Actually I've been using Vista for about a month now, and I have had none of the problems described by, well, lots of people I see complaining. It's not faster than XP, but I haven't found any noticeable slowness. Everything works smooth as silk. All of this elevation stuff? I have Ultimare with UAC turned off, and maybe that's the difference, but I've had not one iota of problem.
Now, I'm a database guy and my friends are all either DBAs or programmers - all of which at the very least have nothing bad to say about Vista and a few even good things. There was apparently some trouble with getting SQL Server and Visual Studio 2005 installed, which I haven't done yet, but my buddy said he did get it working on his laptop with some patches, which might be expected. Of course, we all have pretty beefy machines - while someone's notebook or P4 2 Ghz might be choking on Vista, my 3.2 Ghz Duo Core with 4GB of DDR2 is doing just fine. I also don't use scanners, web cams, TV tuner cards, have an MP3 player I hook up to the machine, or any other funky hardware that Vista might choke on. So far CS3 works; Dreamweaver works; Daemon Tools works; Textpad works; Neverwinter Nights 2 works; FEAR works. It might not be the best solution to throw more hardware at it until it runs smooth, but if you can afford the hardware who the fuck cares?
Actually, I believe the funding for SETI is minute as is the total amount of time they have actually been listening (given they have to beg, borrow and steal facility time) and the amount of sky covered. The idea that "we should have found something by now" really only holds true if they were scanning the entire sky 24-7 with adequate funding - but none of that is happening with SETI.
Games like Final Fantasy *and* Oblivion bore the living shit out of me. I even tried The Fall: Last Days of Gaia and stopped about a half hour into it. When I play a PC game, I'm not interested in infinite character choices and trying to recreate my tabletop gaming experience - with games like Tribe 8, Blue Planet, and Spirit of the Century that just isn't going to happen. I want the PC game to be immersive in the way that they do best - audio visually. Great gameplay, good graphics, good story, strong central character that I don't necessarily care if I created. Because of that I skew more towards FPS' with some trappings of RPGS. My favorites to date have been the Half Life games, System Shock, the Thief Series, Aliens vs. Predator, Far Cry, F.E.A.R., even Tron 2.0 and No One Lives Forever. Now, maybe I'm unique and CRPGs deliver something to tabletop gamers that is of value - but as a tabletop gamer, I see CRPGs as something appealing more to those who don't already enjoy tabletop rpgs. I'd rather see another good installment in the Thief series (Thief: Deadly Shadows was mildly disappointing) or Deus Ex than another CRPG.
I think it's odd that copyright has to be made compatible with the First Amendment. It indicates to me that copyright is somehow askew of what the First Amendment provides. Just an observation.
I usually hear them called packet storms, but they happen and "storm" is usually somewhere in the description. In fact, we were just troubleshooting exactly that at my work last week and the network admin used the exact phrase "packet storm".
"Hong Kong's Commerce Secretary earlier said the posting of copyrighted materials in Hong Kong using BitTorrent had dropped 80 percent within a year of Chan's arrest in 2005."
At least, obvious posting of copyrights materials dropped 80%. I'm not really seeing any lack of available content on The Pirate Bay...
1) The original animation was driven by toy designs. In other words, toys couldn't transform without being all blocky and crap. They were, really, pretty stupid - even as a kid I preferred Dunbine, Dougram and Mospeada toys to Transformers.
2) These are alien robots - why wouldn't the transformations appear alien?
3) These robots do transform, hence the moniker "Transformers" is actually fitting.
4) Optimus Prime's trailer in the original series *appeared and disappeared out of fucking thin air*. How stupid is that?
That I can definitely understand - but it opens the door for misinterpretation and misunderstanding of their theories if they oversimplify things to much to make their point.
If you've worked anywhere near education, you'd know you need to be a lawyer to be a software engineer when working with them. The man is right in many, many ways.
