``given a choice, people may not watch what they have to offer''
You mean I don't have to watch the ads? I've been afraid that the Madison Avenue Police were going to kick down the door if I even thought about using the >> button on my VCR!
If you don't want just anyone linking to your web site, just make the initial page a dead end that requires a password protected account to gain access to the deeper pages. And make those all pages dynamic to that deep linking would be a waste of time. Either that or get your heads screwed straight and learn how the Web is supposed to work.
And finally, for NPR: IANAL but I suspect that you'd lose if you wanted to pursue enforcing your linking policy via the courts. At best you could just jeopardize your public funding. If I'm not mistaken, the ``P'' stands for Public, right? Not Private (as in club).
I'm glad someone finally got around to mention Bentley's books (Programming Pearls and More Programming Pearls). Among other things, they teach you that sitting down and thinking about the problem -- instead of diving right in and cranking out code -- is a useful skill.
If you're trying to be `green' or to save money you're probably better off buying the book. Unless, of course, you have the money for a duplexing printer and a lot more money for printer paper (Priced it at the big office supply stores lately? It ain't cheap). And you're time had better not be worth anything as you'll want to punch holes in that print out and slap it in a binder.
``They are going with Linux because they can use it for free, as in beer.''
Yep. Michael Eisner's kids need new shoes.
``Especially when Microsoft's starting to get all crazy with their forced subscription model. Something like that could cost Disney millions of dollars per year in their animation department alone...''
I took a tour of the animation department down in Orlando in Feb. 2001 and all the workstations that I saw were running UNIX (warmed my heart actually). So they may save big bucks but it won't be at Microsoft's expense.
The way I recently heard it, Arthur Anderson will be, barring some appeals court miracle, out of business due to an SEC rule that prohibits any company convicted of a felony (obstruction of justice in A.A.'s case) from performing audits on publicly traded companies. Not really a liability problem.
``And yet it is considered perfectly acceptable for software to crash regularly, lose data, allow dodgy persons to steal data, or generally aggravate the user to the point of distraction.''
No. I don't think that most people would agree with that. It's just that they have resigned themselves into accepting it because they know they'd go bankrupt taking a major software house to court over a bug that caused them to lose business or money (the same thing right:-) ). XYZ Corporation will hide behind their EULA and who wants to gamble that they'll try the suit in front of a judge sympathetic to the consumer. Most folks aren't in the financial position to blaze that legal trail.
You know that this isn't a technical issue at all. It's an administrative/cultural/political issue. Depending on the company's business, it could be a legal issue as well. And -- call me a heretic -- but this isn't necessarily an issue that's solved by chanting ``install Linux''.
I'd be very surprised if there isn't already a company policy covering this. It may not be getting adhered to in the local office but if there is a policy you need to convince someone -- your boss or whoever it was that seems to have assigned you to this task -- that the policies/procedures need to be followed. If they don't understand that these computers are company resources and need to be looked after, they'll have to be convinced. (Boy, you'll have to be tactful when you do this.:-) ) One should be able to assign a dollar amount to the loss of the data. That'll grab 'em. If you're unable to convince the higher-ups that having business critical information residing on unmanaged computers -- and that it should be centralized to protect it -- isn't a problem, then I'd get that opinion/decision in writing. I'd guess that, one of these days, you'll be held responsible when the next chunk of critical data is lost.
If you get the go-ahead to begin centralizing everyone's files some of the things you'll want to do are:
Audit desktop system to see how much company data is being stored on them. You'll need to know this in case you wind up needing to purchase additional space for the central file server.
Make sure that the central server has a logical volume manager. Without one increasing disk space transparently may require a full backup, a rebuilding of the raidset, and a restore. It's here where the base NT may fall short of the task (Hey, did I say I was an NT admin?). But there are third-party LVM products (Veritas, for example) that'll add this to NT. (Don't boot from this volume. Leave the C: drive alone. In case NT scribbles on itself you don't want to risk the data drive. I know someone who just went through a very scary weekend because they combined NT + data on a single raidset.)
