Hollywood doesn't understand nerds. And even nerds don't understand nerds. It works both ways. Most of the nerds I know, and myself, do not want to be nerds. "Nerd" was *never* a badge of honor, and still is not. It is only this new wave of faux-nerds who want it to be cool, but they were already the cool kids all along and only want to be nerds because tech is cool now (and they goof up by assuming "nerd" is only about tech and gadgets). The moment that nerd became fashionable is the moment when it had to stop being nerdy by definition.
The reason BBT is popular is probably because it's less asinine than most shows, it does not celebrate ignorance, and that makes it different. And it's a comedy, not a documentary. If it was realistic it would be boring.
Sadly, most conferences feel like just a way to extract some vacation and entertainment money from the bosses, or a way to network so that they can more easily hop jobs.
Remember, that's a week of time during which you get no actual work done. Which is fine if you don't mind cheating the employer, but someone even halfway honest should at least attempt to acquire some value at the conference, learn something that's utterly unlearnable on the web or from a book, discover the solution to the vexing problem at work, and so forth.
But aren't company sponsored events just a marketing opportunity. Where will you find people at that conference who think it's all snake oil, or show you alternatives that are cheaper and better or more relevant?
Yes that's useful. The idea of "technology conference" is extremely vague. One could go to a conference on nuclear power engineering and still be considered a technology conference. Or a Blackberry conference, or a video game devices conference, and so forth.
So for a conference to be actually useful, it should be something related to the job being done and where something of value can be acquired. Otherwise it's just a fun holiday at the employer's expense. So even conferences that seem related to the job can be a waste of money if there's no return on the investment. Watch out for the things that are just big marketing showcases because they're pointless and everyone is lying. Also a vendor-sponsored conference is likely to be biased.
It's not in the article, but the story I heard was that these were sales force employees that were short changed. Not the sort of job commonly given to foreign workers. The hints about Silicon Valley and LinkedIn make it seem like these were tech workers, most of which do not get overtime anyway.
How about an adblock like program that still used the ads, but downloaded them very very slowly (so as to not slow down your web viewing) but then don't show the ads until the finish loading, or redirected the ads to a different window that the user may or may not decide to view. So the excuse against fraud is that you didn't want to wait for ads to finish downloading, or you didn't want to go look at the extra ad window.
They still rent games now. You may be paying $60, but you can only play it with permission and you do not own it. Move to a new computer and you may need to buy it again because it won't let you re-install. Or your DRM vendor goes out of business and you lose your games. Or they force an mandatory patch an you breaking the game. Luckily no one's been like Amazon and deleted your purchase, but the capability is there.
But Sony Games, or EA Games, or whoever it is, you get crappy games at a high cost, even if you have access to their full catalog. Yes, Netflix doesn't have everything, but it has a lot of good stuff and high quality stuff. I would not want even one single game from Sony, even if it were free.
Not just scripting, but I can't imagine how to do any development work without grep or find. I even pull open the shell to do basic stuff when I use windows for games (ie, finding and editing the config files).
Actually I had convenient recording to VCR from my DirecTV receiver, before I got the Tivo version. Ie, you would scan the programs on screen and select which ones you wanted to record. Then you placed a very small IR transmitter in a location where your VCR would see it (the VCR was right next to the satellite receiver so that was easy). Then when you're program was about to come on it would turn on the VCR and start recording. The only thing I needed to do was make sure I rotated the tapes so that there was room to record, and to catch up on my shows so I didn't run out of tapes (I basically had about 8 hours of recording).
It really was pretty convenient. Even the on-screen UI was very similar to the Tivo version, so when I did upgrade later there wasn't much new to learn.
But getting the Irish involved is irrelevant. The prosecutor in this case does not want the actual hard drive with the emails. What would the Irish courts actually *do* in this case? Would they send back an email saying "you have our permission to tell your US company to go ahead and retrieve their data from the comfort of their US offices?"
I don't buy the argument that the data is in Ireland. It's not so well localized as that. It flies around all the time to and from "the cloud". There may be caches of it in many countries. The emails were not even originally written in Ireland.
In school we were given a one page sheet with vi cheat notes the very first day class started, and that was all the instruction we had, and we started using it that first day. No one had a mouse yet so no one could complain about the lack of point-and-click editing and so it was naturally assumed there would be some learning involved.
Vim makes it so much easier now as it actually comes with help built in.
How many GUIs at once? One reason I never liked any IDE is that they're locked into this broken format of displaying only one code window at a time. Some IDEs won't you open more than one instance (or that may be due to windows being stupid). I know some people who have a big full screen of just Mac terminal, but subdivided into 10 different text windows, some with shell and some with editors. Others tile their different text editor windows to make use of all the real estate.
