Something isn't right with this story and I don't think we know both sides of the story yet. This whole MySpace, Facebook, etc... crowd is probably hurting themselves more by using these services than doing good. I know that my company checks all of the "social networking" sites when someone applies for a job and more times than not, their online profiles cast them in a negative light. I dunno, some article say she was sending students to her myspace page. http://bbsnews.net/article.php/20070502234811315
Even so, people get fired/reprimanded for all sorts of reasons. Most of the time not really for the reason stated but for a arbitrary "how to we get rid of this person" reason. If she was directing her students to her myspace page (and seriously, that obviously not a good idea. I mean I personnally don't care but it's obviously something you could get in trouble for) then I can believe she was doing other things which warrant no awarding her the certificate.
There seems to be a couple missteps in their logic.
1. How does a picture of an adult drinking from a plastic cup while wearing a pirate costume constitute promoting underage drinking? I guess they felt that telling her students to visit her myspace page did. http://bbsnews.net/article.php/20070502234811315
If anything, they should have just reminded her to quietly take down the picture, so she would not go through the hell of having her students find out about her 20-something escapades. They did.
http://bbsnews.net/article.php/20070502234811315
But no, when small-town redneck buttfuck USA sees anything that goes against Bible 2.0, you're screwed. If you do anything but suck Jaysus' cock in these towns you're a t'rrist and don't deserve to be treated like one of them.
Shit, I've had some bad photos taken of me. There's probably still a midget with a bondage fetish out there jerking off to that set of pictures. And if you directed school kids too those pictures (which is what they say she was doing) would you expect to get fired?
The real barrier to switching is people and productivity. Everyone is used to MS Office, they know how to use it. If you try and switch your company to a different program there will be people who will use the unfamiliarity of the new software as an excuse to sit around and do sweet F.A. There will be some people who will get slightly less done while they learn but there will be more who use the change as a justification for pissing about more. I'd actually agree. What I was trying to point out was that there are business reasons you could use to say Open Office is better than MS Office in some respects. Right now for most businesses the retraining v lock-in equation works out in favor of MS Office most of the time, but that might not be the case in all scenarios.
You aren't saying that OpenOffice is better than MS Office, are you? It's cheaper, it runs on more platforms (which is why I use it on my Linux box for the very few cases where I need Office-type software), but other than that, it's most certainly NOT better.
I love to bash Microsoft as much as the next guy, probably more in fact, but when I'm looking for examples of great free software, OpenOffice usually isn't one of my first choices. It's slow, buggy and just as bloated as Office is -- if not more so. (AbiWord is better, but still not perfect...)
No, OpenOffice isn't a great piece of software. But some might say it's still better than MS Office, it promotes open standards and doesn't lock you in to a product like MS Office. Think of it like this, as a business do you want all your data encoded in a proprietary format which tries to force you in to purchasing software from one supplier, or would you rather store data using open standard which give you a degree of independence?
yay I got it without looking at the links, do I get geek-cred!:)
To be fair I really like the idea behind "A New Kind Of Science" but it is... kind of... a bit of a stretch... and a little bit nuts. I main believing the universe is CA that updates only a single point at a time without really having much backup for it is kind of crazy. Still gotta love CAs and I'm sure there's a lot of good new science there with fundamental implications.
In my opinion, scientists may be able to approach absolute zero but they will never effectively reach it. They may hit a point at which it can be proclaimed as "good enough", but since the entire system must contain no energy and energy will always leak into the system from the universe, absolute zero will not be reached in actuality.
Isn't the problem with reaching absolute zero that you violate Heisenberg's uncertainty principle? (IANAP)
Yes... It was called a Psion Series 5. No heat, AA batteries lasted weeks, word processor and spreadsheet built-in, had e-book software, best keyboard ever in a PDA, very keyboardy (it's predeessor, the Series 3, didn't even have a touch screen). CF slot for storage. Backup battery. Zero start-up time.
