I had regular BSODS on my old laptop ('designed for Windows NT'), blamed to the Microsoft standard ps2 mouse driver. All cryptographically signed to MS and everything. I can only assume it was choking on the hardware in some way.
I like Win2K better. Six months and not one BSOD, fingers crossed, and unlike XP, when stuff goes wrong one can typically fix it oneself. XP just does that buzz grind buzz 'Have recovered from a serious error' thing... which, y know, would help, if it weren't for the fact that the recovery is often less than complete, and entire features mysteriously cease working and never return again...
When I moved last, I just unscrewed the more important of the hard drives and put it in hand luggage in an antistatic bag, screwed the rest of the machine up tight, and dropped the computer into a big blue Ikea bag with a bit of duct tape. Then I just checked it in at Heathrow as part of my luggage and picked it up at Frankfurt.
I'm typing on it now, so it must have worked. This I largely ascribe to the fact that, being a 500MHz Celeron and veteran of several years' life with my sister, the processor is pretty much rammed into its slot with bits of matchstick and TicTac box. Off-topic, this is the way I solve many computer problems. When the microswitch on my monitor died, I just wedged it down with a bit of matchstick. One UK computer supplier who shall remain nameless (and bankrupt) uses a glue gun for this purpose (I know; I had to clean out the glue from the pci slots), but I think matchsticks have more style.
In my view computers are a bit like asthma patients, and can get accustomed to irritant behaviour on the part of their owners if it happens all the time. The trick is never to treat them too well. If you do, watch it, or one day when you're tenderly prising a hard drive loose from its socket there'll be a very small whiff of smoke and that'll be it.
At this very moment I am looking at an autopsied computer belonging to a friend, which gave up the ghost one day in a highly interesting manner after he tried to replace the hard drive. It still boots, still POSTs, and still runs FreeDOS - but nothing that uses extended memory. Somehow, it has transformed itself from a 266MHz Genuine Pentium II into a 286 doorstop, despite having no visible scars. Spooky.
Gmail, twixt bitter rivalry, alone
attained the coveted one thousand megs Do not to the creation of my own Admit impediments. Answer only this:
The thousand thousands of registered geeks leave few appealing logins to the late. Be not élite, but answer he who seeks with cheerful heart, though the rewards be few.
Idle cravings, that in a slashdot post thy busy thoughts will all too soon ignore But, dear reader, I ask thee at the most a Gmail invite for myself - no more.
No verse may order, but my thanks extend - my email address is giv'n at the end.
kaiidth at NOSPAM altern [dot] org
Re:My experiences with Gmail invitations
on
Gmail in the News
·
· Score: 1
Joining the big bridge leap:
kaiidth at (NOSPAM!) altern[dot] org
Thanks, generous person to become my future benefactor... (well, one can hope!)
Not so sure about that. A vague relative of mine who lived in DC was snatched, raped and subsequently murdered on the way home from work, so there is clearly a non-zero chance of kidnap and torture, though not death by beheading I grant you. I don't know whether anybody taped the event, so I will grant you that one too, at least provisionally.
However, I can't honestly say that the mode of death prevalent in DC actually sounds particularly enjoyable to me either, so I personally take two lessons from it: 1) don't move to DC. 2) don't move to Iraq.
Mind you, at the risk of replying to myself it is worth noting that the patch currently available actually does nothing more meaningful than checking to see if the code that got you there is this exact exploit or not... so I would expect a better patch to be coming out that actually deals with the real problem, which appears to be that some poor munchkin started to write an FPU exception handler somewhere near version 2.3 and got distracted before finishing it. I assume though that the production of such a patch implies working out what the dude actually meant to do, first.
Patch is here on LKML. And of course it is on the original exploit page too.
Here is the LKML discussion thread on the subject. It's an interesting bug, briefly summarised by Matt Mackall as follows:
The example code's bogus
asm is generating an FPU fault in frstor in its signal handler, that's bumping us into math_error -> force_sig_info -> specific_send_sig_info. Then we hit:
if (LEGACY_QUEUE(&t->pending, sig))
which decides we don't need to send the signal after all and we bail all the way back out and recurse.
So there's a bit of a massive problem with FPU exception handling, which didn't come to light before. Wheee. Fun.
Hah. Yeah, getting a PhD in Germany often means getting paid as a Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter and doing pretty much what you get told until you get told that it's safe for you to quit. I grant you that I have met people who have done great things in their PhDs in Germany, and who are most impressively good at a lot of things. However, I have also met a large number of people who appeared to have no idea, to the extent that they couldn't define words in their own research papers because they weren't interested enough in their own field of research to find out what they meant!
What I mean to say is that, when I enrolled for my PhD in a UK university, I was given a Talk about What It Meant and What My Rights Were. They make it clear that it is about one's own research, it's one's own chance to show what one can do in a chosen research field (obviously grants can get in the way of this, if you're being paid by SmithKlineBeecham or whichever!) The general theme of the thing was very much in the idealistic direction. Of course, with a UK university you are generally not a research assistant but a student, and therefore if you don't graduate after being accepted for the PhD that is bad for the university.
