This is where you say something clever
I’m installing beta 2 of Office on my new Vista machine, and when I download the file and go to run it I get a Security Warning that says:
The publisher could not be verified. Are you sure you want to run this software?
Name: OPPLUS-EN.EXE
Publisher: Unknown Publisher
Right hand, meet left hand.
I’m installing beta 2 of Office on my new Vista machine, and when I download the file and go to run it I get a Security Warning that says:
The publisher could not be verified. Are you sure you want to run this software?
Name: OPPLUS-EN.EXE
Publisher: Unknown Publisher
Right hand, meet left hand.
Lately it feels like I’m awash in good music coming in from all sides – more than I can even absorb!
The KEXP Blog continues to offer downloads (many in straight MP3 format) and all sorts of insight into great new music. Thanks to Kevin for turning me on to Under Byen and to Andrew for Velella Velella! Someday I’ll have the time to catch up with the latest on the blog.
I also recently became a customer at emusic
- they’ve got a huge selection of music available in non-locked-up mp3 format, using good encoding (192 kbps VBR on the LAME encoder). I’m not sure I prefer the commit to a certain number of tracks per month business plan to the a la carte pay per track model, but we’ll see. You get 25 free tracks for signing up, with no further commitment – so why wouldn’t you? I grabbed Alvin Youngblood Hart’s Down In the Alley and McCoy Tyner’s Supertrios.
It’s really great to see new sources of good music being shared in formats that aren’t locked up and limited to single platforms!
Ed lent me T-Bone Burnett‘s latest, The True False Identity, which is terrific. Nice to see that someone can survive working in Hollywood, art intact.
I think Dan Gillmor has the best (and shortest) take on Bill Gates’ announcement that he’ll be focusing on the work of the Gates Foundation rather than Microsoft.
I also admire the great work that the Gates Foundation has been doing.
I also think that Ray Ozzie is a smart fellow who is undertaking some brave work in trying to orient Microsoft to the emergence of the open nature of the Web. I’ll be down in Mountain View next week for a meeting with the Windows Live Mail and Calendaring teams, so I hope to get some first hand info on how that effort is coming.
So it took several hours to download and install beta 2 of Windows Vista on a brand new Dell Optiplex GX 620.
When Vista finally boots, the first thing I get is a message telling me that an unknown program (netfx?) is trying to access the network, and asking if I want it to have that access or not. I tell Windows no, even though I have no idea what that program is.
Next it tells me that I’m successfully connected to Network, and asks me to choose between a public network (“Use for networks in public places where you don’t want people to access your computer”) or a private network “Use for your home or personal network where you want to share files and devices”). I have no idea which to choose – I don’t want random people accessing my computer, but I do want to share files between my PC and my Mac. There’s no real information here about what I’m choosing. I randomly pick public network, figuring I can change things later (I hope) if I need to.
Now I get a Windows Security Alert telling me that Windows Firewall has blocked some features of the googledesktopindex program. I think Dell installed Google Desktop on the box when shipped (I know I didn’t put it there), so I tell Windows to unblock it. I immediately get a User Account Control telling me “A program needs your permission to continue” and blocks the desktop until I hit “Continue” – when Zephyr comes in to chat. While we’re chatting, the desktop suddenly clears itself up with no input from me. What’s up with that?
Vista detects my two monitor display situation just fine and takes me automatically to the control panel to set that up.
The first task I undertake in Vista is setting up the new Windows Mail program. So far it looks a lot like Outlook Express. The Remember Password box is still checked by default in the setup wizard – that doesn’t smack of enhanced security. Somehow while working through the configuration I manage to lock up the Mail program, but restarting after killing it in the Task Manager I mange to get it configured.
When I finish configuring the Mail program it asks me if I want to download a list of my IMAP mail folders – I tell it yes and immediately get a message saying “The server your are connected to is using a security certificate that could not be verified. The target principal name is incorrect. Do you want to continue using this server?” I assume that’s because it doesn’t like the wild-card certificates we use, so I tell it Yes. The download of folders is blazingly fast, and the following collection of my over 3,000 message Inbox doesn’t take very long either.
More later…
Recently we had a presentation from Turnitin.com, a company that markets an online service that claims to detect possible plagiarism in student works. While there was some interest in the service here, I think we came away with more questions than answers, at least from that particular session (which was led by a representative from the company who did not seem to really know very much about the products he was hawking). But several of the faculty did comment at that presentation that cheating is a real problem.
