I haven't owned a console since the Atari 2600 I bought with my allowance. I have actively boycotted any and all Sony products (including their record labels - not easy for me!) for almost half a decade. This file will never be of any use to me or anyone I know. Nonetheless, I've downloaded a couple of copies, and I'm seeding the torrent as well.
My stereo(yes, two channel!) is worth several thousands of carefully-planned dollars. I think it could be put alongside systems worth $20k, and hold its own. (The speakers at present are the weakest link, and they still sound much better than yours.:-)
That said, it's a practical system. I've got enough background in electronics and acoustics (and psychology!) to know better than to buy a huge amount of the insane junk that's out there. Amplifiers that go into oscillation with the wrong cables? No thanks! Vacuum tubes? The guitar amp is downstairs, thanks very much. Cable elevators? Um...no. Just no.
So here's my defense of 24-bit 48kHz recordings: Breathing space.
Nothing to do (specifically) with dynamic headroom or the like, but when producing, mixing, and mastering data recorded as 16-bit 44kHz, there is very little you can do without inadvertently affecting the audio signal. In other words, it's harder to get it right when you're operating right at the threshold of hearing.
If studios did everything in 24-bit/96kHz and actually avoided clipping through the whole chain, then a final mixdown to 16b/44Khz (i.e. a CD) would sound gorgeous - perfect sound to the extent of human hearing. However, mixing is often done poorly, and as hot as possible for better sales, and the result is that the poor CD suffers the abuse caused by the engineers.
OK, old-school admins use sudo in a multi-admin environment. It's not for security, it's for auditing, i.e. "All right, which one of us fucked up server ?" (Aside: Veteran admins take responsibility for their own mistakes.)
Some other signs of veteran unix admins: 0) We don't use command aliases. It galls me to no end that RedHat aliases mv, cp, and rm commands FOR ROOT! Babysitting routine activity isn't just annoying, it's dangerous! What happens when some Linux admin hops onto a Unix system and issues an "#rm lib*" command, expecting to be able to step through which libraries to delete? (and don't get me started on coloured output from ls on a black background. If you want it, YOU add it, don't make me remove it!)
In the modern world, telnet and rsh are deficient tools for access. ssh is a _necessary_ modern tool, and is ubiquitous.
vim is neither a necessary replacement for vi, nor is it ubiquitous. A full install of Solaris doesn't have it included, so you have to add it by hand - to each machine you admin.
The nature of being a sysadmin is to be completely comfortable with the minimal tools available at 3am on a half-broken system. At one point that was sed, awk, and ed. vi and perl are both reasonable assumptions nowadays, but vim isn't. (and emacs never has been - it is and should always be an editor of programmers.)
Use vim all you want, but make sure you aren't dependent on multi-level undo or flashy colours if you're the guy they call in the middle of the night.
That's what we can't figure out either. It doesn't make any sense. If you buy a company with the intention of killing them, it's generally because they're your competitor. Oracle bought Sun which launched them into an entirely new space, and then proceeded to burn every bridge possible--to the point of harming their own core business as well. It's stupid! The only real explanation is arrogance, which actually makes sense if you factor in Larry Ellison.
We're officially a fairly big customer - somewhere north of 800 Sun servers, if I were to guess. Add another hundred workstations or so, and we're pushing about a thousand machines running Solaris, many of them running Sun apps of one sort or another.
Oracle changed the terms of our software support to the tune of a 500% increase. That's right, they want us to pay SIX TIMES as much for support! We lost all of our training credits overnight (About $100k in training dollars). Our hardware support costs have gone up substantially as well, so we're getting rid of our full-time onsite tech. (with the money we're saving by getting rid of the onsite Sun guy, we're going to hire two hardware techs of our own who are qualified/allowed to work on ALL of our gear, and still have cash left over.) We are planning to migrate away from all Sun/Oracle applications by the end of the current support contract. Even the groups that were using Oracle Database before this are being strongly encouraged to look elsewhere for solutions.
