Yeah, because they need a sysadmin, and any boob can pick up the neccesary skills in a couple of community college courses. Sysadmins? They're a dime a dozen, and all the same. How hard is it to turn on a computer, anyway? Augh.
If the tasks were simple enough that a high school kid who "likes computers" could do it just fine, they wouldn't need a real sysadmin. Probably no one would. Augh. It doesn't matter if you're dealing with five boxes or five hundred - if the job's worth doing, it's worth doing *right*. Doing the job "right" doesn't mean having one of the existing employees handle sysadmin tasks in their spare time - though it might mean having the sysadmin do other tasks in his spare time...
Hmph. An ass is something that often acts beligerantly for no apparent reason, much like I'm doing right now and did in the previous post.:) It's an effective metaphor. Under the sun is appropriate, since conventionally the sun is what you see when you look "up" during the day. In fact, given a point of reference (let's use me as a point of reference, since I'm pretty sure that everything revolves around me, and I consider the sun to be "up"), there is always an "up" and a "down". So "under the sun" is an effective metaphor.
"Finding a cure for cancer" is an ignorant statement made by someone ignorant to medicine who's trying to make themselves look smart - "yeah, I know about cancer but apparently have never heard of chemotherapy and surgery which are used to succesfully treat many kinds of cancer every day" - but accomplishing exactly the opposite. Usually it's used by the same people who refer to anything complex as "rocket science" when, in fact, simple aerodynamics and chemistry aren't exactly the most complicated studies around. So, not only does it not fit in with the metaphors to which you compare it, but explaining that you knew that and used the expression anyway, well, I can't really see that as an effective defence of anything.;)
That said, I pointed it out because it's a pet peeve whose rant has been building up inside of me for weeks. People say "why work on 'x' when there's still no cure for cancer?", but they neglect to consider that people are better suited to researching other areas and couldn't effectively contribute to cancer research even if they wanted to do so. I'll grant that you didn't make such a claim, but I'll still mock it as a pointless figure of speech. So there. But then I'll apologize for wasting several people's worth of rant at a single person who obviously knows better.
Oh, and removing tumors before they turn cancerous is preventative treatment, and the treatment I'd most like to have for cancer (stopping it before it starts). I'm treating my lung cancer right now by not smoking, in fact.:)
The post was going along just fine until you threw in your politics, claiming that the only corrupt and/or dimwitted people are those who affiliate with the current majority party. I'd argue that the intelligent from both parties tend to use their powers for evil, that the rest use their connections for evil, and that the present majority probably is better at current politics than any other party which is not presently in the majority.
I'd like to say that they're all idiots, but unfortunately "they" seem to be able to gain power over large groups of people, while you and I are left with supposedly superior intelligence as consolation. Perhaps they're not as stupid as we'd like to think...
Given that my Yamaha Receiver, Zenith, JVC, RCA, and Optoma Televisions (ok, the Optoma's a projector), Toshiba DVD player, Sansui CD player, Dish Network receivers, and RCA & Zenith VCRs don't ever turn on by themselves when the power flickers (not to mention the 12 ATX-based PCs in my house), I don't think most are designed that way.:) I did have an old Zenith which would do that, but we're talking early 80's...
Yeah, that addition of http:/// is a big problem for me, too. Often I type in a gopher:// URL and forget to type the protocol part, and other "user friendly" browsers will direct me to a malicious http:/// site which I certainly didn't want to visit.
I'm curious - which kind of cancer are we referring to here? Or are you yet another of the insightful armchair medical researchers who believe that all forms of cancer share some kind of common cause which can somehow be reached by a single drug, and then turned back into normal variants of whatever cell it was that's growing abnmormally?
BTW, there's already a cure for cancer. It's usually a knife, and it's used to cut the affected area out of the body. Problem solved.
If only it was possible for me to be discriminated against so I could have equal opportunities, too. Curse my moderate- to cold-weather acclimated skin, and lack of boobs.