In Germany (previously) my experience was rather different, being saddled with a supervisor with no idea and no interest in actual reality and a fellow PhD 'student' with an apparent total lack of interest in the ongoing research. I have the strong impression that whilst it is possible for a 'research assistant' approach to work, as one sometimes sees, it is not by any means guaranteed - and the fact that your professor controls everything (as is not true in at least some Universities in the UK) means that the pressure to toe the line and just do largely what you get told is intense. Most PhD candidates I know here seem to do just that. Stupid ideas are therefore propogated by successive generations... because it's pointless (and Not Done) to disagree with your Professor (TM). And it is made worse by the proportion of PhD candidates who did their undergrad studies in the same university - they have never been exposed to a different viewpoint.
The usual way of changing your research direction in Germany is to get hired by a different professor, who happens to think the way you do. The final point being that frankly I find the sort of Joining-the-Family-Worship-The-Professor control-freak nature of it all to be a pretty darn weird way of encouraging original thought, let alone the threat of PhD removal. That is all:-)
Of course the problem with this discussion is that a significant number of the softer-science PhDs out there should therefore lose them. A significant subset of the PhDs out there operates by publishing in minor journals and applying for grants of a reasonably soft-science sort of nature, doing their thing in a woolly-minded sort of way until the grant runs out, and writing conclusions that come directly from their own arses. How do they survive? well, for the same reason that a lot of bullshit survives.
Nobody is really motivated enough to take them to court for it (and you know as well as I do that half the businesses out there are looking for justification of the opinion they already had, not actual truth). You are of course right, in that scientists who behave dishonourably should lose their PhD status - but it doesn't work like that, for the reason that universities are largely non-idealistic institutions designed for the personal profit of their professors (who are after medium personal glory and an otherwise quiet life) and therefore, provided you are not found out, it is not to the university's benefit to kick you out. Produce the odd press release and make sure your professor gets his moments of glory, and unless you do something really stupid, the mere fact that you produced no useful research in your entire lifetime and most of your journal publications are in the West Argentinian Journal Of Web Engineering is not going to bother anybody. It's politics. It sucks. Only in a relatively few good universities has a PhD student got any hope of retaining any lingering idealism.
As a person who used UK vodaphone for years, I should like to congratulate you for saying exactly what I think of them. We had a family-size contract with them that totalled to somewhere round 250 ppm, realised that we could save half of this by changing one account to a different tariff structure, and spent the next six months trying to change it (note, this is four years after the mandatory contract length ran out). Five hundred wasted quid and twelve letters later, we finally got them to change it by a process of what I can only describe as nuisance phone calling.
I will forever fondly remember vodaphone as the company whose telephone representative told me in all seriousness that they couldn't tell me how to access voicemail on my new mobile, because it violated the Data Protection Act. The answer: "Press '1', and hold".
I know you're not serious but you should know that Germany is experiencing what is most kindly referred to as a tech slowdown, and more honestly referred to as: Today, there are nearly four hundred long-term unemployed, well qualified (Masters' degrees or more) tech specialists looking for a job in my (small) city alone. And my city is peanuts compared to Frankfurt. It's tiny.
So don't try this at home, at least unless you have two degrees and preferably a PhD as well as being mother-tongue bilingual in German and English, and maybe in another language too, have kept German-style Letters Of Reference throughout your professional career and you have friends in reasonably high places or are naturally lucky. In a year or so it should be safe to try again (goes my optimistic viewpoint), but in the meantime there are better places to be, like just about anywhere else, except for on LinuxTag of course.
The German tech scene has been in trouble for a while now, probably ever since CeBIT ceased being anything but an intrabusiness marketing forum. As with everywhere, the year 2000 was a fun time here, but this spring's CeBIT was just depressing. New and cool stuff is mostly coming from elsewhere - German industry has done what the tech industry does at times like this, which is to dump R&D and fall back on selling management 'skills'. Curled up like a stunned hedgehog, in other words, and never mind the obvious prick jokes.
Hmm, well, in my time fiddling with Windows boxes I had a number of annoying errors, ranging from Windows XP's apparent inability to allow VS.Net to be installed after patching to mysterious and long-term loss of the ability to put a laptop into sleep mode. This occurred via about sixty inexplicably weird problems that range from mysterious corruption of files to mysterious faults in graphics card drivers leading to strange phantom effects on screen (turn down graphics acceleration, it goes away).
Now I am not ignoring the possibility that all of these things happen due to bad hardware, and could indeed say far nicer things about Win2K - I have never had a win2k problem, however weird, that can't be solved by a little thoughtful Googling. Yet.
OTOH... a 500mhz development box cannot handle XP +.NET + MSSQL + ASP + the MS CSK. It crunches for two minutes, screen ceases refreshing whilst it thinks, and then it comes up with a nice overloaded-server error. And that for a fairly Hello, World application... and what I like about Linux is that, if this sort of thing happens, I can try to find a solution, fiddle with settings, streamline stuff, etc. With Windows, if your hardware turns out to be inadequate, my experience is that you're just stuffed. You don't get the fine grain of control on things.
Of course, my mother is unlikely to care, so she has Windows. It's WinME - so it isn't locked down- and I'm not buying her another version, so we just reimage the drive now and then. C'est la vie.
