Funnily enough, I've always had good luck with beer and monitors, though.
I spilled half a can of lager down the back of my old 14" when I was at a LAN party[1] as a kid[2], and although it buzzed alarmingly and the colours went screwy, we tried turning it off, letting the beer dry and turning it on and it's worked fine ever since.
Footnotes:
[1] Well, a mate brought his PC round when DOOM first came out, and we played over a null-modem cable. Still counts, right? Nobody'd even coined the term "LAN party" at that point:-)
[2] His parents were out, hence the beer. We were 14, hence the beer getting knocked over and going down the back of the monitor.:-)
"There is no need to teach programming skills to every student anymore than there is no need to teach every student how to draw blood."
I'd argue it's more like teaching all kids to play sports. Very few will go on to play professionally, but the skills and values (healthy lifestyle, teamwork, strategy, losing gracefully) will help them in whatever they do in the future.
"It is a specific job skill for a specific type of career, not a skill needed for life in general. How many nurses need to know how to use a debugger or database theory?"
I think you misunderstand my position. I advocate teaching programming only because it's the best skill I've ever found to teach logic, rigour and meticulousness, not because I think everyone should be able to write a MUD or a compiler.
No-one needs to know how to use a debugger, but "debugging" (looking at a system, comparing what it does to what it should do, identifying any faults and correcting them with minimal impact on the rest of the system) is applicable to practically every profession on the planet.
Using your example of a nurse, what's diagnosis if not a form of debugging? And I certainly wouldn't go to a nurse who'd never learned diagnosis. I just think programming teaches the core concepts more efficiently (and applicably) than anything else I've ever seen or tried.
"Instead of worrying about teaching them how to use a GUI (which might be irrelevant in a few years) I'd much rather see kids learn a truly valuable skill that will help them no matter what job they end up in, such as financial (i.e. handling credit, mortages) or communications (i.e. speaking to groups) skills."
Sorry - I should have made a distinction between general abilities (task-decomposition, debugging, rigour, meticulousness, information handlign and categorisation) and specific skills I thought it would be useful to have (GUI use, for example).
That said, of course, I'd argue GUIs are still going to be around for a bit longer than a few years - we still couldn't do without command line shells, and they've been around since the dawn of computing. I also wouldn't advocate learning the details of a specific GUI or platform, but more general concepts and principles that are generally applicable to any user-interface (modularity, multitasking, very, very basic network topology, etc).
Just to be clear, I'm not arguing we also shouldn't teach skills such as financial management and communication/public speaking, but successful finances (for example) rely on meticulousness, and public speaking/debate relies partly on well-constructed arguments - these are both things that I think we should be teaching, and I only suggested programming because it seems to me to be the best method for teaching them.
Cheers - I'd got that much from preliminary reading, but surely LDAP combined with unix-style permissions and usergroups replicates much of the functionality of (or are just "an example of"?) Access Control Lists?
I mean, it seems that ACLs are basically a way of hierarchally grouping users (usergroups) or resources (LDAP), then applying specific permissions to each group (which linux/unix does already). Is this all there is to it, or do ACLs also permit other, more advanced behaviour not provided by LDAP+unix perms+sudo?
And do ACLs allow elevation of individual user-permissions (optionally, for a specific time-span), or once set do they have to be reconfigured to allow additional permissions?
"Using the internet as a research tool? Why not just teach them how to use research tools in general? That way, whether they find themselves in front of a Google prompt *or* a library card catalog, they'll know how to go about finding the information they seek."
Indeed, why not? I'm with you on that one, and I didn't suggest for a second that that was the only way we could (or should) be doing it.
However, in the absence of a handy desk-sized library for every student, and the hassle of organising orderly class trips to the school or town library, a PC and web browser pointed at Google might be the easiest way to do most of the teaching, with card catalogues and other organisational schemes providing backup and contrast.
In fact, what we should really be doing is teaching (very abstract, high-level) database design concepts, since those are directly applicable to any information-organisation scheme.
"I've seen people try and fail to find what they're looking for on Google, because they don't know how information is logically categorized and classified and evaluated. If you can't teach them *that*, you can't teach them to use the internet as a research tool."
Bingo. Notice how I don't suggest teaching programming so that everyone can become a programmer, but because I believe it teaches you to think right.
You start from a few basic primitive statements (axioms), and combine them to form algorithms or functions (conclusions). You rigidly test these constructions to make sure they're stable and correct, and successfully handle edge-cases, fixing them (or starting again) if you find any faults. These "proven" conclusions can then be relied upon, allowing you to reach higher-level conclusions, and defend these structures from attack by others (secure code).
Ok, I'm stretching the metaphor to breaking point, but I think you'd find it hard to argue with the idea that programming encourages and develops meticulous and impartial thought-habits. Certainly the quickest and clearest thinkers I know (generally) tend to have some significant experience of programming (or logic, or mathematical proofs) at some point in their lives.
"Programming, testing, debugging? That's fine for people who are going into CS, but for most people that's going to be like teaching everyone how to rebuild an upper engine block."
I'd argue only in the same way basic arithmetic is only of use to people who are becoming mathematicians.
To take your (perennial-slashdot-) car analogy - a customer brings the car into the shop, and complains it rattles above a certain speed. Do you bang weights on the wheels, change the axel and check the tyres all at once, or do you isolate each part as much as possible, check each one for correctness, and change as little as possible to fix the problem?
It's the same process - start with axioms ("something's wrong"), and proceed carefully, logically and methodically. Change only what you need to avoid wasting time or creating new bugs (I dunno in this case - maybe denting a wheel while changing it).
Another example would be designing or building something - say a house. Do you build, paint and furnish the lounge, then do the upper story, then do the walls downstairs, or do you plan out the overall structure and plot out (even subsconsciously) regular, methodical sub-tasks and milestones until the job's finished? In fact, I think this is an even better example, because of all the skills we've mentioned so far good task decomposition, which I'd argue is the hardest and most important "thinking" skill it's possible to learn, is also the one best taught by programming.
There's nothing like getting half-way through a project and realising you have to go back and recode half of it because of a bad initial decision you made to teach you to make good, flexible decisions right from the off.
