Software vendors are permitted to redact anything from presentation slides that they don't want other users to see and learn about. In fact, they'll be allowed to summarily pull the plug on the projector whenever they feel like it.
Attendees are required to let vendor representatives gag them lest they talk to other users and learn something about the way the software works without paying the vendor's consulting arm for the privilege.
The won't be an associated vendor show because the only vendor the attendees will be allowed to talk to will be those that sold the software. On the plus side, though, you'll get a lot of one-on-one with a representative from the vendor. Allowing other customers to hear what you're talking about (you guessed it) won't be allowed.
OK, enough snarkiness...
I agree with the poster who mentioned that any CIO that signs a contract that contained such terms ought to be fired. What the heck is IT coming to when vendors feels they need to clamp down on their customers this way? I know a lot of folks criticized it way back when it was published but I'm thinking that The Cluetrain Manifesto needs a new printing. With a copy sent to each member of the BoD of any company pulling this garbage.
``Okay, this is probably a dumb question, but how do you print anything without CUPS?''
The same way one did before CUPS was shoved down everyone's collective throat: lpd/lpr or LPRng.
Probably not too difficult to ferret out my opinion of CUPS from the above, eh? Perhaps I'd feel differently if the documentation was more complete. I find that it has either a lot of holes or that there are just some things one cannot do using CUPS that were possible using either of the alternatives. I keep hoping that I might stumble onto some better documentation or HOWTOs in the future; it's eluded me so far.
"The agent and a partner have asked questions about Tamm's associates and political meetings he might have attended, apparently looking for clues about his motivations for going to the press, according to three of those interviewed."
I think it's indicative of just how fouled up the government is when one's motivations are investigated when you spill the beans on blatantly illegal government activities. Seems to me that questioning one's motivations in a case like this isn't too far removed from the old Soviet Union's practice of labeling anyone that criticized the government of being mentally ill.
Tamm wasn't an elected official and likely never had to swear to uphold the Constitution, the laws of the land, and all that, but I am sure glad he took it upon himself to call the New York Times when he found out what the government was up to.
I was surprised to see that this link (http://www-psych.nmsu.edu/regression/home.html) was still around. That one would probably get blocked at work here as well. (But probably not because of the Ren/Stimpy content. More like: "Well, you're not paid to do statistics, are you?")
While we're on the topic of oddball technical sites, I gotta wonder if the "Britney Spears Guide to Semiconductor Physics" is still online. (I don't even want to attempt looking for that one at work.:-) )
... will be more than happy to come to each company that buys into this harebrained prediction and clean the monitors each of the PCs that are all obscured by smeared fingerprints.
Wasn't Gartner (or another bunch like them) predicting universal PC voice interfaces a while back? How's that adoption going?
``... those computers will have their work checked the old-fashioned way...''
Oh, does that mean the NASA engineers still have their old slide rules in a drawer somewhere? Or that they'll hire a bunch of people to sit at rows of desks doing calculations by hand?
(Fortunately, the article was a little more informative.)
... but unrealistic expectations of the investors.
When investors and Wall Street analysts start looking at how well a company is run and whether it's generating a long-term sustainable income and stop whining about how much profit are you going to make this quarter, perhaps all businesses will do one hell of a lot better than they are able to today. ``Oh, sure you made a profit but it wasn't a double-digit increase over the same quarter last year. Too bad. We're going to penalize you by telling everyone to dump your stock. Who's your daddy now?'' (A year; that what passes for long-term thinking on Wall Street.) But I guess I can sympathize with these analysts to some extent. If they didn't have the job of slamming company stocks that aren't making them and their clients overnight millionaires, what else would they have to do? They aren't capable of actually performing some, you know, productive activity. I almost feel sorry for them.
``i wish i could specifically remember what finally drove me to downgrade...''
