And, to make it a catchier phrase, "going sysadmin" would need to be truncated, which would result in something like "going syssy," which already has a meaning that will never scare anybody.
According to McAfee recently (http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/05/0215201) and Microsoft et al, having your code exposed lets the bad guys exploit its vulnerabilities.
I'm so glad the bad guys haven't found any vulnerabilities in their unexposed code, yet. The number of distinct virus definitions are evidently "just in case."
A sincere apology should have mentioned blocking a competitor's file formats without explanation. Chris Mattern is right on, despite a minor inaccuracy, in the matter of a very trivial detail.
That was essentially my reading of it, although I was about to put it in terms of a schoolyard bully's apology to his victim, "I'm sorry you're a pathetic weakling, POW!"
"We stated that it was the file formats that were insecure, but this is actually not correct," LeBlanc said, referring to a description in a now-changed support document. "A file format isn't insecure -- it's the code that reads the format that's more or less secure. The parsers we use for these older formats aren't as robust as the code we've written more recently, which is part of our decision to disable them by default.
Also, anybody who remembers an epidemic of viruses containes in Word Macros should notice the unmistakable stench of CYA.
LeBlanc knows that it's neither "code" not "format" which is uniformly to blame, it's the author of any particular block of code, which of course doesn't help Microsoft look good, but that's LeBlanc's job, not mine.
It's amazing how many people have an "us vs. them" mentality when it comes to crime. You must be a saint.
I don't even know where you're going, or coming from, with that...
If they learn to be so careful that they commit no further crime, I'm OK with that
You missed my point, but that's okay. I don't think you were looking for it anyway.:)
No, I understand your point and I disagree. As a lazy, but law-abiding citizen, am I entitled to "rehabilitation" of my character, on your dime? Why should criminals be entitled to anything, as a direct consequence of their status as criminals, other than punishment?
Well, of course. Shareholders only invest in something in order to increase their net worth without actually doing any personal work. Hold value is insufficient, and the necessity to constantly increase is an inevitable result of collective ownership.
Roberts is expected to demonstrate a technology that delivers up to 160 megabits of data per second: It will allow him to download a high-definition copy of "Batman Begins" in four minutes. The technology, DOCSIS 3.0, will start rolling out this year.
Hell, if I hated myself that much, I'd just drive a 9" nail through my foot, and it would only take a couple seconds.
The hope is that the system will try to rehabilitate.
If rehabilitation is the only purpose of punishment, should all repeat offenders, for whatever crime, be executed?
Suppose, for sake of discussion, that one of the valid purposes of punishment is to take back what was gotten illegally. When that's impossible, imprisonment is the best that can be done for the victim. Punitive measures are still second-best to full restitution, from victims' persepctives. Since a black eye cannot be undone, what more moral course of action would be available to you than to give a matching imaginary black eye to the imaginary purse snatcher that bruised the imaginary old lady mentioned above?
Revenge only teaches a criminal to be more careful and/or armed.
If they learn to be so careful that they commit no further crime, I'm OK with that; I don't care one bit about criminals' immortal souls, just that they don't harm me or steal from me, including any waste of my precious time. The possibility that they learn to carry a weapon is the reason that felons are not allowed to bear arms. And, if they do anyway, we have the right to use all necessary force to defend ourselves. I'm not a lawyer, btw -- Because I stayed out of law school, I still have the sense to favor harsher penalties for violent crimes and theft, and lesser penalties for victimless crimes.
we now have a much better picture of the large-scale structure of the universe and we know that galaxies are not uniformly distributed. 'Rather, they are in clusters sprinkled thinly in filaments and "bubble walls" surrounding huge voids hundreds of millions of light-years across,'
which we have already known for decades. He seems to think all the cosmologists who have signed on with the dark energy model are unaware of it.