"Yes, there's *nothing wrong* with knowing that stuff, and yes, it's an area where disciplined
They use my machine to do it - I'll let them order one thing on my credit card while I'm watching, but I'm buggered if I'm giving them my login details to order as much stuff as they like <:-)
"Yeah, unless you count hacks like sudo which are meant to emulate ACLs."
I'm no expert, but aren't things like LDAP basically ACLs? I thought Linux/Unix had supported LDAP and similar functionality for a while now?
"Yeah, unless you count hacks like sudo which are meant to emulate ACLs."
Again, surely different purposes? ACLs (as I understand them) allows granting/restriction of priviliges based on user-id or profile. Sudo, OTOH, restricts or grants priviliges based on time. If I understand correctly, you can't tell an ACL "grant me permissions for this one job, then remove the permissions from my account".
Sure, sudo might also be used as a dodgy hack to temporarily grant greater priviliges if you don't have an ACL set up, but I think it's got other uses (eg, I might want to be able to modify my system settings, but I don't always want any user application to be able to do it - this is why Windows is such a mess of spyware).
As I said, I've only got a passing familiarity with the subject, but if I'm wrong please feel free to set me right;-)
Indeed - this is a very smart PR move for Microsoft.
They're calling out Linux in a public setting, and publically promising an end to FUD and biased studies. If OSDL doesn't take the bait, it looks like they're snubbing a perfectly fair (even friendly) offer, and the only conclusion people will jump to is that they're too scared to compete.
If OSDL agree and the study does take place we all know exactly what it'll say - Linux is better for servers, and Windows is better for end-users and enterprise desktops. Microsoft then get to crow loudly about how their end-user experience is provably better, Windows is more usable, and employee productivity is provably higher than on Linux.
At the same time they also ramp up their their multimillion dollar marketing efforts to executives (who are traditionally the major MS-fanboy stronghold anyway). They convince them that Exchange Server is something with which Linux can't compete (which, for a turn-key solution is pretty hard to refute). Bingo - executives buy Windows servers too (for Exchange), and end up consolidating on Windows on the front and back-ends.
Basically, (in my experience) execs have always been the stronghold of MS fanboyism - generally they need a good reason to change, but only an excuse to stay with Microsoft. This will give them a powerful argument against Linux on the client-side, and MS will provide them with the excuse they need (integrated solution, interoperates best with MS clients) to keep Windows on the server-sdie, too.
Their suggestion may be common-sense, but their approach borders on messianic:
"This article is going to ask you to make a paradigm shift... new, cutting edge methodologies... no web analytics product supports... a journey from first generation web analytics to second."
Followed by a lengthy paragraph on "paradigm shifts". In fact, the article takes three pages to basically say:
"In a nut-shell: To determine a web metric we should apply multiple tests, not just count one thing."
Here's a clue, Brandt Dainow - It's a common-sense way of counting visitors, not a new fucking religion.
The basic approach is to use a selection of criteria to assess visitor numbers - cookies first, then use different IPs/userAgents with close access-times to differentiate again, etc.
The good news is there are only three problems with this approach. The bad news is, that makes them effectively useless, or certainly not much more useful than the normal method of user-counting:
Problem 1 There is no information returned to a web server that isn't trivially gameable, and absolutely no way to tie any kind of computer access to a particular human:
"1. If the same cookie is present on multiple visits, it's the same person."
Non-techie friends are always wanting to buy things from Amazon as a one-off, so I let them use my account. Boom - that's up to twenty people represented by one cookie, right there.
"2. We next sort our visits by cookie ID and look at the cookie life spans. Different cookies that overlap in time are different users. In other words, one person can't have two cookies at the same time."
Except that I habitually leave my GMail account (for example) logged in both at work and at home. Many people I know use two or more "personal" computers, and don't bother logging out of their webmail between uses. That's a minimum of two cookies with overlapping timestamps right there, and only one person.
"3. This leaves us with sets of cookie IDs that could belong to the same person because they occur at different times, so we now look at IP addresses."
This isn't actually an operative step, or a test of any kind. It's just a numbered paragraph.
"4. We know some IP addresses cannot be shared by one person. These are the ones that would require a person to move faster than possible. If we have one IP address in New York, then one in Tokyo 60 minutes later, we know it can't be the same person because you can't get from New York to Tokyo in one hour."
FFS, has this guy ever touched a computer? For someone writing on technology he's pretty fucking out of touch. As an example, what about people who commonly telnet+lynx, VMWare or PCAnywhere, right across the world, hundreds of times in their workday? Sure, maybe most normal users don't (yet), but for some sites (eg, nerd-heavy sites like/.), it's likely enough to start skewing results.
"5. This leaves us with those IP addresses that can't be eliminated on the basis of geography. We now switch emphasis. Instead of looking for proof of difference, we now look for combinations which indicate it's the same person. These are IP addresses we know to be owned by the same ISP or company."
Except that one ISP can serve as many as hundreds of thousands of users. And proxy gateways often report one IP for all the users connected to them. For example, NTL reports one "gateway" IP for all the people in my town on cable-modems - that's thousands, minimum. So, we're looking at a potential error magnitude of 100-100,000. That's no better than the existing system for assessing unique visitors.
"6. We can refine this test by going back over the IP address/Cookie combination. We can look at all the IP addresses that a cookie had. Do we see one of those addresses used on a new cookie? Do both cookies have the same User Agent? If we get the same pool
"And yes, there is nothing you can do on a computer on a schooldesk that you cannot do with books, pencils and paper."
Apart from, y'know, using computers? Learning about modern technology? How about becoming familiar with programming, testing and debugging? Using the internet as a research tool?
I'd go so far as to say that while reading, writing and basic maths are important too, you actually can't learn basic technology use without, y'know, using it.
I firmly believe that, like every student should be able to read, write and add up, these days every student leaving school should be able to use the internet, have some appreciation of basic database theory and should be able to use at least one GUI competently.
Ideally, they should also have some experience of very basic-level programming, too - if nothing else, it teaches you how to think meticulously and correctly, a skill which is in all-too-short supply these days.
