I do. I'm an email pack rat, and I find that a full-featured heavyweight client like Thunderbird makes it easier to manage the several years' worth of mail I've got archived.
Simple example: Gmail's interface won't let me easily sort my inbox by arbitrary fields. With T-Bird, I can sort on anything with one mouse click.
I can just imagine someone doing this for a senior CS project: Implement a Yahoo! Mail file system. Cache the bejeezus out of it, and do block reads and writes as email sending and reading.
Yeah, if we can get our wheelchairs from our rooms to the nursing home's "Internet lab".:)
As others have said,/etc was where system files that weren't the kernel (/sys), binaries (/bin), libraries (/lib), or users' home directories (/usr, along with other things only useful in multi-user mode like/usr/games) went.
Actually, the big argument 25 years ago was whether/bin and/lib were pronounced like they were spelled or pronounced "bine" and "libe" owing to what they were short for. We also pronounced/etc as "et cetera" which sounded more like "tsetra". It wasn't until much later that I heard it pronounced "et-see".
So - at what point in the fuzzy region between 'Severe Aspergers' and 'Mild Autism' do we start the magic treatment?
You don't. My story is almost identical to yours, and you couldn't pay me enough to undergo a magic cure-all. What I want is a magic cure for the face-blindness, social problems, etc., but leave alone the parts of Asperger's that are essential to me being happy and earning piles of cash, and well, being me.
You're exactly right regarding writing FOSS replacements for boring apps. But trying to interoperate with Exchange et al is even worse: Not only do you have to deal with the boredom, you have to deal with the roadblocks M$ intentionally puts in your way. They have no reason to make anything easier for the OOo and Evolution folks (or maybe Thunderbird) to make inroads into their established markets, and a lot of reasons not to.
Our only hope now is that Office 2007 is so different from 2003 or so buggy that the big corporate IT departments don't "upgrade" to it for years, giving the OOo people time to get their stuff working seamlessly with 2003.
We're already seeing a lot of people ask why they should upgrade from XP to Vista, and a lot of IT departments (like mine) telling us not to even think about it. The next big watershed events will be when M$ EOLs XP and Office2003, but that won't be for a few years yet.
Back in the Reagan years, when LANs were by no means ubiquitous, we had HP 2621 ASCII terminals on our desks, and worked on a VAX. Management was extremely cheap (how many of you old farts remember the AT&T "Low Cost Wins" campaign?), so we connected to the VAX by dialing into it over the building PBX using scavenged Bell 212A 1200bps modems.
One night, I found in a junk pile a hundred feet of 50-pin ribbon cable, so I crimped down two DB-25 connectors on each end, ran the cable back to the machine room which was in the next aisle over, connected that end to two spare serial ports on the VAX, and my end to two terminals: mine, and my officemate's. It was tricky keeping our 9600bps "high speed" lines secret, but it was really nice to be able to use Emacs instead of ed.
We have the same problem in tournament Scrabble, where Hasbro is constantly exhorting us to refer to "the SCRABBLE(tm) Brand Crossword Game", or at least, "the SCRABBLE(tm) game," and yes, the whole word is supposed to be capitalized in print.
We're a famously anal-retentive lot, and so periodically, someone corrects someone else on the use of the trademark. Every time that happens, I like to point out that there are many other owners of vigorously-defended trademarks that don't expect their customers to refer to their products with such unwieldy verbiage. For example, I've never seen anything from Coca-Cola telling use to refer to their signature product as "the COCA-COLA brand cola drink". They're perfectly happy with us calling it "Coke," even though in the South (where Coca-Cola is headquartered), people have genericized the term "coke" to refer to *any* soft drink, not just cola.
It would be nice, except that the further north you go, the later the sun rises in the late fall and early winter. When they tried this in the late 1970s, kids waiting for the school bus in the dark started getting hit by cars.
Jack Welch told CNN, "Ideally, you'd have every plant you own on a barge, to move with currencies and changes in the economy." Now you can truck your datacenter to wherever sysadmins are cheapest. Goodbye Bangalore, hello Bucharest.
Someone needs to make a CD adapter. You know, a thing shaped like a CD with a wire you plug into the headphone jack, then insert then adapter into the slot on the head unit, and...
I exercise and it definitely relieves stress, because I do it with the mindset that it's another form of nourishment for my body. I look at it this way despite the fact that the exercise itself is primarily to combat my genetic propensity for heart disease and diabetes. This in turn helps me get past the toxic idea that my body is just something I use to carry my brain around. I'd definitely be more stressed if I let myself believe that exercise was just another job.