So, in the last 20 years, you've never had a device which could be turned on by the remote if you turned it off by the switch? Because if the device is truly off, it won't be able to respond to the IR signal emitted by the remote. I suppose someone could have used a passive powered signal detector, but that'd probably decrease the remote's range / increase your odds of developing hand cancer.:)
Drunks are everywhere, and meth labs generally only affect people who live near them. And area dentists. When the worst crime is vandalism of a car in the "bad" part of town, and when the first murder (probably of a meth head) in several years results in front-page news for at least two weeks, I think it's fair to say there's low to no crime.:)
Heh: "There are currently no open positions within the City of Marengo". Just like the small town I grew up in. Except with about twice the population. Well, technically the village I grew up in had a population of about 33, but we lost our post office and zip code in the late 70's whenthe old woman who rant it out of the back room in her house stopped doing that (or possibly the other way around), so I now associate it officially with the "bigger city" with population=1100 a few miles down the road.:)/presently works for a Fortune 100 company and lives in a town with ~15,000 people
Ohhhh.... That makes more sense (Access as a rapid protyping tool).:)
My University IT comment was more directed to the amount of politics involved than the level of technology, if that helps put it in perspective at all. Though, there are certainly several with crummy technology, too.
So you use access to "join" data from a bunch of disparate databases, probably mostly designed by people who didn't know what they were doing. You know that an SQL "join" isn't something you do across multiple databases on multiple systems, right? Sure, the verb's the same, but it's not the same thing... If you'd used "collate" to begin with, it would've made more sense.
Also, working at an academic institution is not the real world. I've worked in IT for a college - it's very much *not* real-world.;)
So, you know that the post was a "knee-jerk", but you don't know what the point of the post is? I'll give you a big hint - I was agreeing with your assesment that the OP was probably making things up.
Just for giggles, though, let's review.
The Mensa members I've met all have high IQs, and they don't go around telling everyone what it is (which is why I refuse to pay the membership fee). Smart people generally are found out "naturally" without having to tell everyone "Hey, I'm smart! Look at me!"...
When someone's lying / "estimating", they almost always use round numbers - that doesn't mean that everyone who says "I have a 500 HP car" or "I have a 190 IQ" is lying, but it sure cuts into their credibility, as it's 9:1 more likely that someone would have a 189, 191, etc. Think about when you've pulled a number out of thin air - was it more likely to be 146.3 or 150?
IQ tests generally consist of things like anagrams and rotated isometric drawings - things which don't require much education.
So, where's the knee-jerk? Perhaps more to the point, why argue with someone who agreed with your self-professed hair-trigger post?
You know, I didn't try it on a Gentoo box - just Ubuntu and RedHat (and probably SuSE at one point). If I wasn't in the process of phasing Gentoo out on my home network...
Just because 200 is the upper limit of "measurable" genius, you think that the ghetto sysadmin might be making things up?:) Then, I guess that'd pretty well shut up the people who say those tests are somehow racially biased - as if recognizing an isometric drawing and quickly determining solutions to an anagram were more or less difficult depending on the color of one's skin...
That's what I was doing - it still insisted that I set up a bunch of crap. Maybe I was using an old version or something - but it's sucked like that each time I've thought "I'll give Myth another try"... Eh, I don't wanna record TV, so using "MythTV" probably isn't ideal anyway.:)
Most anything can run 800x600 just fine, if not 640x480, and that'll look pretty darned decent on your typical TV screen - especially since it only has to get 23fps (at 320x240) to look as good as anything else he'll see on TV (well, 29.9fps, I suppose).
Yes, and if you don't care about TV tuning, merely wanting to organize your DVDs and music on one electronic mecha-machine, MyTH is a waste. Why do I have to configure a TV card and add channel listings to even use this program again? I use Freevo, since it's easier to set up (IMHO) and doesn't asume that its main purpose in life is to record stuff. Heck, Freevo lets you remove the "watch TV" entry (and most anything else) from the main menu - and I think the interface is as nice / nicer than Myth's.