OK, the rest of us got started on a false premise, thanks to Black Parrot; David Wiltshire did not concoct this new theory on the assumption that "all the cosmologists who have signed on with the dark energy model are unaware of it (that galaxies are not uniformly distributed)." What Wiltshire does say is merely that they did not properly take into account the uneven distribution of mass throughout the universe, when doing the calculations that led them to hypothesize a need for dark matter, and subsequent calculations that imply that dark matter "continues" to work. That's a very different thing, and happens all the time in cosmology, which draws from particle physics and astronomy -- the very largest and very smallest systems in the universe. There are not a whole lot of qualified fact-checkers, and like the children's game telegraph (telephone? I don't recall, exactly), once an error crops up, it is propagated thereafter, often followed by more incremental errors, until finally the modified message gets so mangled that it's completely unrecognizable to its creator. The occasional oversight in a field as complex and small as cosmology is to be expected, and getting rid of the dark matter hypothesis does not equate with the assumption that Black Parrot implied with the statement "He seems to think all the cosmologists who have signed on with the dark energy model are unaware of it." Correcting erroneous assumptions based on over-simplification for computational convenience is a normal part of developing better scientific theories, not a scandal.
That is so sad! There are copy & paste forum trolls? OMG, I'm going to trade in my computer, my pocket protector and my Star Wars figurines for weight-lifting equipment and an athletic supporter.
I guess he didn't need to though, as quite a few people fell for it.
Maybe it gives them warm, fuzzy, nostalgic feelings? Still disgusting!
dual HD - I don't really see the point. With the same total volume, or less, why not use a 3.5" formfactor, rotation rate that won't be too much for laptop batteries, but still have the capacity of a desktop drive, 300GB+? Or, use the same space as the second HD occupies for flash memory, to speed bootup? Sure, more storage is better than less storage, but I'd rather do something different with that space.
And let's just forget that if the article says that a meteor shower will occur "in the Arctic," that does not mean "throughout the Arctic" or "everywhere in the Arctic." I'll bet that guys smart enough to calculate the date, time and location of a meteor shower before it happens are just telling their pilot to fly them through the middle of the meteor shower instead of beside it, where they might see something out the windows. Losers who talk about science like Einstein just juxtaposed symbols at random until he came up with E=mc^2 are the best arguments for safe & accessible abortions, and concealed carry permits.
Unfortunately, a large number of Web technologies (HTML, Javascript, Java, Ruby, Rails, Perl, Apache,...) were created to address short-term needs, but the people who created them were learning as they went along and the technologies got hyped up and picked up far too early.
Good technology needs a balance between practicality and theoretical soundness. Unfortunately, in pursuit of dot-com riches, a lot of technologies have been commercialized and frozen far too quickly.
What the programming profession needs is more competition, so instead of getting "frozen" each new-hot-thing is refined by a bona fide rival that forces them to improve on their weaknesses.
That's because unlike the author of the original article, I chose not to debase myself by naming names.
Your parents must be so proud of the particular method you have chosen to debase yourself!
However, if you really insist, there are plenty of opensource projects which are well known for being run by a somewhat arrogant bunch of folk: OpenLDAP and OpenBSD immediately spring to mind.
I think they're both swell, and you idiots who call them "arrogant" should RTFM.
A lot of people have chimed in to say that Zed's post was over-the-top, too vulgar, etc. Maybe they're partly right, but I can also relate to his complaints.
(15:11:12) DHH: before fastthread we had _400 restarts/day
(15:11:22) DHH: now we have perhaps 10
(15:11:29) Zed S.: oh nice
(15:11:33) Zed S.: and that's still fastcgi right? ...
These restarts went away after I exposed bugs in the GC and Threads which Mentalguy fixed with fastthread (like a Ninja, Mentalguy is awesome).
If anyone had known Rails was that unstable they would have laughed in his face. Think about it further, this means that the creator of Rails in his flagship products could not keep them running for longer than 4 minutes on average.
When I'm single-handedly responsible for something as extraordinary as improving a 400 restart/day pile of crap to the "new big thing" among programmers, being treated the way Zed says he was treated -- particularly, denials of the problems he found and fixed -- I sometimes find that writing a rant like that is absolutely necessary, after counting to 10 or more. It isn't easy to even imagine taking that kind of mistreatment more "gracefully" than Zed did.