And, of course, you need to get a procedure in place to make damned sure that you're doing bulletproof backups each and every night. If the reason why the data is being stored on someone's desktop is due to the incompetance of your predecessor (or the total lack of one), you'll have to demonstrate that system backups are now done properly and that it's once again safe to trust the data to the central server.
Another alternative to storing all data on a central server is to purchase something like Legato (or a similar product) that allows you to backup the desktop systems over the network. The drawbacks to this are cost and that employees can no longer turn their systems off at night if they want the data backed up.
...and in use by the people working at the ??AA offices. How else could they come up with some of the whacked out ideas that they put into their press releases? Jack Valenti's speech writer has his surgically attached.
``"Why You Need to Take a Dump", "When to Take a Dump", and "How to Take a Dump"''
There was an IBM manual from about the same time (maybe earlier) that suggested that when a certain error occurred that you should take a dump and send it to IBM. Along with ``the associated listing'', of course. (Everything required that associated listing.:-) ) It was from a FORTRAN manual if memory serves.
``...if Hollywood suddenly got the "bright" idea to limit 35mm reel distribution within the next few years?''
Why they'll blame the resulting drop in movie theatre attendance on piracy over the Internet, of course. We all know that Hollywood is right about all things. Geez, to hear Jack Valenti talk, the most important export that the U.S. of A. has is the output of the Hollywood moviemaking conglomerates. So if they say it's because of piracy then it must be so and not, NOT, because of their reducing the quantity of their product.
Geez, I hate to reply to my own post but here's a link to a page with the text of the fictional IBM operating system -> http://www.bixoft.nl/english/humor.htm. The product was an improvement over the virtual machine concept in which one could now have a virtual universe. You'll have to read it to appreciate it (or not).
Another one that was good for a laugh was the ``Damn Fast Op-Amp'' that appeared in a normal device catalog from one of the major electronics device manufacturers (like Signetics, Fairchild, National, or maybe even AMD -- I'm leaning toward the latter but I can't remember any more. Darned cobwebs.) I used to enjoy asking interns to look up some information for me in the catalog and wait to see if they noticed it. You could tell if they did from the laughter.
Another one from the same time frame (1980-ish) was the announcement -- on official IBM product sheets -- of a Galactic Edition' of the VM/CP (or was it VM/CMS?) operating system. This included advanced features like the one that allowed users to create and destroy their own planetary systems and such.
Oh those were the days. Bet you don't see stuff like this appearing in official company literature any more. Hell, there'd probably be someone suing the company after they'd been traumatized upon seeing such offensive material (like `damn') or claiming fraud when their personal solar system didn't appear.
Nice generalization. Not that I wouldn't mind hearing a little techno or industrial now and again, I'd also like to hear a little classical, country, bluegrass, jazz, etc. I can remember some radios stations that used to play a much wider variety of music than they'd dare today. In fact, for about thirty years, there was a station in Chicago that would play all of the genres that I listed above. Until, that is, they were bought out by the company in mentioned in the article. Now if I dare to tune that station in I might have to listen to a one hour special about the trials and tribulations of Sheryl Crow's rise to fame.
Just why the hell does each genre need its own radio station? These mega-media companies insult everyone's intelligence and change the station formats according to their brain-dead survey results that tell them what ``everyone's'' supposed to prefer. Message to media moguls: We like variety! Instead, you're giving us a steady stream of songs that all basically sound the same by artists who look basically the same. Don't think too hard about why we're not tuning in like we used to.
To save folks the time, here's a quick summary of the article: middle-aged manager of a group of radio stations tells us all how hard it is to make ends meet in today's radio marketplace.
Hint: Skip to the last 2-3 paragraphs and find the real point of the article. You'll be glad you did.
Re:nothing particularly groundbreaking about it
on
lowercase music
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· Score: 2
``the use of ambient sound as part of the composition. brian eno was inpsired to make "music for airports" (for intents and purposes the first
non-classical "ambient" record) when he was recovering from a car accident and asked a friend to put a harpsichord record on the turntable..but she didn't raise the volume high enough before she left so he had to put up with it at a very low volume, barely loud enough to hear over the rain on the windows in his room.''
The recording you're thinking of was Discreet Music released in 1975 on the Obscure Label (Eno's label). If memory serves, the event you are referring to was either from the liner notes or the back of the album; can't recall just now. Music for Airports was released in 1978.