As an aside, I'd be more impressed if the guy had one tuner that could handle multiple channels. With GnuRadio I can use a single tuner to record several radio stations effectively simultaneously - and the machine isn't burning the house down. Nyah.:)
And before anyone says "maybe they've got lots of (big) games" this thing is specifically (and clearly obvious from the hardware) a PVR
Yeah, because it makes no sense to play games on the kick-ass PC you just built and hooked up to your best TV / media distribution system. Probably better to put the games elsewhere.
You can't keep the tables straight in your head? Maybe you should stop naming them "table1", "tbl2", etc and use meaningful names - it's not like the length of table/column names slows SQL down or anything...
Yeah, the relationship view thingie is half handy, but only half, and only if you didn't create a proper ER diagram for this huge complicated database beforehand like you and/or the developer / DBA should have. Yes, if it's too big to keep in your head, it oughtta be written down. In almost any situation, that holds, but esp. in anything database related.
Hypertext has been around for 30+ years, and there have been guidelines regarding how to write clear HTML for decades, many of which are based on actual research with users. The example given should be rewritten to something like "There are more details available" or "To read more, visit name of place to visit". This also sidesteps the foolishness of saying "click here" when you don't know for sure that the user will even be using a device that *can* click - not everyone uses a mouse for web navigation, and HTML doesn't require it...:)
As far as linking Joe's News and the article at Joe's News, while I can see your point, I disagree. The article isn't about Joe's News. The article is about an article published at Joe's News. If the reader wants more information, they have lots of ways to find more information - they can research the source with Google, they can probably go up to the top level from the linked artile, they can look for the related articles that might be linked on the article page, etc. In all of those cases, I think it's the job of the reader to figure out for themselves what extra information about the new source is relevant. Heck, it'll probably be rehashed for the millionth time a couple of comments down in the discussion. The addition of a bunch of extra links to the story makes it harder to read, and still only provides marginally more information at best (in this case). Sure, it makes very little extra information available to the laziest readers, but at the expense of readability - and at the expense of downplaying the importance of the actual article being discussed.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, because they need a sysadmin, and any boob can pick up the neccesary skills in a couple of community college courses. Sysadmins? They're a dime a dozen, and all the same. How hard is it to turn on a computer, anyway? Augh.
If the tasks were simple enough that a high school kid who "likes computers" could do it just fine, they wouldn't need a real sysadmin. Probably no one would. Augh. It doesn't matter if you're dealing with five boxes or five hundred - if the job's worth doing, it's worth doing *right*. Doing the job "right" doesn't mean having one of the existing employees handle sysadmin tasks in their spare time - though it might mean having the sysadmin do other tasks in his spare time...
Hmph. An ass is something that often acts beligerantly for no apparent reason, much like I'm doing right now and did in the previous post. :) It's an effective metaphor. Under the sun is appropriate, since conventionally the sun is what you see when you look "up" during the day. In fact, given a point of reference (let's use me as a point of reference, since I'm pretty sure that everything revolves around me, and I consider the sun to be "up"), there is always an "up" and a "down". So "under the sun" is an effective metaphor.
;)
:)
"Finding a cure for cancer" is an ignorant statement made by someone ignorant to medicine who's trying to make themselves look smart - "yeah, I know about cancer but apparently have never heard of chemotherapy and surgery which are used to succesfully treat many kinds of cancer every day" - but accomplishing exactly the opposite. Usually it's used by the same people who refer to anything complex as "rocket science" when, in fact, simple aerodynamics and chemistry aren't exactly the most complicated studies around. So, not only does it not fit in with the metaphors to which you compare it, but explaining that you knew that and used the expression anyway, well, I can't really see that as an effective defence of anything.
