot. Now the Russians are riled that the Estonians want to move such monuments from their places of prominence (not destroy, mind you, but move). Considering what Estonians have suffered at the hands of Russians, we tend to think that the Russians have no ground to lodge any kind of complaint.
Here's how the mis-addressed email thing works. Politicos in the White House or elsewhere, have mistakenly typed.org instead of.gov when addressing their emails. The www.whitehouse.org owners are none to happy with Bush's politics, and so routinely forward their emails to Greg Palast, whose reputation is well known. Mystery solved. Palast says this much in most of his books. While American networks avoid Palast like the plague, largely because he is at odds with the media-moguls, he has had his own show on the BBC for years and is considered a good source for what is really happening in the US by the Europeans. He has also appeared on the NPR show On the Media and on Democracy Now from Pacifica Radio.
Mod parent up! This is an extremely profound statement:
The transistor is the element that enables execution of instructions and should be patentable. The state of charge on a transistor is the instruction and should not be patentable. To get a different output for the same input, you need only change the state of charge on the transistors* - but the physical state of the machine is identical.
In a more general sense, one could say that a glass is patentable (presuming that they hadn't existed for thousands of years), whereas the amount of water in the glass is not. Please, no glass half empty jokes!
I agree that patent-free formats is good. However, one must specify something or run the risk of having numerous open formats chosen by anyone who might have a say. While this may be good for "freedom", it is not so good when you actually have to get something done. As ODF is now an ISO/IEC 26300:2006 standard it seems to meet the requirements better than most options.
Will it become obsolete? Surely. But it will have better staying power than just about anything else I've seen to this date.
Agreed. When you have any kind of bandwidth limitations, software as a service just doesn't make sense. For those of you at universities, you will recall that sometime in the beginning of September every year, after a long summer of relatively speedy service, the network suddenly comes to a screeching slowdown as all the students return. The network similarly picks up in May when most of the students go away.
Additionally, software as a service is open to all kinds of abuse (think how TiVo has gotten worse with every upgrade instead of better as corporate interests sink their teeth in). Thanks, but I'll stick to running my programs locally.
From what this article says, they do. Of course, the driver who is the main focus of the article may have suicidal tendencies in how he drafts 18 wheelers and how he deals with stop signs in the name of saving gas. Still, it's an intriguing read.
Personally, I was just wondering why it had to be an either-or? Why can't the ultra-economy conscious have the intelligent sensors built into a hybrid car? One would imagine that this would be far better than either.
Congratulations yourself. You've just proven... what exactly?
First I am not the administrator of the windows boxes
Second, I am not the LAN administrator
Third, I do administrate the linux boxes. (The ones which you'll see aren't having the real obvious security issues).
Fourth, you seem to be missing quite a lot about the firewall mentioned above. Nmap was used to show obvious vulnerabilities, services and open ports. I found such on the Windows boxes that I don't administrate, but not on the Linux boxes I do.
Wow, and I thought we were actually having a pleasant discussion up until now.
As for the parent's post, I was not trying to claim that *nix never had it's problems (as I mention in my previous post). Rather, I was questioning your claim about hardening Windows vs. *nix. What it comes down to is: what is your definition of newbie? Is it someone who has never used Linux? Or is your definition that a newbie is someone without a familiarity with computers?
In the first case one could state that a newbie to Windows would have a much harder time securing a Windows box than they could a Linux box (because with the shoe on the other foot now, they would have Linux security experience and know exactly what to lock down on said Linux box - presuming it wasn't already secured by default). In this case, the comparison is obvious: someone with familiarity with a platform will of course have a much easier experience doing anything.
In the second case, you are comparing a person who is familiar with security to someone who has no experience whatsoever, and the platforms again become irrelevant. If you don't even know what a virus/worm/trojan is, of course you won't do such a good job at securing a platform.
As for the local network issue, presuming that my sysadmin doesn't know what they are doing (and I don't deny this), the fact is that the Linux boxes *were* more secure out of the box than the WinXP boxes.
You must be talking about Linspire or whatever they call it these days. Most Linuxes I've run out of the box are quite a bit more secure than their Windows counterparts. I just ran nmap on my local network. The result was that all computers running Windows XP were identified along with their open ports and services whereas none of the linux boxes (with default firewalls configured on install) showed much at all. Nmap guessed that they were running Linux or Unix, but that was it.
Nobody is claiming that any OS is perfectly secure. But I seriously question your statement about newbies running *nix being more insecure compared to their Windows counterparts as most modern distros seem to have firewalls enabled and extraneous services shut off by default.