No USB, of course - a little too old for that - and ethernet is probably tricky (although it has a CF slot, so not impossible). Yes, it can run Linux.
but... people wanted tiny things that went in a shirt pocket and just held copies of thier outlook. These days my phone does all that, or course. Maybe I should dust mine down. I know it was an amazing bit of kit. I've been working on a project to upgrade it with a more modern processor, hopefully one day it'll see the light of day... http://www.psionresurrection.org/
The first thing anyone asks when your thinking about publishing a paper or evaluating the work of a researcher outside your area is "What the impact factor of the journal?". Impact factor is a measurement of the number of citations per article in a given journal and does give some idea of how "important" or "well read" a journal is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor
The problem is that once a journal has a high impact factor it's likely to sustain it, the best work will get sent there first as a high impact factor journal (like say Nature) looks good on your CV. I've been in situations where I've hated many of the journals policies (on copyright etc.) but still submitted to them because, well it's not just my name on the paper and everyone wants a higher impact factor journal.
This means there is little pressure on journals to have "nice" policies. Everyone wants to read the journal because it's where the best work goes (so you have to have a subscription) and everyone wants to publish it in (because it looks good). This results in a situation where they can charge way over costs for subscription and publication (and do things like DRM which annoy people) and people will still use them.
The solution? Well it could well be for us to stop thinking about impact factors and look at the merit of the paper itself. A standard metric based on the number of citations/that/ paper had would be great. That way it wouldn't matter much where you published. I'm not sure how likely this is to happen, it's all too easy just to look at impact factor and say (ahh, this guy must know what he's doing).
Did you know that when an academic writes a paper, to get it published, they have to surrender the copyright to the academic journal? After that, they can't even give copies away. If someone wants to see it, they're supposed to point them to the journal publisher where they can "buy" reprints.
That's not actually true, many Open Access don't require you to surrender copyright. In fact I've never heard of a journal pressing the issue of copyright if you have a preprint on your website.
Open Access journals are paid either at the state level (everyone in a country can publish for free) or the costs are paid by the author (supposedly though the grant they have been given for the research). Publishing isn't cheap, but is worth it if it makes your project look good (of the order of $700)
Are you sure?!? I was watching this documentary called Max Headroom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom and they were saying that in America it's illegal to turn off your TV!!
Until there is a good office suite with exchange compatibility there will be real trouble getting people off windows.
Until the linux community comes to an agreement and throws their support to a desktop linux distro and quits with the religious wars there will be trouble getting people off windows (linspire/ubunto maybe?).
Until the random hardware from the random computer store plugs and plays on the above intra-distro supported desktop there will be trouble getting people off windows. Yes, and it's your job to make that happen. Donate time to free software projects, donate money to free software projects. Otherwise (and I'm not saying you don't) you have no grounds for complaining.
There's a lot more out there, take a look at the repeat analysis at: http://www.4g.soton.ac.uk/~new/genomeReport/
Also a tool called Reputer is commonly used for genomic repeat visualisation..
I ended up looking at a ebay auction for an Acer laptop and thinking "hey that looks like a cool laptop", Acer gets cheap advertising.
I end up looking at screenshots of Vista something I'd not normally bother to do. It didn't do anything for me, but most probably has raised my unconscious desire to check it out at some point.
Someone, will get Vista early and probably write a blog post on it, creating some buzz.
I'm forced to read the words Vista and laptop about a million times in a 24hour period.
I ended up writing a friggin post on/. about Windows Vista
And nobody ended up hating Microsoft any more than they already do (or don't).
First of all, don't dual boot. You end up staying in whichever operating system your most comfortable with all the time (which to begin with will be Windows). At some point your linux install will break, you'll be too tired to fix it and after a few weeks you'll end up dumping it. Seriously I've tried dual booting many times, it never worked out.
So, my suggestion would be buy a system specifically for Linux (if it's an upgrade, keep the old windows drive in a draw and buy a new disk for Linux). Make sure the hardware is well supported under Linux. As far as which distro goes, seriously any of SuSE, Fedora, Debian or Ubuntu (and probably others) will have the packages you need. I'd check what other people in your department are using and go with that, it helps to have people who can help you out and you in turn can help out, in Academia it's a good idea. My personnal choice would be Ubuntu or Debian. I've worked in groups that have been SuSE based before, it was fine but I wouldn't use it by choice.
Slightly offtopic, but a while ago (couple of years?) almost all the staff at Edge quit, because they got annoyed with the management. Does anybody know what the story was? What did management do exactly?
DeusEx (PC)
First person shooter where you actually have to think, well researched an politically revelant and deep plot. It's also trying to make a point, it's not just gaming for the sake of gaming. The only computer game I've played that approaches good literature.
