The job of the CEO/President is to set the vision of the company. Your finance buddy may be good with the numbers side of thing, but does he have the 'vision'? IMHO, it sounds like it is you that has the vision. You know where you want to take your product, and even though you may not know the 'how' end of things, that's what the staff is for. They execute. You lead. Take the CEO job, and there's no shame in your friend taking an advisary position (CFO?) in the way of finances, etc.
If you think that Peter Jackson is a mediocre director, sure. The Lord of the Rings included *numerious* pre-visualization shots. If you watched any of the bonus content on the DVD's, you would see some of the pre-vis stuff on the Mines of Moria scenes where the Fellowship is being chased by the Orcs. I think the movie was fabulous, and if pre-vis made the movie any better (which IMHO it did) then let the mediocre directors continue their work.
Visualization has at least two benefits that I think of right off the top of my head.
1. You as the director may be able to visualize what needs to happen, but communicating that to other people can be difficult if you don't have ESP. This allows the artist to communicate an idea to other people via a medium that is easy to conceptualize. Yes, that's what story boards are for (like the article says), but
2. It allows you to build a set without going through the costly motions of actually having to do it. This goes for virtual sets as well. While this method seems a lot more expensive than hiring a graphic artist to draw it in 2D story board cells, 3D permits you to make changes without having to redraw a whole frame, this in turn allows the crew to explore changes and make iterations very quickly. It also makes a good point of reference for those who are responsible for creating CG add-ins to the movie.
My experience has been that boo at Barnes and Noble are quite a bit more expensivewhen compared to their e-store counterparts. I use Barnes and Noble to scout out what books I want to get, and then go look at Bookpool, Orielly, Amazon, and even *gasp* eBay.
I don't think I should have to pay the cover price of a book if I can help it.
"Contrary to a common assumption that Microsoft is anti open source, the reality is not so black and white. Certainly, most customers don't live in that either/or world. They choose a technology - an operating system or an application - based on its ability to solve a particular problem and to serve a certain business need, not based on its development model."
<insert obligtory M$ bash>
OK. I'm glad we could get that out. Now, obviously Hilf is going to biased towards Microsft, mostly because that's where his paycheck comes from, but I think that the interview says a lot that goes left unsaid here at/. Primarily this:
Don't make a platform decision entirely based on its development model. There are pros and cons on both sides of the issue. Going the MS route creates its own set of challenges, same with OSS. At the end of the day managers only care about this: how much is going to cost and does it solve more business problems than it creates?
In projects that I've done, it made more sense to go with MS, in others, *nix. I haven't let development model politics cloud my judgement in order to get the job done. Isn't that how it should be?
Remember, though, from your Accouning 101 class, that this has benefits for the firm that buys the product as well. For those looking to also put some expenditures on the books before year end, purchasing can have some positive effects also. This get even better if the company is using MACRS depreciation methods, because this means that they get an added depreciation expence the next year, too.
I think the biggest problem in doing that is what is sometimes called interaction fatigue. If the browser reminds them of these things over and over for *legit* content, the user gets used to just clicking OK to download anyway. So, when something malicious really does come down the pipe, they have been conditioned to just click that OK button. It's nothing more than the *browser calling trojan*, nobody believes it until it's too late.
Aside from previous posts alluding to this, was the audience considered when doing this review? Don't many/.ers go out of their way to buy something that they can put together themselves? The obvious/. answer (as covered in other posts) is to buy a cheap drive and corresponding enclosure.
Now, if the drive did something else cool, say was a combination drive/electric shaver, IMHO, we would start drooling over something like this. However, run-of-the-mill junk like this is something that could just as easily be bought at Wal-Mart, CostCo etc. by someone too afraid and unknowledgable to do it themselves.
With all that said, let's see some stuff that matters...like a combo drive/electric shaver.
I have used johntheripper and lophtcrack to experiment with such characters. It was interesting to note that lophtcrack displayed the ' ú ' as ' U '. This in a sense made it secure by obfuscation, but anyone experienced would then start using ú substitutions, etc. Plus, it is not entirelt difficult to introduce these character sets into a brute force mechanism.
This is assuming, of course, that your chipset manufacturer has created drivers. As of today, for example, there are no AMD nForce4 drivers available for my SATA/RAID configuration. I have to run the Vista beta through VMWare, and even then, it is still a hack to get to install.