I'm pretty certain that astronomers have a pretty clear notion of what they are up against. You've got a plasma that must be modeled in 3D using Navier-Stokes equations with allowances made for EM coupling. You must also deal with the nuclear reactions occurring inside. The boundary conditions are ill-defined in that we must make certain assumptions about what's at the core of the Sun on one hand and where its boundary is on the other. Add to this the fact that the solar wind accelerates due to a de Laval nozzle effect and the corona seems to be hotter than the Sun's surface and you've got quite a quandry. It's not that the individual principles are not understood; they are. Rather it's how to put all of it together in such a way that it gives us the right answer. This is most certainly NOT the same as not understanding E&M! Sheesh!
Dogpile has a feature called SearchSpy. So basically, users can view your searches. Dogpile also is an aggregate search engine, so it queries Google and Yahoo among others. We know that Google stores data. Bottom line is that searching for the string enters it into the public record in a myriad of places too numerous to track down and pulls companies with a fair amount of gravis into potential conflict with AACS.
OLPC spokesman Kyle Austin says the wire services got it wrong. In response to a request from Microsoft, the project gave Redmond some early demo models of the XO to play with -- but that was over a year ago. "Their developers are toying with it," Austin told Wired News editor Kevin Poulsen.
OLPC hasn't changed the XO's design to support Windows, and has no formal partnership with Microsoft, he says.
So as often happens, the story is more sensationalist than anything else.
I see that companies are sovereign powers now, and that they are able to do whatever whenever because it is their god-given right to earn money for the share-holders, yada-yada-yada. Give me a break. If MS doesn't like Europe's laws, they can go and try to sell their products elsewhere. Nothing guarantees them the right to make a profit.
Look at sourceforge.net's 140,000 plus projects, all of which are maintained under some sort of open source license. Very few of them get funding of any sort to exist. Clearly there are lots of people out there who *do* spend much of their free time voluntarily putting stuff out into the community. Some do it to scratch an itch and others for fun. But just because *you* wouldn't be able to find the time to do this as a volunteer doesn't mean that it's impossible for others to do so.
My big thing as a scientist is that it would be nice to have equations display ON THE GRAPH. It's really hard to suggest this as an alternative to students in lab classes when it doesn't have even this basic feature.
On the other hand, this is/has been my only real complaint for years. I use it exclusively, but then, I'm a geek.
As someone who works in a gait lab (in the other half of my life) and presents at the Gait and Clinical Motion Analysis Society Conference, I am highly skeptical of any claims that accelerometer data can be correlated with energy expenditure. As an example of a small study that showed no correlation between the two, see here. Essentially, there are too many other variables involved in energy expenditure, the most prominent of which is lean body mass. Accelerometers are blunt instruments compared to the gold standard of oxygen uptake (we use the Cosmed K4).
In other words, the defunding of the study is not surprising as other studies have been unable to show relationships between energy expenditure and activity counts. If on the other hand, the UK government wished to defund physical education, that would be a very different thing.
Slashdot Mirror
While you are correct in your assertion that one should think before one writes, it seems that you are not familiar with SmartBoards. You use them *just like regular blackboards (including erasing)* only you can save the lecture/edit it for later. This allows you to post the lecture to the web, hand it out to students who missed class (for any number of reasons, and generally have a record of your lectures for the purposes of review and class planning for the future. Additionally they are more hygenic as there's no dust (from chalk) or alcohol smell (from dry erase). The former always keeps me sneezing and cold prone during the school year and the latter is just irritating.
I just want to respond to your layers comment. Last time I did animations in the Gimp, I used layers, so I'm not certain where you're coming from. Generally to create animations you make a series of layers, input the time delay for each in ms, and then click Filter|Animations to view/adjust.
Hmm... I just submitted a paper to "The Physics Teacher" in Word Format, and one to "Gait and Posture" (biomechanics) in PDF. Some of my colleagues in the math department where I currently work use LaTeX. I think that the format is largely dependent on the journal and not on the field. But that's just my 2 cents.
And yet in actual practice, we have yet to encounter said bugs where I work. NeoOffice works just fine on the couple of Macs we have, thank you and should be quite a bit more than what 99.9% of students need. In practice when I used to be stuck on Windows, MS Office crashed if you removed the floppy disk before closing the document, or if you inserted pictures into nested tables, etc. Please don't get me started on Micro -Blue Screen of Death-Soft's stability issues. NeoOffice is an excellent alternative for the under-supported MacOS environment.
I could be wrong, but it looked to me like said nitwit had flashing lights on his/her car. I was going to comment on the impressive speed of first response until I realized that most toll-booths have cop cars at the ready.
