I used to know how to do it the hard way. I have since fallen in love with the "just watch the blinkenlichten" interface. Ok, you do have to leet enough to open a webbrowser on port 631 to control the darned thing, assuming you aren't using KDE or Gnome.
All I have to tell you is I would hate if my car had a little electronic "buddy" that tried to be oh so helpful.
I see that you are exceeding the speed limit...
I see that you are running low on gas...
I see that you are parallel parking, would you like some help?
You have turned the ignition switch, would you like to:
Start the car
Turn on the radio
Turn on the headlights
Then again, there are enough folks out there that need this sort of thing. Most of them are small children. The ones that aren't should be sterilized before they breed.
I personally use my walk to and from work to depressurize. I live about 3 miles away, and depending on my mood can take the bus basically from my house to the office, take a bus that drops me off in the center of town, and walk halfway or take the subway, or just plain start whistling "my laptop on my back" and hike the whole thing. If the weather is nasty I can do about 1/3 of the trip underground, ducking through malls and transit tubes.
I have to say it's somewhat satifying to realize that if I walk, its 1 hour, 20 minutes. If I take the direct bus, it's 40 minutes. The other route can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour depending on how I work the pipeline.
There are days where that extra half and hour makes all the difference. My route takes me through Independence park, or Rittenhouse Square, or along the parkway, through City Hall. People pay money for those types of tours. I usually grab a coffee on the go. Heck, this morning I saw a red-tailed hawk flying around the Federal Court building.
Wait a minute. I used to program in Turbo C, assembler, and clipper. I do web-apps now. The secret to sanity is the toolkit you use. In fact 2 years ago I migrated a Clipper app to the web.
Now I personally code for the TCLhttpd. It's basically a web server written in TCL. I wrote a set of object oriented tools to pull records from MySQL, handle validation rules, and widgitize most of the data entry fields. All in all, it's about 10,000 lines of code, though I do cheat and use an object-oriented extension to TCL: IncrTCL.
Rather than code stuff a page at a time, I think of records as objects that hop between containers. Each one has various standard behaviors like "Display" or "Edit" or "Santity check what this user input" or "spit out into a row in an HTML report." When I put a page together, it asks the objects to exhibit those behaviors.
The result is a framework that allows me to slap new interfaces together in minutes, that still behave predicably, while at the same time can still do off the wall checks, rechecks, and interface elements on request.
It sure beats the old days of writing and debugging C code to generate a screen.
The real source of stress is companies trying to do more with fewer people. When you back a rat into a corner they get really nasty. When you set a pack of people to do a job without the resources they need, and the onous of not having a job when they fail, they tend to be really nasty to. Nasty to anyone they interpret and not carrying their own weight. Nasty to anyone that stands between them and a resource they need.
For goodness sake, it's amazing how much having an extra person on staff drops the level of stress in a department. It's equally amazing how much removing a member of the staff increases the stress level of a department.
Well not really. I think the megacorporations of the world have proven they are quite ambidextrous when it comes to labor and environmental regulations. Why should anti-monopoly rules be any different?
Got it all wrong. You've gotta be the tophat, and buy out all the purple and light blue properties. They are cheap to buy, cheap to build on, and you make a hell of a lot more money bleeding for fellow players as they try to avoid "skid row" than you ever will going for the throat.
I was going to post "hell no", but then I realized just how different IBM is now than it was then. IBM used to be a mainframe company. Now they are a service company that happens to sell mainframes.
Microsoft is an operating system and software company. I'm envisioning them morphing into a huge educational services and training organization, that happens to bundle software. You read it here first.
Well, the business model is about the appearence of the widespread deployment of insecure networks and servers. It's like the war on drugs. They are succeeding at failing. "We've stopped xxx tons of yyy from entering the country. But we need more money because smugglers are now trying to ship xxxxxx tons of yyy."
I love how some firms are concerned that large telephone switching centers would be targetted by terrorists. (Thus why they need to run their own fiber all over the place.)
Let me get this straight, a guy with a pickup truck full of explosives is going to blow up (all withing a 10 block radius):
a building full of equipment and cable (containing 100 people)
City hall (containing thousands of people)
A school (containing thousands of people)
A skyscraper (containing thousands of people)
A bridge (causing billions of dollars in damage, and killing thousands of people if you knock out a suspension cable in rush hour.)
Data is important, but it's hardly going to instill terror in the populice if downtown is without phone service for a few weeks.
Public TV's total national, regional and local revenue in FY00 totaled $1.6 billion, according to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). Leading sources of revenue: members (23.5%); state governments (18.3%); CPB and federal grants/contracts (16.4%); businesses (16.1%); state colleges and universities (6.5%); and foundations (5.5%).
So, the federal government chips in 16.3% of 1.6 billion dollars. That's 260 million.
From their website, NPR's operating budget (total) is 100 million dollars. Congress pays for 18%.
The FBI budget: 4.298 billion, with $500 in new spending this year to develop counter-terrorism and high-tech crime fighting.