"When there are millions and billions of people online, there are too many target addresses as well as lots of senders."
Right. But the current system is that one person can (over time) send billions of messages. And since spammers addresses rarely end up on the web (or in other spammers' mailing lists), they can keep sending spam no matter how many "real" people have addresses. Also, once you're on a list you end up on a lot of lists, so while 90% of the population might not get any spam, the other 10% will get it all. How would you like to be one of those 10%?
"Non-bulk mail is mail written personally for you. Not form letters. Not even one person telling a room of 100 slaves "everybody write personal messages all day." These are all bulk mail. Somebody (not the slaves, the guy giving the orders) tried to send mail to a lot of people who didn't know him."
I see your position now, but I still don't agree. How can you possibly prove that any single spam wasn't generated by a template+mailing list?
You can't. And how do you define "writing a personal message"? I could type three e-mail addresses then type a message to them all, or I could cut-and-paste them from a list into a message I wrote first. Or I could produce a template message, and dynamically insert all three names from a database into the message before sending it. How many names is "non-personal"? What level of indirection does there have to be before it's not "writing" the mail? These are all inherently vague weasel-words, with no useful functional definition.
"Hi, I have been following your company for a while, and you are doing cool stuff. I'm skilled at what you do and could really help on product X for the following reasons. Do you have an opening for somebody like me?"
That's a fair point - while some people (like me) would consider this acceptable, others could use an anti-spam law to get the sender in trouble. The thing is, unless the sender pisses off the recipient, he's not going to get in trouble. And if the sender pisses off the recipient, there's no chance it'll result in business so there's no point seding the message, period.
In other words, it's fine to flout the law if you know the other party isn't going to mind. Simply by requiring that someone complains first, the law would protect you from unwanted messages, while allowing wanted ones through.
"No, you don't, so don't write your rules to ban this. Fortunately, there is no need to write them that way, so why create a fight with your otherwise allies just for the sake of banning something you don't need to ban?"
Sigh. If you don't mind message like this, you won't report them. In the same way a masochist doesn't get a dominatrix who stamps on his nuts done for assault. As long as one person has to complain before the sender is prosecuted, you can send as many messages as you like. Fuck it - even make it so each incident of spamming has a fixed penalty. When a spam is caught, the fine is proportional to the number of complaints received, and distributed equally between the complainers.
UCE that turns out to be wanted attracts no penalty. Unwanted UCE attracts a penalty in proportion to the number of people it annoys and the amount of time it wastes. However, the only way to enshrine this in law is to make all UCE illegal, but to selectively enforce based on complaints.
If the majority of people don't care than spamming should be allowed, and spammers can profit. If (as we all suspect) most people don't want most spam they receive, spammers get hit with massive fines and go out of business.
How about: Microsoft makes money by sueing spammers? Not a lot, to be fair, but the publicity is great - "good old Microsoft defending you against the people making your lives a misery". Of course, moves like this opposition to a proper anti-spam bill have the opposite effect, but who's going to hear about this outside of the nerd set, most of whom already dislike or distrust Microsoft anyway?
Or: Microsoft recently bought Gator/Claria, whose sole asset is their database of non-opted-in e-mail addresses? These laws would make that unusable, and would probably demand its immediate deletion. Even assuming they weren't going to use it for UCE (too... evil... even for... MS...?), that's still millions of dollars and a huge potential asset to have to throw away.
Or, yes: Microsoft plans to sell anti-spam services. "Personal" solutions would probably be free (very little cost to them, lots of good publicity), but enterprise-level (eg an Exchange Server plugin) could be worth thousands. Or at least, non-OSS-friendly companies would likely pay that much for a "Microsoft approved" solution.
Either way, this is just another slimy move to add to the list. Is anyone keeping a database of all the shitty things like this Microsoft is doing, or would it be too big a job for anybody to handle?
"at least, I would have, until you asked me to prove that the rest of the universe didn't rotate around the earth. wow.. just. wow. I presume you realize the earth isn't flat, and not on top of a pile of turtles all the way down, right?"
My apologies - my hypothetical scenario wasn't intended as solipsism, but as a serious philosophical/scientific point. Oh, ok, and out-pedanting the pedant;-)
"we can prove the earth revolves around the sun (as opposed to the other way around) fairly conclusively based on seasonal weather patterns"
I don't mean to sound patronising, but I don't think you understand the basic idea.
Basically, according to special relativity perfectly uniform motion in a uniform direction is experimentally indistinguishable from standing still - no additional forcess are acting on you. As long as everything is moving at the same rate as you, there's no way to prove if you're moving at all. Likewise, even if everything appears to be moving, there's no way to tell you aren't static with regards to a greater reference-frame.
The usual example given is if you travelled (eg, in a plane) around the earth's equator against the direction of earth's rotation at exactly the speed it revolves. If you measure yourself relative to the ground, you're moving at about 1038 miles per hour. Measure yourself relative to the sun (a wider reference-frame), and you're basically standing still.
(Ok, there are some complications in practice due to things like the earth's precession, its rotational velocity compared to its orbital velocity and the earth's imperfectly-spherical shape, but you get the idea.)
Likewise, although earth appears to be moving relative to everything we can see, it's entirely possible that (allowing for a reference frame greater than the universe) we're actually the oly thing in it that's truly stationary (relative to that frame).
As I said, I'm not seriously suggesting that that's really the case, but it's a fall-out possibility from special relativity that it's impossible to disprove (well, without looking outside the universe, and even then there might be a larger reference frame containing that;-).
Given that, I was out-pedanting you by proving you couldn't know the earth was moving and the sun wasn't, since you couldn't prove the entire universe wasn't moving in such a way that the earth was the only truly static thing in it. Of course, this presupposes there is a greater reference frame relative to which the earth could be said to be static, but since you'd made the assertion all I had to do was disprove it, not offer a disprovable hypothesis myself;-)
"*but* of course, this is a discussion about videogame violence, and not a flamewar on astrophysics, so i'm going to shut up now. hopefully, you'll take my initial snarky concept as it was intended, and get back onto the subject at hand"
Again, my apologies - I wasn't reading this as a flamewar, more an amusing intellectual sparring match between pedants. Actually, I was quite enjoying it;-p
" that can be easily summarized in one brief phrase: Jack Thompson is an opportunistic asshole."