Dateline NBC did a story on this problem this very week and found that with the full cooperation of the credit card companies, it was still quite time consuming to run down the real perps.
Here's what they did:
- Got the credit card companies to issue bogus credit cards - with real credit lines of $1000 - for them to sell online.
- Sold the cards via certain IRC channels and monitored how quickly such funds were spent.
- Set up a bogus electronics good web site that was advertised via said IRC channels where perps could spend their hard earned cash.
- Set up a bogus shipping company to deliver the goods to the addresses listed
- Found that in a large number of cases, the goods were:
- Dropped at vacationers' houses
- Dropped at the houses of dupes who were convinced that they were participating in real business deals on behalf of their absentee "fiancees".
In short there were no direct connections reported. None of these folks were that stupid apparently. Most of the goods were then shipped out of country to places where US law does not apply and then resold in the retail market.Personally, I suspect that the reason the credit card companies don't do anything is because the people in charge (not the techies or sysadmins) really don't understand the internet because it doesn't fit into the age old business model. As there is no understanding, there is no drive to fix the problem.
While it was no walk in the park, so long as you were neither Jewish nor Romani, life was quite a lot better under German occupation than under Russian occupation. (Jews and Romani had it as bad in Estonia under the Nazis as anywhere in occupied Europe.) Here in the West, we view Hitler as the arch villain. In Estonia, it is Stalin who is viewed as such. Therefore when you make a statement alluding to how "millions of soldiers died fighting the Nazis and protecting Estonia" you display an ignorance of history. It is like saying that the wolf is protecting the rabbit when it drives off the hawk. Truly the Estonians wanted neither the Russians NOR the Germans as overlords.
As an Estonian-American, I can confirm that we Estonians are a might bit riled up about the Russians. On June 13-14, 1941 huge numbers of Estonians were forcibly deported to Siberia. Another deportation occurred in 1949. Then Russians were imported to re-occupy many of the vacant households. Estonians view this as a sort of ethnic cleansing. Estonians were forced to speak Russian in the school system and all traces of their former nationalism were banned. To put it bluntly, many Estonians viewed the occupations under Stalin (and later) as being the worst thing to ever happen to the country (including the Nazi occupation). Putting up Russian war monuments on Estonian soil was insulting to boot. Now the Russians are riled that the Estonians want to move such monuments from their places of prominence (not destroy, mind you, but move). Considering what Estonians have suffered at the hands of Russians, we tend to think that the Russians have no ground to lodge any kind of complaint.
Here's how the mis-addressed email thing works. Politicos in the White House or elsewhere, have mistakenly typed .org instead of .gov when addressing their emails. The www.whitehouse.org owners are none to happy with Bush's politics, and so routinely forward their emails to Greg Palast, whose reputation is well known. Mystery solved. Palast says this much in most of his books. While American networks avoid Palast like the plague, largely because he is at odds with the media-moguls, he has had his own show on the BBC for years and is considered a good source for what is really happening in the US by the Europeans. He has also appeared on the NPR show On the Media and on Democracy Now from Pacifica Radio.
Mod parent up! This is an extremely profound statement:
In a more general sense, one could say that a glass is patentable (presuming that they hadn't existed for thousands of years), whereas the amount of water in the glass is not. Please, no glass half empty jokes!I agree that patent-free formats is good. However, one must specify something or run the risk of having numerous open formats chosen by anyone who might have a say. While this may be good for "freedom", it is not so good when you actually have to get something done. As ODF is now an ISO/IEC 26300:2006 standard it seems to meet the requirements better than most options.
Will it become obsolete? Surely. But it will have better staying power than just about anything else I've seen to this date.
Agreed. When you have any kind of bandwidth limitations, software as a service just doesn't make sense. For those of you at universities, you will recall that sometime in the beginning of September every year, after a long summer of relatively speedy service, the network suddenly comes to a screeching slowdown as all the students return. The network similarly picks up in May when most of the students go away.
Additionally, software as a service is open to all kinds of abuse (think how TiVo has gotten worse with every upgrade instead of better as corporate interests sink their teeth in). Thanks, but I'll stick to running my programs locally.
From what this article says, they do. Of course, the driver who is the main focus of the article may have suicidal tendencies in how he drafts 18 wheelers and how he deals with stop signs in the name of saving gas. Still, it's an intriguing read.
Personally, I was just wondering why it had to be an either-or? Why can't the ultra-economy conscious have the intelligent sensors built into a hybrid car? One would imagine that this would be far better than either.
- First I am not the administrator of the windows boxes
- Second, I am not the LAN administrator
- Third, I do administrate the linux boxes. (The ones which you'll see aren't having the real obvious security issues).