For example, the beta will not format a NTFS partition on which it can install. You must have preformated the partition BEFORE installation. If that wasn't enough, I had to mount an additional hard drive to VMWare so that it could copy temp install files to it. This all despite the fact that it was installing to a 24 GB hard drive -- well above the prescribed minimum.
This all said, it is understandable that such idiosynchronies happen because it is after all a beta. Give them a break. I have used plenty of 'non-beta' Linux distros (Ubuntu somes to mind...) that had rediculous problems with them.
Wiring everything into their internet servers just creates a lot more problems when something goes down.
While true, that's another part of the system's analysis and design. A risk and cost/benefit assessment must be made. How important are these services in the event of IP failure? What redundency can be built in to avoid it? What are the consequences of a security breach? etc. It seems to me that if they were smart enough to address IP possibilities before construction begins, they also have the brains to make such assessments--which means that despite the obvious problems that might come up, they have solutions that outwiegh the costs.
California, which averaged 62 statutory rape convictions per month in the late 90s, in a state population of 33 million.
Gee, that's comforting. Joseph Stalin is quoted as saying: One death is a tradgedy, a million deaths is a statistic. I hate to sound like a bleeding heart, but that's nearly 750 cases a year. What if you were the parent of a child involved in one of those cases? Those numbers seem really small when compared to the 33 million, but they are 750 people that have had a life altering experience (that they were more than likely not ready for) at the hands of someone else. Why don't we take a stand on that? How can we reduce something tragic like that to just a statistic?
They haven't shown that they can do anything the iPod can't do, so why would consumers switch?
That's a good marketing question. Any company with a good marketing department needs to consider such a question very carefully. From my perspective, the digital music player market is pretty saturated. There are too many devices from too many manufacturers, and so the product with the most visibility and word-of-mouth advertising usually gets the market dominance.
For example, for those of you who opted to watch at least part of the Olympics, how many athletes who were listening to music had a Archos AV 500? How many of them had a Creative Zen? Ok, how many of them had some sort of iPod? I am safe in saying that all the athletes that *I* saw had an iPod.
This says a lot. The iPod didn't get where it is today simply because it plays music. It's the top music player because it's easy to use, there are a myriad of accessories for it, it has an easy to use music download service (which is done in house) and it just looks aesthetically appealing.
So, what does Samsung have to do? For starters, thier music download service MUST BE USER FRIENDLY! One of the biggest things that I hate about WMA's is that once they have been tied to your computer, they are inextricably tied to that instance of your OS *FOREVER*. If you reinstall your OS fairly regularly, then paying $0.99 to listen to a song for a few months is a joke.
iTunes corrects this problem by 'authorizing' a computer to play back songs purchased through their service. Before I destroy my computer, I simply backup my music, 'de-authorize' my machine, and no more hassles. In fact, I can authorize up to 5 computers to play my music. So, if I want a copy on two home machines and a machine at work, I'm still left with 2 spare licences.
To do just that would be very costly for Samsung--especially when it comes to negotiating music prices with the RIAA execs. I would expect things to be ruthless and costly since they are no longer happy with people paying $.99 anymore.
Next, how do you catapult your product's visibility beyond that of a well entrenched competitor. Here is the part that requires creative marketing. You could launch a smear campaign, alleging that an iPod creates some insane amount EMI radiation that causes cancer. Maybe you could even pay some basketball stars and other athletes to use your product. This also would be very costly, but does not garantee any success.
Finally, you would need to convince 3rd party vendors to make brand specific accessories for your player. iPod spawned a multi-billion dollar industry in just accessories. These accessories can't be generic. They have to be convincing enough to manufactorers that they incorporate some part of your identity in their name and packaging or other form of sneaky co-branding. How many products have been released with the *i-something* identity?--some of them totally unrelated to the iPod or Apple related!
So, you see the nearly insurmountable task of killing an iPod. There are too many of them to kill them at once. Samsung, you have a long and winding road to the day you put it 6' under. Good luck, your going to need it. Maybe if you would lower your price I would consider.
I disagree. I think the best games incorporate a meaningful and involving story AND a fun gaming experience. Take for example some of the more successful RPG's on the NES and SNES consoles like the Final Fantasy series. What made these games great was not just the game play, but the drama and excitement of wanting to know how the story line was going to be advanced. Nothing was quite more exciting, for example, in Final Fantasy IV (that's II here in the US), to find out that Golbez is Cecil's brother. How about that for irony?
Then you go over to the FPS series. What made the original Half-Life exciting? Not just from shooting aliens and Special Ops guys, but how the story was unravelling concerning the Black Mesa incident. Same for Half-Life 2. It was exhilerating to see what had happened since the first game.