But, as you said, Eno wasn't the first to get involved in this sort of music. Check out http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/. It has some pages that go into a lot of the background, thoughts, etc. about ambient.
...of the current state of television was presented in my family room this morning. I wasn't impressed either. Not much has changed on the past 70 years.
Luckily I have a stack of books that I haven't gotten around to reading yet.
My how things have changed.
on
Disconnecting
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· Score: 2
I dropped AOL service a long time ago (when 28.2Kb modems were state of the art) and had no trouble at all. I did get a slew of letters from Steve Case wondering why I'd cancelled the service but no surly Customer Service person berating my reason for leaving.:-)
Someone should be explaining to Brian what the job market is like nowadays. Might just clear up that attitude problem he's got.
I interpretted it to read that they had to, primarily, maintain the public's data in a format that wasn't locked to a particular vendor's software. You're right about the Bill's wish to ban the use of proprietary software by the government itself, though. (My bad, I was wading through his letter for quite some time and lost track of that. But that's no excuse, right?) I recall the migration issue being part of the Nunez's arrow through the heart of the Microsoft position that it would cost too much to migrate to open source. (Nunez noting that if you're going to pay that price why not go to open source since you should be able to save as much as 8% anyway -- the supposed maximum amount saved by Gartner's estimates when taking licensing costs into account). Wonder how one would evaluate a migration to a proprietary solution that saved 15%? Ideals always seem to take a back seat to the bottom line.
But, hey, I wouldn't mind so much about anyone using closed source software if the information stored by that software was openly documented and easily used by another vendor's closed source software or with open source software. (aside: For example, I had no problem with MS using Kerberos -- thought it was a move in the right direction for them -- until it came out that they had dinked around with the protocol making it non-standard. But if I were evaluating software products for the Peruvean government, I'd have to consider MS's implementation ``Kerberos-like'' but not in keeping to the widely-accepted standard and drop them from consideration. Of course, MS would appeal until the heat death of the universe...) An open data format would mean that any clever group of software developers should be able to write software to make use of that data. It wouldn't necessarily have to be purchased. The government (even Peru's) could hire programmers to do this. Dr. Nunez is a bit more picky about it than I would be, I suppose. But he and his fellow elected officials may already be dealing with the effects of heavy use of proprietary systems. (I.e., similar to the situation experienced by companies who find their data trapped within an application that the vendor doesn't wish to support any more or that can no longer be supported because the company doesn't exist any more.) His letter didn't go into any specific examples if this is the case and it would be very interesting to know of this is one of the reasons for the Bill being created. What I took away from my reading of the letter was Dr. Nunez just wants -- and who wouldn't -- for data availability to not be a problem where the citizens are asked to fork over more and more money for software to maintain records that are theirs in the first place. And for the taxpayers to have cough up the dollars (er, I guess that would be Nuevo sols) to prop up some foreign corporation to provide that software would certainly stick in my craw.
Also, I wonder if the Bill isn't also something of a ``let's clean up our act before the BSA comes a-knocking'' angle to this Bill. Peru's apparently gotten itself a reputation for harboring some large illegal software duplication outfits. Getting the government to adopt the use of OSS would prevent a BSA audit from having having much impact; at least the government would be clean.
I didn't read it that way. It had a much different tone than your typical RMS paper (more analytical and less emotional). The Good Dr. made the point -- several times -- that the purpose of the Bill was to promote the use of software that adhered to open, freely adoptable, standards for the storage of the data (and that open/free software had a better record of meeting that goal of the Bill). He made, as I recall, a couple of mentions that proprietary software being perfectly OK as long as it met the goal of making the data available in an open format. I got the impression that he wouldn't mind MS Office at all provded the information was in an well documented and open format.
Some things I particularly enjoyed: 1.) the jabs about migration costs and 2.) the repeated times that the Microsoft letter contradicted itself -- especially with the licensing costs issue.