- Fourth, you seem to be missing quite a lot about the firewall mentioned above. Nmap was used to show obvious vulnerabilities, services and open ports. I found such on the Windows boxes that I don't administrate, but not on the Linux boxes I do.
Wow, and I thought we were actually having a pleasant discussion up until now.As for the parent's post, I was not trying to claim that *nix never had it's problems (as I mention in my previous post). Rather, I was questioning your claim about hardening Windows vs. *nix. What it comes down to is: what is your definition of newbie? Is it someone who has never used Linux? Or is your definition that a newbie is someone without a familiarity with computers?
In the first case one could state that a newbie to Windows would have a much harder time securing a Windows box than they could a Linux box (because with the shoe on the other foot now, they would have Linux security experience and know exactly what to lock down on said Linux box - presuming it wasn't already secured by default). In this case, the comparison is obvious: someone with familiarity with a platform will of course have a much easier experience doing anything.
In the second case, you are comparing a person who is familiar with security to someone who has no experience whatsoever, and the platforms again become irrelevant. If you don't even know what a virus/worm/trojan is, of course you won't do such a good job at securing a platform.
As for the local network issue, presuming that my sysadmin doesn't know what they are doing (and I don't deny this), the fact is that the Linux boxes *were* more secure out of the box than the WinXP boxes.
You must be talking about Linspire or whatever they call it these days. Most Linuxes I've run out of the box are quite a bit more secure than their Windows counterparts. I just ran nmap on my local network. The result was that all computers running Windows XP were identified along with their open ports and services whereas none of the linux boxes (with default firewalls configured on install) showed much at all. Nmap guessed that they were running Linux or Unix, but that was it.
Nobody is claiming that any OS is perfectly secure. But I seriously question your statement about newbies running *nix being more insecure compared to their Windows counterparts as most modern distros seem to have firewalls enabled and extraneous services shut off by default.
I'm pretty certain that astronomers have a pretty clear notion of what they are up against. You've got a plasma that must be modeled in 3D using Navier-Stokes equations with allowances made for EM coupling. You must also deal with the nuclear reactions occurring inside. The boundary conditions are ill-defined in that we must make certain assumptions about what's at the core of the Sun on one hand and where its boundary is on the other. Add to this the fact that the solar wind accelerates due to a de Laval nozzle effect and the corona seems to be hotter than the Sun's surface and you've got quite a quandry. It's not that the individual principles are not understood; they are. Rather it's how to put all of it together in such a way that it gives us the right answer. This is most certainly NOT the same as not understanding E&M! Sheesh!
Dogpile has a feature called SearchSpy. So basically, users can view your searches. Dogpile also is an aggregate search engine, so it queries Google and Yahoo among others. We know that Google stores data. Bottom line is that searching for the string enters it into the public record in a myriad of places too numerous to track down and pulls companies with a fair amount of gravis into potential conflict with AACS.
So as often happens, the story is more sensationalist than anything else.
I see that companies are sovereign powers now, and that they are able to do whatever whenever because it is their god-given right to earn money for the share-holders, yada-yada-yada. Give me a break. If MS doesn't like Europe's laws, they can go and try to sell their products elsewhere. Nothing guarantees them the right to make a profit.
Sourceforge could help them with their server load next year :-)
Look at sourceforge.net's 140,000 plus projects, all of which are maintained under some sort of open source license. Very few of them get funding of any sort to exist. Clearly there are lots of people out there who *do* spend much of their free time voluntarily putting stuff out into the community. Some do it to scratch an itch and others for fun. But just because *you* wouldn't be able to find the time to do this as a volunteer doesn't mean that it's impossible for others to do so.
My big thing as a scientist is that it would be nice to have equations display ON THE GRAPH. It's really hard to suggest this as an alternative to students in lab classes when it doesn't have even this basic feature.
On the other hand, this is/has been my only real complaint for years. I use it exclusively, but then, I'm a geek.
As someone who works in a gait lab (in the other half of my life) and presents at the Gait and Clinical Motion Analysis Society Conference, I am highly skeptical of any claims that accelerometer data can be correlated with energy expenditure. As an example of a small study that showed no correlation between the two, see here. Essentially, there are too many other variables involved in energy expenditure, the most prominent of which is lean body mass. Accelerometers are blunt instruments compared to the gold standard of oxygen uptake (we use the Cosmed K4).
In other words, the defunding of the study is not surprising as other studies have been unable to show relationships between energy expenditure and activity counts. If on the other hand, the UK government wished to defund physical education, that would be a very different thing.