And you can use a gui with emacs and vim. In fact, most people do that most of the time. But the option exists for text mode. Except for Microsoft, most people seem to think that options are a good thing.
But but but.. the newer editors are different! """They can highlight syntax and auto-indent code just as effortlessly as they can spellcheck documents. You can use them to record macros and manage code snippets just as easily as you can copy/paste plain text. Some simple text editors even exceed their design goals thanks to plugins that infuse them with capabilities to rival text-centric apps from other genres. They can take on the duties of a source code editor and even an Integrated Development Environment."""
Next you'll be pulling my leg and telling me that emacs and vim can do that stuff too. You sound like the skeptical sort of person who refuses to believe the words of truth that flow from the marketing departments.
(do I really need to mark this as sarcasm, on the one hand it's obvious, but on the other hand this is slashdot)
Ya, I'm surprised by the summary. Apparently the author has not actually used emacs or vim, and instead listed the BARE MINIMUM set of features that any editor should support. Maybe the author came with a pre-existing bias against emacs and vi as "tools for old farts" and assumed any new tools must automatically be better.
That's an interesting aside, but it has nothing to do with this particular case. In your example there is no access to the data within the US, so UK must get involved. In the actual non-hypothetical case Microsoft can get the requested data within five minutes without leaving Redmond.
This case does NOT involve asking foreign entities to hand over evidence. Read the article and the attachments. Microsoft can get this data from within the US at any time. No one has to go overseas. This is a crime in the US and the evidence for all practical purposes exists in the US. The Irish police have no easier access to this data locally unless they went to grab the physical servers (far exceeding the limited scope of the warrent).
Your analogy has absolutely not resemblance to this case. Except perhaps if you had a briefcase full of drugs that was locked, and you claim that you can't unlock it because your combination to the lock is on the phone in your pocket but you can't use the phone because the account is with a Dutch provider.
Slashdot Mirror
All in the Family: exaggeration
Friends: exaggeration
Sex in the City: amazingly exaggerated
Cheers: exaggeration
I Love Lucy: plausible
Hollywood doesn't understand nerds. And even nerds don't understand nerds. It works both ways. Most of the nerds I know, and myself, do not want to be nerds. "Nerd" was *never* a badge of honor, and still is not. It is only this new wave of faux-nerds who want it to be cool, but they were already the cool kids all along and only want to be nerds because tech is cool now (and they goof up by assuming "nerd" is only about tech and gadgets). The moment that nerd became fashionable is the moment when it had to stop being nerdy by definition.
The reason BBT is popular is probably because it's less asinine than most shows, it does not celebrate ignorance, and that makes it different. And it's a comedy, not a documentary. If it was realistic it would be boring.
Sadly, most conferences feel like just a way to extract some vacation and entertainment money from the bosses, or a way to network so that they can more easily hop jobs.
Remember, that's a week of time during which you get no actual work done. Which is fine if you don't mind cheating the employer, but someone even halfway honest should at least attempt to acquire some value at the conference, learn something that's utterly unlearnable on the web or from a book, discover the solution to the vexing problem at work, and so forth.
But aren't company sponsored events just a marketing opportunity. Where will you find people at that conference who think it's all snake oil, or show you alternatives that are cheaper and better or more relevant?
Yes that's useful. The idea of "technology conference" is extremely vague. One could go to a conference on nuclear power engineering and still be considered a technology conference. Or a Blackberry conference, or a video game devices conference, and so forth.
So for a conference to be actually useful, it should be something related to the job being done and where something of value can be acquired. Otherwise it's just a fun holiday at the employer's expense. So even conferences that seem related to the job can be a waste of money if there's no return on the investment. Watch out for the things that are just big marketing showcases because they're pointless and everyone is lying. Also a vendor-sponsored conference is likely to be biased.
It's not in the article, but the story I heard was that these were sales force employees that were short changed. Not the sort of job commonly given to foreign workers. The hints about Silicon Valley and LinkedIn make it seem like these were tech workers, most of which do not get overtime anyway.
Best to just avoid TV in that case.
How about an adblock like program that still used the ads, but downloaded them very very slowly (so as to not slow down your web viewing) but then don't show the ads until the finish loading, or redirected the ads to a different window that the user may or may not decide to view. So the excuse against fraud is that you didn't want to wait for ads to finish downloading, or you didn't want to go look at the extra ad window.
Just like how all the junk mail to refinance my home began as soon as I finished the first financing.
I know people from Soviet bloc but who were not USSR or Russian. They are very much happier now that the masters in Moscow are not in charge.