Being one of the mid-sized to larger districts, I'm assuming that existing SIS solutions didn't quite meet your needs and you've had to make disparate systems work together? I've seen this...it's a testament to technical ingenuity when it works. One web front end that district users can log into, but on the back end the HR system has to query the class scheduler through the lunch menu system to get the bus routes. Oh, and one database is Oracle and the other one is running on VAX. Yes, I'm exaggerating but it was a real eye opener to see how schools often have to make do.
The Student Information System market in the U.S. is dominated by several large systems, such as SASI. Most of them are backed by large companies like NCS Pearson (SASI) or Harcourt Brace. They have - at most - 70% of the market. The rest of the market is made up of a bunch of smaller information systems.
The biggest hurdles that SIS face are lack of interoperability. SIF just doesn't have a lot going on for it integration-wise; it's a standard and nothing more. Most big districts pretty much develop their own specifications for their data - sometimes (which I've seen) paying to have an SIS like SASI customized. Getting them all to use one standard like SIF for data exchange is like asking them to cut their toes off (and gets much the same reaction).
I can see several issues when it comes to open source solutions for K-12:
1) Licensing issues. You have to make sure that any portions that *must* remain secure due to legislation *stay* secure and are not exposed.
2) More fractious than a herd of cats. They all want to do things their own way - even in states where there is some kind of oversight.They're *not* that collaborative. Many of them actively resist even the most basic steps that would allow for data to be used to benefit those they are supposed to be working for - the students. Case in point: a teacher's union that disallows the district from having any visibility of data that could allow a teacher's performance to be measured. In short, the district could not have any data that would tie the student to the teacher in their SIS. The school knew which teachers were teaching which students, but the district couldn't.True story!
I've been in the trenches for three years now working at a technology company dedicated to school improvement; I've worked with people working for other companies. Everywhere I go, I hear the same things. Some districts are fantastically proficient. Most are horribly, horribly deficient (such as a technology director not knowing what an FTP site is - another true story). School districts need everything spoon fed to them as much as possible, and hand holding the entire time they are your clients. I just can't see open source helping out a whole lot until those underlying issues are fixed.
I have a challenge then...find me some math. In any of the electric universe writings that you are aware of, give me an equation. A formula. A mathematical proof. Anything. Then we'll talk.
"To be effective a TIM combines properties to minimize the total interface resistance. High conductivity (200-420 W/mC) materials, like copper, silver, aluminum and gold, maximize thermal conductivity, but do not flow into intimate contact because of the relative lack of compliance so the interface resistances are very high and the overall performance is poor."
She just got the job a few months ago, hired in as a service writer. She consistently gets compliments and actually gets "spiffs" (little bonuses for selling things) over the sales floor people. She doesn't push people into things, is honest with them, and is actually pretty knowledgeable. The tech staff are all computer geeks and seem to be pretty sharp - I did my stint in both phone based tech support and repair for a computer builder and they're all at least as good as the guys I worked with.
So, this news partly sucks. CompUSA is trying to give them something though...they're all getting ramped up to 40 hours a week even if they were hired part time and apparently there are going to be severance packages. Sucks thought because she was working just across the street from my office and she just got the job.
So it's just an example of people complaining about something that might not be true anymore (when the complaining happens). Nice. Thanks for a balanced answer.
I realize that this is mostly a Linux discussion...but are spontaneous reboots or BSODs that common on a solid Windows platform? I have four Windows boxes - all different hardware - at home plus a Dell at work and I never have BSODs or spontaneous reboots. Occasionally I need to reboot one of them for some reason, but usually they get shut off for any number of reasons (like leaving for long periods of time or we lose power) before that happens. Given my experience doing tech support, could it really be user stupidity and/or poor software or hardware choices that causes all of these alleged BSOD's on WIndows boxes?
The problem with this line of thinking is twofold:
1) Adult Swim *already* paid for marketing and advertising. That's what the lightbrites were all about.
2) The show probably doesn't warrant a $2 million dollar advertising budget. If it did, they wouldn't have gone with some whacked out guerilla marketing campaign.
