I'm just fantastic, me. Because I am in no way a programmer and see my job as computer roadie, to make developers look like rock stars and make sure THE SHOW GOES ON.
There do exist horrible sysadmins, and there do exist devs who just don't understand the attitude needed for a robust service. The sort of devs who seriously advocate Gentoo over CentOS for a stable and well-supported server environment. *shudder*
Thankfully my last two workplaces, with a reasonably strict dev-integration-staging-production chain in the last one and dev's PC-dev-staging-production chain in this one (which is functionally the same chain), had considerable excellence on both sides... and one or two dickheads on each side. (None at all in the present job, of course!)
(Both have serious availability requirements. The previous one needed broadcast reliability, and the crippling SLA penalties for any outage were certainly a tremendous incentive for the sysadmins to be fair but firm. The current one, only needing website levels of reliability, is like a holiday by comparison.)
They will understand it if they have done it, you mean;-)
Development is building new things; system administration is making them work robustly and reliably in the real world. These are different jobs, even if they're being at least partly done by the same people.
I'm a sysadmin to developers. IME devs get all the production logs they want, at the logging level they want. Writing to live, we work as a pair. A very good and experienced dev gets live write access without a sysadmin, his phone is one of the ones that rings at 3am when it goes wrong. This provides the feedback loop that keeps everyone's attention focused and stuff running smoothly;-)
Development and system administration are different jobs; experience in one is not experience in the other. The competences do not transfer, either way.
Sceptics are adept at making really quite fetching mincemeat sculptures of religion, alternative medicine and the new age, but we need some serious attention paid to the transhumanist/singularist/cryonicist belief cluster. Because these are smart people, they are likely our friends, they share a lot of our notions and they are proving that the main use apes with delusions of grandeur like ourselves put intelligence to is being stupid with far greater efficiency.
Obligatory RationalWiki plug: Cryonics. I was actually neutral-to-positive on the subject until a friend started looking seriously into spending $120k on freezing his head and I started looking seriously into what he was getting into. And goddamn, it's woo all the way down. Woo by people who are ridiculously smarter than you or me and use it to be dumb. How do you fight that sort of woo? Piece by piece, of course. So I have to learn the bollocks on its own terms to take it down (at which point you see goalpost-moving, reversal of burden of proof, etc., all the things apes with delusions of grandeur do so well). And it's just AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.
tl;dr: Singularitarians talk as much utter bollocks as creationists, climate change deniers, New Age hippies and the tobacco industry. There needs to be more analysis and dissection of said bollocks.
Prince Charles must prove his claim that GM crops could cause a global environmental disaster, Monsanto has challenged.
Cylon Number Six of Monsanto Public Relations said it was their "moral responsibility" to investigate whether genetically modified crops, fully owned and patented to the hilt by Monsanto, could help provide a suitably profitable solution to hunger in the developing world. Monsanto famously protect their hard work, having sued and won for patent violation when their seeds have blown onto another farmer's land.
"We see this as part of our Africa strategy," she said. "It's easy for those of us with plentiful food supplies to ignore the issue, but we have a responsibility to use science to get our hooks into the less well off where we can. We certainly wouldn't drive them off their land, they're too useful to us as labour. It's in their own best interest. I think of it as the 'Corporate Man's Burden.'"
Nestlé has also urged the European Union to review its opposition to GM. "People are starting to think Monsanto are a bigger bunch of bastards than we are, and we can't have such strikes against our public image go unchallenged."
We act for Mr Arkell who is Retail Credit Manager of Granada TV Rental Ltd. His attention has been drawn to an article appearing in the issue of Private Eye dated 9th April 1971 on page 4. The statements made about Mr Arkell are entirely untrue and clearly highly defamatory. We are therefore instructed to require from you immediately your proposals for dealing with the matter. Mr Arkell's first concern is that there should be a full retraction at the earliest possible date in Private Eye and he will also want his costs paid. His attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of your reply.
Private Eye:
We acknowledge your letter of 29th April referring to Mr J. Arkell. We note that Mr Arkell's attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of our reply and would therefore be grateful if you would inform us what his attitude to damages would be, were he to learn that the nature of our reply is as follows: fuck off.
[No further reply]
(Mike Godwin's response isn't quite that terse, but it's pretty close in tone. Read the letter (PDF) he sent the FBI.)
A device claimed to "smell" human fear is being marketed as identifying terrorists by detecting "snake oil pheromones" in sweat.
"The challenge lies in the characterisation and identification of the specific chemical that gives away the signature of human fear," said project leader Professor Tong Sun of City University, "especially the fear of losing funding for security theatre. If we can reliably detect this fear, we should be able to land some eyewateringly lucrative contracts in the very near future."