I know exactly what's kept me on FF2: It wasn't that it crashed. It wasn't that it locked up X. It's that nobody at home has been able to print anything using FF3. Unless you count extremely poorly bitmapped text (imagine, say, 4pt fonts enlarged using pixel replication) and, in some cases, greeked text when printing a web page as something that's acceptable. I need to print stuff that I receive from vendors, the missus needs to print invoices, financial statements, and things like that, and my daughters print pages for reference when doing homework assignments. The printed output of FF3 is unintelligible. Oh the lines and boxes around the text -- borders and such -- come out just fine. It's just that the text is a disaster and it's been bad for a couple of different 3.x releases. I suppose I'm just expected to trust that the problem has been corrected this time. Sure, it doesn't take much for me to redo the symbolic links to fall back to 2.x but, frankly, I'm getting a bit tired of that exercise. We're not married to Firefox and if this next release doesn't work, I expect it's time to either switch completely over to Konqueror or to Opera and just remove Firefox from the systems.
If... you've paid the phone company for the ability to send the picture off the phone. I haven't spent the extra time to find one that doesn't require the extra fees to "send the picture" but from the modest amount of checking (and I'm sure dozens of Slashdotters will kindly inform me of those companies I overlooked) I find that that's pretty much standard. I'd prefer it if the darned phones merely plugged into your USB port and you could pull the darned photos off the camera yourself. Haven't found one that'll let you do that yet. For now I'll carry the camera along with the phone.
I agree when I'm somewhere and see something that I want a photo of I'll want a good quality photo. When phones can take 10M-12M pixel images with, say, a zoom equivalent to a 35mm camera's 20mm-200mm, then we'll have something. Make that a macro lense as well, will ya. (Oh yeah... it's also gotta be light enough and small enough to fit in my pocket when I'm out on my bike or out on a run.)
Heck, I should have tried this before but the search results I get show symbols denoting that the information is in a PDF but the PDF images aren't links to anything. They're just pictures. The site is even less than worthless.
I tried searching for text in the Guidebook and, for a long time, found I was more likely than not to receive an HTTP 500 error. Eventually I did get results returned though all returned hits (that I got, anyway) were links to individual PDFs. There were often dozens of linked PDFs with no real way of knowing which ones were really going to be helpful at all to you. The search function is, in a word: useless
Nice site. (For sufficiently small values of nice, that is.)
I was going to switch my internet access at home from Covad to ATT. Until now.
As I was scrolling down toward the bottom of the page, I saw that and quickly scrolled back up thinking "Huh? Pocket protector"? (Well, it is "News for Nerds", right?)
... is why there are legal types out there that continue to slip these clauses or sections into legal agreements in the first place. Are they really that stupid that they think that as many times as these terms have been ferreted out and publicized that anyone is going to think "well, okay, I guess it's all right this time"? They don't understand that there enough people on the Internet that there will never be a time when there's no one looking for and exposing these sort of legal shenanigans.
``But I gotta tell you, as a user, and as an SA that has manage the paths, toolkits, and jre's I really wish you guys would just fucking quit already.''
I hear ya. The Java folks surely never got their head around backward compatibility did they. I've got one system that has to keep four different run-time environments around for various applications that nobody has time to rewrite/re-engineer to work with newer versions of Java. I'm sure there are other folks out there with even more JREs that cannot be de-installed. Java's version of DLL Hell.
I used to rarely use "use strict" when I first began writing Perl years ago. Then, as I got to where the scripts got larger and used for more complex tasks, "use strict" got to be a habit. Nowadays I have a standard Perl skeleton that includes the shebang line, a header that I fill in describing what the script is used for (along with the RCS log, etc.), and "use strict". I might skip that directive for a quick-n-dirty script that I don't expect to use for more than a one-off task but it's funny how those scripts tend to get kept and reused. Once that happens, a "use strict" get inserted and I clean up the errors before doing anything else with it.
Writing obfuscated Perl (or any programming language for that matter) is a choice, not a requirement. If the code isn't easy to understand, I think it reflects more on the programmer than the language s/he used.
``I realize that with enough time and discipline, Perl code can be written in a more maintainable form. But that's swimming against the current in the busy business world.''
And I'm betting that when Ruby and Python become more widely used in ``the busy business world'' that the quality of the code that is produced will drop just as some think Perl code quality has. Just like any language has once it gets used in a place where deadlines are more important than creating maintainable code run by managers whose programming concepts were likely learned using something descended from MS-BASIC.
The easy answer is that the GNU tools are most probably already installed in/usr/sfw and that to use them requires nothing more than a minor tweak to/etc/profile.