Adult Swim shares channel space with Cartoon Network, and while they are owned by Turner its likely run as an independent entity. If they had the budget, and the audience, to fill their own seperate channel they would have. This means that they hadn't set aside $2 million dollars "in case our plan goes awry". It's extra money out of pocket. This little publicity stunt isn't really going to gain Adult Swim many more viewers, at least in the long run (there might be a surge in the next few weeks, but it will die when they realize how insipid the show really is). It probably isn't going to allow them to increase the cost of ad space - at least for a long period of time, and probably not enough to make up for the $2 million deficit. Turner is out the marketing money *and* and extra $2 million dollars - money that could have been spent for much more effective advertising, if they thought the show deserved it.
Does that mean that Boston municipal authorities overreacted? Sure they did - they're a bunch of putzes too. But don't con yourself into thinking that the sum that Turner is going to pay somehow magically gets turned into profit because they got some free publicity. There's no correlation between the two - it's like saying NASA will get more wannabe astronauts because some astronaut drove from Houston to Orlando in a diaper and tried to abduct another woman.
I'm still waiting for the Dell commercial where the Dell and the Mac walk into Electronic Boutique and the PC walks out with Quake X or whatever and the Mac walks out with Choplifter
A lot of non-IT people have a distorted view that all IT staff fix computers. I know how, but I don't. It's not my job. I *can* get you the data you need to make a sales decision. I can tell you why the query development wrote is broken, and how to fix it so that not only will it make the website work but *faster*. So please don't confuse a DBA with a desktop administrator;)
P.S. All of the desktop administrators I have known have been extremely helpful, skilled in multiple areas and far from lazy. Maybe I'm just lucky.
That's funny, because Gary Gygax used the analogy of a chair during his interview about roleplaying games on 60 minutes - he said you could sit on it or hit someone over the head with it, but that didn't mean that chairs should be banned.
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Actually I've been using Vista for about a month now, and I have had none of the problems described by, well, lots of people I see complaining. It's not faster than XP, but I haven't found any noticeable slowness. Everything works smooth as silk. All of this elevation stuff? I have Ultimare with UAC turned off, and maybe that's the difference, but I've had not one iota of problem.
Now, I'm a database guy and my friends are all either DBAs or programmers - all of which at the very least have nothing bad to say about Vista and a few even good things. There was apparently some trouble with getting SQL Server and Visual Studio 2005 installed, which I haven't done yet, but my buddy said he did get it working on his laptop with some patches, which might be expected. Of course, we all have pretty beefy machines - while someone's notebook or P4 2 Ghz might be choking on Vista, my 3.2 Ghz Duo Core with 4GB of DDR2 is doing just fine. I also don't use scanners, web cams, TV tuner cards, have an MP3 player I hook up to the machine, or any other funky hardware that Vista might choke on. So far CS3 works; Dreamweaver works; Daemon Tools works; Textpad works; Neverwinter Nights 2 works; FEAR works. It might not be the best solution to throw more hardware at it until it runs smooth, but if you can afford the hardware who the fuck cares?
Actually, I believe the funding for SETI is minute as is the total amount of time they have actually been listening (given they have to beg, borrow and steal facility time) and the amount of sky covered. The idea that "we should have found something by now" really only holds true if they were scanning the entire sky 24-7 with adequate funding - but none of that is happening with SETI.
Games like Final Fantasy *and* Oblivion bore the living shit out of me. I even tried The Fall: Last Days of Gaia and stopped about a half hour into it. When I play a PC game, I'm not interested in infinite character choices and trying to recreate my tabletop gaming experience - with games like Tribe 8, Blue Planet, and Spirit of the Century that just isn't going to happen. I want the PC game to be immersive in the way that they do best - audio visually. Great gameplay, good graphics, good story, strong central character that I don't necessarily care if I created. Because of that I skew more towards FPS' with some trappings of RPGS. My favorites to date have been the Half Life games, System Shock, the Thief Series, Aliens vs. Predator, Far Cry, F.E.A.R., even Tron 2.0 and No One Lives Forever. Now, maybe I'm unique and CRPGs deliver something to tabletop gamers that is of value - but as a tabletop gamer, I see CRPGs as something appealing more to those who don't already enjoy tabletop rpgs. I'd rather see another good installment in the Thief series (Thief: Deadly Shadows was mildly disappointing) or Deus Ex than another CRPG.
