Will organisms that eat BSE-infested beef eventually die off? The chances of getting sick from it are infinitestimally small. Somebody run the numbers, but my guess is more genertic information is transmitted by the increased reproductive success of not living near a volcano or subduction zone, or not getting hit by an asteroid, or not gorging on 3000-calorie breakfasts
I had several calls when I gave away a Powerbook 100, minus disk drive, on Craigslist, and only a few years ago even managed to sell the dot-matrix printer that came with my Mac 128 for $10 - so there are people out there who have room for this stuff in their house.
I won't waste good electricy on anything slower than a 500 mhz Pentium III myself, though. And I've kept the Mac 128, which is trotted out accasionally as a nightlight / digital clock.
We're always looking for ways to make light go faster than C. Customers complain about network latencies between SF and London, and we have to explain about the speed of light. Now there's an alternative to digging a fiber optic trench through the mantle of the Earth!
I have earned a good living writing fairly stupid Perl scripts to fix refential integrity in MySQL databases that foreign keys would have prevented easily. (Why is it always the SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR who has to fix all that crap?) Please do not endanger my career!
Yeah any coder can work around this - and bats will fly out of my nose on Christmas Day!
Verizon is a CDMA not a GSM network. You can unlock your phone but it's not much use except in the non-Verizon parts of the world that have CDMA (S Korea?). They have a international plan that can accomodate a GSM phone overseas but if youre going to be calling locally overseas it's just cheaper to buy a prepaid GSM phone from some random place in the destination country.
There are lots of hacks floating around for cracking OBEX. It seems to be faily trivial if you have the right cabling.
35 Cds required for installation, apps only run efficiently on 8-core CPU with 16 GB of memory and 2 TB of disk space. All GNU utils ported to SQL stored procedures.
>> Microsoft enters Linux - "nothing to worry about".
The only Linux ever devised that is rootable on port 135 out of the box. Daily patches. And it has Dell PERC-2 support!
OTOH, RedHat ES is more expensive than Solaris (and a lot fo other OSes.)
This is a new trend specifically designed to piss me off. Seems a tad racist to blame it on Indians since everybody does this now:
Them: "Hello my name is Rodney and howmayIprovideyouwiththeexcellentservicetodaywhich nodoubtwhohavecometoexpectfrommakingasmartpurchase decisiontobuyfromthegarbageshitesoftwarecomapnyand Ihopeyouarehavinganexcellentday."
>>>> I went out on my own again. I barely had enough work to pay the bills through the summer, but DAMN I was relaxed! By the end of the summer I was able to stomach another corporate job.
Don't you just HATE that! You work self-employed, and about the time you start to say to yourself, "you know, with one more customer like so and so, I could do this forever". And then the siren song of permanent employment sucks you right back into the system.
I've been through this cycle a few times, and each iteration makes it easier to tell a disrespectful employer to piss up a rope, and easier to find self-employment elsewhere.
If it weren't for the fact that medical care is so f***ed up in the US, we'd gave a lot more happy, self-employed, successful people.
Gmail is the only service that works. The success rate has risen to about 99.5% for me - rejecting 150 to 250 spams per day out of 30 or so legit emails, one or two spams get through per day, and no false positives, ever.
It is simply leverage. At a small company where I used to work where the CEO blew his top every time he got any spam, there was a guy who basically worked half time examining his mail for spam. It's a labor intensive process. Gmail has millions of users, and probably a whole floor of people tweaking rules full time. Gmail will always be better.
You're supposed to allow 1 foot for each 10 MPH of speed, you inconsiderate clod. And an extra 10 feet if you're watching a movie on the DVD player in the dash, and 10 more feet if it's a porn movie.
A colleague points out that current sport among search mavens is to find the "the perfectly evil book which causes the Unsuggester to generate a great library. The best try so far was "Who Moved My Cheese? For Kids", but not enough people own it."
The very fact that there is a WMMC for kids gives me greater despair then knowing GWB will be President for two more years.
Although the WMMC regular ed. unsuggestions are pretty good, good enough to keep my book club busy for a few years:
The LED thingys replace the antenna. Since it takes 10 or 20 mW to light up a LED that's a pretty good fraction of the phone power. If you're near a tower, you phone might operate at only 100 or 200 mW, unmolested.
If you're paranoid enough to suspect your cell phone is bugged, then someone in your organization probbaly knows how to sweep for this kind of thing. If you're operating alone, go accidentally blow yourself up already.
The blogger is moron but also a typical consumer.The typical consumer is expected to make unrealistic demands. I mean, you can drive your new car into a tree at 50+ MPH and walk away - what would have made that possible except for the mass stupidity and ridicuous demands of customers!
I suppose it's possible to build a drop-proof PC that you can back over with your car, are you willing to pay for it?
> Computers and mobile phones that last a lifetime can already be built.
Bullshit on that. Ever heard of Moore's law? I have a 22 year old Mac Plus that still works fine but it's not of much use except as a digital clock. It is simply not possible to build a computer now that will usably load software produced 20 years in the future..