Now Alex Halavais, who did his graduate work here at the UW and served on the Student Technology Fee Committee during those years, is now a bona-fide academic, faculty member (recently at Buffalo and soon at Quinnipiac University), and blogger, has a great post on just how bad many students are a plagiarizing, under the title of “How to Cheat Good”.
3. You Google, I Google
How do you think I check suspicious work? It’s not like our state university is shelling out for TurnItIn. I am pretty good with that Google thingy. And changing two words won’t send me off the trail. So copy from something a bit more obscure. Or—and this is really tricky—try making up your own stuff.
I particularly like his ending:
And what if you follow all eight points and still get caught? Here’s your “get out of jail free” card. Simply say this to your teacher (no, no one has tried these exact words on me yet), and you are off scot free:
“Like a postmodern version of Searle’s Chinese Room, I am able to re-articulate existing knowledge through my command of its (re)presentation and manipulation. Any claim to originality ignores what I like to call our ability to stand on the shoulders of giants. By this, I mean that there is a well-known correlation between book sales and height, and we should use their height to our own advantage, to avoid mud and small dogs.
“Also, is it really all that original to give me an F? After all, I’ve already received an F from two other profs this semester alone. Be an original: give me a C.
“By the way, I don’t know who this ‘John Rawls’ guy is—is he even in our major?—but I think it’s possible he cheated off me.
“Finally, and I think this is most vital, my plagiarism in this case is a clear indictment of the educational system. After all, I’ve been failed by my high school and by three years of university, while continually passing. I don’t think it can be entirely my fault if I’ve gotten this far by plagiarism, and in this, my last class, you decide that it is somehow ‘wrong.’ Clearly, you should use this outcome as a way of evaluating your own teaching and expectations.”
You have my permission to use the above excuses, verbatim and without attribution, in any discussion with your respected faculty. I don’t guarantee their success, but would be happy to hear from any of you who employ them as to their efficacy.
Nice post, Alex, and good luck on your new gig!
In an article in eWeek titled “Beyond the Valley: 10 Blooming U.S. Cities for Tech“, Deborah Rothberg ranks Seattle at the top of the list to become the next technology epicenter.
Seattle • City population: 570,430 • Companies that call it home: Amazon, RealNetworks, AT&T Wireless, T-Mobile • The details: The June 2006 Dice Report ranks Seattle No. 10 in available jobs, with 1,901 listed, up over 300 from one year ago. Indeed.com ranks Seattle No. 4 in number of tech jobs per capita, with 13 jobs per 1000 people. And a WashTech/CWA report issued this week calls Seattle a “bright spot” of technology growth in a recovering market.
I wonder what that means for the already over-inflated housing prices…
Technorati Tags: technology, puppy
For the past year or two I’ve mostly settled in to using the native Mac OS X mail program, which I like pretty well (keeping in mind that all my email is stored on the UW’s central IMAP servers, not on my Mac). There’s a lot to like about the Mac mail app – it does nice graphical things with keeping mail threads together, it handles forwards of multiple messages right (which Thunderbird doesn’t do), etc.
But every once in a while I go back to using Pine, and I’m always amazed at just how it’s got features which are so far ahead of any other mail program I’ve seen.
Today I was searching for someone’s mail address – I had searched through the From field in several folders with no success, when I realized that the person I was looking for had probably been copied on some group emails. Pine allows you to do a search on all of the “participants” in an email – so that searches the From, To, and CC fields at once – and sure enough that brought the address right up. How sensible can you get?
For the past year or two I’ve mostly settled in to using the native Mac OS X mail program, which I like pretty well (keeping in mind that all my email is stored on the UW’s central IMAP servers, not on my Mac). There’s a lot to like about the Mac mail app – it does nice graphical things with keeping mail threads together, it handles forwards of multiple messages right (which Thunderbird doesn’t do), etc.
But every once in a while I go back to using Pine, and I’m always amazed at just how it’s got features which are so far ahead of any other mail program I’ve seen.
Today I was searching for someone’s mail address – I had searched through the From field in several folders with no success, when I realized that the person I was looking for had probably been copied on some group emails. Pine allows you to do a search on all of the “participants” in an email – so that searches the From, To, and CC fields at once – and sure enough that brought the address right up. How sensible can you get?
Today I saw a report that yesterday the machines which process email external to the UW handled a record 2.1 million messages (in one day!), and that our spam detection software scored 65% of those messages as having a 50% or greater possibility of being spam.
That means, if we take it as a given that those messages scored greater than 50% really are spam, that we processed 1.36 million spam messages in one day. In one day. That’s more than fifteen spam messages per second all day long.
The implications of this activity when multiplied on a global scale are staggering.