The way I see it, DRM is already here. Short-term, at least, it isn't going away.
The near-future choice is between a DRMed-up future controlled by open standards (giving nobody but Big Media a vested interest in pushing it), or a DRMed-up future controlled by one company (most likely Microsoft, Apple or Sony), giving us both Big Media and at least one big IT company pushing to have it included/mandatory in all their products.
Against that background, I'll take open standards and one less big player in favour of it. In addition, if DRM does become ubiquitous, whoever controls it influences the entire content-distribution industry. Again, I'll take a vendor-neutral open standards organisation over any one corporation, any day of the week.
The only danger is if OSS developers have anything to do with it, we might actually see a DRM system that works, and is secure. And that'll spoil all our fun...
(Apologies if this is double-posted. The comments system appears to be fscked for the last three or four articles, so I can't tell if this has actually gone through).
Not necessarily, because the speed of light only applies to our current reference-frame, namely the universe.
The universe (as a whole) could be moving in any "direction" without it being detectable from within the universe, since all our measurements are relative to other parts of the universe, also moving in the same way.
If there is a way to tell for sure I'd be fascinated to hear it, but I'm pretty sure it's impossible - just like the way (IIRC) it's impossible for any object to detect the difference between constant velocity and gravitational force acting on itself.
The way I see it, DRM is already here. Short-term, at least, it isn't going away.
The near-future choice is between a DRMed-up future controlled by open standards (giving nobody but Big Media a vested interest in pushing it), or a DRMed-up future controlled by one company (most likely Microsoft, Apple or Sony), giving us both Big Media and at least one big IT company pushing to have it included/mandatory in all their products.
Against that background, I'll take open standards and one less big player in favour of it. In addition, if DRM does become ubiquitous, whoever controls it influences the entire content-distribution industry. Again, I'll take a vendor-neutral open standards organisation over any one corporation, any day of the week.
The only danger is if OSS developers have anything to do with it, we might actually see a DRM system that works, and is secure. And that'll spoil all our fun...
But seriously, assuming it's therapy (and voluntary), I think this is a really exciting development - akin to using the holodeck for therapeutic purposes in Star Trek (I forget which episodes).
"there are no innocent people in the country you go to war with."
What about conscientious objectors? Or protesters? Or kids? Or ordinary subjects of non-democratic regimes? Or military personnel (subject to court-martial and possible imprisonment or death for refusing an order) who joined up before the current conflict with your country?
Exactly. No different whatsoever from all the kids who play computer games, and the tiny, tiny sub-group with emotional problems who end up shooting up their school.
Remember, we haven't had a PC-based DRM scheme supported end-to-end (hardware, OS, applications) yet. Sure software DRM is easy (worst case, just add another level of indirection), but hardware is, well, hard.
The closest thing was getting unsigned code running on an XBox (for example), but although that was cracked once, by talented hardware hackers, it's not the kind of thing anyone can do - normal users are locked out just as effectively as if it had never been cracked.
Software DRM is easily cracked, and (being software) the cracks are easily distributed. Hardware DRM is hard, and once one person's cracked their box there's no way to apply the crack on your box without the same level of hardware skill.
"I'd be much quicker to defend the games industry if they gave any indication of being remotely concerned about the effects of what they sell on their customers."
What, you mean like stickers on all games, explicitely stating the recommended minimum age of players? And shops that refuse point-blank to sell "grown-up" games to minors? What about places like Wal-Mart, who won't stock adults-only games?
The games are produced for adults, by adults. The shops (overwhelmingly) won't sell the games to underage kids. The kids are still getting the games somehow. You do the math.
"Even if you refuse to allow them GTA, half of their friends will have it."
Yeah, fine. So those kids have (by your standards) bad parents. So forbid your kid from going round their house, exactly like you would if they encouraged him to smoke crack or have underage sex with housepets.
If you can't stop you kid from going round there, you're a bad parent, period.
It's very, very simple - kids don't come out of the womb fucked up and disrespectful of authority. If you can't control them by the time they're old enough to go out playing on their own, you've fucked up their upbringing.
All kids are exposed to popular media. Not all kids grow up violent, drug-abusing sex criminals. The only difference is which parents they have.
What's so hard to understand?
"We of course get pissed, because as adults its inconvenient to have red tape around the products we like, but the tone around here seems to be pretty knee jerk in the assumption that there can't possibly be any harm to the games we love"
Nope. I'm pissed because the people who are advocating ever-more draconian controls cheerfully admit they'll only be happy when these games are banned outright. And, with enforced age-certification on games, I think we have exactly as much red tape as we need - it already works for movie theatres, DVDs and music albums.
The only reason people are up in arms about games are that they're a relatively new mainstream medium (just like they obsessed about movies, music and the internet before), and because neglectful parents would rather rely on government regulations to raise their fucking kids.
I'm willing to accept (when presented with anything vaguely approaching evidence) that exposure to games might negatively affect kids. I'm not willing to accept that this exposure has anything to do with anything but poor parenting.
Only if the party was revealed as a secret test of their new Google-branded bipedal weapons platforms, and they'd chased down and electrocuted all the SEOers with voltage-whips.
If so I, for one, welcome out mech-riding electro-whip weilding Google overlords.
Yes, but only as long as the other side is composed of little brown people, talk a funny language or look like they're wearing towels on their heads.
Opportunity for modders here - diffuse the entire GTA:SA debate by producing a "San Andreas:Socially-Acceptable-to-Middle-Class-White- People" mod where everyone you shoot looks asian or wears a turban...
Slashdot Mirror
Hell yes.
;-)
Basically
Funnily enough, I've always had good luck with beer and monitors, though.
:-)
:-)
I spilled half a can of lager down the back of my old 14" when I was at a LAN party[1] as a kid[2], and although it buzzed alarmingly and the colours went screwy, we tried turning it off, letting the beer dry and turning it on and it's worked fine ever since.