Your first paragraphs are entirely irrelevant to my comment, since I disagreed with your definition of rape as "taking a service without permission" and am rather uninterested in joining a discussion about your philosophies re uploaders.
Thank you; I am aware of the French noun, viol. A more useful overview of rape in French law is available here, and may be briefly summarised in the following: "Tout acte de pénétration sexuelle, de quelque nature qu'il soit, commis sur la personne d'autrui par violence, contrainte, menace ou surprise est un viol [...] Le viol existe lorsque le consentement de la victime est vicié soit par la violence, la contrainte, la menace ou la surprise" I caution you to avoid making assumptions as to the implications of terms merely because they appear similar. As you are no doubt aware, faux amis (false cognates) are common in French, and many more words exist that correspond only in part to their English cognates. Whilst you are correct that rape involves a violation of consent, as stated in the linked definition, you must also note that "viol(er)" implies not only violation in the English sense, but desecration. A different expression does not necessarily alter the implications of the act behind the representation; it is the means by which the violation occur and the events within that make the rape, not just the existence of a circumstance legally definable as "violation of consent" or "consentement vicié". This explains why, at least in French, this term also appears in many other legal contexts (fraud, contract law, business law, etc).
Given that much of the audience here seldom visits the US, whatever trivialised definition of rape you personally may enjoy is hardly relevant to the discussion, in which you invoked the spectre of rape, not the badly-defined spectre of "offences ranging from the trivial to the serious, involving almost any form of invasive bodily contact without permission". You might realise why your "reference to rape would cause this reaction" - it is merely because it is a damn-fool stupid thing to say. Your comment, "Ask a 'sex worker' if sex is a service or a product; ask the guys who think their women aren't providing enough of it, or the other way around", is another (in which you may look for the sense underlying my "question about the bills"), and - ad hominem as this indeed is - underlines my suggestion of misogynism nicely. Would you call smiling a service? Watching a movie together? Sharing a joke? Perhaps you would. All of these are elements in human interaction, sex included. The mere fact that a subset of sexual activity with certain participants and conditions is de facto available for purchase does not require one to trivialise the whole issue.
In any case, the bottom line follows:- I've been there. Done that. Bought the T-shirt. I therefore feel entitled to note that I find your attitude childish and repellent, the sensationalism that you apply utterly inappropriate, and the apology provided in the original post to be inadequate. That said, I find your mitigation of the term "rape" rather amusing under the circumstances.
As for Godwin's law, I know of no law that states that "as a Slashdot thread grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving rape approaches one". The main reason for this is likely to be that there exist relatively few people daft enough to consider it as a helpful conversational gambit, despite its sensationalistic value.
Give up on the stupid rape analogy already. It's not only simplistic, it also makes you sound monumentally tactless/stupid.
"Take a service without permission, leaving the service more or less intact for others to take with or without permission" - if you think this is in any way an adequate description of rape, you are really in trouble. Do you consider sex 'a service'?! Did you grow up with Windows NT? Do you think you can start sex with the Win32 CreateService API function? Are you implying that you regularly see bills of the 'Hand Job, Qty. 1, $#' variety? Religious enough to go for the 'God-ordained master/servant relationship to man'? Misogynous enough to speak of sex as though between animals? Or are you merely somewhat cynically suggesting that all forms of physical affection are work done as a form of employment, and that rape is a crime merely because the attacker witholds the cash/barter?
Aside from the above, rape is a close-contact crime. If it were the case that the process of copyright violation required one to tie up the artist(s), rip their clothes off and shove CDs where the sun does not shine, then perhaps you might have a point that the two were analogous. Both would then involve pain, humiliation, helplessness, violation and potentially serious physical and psychological ramifications. Since this is manifestly not the case, I suggest to you that you should either update your choice of analogy (to, perhaps, having your paycheck unfairly docked because somebody stole your paperclips) or simply leave the sensationalism out entirely. You clearly knew that it was a dodgy analogy before you made it - so why bother?
Small random point: the BBC web site asks if you are from the UK in order to choose what version of the news site you see. You can answer "no" and get one with the various world regions down the left: Africas, Americas, Asia-Pacific, etc... or "yes", in which case you get: World, UK, England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Business, Politics, etc. If you click on the "Change Edition" link it'll let you try either.
It is entirely possible that they are using the information collected for nefarious purposes of profiling, data collection or other, but in that case they are not getting particularly good data on it, since many people choose the international edition merely because it has more actual news on it...
Slightly offtopic I realise - however; I eventually traced my personal dislike of Microsoft products down to, not the details of the software, but to the philosophy exhibited by parts of the user community.
Some issues are political, such as artificial limitations... Others are down to personal taste, such as software based on several layers of abstraction that seems to serve no purpose - such as Visual C++ 6.0's Member Variable Wizard... in fact, I would describe unnecessary obfuscation of perfectly simple principles to have been my major issue with MS stuff throughout, and the major cause for my preference for Unix development.
