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Education

Scientists' Success Or Failure Correlated With Beer 349

Posted by kdawson from the malt-does-more-than-milton-can dept.
mernil sends in an article from the NYTimes that casts a glance at a study done in the Czech Republic (natch) on what divides the successful scientists from the duffers. "Ever since there have been scientists, there have been those who are wildly successful, publishing one well-received paper after another, and those who are not. And since nearly the same time, there have been scholars arguing over what makes the difference. What is it that turns one scientist into more of a Darwin and another into more of a dud? After years of argument over the roles of factors like genius, sex, and dumb luck, a new study shows that something entirely unexpected and considerably sudsier may be at play in determining the success or failure of scientists — beer."
Programming

Submission + - Concealing documents and patents waives rights? (eweek.com)

Submitted by
gimme00
gimme00 writes: "If concealing documents and patents makes Qualcomm waive rights — how does this play into companies trying to pull the indemnity trick against linux or other companies and technologies? The following article triggers this type of question. Court Says . Slashdotters dound off..."
Operating Systems

Submission + - How do we teach users about filesystem locations?

Submitted by thc69
thc69 writes: The most common education problem I find in users is that they don't know where their files are. They don't understand the file system. They save a file and then wonder how to find it. If I ask them where a file is, they either say "It's in Word" or "I don't know."

"Introduction To Computers" courses apparently don't teach the concept, because users who aced such courses still have no clue. Even people who know lots of advanced stuff sometimes don't understand that their files are in a folder on their C: drive or whatever — I have a friend who knows SQL, C++, and Linux, but doesn't know the locations of her files.

Could it be a gender thing? It seems that the people who I've observed having this problem are all female. I remember reading about studies that show men and women navigate roads very differently; perhaps file system navigation is incompatible with the intuitive navigation method that women use?

It's a very important concept. Once you understand how files and folders (which I still like to call "directories", but I digress) work, everything on the computer becomes much easier. You become less dependent on your applications to keep track of everything for you. Backing up and restoring files becomes much easier.

How can I teach people this concept in a way that will stick? It's so intuitive to me that I don't know how to make it into lessons, it's just second-nature.
Businesses

Submission + - Are contracts valid if ... 1

Submitted by
MarkWatson
MarkWatson writes: "I am frequently asked to sign 2 copies of a consulting contract and send them to the other party. More often than you would think, the other party files away both copies, sends me an email saying everything is OK, but never signs and returns a copy to me.

My policy is to bring this to their attention, and if a signed copy is not forthcoming, complain.

One customer has never returned a contract, but have been promptly paying me for 6 months. In another case, a property management agent in another state never bothered to sign and return a copy of another contract with me, but proceeds as if we are under contract.

Are contracts legal if one party does not sign and return a copy to the other party?"
Wireless Networking

Submission + - what can you do with a cool antenna to make money? 1

Submitted by cryptozoologist
cryptozoologist writes: A friend of mine just purchased an old firehouse that has an 80 ft (24 m) mast and a 20 ft (6 m) antenna. the details on the antenna are not known but it was used by the fire and rescue folks there. My friend has been advised to tear it down, but before that happens i want to ask the slashdot community, what can be done with an antenna like this to make some money, or is just plain cool? it is not in a very densely populated area so a wifi hotspot is not gonna get many users. Thanks in advance for your ideas!
Businesses

A CIO's View of Ubuntu 308

Posted by kdawson from the sweet-spot dept.
onehitwonder writes "Well-known CIO John Halamka has rigorously tested six different operating systems over the course of a year in an effort to find a viable alternative to Microsoft Windows on his laptop and his company's computers. Here is CIO.com's initial writeup on Halamka's experiences; we discussed their followup article on SUSE. Now CIO is running a writeup on Halamka's take on Ubuntu and how it stacks up against Novell SUSE 10, RHEL, Fedora, XP, and Mac OS X, in a life-and-death business environment." For the impatient, here's Halamka's conclusion: "A balanced approach of Windows for the niche business application user, Macs for the graphic artists/researchers, SUSE for enterprise kiosks/thin clients, and Ubuntu for power users seems like the sweet spot for 2008."
News

Schneier Talks to the Head of TSA 342

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the go-to-the-source dept.
Bruce Schneier recently had the chance to sit down with Kip Hawley, head of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and discuss some of the frustrations travelers experience head-on. "In April, Kip Hawley, the head of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), invited me to Washington for a meeting. Despite some serious trepidation, I accepted. And it was a good meeting. Most of it was off the record, but he asked me how the TSA could overcome its negative image. I told him to be more transparent, and stop ducking the hard questions. He said that he wanted to do that. He did enjoy writing a guest blog post for Aviation Daily, but having a blog himself didn't work within the bureaucracy."

