Comment Re:OpenWRT (Score 2) 193
yes, if you want to do fringe things that no one else in the community is interested in, then a community-supported system is a bad choice. surprise!
Comment certification (Score 2) 73
People tend to focus on surface issues when considering how traditional Higher Education (HE) will relate to Online Education (OE). Things like the concept of lectures, or the character of universities if research and teaching are severed.
But much of the value (and much of an instructor's effort) actually goes toward establishing some measure of competency of the student: a grade. Other comments here have mentioned Honor Code, for instance, but that's not so much a problem as simply an attempt to ensure that a face-to-face course's grading is accurately assigning competence to individuals. for OE, it's even more natural to seek some form of collaborative learning (or outside assistance), especially if the OE course is self-paced. And really, why shouldn't a student simply continue to take the OE course until they are competent (or give up)? In which case, the import of an OE course is mainly in the competency testing - it's certification aspect.
So, is certification the way that traditional HE institutions become relevant to the future where everything is OE?
Students Hack School-Issued iPads Within One Week 375
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Los Angeles Unified School District started issuing iPads to its students this school year, as part of a $30 million deal with Apple. Now Sam Sanders reports at NPR that less than a week after getting their iPads, high school students have found a way to bypass software blocks on the devices that limit what websites the students can use. The students are getting around software that lets school district officials know where the iPads are, what the students are doing with them at all times and lets the district block certain sites, such as social media favorites like Facebook. 'They were bound to fail,' says Renee Hobbs, who's been a skeptic of the iPad program from the start. 'There is a huge history in American education of being attracted to the new, shiny, hugely promising bauble and then watching the idea fizzle because teachers weren't properly trained to use it and it just ended up in the closet.' The rollout of the iPads might have to be delayed as officials reassess access policies. Right now, the program is still in Phase 1, with fewer than 15,000 iPads distributed. 'I'm guessing this is just a sample of what will likely occur on other campuses once this hits Twitter, YouTube or other social media sites explaining to our students how to breach or compromise the security of these devices,' says Steven Zipperman. 'I want to prevent a "runaway train" scenario when we may have the ability to put a hold on the roll-out.' The incident has prompted questions about overall preparations for the $1-billion tablet initiative."
Comment Re:64 bit - Really, what's the point? (Score 1) 259
The point is the new register set. Registers being wider is a happy side-effect, as is greater virtual address space. But the main point of AMD64 is more registers. and it started a sequence of ISA extensions that have dramatically improved compute-bound throughput via SIMD.
Ask Slashdot: Are We Witnessing the Decline of Ubuntu? 631
jammag writes "'When the history of free software is written, I am increasingly convinced that this last year will be noted as the start of the decline of Ubuntu,' opines Linux pundit Bruce Byfield. After great initial success, Ubuntu and Canonical began to isolate themselves from the mainstream of the free software community. Canonical, he says, has tried to control the open source community, and the company has floundered in many of its initiatives. Really, the mighty Ubuntu, in decline?"
Apple Starts Blocking Unauthorized Lightning Cables With iOS 7 663
beltsbear writes "Your formerly working clone Lightning cable could stop working with the latest iOS update. Previously the beta version allowed these cables to charge with a warning message but the final release actually stops many cables from working. Apples Lightning connector system is locked with authentication chips that can verify if a cable is authorized by Apple. Many users with clone cables are now without the ability to charge their iPhones."
Comment should we be helping? (Score 1) 220
as a bit of a strawman, I'm suggesting that we IT people have a moral obligation to get involved in projects like this. sort of the way doctors are obliged to help any patient that presents, regardless of who they are or what they've done.
these sort of megaprojects seem to be self-justifying in some weird way: managers who don't know what they're doing adopt an incredibly conservative attitude toward risk management when any large project is proposed. once that phase-space is entered, it's an upward spiral to oblivion, since the project becomes more and more scary, and gains a kind of management momentum. the event horizon is when it exceeds the fear threshold of the strongest and/or highest-up manager.
a major part of the problem is that these projects happen in a domain where money is funny - a bit made up, subject to arbitrary stretching (or inflation). certainly governments, but certain kinds of businesses, and definitely public institutions. (the higher ed landscape is littered with smoking radioactive craters of failed ERP projects.)
typically these projects are considered internal - improving the business process, and so not really offered for public review. but maybe that shouldn't be the case, at least for branches of government.