Alright, now during the time this was all happening though, I was really driving myself crazy trying to find out why my applications used up so much RAM. I had graphs, charts, debugging output from the GC, used gcc, nothing could find it. I was dealing with guys like ara.t.howard trying to tell me it was the OS holding RAM. Telling me these problems were because I didn't understand how Unix worked? What? Alright, if there wasn't a damn problem why was every hosting company having mysterious restarts for no damn reason? Linux's oomkiller don't kill a process for no reason. It kills them for Out Of Memory.
I would complain to Chad, Dave Thomas, DHH, and anyone in Rails core that this can't be right. Something's up and I smell a rat because no way should a server have such problems. Memory leaks, threads stalling, nasty hacks needed to get simple stuff working. Was this the same for them? "Nope, not over here."
This whole time they not only denied what I said, but told me I was crazy and paranoid. The guys with the most to lose (like Dave Thomas) would tell me I was full of shit and demanded proof, and even when I gave proof, tried to give some lame excuse about the OS keeping the memory.
Then I find out that not only was I right, that it could be fixed, that I wasn't crazy, but that Eric Mahurian fixed it a year earlier including improving the performance to O(1). All that drama and bullshit because this one patch was largely ignored by the core Ruby developers (not maliciously though).
I am not acquainted well enough with Ruby and/or Rails to comment on the specifics of Zed Shaw's piece beyond that, but having records of such conversations is an extremely wise precaution to take, beginning the first time somebody denies a problem you *know* to exist, on any collaborative project, of *any* kind.
I'm beginning to get an inkling of why you don't tend to see such an elitist "I'm better than you!" approach to communication on Windows-based forums, mailing lists and IRC channels - and I think Zed has just inadvertently explained it beautifully.
And I'm beginning to get an inkling that you're equating some community, or unconscionably-broadly-defined category of people, as generally having "an elitist 'I'm better than you!' approach to communication," without substantiating your claim.
In Open Source, everyone has access to and can discuss the source code all they like - and there is an elite of people...
Sure enough, there it is, a broadly-defined category of people, this time with the same epithet "elite" clearly applied directly to the antecedent "Open Source."
It's in everyone's interest to remain at least civil at all times, because next week it could be us asking the questions.
"It's in everyone's interest to remain at least civil at all times" on any forum in which one might later ask a question, for the same reason; "because next week it could be us asking the questions." Your portrayal of the Open Source community is a straw man. In my experiences on various Open Source forums, some questions get the reply "read the man pages before writing vague 'I don't get it' messages," some of those add "please," and a very few say "RTFM" or similar. Of course, I have not formally gathered data to support my position as generally true. Ultimately, I don't think it matters much; with the source code open, what does it matter if somebody won't write you a summary? You have the option to read the code, learning the coding languages first if you don't already know them, or to buy a competitor's product. Open Source gives you another set of options, without taking any away. Your complaint isn't the first I've seen about Open Source people being "elitist," but "I don't get it."
Um, the whole point of dark matter is that it has detectable gravitational effects. (As does dark energy, which this article is about.) Why do you think the theory was invented?
Um, sort of. Dark energy was not detected, it was inferred, from behavior that appeared inconsistent with gravitationally-limited post-Big Bang expansion, which is not quite the same thing. Bending of light rays has been used to *detect* black holes. Dark energy and dark matter were more matters of guess work: those galaxies are moving as if something other than gravity is acting on them, I *guess* it's dark matter.
You used a perfect example of "theories over time" turning out to be incorrect or incomplete, with the "inoculations to outbreaks of Polio & Tuberculosis" statement. Observation: and it may even be "empirical": Aids has killed more people that Polio ever would have. Aids is most prevalent in Africa, it is believed to have originated there. It is also believed to have originated in Rhesus monkeys, and somehow made the transition to humans. Now in the 50s the serum for Polio vaccination was made from human blood for Europe and the USA, but for Africa it was made from the blood of Rhesus monkeys.
