My department has always done a lot of different things. Many years agowe were called 'Computing Services' ('University of Toronto ComputingServices' if you were being formal), and one of those things was a bunchof modems on a Sun 4. Of course, we had a greeting banner:

U of T Computing Services.

login:

(roughly what you saw if you dialed in.)

One April 1st, a co-worker changed this to ' U of T Confusing Services '.

The

I'm not going to fault Firefox for not supporting the CSS 2.1 ' word-wrap: pre-wrap ',no matter how convenient it would be for me if it did.Especially since CSS 2.1 is not yet a standard, merely a late stageworking draft. But I am annoyed that Firefox doesn't support the CSS2' display: compact ', since I could have used it just now.

' display: compact ' is classically used (in that it is right

I've mentioned Richard Gabriel's famous The Rise of "Worse is Better" before (back here ), but only recently did oneof its important lessons coalesce in my thoughts.

"Worse is Better" contrasts what Gabriel calls the MIT approach , with the cornerstoneof 'the right thing', against the New Jersey approach , with a 'worseis better' minimalism (this is a simplified summary). Gabriel arguedthat despite its flaws, the New Jersey approach had significantly bettersurvival characteristics than the

One of the quiet little secrets of university computing is just howdifficult it is to actually punish people for doing bad stuff withcomputing resources. Really bad stuff, things that are criminal orhave serious civil liabilities, can be punished. But mere violations ofpolicies or bad network behavior (including spamming) can run into aseries of problems.

Tenured professors might as well be the left hand of God, of course,especially if they get grant money . But evenstudents (grad and undergrad both) are heavily protected