I have a few friends who think it's "funny" to have half a dozen different profiles on Facebook, it makes no sense to me and it makes them very hard to keep track of...
You think it's not the way to go, there are lots of us who think it is the way to go. And those handling NASA's funding don't care either way, they just want large chunks of government money sent to their states and if they can't get it they do all they can to make sure no one else gets it either...
That's actually a very common IT/software dev reaction to marketing decisions, "Fine, we'll spend three weeks building this feature and make sure to make it log everything just so we can get them to realize that it's pointless".
Ah, but what if you're the guy who's installing a rack full of new gear? Or perhaps doing other hardware-related work in the datacenter and you need to call Joe, the sysadmin in charge of system xyz to ask him about the instructions he scribbled on a napkin which you can at best interpret as "wen/talling sstem make siiie cd320-co.jkei.djk ls conn drec tsm23_33uid.erjk.djk"?
Why? It took me a very long time after Vista came out before I first used it, the reasons for this included (in no specific order):
I don't run MS Windows at home, not a single Windows install here (although I do have a couple of licenses).
We weren't running Vista at work (nor planning to deploy it).
I wasn't really interested in going through the hassle of installing Windows Vista just to try it out since I had already read enough about it to be fairly uninterested in it.
To this day, despite being a software developer who also doubles as a sysadmin when the regular senior sysadmin is unreachable, I still haven't used Windows 7 more than maybe four or five hours, and all that time went to helping a friend who had a damaged Win7 system.
Right, because it's not possible that at work they use XP + Server 2k3 and at home Coopa uses OS X, FreeBSD, Plan 9, Linux, Solaris or a whole bunch of other operating systems...
I know this may come as a shock to you but some people who have a keen interest in computers, electronics, technology and science really don't give a damn about MS Windows outside of what they're required to know for work (if any at all).
If you only want a gun because you want to be cool then generally you're probably not going feel like dealing with all the paperwork and exams (oh yes, there are exams, both theoretical and practical).
As for criminals, if you have an illegal gun in your home or on your person then that's something you can get busted for, and in an environment where the average person doesn't have a gun it's not really worth the effort for the average criminal to have one either (since all it takes is the cops searching him/her or his/her home and the criminal is off to jail).
Actually I'd argue that what you described shows that banning guns doesn't work. One guy used an automatic rifle, so they banned it. The next guy used a handgun, so they banned that. The next guy used a shotgun, so they banned that. What's next a guy using a butcher's cleaver so they ban that?
Well, a meat cleaver is a lot harder to go on a killing spree with than a gun. If you tried attacking a crowd of people with a meat cleaver chances are a lot of them would simply run away from you with a few possibly jumping you from behind, "massacre" over. You stand 30 ft. away and empty a few clips in their general direction and the situation is a bit trickier from their point of view.
You can always find a way to cause physical harm against another person ranging from string, table legs, anvils to guns. Should we ban all those when a single person miss uses them?
String - Plenty of everyday uses.
Table legs - Are generally used for holding tables up, can also be used as a hammer in an emergency.
Anvils - Fairly specialized and not exactly easy to use for randomly attacking people in the street (well, you could chuck it from a building but good luck retrieving it and doing it again)
Guns - Gee, I guess I could shoot out light bulbs like Homer Simpson but other than that it's either for recreation (hunting is recreation these days, even in rural parts of the civilized world) or violence...
Basically, guns are a tool for hurting others or target practice, most places (even here in commie y'urp) allow people to keep guns for target practice, it's just that they try to discourage the macho idiots from getting guns by making the paperwork and requirements surrounding gun ownership a PITA.
Well, knowing governments everywhere it's likely the domain wouldn't be police.somecity.somestate.gov but rather pdcity.somecounty.scity.state.gov...
Re:Not true - you still need sufficient horsepower
on
Prosecuting DDoS Attacks?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
In a way I think "properly configured" includes "not running on a 512/128 kbps DSL line", "not running the latest whizbang blogging platform webapp on a 133 MHz Pentium with 64 megs of RAM" and "not trying to server up funny cyborg pet videos on said 512/128 kbps DSL line".
There seem to be three common scenarios when sites get slashdotted:
"Junk lovers" who take pride in running their home server on some ancient piece of junk they got for free ten years ago, generally have blog posts about how they managed to speed up SpamAssassin so it now only takes ten minutes to process each incoming message, completely oblivious to why it is not advisable to run modern resource-intensive software on ancient hardware.