Since May 2006 AIDS has not been "believed to have originated with Rhesus monkeys."
Tangentially related, very interesting note: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/269306.stm
"There is evidence that HIV may have transferred to humans throughout history, but only became an epidemic in the 20th century. The reasons for this are increased sexual promiscuity, civil unrest and movement of people to cities, according to Dr Hahn."
Thought is limited. The scientific method does not assert that thought is infallible. Your straw man has better things to do than to continue to engage you.
You indignantly want to know what theories I have read.
I asked you what theories you have read, yes -- in response to a specific assertion you made:
I've read just about every theory out there
..."indignantly" is your personal opinion, which is something you seem to have in overabundance.
The whole point is that theories are endless and they do not matter,
Maybe not to you, but I prefer inoculations to outbreaks of Polio & Tuberculosis, which we would still undoubtedly have, if not for theories developed about germs before microscopes were made powerful enough to resolve those microorganisms.
... they could be right and they could be wrong.
Had you read as widely as you claim, and understood what you read, you would know that empiricism is the means of testing the truth or falsehood of any theory, and of determining its range of applicability, which is probably the trickiest concept to grasp in the theory of theories. But I'm probably giving you too much credit; I have a hunch you know all of that fully, and are just a worthless lying sack of shit.
If you will qualify your statement with some indication of which theories you have read, such as particular fields of study in which you are very well-versed, and then proceed to support your funny assertions logically and factually, you might be taken seriously...
You didn't, so you won't, at least by me. And as to your silly references to taliban & priests, they need victims to rule, I do not; I do not expect anything at all of you, sir, but to respect my freedom to pursue my happiness.
The old dualistic thinking that I wrote about earlier.
I'm not trying to tell you how to think, while you claim that others are not thinking correctly because do not take seriously the stupid idea that thought is "not ever capable of comprehending REALITY." And then, you suggest that I bear similarity to tyrants?? Evidently, I have afforded you too much respect.
From what I gather, dark matter is a pipe-dream explanation for why the universe is not [apparently] collapsing. To me, it's quite wrong to explain why something is the "way it is" when you don't actually know how something is.
It's the apparent contradiction of the strength of the gravitational forces as we observe them on planets and amongst planets in our solar system vs the behavior of galaxies with respect to one another that dark matter was invented to address. It is not trivial, or "a pipe-dream explanation for why the universe is not [apparently] collapsing," but that is not easy to explain to somebody who believes it is. Excellent explanation.
Slashdot Mirror
And, to make it a catchier phrase, "going sysadmin" would need to be truncated, which would result in something like "going syssy," which already has a meaning that will never scare anybody.
I'm so glad the bad guys haven't found any vulnerabilities in their unexposed code, yet. The number of distinct virus definitions are evidently "just in case."
A sincere apology should have mentioned blocking a competitor's file formats without explanation. Chris Mattern is right on, despite a minor inaccuracy, in the matter of a very trivial detail.
LeBlanc knows that it's neither "code" not "format" which is uniformly to blame, it's the author of any particular block of code, which of course doesn't help Microsoft look good, but that's LeBlanc's job, not mine.
Except to point out the irony of the alias that posted that. So very fitting!
Well, of course. Shareholders only invest in something in order to increase their net worth without actually doing any personal work. Hold value is insufficient, and the necessity to constantly increase is an inevitable result of collective ownership.
justice = revenge
If rehabilitation is the only purpose of punishment, should all repeat offenders, for whatever crime, be executed?
Suppose, for sake of discussion, that one of the valid purposes of punishment is to take back what was gotten illegally. When that's impossible, imprisonment is the best that can be done for the victim. Punitive measures are still second-best to full restitution, from victims' persepctives. Since a black eye cannot be undone, what more moral course of action would be available to you than to give a matching imaginary black eye to the imaginary purse snatcher that bruised the imaginary old lady mentioned above?