Ours isn't an isolated case. The general feeling in the Sun customer community is that they're standing on a sinking ship, flailing at the floorboards with an axe to make it go down even faster. Every Sun software product is now in the 'legacy' section of Oracle's (disastrous!!!) website. Contracts have gone from three pages to 500, due to the lack of blanket terms. Oracle is TRYING to piss off their "Sun" customers as much as possible, and are succeeding. Oracle Solaris is going to lose more than 70% of its purchase-time market share by the end of 2013. Separate products (iPlanet, Directory Server, StarOffice, etc.) will all be shot through the head.
AOL was *NEVER* a great service. When I had a 1200 baud modem, AOL was a joke. When I was first discovering usenet, AOL was unknown, but a few years later became a bad joke. (And arguably led to the eventual death of usenet.) When a tech preview of Mosaic rendered our Gopher site better than Gopher itself, AOL was a joke and a ghetto.
As a foreigner watching US politics with interest, I have to agree. What bothers me is that he doesn't even seem to be trying to improve things. He hasn't fought very hard for anything, and he's backpedalled (preemptively!) on many HUGE issues like closing Guantanamo Bay.
It's an uphill battle, no doubt, and he's facing some relatively popular whack-job Republicans, but dammit, he needs to FIGHT a bit.
My first response would be neither of the above. As a curmudgeon, I would ask why. What is the goal of the project?
The manager here, is almost certainly assigning the wrong task. They should be saying, "I want you to figure out how to make this project happen." If the company is porting their application to the iPhone, then obviously developing code for the iPhone is a requisite and in that case, great! Let's go for it!
This is a bit of a limited example, but in general a manager's job is not to dictate technologies - he should dictate the project, and the staff should determine the best technology to use, where "best" is a very subtle and multi-faceted combination of factors.
There comes a point where you get tired of hearing from someone with no practical experience, "You're still using PERL? I can rewrite your entire documentation system in in about a week." Hey, great idea! Let's do this every nine months with a new language each time, (and discover new quirks and bugs of the new language each time!), with no discernible benefit other than being modern! (Note that with bugs, unforseen issues, and retraining, that week usually ends up being about six weeks long, and pisses people off along the way.)
I've encountered very few senior IT people who refuse to learn anything new. I have, however, come across a nearly endless stream of them who have come to accept that (a) there are more new technologies constantly popping up than they have time for, (b) most of them will be forgotten in a year, and (c) conservative change is the best plan if you're not a cutting-edge technology company. Banks? Oil and Gas? Retail? Implementing the newest (invariably buggy) technology is a pointless risk for companies in these industries.
For every old guy unwilling to move forward with the times, I've encountered ten fresh-out-of-college kids who refuse to think through an idea before trying to throw together a half-assed implementation of a bad plan. You CAN do a lot of things. WHY do you want to do them, other than "it's cool!"?
Some of what you say is true though, but I would say that salaries don't reflect it so much as they cause it. Imagine getting hired as a junior at a good salary and then for your hard work and determination to keep up with modern technology, you get a 2.2% raise each year (on average). Meanwhile, every year someone new is getting hired at 6% higher than the previous year's starting salary. After five years of this, you're still as hip as new hires, have half a decade of real experience, and are getting about 15% less than someone new. After a decade of this,it's 30%. Yeah, you'll get some promotions in there to reduce the difference, but ultimately you're getting penalized for starting earlier and being older, regardless of skills and currency. Sooner or later you get tempted to say fuck it all, and put in the minimum amount of effort you need to keep your job, because excellence and self-improvement are hardly ever rewarded appropriately.
The internet is turning into 4chan./. is ahead of the curve, digg is already there, reddit is close behind, and the MSM are going to be next (starting with Wired).
"Star Wars: The Complete Saga on Blu-ray will be available for $139.99 US/$179.99 CAN and the Star Wars: Trilogy Sets for $69.99 US/89.99 CAN. Pricing for each set will vary by international territory."
Excuse me Lucas? The dollar is above parity. YOUR dollar is worth LESS than mine, not ~30% MORE!
I had no intention of giving Lucas another dime of my money, but this makes me even more determined.
I did find this quote interesting: 'Flanked by a legion of his finest Imperial stormtroopers, Darth Vader himself joined Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment President Mike Dunn at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to announce the release, vowing "The forces of the Empire will be at your disposal to assure the success of this endeavor."'