The research is funded by the Home Office. "The project relies on a government with a firm commitment to policy-based science, but the Tories look as craven over David Nutt's firing as Labour, so we should be coining it in for a good while yet."
The technology will assist airport security officers in picking out suitable subjects. Sensors can reliably detect if someone is a bit brown, or a bit foreign-looking, or has a non-Anglo-Saxon name, or if they might be thinking of giving cheek to security officers. It will work in conjunction with the millimetre-wave "naked" radar, currently used to identify terrorist subjects with large breasts.
The false positive rate will be only 5% on a terrorist detection rate of 1 in 100,000, meaning only 99.95% of subjects flagged will be a complete waste of time to finger up the arse with a latex glove. "But we're sure the government will agree that mere statistical evidence is meaningless in the face of the vital necessity to send the right message," said Prof Sun, "that if you make trouble the government will quite literally forcibly fuck you in the arse until you bleed. So just shut the fuck up and keep giving us money."
Re:No people complain when you over claim
on
Wine 1.2 Released
·
· Score: 1
All of this is true, and the project itself makes no bones about it. That said, it's always worth trying - these days, it's more surprising when a Windows app doesn't work at all than when it does.
It does.NET 2.0 somewhat,.NET 3.5 hardly at all and Mono. Mind you, Mono does.NET somewhat. I wouldn't expect too much of.NET in Wine, but it's worth a try.
Ies4Linux is largely unmaintained and obsolete and will break your wineprefix. Install ie6 or ie7 using winetricks. (Preferably each to their own wineprefix.)
The Times has put into place its new paywall system, to keep readers, search engines and other criminals from using it to download cars, to the sound of champagne corks popping at the Guardian, Telegraph and BBC.
The newspaper will now require payment of £1 a day for its unique and high-quality editorial viewpoints, as taken from the Sun and rewritten in big words. The site also blocks anyone under 18 from registering, in order to keep the paper's quality demographic aging nicely.
"I firmly support this move," said everyday citizen on the street and certainly not Guardian editor at all Alan Rusbridger. "In fact, it should be ten pounds a day. Ten pounds a story. Then people will really see it as high-quality merchandise and not rewritten press releases and news feeds with Mr Murdoch dictating the editorial page."
"It's ours," said James Murdoch, frothing slightly. "You thieving bastards steal our copyright every time you save a copy into your heads! Well, we'll fix your little wagon. It's a pound a day plus a pound a copy behind your eyes plus a pound a copy you talk about with anyone else plus a pound a copy just fucking because. It's for me and Dad and you can just fuck off. And when we buy the BBC we won't let you watch that either. Arseholes."
"OK, the champagne is Thunderbird Sparkling," said Mr Rusbridger. "Times are tough, you know. But I have complete faith we're on the right path and the Times is doomed. I told ’em, I told ’em. Spare fiddy pee for a Polly Toynbee column? God bless you, sir!"
"I am one hundred percent behind paying for quality journalism," said free culture activist Hiram Nerdboy, 17. "That's why I just gave fifty quid to Wikileaks."
You fail comprehension. This blog was purchased advertising designed to fraudulently look like a blog. The only reason Pepsico did that was the good reputation produced by the other sciencebloggers. The managementspeak is trying to work out how to get away with such lucrative deception again.
"How do we empower top scientists working in industry to lead science-minded positive change within their organizations?... How do companies who seek genuine dialogue with this community engage?"
Translation: "Damn, how do we get away with this next time? Do you know how much money Pepsi was giving us for selling out your reputations? This 'wall between editorial and advertising' concept is so outmoded and pre-Web 2.0, you know."
THE LAB, Borg Cube, Wednesday (NotScientist) — Dedicated Monsanto geneticists, working for the good of humanity and a badly-written space filler in the newspapers, have produced a fabulous array of valuable new cash crops with 100% all-natural artificial flavors that developing countries can grow to pay the interest on their ludicrous debts to the International Monetary Fund.
"Bananas that taste like banana flavoring!" said Cylon Number Six of Monsanto Public Relations. "Strawberries that taste like strawberry flavoring! Brewed coffee that tastes like instant! I was really disappointed the time I ate a strawberry as a kid, it didn't taste anything like strawberry flavor. Now your kids will never have to suffer the same way."
The wholly natural artificial flavoring builds on examples from nature: bacon with the magical taste of bacon, Quorn with the magical taste of Quorn and Budweiser with the magical taste of urine. The latter example also produces urine with the magical taste of Budweiser.