But I can accept the fact that these tools are designed for a different target market. The real issue for me is the working philosophy, the attitude that Microsoft seems to bring out in people; much as I detest sounding like Karl Marx, the Microsoft philosophy is somewhat extraordinary. It promises functionality on a sliding scale with relation to the amount of cash you care to put in. This, in a business environment, is no problem - sure, if you seriously believe that to successfully support a given task, you need MS Whatever '04, it's a business decision - but in the academic environment, it's pure poison to the more weak-minded type. For one thing, merely proving that one can achieve a goal by paying Microsoft is hardly a proof that one understands what one has done; for another, training students that the engineering process necessarily involves a stage in which one identifies the best-fit MS product is hardly a good preparation for a long-term career (or is it?). For another, MS sponsorship leads to limitations (MS products to be used only please?) that limit long-term viability of produced software, usefulness of results, and independence in research/ownership of research.
The other thing of course is that this 'smug haves' vs 'delusional have-nots' attitude that seems to be shared by a vocal subset of the MS user/manager community (though not all, of course - many are perfectly switched-on people) is utterly repellent. It suggests, forgive me for sounding Marxist again, that the bearer of that attitude feels extraordinarily superior and utterly secure of it. To those of us who are simply trying to get on with life and do as much science as possible on a limited budget, this is outstandingly irritating... so from that perspective it makes sense wherever possible to avoid the type, and by association the corporation, fundamentally for the reason that one is simply sick to the back teeth of the whole thing. If that makes sense.
...after totally losing it with my last so-called university job, I figured that research was a dish best served without direct monetary flavour. The alternative is to 'research' as you are paid to research, which in the computer-science field is of course merely another way of becoming an underpaid code monkey for the greater glory of a usually-very-stupid boss... so now I'm taking the PhD on my own terms until I persuade somebody into funding it for what it is, no strings attached, and getting money as a freelance translator (certification pending).
I think, if you're ideologically handicapped (eg, you have the irrational and idealistic belief that science involves facts) then the best type of science is at least initially that which you aren't paid for. The alternative is either to be very lucky, get a great boss or go blindly through your life ignoring the fact that you don't believe in your own papers, and eventually receive a PhD that might just as well be printed on toilet paper for all you'll care...
I thought he sounded like somebody I knew... and he does. There are a number of people like this hanging around the place in 'Old Europe' and elsewhere. Call them pseudo-programmers; they're basically characterised by an intolerable smugness and self-centred attitude. They invariably believe they have the Answer (with a capital A), which, simply, could be roughly characterised by the statements:
"America is the IT-Mecca of the EU" "Money is where the heart is" "Microsoft is where the money is" "Visual rocks; code sucks; the Future is Configuration" "You can trust Microsoft; they only want to help" "I follow Microsoft: ergo, I am right"
The saddest part is the naivete; this poor species of people (usually male and mid-thirties in my experience, generally relatively well-off... with exceptions) actually believe the above statements. For a range of reasons, few enough of these people ever suffer disillusionment. Within their viewpoint, Microsoft is not even lying. They themselves do not suffer from their decisions. And for them, this is not a world-view that admits uncertainty. It is the Way Life Is And Must Be...
And, because their little Way of the Blind Muppet works from their perspective, it never seriously occurs to them that they may not have the Whole Truth. Such muppets need a good slapping and a wider viewpoint.
Of course he is correct that one needs a source of income. Aside from this, his conclusions are dodgy as hell and should be duly ignored. Listening to people like this merely gives one a headache. You cannot be reasonable with them; there is no middle ground. They are the antithesis of the FSF geek and have an equally extreme perspective.
Shill. Sycophant. Enough cash to live comfortably, then learn to count what matters... the other things that are so much more satisfying to count in life, and the things to which this peculiar species are apparently blind.
Microsoft regional bollocks. Somewhere inside the DNA of any person who displays the ability to write a letter so eerily similar to the Bill Gates' 'hobbyist' effort, is the other sort of Selfish Gene. Leaving one to think that perhaps if he hadn't been (as he implies in the letter) supported by his parents for the first twenty-five years of his life, he might actually have learnt something about the need to deal with the sort of end-of-student-loan supermarket-stacking ramen-eating penny-counting poverty that leads the rest of the world to having to get by with less. And he might have learned something about gratitude, community, and common fucking sense.
Young Programmer Aiden, do whatever the hell you feel like -- and ignore the prick with the Microsoft paycheck. He ain't God though he thinks he has the Fast-Track into the Divine Mind. Most people learn in childhood to make a sensible mixture between selfishness and sharing; this guy just hasn't twigged to it yet.
In the absence of urinary tract or kidney infections, urine is sterile. Though it is apparently a good culture medium, so keeping it sterile might be fun.
You have it in one. Back in the days when Mir's future was 'under discussion', the papers were full of dismissive comments on the subject of the station; it was mouldy, it was leaky, it was dangerous, there had been accidents... the mere fact that each of these problems had apparently been safely contained and dealt with (I find that impressive, frankly) was apparently irrelevent. The implication was that no space station that NASA would build could ever suffer from such embarrassing issues.
Given that the reality of the situation is clearly that the recent incarnation of NASA do not and have not succeeded in building and maintaining a space station single-handed, mouldy or otherwise, it seems like the only way to save face at this point is, "Well, why the hell do we really want a useless bloody space station anyway?"
I would have loved it if NASA had succeeded in opening up space, but I suspect that the American spirit has moved on; space has been 'done' and found not to be particularly shiny or pretty. Let the Russians take it, or the Chinese, or whoever has the guts; just hope that the next US move won't be the militarization of near-Earth... to ensure nobody else gets it either.