Now, the real challenge about this game is not making it just like any other MMO game where you run around and kill--it's going to be "how can we advance the super hero story" in a highly dynamic, non-linear fashion, and make the gameplay fun too. You can't separate them and they're not mutually exclusive. A really good game worth playing over over, like watching your favorite movie again and again, incorporates a good story AND game play.
Without knowing the outcome of this rediculousness, I already know who the winners are going to be--the lawyers. Wow. I kinda wish I was getting billable time out of this trial, because by the time it gets settled, I would have enough to retire!
I whole heartedly agree. Nothing was more irritating to me than to install Kubuntu ( the 'Breezy Badger' distro ) than to find out that I couldn't graphically interface as root, even though it would prompt me with the *psudeo*-root password. It was annoying more than anything, but when you cripple the way root ought to interact even through the CLI, you got some problems. I think that before they start getting into mission critical applications of the Penguin (ie an embedded distro for a cash register), they need to iron out some fatal flaws with their distro. Nothing would be more incommodious than a puking embedded machine manned by 16-year old McDonald's employee.
My college is on the edge of doing the same thing. The biggest and most important thing to plan for is a complete remodeling of existing infrastructure. For example, since students are expected to the laptop all the time, remodeling of classrooms was required to add additional AC outlets so that students did not have to run a on battery during scheduled classes. Also, it was decided that a cat five plug in would be supplied for each 'workstation' and wifi as a supplement. This was done for security reasons because certain requirements (such as opening certain ports) was something that the IT department of campus wasn't willing to do on the wifi network, but tollerable for in class use.
One other thing that was considered for lowering the cost were custom built machines that were sold by the department at cost with Linux distros installed on them. The department also has some licences for VM Ware that were going to use so taht students could run XP Pro for.NET development and other software whose niche was based on the Windows platform.
Bottom line...prepare to remodel your buildings--that part ain't going to come cheap. I think that if you're going to require students to have a laptop and use it, you better bite the bullet of providing some infrastructure that may not yet be in place.
I remember one time from my days working at a grocery store. I know that sometimes leaks for people can be a problem, so I would help them out by directing them to isle 12. Bill, for your leak problem, here's a solution.
It might be a stretch, but the 'morality police' seems too easy of an answer. The 33rd rule of wanting to be involved in something without looking like one of the transgressors is...look like your trying to enforce something. Meaning: if you want to look at porn but don't want to be viewed as a pervert if caught in the act, you simply become someone who enforces it. That way you confiscate a whole lot of 'contraband' material, but are free to look at it all because that's your job.
I knew a guy at a youth correctional facility that spent his time looking at porn sites and such, in the name of trying to understand the people he was trying to help. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if he was shooting heroin for the same reasons.
If Google hasn't done anything wrong... then they shouldn't have to comply.
Not entirely true. If the corporation has knowledge or posession of evidence of wrong doing, then they have a moral responsibility to divulge relevent details. On the flip side, however, the governement can't just go on a 'fishing expedition'. The government must present a compelling case based on *probable cause* that wrong doing has occured.
Personnaly, I don't think they're going to get it, and they're just going to make the administration look like a bunch of idiots (if they already havn't).
I like to take often used 'custom classes' in Java and puting them in a reusable package that I can use in many of my apps. My favorite package that I like to use is the Convert class.
It basically does all the.valueOf(), parsing, and casting without having to begrudgingly type all that crap out.
My favorite with ASP.NET is a sanitize routine that scrubs input fields for SQL and script injection attacks. It is a perfect canadite for a class that needs to be implemented in all my.NET projects.
There's a reason for more than 1 drive--by puting disks into arrays, you not only maximize their capacity, but the speed at which they read/write data. Having a 1.2 PB drive isn't as useful as having four 600 TB disks configured to do RAID 0+1, for example.
Call of Duty put in there as well. A lot of the battles are mostly or at least partly on real life history, and it would be an educational experience about the hell of war and price paid to secure freedoms. I remember for one of my history classes we had to watch Glory, a movie about african americans in the Civil War. It was quite an experience, and think this sort of medium can be an instructive teaching tool.
Slashdot Mirror
The job of the CEO/President is to set the vision of the company. Your finance buddy may be good with the numbers side of thing, but does he have the 'vision'? IMHO, it sounds like it is you that has the vision. You know where you want to take your product, and even though you may not know the 'how' end of things, that's what the staff is for. They execute. You lead. Take the CEO job, and there's no shame in your friend taking an advisary position (CFO?) in the way of finances, etc.