Only thing I use the USPS for anymore is Netflix, Taxes, and the sundry documents associated with being a good citizen like jury summons, election packets, etc. I write about four checks per year, and haven't gotten on in the mail in years.
Mail is so 1999. Although I could see this being useful for people who are sailing aroud the world or deployed in the military, and aren't fortunate enough to have someone to volunteer to serve as their mail drop.
I know/.ers are instictively repulsed by the idea of anyone saying something non-negative about MS, but an article in the WSJ today pointed out that the usability tide has turned - computers now are pretty easy to configure and interconnect, compared to consumer devices.
As bloated and late as it seems, Vista's most important design objectives were to be somewhat idiot-proof and to support every half-assedly-engineered peripheral device sold in all the four corners of the Earth. I think that is what bogged them down, not something of interest only to anal-retentive UI consoisseurs. Meeting these objectives required getting rid of generation of cruft (and laying the foundations for generation more to come, I am sure); if you've ever done any programming you know that is the hardest part of any project.
These days, 50 TB is a pretty wuss file system. I'll bet a significant number of/.ers have 50TB in their bedroom file server.
Google, apprently, intends to write all data it encounters, forever, and I bet they have a room full of people whose job it is to buy storage capacity by the Tens of Petabytes, and still it's not enough for their plan for world domination, BWAA HAA HAA HAA!
If you're in between those extremes, you will end up purging old files sooner or later.
Context switching considered harmful
on
You Call This Agile?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Pardon the rant, I'm having a cynical week this week.
Used to be, there were generalists writing code. It was possible for one person to understand security, IO performance, database design. Not any more. Now, projects, even individual applications, are too complex to be understood by one person. This forces specialization. Back in the day, system administrators were often the in house generalists, accepted as relatively unproductive coders, but peers in the architecture process.
Nowadays system administrators are rarely asked to help in the application architecture process, most apps are rushed into production with enough crap in them so that we sysadmins are fully occupied devising clever kludges to work around bugs and security holes in already-deployed code. It's a living.
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno, Paris Hilton's opinion on CCIE Storage certification is pretty spot-on:
http://www.routergod.com/index.php?p=30
... via the holes in the fence in Southern California!
Will organisms that eat BSE-infested beef eventually die off? The chances of getting sick from it are infinitestimally small. Somebody run the numbers, but my guess is more genertic information is transmitted by the increased reproductive success of not living near a volcano or subduction zone, or not getting hit by an asteroid, or not gorging on 3000-calorie breakfasts
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jht ml?articleID=193005453
I had several calls when I gave away a Powerbook 100, minus disk drive, on Craigslist, and only a few years ago even managed to sell the dot-matrix printer that came with my Mac 128 for $10 - so there are people out there who have room for this stuff in their house.
I won't waste good electricy on anything slower than a 500 mhz Pentium III myself, though. And I've kept the Mac 128, which is trotted out accasionally as a nightlight / digital clock.
So light goes backwards in this doodad?
We're always looking for ways to make light go faster than C. Customers complain about network latencies between SF and London, and we have to explain about the speed of light. Now there's an alternative to digging a fiber optic trench through the mantle of the Earth!
I have earned a good living writing fairly stupid Perl scripts to fix refential integrity in MySQL databases that foreign keys would have prevented easily. (Why is it always the SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR who has to fix all that crap?) Please do not endanger my career!
Yeah any coder can work around this - and bats will fly out of my nose on Christmas Day!
.... disabled that feature in the E815 I have. Or maybe it was only availabe in the "Middle East" version.
Verizon is a CDMA not a GSM network. You can unlock your phone but it's not much use except in the non-Verizon parts of the world that have CDMA (S Korea?). They have a international plan that can accomodate a GSM phone overseas but if youre going to be calling locally overseas it's just cheaper to buy a prepaid GSM phone from some random place in the destination country.
There are lots of hacks floating around for cracking OBEX. It seems to be faily trivial if you have the right cabling.
>> Oracle enters Linux - "not a big deal".
35 Cds required for installation, apps only run efficiently on 8-core CPU with 16 GB of memory and 2 TB of disk space. All GNU utils ported to SQL stored procedures.
>> Microsoft enters Linux - "nothing to worry about".
The only Linux ever devised that is rootable on port 135 out of the box. Daily patches. And it has Dell PERC-2 support!
OTOH, RedHat ES is more expensive than Solaris (and a lot fo other OSes.)
This is a new trend specifically designed to piss me off. Seems a tad racist to blame it on Indians since everybody does this now:
h nodoubtwhohavecometoexpectfrommakingasmartpurchase decisiontobuyfromthegarbageshitesoftwarecomapnyand Ihopeyouarehavinganexcellentday."
n yourcontactasasupportedgarbageshitewaresoftwarerod uctyouhavepurchasedbutnecessarilyintheinterestofpr ovidingtheupmostexcelletcustoerservicetowhicyouare ntitemayIaskyoutoexplainwhetherARRRRRGGHisimpactin gyouroperationsseverelyheavilyonlymarginallyornota tall?"
Them: "Hello my name is Rodney and howmayIprovideyouwiththeexcellentservicetodaywhic
Me: "ARRRRRGGH!"