Bottom line: I thought the Dr.'s letter was spot on. Let's hope that Dr. Nunez isn't a one-in-a-million phenomena down there in S. America. Not too many years ago, businesses were making all sorts of noise about how they'd grow by moving into the Latin American marketplace. Well, it didn't work too well for the vast majority of companies. And now I'm wondering if it wasn't because they'd run into folks down in S. America (like Dr. Nunez) who spoiled all those grand plans by having brains with a finely tuned B.S. detectors.
Oh, well. I hoping that this Bill passes. If so, this letter's going to get read by a lot of people and I expect it to be quoted heavily by others who have to stand up to Microsoft.
``I don't think people would like a motion detector on their TV.''
Heh, heh. You obviously don't have children. A motion detector could be useful for turning the TV off when they leave the room.
But you're right. I wouldn't want someone tracking my viewing habits (though if they did, it'd foul up their statistical analysis something fierce). Besides, I watch it infrequently so I wouldn't be a valuable source of data for the networks.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean I don't have to watch the ads? I've been afraid that the Madison Avenue Police were going to kick down the door if I even thought about using the >> button on my VCR!
If you don't want just anyone linking to your web site, just make the initial page a dead end that requires a password protected account to gain access to the deeper pages. And make those all pages dynamic to that deep linking would be a waste of time. Either that or get your heads screwed straight and learn how the Web is supposed to work.
And finally, for NPR: IANAL but I suspect that you'd lose if you wanted to pursue enforcing your linking policy via the courts. At best you could just jeopardize your public funding. If I'm not mistaken, the ``P'' stands for Public, right? Not Private (as in club).
These organizations crack me up.
In some southern states, I think 3 may be illegal. (wink wink) Dunno about 2.
Are they kidding? If it's alive a really good lawyer will find a way to sue it. Heh, heh.
I'm glad someone finally got around to mention Bentley's books (Programming Pearls and More Programming Pearls). Among other things, they teach you that sitting down and thinking about the problem -- instead of diving right in and cranking out code -- is a useful skill.
If you're trying to be `green' or to save money you're probably better off buying the book. Unless, of course, you have the money for a duplexing printer and a lot more money for printer paper (Priced it at the big office supply stores lately? It ain't cheap). And you're time had better not be worth anything as you'll want to punch holes in that print out and slap it in a binder.
:-)
Nice try, Bill. We know that's you.
Yep. Michael Eisner's kids need new shoes.
I took a tour of the animation department down in Orlando in Feb. 2001 and all the workstations that I saw were running UNIX (warmed my heart actually). So they may save big bucks but it won't be at Microsoft's expense.
The way I recently heard it, Arthur Anderson will be, barring some appeals court miracle, out of business due to an SEC rule that prohibits any company convicted of a felony (obstruction of justice in A.A.'s case) from performing audits on publicly traded companies. Not really a liability problem.
No. I don't think that most people would agree with that. It's just that they have resigned themselves into accepting it because they know they'd go bankrupt taking a major software house to court over a bug that caused them to lose business or money (the same thing right :-) ). XYZ Corporation will hide behind their EULA and who wants to gamble that they'll try the suit in front of a judge sympathetic to the consumer. Most folks aren't in the financial position to blaze that legal trail.
You know that this isn't a technical issue at all. It's an administrative/cultural/political issue. Depending on the company's business, it could be a legal issue as well. And -- call me a heretic -- but this isn't necessarily an issue that's solved by chanting ``install Linux''.
I'd be very surprised if there isn't already a company policy covering this. It may not be getting adhered to in the local office but if there is a policy you need to convince someone -- your boss or whoever it was that seems to have assigned you to this task -- that the policies/procedures need to be followed. If they don't understand that these computers are company resources and need to be looked after, they'll have to be convinced. (Boy, you'll have to be tactful when you do this. :-) ) One should be able to assign a dollar amount to the loss of the data. That'll grab 'em. If you're unable to convince the higher-ups that having business critical information residing on unmanaged computers -- and that it should be centralized to protect it -- isn't a problem, then I'd get that opinion/decision in writing. I'd guess that, one of these days, you'll be held responsible when the next chunk of critical data is lost.
If you get the go-ahead to begin centralizing everyone's files some of the things you'll want to do are:
Another alternative to storing all data on a central server is to purchase something like Legato (or a similar product) that allows you to backup the desktop systems over the network. The drawbacks to this are cost and that employees can no longer turn their systems off at night if they want the data backed up.