That said, I pointed it out because it's a pet peeve whose rant has been building up inside of me for weeks. People say "why work on 'x' when there's still no cure for cancer?", but they neglect to consider that people are better suited to researching other areas and couldn't effectively contribute to cancer research even if they wanted to do so. I'll grant that you didn't make such a claim, but I'll still mock it as a pointless figure of speech. So there. But then I'll apologize for wasting several people's worth of rant at a single person who obviously knows better.
Oh, and removing tumors before they turn cancerous is preventative treatment, and the treatment I'd most like to have for cancer (stopping it before it starts). I'm treating my lung cancer right now by not smoking, in fact.
The post was going along just fine until you threw in your politics, claiming that the only corrupt and/or dimwitted people are those who affiliate with the current majority party. I'd argue that the intelligent from both parties tend to use their powers for evil, that the rest use their connections for evil, and that the present majority probably is better at current politics than any other party which is not presently in the majority.
I'd like to say that they're all idiots, but unfortunately "they" seem to be able to gain power over large groups of people, while you and I are left with supposedly superior intelligence as consolation. Perhaps they're not as stupid as we'd like to think...
Is Belinda the woman who came before Melinda, or is Belinda your wife's name?
:)
As an aside, I like the "occupation: relative" part in her bio.
[replying to anonymous]
:) I did have an old Zenith which would do that, but we're talking early 80's...
Given that my Yamaha Receiver, Zenith, JVC, RCA, and Optoma Televisions (ok, the Optoma's a projector), Toshiba DVD player, Sansui CD player, Dish Network receivers, and RCA & Zenith VCRs don't ever turn on by themselves when the power flickers (not to mention the 12 ATX-based PCs in my house), I don't think most are designed that way.
Yeah, that addition of http:/// is a big problem for me, too. Often I type in a gopher:// URL and forget to type the protocol part, and other "user friendly" browsers will direct me to a malicious http:/// site which I certainly didn't want to visit.
I'm curious - which kind of cancer are we referring to here? Or are you yet another of the insightful armchair medical researchers who believe that all forms of cancer share some kind of common cause which can somehow be reached by a single drug, and then turned back into normal variants of whatever cell it was that's growing abnmormally?
BTW, there's already a cure for cancer. It's usually a knife, and it's used to cut the affected area out of the body. Problem solved.
Sigh. No one's researching "the cure for cancer".
If only it was possible for me to be discriminated against so I could have equal opportunities, too. Curse my moderate- to cold-weather acclimated skin, and lack of boobs.
So, in the last 20 years, you've never had a device which could be turned on by the remote if you turned it off by the switch? Because if the device is truly off, it won't be able to respond to the IR signal emitted by the remote. I suppose someone could have used a passive powered signal detector, but that'd probably decrease the remote's range / increase your odds of developing hand cancer. :)
Aregardless, chomping sounds fine, antiregardless of how it might sound.
Drunks are everywhere, and meth labs generally only affect people who live near them. And area dentists. When the worst crime is vandalism of a car in the "bad" part of town, and when the first murder (probably of a meth head) in several years results in front-page news for at least two weeks, I think it's fair to say there's low to no crime. :)
http://www.marengoiowa.com/Employment.html
:) /presently works for a Fortune 100 company and lives in a town with ~15,000 people
Heh: "There are currently no open positions within the City of Marengo". Just like the small town I grew up in. Except with about twice the population. Well, technically the village I grew up in had a population of about 33, but we lost our post office and zip code in the late 70's whenthe old woman who rant it out of the back room in her house stopped doing that (or possibly the other way around), so I now associate it officially with the "bigger city" with population=1100 a few miles down the road.
Ohhhh.... That makes more sense (Access as a rapid protyping tool). :)
My University IT comment was more directed to the amount of politics involved than the level of technology, if that helps put it in perspective at all. Though, there are certainly several with crummy technology, too.
