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Comment Re: Warning: paranoia may cloud sensibilities (Score 5, Insightful) 183

Eating yogurt is not a homeopathic remedy. Look up what homeopathic means.

Eating yogurt is a simple treatment, and as the grandparent's quote indicates it is significantly effective at reducing the incidence of diarrhea in cases of gut flora loss (due to antibiotics usually). However, it is significantly less effective when the problem is specifically c.difficile overgrowth.

So if you're taking antibiotics, get a probiotic yogurt, it is likely to help. If you do end up with c. diff, you may need another type of treatment.

Comment Re:Tor and using a specific exit node (and SSL!) (Score 1) 206

Actually, Canadian dead-tree books are now almost the same price for US/Canada finally. For instance, the new hardcover from JK Rowling is I believe $1 difference. This only happened after there was a significant amount of press uproar about years of unjustifiable differences, which I believe is good evidence for the argument that the pricing gap is pure greed the distributors think they can get away with it.

Comment Re:"Learning management systems" (Score 4, Informative) 95

"Yet schools seem to constantly get rid of these home-grown solutions in favor of Blackboard 'n pals...why?"

Because of CYA support contracts. Executive university ITS staff hate the thought of having the buck stop with their department. By paying outrageous fees to these big players, they always have an out when things don't work - they can yell at someone at Blackboard.

The linked article only mentions Moodle, but Blackboard also announced yesterday that they have hired Charles Severence, one of the founding architects of the Sakai project, in the role of "Chief Sakai Strategist", and also announced that they will provide hosted Moodle and Sakai installations. This is a major foray into the Open Source LMS world, and it's still to be seen whether it is an opportunity to keep relationships with non-Bb schools, or a razed-earth invasion of the OS support arena.

As a side note, technically Banner isn't an LMS, it is a Student Information System (SIS): it goes rather deeper into the registration process than an LMS, and also acts as the HR system at most institutions that use it.

Comment Re:If you go with ESRI products... (Score 1) 316

(accidentally posted as AC above... thought I was logged in...)

I've run ESRI products on Linux and Windows platforms, and even though I'm a linux admin first, I would have to recommend Windows/MSSQL if you do choose to go with their products. Although they technically support Linux platforms, I found that their support was abysmal, and when we moved to ArcGIS on Windows, suddenly things worked much better, and their support actually had answers when we needed it.

Comment Virtual Machine on a Macbook Pro (Score 3, Interesting) 708

I would recommend buying yourself a Macbook Pro, getting VMWare Fusion or if you're low on funds after buying the MB, then VirtualBox, and running a Linux VM. You get the solid quality of the MBPro hardware and the standardised hardware environment that a VM offers and the resulting good linux driver behaviour.

I use VirtualBox on my 2010 MBPro and it works like a charm.

Comment Re:configuration options exist (Score 1) 306

For my institution in Canada, a big concern was that we might be jeopardizing our students' future options if they wrote something that was politically sensitive in the U.S. and it was snatched up under PATRIOT Act legislation and used against them for blacklisting or other discrimination in the future.

Comment Turnitin as a teaching tool (Score 3, Informative) 306

I was a technical advisor to a committee creating policy for Turnitin style service use on the university campus I work on. Turnitin isn't a plagiarism detection service: they're being disingenuous when they say that. It is a text matching service. The difference is significant: a first-year history paper might be 75% matched, but not plagiarized because the student correctly attributed all their quoted passages.

The committee recommended against using it for detecting plagiarism, and for encouraging its use as a teaching tool to make students aware of proper citation techniques and the importance of avoiding plagiarism.

Some service like this also happen to be quite good at the most common kind of plagiarism: someone on campus submitting someone elses paper from the previous year to a different prof... but that's a special clear-cut case of cheating, not what people commonly think of as plagiarism.

Comment Won't someone please RTFA? (Score 1) 892

Did ANYONE who had commented in this thread actually read the linked article? Nowhere does it say that drone strikes are not hostile, it says that they don't meet the legal definition of "hostilities", which is a very different statement.

If the POTUS calls American Slashdot readers who don't RTFA morons every day for 91 days, he's being hostile, but it doesn't require congressional approval to continue because it's not hostilities as defined by the your War Powers Resolution.

Games

Too Much Multiplayer In Today's Games? 362

hornedrat writes "Gamepro discusses the idea that modern games put too much emphasis on multiplayer, and that players aren't as concerned about it as developers think. 'The current environment encourages developers to unnecessarily toss multiplayer into their games without caring about it — or even considering whether anyone will bother playing it. It’s like they're checking an invisible quota box that demands multiplayer's inclusion.' Personally I agree that too much emphasis is placed on competitive multiplayer. I play online, but only with my brother in games that allow co-operative modes, like Rainbow Six: Vegas and ARMA 2. 'My point isn't that developers shouldn't try and conquer Halo or Call of Duty. We'd never have any progress in this industry if developers didn't compete. Game companies, however, should think carefully about what they want their games to be, and more important, gamers should consider what they want. If a developer wants to eclipse Halo, then by all means, pour that effort into a multiplayer mode that's different.' I would be interested to know how many gamers really care about the multiplayer components of the games they buy."

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