Slashdot Mirror
I had regular BSODS on my old laptop ('designed for Windows NT'), blamed to the Microsoft standard ps2 mouse driver. All cryptographically signed to MS and everything. I can only assume it was choking on the hardware in some way.
I like Win2K better. Six months and not one BSOD, fingers crossed, and unlike XP, when stuff goes wrong one can typically fix it oneself. XP just does that buzz grind buzz 'Have recovered from a serious error' thing... which, y know, would help, if it weren't for the fact that the recovery is often less than complete, and entire features mysteriously cease working and never return again...
When I moved last, I just unscrewed the more important of the hard drives and put it in hand luggage in an antistatic bag, screwed the rest of the machine up tight, and dropped the computer into a big blue Ikea bag with a bit of duct tape. Then I just checked it in at Heathrow as part of my luggage and picked it up at Frankfurt.
I'm typing on it now, so it must have worked. This I largely ascribe to the fact that, being a 500MHz Celeron and veteran of several years' life with my sister, the processor is pretty much rammed into its slot with bits of matchstick and TicTac box. Off-topic, this is the way I solve many computer problems. When the microswitch on my monitor died, I just wedged it down with a bit of matchstick. One UK computer supplier who shall remain nameless (and bankrupt) uses a glue gun for this purpose (I know; I had to clean out the glue from the pci slots), but I think matchsticks have more style.
In my view computers are a bit like asthma patients, and can get accustomed to irritant behaviour on the part of their owners if it happens all the time. The trick is never to treat them too well. If you do, watch it, or one day when you're tenderly prising a hard drive loose from its socket there'll be a very small whiff of smoke and that'll be it.
At this very moment I am looking at an autopsied computer belonging to a friend, which gave up the ghost one day in a highly interesting manner after he tried to replace the hard drive. It still boots, still POSTs, and still runs FreeDOS - but nothing that uses extended memory. Somehow, it has transformed itself from a 266MHz Genuine Pentium II into a 286 doorstop, despite having no visible scars. Spooky.
> One of the worst 3 presidents in US history.
At least he stuck around longer than William Henry Harrison.
Actually, that's not really a plus point, is it?
kaiidth at NOSPAM altern [dot] org
Joining the big bridge leap:
kaiidth at (NOSPAM!) altern[dot] org
Thanks, generous person to become my future benefactor... (well, one can hope!)
ifconfig eth0 hw ether my:mates:mac:address...
Not so sure about that. A vague relative of mine who lived in DC was snatched, raped and subsequently murdered on the way home from work, so there is clearly a non-zero chance of kidnap and torture, though not death by beheading I grant you. I don't know whether anybody taped the event, so I will grant you that one too, at least provisionally.
However, I can't honestly say that the mode of death prevalent in DC actually sounds particularly enjoyable to me either, so I personally take two lessons from it:
1) don't move to DC.
2) don't move to Iraq.
Whereas I checked from Bristol and got Google, but checking from my home machine in Germany showed it as well-and-truly down.
That's the magic of cached entries I guess.
Mind you, at the risk of replying to myself it is worth noting that the patch currently available actually does nothing more meaningful than checking to see if the code that got you there is this exact exploit or not... so I would expect a better patch to be coming out that actually deals with the real problem, which appears to be that some poor munchkin started to write an FPU exception handler somewhere near version 2.3 and got distracted before finishing it. I assume though that the production of such a patch implies working out what the dude actually meant to do, first.
Here is the LKML discussion thread on the subject. It's an interesting bug, briefly summarised by Matt Mackall as follows:
So there's a bit of a massive problem with FPU exception handling, which didn't come to light before. Wheee. Fun.
Hah. Yeah, getting a PhD in Germany often means getting paid as a Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter and doing pretty much what you get told until you get told that it's safe for you to quit. I grant you that I have met people who have done great things in their PhDs in Germany, and who are most impressively good at a lot of things. However, I have also met a large number of people who appeared to have no idea, to the extent that they couldn't define words in their own research papers because they weren't interested enough in their own field of research to find out what they meant!
:-)
What I mean to say is that, when I enrolled for my PhD in a UK university, I was given a Talk about What It Meant and What My Rights Were. They make it clear that it is about one's own research, it's one's own chance to show what one can do in a chosen research field (obviously grants can get in the way of this, if you're being paid by SmithKlineBeecham or whichever!) The general theme of the thing was very much in the idealistic direction. Of course, with a UK university you are generally not a research assistant but a student, and therefore if you don't graduate after being accepted for the PhD that is bad for the university.
In Germany (previously) my experience was rather different, being saddled with a supervisor with no idea and no interest in actual reality and a fellow PhD 'student' with an apparent total lack of interest in the ongoing research. I have the strong impression that whilst it is possible for a 'research assistant' approach to work, as one sometimes sees, it is not by any means guaranteed - and the fact that your professor controls everything (as is not true in at least some Universities in the UK) means that the pressure to toe the line and just do largely what you get told is intense. Most PhD candidates I know here seem to do just that. Stupid ideas are therefore propogated by successive generations... because it's pointless (and Not Done) to disagree with your Professor (TM). And it is made worse by the proportion of PhD candidates who did their undergrad studies in the same university - they have never been exposed to a different viewpoint.