That depends on the site you're working at. My most recent experience is that most Solaris system admins never bother installing anything but the base OS so when you come onto a Solaris system after using most other UNIXes you feel like you've gone back in time when your only editor was ed (OK, I exaggerate; but only a little). Heck, they rarely even run catman after the installation making looking up information in the manpages next to impossible. Great fun when you're moving from Sol[789] to Sol10 in a multi-vendor shop and you cannot remember the new Solaris commands. svcadm threw me for quite a while until I finally got it burned into my synapses. (And it's so-o-o-o much better than "servicename start|stop".)
There were numerous DOS utilities for managing files that used a tree display with a window where the details could be viewed. Xtree was one of them, if memory serves, and I'm pretty sure that the early versions of Norton's Utilities had something like this as well. (Wasn't NU's little tool the inspiration for Midnight Commander?) They might qualify as prior art. They were certainly in wide use before 1995. Microsoft may not have even been the first to do this in a GUI. I'd bet that Desqview (technically not a GUI, I guess but darned close), Desqview/X, or GEM had used this method of viewing the contents of directories. Both pre-date 1995 as well.
How nice it must be to have the bandwidth available to download DVDs full of software at will.
I used to buy boxed editions of Red Hat from Best Buy when they still sold it that way. And I purchased a couple of versions of Suse/Novell from Fry's until they seemed to lose interest in stocking it. At the very least, it showed those stores that those products were found to be worth keeping in stock. Having it on the shelves showed shoppers that there was something other than Windows to run on your computer.
Because of the narrowband connection we're stuck with at home (thanks to the phone company's use of fibre, no DSL for us; IDSL only), I'm now looking for Cheapbytes as a source of new versions of my favorite OS. Cable? The wife won't have it. And I agree with her. For the cost of a cable connection, I could buy 2-3 of these Ubuntu distributions per month. Since I only need one, I'm bucks up.
One of the things that used to distinguish American troops from those of other country's armed forces was the level of decision making that was allowed at the lower ranks. I think the phrase I heard was something like "an American sargeant makes the same kind of decisions that normally requires a colonel in the [fill in country name here] army". The idea being that that sort of delegation (and trust) made for a much flexible and responsive force than the more hierarchical, all-decisions-flow-from-the-top armies they typically faced.
Perhaps this is how the commanders are dealing with the lowering of educational standards of the recruits.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, enough snarkiness...
I agree with the poster who mentioned that any CIO that signs a contract that contained such terms ought to be fired. What the heck is IT coming to when vendors feels they need to clamp down on their customers this way? I know a lot of folks criticized it way back when it was published but I'm thinking that The Cluetrain Manifesto needs a new printing. With a copy sent to each member of the BoD of any company pulling this garbage.
The same way one did before CUPS was shoved down everyone's collective throat: lpd/lpr or LPRng.
Probably not too difficult to ferret out my opinion of CUPS from the above, eh? Perhaps I'd feel differently if the documentation was more complete. I find that it has either a lot of holes or that there are just some things one cannot do using CUPS that were possible using either of the alternatives. I keep hoping that I might stumble onto some better documentation or HOWTOs in the future; it's eluded me so far.
What? Did I miss hearing about that campaign promise? Do we get to choose? (I wouldn't mind a new Madone, Barack.)
I think it's indicative of just how fouled up the government is when one's motivations are investigated when you spill the beans on blatantly illegal government activities. Seems to me that questioning one's motivations in a case like this isn't too far removed from the old Soviet Union's practice of labeling anyone that criticized the government of being mentally ill.
Tamm wasn't an elected official and likely never had to swear to uphold the Constitution, the laws of the land, and all that, but I am sure glad he took it upon himself to call the New York Times when he found out what the government was up to.
I was surprised to see that this link (http://www-psych.nmsu.edu/regression/home.html) was still around. That one would probably get blocked at work here as well. (But probably not because of the Ren/Stimpy content. More like: "Well, you're not paid to do statistics, are you?")
While we're on the topic of oddball technical sites, I gotta wonder if the "Britney Spears Guide to Semiconductor Physics" is still online. (I don't even want to attempt looking for that one at work. :-) )
... will be more than happy to come to each company that buys into this harebrained prediction and clean the monitors each of the PCs that are all obscured by smeared fingerprints.