Sounds like a toy for mediocre directors.
If you think that Peter Jackson is a mediocre director, sure. The Lord of the Rings included *numerious* pre-visualization shots. If you watched any of the bonus content on the DVD's, you would see some of the pre-vis stuff on the Mines of Moria scenes where the Fellowship is being chased by the Orcs. I think the movie was fabulous, and if pre-vis made the movie any better (which IMHO it did) then let the mediocre directors continue their work.
Visualization has at least two benefits that I think of right off the top of my head.
1. You as the director may be able to visualize what needs to happen, but communicating that to other people can be difficult if you don't have ESP. This allows the artist to communicate an idea to other people via a medium that is easy to conceptualize. Yes, that's what story boards are for (like the article says), but
2. It allows you to build a set without going through the costly motions of actually having to do it. This goes for virtual sets as well. While this method seems a lot more expensive than hiring a graphic artist to draw it in 2D story board cells, 3D permits you to make changes without having to redraw a whole frame, this in turn allows the crew to explore changes and make iterations very quickly. It also makes a good point of reference for those who are responsible for creating CG add-ins to the movie.
My experience has been that boo at Barnes and Noble are quite a bit more expensivewhen compared to their e-store counterparts. I use Barnes and Noble to scout out what books I want to get, and then go look at Bookpool, Orielly, Amazon, and even *gasp* eBay.
I don't think I should have to pay the cover price of a book if I can help it.
"Contrary to a common assumption that Microsoft is anti open source, the reality is not so black and white. Certainly, most customers don't live in that either/or world. They choose a technology - an operating system or an application - based on its ability to solve a particular problem and to serve a certain business need, not based on its development model."
<insert obligtory M$ bash>
OK. I'm glad we could get that out. Now, obviously Hilf is going to biased towards Microsft, mostly because that's where his paycheck comes from, but I think that the interview says a lot that goes left unsaid here at /. Primarily this:
Don't make a platform decision entirely based on its development model. There are pros and cons on both sides of the issue. Going the MS route creates its own set of challenges, same with OSS. At the end of the day managers only care about this: how much is going to cost and does it solve more business problems than it creates?
In projects that I've done, it made more sense to go with MS, in others, *nix. I haven't let development model politics cloud my judgement in order to get the job done. Isn't that how it should be?
Remember, though, from your Accouning 101 class, that this has benefits for the firm that buys the product as well. For those looking to also put some expenditures on the books before year end, purchasing can have some positive effects also. This get even better if the company is using MACRS depreciation methods, because this means that they get an added depreciation expence the next year, too.
I think the biggest problem in doing that is what is sometimes called interaction fatigue. If the browser reminds them of these things over and over for *legit* content, the user gets used to just clicking OK to download anyway. So, when something malicious really does come down the pipe, they have been conditioned to just click that OK button. It's nothing more than the *browser calling trojan*, nobody believes it until it's too late.
Aside from previous posts alluding to this, was the audience considered when doing this review? Don't many /.ers go out of their way to buy something that they can put together themselves? The obvious /. answer (as covered in other posts) is to buy a cheap drive and corresponding enclosure.
Now, if the drive did something else cool, say was a combination drive/electric shaver, IMHO, we would start drooling over something like this. However, run-of-the-mill junk like this is something that could just as easily be bought at Wal-Mart, CostCo etc. by someone too afraid and unknowledgable to do it themselves.
With all that said, let's see some stuff that matters...like a combo drive/electric shaver.
I have used johntheripper and lophtcrack to experiment with such characters. It was interesting to note that lophtcrack displayed the ' ú ' as ' U '. This in a sense made it secure by obfuscation, but anyone experienced would then start using ú substitutions, etc. Plus, it is not entirelt difficult to introduce these character sets into a brute force mechanism.
This is assuming, of course, that your chipset manufacturer has created drivers. As of today, for example, there are no AMD nForce4 drivers available for my SATA/RAID configuration. I have to run the Vista beta through VMWare, and even then, it is still a hack to get to install.
For example, the beta will not format a NTFS partition on which it can install. You must have preformated the partition BEFORE installation. If that wasn't enough, I had to mount an additional hard drive to VMWare so that it could copy temp install files to it. This all despite the fact that it was installing to a 24 GB hard drive -- well above the prescribed minimum.