Yep. Sun replaced Master/Slave" relationships in LDAP with "supplier/consumer." So many other services are moving to "primary/secondary" language. Sigh. So dumb when the word slave is appropriate.
Actually, the text never said n----r. It said nigger. And injun. Those are the words I read when I was eight years old, and I never misunderstood them. Of course, my parents actually talked to me about history and context. (And that began earlier, when my dad read Tom Sawyer to me for the first time.)
It amazes me that even newspapers no longer dash-out words such as "fuck, cunt, slut, bastard" in court transcripts, but spreading from the US, you can NOT commit the word "nigger" to print in any context - even in the discussion of the word. Unless, of course, you're a black rapper. Then you have "reclaimed" the word and everything is all happiness and light.
Seriously, if we erased the memory of the entire planet's population and started fresh, people would fracture into groups. Religions would spring up and fight over the proper interpretation of new scriptures.
History (mostly) doesn't _cause_ conflict, it records it. People are different and unique enough that conflict will arise in a vacuum.
I don't frequent/. as much as I used to. It's good to see, though, that kdawson's inflammatory "sky is falling" articles (which usually--like in this case--link to an idiotic opinion disguised as reporting) are still um...
Actually, it's not good at all. kdawson is one of the two main reasons I don't bother with/. most of the time. (the other is the idiotic new posting window with dog-slow preview.)
Seriously, three short lines which clearly convey the entire summary of the story, contains lots of links to both story and background, AND doesn't contain terrible typos! Also, geeky and interesting. This is what slashdot needs more of.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't owned a console since the Atari 2600 I bought with my allowance. I have actively boycotted any and all Sony products (including their record labels - not easy for me!) for almost half a decade. This file will never be of any use to me or anyone I know. Nonetheless, I've downloaded a couple of copies, and I'm seeding the torrent as well.
Fuck 'em all.
My stereo(yes, two channel!) is worth several thousands of carefully-planned dollars. I think it could be put alongside systems worth $20k, and hold its own. (The speakers at present are the weakest link, and they still sound much better than yours. :-)
That said, it's a practical system. I've got enough background in electronics and acoustics (and psychology!) to know better than to buy a huge amount of the insane junk that's out there. Amplifiers that go into oscillation with the wrong cables? No thanks! Vacuum tubes? The guitar amp is downstairs, thanks very much. Cable elevators? Um...no. Just no.
So here's my defense of 24-bit 48kHz recordings: Breathing space.
Nothing to do (specifically) with dynamic headroom or the like, but when producing, mixing, and mastering data recorded as 16-bit 44kHz, there is very little you can do without inadvertently affecting the audio signal. In other words, it's harder to get it right when you're operating right at the threshold of hearing.
If studios did everything in 24-bit/96kHz and actually avoided clipping through the whole chain, then a final mixdown to 16b/44Khz (i.e. a CD) would sound gorgeous - perfect sound to the extent of human hearing. However, mixing is often done poorly, and as hot as possible for better sales, and the result is that the poor CD suffers the abuse caused by the engineers.
OK, old-school admins use sudo in a multi-admin environment. It's not for security, it's for auditing, i.e. "All right, which one of us fucked up server ?" (Aside: Veteran admins take responsibility for their own mistakes.)
Some other signs of veteran unix admins:
0) We don't use command aliases. It galls me to no end that RedHat aliases mv, cp, and rm commands FOR ROOT! Babysitting routine activity isn't just annoying, it's dangerous! What happens when some Linux admin hops onto a Unix system and issues an "#rm lib*" command, expecting to be able to step through which libraries to delete? (and don't get me started on coloured output from ls on a black background. If you want it, YOU add it, don't make me remove it!)
Bollocks!
In the modern world, telnet and rsh are deficient tools for access. ssh is a _necessary_ modern tool, and is ubiquitous.
vim is neither a necessary replacement for vi, nor is it ubiquitous. A full install of Solaris doesn't have it included, so you have to add it by hand - to each machine you admin.
The nature of being a sysadmin is to be completely comfortable with the minimal tools available at 3am on a half-broken system. At one point that was sed, awk, and ed. vi and perl are both reasonable assumptions nowadays, but vim isn't. (and emacs never has been - it is and should always be an editor of programmers.)