Wasn't Gartner (or another bunch like them) predicting universal PC voice interfaces a while back? How's that adoption going?
Heh, that name sounds like it came from a Douglas Adams novel or it's a character in a Foghorn Leghorn cartoon.
Oh, does that mean the NASA engineers still have their old slide rules in a drawer somewhere? Or that they'll hire a bunch of people to sit at rows of desks doing calculations by hand?
(Fortunately, the article was a little more informative.)
... but unrealistic expectations of the investors.
When investors and Wall Street analysts start looking at how well a company is run and whether it's generating a long-term sustainable income and stop whining about how much profit are you going to make this quarter, perhaps all businesses will do one hell of a lot better than they are able to today. ``Oh, sure you made a profit but it wasn't a double-digit increase over the same quarter last year. Too bad. We're going to penalize you by telling everyone to dump your stock. Who's your daddy now?'' (A year; that what passes for long-term thinking on Wall Street.) But I guess I can sympathize with these analysts to some extent. If they didn't have the job of slamming company stocks that aren't making them and their clients overnight millionaires, what else would they have to do? They aren't capable of actually performing some, you know, productive activity. I almost feel sorry for them.
Bill: I know how to kill Linux!
Steve: How, Bill?
Bill: We'll get someone to suggest that committees need to be created to make Linux "uniform".
Steve: Oh, Bill. That's diabolical.
Bill: You said it, Steve. They'll be so tied down by the committees that their rate of innovation will slow to a crawl or die out completely.
Steve: Like I said, Bill: diabolical. I've never known a committee that's made anything better.
Bill: Yeah. Some times I impress even myself.
And the result looks like the Internet? Is this a huge surprise?
I know exactly what's kept me on FF2: It wasn't that it crashed. It wasn't that it locked up X. It's that nobody at home has been able to print anything using FF3. Unless you count extremely poorly bitmapped text (imagine, say, 4pt fonts enlarged using pixel replication) and, in some cases, greeked text when printing a web page as something that's acceptable. I need to print stuff that I receive from vendors, the missus needs to print invoices, financial statements, and things like that, and my daughters print pages for reference when doing homework assignments. The printed output of FF3 is unintelligible. Oh the lines and boxes around the text -- borders and such -- come out just fine. It's just that the text is a disaster and it's been bad for a couple of different 3.x releases. I suppose I'm just expected to trust that the problem has been corrected this time. Sure, it doesn't take much for me to redo the symbolic links to fall back to 2.x but, frankly, I'm getting a bit tired of that exercise. We're not married to Firefox and if this next release doesn't work, I expect it's time to either switch completely over to Konqueror or to Opera and just remove Firefox from the systems.
If... you've paid the phone company for the ability to send the picture off the phone. I haven't spent the extra time to find one that doesn't require the extra fees to "send the picture" but from the modest amount of checking (and I'm sure dozens of Slashdotters will kindly inform me of those companies I overlooked) I find that that's pretty much standard. I'd prefer it if the darned phones merely plugged into your USB port and you could pull the darned photos off the camera yourself. Haven't found one that'll let you do that yet. For now I'll carry the camera along with the phone.
I agree when I'm somewhere and see something that I want a photo of I'll want a good quality photo. When phones can take 10M-12M pixel images with, say, a zoom equivalent to a 35mm camera's 20mm-200mm, then we'll have something. Make that a macro lense as well, will ya. (Oh yeah... it's also gotta be light enough and small enough to fit in my pocket when I'm out on my bike or out on a run.)
Heck, I should have tried this before but the search results I get show symbols denoting that the information is in a PDF but the PDF images aren't links to anything. They're just pictures. The site is even less than worthless.
I tried searching for text in the Guidebook and, for a long time, found I was more likely than not to receive an HTTP 500 error. Eventually I did get results returned though all returned hits (that I got, anyway) were links to individual PDFs. There were often dozens of linked PDFs with no real way of knowing which ones were really going to be helpful at all to you. The search function is, in a word: useless
Nice site. (For sufficiently small values of nice, that is.)
I was going to switch my internet access at home from Covad to ATT. Until now.
No.