Them: "AsIunderstandityousaidARRRRRGGHwhichisnotlistedo
... 459 days per year the hours add up pretty quickly.
>>>> I went out on my own again. I barely had enough work to pay the bills through the summer, but DAMN I was relaxed! By the end of the summer I was able to stomach another corporate job.
Don't you just HATE that! You work self-employed, and about the time you start to say to yourself, "you know, with one more customer like so and so, I could do this forever". And then the siren song of permanent employment sucks you right back into the system.
I've been through this cycle a few times, and each iteration makes it easier to tell a disrespectful employer to piss up a rope, and easier to find self-employment elsewhere.
If it weren't for the fact that medical care is so f***ed up in the US, we'd gave a lot more happy, self-employed, successful people.
Gmail is the only service that works. The success rate has risen to about 99.5% for me - rejecting 150 to 250 spams per day out of 30 or so legit emails, one or two spams get through per day, and no false positives, ever.
It is simply leverage. At a small company where I used to work where the CEO blew his top every time he got any spam, there was a guy who basically worked half time examining his mail for spam. It's a labor intensive process. Gmail has millions of users, and probably a whole floor of people tweaking rules full time. Gmail will always be better.
You're supposed to allow 1 foot for each 10 MPH of speed, you inconsiderate clod. And an extra 10 feet if you're watching a movie on the DVD player in the dash, and 10 more feet if it's a porn movie.
A colleague points out that current sport among search mavens is to find the "the
perfectly evil book which causes the Unsuggester to generate a great library. The best try so far was "Who Moved My Cheese? For Kids", but not enough people own it."
The very fact that there is a WMMC for kids gives me greater despair then knowing GWB will be President for two more years.
Although the WMMC regular ed. unsuggestions are pretty good, good enough to keep my book club busy for a few years:
http://www.librarything.com/unsuggester/12799
I read the winners and you have to kiss a lot of asses to get recommendations like that.
Where's the old BOFH spirit, people?
The profession is doomed.
The LED thingys replace the antenna. Since it takes 10 or 20 mW to light up a LED that's a pretty good fraction of the phone power. If you're near a tower, you phone might operate at only 100 or 200 mW, unmolested.
If you're paranoid enough to suspect your cell phone is bugged, then someone in your organization probbaly knows how to sweep for this kind of thing. If you're operating alone, go accidentally blow yourself up already.
The blogger is moron but also a typical consumer.The typical consumer is expected to make unrealistic demands. I mean, you can drive your new car into a tree at 50+ MPH and walk away - what would have made that possible except for the mass stupidity and ridicuous demands of customers!
I suppose it's possible to build a drop-proof PC that you can back over with your car, are you willing to pay for it?
> Computers and mobile phones that last a lifetime can already be built.
Bullshit on that. Ever heard of Moore's law? I have a 22 year old Mac Plus that still works fine but it's not of much use except as a digital clock. It is simply not possible to build a computer now that will usably load software produced 20 years in the future..
Weird. Who gets mail anymore?
Only thing I use the USPS for anymore is Netflix, Taxes, and the sundry documents associated with being a good citizen like jury summons, election packets, etc. I write about four checks per year, and haven't gotten on in the mail in years.
Mail is so 1999. Although I could see this being useful for people who are sailing aroud the world or deployed in the military, and aren't fortunate enough to have someone to volunteer to serve as their mail drop.
I know /.ers are instictively repulsed by the idea of anyone saying something non-negative about MS, but an article in the WSJ today pointed out that the usability tide has turned - computers now are pretty easy to configure and interconnect, compared to consumer devices.
As bloated and late as it seems, Vista's most important design objectives were to be somewhat idiot-proof and to support every half-assedly-engineered peripheral device sold in all the four corners of the Earth. I think that is what bogged them down, not something of interest only to anal-retentive UI consoisseurs. Meeting these objectives required getting rid of generation of cruft (and laying the foundations for generation more to come, I am sure); if you've ever done any programming you know that is the hardest part of any project.
It's pretty useful for shoving bits around here there ad everywhere.
Teh rest is up to whatever Turing Complete thingamajigs you plug into the tubes.
These days, 50 TB is a pretty wuss file system. I'll bet a significant number of /.ers have 50TB in their bedroom file server.
Google, apprently, intends to write all data it encounters, forever, and I bet they have a room full of people whose job it is to buy storage capacity by the Tens of Petabytes, and still it's not enough for their plan for world domination, BWAA HAA HAA HAA!
If you're in between those extremes, you will end up purging old files sooner or later.
Pardon the rant, I'm having a cynical week this week.
Used to be, there were generalists writing code. It was possible for one person to understand security, IO performance, database design. Not any more. Now, projects, even individual applications, are too complex to be understood by one person. This forces specialization. Back in the day, system administrators were often the in house generalists, accepted as relatively unproductive coders, but peers in the architecture process.
Nowadays system administrators are rarely asked to help in the application architecture process, most apps are rushed into production with enough crap in them so that we sysadmins are fully occupied devising clever kludges to work around bugs and security holes in already-deployed code. It's a living.
)
8 8
[Fie on thee, infidel!]
)
8 o o