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Comment Re:"Free" money (Score 1) 1797

by saitoh (#37828100) Attached to: Ron Paul Wants To End the Federal Student Loan Program

Also, a student has to be an above-average performer for post-secondary. How do you expect someone with uneducated parents to perform at that level in high school?

Both of you are partially right in the specific examples that I can tell you are thinking of.

A) If someone is that deep into poverty, chances are they qualify (and would get) Pell. There are other sources of funding on a "need based" allotment.
B) Most of my family and surrounding area where I grew up was poor. Sometimes that was the case because they just couldn't get ahead. Sometimes that was the case because they could get ahead and weren't responsible enough to do so. It's never clear cut when you look at the aggregate.
C) While there are some states where higher education is out of reach without loans for those in the bottom quartile of the income bracket (Vermont comes to mind at a whopping ~$200 a credit hour), there are many states where it's very affordable (California, and some could consider Virginia another).
D) I suggest you read up on the open access mission of community colleges. A great example would be the Middle College program in Virginia. If you don't qualify for Middle College, I'm not sure paying for higher education (or the lack of education that your parents had) is the problem that needs to be worked on first... I also recommend reading up on 2+2 agreements of transferring to a 4 year instead of starting there as a way to reduce costs. Last I recommend reading up on many community college efforts to deliver instruction to high school students at their high school to mitigate factors of time/transportation/facilities/etc.

Sometimes the barriers to higher education are purely financial/time. Other times it's having the right information available to make the decisions. While you did articulate a couple of thoughts in the abstract that are valid, those ideas have issues when applied outside of the traditional 4 year mid-level/prestigious university which has been disappearing over the last decade.

disclaimer: I have worked in higher education for 8 years, 5 of which were at a community college system in their finance office. Second, I am nearing completion of a masters in (specifically) higher education administration. This is one of the few topics I can really talk about on /. with some authority.

Comment Re:So long and thanks for the OMG PONIES!!! (Score 1) 1521

by saitoh (#37206838) Attached to: Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot

I agree with this (and even made a point to log in and post for once!)

Steve Jobs had been making a transition out due to health for a while. I knew he would resign eventually. Maybe not this year, maybe not next, but he's human as much as the SuperJobs persona tries to hide that.

In the back of my mind, I never thought Taco would leave. Irrational at best, but that through just didn't fit into my mental universe.

Comment Re:money is not the way (Score 1) 497

by saitoh (#26778639) Attached to: How Do I Start a University Transition To Open Source?

Last but not least: Look at getting a committee spun off from your general technology council to analyze the issue, setup meetings and conduct the analysis debate there. One issue you will face is overcoming the bureaucratic inertia that higher ed traditionally has, and one way to accomplish that is through the use of committees. "He who has energy to outlast the committee, is inclined to win."

Also, do not be discouraged if you are turned down. A decision today may not be the same decision rendered during the proverbial tomorrow. Wait a while and under the guise of academic inquisition, have the committee relaunched under a new goal that is similar (and yields your intended results as tertiary victories) in 9-12 months.

If you are interested in the theoretical pinnings of the above, look into research and papers by March and Cohen (1974 I think, not much has changed I'm afraid). Things to consider, best of luck.

disclaimer: I have worked in various levels of general worker and administrative positions in higher ed for just over 5 years, and currently study organization and governance/governing (structure/power) within higher ed.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft answers to Vista DRM critics claims

Submitted by skepsis
skepsis writes: Recently there were two stories in Slashdot claiming that Vista would downgrade the quality of audio and video for every application in a machine where protected content was running.

One of the stories painted a scary scenario where a "medical IT worker who's using a medical imaging PC while listening to audio/video played back by the computer" would have his medical images "deliberately degraded". Audio professionals were similarly scared by similar claims.

Well, Microsoft has just explained exactly how the content protection woks, and it turns out the medical IT staff and audio pros can relax, as all claims (even those by 'specialists') were rebuked.

It seems the Open Source crows also knows how to distribute FUD as well as MS...
Google

Submission + - Google Checkout sees poor customer satisfaction

Submitted by
Aryabhata
Aryabhata writes: "As per an Arstechnica report on a survey by investment firm J.P. Morgan Securities, Google Checkout has had a relatively quick and modest market penetration of six percent since its launch in June of 2006, but lags behind in customer satisfaction vs PayPal. On the customer satisfaction front, only 18.8 percent reported having a "good" or "very good" experience with Google Checkout, while 81.2 percent indicated a fair to poor experience customer experience compared to PayPal's 44.2 percent reporting good experiences. Some users have reported anecdotally that Google Checkout mistakenly canceled sales without warning or that the checkout process took too long."
The Internet