And then the guys who have shared hosting which they're constantly pushing to its limits even without getting slashdotted ("I have n gigs of transfer per month and I'm only using 96% of that on an average month, why would I upgrade?"), also known as cheapskates.
Extremely resource-intensive server-side processing, I'm not talking about people who run Wordpress on a 486, I'm talking about those "Look at the neat stuff we did" sites that run on some lab server that is unable to handle the load of hundreds of/. users trying it out at the same time.
Given the recent tactics employed by hijackers, travellers should be aware that, in the unlikely event that assailtants gain control of the aircraft, survival of crew and passengers is unlikley.
Actually, looking only at the statistics the survival of the crew and passengers in case of a hijacking is still highly likely.
But Python had a bit of consistency in 2.x that PHP has always lacked. And once you get used to how stuff works in python you can just sort of guess at how various parts of the standard library work unlike PHP where it's seemingly random.
That said, I do hold a bit of a grudge toward PHP since I have some code that I wrote in PHP ages ago and took great care to make sure it was nearly bug-free and now I can't be bothered rewriting it in a more sane language (this is OO PHP4 code with some PHP5 thrown in for kicks, at least all the old PHP3 stuff is gone and I no longer have any mod_perl crap to worry about).
In an RTS, it's might be quick and easy to order your squad to take out that enemy platoon, while you worry about the grander scheme of things.
Unfortunately that's not how most RTS games work, for some reason developers of these games seem to think that what all RTS players crave is tight quick battles where they have to control everything. Hell, in most so-called RTS games you can't order a few units to travel from point A to point B reliably, you actually have to keep an eye on the minimap to make sure they don't decide to wander halfway across the map and attempt to take some convoluted path through the enemy's base (ok, this doesn't happen all that often but does happen) and when it comes to combat you pretty much have to position units manually unless you're doing a tank/zerg/whatever rush. A great example of this from Red Alert 3 is if you send a small "navy" with a couple of carriers to take out the enemy base and your defensive units (non-carrier units) will happily let the carriers get blown to bits by the enemy, that's AI for you...
Yes, but the reason that caused trouble for MS was because they were using their near-complete monopoly in one market to kill off competitors in another market by bundling their product for that market with their "monopoly product".
A suitable car analogy might be if Ford manufactured 95% of all trucks but didn't sell them with trailers, then one day they decided to enter the trailer market by buying licensing "trailer technology" from some other company and bundling a trailer with every truck, that would pretty much kill the trailer market. The dishonest part basically being that they were basically giving their new product away to kill off the competition and gain complete control over the trailer market.
You may be wrong there. Once a product has a large enough market share, monopoly regulations come into play, whether there are competitors or not. Especially if you use your market share in one market to gain share in a different market. Which is precisely why Microsoft had to change some things - even though there were dozens of other operating systems and office products.
Of course, MS had a 90+% market share on the desktop OS market, what's the iPhone's market share? Even if we're looking at smartphones I have yet to see any stats that even put it above 50%...
As for the music player market, they don't hold a majority on that either, if you narrow down the criteria enough I suppose you could give them a majority market share in part of that market but it's not like MS and operating systems where it was basically "almost completely owns the market except for the server market which they're advancing into strongly".
Wow, it's so obvious now, I think I've figured out how to actually avoid an unpleasant afterlife if there is a god.
If you just make sure that several religions end up fighting over the right to send your soul to their version of hell then you could probably negotiate a pretty sweet deal ("Ok, I'll go to your hell but you have to skip the torture. And I want a nice house, and a maid, and hot girls. Also, I'd like to go to your heaven on the weekends").
But even if you could do your job from anywhere a lot of times employers want you to be in the office during office hours so that they can make sure you're working (although they'll describe it with a bunch of talk about wanting the employees to function well as a team and such things).
Personally I could easily do my job from home or a beach in some much warmer country but my boss would rather have me come to the office every day and sit there, even if we both know I have no work to do for the first couple of hours of a particular day (and the boss is unreachable and unable to assign further things to do, pretty common at the end of a project when the boss is already busy in meetings planning the next project).
Actually, when I was about seven years old I was mainly fascinated by two things, computers and drugs (the mind-altering aspects of LSD and other similar substances really piqued my curiosity). Since we didn't have either at home when I was that age I went to the library and flipped through books about computers and drugs, trying to understand them that way, it was better than nothing. A year later we got our first computer at home and I could code on a real computer. As for the drugs, well that took a few more years before I had access to them (except for alcohol which I suppose I could've "borrowed" from my parents).