Figured as much. :)
So you use access to "join" data from a bunch of disparate databases, probably mostly designed by people who didn't know what they were doing. You know that an SQL "join" isn't something you do across multiple databases on multiple systems, right? Sure, the verb's the same, but it's not the same thing... If you'd used "collate" to begin with, it would've made more sense.
;)
Also, working at an academic institution is not the real world. I've worked in IT for a college - it's very much *not* real-world.
Just for giggles, though, let's review.
So, where's the knee-jerk? Perhaps more to the point, why argue with someone who agreed with your self-professed hair-trigger post?
You know, I didn't try it on a Gentoo box - just Ubuntu and RedHat (and probably SuSE at one point). If I wasn't in the process of phasing Gentoo out on my home network...
Just because 200 is the upper limit of "measurable" genius, you think that the ghetto sysadmin might be making things up? :) Then, I guess that'd pretty well shut up the people who say those tests are somehow racially biased - as if recognizing an isometric drawing and quickly determining solutions to an anagram were more or less difficult depending on the color of one's skin...
That's what I was doing - it still insisted that I set up a bunch of crap. Maybe I was using an old version or something - but it's sucked like that each time I've thought "I'll give Myth another try"... Eh, I don't wanna record TV, so using "MythTV" probably isn't ideal anyway. :)
Most anything can run 800x600 just fine, if not 640x480, and that'll look pretty darned decent on your typical TV screen - especially since it only has to get 23fps (at 320x240) to look as good as anything else he'll see on TV (well, 29.9fps, I suppose).
Yes, and if you don't care about TV tuning, merely wanting to organize your DVDs and music on one electronic mecha-machine, MyTH is a waste. Why do I have to configure a TV card and add channel listings to even use this program again? I use Freevo, since it's easier to set up (IMHO) and doesn't asume that its main purpose in life is to record stuff. Heck, Freevo lets you remove the "watch TV" entry (and most anything else) from the main menu - and I think the interface is as nice / nicer than Myth's.
:)
As an aside, I'd be more impressed if the guy had one tuner that could handle multiple channels. With GnuRadio I can use a single tuner to record several radio stations effectively simultaneously - and the machine isn't burning the house down. Nyah.
Yeah, because it makes no sense to play games on the kick-ass PC you just built and hooked up to your best TV / media distribution system. Probably better to put the games elsewhere.
You can't keep the tables straight in your head? Maybe you should stop naming them "table1", "tbl2", etc and use meaningful names - it's not like the length of table/column names slows SQL down or anything...
Yeah, the relationship view thingie is half handy, but only half, and only if you didn't create a proper ER diagram for this huge complicated database beforehand like you and/or the developer / DBA should have. Yes, if it's too big to keep in your head, it oughtta be written down. In almost any situation, that holds, but esp. in anything database related.
Incorrect relative to my requirements? :)
Hypertext has been around for 30+ years, and there have been guidelines regarding how to write clear HTML for decades, many of which are based on actual research with users. The example given should be rewritten to something like "There are more details available" or "To read more, visit name of place to visit". This also sidesteps the foolishness of saying "click here" when you don't know for sure that the user will even be using a device that *can* click - not everyone uses a mouse for web navigation, and HTML doesn't require it... :)
As far as linking Joe's News and the article at Joe's News, while I can see your point, I disagree. The article isn't about Joe's News. The article is about an article published at Joe's News. If the reader wants more information, they have lots of ways to find more information - they can research the source with Google, they can probably go up to the top level from the linked artile, they can look for the related articles that might be linked on the article page, etc. In all of those cases, I think it's the job of the reader to figure out for themselves what extra information about the new source is relevant. Heck, it'll probably be rehashed for the millionth time a couple of comments down in the discussion. The addition of a bunch of extra links to the story makes it harder to read, and still only provides marginally more information at best (in this case). Sure, it makes very little extra information available to the laziest readers, but at the expense of readability - and at the expense of downplaying the importance of the actual article being discussed.