This all said, it is understandable that such idiosynchronies happen because it is after all a beta. Give them a break. I have used plenty of 'non-beta' Linux distros (Ubuntu somes to mind...) that had rediculous problems with them.
and with a simple D,U,L,R,X,Y,B,A,SELECT,START combo on the court and the players will have no clothes on!
Wiring everything into their internet servers just creates a lot more problems when something goes down.
While true, that's another part of the system's analysis and design. A risk and cost/benefit assessment must be made. How important are these services in the event of IP failure? What redundency can be built in to avoid it? What are the consequences of a security breach? etc. It seems to me that if they were smart enough to address IP possibilities before construction begins, they also have the brains to make such assessments--which means that despite the obvious problems that might come up, they have solutions that outwiegh the costs.
California, which averaged 62 statutory rape convictions per month in the late 90s, in a state population of 33 million.
Gee, that's comforting. Joseph Stalin is quoted as saying: One death is a tradgedy, a million deaths is a statistic. I hate to sound like a bleeding heart, but that's nearly 750 cases a year. What if you were the parent of a child involved in one of those cases? Those numbers seem really small when compared to the 33 million, but they are 750 people that have had a life altering experience (that they were more than likely not ready for) at the hands of someone else. Why don't we take a stand on that? How can we reduce something tragic like that to just a statistic?
A since-removed promotional video...shows a portable computer whose functionality is likely to straddle both markets.
I this a subtle clue that M$ wants to get into the lucrative adult entertainment biz? Pretty interesting coming from *gamasutra*...
They haven't shown that they can do anything the iPod can't do, so why would consumers switch?
That's a good marketing question. Any company with a good marketing department needs to consider such a question very carefully. From my perspective, the digital music player market is pretty saturated. There are too many devices from too many manufacturers, and so the product with the most visibility and word-of-mouth advertising usually gets the market dominance.
For example, for those of you who opted to watch at least part of the Olympics, how many athletes who were listening to music had a Archos AV 500? How many of them had a Creative Zen? Ok, how many of them had some sort of iPod? I am safe in saying that all the athletes that *I* saw had an iPod.
This says a lot. The iPod didn't get where it is today simply because it plays music. It's the top music player because it's easy to use, there are a myriad of accessories for it, it has an easy to use music download service (which is done in house) and it just looks aesthetically appealing.
So, what does Samsung have to do? For starters, thier music download service MUST BE USER FRIENDLY! One of the biggest things that I hate about WMA's is that once they have been tied to your computer, they are inextricably tied to that instance of your OS *FOREVER*. If you reinstall your OS fairly regularly, then paying $0.99 to listen to a song for a few months is a joke.
iTunes corrects this problem by 'authorizing' a computer to play back songs purchased through their service. Before I destroy my computer, I simply backup my music, 'de-authorize' my machine, and no more hassles. In fact, I can authorize up to 5 computers to play my music. So, if I want a copy on two home machines and a machine at work, I'm still left with 2 spare licences.
To do just that would be very costly for Samsung--especially when it comes to negotiating music prices with the RIAA execs. I would expect things to be ruthless and costly since they are no longer happy with people paying $.99 anymore.
Next, how do you catapult your product's visibility beyond that of a well entrenched competitor. Here is the part that requires creative marketing. You could launch a smear campaign, alleging that an iPod creates some insane amount EMI radiation that causes cancer. Maybe you could even pay some basketball stars and other athletes to use your product. This also would be very costly, but does not garantee any success.
Finally, you would need to convince 3rd party vendors to make brand specific accessories for your player. iPod spawned a multi-billion dollar industry in just accessories. These accessories can't be generic. They have to be convincing enough to manufactorers that they incorporate some part of your identity in their name and packaging or other form of sneaky co-branding. How many products have been released with the *i-something* identity?--some of them totally unrelated to the iPod or Apple related!
So, you see the nearly insurmountable task of killing an iPod. There are too many of them to kill them at once. Samsung, you have a long and winding road to the day you put it 6' under. Good luck, your going to need it. Maybe if you would lower your price I would consider.
I disagree. I think the best games incorporate a meaningful and involving story AND a fun gaming experience. Take for example some of the more successful RPG's on the NES and SNES consoles like the Final Fantasy series. What made these games great was not just the game play, but the drama and excitement of wanting to know how the story line was going to be advanced. Nothing was quite more exciting, for example, in Final Fantasy IV (that's II here in the US), to find out that Golbez is Cecil's brother. How about that for irony?