And what's with the strawman of "10 million people... who's (sic) sole job it is to annoy and slow down their economy"? I never said anything of the sort. By the way:
In the US it seems a lot of people assume that unless proof of the opposite exists then anyone working for the government is unqualified, lazy, expensive and generally just a burden on everyone else.
nly reason Apple shipped the iPad during the slowest shopping time of the year is to work out the bugs before the next holiday season and get market share before everyone else.
There's also the possibility that they've got some other big product release coming up before the end of the year and didn't want their products competing for attention.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a few friends who think it's "funny" to have half a dozen different profiles on Facebook, it makes no sense to me and it makes them very hard to keep track of...
You think it's not the way to go, there are lots of us who think it is the way to go. And those handling NASA's funding don't care either way, they just want large chunks of government money sent to their states and if they can't get it they do all they can to make sure no one else gets it either...
That's actually a very common IT/software dev reaction to marketing decisions, "Fine, we'll spend three weeks building this feature and make sure to make it log everything just so we can get them to realize that it's pointless".
Ah, but what if you're the guy who's installing a rack full of new gear? Or perhaps doing other hardware-related work in the datacenter and you need to call Joe, the sysadmin in charge of system xyz to ask him about the instructions he scribbled on a napkin which you can at best interpret as "wen /talling sstem make siiie cd320-co.jkei.djk ls conn drec tsm23_33uid.erjk.djk"?
Why? It took me a very long time after Vista came out before I first used it, the reasons for this included (in no specific order):
To this day, despite being a software developer who also doubles as a sysadmin when the regular senior sysadmin is unreachable, I still haven't used Windows 7 more than maybe four or five hours, and all that time went to helping a friend who had a damaged Win7 system.
Right, because it's not possible that at work they use XP + Server 2k3 and at home Coopa uses OS X, FreeBSD, Plan 9, Linux, Solaris or a whole bunch of other operating systems...
I know this may come as a shock to you but some people who have a keen interest in computers, electronics, technology and science really don't give a damn about MS Windows outside of what they're required to know for work (if any at all).
If you only want a gun because you want to be cool then generally you're probably not going feel like dealing with all the paperwork and exams (oh yes, there are exams, both theoretical and practical).
As for criminals, if you have an illegal gun in your home or on your person then that's something you can get busted for, and in an environment where the average person doesn't have a gun it's not really worth the effort for the average criminal to have one either (since all it takes is the cops searching him/her or his/her home and the criminal is off to jail).
Actually I'd argue that what you described shows that banning guns doesn't work. One guy used an automatic rifle, so they banned it. The next guy used a handgun, so they banned that. The next guy used a shotgun, so they banned that. What's next a guy using a butcher's cleaver so they ban that?
Well, a meat cleaver is a lot harder to go on a killing spree with than a gun. If you tried attacking a crowd of people with a meat cleaver chances are a lot of them would simply run away from you with a few possibly jumping you from behind, "massacre" over. You stand 30 ft. away and empty a few clips in their general direction and the situation is a bit trickier from their point of view.
You can always find a way to cause physical harm against another person ranging from string, table legs, anvils to guns. Should we ban all those when a single person miss uses them?
Basically, guns are a tool for hurting others or target practice, most places (even here in commie y'urp) allow people to keep guns for target practice, it's just that they try to discourage the macho idiots from getting guns by making the paperwork and requirements surrounding gun ownership a PITA.
Well, knowing governments everywhere it's likely the domain wouldn't be police.somecity.somestate.gov but rather pdcity.somecounty.scity.state.gov...
In a way I think "properly configured" includes "not running on a 512/128 kbps DSL line", "not running the latest whizbang blogging platform webapp on a 133 MHz Pentium with 64 megs of RAM" and "not trying to server up funny cyborg pet videos on said 512/128 kbps DSL line".
There seem to be three common scenarios when sites get slashdotted:
Given the recent tactics employed by hijackers, travellers should be aware that, in the unlikely event that assailtants gain control of the aircraft, survival of crew and passengers is unlikley.
Actually, looking only at the statistics the survival of the crew and passengers in case of a hijacking is still highly likely.
One-way communication over radio with OTP encrypted messages is a lot safer than using Tor to access some service somewhere,
Of course, the namespace operator in PHP is "\" which seems to be hated by just about everyone.
But Python had a bit of consistency in 2.x that PHP has always lacked. And once you get used to how stuff works in python you can just sort of guess at how various parts of the standard library work unlike PHP where it's seemingly random.