If they learn to be so careful that they commit no further crime, I'm OK with that; I don't care one bit about criminals' immortal souls, just that they don't harm me or steal from me, including any waste of my precious time. The possibility that they learn to carry a weapon is the reason that felons are not allowed to bear arms. And, if they do anyway, we have the right to use all necessary force to defend ourselves. I'm not a lawyer, btw -- Because I stayed out of law school, I still have the sense to favor harsher penalties for violent crimes and theft, and lesser penalties for victimless crimes.
Thumbs down to all biometrics.
dual HD - I don't really see the point. With the same total volume, or less, why not use a 3.5" formfactor, rotation rate that won't be too much for laptop batteries, but still have the capacity of a desktop drive, 300GB+? Or, use the same space as the second HD occupies for flash memory, to speed bootup? Sure, more storage is better than less storage, but I'd rather do something different with that space.
URL?
http://sourceforge.net/project/screenshots.php?group_id=41019
And let's just forget that if the article says that a meteor shower will occur "in the Arctic," that does not mean "throughout the Arctic" or "everywhere in the Arctic." I'll bet that guys smart enough to calculate the date, time and location of a meteor shower before it happens are just telling their pilot to fly them through the middle of the meteor shower instead of beside it, where they might see something out the windows. Losers who talk about science like Einstein just juxtaposed symbols at random until he came up with E=mc^2 are the best arguments for safe & accessible abortions, and concealed carry permits.
Your parents must be so proud of the particular method you have chosen to debase yourself!
I think they're both swell, and you idiots who call them "arrogant" should RTFM.
Thanks, ScuttleMonkey, for posting that article.
http://www.philosophicalsociety.com/Logical%20Fallacies.htm
And I'm beginning to get an inkling that you're equating some community, or unconscionably-broadly-defined category of people, as generally having "an elitist 'I'm better than you!' approach to communication," without substantiating your claim.
Sure enough, there it is, a broadly-defined category of people, this time with the same epithet "elite" clearly applied directly to the antecedent "Open Source."
"It's in everyone's interest to remain at least civil at all times" on any forum in which one might later ask a question, for the same reason; "because next week it could be us asking the questions." Your portrayal of the Open Source community is a straw man. In my experiences on various Open Source forums, some questions get the reply "read the man pages before writing vague 'I don't get it' messages," some of those add "please," and a very few say "RTFM" or similar. Of course, I have not formally gathered data to support my position as generally true. Ultimately, I don't think it matters much; with the source code open, what does it matter if somebody won't write you a summary? You have the option to read the code, learning the coding languages first if you don't already know them, or to buy a competitor's product. Open Source gives you another set of options, without taking any away. Your complaint isn't the first I've seen about Open Source people being "elitist," but "I don't get it."
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/05/060525-aids-chimps.html
Tangentially related, very interesting note:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/269306.stm
"There is evidence that HIV may have transferred to humans throughout history, but only became an epidemic in the 20th century. The reasons for this are increased sexual promiscuity, civil unrest and movement of people to cities, according to Dr Hahn."
Thought is limited. The scientific method does not assert that thought is infallible. Your straw man has better things to do than to continue to engage you.
I asked you what theories you have read, yes -- in response to a specific assertion you made:
Maybe not to you, but I prefer inoculations to outbreaks of Polio & Tuberculosis, which we would still undoubtedly have, if not for theories developed about germs before microscopes were made powerful enough to resolve those microorganisms.
Had you read as widely as you claim, and understood what you read, you would know that empiricism is the means of testing the truth or falsehood of any theory, and of determining its range of applicability, which is probably the trickiest concept to grasp in the theory of theories. But I'm probably giving you too much credit; I have a hunch you know all of that fully, and are just a worthless lying sack of shit.
You didn't, so you won't, at least by me. And as to your silly references to taliban & priests, they need victims to rule, I do not; I do not expect anything at all of you, sir, but to respect my freedom to pursue my happiness.
I'm not trying to tell you how to think, while you claim that others are not thinking correctly because do not take seriously the stupid idea that thought is "not ever capable of comprehending REALITY." And then, you suggest that I bear similarity to tyrants?? Evidently, I have afforded you too much respect.