Submission + - NYC 911 to accept cellphone pictures

Submitted by
SpaceAdmiral
SpaceAdmiral writes: "New York City is developing a plan to allow images to be sent to 911 emergency operators from cellphones. This will likely give emergency operators better information to pass along to responders. According to John A. Feinblatt, Mayor Michael Bloomberg's criminal justice coordinator, "The more information that the police have and the more quickly that they get it, the more likely that they are going to fight a crime.""
Space

Submission + - Avoiding Hubble trouble for NASA's big new scope

Submitted by
BobB
BobB writes: "A NASA infrared space telescope called the James Web Space Telescope scheduled to launch in 2013 will be built using open standards-based software designed to prevent problems caused when software programs developed by various agencies are incompatible with each other, as has been the case with the Hubble telescope. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/011907-softw are-hubble-nasa.html"
Perl

Submission + - Minimal Perl for Unix and Linux People

Submitted by
Ravi
Ravi writes: "Perl (Practical Extraction and Report Language) — the language which was created by Larry Wall is arguably one of the greatest programming languages. But it has a reputation for taking an excessive cryptic nature which gives it an image especially among Perl novices as a language which is complex and hard to master.

The book titled "Minimal Perl — for Unix and Linux people", authored by Tim Maher and published by Manning Publications addresses these obstacles presented by Perl's complexity. This book which is divided into two parts comprising of a total of 12 chapters takes a unique methodology to explain the Perl syntax and its use. The author emphasizes on Perl's grep, awk and sed like features and relys on concepts such as inputs, filters and arguments to allow Unix users to directly apply their existing knowledge to the task of learning Perl.

What I found while reading this book is that the "Minimal Perl" is a specially crafted subset of Perl language designed to be easily grasped by people who have a Unix background and who wish to use Perl to write their scripts. Its main aim is to filter out the complex way of writing programs using Perl and stick to simple ways and where ever possible accomplish complex tasks using just one or two lines of Perl code. So in the first part of the book comprising of 6 chapters, the author explains how Perl can be used to do the same tasks as accomplished by common Unix tools such as grep, awk, sed and find. He goes one step further by explaining how one can accomplish much more and in a much simpler way by using the Perl techniques than can be achieved by using these tools.

Through out the book, the author consciously makes sure that the learning curve in acquiring Perl skills remain gentle. As Perl is a language whose syntax has a multitude of options, this book is peppered with numerous tables which provide excellent information at a glance. For example, in the third chapter titled "Perl as a (Better) grep command", the author lists and compares the fundamental capabilities of Perl and the different grep commands such as grep, egrep and fgrep which clearly shows the advantages that Perl has over grep. In another table, you get a birds eye view of the essential syntax of Perl's regular expressions and their meaning. This chapter alone has around 12 tables. This is a really nice feature of this book because it doubles this book as a ready reference for Perl where you can flip to the respective page and get the information you need.

The main strength and drawback of a language such as Perl is its dependence on regular expressions for accomplishing complex tasks. Once you master the regular expressions, the sky is the limit for ordering and segregating data using this language. And in Perl, there are more than one ways of doing the same thing. What is unique about this book is that the author specializes in explaining the easiest way of doing a particular task as is hinted by the title of the book.

In many places, the author demonstrates accomplishing complex tasks using just a few lines of Perl code. And many of the examples covered in this book are practical examples which give an idea of how the commands relate to the final outcome. For instance, while elaborating on the one line grep like commands in Perl, the author illustrates a web oriented application of pattern matching where he shows how to extract and list, the outline of slashdot.org site's front page. And the surprising thing is this is accomplished using just a single line of Perl code. This book has lots of such one liner examples which teaches how to use Perl intelligently using minimal effort.

If part I of this book focuses on ways in which simple Perl programs can provide superior alternatives to standard Unix commands, the second part comprising of another six chapters throws light on the other aspects of Perl concentrating on the syntax of the language and various built-in functions and modules available which does away with a lot of re-invention of the wheel — so to speak, and helps churn out code which is portable across OSes.

Chapter 7 titled "Built-in functions" introduces an eclectic mix of functions available in Perl. So you have functions which are used to extract a list of fields from a string, functions to access the current date and time, generating random numbers, sorting lists, transforming lists, managing files with functions and so on. These functions are broadly classified into those which generate and process scalars and those that process lists.

In chapter 8 of this book, the author involves the reader on the numerous scripting techniques that can be used to write better Perl programs.

It was quite surprising that the author has chosen to discuss the variables — more specifically the list variables comprising of arrays and hashes as well as the looping constructs only in the 9th and 10th chapters respectively when they should be some where up front. But on hind sight, I feel it is a good decision as once, you execute the one liner Perl programs in the initial chapters, by the time you reach the 9th chapter, you will be fairly confident in using Perl.