BusinessWeek Advocates Microsoft Piracy 181

Posted by Zonk from the not-like-they-have-anything-to-lose dept.
xzvf writes "In a lengthy editorial, BusinessWeek advocates allowing users in China and India to pirate Microsoft software so that it can obtain the same level of market share there as it has in the US and Europe. From the piece: 'If Microsoft succeeds in discouraging piracy of Windows in China and India, it is far more likely to drive the user of the pirated software into the Linux camp than it is to steer them into the land of paid-up Windows users. Microsoft's IP management strategy in China and India should instead focus on securing the victory of Windows on the desktops of all PC users. That may require deliberately lax enforcement efforts against pirated copies of Windows for the short and medium term. Only after the Linux threat lessens might Microsoft have the luxury of tightening up piracy protections, as it is now doing in the West. Microsoft can afford to be patient.'"
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - 25 Complaints For Sprint

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Last week, we read about Sprint's new policy to cancel accounts of burdensome customers; about 25 CS calls a month is the threshold. With the iPhone out, I couldn't wish for a better opportunity to weasel out of my early termination fee! I'd like to challenge like-minded Sprint-ing Slashdotters to join in, but we need the community's help: we need to put together a list of 25 or more unique complaints to throw at customer service. Any ideas?
Education

Submission + - Getting involved with writing open source licenses

Submitted by bulio
bulio writes: I'm planning on studying civil law, and would like to gain some experience in the field by helping to write and revise licenses such as the GNU Free Documentation License, and licenses such as Creative Commons (and its derivatives). My question is, how does one help to revise and improve licenses like these? Is there a mailing list or IRC channel that I could visit? On another note, how would one go about writing his own documentation license?
Programming

Submission + - Are IT deadlines too strict? (karastathis.org)

Submitted by
wikinerd
wikinerd writes: "Reading the latest issue of Information Age, a publication of the ACS (Australian Computer Society), an organisation with which I am associated, I became concerned by an article about ethics in ICT. Citing a recent ACS-funded online survey among public and private sector ICT professionals, with over 40% of them being aware of ACS Code of Ethics, the authors show that the leading cause of concern about ICT ethics among respondends is compromising quality to meet deadlines (54.9%), while the second (49.7%) is about unprofessional behaviour. Concerns over deadlines also appear as the 7th and 8th cause of worry among ICT pros: 29.9% say consider compromising user requirements to meet deadlines an ethical issue facing ICT, and 29.6% say the same about compromising functionality to meet deadlines.

What are your own personal observations regarding deadlines of IT and software projects and their correlation with the quality of the delivered projects? Have unrealistic deadline demands from PHBs forced you or your team to deliver something below your own quality standards? If you work solo, have you tried to explain to pushy clients that quality is not subject to cutbacks, especially in critical systems? Would you ever accept to deliver a system knowing that it is highly likely to fail in operation? How many do the right thing, ie attempting to discuss and explain the issue to the client and if unsuccessful turn down a contract before committing to a client asking you to underdeliver in your chosen profession?"
Spam

Submission + - Invasive popups, what can we do?

Submitted by
phyrebyrd
phyrebyrd writes: "Everyone knows those annoying popups that seem to get through the popup blockers... One that seems prolific are those for NetFlix... But what can we do to seriously hurt this advertising model so that it's not so attractive to use? Is there a way we can automate spoofed 'clicks' so that this racks up the bill for the invasive advertiser? Can this be done 'legally'? After all, they're going against our own wishes and forcing ads upon us with the intent of circumventing our own blockers, couldn't we fight back and hurt them where it counts? Does such a technology already exist to combat these things and hit them where it really hurts instead of just blocking the ads? I feel like these advertisers have absolutely no regard for how they get their 'messages' across, so why can't we use the same tactics to get OUR message across? Why should we have to tolerate such practices?"
United States

Submission + - Hacktivism Questions for Presidential Candidates 1

Submitted by
DevanJedi
DevanJedi writes: "I am putting together a questionnaire of issues important to the geek hacktivists for each of the candidates for next years US Presidential Election. Most of the web sites of these candidates do not come close to addressing the issues that are important to us today and will affect society in general tomorrow. Issues of privacy, copyright and fair use, net neutrality, the DMCA, the PATRIOT act will obviously come up, but what are the questions that you would want to put to the people who may have the power to change the rules of the digital game?"
Slashdot.org

Submission + - Slashdot and the tagging fad 2

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Here's a question for the slashdot crowd. Tagging is one of those fads that seems to be everywhere, and slashdot has picked it up too. After watching how people use tagging since it's introduction here, it appears that it's mostly useless though, given that nearly every article gets tagged with either contradictory tags ("yes","no","yesno", all on one post) or ones that are opinions of the tag posters ("slownewsday", "whoopeef*ck", "wewerenotmeanttobe", as a sampling from the current front page). The remaining tags of any value seem to be solely for the purpose of categorizing, and can be achieved without tagging by editors simply putting articles in the right category/subcategory. So my question: why bother with the tagging thing? Can we get that useless garbage off of the front page so we don't have to see "whoopeef*ck* and other childish noise?

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