Some flavors for specialist niches were not a success. "Ice cream that tastes like vanilla dental dams turned out too gritty for the lesbian market, probably because no-one actually uses them." Authentic ManJuice chewing gum for the gay market was considered too "outré" at this time, as no-one could actually bring themselves to use the word "tasteless."
The company looks forward to continuing to feed the world at very reasonable rates on heavily patented non-breeding seed. "Without us, the poor would starve. Starve, you hear? Naturally grown Big Macs with the magical taste of a New Jersey chemical vat will save the world. Anyone who hates Monsanto hates humanity and probably turns tortoises upside-down in the desert," said Six, nibbling on a Red Dye No. 1 fruit fresh off the vine. "We do what we must because we can."
Slashdot Mirror
"Many organizations are using FreeBSD with ZFS in production environments."
Is there a list handy?
I'm just fantastic, me. Because I am in no way a programmer and see my job as computer roadie, to make developers look like rock stars and make sure THE SHOW GOES ON.
There do exist horrible sysadmins, and there do exist devs who just don't understand the attitude needed for a robust service. The sort of devs who seriously advocate Gentoo over CentOS for a stable and well-supported server environment. *shudder*
Thankfully my last two workplaces, with a reasonably strict dev-integration-staging-production chain in the last one and dev's PC-dev-staging-production chain in this one (which is functionally the same chain), had considerable excellence on both sides ... and one or two dickheads on each side. (None at all in the present job, of course!)
(Both have serious availability requirements. The previous one needed broadcast reliability, and the crippling SLA penalties for any outage were certainly a tremendous incentive for the sysadmins to be fair but firm. The current one, only needing website levels of reliability, is like a holiday by comparison.)
They will understand it if they have done it, you mean ;-)
Development is building new things; system administration is making them work robustly and reliably in the real world. These are different jobs, even if they're being at least partly done by the same people.
Making a developer's phone ring at 3am is, in my experience, an *excellent* way to make them a far better developer!
I'm a sysadmin to developers. IME devs get all the production logs they want, at the logging level they want. Writing to live, we work as a pair. A very good and experienced dev gets live write access without a sysadmin, his phone is one of the ones that rings at 3am when it goes wrong. This provides the feedback loop that keeps everyone's attention focused and stuff running smoothly ;-)
Development and system administration are different jobs; experience in one is not experience in the other. The competences do not transfer, either way.
Sceptics are adept at making really quite fetching mincemeat sculptures of religion, alternative medicine and the new age, but we need some serious attention paid to the transhumanist/singularist/cryonicist belief cluster. Because these are smart people, they are likely our friends, they share a lot of our notions and they are proving that the main use apes with delusions of grandeur like ourselves put intelligence to is being stupid with far greater efficiency.
Obligatory RationalWiki plug: Cryonics. I was actually neutral-to-positive on the subject until a friend started looking seriously into spending $120k on freezing his head and I started looking seriously into what he was getting into. And goddamn, it's woo all the way down. Woo by people who are ridiculously smarter than you or me and use it to be dumb. How do you fight that sort of woo? Piece by piece, of course. So I have to learn the bollocks on its own terms to take it down (at which point you see goalpost-moving, reversal of burden of proof, etc., all the things apes with delusions of grandeur do so well). And it's just AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.
tl;dr: Singularitarians talk as much utter bollocks as creationists, climate change deniers, New Age hippies and the tobacco industry. There needs to be more analysis and dissection of said bollocks.
Ubuntu has popcon as well. Always worth running to say "yes, I really do use the Gimp and really did delete F-Spot."
Prince Charles must prove his claim that GM crops could cause a global environmental disaster, Monsanto has challenged.
Cylon Number Six of Monsanto Public Relations said it was their "moral responsibility" to investigate whether genetically modified crops, fully owned and patented to the hilt by Monsanto, could help provide a suitably profitable solution to hunger in the developing world. Monsanto famously protect their hard work, having sued and won for patent violation when their seeds have blown onto another farmer's land.
"We see this as part of our Africa strategy," she said. "It's easy for those of us with plentiful food supplies to ignore the issue, but we have a responsibility to use science to get our hooks into the less well off where we can. We certainly wouldn't drive them off their land, they're too useful to us as labour. It's in their own best interest. I think of it as the 'Corporate Man's Burden.'"
Nestlé has also urged the European Union to review its opposition to GM. "People are starting to think Monsanto are a bigger bunch of bastards than we are, and we can't have such strikes against our public image go unchallenged."