Footnotes:
[1] Well, a mate brought his PC round when DOOM first came out, and we played over a null-modem cable. Still counts, right? Nobody'd even coined the term "LAN party" at that point
[2] His parents were out, hence the beer. We were 14, hence the beer getting knocked over and going down the back of the monitor.
Yeah. It's terrible when you down't have the bandwidth for a big download.
"There is no need to teach programming skills to every student anymore than there is no need to teach every student how to draw blood."
I'd argue it's more like teaching all kids to play sports. Very few will go on to play professionally, but the skills and values (healthy lifestyle, teamwork, strategy, losing gracefully) will help them in whatever they do in the future.
"It is a specific job skill for a specific type of career, not a skill needed for life in general. How many nurses need to know how to use a debugger or database theory?"
I think you misunderstand my position. I advocate teaching programming only because it's the best skill I've ever found to teach logic, rigour and meticulousness, not because I think everyone should be able to write a MUD or a compiler.
No-one needs to know how to use a debugger, but "debugging" (looking at a system, comparing what it does to what it should do, identifying any faults and correcting them with minimal impact on the rest of the system) is applicable to practically every profession on the planet.
Using your example of a nurse, what's diagnosis if not a form of debugging? And I certainly wouldn't go to a nurse who'd never learned diagnosis. I just think programming teaches the core concepts more efficiently (and applicably) than anything else I've ever seen or tried.
"Instead of worrying about teaching them how to use a GUI (which might be irrelevant in a few years) I'd much rather see kids learn a truly valuable skill that will help them no matter what job they end up in, such as financial (i.e. handling credit, mortages) or communications (i.e. speaking to groups) skills."
Sorry - I should have made a distinction between general abilities (task-decomposition, debugging, rigour, meticulousness, information handlign and categorisation) and specific skills I thought it would be useful to have (GUI use, for example).
That said, of course, I'd argue GUIs are still going to be around for a bit longer than a few years - we still couldn't do without command line shells, and they've been around since the dawn of computing. I also wouldn't advocate learning the details of a specific GUI or platform, but more general concepts and principles that are generally applicable to any user-interface (modularity, multitasking, very, very basic network topology, etc).
Just to be clear, I'm not arguing we also shouldn't teach skills such as financial management and communication/public speaking, but successful finances (for example) rely on meticulousness, and public speaking/debate relies partly on well-constructed arguments - these are both things that I think we should be teaching, and I only suggested programming because it seems to me to be the best method for teaching them.
Cheers - I'd got that much from preliminary reading, but surely LDAP combined with unix-style permissions and usergroups replicates much of the functionality of (or are just "an example of"?) Access Control Lists?
I mean, it seems that ACLs are basically a way of hierarchally grouping users (usergroups) or resources (LDAP), then applying specific permissions to each group (which linux/unix does already). Is this all there is to it, or do ACLs also permit other, more advanced behaviour not provided by LDAP+unix perms+sudo?
And do ACLs allow elevation of individual user-permissions (optionally, for a specific time-span), or once set do they have to be reconfigured to allow additional permissions?
"Using the internet as a research tool? Why not just teach them how to use research tools in general? That way, whether they find themselves in front of a Google prompt *or* a library card catalog, they'll know how to go about finding the information they seek."
Indeed, why not? I'm with you on that one, and I didn't suggest for a second that that was the only way we could (or should) be doing it.
However, in the absence of a handy desk-sized library for every student, and the hassle of organising orderly class trips to the school or town library, a PC and web browser pointed at Google might be the easiest way to do most of the teaching, with card catalogues and other organisational schemes providing backup and contrast.
In fact, what we should really be doing is teaching (very abstract, high-level) database design concepts, since those are directly applicable to any information-organisation scheme.
"I've seen people try and fail to find what they're looking for on Google, because they don't know how information is logically categorized and classified and evaluated. If you can't teach them *that*, you can't teach them to use the internet as a research tool."
Bingo. Notice how I don't suggest teaching programming so that everyone can become a programmer, but because I believe it teaches you to think right.
You start from a few basic primitive statements (axioms), and combine them to form algorithms or functions (conclusions). You rigidly test these constructions to make sure they're stable and correct, and successfully handle edge-cases, fixing them (or starting again) if you find any faults. These "proven" conclusions can then be relied upon, allowing you to reach higher-level conclusions, and defend these structures from attack by others (secure code).
Ok, I'm stretching the metaphor to breaking point, but I think you'd find it hard to argue with the idea that programming encourages and develops meticulous and impartial thought-habits. Certainly the quickest and clearest thinkers I know (generally) tend to have some significant experience of programming (or logic, or mathematical proofs) at some point in their lives.
"Programming, testing, debugging? That's fine for people who are going into CS, but for most people that's going to be like teaching everyone how to rebuild an upper engine block."
I'd argue only in the same way basic arithmetic is only of use to people who are becoming mathematicians.
To take your (perennial-slashdot-) car analogy - a customer brings the car into the shop, and complains it rattles above a certain speed. Do you bang weights on the wheels, change the axel and check the tyres all at once, or do you isolate each part as much as possible, check each one for correctness, and change as little as possible to fix the problem?
It's the same process - start with axioms ("something's wrong"), and proceed carefully, logically and methodically. Change only what you need to avoid wasting time or creating new bugs (I dunno in this case - maybe denting a wheel while changing it).
Another example would be designing or building something - say a house. Do you build, paint and furnish the lounge, then do the upper story, then do the walls downstairs, or do you plan out the overall structure and plot out (even subsconsciously) regular, methodical sub-tasks and milestones until the job's finished? In fact, I think this is an even better example, because of all the skills we've mentioned so far good task decomposition, which I'd argue is the hardest and most important "thinking" skill it's possible to learn, is also the one best taught by programming.
There's nothing like getting half-way through a project and realising you have to go back and recode half of it because of a bad initial decision you made to teach you to make good, flexible decisions right from the off.
"Yes, there's *nothing wrong* with knowing that stuff, and yes, it's an area where disciplined
Uhhm nope.