Good luck.
...and in use by the people working at the ??AA offices. How else could they come up with some of the whacked out ideas that they put into their press releases? Jack Valenti's speech writer has his surgically attached.
There was an IBM manual from about the same time (maybe earlier) that suggested that when a certain error occurred that you should take a dump and send it to IBM. Along with ``the associated listing'', of course. (Everything required that associated listing. :-) ) It was from a FORTRAN manual if memory serves.
``...if Hollywood suddenly got the "bright" idea to limit 35mm reel distribution within the next few years?''
Why they'll blame the resulting drop in movie theatre attendance on piracy over the Internet, of course. We all know that Hollywood is right about all things. Geez, to hear Jack Valenti talk, the most important export that the U.S. of A. has is the output of the Hollywood moviemaking conglomerates. So if they say it's because of piracy then it must be so and not, NOT, because of their reducing the quantity of their product.
Geez, I hate to reply to my own post but here's a link to a page with the text of the fictional IBM operating system -> http://www.bixoft.nl/english/humor.htm. The product was an improvement over the virtual machine concept in which one could now have a virtual universe. You'll have to read it to appreciate it (or not).
Later...
I know people who have copies of that data sheet.
Another one that was good for a laugh was the ``Damn Fast Op-Amp'' that appeared in a normal device catalog from one of the major electronics device manufacturers (like Signetics, Fairchild, National, or maybe even AMD -- I'm leaning toward the latter but I can't remember any more. Darned cobwebs.) I used to enjoy asking interns to look up some information for me in the catalog and wait to see if they noticed it. You could tell if they did from the laughter.
Another one from the same time frame (1980-ish) was the announcement -- on official IBM product sheets -- of a Galactic Edition' of the VM/CP (or was it VM/CMS?) operating system. This included advanced features like the one that allowed users to create and destroy their own planetary systems and such.
Oh those were the days. Bet you don't see stuff like this appearing in official company literature any more. Hell, there'd probably be someone suing the company after they'd been traumatized upon seeing such offensive material (like `damn') or claiming fraud when their personal solar system didn't appear.
Nice generalization. Not that I wouldn't mind hearing a little techno or industrial now and again, I'd also like to hear a little classical, country, bluegrass, jazz, etc. I can remember some radios stations that used to play a much wider variety of music than they'd dare today. In fact, for about thirty years, there was a station in Chicago that would play all of the genres that I listed above. Until, that is, they were bought out by the company in mentioned in the article. Now if I dare to tune that station in I might have to listen to a one hour special about the trials and tribulations of Sheryl Crow's rise to fame.
Just why the hell does each genre need its own radio station? These mega-media companies insult everyone's intelligence and change the station formats according to their brain-dead survey results that tell them what ``everyone's'' supposed to prefer. Message to media moguls: We like variety! Instead, you're giving us a steady stream of songs that all basically sound the same by artists who look basically the same. Don't think too hard about why we're not tuning in like we used to.
Geez...
To save folks the time, here's a quick summary of the article: middle-aged manager of a group of radio stations tells us all how hard it is to make ends meet in today's radio marketplace.
Hint: Skip to the last 2-3 paragraphs and find the real point of the article. You'll be glad you did.
The recording you're thinking of was Discreet Music released in 1975 on the Obscure Label (Eno's label). If memory serves, the event you are referring to was either from the liner notes or the back of the album; can't recall just now. Music for Airports was released in 1978.
But, as you said, Eno wasn't the first to get involved in this sort of music. Check out http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/. It has some pages that go into a lot of the background, thoughts, etc. about ambient.
...of the current state of television was presented in my family room this morning. I wasn't impressed either. Not much has changed on the past 70 years.
Luckily I have a stack of books that I haven't gotten around to reading yet.
I dropped AOL service a long time ago (when 28.2Kb modems were state of the art) and had no trouble at all. I did get a slew of letters from Steve Case wondering why I'd cancelled the service but no surly Customer Service person berating my reason for leaving. :-)
Someone should be explaining to Brian what the job market is like nowadays. Might just clear up that attitude problem he's got.
