I currently work for the web communications part of a small-to-medium size university. We have around 2000 employees and 8000 students. We embrace all google products on campus. We actually use gmail for our primary email system. We use google forms to collect data throughout our website (not perfect by a long shot, but makes data collection approachable and accessible to end users). We would never shut down google forms. We simply couldn't. We regulate mass email by only allowing a select few individuals to email to all users. We have literally a dozen or so users on campus that can send an email to all users, and most are in the communications department or IT. All this talk of authentication systems, and teaching users not to get caught by phishing, sounds like "ideal world" solutions. Our solution is simple. If you want to send out an email to everyone, send it to a central authority that can approve the sending. It is easier to make sure a dozen people have the skill to send a mass email appropriately and avoid phishing attempts, then it is ten thousand. Also, it has the added advantage to allow us to consolidate less urgent emails into a single newsletter once a week, keeping faculty/staff and students email boxes free of non-urgent notifications. I'm not pretending we have a perfect solution, but it seems like we'd never get approval to stop using google docs in a situation like this. I'm actually rather impressed by Oxford's ability to react and then write a long and thorough explanation of their actions.
> Our solution is simple. If you want to send out an email to everyone, send it to a central authority that can approve the sending.
It sounds like all you are doing is regulating access to some sort of all@university mailing list. How does this solve the much bigger problem of spammers using compromised accounts to spam Gmail/Hotmail addresses, which then end up getting the university blocked? And even ignoring that how does it prevent people from just looping through a list of your university's email addresses and sending them one at a time?
You are mostly correct. We are primarily regulating access to a all@university mailing list, but we also have restrictions that prevent mass emails being sent via gmail (though I'm not the authority on this). You are correct, nothing prevents a compromised account, that I know of, from sending out emails one at a time to an list of users, though we do have control over all email accounts and can disable a compromised accounts. If the traffic is internal we have other ways of preventing it. I'm not saying our solution is an absolute substitute for all combinations of possibilities. Just that if we were to be blocked we'd have to deal with it in some other way then to disable google forms. We just couldn't get away with it, and according to some of the comments, Oxford couldn't get away with it very long either.
I'm nearly in the same boat. I've been at the same company for some time now and started bringing my personal macbook to work to code on. After awhile, I was so productive they bought me a one for work use. However in a 1000+ person company I'm the only one on a Mac, but I also have to do my own support.
This is indeed sweet. I haven't done much research on this, so maybe someone else on HN would know, but are there any plans on having embedded "sound fonts"?
Keven Smith is a smart guy who can tell a great story. "An Evening with Kevin Smith [1 & 2]" are both great DVD's where he goes from college to college telling life stories and answering questions/ giving advice off-the-cuff, and yet, these stories are engaging and hilarious and well worth watching. The advice he gives in this article, in my opinion, is simple advice that I think guys here on HN have been reading for years, but it's no less true, whether you like Kevin Smith or not.
I tried your sentence "The owl and the pussycat went to sea in a beautiful pea green boat" and got "seattle hookers gatwick to see a beautiful pizza ri boat". You win.
This one is simple, but I like it. Use -X command to launch a local x11 session for a given remote application. Works for Linux and OSX machines with x11 installed.
>ssh -X user@remoteserver.com will connect you.
>gedit file.txt
will launch a remote instance (viewable locally) of gedit with the remote file.txt loaded and ready for editing. Especially good for those who don't like command line editors (note: gedit must be installed on the remote machine for the example to work.)
This is a neat trick, and I've used it a lot -- but worth pointing out that this should really only be done over a local network. X11 apps tend to be VERY chatty, and very slow when forwarded over the internet. I'd recommend VNC or FreeNX to do remote X11 apps over the internet.
I'm curious if elevated levels of serotonine for extremely long periods of time would cause memory loss alone. It seems to me that memory is very much a "wow that just stood out from the norm." sort of tracking system. Under high levels of serotonine, maybe nothing can stand out from the norm long enough to be remembered?
I don't think this applies to my Mom. She is 50 years old and has installed harddrives (both scsi & ide), memory, formated and installed Windows 98,XP,ME (blah) and 7. Set up her own wireless. She calls me every-now-and-then for tech support, though honestly, the level of questions she asks have shot ahead of me, since I've been on a Mac since 05' and hate messing with hardware now. You'd be surprised how much a game like the Sim's can motivate a person to pick this stuff up.
There was a really interesting This American Life about this very subject. It does a great job of explaining some of the issues surrounding what Goldman Sachs did, though not about Goldman Sachs in particular.It does mention how Magnetar was supposably attempting to influence CDO managers into taking on riskier investment in order to get the CDO's to fail in order to cash in. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/405/i...
The macbook pro 13" is worth the money for the unibody alone. I own a 13MB and the white plastic case is cracking in more places then I care to mention. I got them to fix it once, and only because it was their fault. They just don't hold up build quality wise. The only negative part about the unibody is my wife doesn't like the feel of the metal, it gives her the willies, but I can't fault Apple for that one.
Really? I have a black MB that just passed the 2 year mark and it looks pristine. I carry it in my backpack every day, I took it with me on a three month trip through South America, and yet it has no scratches, cracks, or other signs of damage.