As I was scrolling down toward the bottom of the page, I saw that and quickly scrolled back up thinking "Huh? Pocket protector"? (Well, it is "News for Nerds", right?)
... is why there are legal types out there that continue to slip these clauses or sections into legal agreements in the first place. Are they really that stupid that they think that as many times as these terms have been ferreted out and publicized that anyone is going to think "well, okay, I guess it's all right this time"? They don't understand that there enough people on the Internet that there will never be a time when there's no one looking for and exposing these sort of legal shenanigans.
I hear ya. The Java folks surely never got their head around backward compatibility did they. I've got one system that has to keep four different run-time environments around for various applications that nobody has time to rewrite/re-engineer to work with newer versions of Java. I'm sure there are other folks out there with even more JREs that cannot be de-installed. Java's version of DLL Hell.
Hear hear!
I used to rarely use "use strict" when I first began writing Perl years ago. Then, as I got to where the scripts got larger and used for more complex tasks, "use strict" got to be a habit. Nowadays I have a standard Perl skeleton that includes the shebang line, a header that I fill in describing what the script is used for (along with the RCS log, etc.), and "use strict". I might skip that directive for a quick-n-dirty script that I don't expect to use for more than a one-off task but it's funny how those scripts tend to get kept and reused. Once that happens, a "use strict" get inserted and I clean up the errors before doing anything else with it.
Writing obfuscated Perl (or any programming language for that matter) is a choice, not a requirement. If the code isn't easy to understand, I think it reflects more on the programmer than the language s/he used.
(I don't think it matters whether you're conversant in Perl, C, or whatever.)
:-D
And I'm betting that when Ruby and Python become more widely used in ``the busy business world'' that the quality of the code that is produced will drop just as some think Perl code quality has. Just like any language has once it gets used in a place where deadlines are more important than creating maintainable code run by managers whose programming concepts were likely learned using something descended from MS-BASIC.
That depends on the site you're working at. My most recent experience is that most Solaris system admins never bother installing anything but the base OS so when you come onto a Solaris system after using most other UNIXes you feel like you've gone back in time when your only editor was ed (OK, I exaggerate; but only a little). Heck, they rarely even run catman after the installation making looking up information in the manpages next to impossible. Great fun when you're moving from Sol[789] to Sol10 in a multi-vendor shop and you cannot remember the new Solaris commands. svcadm threw me for quite a while until I finally got it burned into my synapses. (And it's so-o-o-o much better than "servicename start|stop".)
... broken even back then.
There were numerous DOS utilities for managing files that used a tree display with a window where the details could be viewed. Xtree was one of them, if memory serves, and I'm pretty sure that the early versions of Norton's Utilities had something like this as well. (Wasn't NU's little tool the inspiration for Midnight Commander?) They might qualify as prior art. They were certainly in wide use before 1995. Microsoft may not have even been the first to do this in a GUI. I'd bet that Desqview (technically not a GUI, I guess but darned close), Desqview/X, or GEM had used this method of viewing the contents of directories. Both pre-date 1995 as well.
How nice it must be to have the bandwidth available to download DVDs full of software at will.
I used to buy boxed editions of Red Hat from Best Buy when they still sold it that way. And I purchased a couple of versions of Suse/Novell from Fry's until they seemed to lose interest in stocking it. At the very least, it showed those stores that those products were found to be worth keeping in stock. Having it on the shelves showed shoppers that there was something other than Windows to run on your computer.
Because of the narrowband connection we're stuck with at home (thanks to the phone company's use of fibre, no DSL for us; IDSL only), I'm now looking for Cheapbytes as a source of new versions of my favorite OS. Cable? The wife won't have it. And I agree with her. For the cost of a cable connection, I could buy 2-3 of these Ubuntu distributions per month. Since I only need one, I'm bucks up.
One of the things that used to distinguish American troops from those of other country's armed forces was the level of decision making that was allowed at the lower ranks. I think the phrase I heard was something like "an American sargeant makes the same kind of decisions that normally requires a colonel in the [fill in country name here] army". The idea being that that sort of delegation (and trust) made for a much flexible and responsive force than the more hierarchical, all-decisions-flow-from-the-top armies they typically faced.
Perhaps this is how the commanders are dealing with the lowering of educational standards of the recruits.