From their website "High tech" crimes outrank public corruption investigations, protecting civil rights, combating organized crime, and even upgrading the organizations technology to successfully perform their mission.
While I don't have a hard number, I can tell you if it's not close to 280 million, it's probably more.
Heck, I remember when I used to have to explain what Linux was. Now I spend half a dinner party having some jackoff tell me all about it.
Of course I let them make a total ass out of themselves before I reveal that not only do I use Linux, I've used it since before Linux was cool. Alright, I'm the same evil guy who always managed to have a relative who was [fill in subject of ethnic joke]. I get a perverse pleasure in watching people squirm.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to know how to do it the hard way. I have since fallen in love with the "just watch the blinkenlichten" interface. Ok, you do have to leet enough to open a webbrowser on port 631 to control the darned thing, assuming you aren't using KDE or Gnome.
I see that you are exceeding the speed limit...
I see that you are running low on gas...
I see that you are parallel parking, would you like some help?
You have turned the ignition switch, would you like to:
Start the car
Turn on the radio
Turn on the headlights
Then again, there are enough folks out there that need this sort of thing. Most of them are small children. The ones that aren't should be sterilized before they breed.
I have to say it's somewhat satifying to realize that if I walk, its 1 hour, 20 minutes. If I take the direct bus, it's 40 minutes. The other route can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour depending on how I work the pipeline.
There are days where that extra half and hour makes all the difference. My route takes me through Independence park, or Rittenhouse Square, or along the parkway, through City Hall. People pay money for those types of tours. I usually grab a coffee on the go. Heck, this morning I saw a red-tailed hawk flying around the Federal Court building.
Anyway, that's my lo-tech way to unwind.
Now I personally code for the TCLhttpd. It's basically a web server written in TCL. I wrote a set of object oriented tools to pull records from MySQL, handle validation rules, and widgitize most of the data entry fields. All in all, it's about 10,000 lines of code, though I do cheat and use an object-oriented extension to TCL: IncrTCL.
Rather than code stuff a page at a time, I think of records as objects that hop between containers. Each one has various standard behaviors like "Display" or "Edit" or "Santity check what this user input" or "spit out into a row in an HTML report." When I put a page together, it asks the objects to exhibit those behaviors.
The result is a framework that allows me to slap new interfaces together in minutes, that still behave predicably, while at the same time can still do off the wall checks, rechecks, and interface elements on request.
It sure beats the old days of writing and debugging C code to generate a screen.
For goodness sake, it's amazing how much having an extra person on staff drops the level of stress in a department. It's equally amazing how much removing a member of the staff increases the stress level of a department.
Well not really. I think the megacorporations of the world have proven they are quite ambidextrous when it comes to labor and environmental regulations. Why should anti-monopoly rules be any different?
Ah, the slumlord principle...
Microsoft is an operating system and software company. I'm envisioning them morphing into a huge educational services and training organization, that happens to bundle software. You read it here first.
There is no perfect person either, yet it could be said there is a wide gulf between Ken Lay and Mother Theresa.
Well, the business model is about the appearence of the widespread deployment of insecure networks and servers. It's like the war on drugs. They are succeeding at failing. "We've stopped xxx tons of yyy from entering the country. But we need more money because smugglers are now trying to ship xxxxxx tons of yyy."
Let me get this straight, a guy with a pickup truck full of explosives is going to blow up (all withing a 10 block radius):
Data is important, but it's hardly going to instill terror in the populice if downtown is without phone service for a few weeks.
No wait, that would be a change regime, not a regime change.
From their website:
Public TV's total national, regional and local revenue in FY00 totaled $1.6 billion, according to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). Leading sources of revenue: members (23.5%); state governments (18.3%); CPB and federal grants/contracts (16.4%); businesses (16.1%); state colleges and universities (6.5%); and foundations (5.5%).
So, the federal government chips in 16.3% of 1.6 billion dollars. That's 260 million.
From their website, NPR's operating budget (total) is 100 million dollars. Congress pays for 18%.
The FBI budget: 4.298 billion, with $500 in new spending this year to develop counter-terrorism and high-tech crime fighting.
From their website "High tech" crimes outrank public corruption investigations, protecting civil rights, combating organized crime, and even upgrading the organizations technology to successfully perform their mission.
While I don't have a hard number, I can tell you if it's not close to 280 million, it's probably more.
See! (LOL)
What, are you dead-heading again?
Of course I let them make a total ass out of themselves before I reveal that not only do I use Linux, I've used it since before Linux was cool. Alright, I'm the same evil guy who always managed to have a relative who was [fill in subject of ethnic joke]. I get a perverse pleasure in watching people squirm.
I believe that's Tcl/Tk
Wow, I didn't see that one coming.
Nah, tight fisted neocons just use a cracked copy of photoshop.
Think of the kittens.
I dunno, maybe start my own.
Silly, the guy with the beard and the choker is Emmanual Goldstien!
The trick with them is that they doctor photographs taken by contract photographers. They own the copyrights to the images.
And yes, lead is a nasty material too.
Both materials are very deadly, at least when propelled faster than the speed of sound.