Use vim all you want, but make sure you aren't dependent on multi-level undo or flashy colours if you're the guy they call in the middle of the night.
That's what we can't figure out either. It doesn't make any sense. If you buy a company with the intention of killing them, it's generally because they're your competitor. Oracle bought Sun which launched them into an entirely new space, and then proceeded to burn every bridge possible--to the point of harming their own core business as well. It's stupid! The only real explanation is arrogance, which actually makes sense if you factor in Larry Ellison.
We're officially a fairly big customer - somewhere north of 800 Sun servers, if I were to guess. Add another hundred workstations or so, and we're pushing about a thousand machines running Solaris, many of them running Sun apps of one sort or another.
Oracle changed the terms of our software support to the tune of a 500% increase. That's right, they want us to pay SIX TIMES as much for support! We lost all of our training credits overnight (About $100k in training dollars). Our hardware support costs have gone up substantially as well, so we're getting rid of our full-time onsite tech. (with the money we're saving by getting rid of the onsite Sun guy, we're going to hire two hardware techs of our own who are qualified/allowed to work on ALL of our gear, and still have cash left over.)
We are planning to migrate away from all Sun/Oracle applications by the end of the current support contract. Even the groups that were using Oracle Database before this are being strongly encouraged to look elsewhere for solutions.
Ours isn't an isolated case. The general feeling in the Sun customer community is that they're standing on a sinking ship, flailing at the floorboards with an axe to make it go down even faster. Every Sun software product is now in the 'legacy' section of Oracle's (disastrous!!!) website. Contracts have gone from three pages to 500, due to the lack of blanket terms. Oracle is TRYING to piss off their "Sun" customers as much as possible, and are succeeding. Oracle Solaris is going to lose more than 70% of its purchase-time market share by the end of 2013. Separate products (iPlanet, Directory Server, StarOffice, etc.) will all be shot through the head.
No, the REALLY annoying thing is determining a file's purpose by its file extension.
The "final straw"? Or else...WHAT?
No.
AOL was *NEVER* a great service. When I had a 1200 baud modem, AOL was a joke. When I was first discovering usenet, AOL was unknown, but a few years later became a bad joke. (And arguably led to the eventual death of usenet.) When a tech preview of Mosaic rendered our Gopher site better than Gopher itself, AOL was a joke and a ghetto.
For the first time in 2011, let me offer you a hearty "Fuck You."
Gotta get that in every year, it seems--this year it either came early, or will come often.
No no, those are _chicken_ cannons! We have chicken cannons up here, not air cannons.
Yep. It went from good to bad to broken.
Also, the preview is still pointless suckage.
As a foreigner watching US politics with interest, I have to agree. What bothers me is that he doesn't even seem to be trying to improve things. He hasn't fought very hard for anything, and he's backpedalled (preemptively!) on many HUGE issues like closing Guantanamo Bay.
It's an uphill battle, no doubt, and he's facing some relatively popular whack-job Republicans, but dammit, he needs to FIGHT a bit.
"...such an obvious enemy of much of the online community..."
The "online community" is now society as a whole. It's easier to just say "...such an obvious enemy of the public."
Here's me orthogonal experience. :-)
30 years ago the requirement was "it has to work."
20 years ago, "it has to be simple."
10 years ago, "it has to look good."
Each evolutionary step has _not_ built on the previous step, but instead has replaced it.
Then again, I'm a curmudgeon.
My first response would be neither of the above. As a curmudgeon, I would ask why. What is the goal of the project?
The manager here, is almost certainly assigning the wrong task. They should be saying, "I want you to figure out how to make this project happen." If the company is porting their application to the iPhone, then obviously developing code for the iPhone is a requisite and in that case, great! Let's go for it!
This is a bit of a limited example, but in general a manager's job is not to dictate technologies - he should dictate the project, and the staff should determine the best technology to use, where "best" is a very subtle and multi-faceted combination of factors.
In defense of the IT curmudgeon...