You mean old and rich?
I interpretted it to read that they had to, primarily, maintain the public's data in a format that wasn't locked to a particular vendor's software. You're right about the Bill's wish to ban the use of proprietary software by the government itself, though. (My bad, I was wading through his letter for quite some time and lost track of that. But that's no excuse, right?) I recall the migration issue being part of the Nunez's arrow through the heart of the Microsoft position that it would cost too much to migrate to open source. (Nunez noting that if you're going to pay that price why not go to open source since you should be able to save as much as 8% anyway -- the supposed maximum amount saved by Gartner's estimates when taking licensing costs into account). Wonder how one would evaluate a migration to a proprietary solution that saved 15%? Ideals always seem to take a back seat to the bottom line.
But, hey, I wouldn't mind so much about anyone using closed source software if the information stored by that software was openly documented and easily used by another vendor's closed source software or with open source software. (aside: For example, I had no problem with MS using Kerberos -- thought it was a move in the right direction for them -- until it came out that they had dinked around with the protocol making it non-standard. But if I were evaluating software products for the Peruvean government, I'd have to consider MS's implementation ``Kerberos-like'' but not in keeping to the widely-accepted standard and drop them from consideration. Of course, MS would appeal until the heat death of the universe...) An open data format would mean that any clever group of software developers should be able to write software to make use of that data. It wouldn't necessarily have to be purchased. The government (even Peru's) could hire programmers to do this. Dr. Nunez is a bit more picky about it than I would be, I suppose. But he and his fellow elected officials may already be dealing with the effects of heavy use of proprietary systems. (I.e., similar to the situation experienced by companies who find their data trapped within an application that the vendor doesn't wish to support any more or that can no longer be supported because the company doesn't exist any more.) His letter didn't go into any specific examples if this is the case and it would be very interesting to know of this is one of the reasons for the Bill being created. What I took away from my reading of the letter was Dr. Nunez just wants -- and who wouldn't -- for data availability to not be a problem where the citizens are asked to fork over more and more money for software to maintain records that are theirs in the first place. And for the taxpayers to have cough up the dollars (er, I guess that would be Nuevo sols) to prop up some foreign corporation to provide that software would certainly stick in my craw.
Also, I wonder if the Bill isn't also something of a ``let's clean up our act before the BSA comes a-knocking'' angle to this Bill. Peru's apparently gotten itself a reputation for harboring some large illegal software duplication outfits. Getting the government to adopt the use of OSS would prevent a BSA audit from having having much impact; at least the government would be clean.
I didn't read it that way. It had a much different tone than your typical RMS paper (more analytical and less emotional). The Good Dr. made the point -- several times -- that the purpose of the Bill was to promote the use of software that adhered to open, freely adoptable, standards for the storage of the data (and that open/free software had a better record of meeting that goal of the Bill). He made, as I recall, a couple of mentions that proprietary software being perfectly OK as long as it met the goal of making the data available in an open format. I got the impression that he wouldn't mind MS Office at all provded the information was in an well documented and open format. Some things I particularly enjoyed: 1.) the jabs about migration costs and 2.) the repeated times that the Microsoft letter contradicted itself -- especially with the licensing costs issue.
Bottom line: I thought the Dr.'s letter was spot on. Let's hope that Dr. Nunez isn't a one-in-a-million phenomena down there in S. America. Not too many years ago, businesses were making all sorts of noise about how they'd grow by moving into the Latin American marketplace. Well, it didn't work too well for the vast majority of companies. And now I'm wondering if it wasn't because they'd run into folks down in S. America (like Dr. Nunez) who spoiled all those grand plans by having brains with a finely tuned B.S. detectors.
Oh, well. I hoping that this Bill passes. If so, this letter's going to get read by a lot of people and I expect it to be quoted heavily by others who have to stand up to Microsoft.
Heh, heh. You obviously don't have children. A motion detector could be useful for turning the TV off when they leave the room.
But you're right. I wouldn't want someone tracking my viewing habits (though if they did, it'd foul up their statistical analysis something fierce). Besides, I watch it infrequently so I wouldn't be a valuable source of data for the networks.