They use my machine to do it - I'll let them order one thing on my credit card while I'm watching, but I'm buggered if I'm giving them my login details to order as much stuff as they like <:-)
"Most Linux rarely use ACL"
;-)
"Yeah, unless you count hacks like sudo which are meant to emulate ACLs."
I'm no expert, but aren't things like LDAP basically ACLs? I thought Linux/Unix had supported LDAP and similar functionality for a while now?
"Yeah, unless you count hacks like sudo which are meant to emulate ACLs."
Again, surely different purposes? ACLs (as I understand them) allows granting/restriction of priviliges based on user-id or profile. Sudo, OTOH, restricts or grants priviliges based on time. If I understand correctly, you can't tell an ACL "grant me permissions for this one job, then remove the permissions from my account".
Sure, sudo might also be used as a dodgy hack to temporarily grant greater priviliges if you don't have an ACL set up, but I think it's got other uses (eg, I might want to be able to modify my system settings, but I don't always want any user application to be able to do it - this is why Windows is such a mess of spyware).
As I said, I've only got a passing familiarity with the subject, but if I'm wrong please feel free to set me right
Indeed - this is a very smart PR move for Microsoft.
They're calling out Linux in a public setting, and publically promising an end to FUD and biased studies. If OSDL doesn't take the bait, it looks like they're snubbing a perfectly fair (even friendly) offer, and the only conclusion people will jump to is that they're too scared to compete.
If OSDL agree and the study does take place we all know exactly what it'll say - Linux is better for servers, and Windows is better for end-users and enterprise desktops. Microsoft then get to crow loudly about how their end-user experience is provably better, Windows is more usable, and employee productivity is provably higher than on Linux.
At the same time they also ramp up their their multimillion dollar marketing efforts to executives (who are traditionally the major MS-fanboy stronghold anyway). They convince them that Exchange Server is something with which Linux can't compete (which, for a turn-key solution is pretty hard to refute). Bingo - executives buy Windows servers too (for Exchange), and end up consolidating on Windows on the front and back-ends.
Basically, (in my experience) execs have always been the stronghold of MS fanboyism - generally they need a good reason to change, but only an excuse to stay with Microsoft. This will give them a powerful argument against Linux on the client-side, and MS will provide them with the excuse they need (integrated solution, interoperates best with MS clients) to keep Windows on the server-sdie, too.
"Their approach seems to be common-sense."
/.), it's likely enough to start skewing results.
Their suggestion may be common-sense, but their approach borders on messianic:
"This article is going to ask you to make a paradigm shift... new, cutting edge methodologies... no web analytics product supports... a journey from first generation web analytics to second."
Followed by a lengthy paragraph on "paradigm shifts". In fact, the article takes three pages to basically say:
"In a nut-shell: To determine a web metric we should apply multiple tests, not just count one thing."
Here's a clue, Brandt Dainow - It's a common-sense way of counting visitors, not a new fucking religion.
The basic approach is to use a selection of criteria to assess visitor numbers - cookies first, then use different IPs/userAgents with close access-times to differentiate again, etc.
The good news is there are only three problems with this approach. The bad news is, that makes them effectively useless, or certainly not much more useful than the normal method of user-counting:
Problem 1
There is no information returned to a web server that isn't trivially gameable, and absolutely no way to tie any kind of computer access to a particular human:
"1. If the same cookie is present on multiple visits, it's the same person."
Non-techie friends are always wanting to buy things from Amazon as a one-off, so I let them use my account. Boom - that's up to twenty people represented by one cookie, right there.
"2. We next sort our visits by cookie ID and look at the cookie life spans. Different cookies that overlap in time are different users. In other words, one person can't have two cookies at the same time."
Except that I habitually leave my GMail account (for example) logged in both at work and at home. Many people I know use two or more "personal" computers, and don't bother logging out of their webmail between uses. That's a minimum of two cookies with overlapping timestamps right there, and only one person.
"3. This leaves us with sets of cookie IDs that could belong to the same person because they occur at different times, so we now look at IP addresses."
This isn't actually an operative step, or a test of any kind. It's just a numbered paragraph.
"4. We know some IP addresses cannot be shared by one person. These are the ones that would require a person to move faster than possible. If we have one IP address in New York, then one in Tokyo 60 minutes later, we know it can't be the same person because you can't get from New York to Tokyo in one hour."
FFS, has this guy ever touched a computer? For someone writing on technology he's pretty fucking out of touch. As an example, what about people who commonly telnet+lynx, VMWare or PCAnywhere, right across the world, hundreds of times in their workday? Sure, maybe most normal users don't (yet), but for some sites (eg, nerd-heavy sites like
"5. This leaves us with those IP addresses that can't be eliminated on the basis of geography. We now switch emphasis. Instead of looking for proof of difference, we now look for combinations which indicate it's the same person. These are IP addresses we know to be owned by the same ISP or company."
Except that one ISP can serve as many as hundreds of thousands of users. And proxy gateways often report one IP for all the users connected to them. For example, NTL reports one "gateway" IP for all the people in my town on cable-modems - that's thousands, minimum. So, we're looking at a potential error magnitude of 100-100,000. That's no better than the existing system for assessing unique visitors.
"6. We can refine this test by going back over the IP address/Cookie combination. We can look at all the IP addresses that a cookie had. Do we see one of those addresses used on a new cookie? Do both cookies have the same User Agent? If we get the same pool
"And yes, there is nothing you can do on a computer on a schooldesk that you cannot do with books, pencils and paper."
Apart from, y'know, using computers? Learning about modern technology? How about becoming familiar with programming, testing and debugging? Using the internet as a research tool?
I'd go so far as to say that while reading, writing and basic maths are important too, you actually can't learn basic technology use without, y'know, using it.
I firmly believe that, like every student should be able to read, write and add up, these days every student leaving school should be able to use the internet, have some appreciation of basic database theory and should be able to use at least one GUI competently.
Ideally, they should also have some experience of very basic-level programming, too - if nothing else, it teaches you how to think meticulously and correctly, a skill which is in all-too-short supply these days.