There comes a point where you get tired of hearing from someone with no practical experience, "You're still using PERL? I can rewrite your entire documentation system in in about a week." Hey, great idea! Let's do this every nine months with a new language each time, (and discover new quirks and bugs of the new language each time!), with no discernible benefit other than being modern! (Note that with bugs, unforseen issues, and retraining, that week usually ends up being about six weeks long, and pisses people off along the way.)
I've encountered very few senior IT people who refuse to learn anything new. I have, however, come across a nearly endless stream of them who have come to accept that (a) there are more new technologies constantly popping up than they have time for, (b) most of them will be forgotten in a year, and (c) conservative change is the best plan if you're not a cutting-edge technology company. Banks? Oil and Gas? Retail? Implementing the newest (invariably buggy) technology is a pointless risk for companies in these industries.
For every old guy unwilling to move forward with the times, I've encountered ten fresh-out-of-college kids who refuse to think through an idea before trying to throw together a half-assed implementation of a bad plan. You CAN do a lot of things. WHY do you want to do them, other than "it's cool!"?
Some of what you say is true though, but I would say that salaries don't reflect it so much as they cause it. Imagine getting hired as a junior at a good salary and then for your hard work and determination to keep up with modern technology, you get a 2.2% raise each year (on average). Meanwhile, every year someone new is getting hired at 6% higher than the previous year's starting salary. After five years of this, you're still as hip as new hires, have half a decade of real experience, and are getting about 15% less than someone new. After a decade of this,it's 30%. Yeah, you'll get some promotions in there to reduce the difference, but ultimately you're getting penalized for starting earlier and being older, regardless of skills and currency. Sooner or later you get tempted to say fuck it all, and put in the minimum amount of effort you need to keep your job, because excellence and self-improvement are hardly ever rewarded appropriately.
The internet is turning into 4chan. /. is ahead of the curve, digg is already there, reddit is close behind, and the MSM are going to be next (starting with Wired).
It may not solve the problem, but the pink slip will solve recurrences of the problem.
"Star Wars: The Complete Saga on Blu-ray will be available for $139.99 US/$179.99 CAN and the Star Wars: Trilogy Sets for $69.99 US/89.99 CAN. Pricing for each set will vary by international territory."
Excuse me Lucas? The dollar is above parity. YOUR dollar is worth LESS than mine, not ~30% MORE!
I had no intention of giving Lucas another dime of my money, but this makes me even more determined.
I did find this quote interesting:
'Flanked by a legion of his finest Imperial stormtroopers, Darth Vader himself joined Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment President Mike Dunn at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to announce the release, vowing "The forces of the Empire will be at your disposal to assure the success of this endeavor."'
So Fox and Lucas are allied with the dark side...
Yep. Sun replaced Master/Slave" relationships in LDAP with "supplier/consumer." So many other services are moving to "primary/secondary" language. Sigh. So dumb when the word slave is appropriate.
Actually, the text never said n----r. It said nigger. And injun. Those are the words I read when I was eight years old, and I never misunderstood them. Of course, my parents actually talked to me about history and context. (And that began earlier, when my dad read Tom Sawyer to me for the first time.)
It amazes me that even newspapers no longer dash-out words such as "fuck, cunt, slut, bastard" in court transcripts, but spreading from the US, you can NOT commit the word "nigger" to print in any context - even in the discussion of the word. Unless, of course, you're a black rapper. Then you have "reclaimed" the word and everything is all happiness and light.
Damn.
Your opinion makes me uncomfortable. STOP IT!!!
Seriously, if we erased the memory of the entire planet's population and started fresh, people would fracture into groups. Religions would spring up and fight over the proper interpretation of new scriptures.
History (mostly) doesn't _cause_ conflict, it records it. People are different and unique enough that conflict will arise in a vacuum.
I don't frequent /. as much as I used to. It's good to see, though, that kdawson's inflammatory "sky is falling" articles (which usually--like in this case--link to an idiotic opinion disguised as reporting) are still um...
Actually, it's not good at all. kdawson is one of the two main reasons I don't bother with /. most of the time. (the other is the idiotic new posting window with dog-slow preview.)
Seriously, three short lines which clearly convey the entire summary of the story, contains lots of links to both story and background, AND doesn't contain terrible typos! Also, geeky and interesting. This is what slashdot needs more of.