Rez (Dreamcast/PS2)
On the rails shooter, perhaps one of the most beautiful games ever and also conveys something beyond it's simple mechanic.
Shenmue 1 and 2 (Dreamcast)
Perhaps not as deep as DeusEx or Shenmue but a nice story and well executed. And hay, most expensive video game ever made. At least it was at the time.
Ico (PS2)
Beautiful, really beautiful.
Really it totally depends who you are and what you like, if I could only play one of these games again before I died it would probably be DeusEx.
Changing all the DNS servers in the world to switch from ASCII to Unicode is NOT trivial. The fact that some societies have used non-latin characters for thousands of years is completely and utterly irrelevant. THEY didn't make the internet. They simply bolted themselves on to an existing infrastructure.
Yea, bloody towel heads coming on to our INTERNET. Stealing our jobs and our women! Let them make their own Interweb in sandnigger language. MAKES ME MAD!
Seriously, you need to sort yourself out and adopt a slightly less racist attitude. It's not "your Internet", it's a standardised global network. These countries are asking for an technical problem which I imagine has significant economic impact for them to be addressed through a standards body. The standards body is coming back and saying "well that's going to be really hard". Doesn't mean they shouldn't push for this to be a priority, after all it's better than them adopting a proprietary solution.
Slashdot Mirror
They did. http://bbsnews.net/article.php/20070502234811315 But no, when small-town redneck buttfuck USA sees anything that goes against Bible 2.0, you're screwed. If you do anything but suck Jaysus' cock in these towns you're a t'rrist and don't deserve to be treated like one of them.
Shit, I've had some bad photos taken of me. There's probably still a midget with a bondage fetish out there jerking off to that set of pictures. And if you directed school kids too those pictures (which is what they say she was doing) would you expect to get fired?
I'd actually agree. What I was trying to point out was that there are business reasons you could use to say Open Office is better than MS Office in some respects. Right now for most businesses the retraining v lock-in equation works out in favor of MS Office most of the time, but that might not be the case in all scenarios.
...)
No, OpenOffice isn't a great piece of software. But some might say it's still better than MS Office, it promotes open standards and doesn't lock you in to a product like MS Office. Think of it like this, as a business do you want all your data encoded in a proprietary format which tries to force you in to purchasing software from one supplier, or would you rather store data using open standard which give you a degree of independence?I love to bash Microsoft as much as the next guy, probably more in fact, but when I'm looking for examples of great free software, OpenOffice usually isn't one of my first choices. It's slow, buggy and just as bloated as Office is -- if not more so. (AbiWord is better, but still not perfect
http://oldcomputers.net/ibm5140.html
yay I got it without looking at the links, do I get geek-cred! :)
To be fair I really like the idea behind "A New Kind Of Science" but it is... kind of... a bit of a stretch... and a little bit nuts. I main believing the universe is CA that updates only a single point at a time without really having much backup for it is kind of crazy. Still gotta love CAs and I'm sure there's a lot of good new science there with fundamental implications.
Or alternatively I dunno. Publish it on thousands of DNS servers across the planet :) : http://www.09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.com/
Wasn't Vonnegut an Atheist? Or were his beliefs more ambiguous than that?
No USB, of course - a little too old for that - and ethernet is probably tricky (although it has a CF slot, so not impossible). Yes, it can run Linux.
but... people wanted tiny things that went in a shirt pocket and just held copies of thier outlook. These days my phone does all that, or course. Maybe I should dust mine down. I know it was an amazing bit of kit. I've been working on a project to upgrade it with a more modern processor, hopefully one day it'll see the light of day... http://www.psionresurrection.org/
The first thing anyone asks when your thinking about publishing a paper or evaluating the work of a researcher outside your area is "What the impact factor of the journal?". Impact factor is a measurement of the number of citations per article in a given journal and does give some idea of how "important" or "well read" a journal is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor
/that/ paper had would be great. That way it wouldn't matter much where you published. I'm not sure how likely this is to happen, it's all too easy just to look at impact factor and say (ahh, this guy must know what he's doing).