Then you go over to the FPS series. What made the original Half-Life exciting? Not just from shooting aliens and Special Ops guys, but how the story was unravelling concerning the Black Mesa incident. Same for Half-Life 2. It was exhilerating to see what had happened since the first game.
Now, the real challenge about this game is not making it just like any other MMO game where you run around and kill--it's going to be "how can we advance the super hero story" in a highly dynamic, non-linear fashion, and make the gameplay fun too. You can't separate them and they're not mutually exclusive. A really good game worth playing over over, like watching your favorite movie again and again, incorporates a good story AND game play.
Without knowing the outcome of this rediculousness, I already know who the winners are going to be--the lawyers. Wow. I kinda wish I was getting billable time out of this trial, because by the time it gets settled, I would have enough to retire!
I whole heartedly agree. Nothing was more irritating to me than to install Kubuntu ( the 'Breezy Badger' distro ) than to find out that I couldn't graphically interface as root, even though it would prompt me with the *psudeo*-root password. It was annoying more than anything, but when you cripple the way root ought to interact even through the CLI, you got some problems. I think that before they start getting into mission critical applications of the Penguin (ie an embedded distro for a cash register), they need to iron out some fatal flaws with their distro. Nothing would be more incommodious than a puking embedded machine manned by 16-year old McDonald's employee.
My college is on the edge of doing the same thing. The biggest and most important thing to plan for is a complete remodeling of existing infrastructure. For example, since students are expected to the laptop all the time, remodeling of classrooms was required to add additional AC outlets so that students did not have to run a on battery during scheduled classes. Also, it was decided that a cat five plug in would be supplied for each 'workstation' and wifi as a supplement. This was done for security reasons because certain requirements (such as opening certain ports) was something that the IT department of campus wasn't willing to do on the wifi network, but tollerable for in class use.
.NET development and other software whose niche was based on the Windows platform.
One other thing that was considered for lowering the cost were custom built machines that were sold by the department at cost with Linux distros installed on them. The department also has some licences for VM Ware that were going to use so taht students could run XP Pro for
Bottom line...prepare to remodel your buildings--that part ain't going to come cheap. I think that if you're going to require students to have a laptop and use it, you better bite the bullet of providing some infrastructure that may not yet be in place.
I remember one time from my days working at a grocery store. I know that sometimes leaks for people can be a problem, so I would help them out by directing them to isle 12. Bill, for your leak problem, here's a solution.
How exactly does someone "break up" with a search engine? Is that like some sort of declaration of boycott?
What, you don't have a relationship with your search engine???
It might be a stretch, but the 'morality police' seems too easy of an answer. The 33rd rule of wanting to be involved in something without looking like one of the transgressors is...look like your trying to enforce something. Meaning: if you want to look at porn but don't want to be viewed as a pervert if caught in the act, you simply become someone who enforces it. That way you confiscate a whole lot of 'contraband' material, but are free to look at it all because that's your job.
I knew a guy at a youth correctional facility that spent his time looking at porn sites and such, in the name of trying to understand the people he was trying to help. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if he was shooting heroin for the same reasons.
If Google hasn't done anything wrong ... then they shouldn't have to comply.
Not entirely true. If the corporation has knowledge or posession of evidence of wrong doing, then they have a moral responsibility to divulge relevent details. On the flip side, however, the governement can't just go on a 'fishing expedition'. The government must present a compelling case based on *probable cause* that wrong doing has occured.
Personnaly, I don't think they're going to get it, and they're just going to make the administration look like a bunch of idiots (if they already havn't).
I like to take often used 'custom classes' in Java and puting them in a reusable package that I can use in many of my apps. My favorite package that I like to use is the Convert class. It basically does all the .valueOf(), parsing, and casting without having to begrudgingly type all that crap out.
My favorite with ASP.NET is a sanitize routine that scrubs input fields for SQL and script injection attacks. It is a perfect canadite for a class that needs to be implemented in all my .NET projects.
There's a reason for more than 1 drive--by puting disks into arrays, you not only maximize their capacity, but the speed at which they read/write data. Having a 1.2 PB drive isn't as useful as having four 600 TB disks configured to do RAID 0+1, for example.
Call of Duty put in there as well. A lot of the battles are mostly or at least partly on real life history, and it would be an educational experience about the hell of war and price paid to secure freedoms. I remember for one of my history classes we had to watch Glory, a movie about african americans in the Civil War. It was quite an experience, and think this sort of medium can be an instructive teaching tool.