Being fit and strong doesn't suck either. I can wear my geek badge with honor rather than seeing it as a dork badge, too.
Have you SEEN what medical residents eat? All that moving around leaves very little time for actual meals. They subsist on vending machine crap even more than we do.
I once interviewed for a software engineering position at Dow Jones. There, the software engineers were in the printers' union. It was a tough choice: the offer was a 20% pay cut, but its 37.5 hour workweek with no overtime represented about a 25% cut in hours. It was such a close call that I only turned the job down because it meant moving from a private window office to a two-person cubicle.
Locomotives have been built this way for decades. The win there isn't the efficiency, it's that your driveline doesn't need a transmission or a clutch--electric motors don't stall and can generate pretty much full torque at zero RPM. IIRC, the diesel engines are V-16s that displace something like seven liters per cylinder and redline at eight hundred RPM.
There is. It's called ISO-9660. It has native VMS-style version numbering right down to the semicolon. Course, that read-only thing might be tough to work around...
More seriously, they're going to open the source to ClearCase's MVFS, which might be an interesting starting point. Depending on how it's implemented, you might be able to plug a different version control system into it.
Yes, it's true, and it really kills you in ClearCase, where you might have a file name like M:\some_view\some_vob\src\deep\path\to\file@@\main \some_branch\some_other_branch\1.
I use a much lower-tech solution. I have a credit-card sized address book that I keep in my wallet, in which I describe my logins and passwords in ways only I understand. No actual passwords are written down, so this book would be useless to a thief.
There are zillions of ways to create passwords that are hard to crack and easy to remember. That's not the problem.
The problem is when you have to remember lots of them. I have over 300, for the various accounts on the machines I administer, as well as for web sites, ATM PINs, etc. They're on facilities with differing requirements and aging schedules. Lessee, is this the one that requires or forbids special characters? The one that has to be more than eight characters or at most eight? The one I have to change, or the one I'm not permitted to change yet? The one that requires upper and lower case letters or is case-insensitive? Or was it all numeric?
There's simply no one-size-fits-all way to generate and remember passwords.
"Your retina scan has expired -- choose a new one"
Scott Adams coined the term "brightsizing" to describe this, as well as other situations that drive out the best people, thereby dumbing down the whole organization.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to admit, it's very unsettling to read all this about a guy I spent a day with at HP when we were considering including ReiserFS in HP-UX.
Wimp.
$ export EDITOR=cat
I do. I'm an email pack rat, and I find that a full-featured heavyweight client like Thunderbird makes it easier to manage the several years' worth of mail I've got archived.
Simple example: Gmail's interface won't let me easily sort my inbox by arbitrary fields. With T-Bird, I can sort on anything with one mouse click.
I can just imagine someone doing this for a senior CS project: Implement a Yahoo! Mail file system. Cache the bejeezus out of it, and do block reads and writes as email sending and reading.
Yeah, if we can get our wheelchairs from our rooms to the nursing home's "Internet lab". :)
/etc was where system files that weren't the kernel (/sys), binaries (/bin), libraries (/lib), or users' home directories (/usr, along with other things only useful in multi-user mode like /usr/games) went.
/bin and /lib were pronounced like they were spelled or pronounced "bine" and "libe" owing to what they were short for. We also pronounced /etc as "et cetera" which sounded more like "tsetra". It wasn't until much later that I heard it pronounced "et-see".
As others have said,
Actually, the big argument 25 years ago was whether
You don't. My story is almost identical to yours, and you couldn't pay me enough to undergo a magic cure-all. What I want is a magic cure for the face-blindness, social problems, etc., but leave alone the parts of Asperger's that are essential to me being happy and earning piles of cash, and well, being me.
You're exactly right regarding writing FOSS replacements for boring apps. But trying to interoperate with Exchange et al is even worse: Not only do you have to deal with the boredom, you have to deal with the roadblocks M$ intentionally puts in your way. They have no reason to make anything easier for the OOo and Evolution folks (or maybe Thunderbird) to make inroads into their established markets, and a lot of reasons not to.
Our only hope now is that Office 2007 is so different from 2003 or so buggy that the big corporate IT departments don't "upgrade" to it for years, giving the OOo people time to get their stuff working seamlessly with 2003.
We're already seeing a lot of people ask why they should upgrade from XP to Vista, and a lot of IT departments (like mine) telling us not to even think about it. The next big watershed events will be when M$ EOLs XP and Office2003, but that won't be for a few years yet.
Back in the Reagan years, when LANs were by no means ubiquitous, we had HP 2621 ASCII terminals on our desks, and worked on a VAX. Management was extremely cheap (how many of you old farts remember the AT&T "Low Cost Wins" campaign?), so we connected to the VAX by dialing into it over the building PBX using scavenged Bell 212A 1200bps modems.