That said, I do hold a bit of a grudge toward PHP since I have some code that I wrote in PHP ages ago and took great care to make sure it was nearly bug-free and now I can't be bothered rewriting it in a more sane language (this is OO PHP4 code with some PHP5 thrown in for kicks, at least all the old PHP3 stuff is gone and I no longer have any mod_perl crap to worry about).
In an RTS, it's might be quick and easy to order your squad to take out that enemy platoon, while you worry about the grander scheme of things.
Unfortunately that's not how most RTS games work, for some reason developers of these games seem to think that what all RTS players crave is tight quick battles where they have to control everything. Hell, in most so-called RTS games you can't order a few units to travel from point A to point B reliably, you actually have to keep an eye on the minimap to make sure they don't decide to wander halfway across the map and attempt to take some convoluted path through the enemy's base (ok, this doesn't happen all that often but does happen) and when it comes to combat you pretty much have to position units manually unless you're doing a tank/zerg/whatever rush. A great example of this from Red Alert 3 is if you send a small "navy" with a couple of carriers to take out the enemy base and your defensive units (non-carrier units) will happily let the carriers get blown to bits by the enemy, that's AI for you...
Yes, but the reason that caused trouble for MS was because they were using their near-complete monopoly in one market to kill off competitors in another market by bundling their product for that market with their "monopoly product".
A suitable car analogy might be if Ford manufactured 95% of all trucks but didn't sell them with trailers, then one day they decided to enter the trailer market by buying licensing "trailer technology" from some other company and bundling a trailer with every truck, that would pretty much kill the trailer market. The dishonest part basically being that they were basically giving their new product away to kill off the competition and gain complete control over the trailer market.
Ok, not the best car analogy ever..
You may be wrong there. Once a product has a large enough market share, monopoly regulations come into play, whether there are competitors or not. Especially if you use your market share in one market to gain share in a different market. Which is precisely why Microsoft had to change some things - even though there were dozens of other operating systems and office products.
Of course, MS had a 90+% market share on the desktop OS market, what's the iPhone's market share? Even if we're looking at smartphones I have yet to see any stats that even put it above 50%...
As for the music player market, they don't hold a majority on that either, if you narrow down the criteria enough I suppose you could give them a majority market share in part of that market but it's not like MS and operating systems where it was basically "almost completely owns the market except for the server market which they're advancing into strongly".
Wow, it's so obvious now, I think I've figured out how to actually avoid an unpleasant afterlife if there is a god.
If you just make sure that several religions end up fighting over the right to send your soul to their version of hell then you could probably negotiate a pretty sweet deal ("Ok, I'll go to your hell but you have to skip the torture. And I want a nice house, and a maid, and hot girls. Also, I'd like to go to your heaven on the weekends").
But even if you could do your job from anywhere a lot of times employers want you to be in the office during office hours so that they can make sure you're working (although they'll describe it with a bunch of talk about wanting the employees to function well as a team and such things).
Personally I could easily do my job from home or a beach in some much warmer country but my boss would rather have me come to the office every day and sit there, even if we both know I have no work to do for the first couple of hours of a particular day (and the boss is unreachable and unable to assign further things to do, pretty common at the end of a project when the boss is already busy in meetings planning the next project).
I've actually wondered this myself for a while. In its simplest form it could just be something like:
<latex>y &= \frac{x^2}{7}</latex>
Or at least something similar to that. Not exactly very html-ish but it's not like the purpose would be to create entire websites using LaTeX...
Actually, when I was about seven years old I was mainly fascinated by two things, computers and drugs (the mind-altering aspects of LSD and other similar substances really piqued my curiosity). Since we didn't have either at home when I was that age I went to the library and flipped through books about computers and drugs, trying to understand them that way, it was better than nothing. A year later we got our first computer at home and I could code on a real computer. As for the drugs, well that took a few more years before I had access to them (except for alcohol which I suppose I could've "borrowed" from my parents).
And what's with the strawman of "10 million people... who's (sic) sole job it is to annoy and slow down their economy"? I never said anything of the sort. By the way:
In the US it seems a lot of people assume that unless proof of the opposite exists then anyone working for the government is unqualified, lazy, expensive and generally just a burden on everyone else.
nly reason Apple shipped the iPad during the slowest shopping time of the year is to work out the bugs before the next holiday season and get market share before everyone else.
There's also the possibility that they've got some other big product release coming up before the end of the year and didn't want their products competing for attention.
The 8 or so iPhone users constantly struggle with connectivity issues just to get email unless it's 8pm at night for some reason.
I've only heard of connectivity problems from american iPhone users who are using AT&T, it's most likely a network problem.
Actually, they bought QDOS which was a CP/M clone.