The problem is that once a journal has a high impact factor it's likely to sustain it, the best work will get sent there first as a high impact factor journal (like say Nature) looks good on your CV. I've been in situations where I've hated many of the journals policies (on copyright etc.) but still submitted to them because, well it's not just my name on the paper and everyone wants a higher impact factor journal.
This means there is little pressure on journals to have "nice" policies. Everyone wants to read the journal because it's where the best work goes (so you have to have a subscription) and everyone wants to publish it in (because it looks good). This results in a situation where they can charge way over costs for subscription and publication (and do things like DRM which annoy people) and people will still use them.
The solution? Well it could well be for us to stop thinking about impact factors and look at the merit of the paper itself. A standard metric based on the number of citations
That's not actually true, many Open Access don't require you to surrender copyright. In fact I've never heard of a journal pressing the issue of copyright if you have a preprint on your website.
Open Access journals are paid either at the state level (everyone in a country can publish for free) or the costs are paid by the author (supposedly though the grant they have been given for the research). Publishing isn't cheap, but is worth it if it makes your project look good (of the order of $700)
Are you sure?!? I was watching this documentary called Max Headroom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom and they were saying that in America it's illegal to turn off your TV!!
If you want to hurt Sony buy a PS3, just don't buy and games and run Linux on it. Hugely expensive as it is, it still costs more to make than they are selling it for. http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/11/16/isuppli_pr ices_up_ps3/
There's a lot more out there, take a look at the repeat analysis at: http://www.4g.soton.ac.uk/~new/genomeReport/ Also a tool called Reputer is commonly used for genomic repeat visualisation..
I end up looking at screenshots of Vista something I'd not normally bother to do. It didn't do anything for me, but most probably has raised my unconscious desire to check it out at some point.
Someone, will get Vista early and probably write a blog post on it, creating some buzz.
I'm forced to read the words Vista and laptop about a million times in a 24hour period.
I ended up writing a friggin post on /. about Windows Vista
And nobody ended up hating Microsoft any more than they already do (or don't).
Not saying there's anything wrong with Ubuntu, but it's not magic. Like you say "your mileage may vary".
First of all, don't dual boot. You end up staying in whichever operating system your most comfortable with all the time (which to begin with will be Windows). At some point your linux install will break, you'll be too tired to fix it and after a few weeks you'll end up dumping it. Seriously I've tried dual booting many times, it never worked out.
So, my suggestion would be buy a system specifically for Linux (if it's an upgrade, keep the old windows drive in a draw and buy a new disk for Linux). Make sure the hardware is well supported under Linux. As far as which distro goes, seriously any of SuSE, Fedora, Debian or Ubuntu (and probably others) will have the packages you need. I'd check what other people in your department are using and go with that, it helps to have people who can help you out and you in turn can help out, in Academia it's a good idea. My personnal choice would be Ubuntu or Debian. I've worked in groups that have been SuSE based before, it was fine but I wouldn't use it by choice.
Slightly offtopic, but a while ago (couple of years?) almost all the staff at Edge quit, because they got annoyed with the management. Does anybody know what the story was? What did management do exactly?
DeusEx (PC)
First person shooter where you actually have to think, well researched an politically revelant and deep plot. It's also trying to make a point, it's not just gaming for the sake of gaming. The only computer game I've played that approaches good literature.
Rez (Dreamcast/PS2)
On the rails shooter, perhaps one of the most beautiful games ever and also conveys something beyond it's simple mechanic.
Shenmue 1 and 2 (Dreamcast)
Perhaps not as deep as DeusEx or Shenmue but a nice story and well executed. And hay, most expensive video game ever made. At least it was at the time.
Ico (PS2)
Beautiful, really beautiful.
Really it totally depends who you are and what you like, if I could only play one of these games again before I died it would probably be DeusEx.
Seriously, you need to sort yourself out and adopt a slightly less racist attitude. It's not "your Internet", it's a standardised global network. These countries are asking for an technical problem which I imagine has significant economic impact for them to be addressed through a standards body. The standards body is coming back and saying "well that's going to be really hard". Doesn't mean they shouldn't push for this to be a priority, after all it's better than them adopting a proprietary solution.
To build a standardised layer on top of DNS that translates the native alphabet in to whatever subset of ASCII DNS allows?
That way none of the rest of the protocol stack would be disrupted and everybody would be able to enter all URLs on a standard (English) keyboard?