Comment Re:Status of the gun control debate: (Score 1) 706
there are differences between possessing the means to commit a crime, publicly threatening a crime, and actually committing a crime.
Comment Re:Solidarity (Score 1) 706
"uttering threats" is broadly defined. so keep your homicidal thoughts entirely to yourself.
Comment Re:YADOUS (Score 1) 706
no, you are wrong. pretend or rehearsal assault is a serious mental problem. protective over-reaction is just a quantitative issue - not reacting at all, OTOH, would indicate a huge problem with the school.
Comment Re:Are you serious? (Score 1) 706
you can get FBI UCR data yourself and plot it. violent crime peaked in 91/92 and is about half that value now (per-capita - though this normalization doesn't make much difference.) the interesting thing about the UCR data is that most of those numbers are "aggravated assault" - not a happy-fun thing, but the homicide rate is only a tiny fraction of the total. the robbery rate has stayed about half the assult rate since 1990, though before that they tracked closer. rape is also included in the violent-crime total, though it's obviously under-reported.
homicide is probably the metric most relevant to this story. it has indeed fallen dramatically.
Comment Re:Really? (Score -1) 706
no. "nonviolent stress relief" is taking up weightlifting or meditation. virtually shooting people, *real* people, is what we call "rehersal".
The Windows Flaw That Cracks Amazon Web Services 114
Nerval's Lobster writes "Developer and editor Jeff Cogswell decided to poke around the security of Amazon Web Services, and found a potential loophole that could theoretically allow anyone — a developer, an unscrupulous Amazon employee, the NSA — to access and copy data volumes stored on the system, using a slightly modified version of the popular 'chntwp' password tool. In this article, he breaks down how he did it, and suggests some ways for those who use cloud-hosting services to keep their data a little more secure in the future. 'The key here, of course, is that an unscrupulous employee might be able to make a copy of any existing Windows volume, and go to work on it without the customer ever knowing that it happened,' he writes. 'Now let's be clear: I'm not accusing anyone of having done this; in fact, I doubt anybody has, considering I was unable to find a working copy of chntpw until I modified it.' It's a security concern, and one that's particularly insidious to patch."
How Gen Y Should Talk To Old People At Work 459
jfruh writes "A lot of ink has been spilled explaining to Boomers and Gen Xers how they can best manage, motivate, and retain talented members of the Millenial generation on the job. But it's a two-way street, and those born in the '80s and later could also use a lesson on how to best communicate with older co-workers, who after all will determine their promotion and pay raises for the foreseeable future. Advice includes: make actual phone calls, mirror the level of formality your co-workers use in e-mails, and for Pete's sake don't ask them things like 'R U going?' in a non-texting medium."
AMD Next-Gen Kaveri APU Shipments Slip To 2014 138
MojoKid writes "The story around AMD's upcoming Kaveri continues to evolve, but it's increasingly clear that AMD's 3rd generation APU won't be available for retail purchase this year. If you recall, AMD initially promised that Kaveri would be available during 2013 and even published roadmaps earlier in May that show the chip shipping in the beginning of the fourth quarter. What the company is saying now is that while Kaveri will ship to manufacturers in late 2013, it won't actually hit shelves until 2014. The reason Kaveri was late taping out, according to sources, was that AMD kept the chip back to put some additional polish on its performance. Unlike Piledriver, which we knew would be a minor tweak to the core Bulldozer architecture, Steamroller, Kaveri's core architecture, is the first serious overhaul to that hardware. That means it's AMD's first chance to really fix things. Piledriver delivered improved clock speeds and power consumption, but CPU efficiency barely budged compared to 'Dozer. Steamroller needs to deliver on that front."