I think it's odd that copyright has to be made compatible with the First Amendment. It indicates to me that copyright is somehow askew of what the First Amendment provides. Just an observation.
I usually hear them called packet storms, but they happen and "storm" is usually somewhere in the description. In fact, we were just troubleshooting exactly that at my work last week and the network admin used the exact phrase "packet storm".
"Hong Kong's Commerce Secretary earlier said the posting of copyrighted materials in Hong Kong using BitTorrent had dropped 80 percent within a year of Chan's arrest in 2005."
At least, obvious posting of copyrights materials dropped 80%. I'm not really seeing any lack of available content on The Pirate Bay...
1) The original animation was driven by toy designs. In other words, toys couldn't transform without being all blocky and crap. They were, really, pretty stupid - even as a kid I preferred Dunbine, Dougram and Mospeada toys to Transformers.
2) These are alien robots - why wouldn't the transformations appear alien?
3) These robots do transform, hence the moniker "Transformers" is actually fitting.
4) Optimus Prime's trailer in the original series *appeared and disappeared out of fucking thin air*. How stupid is that?
That I can definitely understand - but it opens the door for misinterpretation and misunderstanding of their theories if they oversimplify things to much to make their point.
This to me demonstrates, given the legal considerations when code must safeguard student data, of avoiding open source solutions.
If you've worked anywhere near education, you'd know you need to be a lawyer to be a software engineer when working with them. The man is right in many, many ways.
Being one of the mid-sized to larger districts, I'm assuming that existing SIS solutions didn't quite meet your needs and you've had to make disparate systems work together? I've seen this...it's a testament to technical ingenuity when it works. One web front end that district users can log into, but on the back end the HR system has to query the class scheduler through the lunch menu system to get the bus routes. Oh, and one database is Oracle and the other one is running on VAX. Yes, I'm exaggerating but it was a real eye opener to see how schools often have to make do.
The Student Information System market in the U.S. is dominated by several large systems, such as SASI. Most of them are backed by large companies like NCS Pearson (SASI) or Harcourt Brace. They have - at most - 70% of the market. The rest of the market is made up of a bunch of smaller information systems. The biggest hurdles that SIS face are lack of interoperability. SIF just doesn't have a lot going on for it integration-wise; it's a standard and nothing more. Most big districts pretty much develop their own specifications for their data - sometimes (which I've seen) paying to have an SIS like SASI customized. Getting them all to use one standard like SIF for data exchange is like asking them to cut their toes off (and gets much the same reaction).
I can see several issues when it comes to open source solutions for K-12:
1) Licensing issues. You have to make sure that any portions that *must* remain secure due to legislation *stay* secure and are not exposed.
2) More fractious than a herd of cats. They all want to do things their own way - even in states where there is some kind of oversight.They're *not* that collaborative. Many of them actively resist even the most basic steps that would allow for data to be used to benefit those they are supposed to be working for - the students. Case in point: a teacher's union that disallows the district from having any visibility of data that could allow a teacher's performance to be measured. In short, the district could not have any data that would tie the student to the teacher in their SIS. The school knew which teachers were teaching which students, but the district couldn't.True story!
I've been in the trenches for three years now working at a technology company dedicated to school improvement; I've worked with people working for other companies. Everywhere I go, I hear the same things. Some districts are fantastically proficient. Most are horribly, horribly deficient (such as a technology director not knowing what an FTP site is - another true story). School districts need everything spoon fed to them as much as possible, and hand holding the entire time they are your clients. I just can't see open source helping out a whole lot until those underlying issues are fixed.
I have a challenge then...find me some math. In any of the electric universe writings that you are aware of, give me an equation. A formula. A mathematical proof. Anything. Then we'll talk.