The usual way of changing your research direction in Germany is to get hired by a different professor, who happens to think the way you do. The final point being that frankly I find the sort of Joining-the-Family-Worship-The-Professor control-freak nature of it all to be a pretty darn weird way of encouraging original thought, let alone the threat of PhD removal. That is all
Of course the problem with this discussion is that a significant number of the softer-science PhDs out there should therefore lose them. A significant subset of the PhDs out there operates by publishing in minor journals and applying for grants of a reasonably soft-science sort of nature, doing their thing in a woolly-minded sort of way until the grant runs out, and writing conclusions that come directly from their own arses. How do they survive? well, for the same reason that a lot of bullshit survives.
Nobody is really motivated enough to take them to court for it (and you know as well as I do that half the businesses out there are looking for justification of the opinion they already had, not actual truth). You are of course right, in that scientists who behave dishonourably should lose their PhD status - but it doesn't work like that, for the reason that universities are largely non-idealistic institutions designed for the personal profit of their professors (who are after medium personal glory and an otherwise quiet life) and therefore, provided you are not found out, it is not to the university's benefit to kick you out. Produce the odd press release and make sure your professor gets his moments of glory, and unless you do something really stupid, the mere fact that you produced no useful research in your entire lifetime and most of your journal publications are in the West Argentinian Journal Of Web Engineering is not going to bother anybody. It's politics. It sucks. Only in a relatively few good universities has a PhD student got any hope of retaining any lingering idealism.
As a person who used UK vodaphone for years, I should like to congratulate you for saying exactly what I think of them. We had a family-size contract with them that totalled to somewhere round 250 ppm, realised that we could save half of this by changing one account to a different tariff structure, and spent the next six months trying to change it (note, this is four years after the mandatory contract length ran out). Five hundred wasted quid and twelve letters later, we finally got them to change it by a process of what I can only describe as nuisance phone calling.
I will forever fondly remember vodaphone as the company whose telephone representative told me in all seriousness that they couldn't tell me how to access voicemail on my new mobile, because it violated the Data Protection Act. The answer: "Press '1', and hold".
I know you're not serious but you should know that Germany is experiencing what is most kindly referred to as a tech slowdown, and more honestly referred to as: Today, there are nearly four hundred long-term unemployed, well qualified (Masters' degrees or more) tech specialists looking for a job in my (small) city alone. And my city is peanuts compared to Frankfurt. It's tiny.
So don't try this at home, at least unless you have two degrees and preferably a PhD as well as being mother-tongue bilingual in German and English, and maybe in another language too, have kept German-style Letters Of Reference throughout your professional career and you have friends in reasonably high places or are naturally lucky. In a year or so it should be safe to try again (goes my optimistic viewpoint), but in the meantime there are better places to be, like just about anywhere else, except for on LinuxTag of course.
The German tech scene has been in trouble for a while now, probably ever since CeBIT ceased being anything but an intrabusiness marketing forum. As with everywhere, the year 2000 was a fun time here, but this spring's CeBIT was just depressing. New and cool stuff is mostly coming from elsewhere - German industry has done what the tech industry does at times like this, which is to dump R&D and fall back on selling management 'skills'. Curled up like a stunned hedgehog, in other words, and never mind the obvious prick jokes.
Hmm, well, in my time fiddling with Windows boxes I had a number of annoying errors, ranging from Windows XP's apparent inability to allow VS.Net to be installed after patching to mysterious and long-term loss of the ability to put a laptop into sleep mode. This occurred via about sixty inexplicably weird problems that range from mysterious corruption of files to mysterious faults in graphics card drivers leading to strange phantom effects on screen (turn down graphics acceleration, it goes away).
.NET + MSSQL + ASP + the MS CSK. It crunches for two minutes, screen ceases refreshing whilst it thinks, and then it comes up with a nice overloaded-server error. And that for a fairly Hello, World application... and what I like about Linux is that, if this sort of thing happens, I can try to find a solution, fiddle with settings, streamline stuff, etc. With Windows, if your hardware turns out to be inadequate, my experience is that you're just stuffed. You don't get the fine grain of control on things.
Now I am not ignoring the possibility that all of these things happen due to bad hardware, and could indeed say far nicer things about Win2K - I have never had a win2k problem, however weird, that can't be solved by a little thoughtful Googling. Yet.
OTOH... a 500mhz development box cannot handle XP +
Of course, my mother is unlikely to care, so she has Windows. It's WinME - so it isn't locked down- and I'm not buying her another version, so we just reimage the drive now and then. C'est la vie.
Contraceptive coil (IUD, not IUS) and non-spermicidal condom? Or finding a bloke who's had the unkindest cut of all :-)
Your first paragraphs are entirely irrelevant to my comment, since I disagreed with your definition of rape as "taking a service without permission" and am rather uninterested in joining a discussion about your philosophies re uploaders.