Nice idea, but that dog just won't hunt.
"When there are millions and billions of people online, there are too many target addresses as well as lots of senders."
Right. But the current system is that one person can (over time) send billions of messages. And since spammers addresses rarely end up on the web (or in other spammers' mailing lists), they can keep sending spam no matter how many "real" people have addresses. Also, once you're on a list you end up on a lot of lists, so while 90% of the population might not get any spam, the other 10% will get it all. How would you like to be one of those 10%?
"Non-bulk mail is mail written personally for you. Not form letters. Not even one person telling a room of 100 slaves "everybody write personal messages all day." These are all bulk mail. Somebody (not the slaves, the guy giving the orders) tried to send mail to a lot of people who didn't know him."
I see your position now, but I still don't agree. How can you possibly prove that any single spam wasn't generated by a template+mailing list?
You can't. And how do you define "writing a personal message"? I could type three e-mail addresses then type a message to them all, or I could cut-and-paste them from a list into a message I wrote first. Or I could produce a template message, and dynamically insert all three names from a database into the message before sending it. How many names is "non-personal"? What level of indirection does there have to be before it's not "writing" the mail? These are all inherently vague weasel-words, with no useful functional definition.
"Hi, I have been following your company for a while, and you are doing cool stuff. I'm skilled at what you do and could really help on product X for the following reasons. Do you have an opening for somebody like me?"
That's a fair point - while some people (like me) would consider this acceptable, others could use an anti-spam law to get the sender in trouble. The thing is, unless the sender pisses off the recipient, he's not going to get in trouble. And if the sender pisses off the recipient, there's no chance it'll result in business so there's no point seding the message, period.
In other words, it's fine to flout the law if you know the other party isn't going to mind. Simply by requiring that someone complains first, the law would protect you from unwanted messages, while allowing wanted ones through.
"No, you don't, so don't write your rules to ban this. Fortunately, there is no need to write them that way, so why create a fight with your otherwise allies just for the sake of banning something you don't need to ban?"
Sigh. If you don't mind message like this, you won't report them. In the same way a masochist doesn't get a dominatrix who stamps on his nuts done for assault. As long as one person has to complain before the sender is prosecuted, you can send as many messages as you like. Fuck it - even make it so each incident of spamming has a fixed penalty. When a spam is caught, the fine is proportional to the number of complaints received, and distributed equally between the complainers.
UCE that turns out to be wanted attracts no penalty. Unwanted UCE attracts a penalty in proportion to the number of people it annoys and the amount of time it wastes. However, the only way to enshrine this in law is to make all UCE illegal, but to selectively enforce based on complaints.
If the majority of people don't care than spamming should be allowed, and spammers can profit. If (as we all suspect) most people don't want most spam they receive, spammers get hit with massive fines and go out of business.
Either way, the will of the majority is served.
How about: Microsoft makes money by sueing spammers? Not a lot, to be fair, but the publicity is great - "good old Microsoft defending you against the people making your lives a misery". Of course, moves like this opposition to a proper anti-spam bill have the opposite effect, but who's going to hear about this outside of the nerd set, most of whom already dislike or distrust Microsoft anyway?
Or: Microsoft recently bought Gator/Claria, whose sole asset is their database of non-opted-in e-mail addresses? These laws would make that unusable, and would probably demand its immediate deletion. Even assuming they weren't going to use it for UCE (too... evil... even for... MS...?), that's still millions of dollars and a huge potential asset to have to throw away.
Or, yes: Microsoft plans to sell anti-spam services. "Personal" solutions would probably be free (very little cost to them, lots of good publicity), but enterprise-level (eg an Exchange Server plugin) could be worth thousands. Or at least, non-OSS-friendly companies would likely pay that much for a "Microsoft approved" solution.
Either way, this is just another slimy move to add to the list. Is anyone keeping a database of all the shitty things like this Microsoft is doing, or would it be too big a job for anybody to handle?
"at least, I would have, until you asked me to prove that the rest of the universe didn't rotate around the earth. wow.. just. wow. I presume you realize the earth isn't flat, and not on top of a pile of turtles all the way down, right?"
;-)
;-).
;-)
;-p
;-)
My apologies - my hypothetical scenario wasn't intended as solipsism, but as a serious philosophical/scientific point. Oh, ok, and out-pedanting the pedant
"we can prove the earth revolves around the sun (as opposed to the other way around) fairly conclusively based on seasonal weather patterns"
I don't mean to sound patronising, but I don't think you understand the basic idea.
Basically, according to special relativity perfectly uniform motion in a uniform direction is experimentally indistinguishable from standing still - no additional forcess are acting on you. As long as everything is moving at the same rate as you, there's no way to prove if you're moving at all. Likewise, even if everything appears to be moving, there's no way to tell you aren't static with regards to a greater reference-frame.
The usual example given is if you travelled (eg, in a plane) around the earth's equator against the direction of earth's rotation at exactly the speed it revolves. If you measure yourself relative to the ground, you're moving at about 1038 miles per hour. Measure yourself relative to the sun (a wider reference-frame), and you're basically standing still.
(Ok, there are some complications in practice due to things like the earth's precession, its rotational velocity compared to its orbital velocity and the earth's imperfectly-spherical shape, but you get the idea.)
Likewise, although earth appears to be moving relative to everything we can see, it's entirely possible that (allowing for a reference frame greater than the universe) we're actually the oly thing in it that's truly stationary (relative to that frame).
As I said, I'm not seriously suggesting that that's really the case, but it's a fall-out possibility from special relativity that it's impossible to disprove (well, without looking outside the universe, and even then there might be a larger reference frame containing that
Given that, I was out-pedanting you by proving you couldn't know the earth was moving and the sun wasn't, since you couldn't prove the entire universe wasn't moving in such a way that the earth was the only truly static thing in it. Of course, this presupposes there is a greater reference frame relative to which the earth could be said to be static, but since you'd made the assertion all I had to do was disprove it, not offer a disprovable hypothesis myself
"*but* of course, this is a discussion about videogame violence, and not a flamewar on astrophysics, so i'm going to shut up now. hopefully, you'll take my initial snarky concept as it was intended, and get back onto the subject at hand"
Again, my apologies - I wasn't reading this as a flamewar, more an amusing intellectual sparring match between pedants. Actually, I was quite enjoying it
" that can be easily summarized in one brief phrase: Jack Thompson is an opportunistic asshole."