Sounds like it would not work well:
3 10
"To be effective a TIM combines properties to minimize the total interface resistance. High conductivity (200-420 W/mC) materials, like copper, silver, aluminum and gold, maximize thermal conductivity, but do not flow into intimate contact because of the relative lack of compliance so the interface resistances are very high and the overall performance is poor."
http://www.indium.com/_dynamo/download.php?docid=
She just got the job a few months ago, hired in as a service writer. She consistently gets compliments and actually gets "spiffs" (little bonuses for selling things) over the sales floor people. She doesn't push people into things, is honest with them, and is actually pretty knowledgeable. The tech staff are all computer geeks and seem to be pretty sharp - I did my stint in both phone based tech support and repair for a computer builder and they're all at least as good as the guys I worked with.
So, this news partly sucks. CompUSA is trying to give them something though...they're all getting ramped up to 40 hours a week even if they were hired part time and apparently there are going to be severance packages. Sucks thought because she was working just across the street from my office and she just got the job.
So it's just an example of people complaining about something that might not be true anymore (when the complaining happens). Nice. Thanks for a balanced answer.
I realize that this is mostly a Linux discussion...but are spontaneous reboots or BSODs that common on a solid Windows platform? I have four Windows boxes - all different hardware - at home plus a Dell at work and I never have BSODs or spontaneous reboots. Occasionally I need to reboot one of them for some reason, but usually they get shut off for any number of reasons (like leaving for long periods of time or we lose power) before that happens. Given my experience doing tech support, could it really be user stupidity and/or poor software or hardware choices that causes all of these alleged BSOD's on WIndows boxes?
The problem with this line of thinking is twofold:
1) Adult Swim *already* paid for marketing and advertising. That's what the lightbrites were all about.
2) The show probably doesn't warrant a $2 million dollar advertising budget. If it did, they wouldn't have gone with some whacked out guerilla marketing campaign.
Adult Swim shares channel space with Cartoon Network, and while they are owned by Turner its likely run as an independent entity. If they had the budget, and the audience, to fill their own seperate channel they would have. This means that they hadn't set aside $2 million dollars "in case our plan goes awry". It's extra money out of pocket. This little publicity stunt isn't really going to gain Adult Swim many more viewers, at least in the long run (there might be a surge in the next few weeks, but it will die when they realize how insipid the show really is). It probably isn't going to allow them to increase the cost of ad space - at least for a long period of time, and probably not enough to make up for the $2 million deficit. Turner is out the marketing money *and* and extra $2 million dollars - money that could have been spent for much more effective advertising, if they thought the show deserved it.
Does that mean that Boston municipal authorities overreacted? Sure they did - they're a bunch of putzes too. But don't con yourself into thinking that the sum that Turner is going to pay somehow magically gets turned into profit because they got some free publicity. There's no correlation between the two - it's like saying NASA will get more wannabe astronauts because some astronaut drove from Houston to Orlando in a diaper and tried to abduct another woman.
After reading a bit on previous Scientologist antics I'm convinced they're apeshit fucking insane.
I'm still waiting for the Dell commercial where the Dell and the Mac walk into Electronic Boutique and the PC walks out with Quake X or whatever and the Mac walks out with Choplifter
A lot of non-IT people have a distorted view that all IT staff fix computers. I know how, but I don't. It's not my job. I *can* get you the data you need to make a sales decision. I can tell you why the query development wrote is broken, and how to fix it so that not only will it make the website work but *faster*. So please don't confuse a DBA with a desktop administrator ;)
P.S. All of the desktop administrators I have known have been extremely helpful, skilled in multiple areas and far from lazy. Maybe I'm just lucky.
Or does this guy really suck in court? I mean, I can understand reading through one of the cases why he lost.
Unless you're on Southwest Airlines or an airline that doesn't have assigned seating.
That's funny, because Gary Gygax used the analogy of a chair during his interview about roleplaying games on 60 minutes - he said you could sit on it or hit someone over the head with it, but that didn't mean that chairs should be banned.