Thank you; I am aware of the French noun, viol. A more useful overview of rape in French law is available here, and may be briefly summarised in the following: "Tout acte de pénétration sexuelle, de quelque nature qu'il soit, commis sur la personne d'autrui par violence, contrainte, menace ou surprise est un viol [...] Le viol existe lorsque le consentement de la victime est vicié soit par la violence, la contrainte, la menace ou la surprise" I caution you to avoid making assumptions as to the implications of terms merely because they appear similar. As you are no doubt aware, faux amis (false cognates) are common in French, and many more words exist that correspond only in part to their English cognates. Whilst you are correct that rape involves a violation of consent, as stated in the linked definition, you must also note that "viol(er)" implies not only violation in the English sense, but desecration. A different expression does not necessarily alter the implications of the act behind the representation; it is the means by which the violation occur and the events within that make the rape, not just the existence of a circumstance legally definable as "violation of consent" or "consentement vicié". This explains why, at least in French, this term also appears in many other legal contexts (fraud, contract law, business law, etc).
Given that much of the audience here seldom visits the US, whatever trivialised definition of rape you personally may enjoy is hardly relevant to the discussion, in which you invoked the spectre of rape, not the badly-defined spectre of "offences ranging from the trivial to the serious, involving almost any form of invasive bodily contact without permission". You might realise why your "reference to rape would cause this reaction" - it is merely because it is a damn-fool stupid thing to say. Your comment, "Ask a 'sex worker' if sex is a service or a product; ask the guys who think their women aren't providing enough of it, or the other way around", is another (in which you may look for the sense underlying my "question about the bills"), and - ad hominem as this indeed is - underlines my suggestion of misogynism nicely. Would you call smiling a service? Watching a movie together? Sharing a joke? Perhaps you would. All of these are elements in human interaction, sex included. The mere fact that a subset of sexual activity with certain participants and conditions is de facto available for purchase does not require one to trivialise the whole issue.
In any case, the bottom line follows:- I've been there. Done that. Bought the T-shirt. I therefore feel entitled to note that I find your attitude childish and repellent, the sensationalism that you apply utterly inappropriate, and the apology provided in the original post to be inadequate. That said, I find your mitigation of the term "rape" rather amusing under the circumstances.
As for Godwin's law, I know of no law that states that "as a Slashdot thread grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving rape approaches one". The main reason for this is likely to be that there exist relatively few people daft enough to consider it as a helpful conversational gambit, despite its sensationalistic value.
Give up on the stupid rape analogy already. It's not only simplistic, it also makes you sound monumentally tactless/stupid.
"Take a service without permission, leaving the service more or less intact for others to take with or without permission" - if you think this is in any way an adequate description of rape, you are really in trouble. Do you consider sex 'a service'?! Did you grow up with Windows NT? Do you think you can start sex with the Win32 CreateService API function? Are you implying that you regularly see bills of the 'Hand Job, Qty. 1, $#' variety? Religious enough to go for the 'God-ordained master/servant relationship to man'? Misogynous enough to speak of sex as though between animals? Or are you merely somewhat cynically suggesting that all forms of physical affection are work done as a form of employment, and that rape is a crime merely because the attacker witholds the cash/barter?
Aside from the above, rape is a close-contact crime. If it were the case that the process of copyright violation required one to tie up the artist(s), rip their clothes off and shove CDs where the sun does not shine, then perhaps you might have a point that the two were analogous. Both would then involve pain, humiliation, helplessness, violation and potentially serious physical and psychological ramifications. Since this is manifestly not the case, I suggest to you that you should either update your choice of analogy (to, perhaps, having your paycheck unfairly docked because somebody stole your paperclips) or simply leave the sensationalism out entirely. You clearly knew that it was a dodgy analogy before you made it - so why bother?
No, but they can refuse to give the other half of your skull back.
Small random point: the BBC web site asks if you are from the UK in order to choose what version of the news site you see. You can answer "no" and get one with the various world regions down the left: Africas, Americas, Asia-Pacific, etc... or "yes", in which case you get: World, UK, England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Business, Politics, etc. If you click on the "Change Edition" link it'll let you try either.
It is entirely possible that they are using the information collected for nefarious purposes of profiling, data collection or other, but in that case they are not getting particularly good data on it, since many people choose the international edition merely because it has more actual news on it...
Slightly offtopic I realise - however; I eventually traced my personal dislike of Microsoft products down to, not the details of the software, but to the philosophy exhibited by parts of the user community.
Some issues are political, such as artificial limitations... Others are down to personal taste, such as software based on several layers of abstraction that seems to serve no purpose - such as Visual C++ 6.0's Member Variable Wizard... in fact, I would describe unnecessary obfuscation of perfectly simple principles to have been my major issue with MS stuff throughout, and the major cause for my preference for Unix development.
But I can accept the fact that these tools are designed for a different target market. The real issue for me is the working philosophy, the attitude that Microsoft seems to bring out in people; much as I detest sounding like Karl Marx, the Microsoft philosophy is somewhat extraordinary. It promises functionality on a sliding scale with relation to the amount of cash you care to put in. This, in a business environment, is no problem - sure, if you seriously believe that to successfully support a given task, you need MS Whatever '04, it's a business decision - but in the academic environment, it's pure poison to the more weak-minded type. For one thing, merely proving that one can achieve a goal by paying Microsoft is hardly a proof that one understands what one has done; for another, training students that the engineering process necessarily involves a stage in which one identifies the best-fit MS product is hardly a good preparation for a long-term career (or is it?). For another, MS sponsorship leads to limitations (MS products to be used only please?) that limit long-term viability of produced software, usefulness of results, and independence in research/ownership of research.