Indeed. On that, there's no disagreement
...outside the tent pissing in?
The way I see it, DRM is already here. Short-term, at least, it isn't going away.
The near-future choice is between a DRMed-up future controlled by open standards (giving nobody but Big Media a vested interest in pushing it), or a DRMed-up future controlled by one company (most likely Microsoft, Apple or Sony), giving us both Big Media and at least one big IT company pushing to have it included/mandatory in all their products.
Against that background, I'll take open standards and one less big player in favour of it. In addition, if DRM does become ubiquitous, whoever controls it influences the entire content-distribution industry. Again, I'll take a vendor-neutral open standards organisation over any one corporation, any day of the week.
The only danger is if OSS developers have anything to do with it, we might actually see a DRM system that works, and is secure. And that'll spoil all our fun...
(Apologies if this is double-posted. The comments system appears to be fscked for the last three or four articles, so I can't tell if this has actually gone through).
Not necessarily, because the speed of light only applies to our current reference-frame, namely the universe.
The universe (as a whole) could be moving in any "direction" without it being detectable from within the universe, since all our measurements are relative to other parts of the universe, also moving in the same way.
If there is a way to tell for sure I'd be fascinated to hear it, but I'm pretty sure it's impossible - just like the way (IIRC) it's impossible for any object to detect the difference between constant velocity and gravitational force acting on itself.
...outside the tent pissing in?
The way I see it, DRM is already here. Short-term, at least, it isn't going away.
The near-future choice is between a DRMed-up future controlled by open standards (giving nobody but Big Media a vested interest in pushing it), or a DRMed-up future controlled by one company (most likely Microsoft, Apple or Sony), giving us both Big Media and at least one big IT company pushing to have it included/mandatory in all their products.
Against that background, I'll take open standards and one less big player in favour of it. In addition, if DRM does become ubiquitous, whoever controls it influences the entire content-distribution industry. Again, I'll take a vendor-neutral open standards organisation over any one corporation, any day of the week.
The only danger is if OSS developers have anything to do with it, we might actually see a DRM system that works, and is secure. And that'll spoil all our fun...
I thought it was a reasoned, logical statement of position. Apparently not.
Heh. Ludwig Van, of course.
But seriously, assuming it's therapy (and voluntary), I think this is a really exciting development - akin to using the holodeck for therapeutic purposes in Star Trek (I forget which episodes).
"there are no innocent people in the country you go to war with."
What about conscientious objectors? Or protesters? Or kids? Or ordinary subjects of non-democratic regimes? Or military personnel (subject to court-martial and possible imprisonment or death for refusing an order) who joined up before the current conflict with your country?
What a fucking retarded statement of position.
Exactly. No different whatsoever from all the kids who play computer games, and the tiny, tiny sub-group with emotional problems who end up shooting up their school.
Remember, we haven't had a PC-based DRM scheme supported end-to-end (hardware, OS, applications) yet. Sure software DRM is easy (worst case, just add another level of indirection), but hardware is, well, hard.
The closest thing was getting unsigned code running on an XBox (for example), but although that was cracked once, by talented hardware hackers, it's not the kind of thing anyone can do - normal users are locked out just as effectively as if it had never been cracked.
Software DRM is easily cracked, and (being software) the cracks are easily distributed. Hardware DRM is hard, and once one person's cracked their box there's no way to apply the crack on your box without the same level of hardware skill.
"I'd be much quicker to defend the games industry if they gave any indication of being remotely concerned about the effects of what they sell on their customers."
What, you mean like stickers on all games, explicitely stating the recommended minimum age of players? And shops that refuse point-blank to sell "grown-up" games to minors? What about places like Wal-Mart, who won't stock adults-only games?
The games are produced for adults, by adults. The shops (overwhelmingly) won't sell the games to underage kids. The kids are still getting the games somehow. You do the math.
"Even if you refuse to allow them GTA, half of their friends will have it."
Yeah, fine. So those kids have (by your standards) bad parents. So forbid your kid from going round their house, exactly like you would if they encouraged him to smoke crack or have underage sex with housepets.
If you can't stop you kid from going round there, you're a bad parent, period.
It's very, very simple - kids don't come out of the womb fucked up and disrespectful of authority. If you can't control them by the time they're old enough to go out playing on their own, you've fucked up their upbringing.
All kids are exposed to popular media. Not all kids grow up violent, drug-abusing sex criminals. The only difference is which parents they have.
What's so hard to understand?
"We of course get pissed, because as adults its inconvenient to have red tape around the products we like, but the tone around here seems to be pretty knee jerk in the assumption that there can't possibly be any harm to the games we love"
Nope. I'm pissed because the people who are advocating ever-more draconian controls cheerfully admit they'll only be happy when these games are banned outright. And, with enforced age-certification on games, I think we have exactly as much red tape as we need - it already works for movie theatres, DVDs and music albums.
The only reason people are up in arms about games are that they're a relatively new mainstream medium (just like they obsessed about movies, music and the internet before), and because neglectful parents would rather rely on government regulations to raise their fucking kids.
I'm willing to accept (when presented with anything vaguely approaching evidence) that exposure to games might negatively affect kids. I'm not willing to accept that this exposure has anything to do with anything but poor parenting.
Only if the party was revealed as a secret test of their new Google-branded bipedal weapons platforms, and they'd chased down and electrocuted all the SEOers with voltage-whips.
If so I, for one, welcome out mech-riding electro-whip weilding Google overlords.
Yes, but only as long as the other side is composed of little brown people, talk a funny language or look like they're wearing towels on their heads.
- People" mod where everyone you shoot looks asian or wears a turban...
Opportunity for modders here - diffuse the entire GTA:SA debate by producing a "San Andreas:Socially-Acceptable-to-Middle-Class-White