What about Georgia? And Chechnya (internal wars are still wars). And when you get to USSR there's the whole Afghanistan war as well.
They still rent games now. You may be paying $60, but you can only play it with permission and you do not own it. Move to a new computer and you may need to buy it again because it won't let you re-install. Or your DRM vendor goes out of business and you lose your games. Or they force an mandatory patch an you breaking the game. Luckily no one's been like Amazon and deleted your purchase, but the capability is there.
But Sony Games, or EA Games, or whoever it is, you get crappy games at a high cost, even if you have access to their full catalog. Yes, Netflix doesn't have everything, but it has a lot of good stuff and high quality stuff. I would not want even one single game from Sony, even if it were free.
The best thing about G+ is that you don't have to be on facebook.
Not just scripting, but I can't imagine how to do any development work without grep or find. I even pull open the shell to do basic stuff when I use windows for games (ie, finding and editing the config files).
Actually I had convenient recording to VCR from my DirecTV receiver, before I got the Tivo version. Ie, you would scan the programs on screen and select which ones you wanted to record. Then you placed a very small IR transmitter in a location where your VCR would see it (the VCR was right next to the satellite receiver so that was easy). Then when you're program was about to come on it would turn on the VCR and start recording. The only thing I needed to do was make sure I rotated the tapes so that there was room to record, and to catch up on my shows so I didn't run out of tapes (I basically had about 8 hours of recording).
It really was pretty convenient. Even the on-screen UI was very similar to the Tivo version, so when I did upgrade later there wasn't much new to learn.
But getting the Irish involved is irrelevant. The prosecutor in this case does not want the actual hard drive with the emails. What would the Irish courts actually *do* in this case? Would they send back an email saying "you have our permission to tell your US company to go ahead and retrieve their data from the comfort of their US offices?"
I don't buy the argument that the data is in Ireland. It's not so well localized as that. It flies around all the time to and from "the cloud". There may be caches of it in many countries. The emails were not even originally written in Ireland.
In school we were given a one page sheet with vi cheat notes the very first day class started, and that was all the instruction we had, and we started using it that first day. No one had a mouse yet so no one could complain about the lack of point-and-click editing and so it was naturally assumed there would be some learning involved.
Vim makes it so much easier now as it actually comes with help built in.
dd of=/dev/hd1a seek=1172 conv=sparse
How many GUIs at once? One reason I never liked any IDE is that they're locked into this broken format of displaying only one code window at a time. Some IDEs won't you open more than one instance (or that may be due to windows being stupid).
I know some people who have a big full screen of just Mac terminal, but subdivided into 10 different text windows, some with shell and some with editors. Others tile their different text editor windows to make use of all the real estate.
And you can use a gui with emacs and vim. In fact, most people do that most of the time. But the option exists for text mode. Except for Microsoft, most people seem to think that options are a good thing.
But but but.. the newer editors are different! """They can highlight syntax and auto-indent code just as effortlessly as they can spellcheck documents. You can use them to record macros and manage code snippets just as easily as you can copy/paste plain text. Some simple text editors even exceed their design goals thanks to plugins that infuse them with capabilities to rival text-centric apps from other genres. They can take on the duties of a source code editor and even an Integrated Development Environment."""
Next you'll be pulling my leg and telling me that emacs and vim can do that stuff too. You sound like the skeptical sort of person who refuses to believe the words of truth that flow from the marketing departments.
(do I really need to mark this as sarcasm, on the one hand it's obvious, but on the other hand this is slashdot)
Ya, I'm surprised by the summary. Apparently the author has not actually used emacs or vim, and instead listed the BARE MINIMUM set of features that any editor should support. Maybe the author came with a pre-existing bias against emacs and vi as "tools for old farts" and assumed any new tools must automatically be better.
You essentially are required to install cygwin on all windows computers before they become marginally useful.
That's an interesting aside, but it has nothing to do with this particular case. In your example there is no access to the data within the US, so UK must get involved. In the actual non-hypothetical case Microsoft can get the requested data within five minutes without leaving Redmond.
This case does NOT involve asking foreign entities to hand over evidence. Read the article and the attachments. Microsoft can get this data from within the US at any time. No one has to go overseas. This is a crime in the US and the evidence for all practical purposes exists in the US. The Irish police have no easier access to this data locally unless they went to grab the physical servers (far exceeding the limited scope of the warrent).
Your analogy has absolutely not resemblance to this case. Except perhaps if you had a briefcase full of drugs that was locked, and you claim that you can't unlock it because your combination to the lock is on the phone in your pocket but you can't use the phone because the account is with a Dutch provider.