The other thing of course is that this 'smug haves' vs 'delusional have-nots' attitude that seems to be shared by a vocal subset of the MS user/manager community (though not all, of course - many are perfectly switched-on people) is utterly repellent. It suggests, forgive me for sounding Marxist again, that the bearer of that attitude feels extraordinarily superior and utterly secure of it. To those of us who are simply trying to get on with life and do as much science as possible on a limited budget, this is outstandingly irritating... so from that perspective it makes sense wherever possible to avoid the type, and by association the corporation, fundamentally for the reason that one is simply sick to the back teeth of the whole thing. If that makes sense.
...after totally losing it with my last so-called university job, I figured that research was a dish best served without direct monetary flavour. The alternative is to 'research' as you are paid to research, which in the computer-science field is of course merely another way of becoming an underpaid code monkey for the greater glory of a usually-very-stupid boss... so now I'm taking the PhD on my own terms until I persuade somebody into funding it for what it is, no strings attached, and getting money as a freelance translator (certification pending).
I think, if you're ideologically handicapped (eg, you have the irrational and idealistic belief that science involves facts) then the best type of science is at least initially that which you aren't paid for. The alternative is either to be very lucky, get a great boss or go blindly through your life ignoring the fact that you don't believe in your own papers, and eventually receive a PhD that might just as well be printed on toilet paper for all you'll care...
I knew it.
I should like to give this guy a good slapping.
I thought he sounded like somebody I knew... and he does. There are a number of people like this hanging around the place in 'Old Europe' and elsewhere. Call them pseudo-programmers; they're basically characterised by an intolerable smugness and self-centred attitude. They invariably believe they have the Answer (with a capital A), which, simply, could be roughly characterised by the statements:
"America is the IT-Mecca of the EU"
"Money is where the heart is"
"Microsoft is where the money is"
"Visual rocks; code sucks; the Future is Configuration"
"You can trust Microsoft; they only want to help"
"I follow Microsoft: ergo, I am right"
The saddest part is the naivete; this poor species of people (usually male and mid-thirties in my experience, generally relatively well-off... with exceptions) actually believe the above statements. For a range of reasons, few enough of these people ever suffer disillusionment. Within their viewpoint, Microsoft is not even lying. They themselves do not suffer from their decisions. And for them, this is not a world-view that admits uncertainty. It is the Way Life Is And Must Be...
And, because their little Way of the Blind Muppet works from their perspective, it never seriously occurs to them that they may not have the Whole Truth. Such muppets need a good slapping and a wider viewpoint.
Of course he is correct that one needs a source of income. Aside from this, his conclusions are dodgy as hell and should be duly ignored. Listening to people like this merely gives one a headache. You cannot be reasonable with them; there is no middle ground. They are the antithesis of the FSF geek and have an equally extreme perspective.
Shill. Sycophant. Enough cash to live comfortably, then learn to count what matters... the other things that are so much more satisfying to count in life, and the things to which this peculiar species are apparently blind.
Microsoft regional bollocks. Somewhere inside the DNA of any person who displays the ability to write a letter so eerily similar to the Bill Gates' 'hobbyist' effort, is the other sort of Selfish Gene. Leaving one to think that perhaps if he hadn't been (as he implies in the letter) supported by his parents for the first twenty-five years of his life, he might actually have learnt something about the need to deal with the sort of end-of-student-loan supermarket-stacking ramen-eating penny-counting poverty that leads the rest of the world to having to get by with less. And he might have learned something about gratitude, community, and common fucking sense.
Young Programmer Aiden, do whatever the hell you feel like -- and ignore the prick with the Microsoft paycheck. He ain't God though he thinks he has the Fast-Track into the Divine Mind. Most people learn in childhood to make a sensible mixture between selfishness and sharing; this guy just hasn't twigged to it yet.
*spits*
In the absence of urinary tract or kidney infections, urine is sterile. Though it is apparently a good culture medium, so keeping it sterile might be fun.
You have it in one. Back in the days when Mir's future was 'under discussion', the papers were full of dismissive comments on the subject of the station; it was mouldy, it was leaky, it was dangerous, there had been accidents... the mere fact that each of these problems had apparently been safely contained and dealt with (I find that impressive, frankly) was apparently irrelevent. The implication was that no space station that NASA would build could ever suffer from such embarrassing issues.
:-P
Given that the reality of the situation is clearly that the recent incarnation of NASA do not and have not succeeded in building and maintaining a space station single-handed, mouldy or otherwise, it seems like the only way to save face at this point is, "Well, why the hell do we really want a useless bloody space station anyway?"
I would have loved it if NASA had succeeded in opening up space, but I suspect that the American spirit has moved on; space has been 'done' and found not to be particularly shiny or pretty. Let the Russians take it, or the Chinese, or whoever has the guts; just hope that the next US move won't be the militarization of near-Earth... to ensure nobody else gets it either.
Tin-foil hat removed, on with life