The last two chapters deal with creating sub-routines and modules. Over the years various Perl programmers have created modules which are used for diverse purposes. And with an aim to share these modules, they are collected and stored at one central place known as CPAN, which is an acronym for Comprehensive Perl Archive Network. The final chapter, apart from teaching how to create modules in Perl and manage them, also introduces the CPAN and ways in which one can find the right module by searching on CPAN.

The special variables cheat-sheet and the guidelines for parenthesizing code provided in the two appendices are really useful as a quick reference while writing Perl programs.

This is not a comprehensive book on Perl, rather the author specializes on a slice of Perl which when mastered can do over 95% of the jobs which require Perl. So for instance, you won't find object oriented concepts of Perl being mentioned in this book. But in many ways, the author has moved beyond explaining a subset of Perl by providing a section titled "Directions for further study" at the end of each chapter, where the author lists further material which can be used to learn more about the topic that is covered.

I really enjoyed going through this book on Perl, especially because it stresses on the practical side of using Perl and takes a minimal approach which does away with some of the seemingly complex nature of this language.

Ravi Kumar maintains a blog titled "All about Linux" where he shares his thoughts and experiences in using Linux, Open Source and Free software."

Feed Bloggers Take on Talk Radio Hosts (nytimes.com)

From feed by nytfeed
A San Francisco radio station pre-empted programming in response to a campaign by bloggers who recorded extreme comments by several hosts and passed on digital copies to advertisers.
Privacy

New Plan In UK For "Big Brother" Database 178

Posted by kdawson from the for-our-own-good dept.
POPE Mad Mitch writes "The BBC is reporting that Tony Blair is going to unveil plans on Monday to build a single database to pull together and share every piece of personal data from all government departments. The claimed justification is to improve public services. The opposition party and the Information Commission have both condemned the plan as another step towards a 'Big Brother' society. Sharing information in this way is currently prohibited by the 'over-zealous' data protection legislation. An attempt to build a similar database was a key part of the, now severely delayed, ID card scheme."
Software

Submission + - A development contract for code to be GPL'ed?

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: I am working as an independent developer for a client I have a long relationship with, and of whom I used to be an employee. I've made informal contracts in the past for development work, but this job is much more significant. Also, the client has gone to court over software development in the past; he was in the right to do so, but I need to cover myself. The product will be released under the (L)GPL and copyrighted by me, and the client will also be agreeing to open the license and give me the copyright on some code I previously developed.

I plan to consult a lawyer, but I just want a little more direction before I start investing hours. Are there any resources I should know about, beyond what the FSF has to offer?
Microsoft

Submission + - Submitting Federal Proposals Requires Windows

Submitted by Petronius Arbiter
Petronius Arbiter writes: The US federal government is requiring that proposals for grants etc be submitted using a common system at http://grants.gov/ . That's would be a good idea, except that, effectively, you must use Windows and Explorer. See http://www.grants.gov/resources/download_software. jsp :

To operate PureEdge Viewer, your computer must meet the following system requirements: Windows 98, ME, NT 4.0, 2000, XP... PureEdge on Grants.gov will not run within the Firefox browser.


They do have a Citrix substitute for non-Windows users. However:

Note that a limited amount of users can access the Citrix Server at any one time... Finally, you will find the best time to work and submit an application via Citrix is during off-peak hours, usually between 10 p.m. and 10 a.m., EST.


Finally, if your organization has more than 10 non-Windows users, they want you to add a dedicated Windows box to handle the traffic.

Why is it legal for the federal government to require applicants to use an expensive, proprietary system with terrible security? This is particularly surprising because many technical people, from program officers to computer administrators, in the government personally like open source and detest MS.

As a crazy guess, over 100,000 different people each year submit proposals. That's 100,000 people who must have MS Windows licenses whether they want to or not.

Anyone who was concerned about the open format fight in Massachusetts last year should be concerned about grants.gov.

Finally, for National Science Foundation clients, this is a big step backwards. NSF has had an excellent online system, http://fastlane.nsf.gov/ for years. Fastlane has no bias towards MS. However, by federal edict, NSF people must also use grants.gov.
Operating Systems

Submission + - FreeBSD 6.2 Released to Mirrors

Submitted by
AlanS2002
AlanS2002 writes: "FreeBSD 6.2 has been released to mirrors. The release notes for your specific platform are also available. "FreeBSD is an advanced operating system for x86 compatible (including Pentium and Athlon), amd64 compatible (including Opteron, Athlon64, and EM64T), ARM, IA-64, PC-98 and UltraSPARC architectures. It is derived from BSD, the version of UNIX developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It is developed and maintained by a large team of individuals. Additional platforms are in various stages of development.""

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