One night, I found in a junk pile a hundred feet of 50-pin ribbon cable, so I crimped down two DB-25 connectors on each end, ran the cable back to the machine room which was in the next aisle over, connected that end to two spare serial ports on the VAX, and my end to two terminals: mine, and my officemate's. It was tricky keeping our 9600bps "high speed" lines secret, but it was really nice to be able to use Emacs instead of ed.
We have the same problem in tournament Scrabble, where Hasbro is constantly exhorting us to refer to "the SCRABBLE(tm) Brand Crossword Game", or at least, "the SCRABBLE(tm) game," and yes, the whole word is supposed to be capitalized in print.
We're a famously anal-retentive lot, and so periodically, someone corrects someone else on the use of the trademark. Every time that happens, I like to point out that there are many other owners of vigorously-defended trademarks that don't expect their customers to refer to their products with such unwieldy verbiage. For example, I've never seen anything from Coca-Cola telling use to refer to their signature product as "the COCA-COLA brand cola drink". They're perfectly happy with us calling it "Coke," even though in the South (where Coca-Cola is headquartered), people have genericized the term "coke" to refer to *any* soft drink, not just cola.
It would be nice, except that the further north you go, the later the sun rises in the late fall and early winter. When they tried this in the late 1970s, kids waiting for the school bus in the dark started getting hit by cars.
CHUTZPAH scores even higher (383).
Jack Welch told CNN, "Ideally, you'd have every plant you own on a barge, to move with currencies and changes in the economy." Now you can truck your datacenter to wherever sysadmins are cheapest. Goodbye Bangalore, hello Bucharest.
Yeah, they start wearing smaller clothes...
Myth #6a: It's not what you know, it's who you know.
Reality: It's not who you know, it's who knows you.
*never mind*
I exercise and it definitely relieves stress, because I do it with the mindset that it's another form of nourishment for my body. I look at it this way despite the fact that the exercise itself is primarily to combat my genetic propensity for heart disease and diabetes. This in turn helps me get past the toxic idea that my body is just something I use to carry my brain around. I'd definitely be more stressed if I let myself believe that exercise was just another job.
Being fit and strong doesn't suck either. I can wear my geek badge with honor rather than seeing it as a dork badge, too.
Have you SEEN what medical residents eat? All that moving around leaves very little time for actual meals. They subsist on vending machine crap even more than we do.
I once interviewed for a software engineering position at Dow Jones. There, the software engineers were in the printers' union. It was a tough choice: the offer was a 20% pay cut, but its 37.5 hour workweek with no overtime represented about a 25% cut in hours. It was such a close call that I only turned the job down because it meant moving from a private window office to a two-person cubicle.
Locomotives have been built this way for decades. The win there isn't the efficiency, it's that your driveline doesn't need a transmission or a clutch--electric motors don't stall and can generate pretty much full torque at zero RPM. IIRC, the diesel engines are V-16s that displace something like seven liters per cylinder and redline at eight hundred RPM.
There is. It's called ISO-9660. It has native VMS-style version numbering right down to the semicolon. Course, that read-only thing might be tough to work around...
More seriously, they're going to open the source to ClearCase's MVFS, which might be an interesting starting point. Depending on how it's implemented, you might be able to plug a different version control system into it.
Yes, it's true, and it really kills you in ClearCase, where you might have a file name like M:\some_view\some_vob\src\deep\path\to\file@@\main \some_branch\some_other_branch\1.
I use a much lower-tech solution. I have a credit-card sized address book that I keep in my wallet, in which I describe my logins and passwords in ways only I understand. No actual passwords are written down, so this book would be useless to a thief.
You mean privatized, and opened to nonacademic traffic? You're right, congress had nothing whatsoever to do with that.
There are zillions of ways to create passwords that are hard to crack and easy to remember. That's not the problem.
The problem is when you have to remember lots of them. I have over 300, for the various accounts on the machines I administer, as well as for web sites, ATM PINs, etc. They're on facilities with differing requirements and aging schedules. Lessee, is this the one that requires or forbids special characters? The one that has to be more than eight characters or at most eight? The one I have to change, or the one I'm not permitted to change yet? The one that requires upper and lower case letters or is case-insensitive? Or was it all numeric?
There's simply no one-size-fits-all way to generate and remember passwords.
"Your retina scan has expired -- choose a new one"
Scott Adams coined the term "brightsizing" to describe this, as well as other situations that drive out the best people, thereby dumbing down the whole organization.