Arkell v. Pressdram (1971) [unreported]
Solicitor (Goodman Derrick & Co.):
We act for Mr Arkell who is Retail Credit Manager of Granada TV Rental Ltd. His attention has been drawn to an article appearing in the issue of Private Eye dated 9th April 1971 on page 4. The statements made about Mr Arkell are entirely untrue and clearly highly defamatory. We are therefore instructed to require from you immediately your proposals for dealing with the matter. Mr Arkell's first concern is that there should be a full retraction at the earliest possible date in Private Eye and he will also want his costs paid. His attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of your reply.
Private Eye:
We acknowledge your letter of 29th April referring to Mr J. Arkell. We note that Mr Arkell's attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of our reply and would therefore be grateful if you would inform us what his attitude to damages would be, were he to learn that the nature of our reply is as follows: fuck off.
[No further reply]
(Mike Godwin's response isn't quite that terse, but it's pretty close in tone. Read the letter (PDF) he sent the FBI.)
A device claimed to "smell" human fear is being marketed as identifying terrorists by detecting "snake oil pheromones" in sweat.
"The challenge lies in the characterisation and identification of the specific chemical that gives away the signature of human fear," said project leader Professor Tong Sun of City University, "especially the fear of losing funding for security theatre. If we can reliably detect this fear, we should be able to land some eyewateringly lucrative contracts in the very near future."
The research is funded by the Home Office. "The project relies on a government with a firm commitment to policy-based science, but the Tories look as craven over David Nutt's firing as Labour, so we should be coining it in for a good while yet."
The technology will assist airport security officers in picking out suitable subjects. Sensors can reliably detect if someone is a bit brown, or a bit foreign-looking, or has a non-Anglo-Saxon name, or if they might be thinking of giving cheek to security officers. It will work in conjunction with the millimetre-wave "naked" radar, currently used to identify terrorist subjects with large breasts.
The false positive rate will be only 5% on a terrorist detection rate of 1 in 100,000, meaning only 99.95% of subjects flagged will be a complete waste of time to finger up the arse with a latex glove. "But we're sure the government will agree that mere statistical evidence is meaningless in the face of the vital necessity to send the right message," said Prof Sun, "that if you make trouble the government will quite literally forcibly fuck you in the arse until you bleed. So just shut the fuck up and keep giving us money."
*applause*
All of this is true, and the project itself makes no bones about it. That said, it's always worth trying - these days, it's more surprising when a Windows app doesn't work at all than when it does.
Ahahaha. I mean that the app interface doesn't render properly and it's a bit weird at times.
It does .NET 2.0 somewhat, .NET 3.5 hardly at all and Mono. Mind you, Mono does .NET somewhat. I wouldn't expect too much of .NET in Wine, but it's worth a try.
Ies4Linux is largely unmaintained and obsolete and will break your wineprefix. Install ie6 or ie7 using winetricks. (Preferably each to their own wineprefix.)
IE 7 installs in Winetricks but doesn't work too well as an app.
If they really don't support a current Firefox, it's time to find a new bank and tell them why.
"I am only sorry that so many people end up bashing Wine."
It's because no-one complains worse than the people getting something for free.
The winetricks script installs IE7 now. The app itself works pretty badly, but it works well enough to check rendering or provide a genuine MSHTML.
You want Crossover.
(Buying Crossover funds Wine, by the way - half the Wine devs work for Codeweavers.)
You think you're joking ...
The Times has put into place its new paywall system, to keep readers, search engines and other criminals from using it to download cars, to the sound of champagne corks popping at the Guardian, Telegraph and BBC.
The newspaper will now require payment of £1 a day for its unique and high-quality editorial viewpoints, as taken from the Sun and rewritten in big words. The site also blocks anyone under 18 from registering, in order to keep the paper's quality demographic aging nicely.
"I firmly support this move," said everyday citizen on the street and certainly not Guardian editor at all Alan Rusbridger. "In fact, it should be ten pounds a day. Ten pounds a story. Then people will really see it as high-quality merchandise and not rewritten press releases and news feeds with Mr Murdoch dictating the editorial page."
"It's ours," said James Murdoch, frothing slightly. "You thieving bastards steal our copyright every time you save a copy into your heads! Well, we'll fix your little wagon. It's a pound a day plus a pound a copy behind your eyes plus a pound a copy you talk about with anyone else plus a pound a copy just fucking because. It's for me and Dad and you can just fuck off. And when we buy the BBC we won't let you watch that either. Arseholes."
"OK, the champagne is Thunderbird Sparkling," said Mr Rusbridger. "Times are tough, you know. But I have complete faith we're on the right path and the Times is doomed. I told ’em, I told ’em. Spare fiddy pee for a Polly Toynbee column? God bless you, sir!"
"I am one hundred percent behind paying for quality journalism," said free culture activist Hiram Nerdboy, 17. "That's why I just gave fifty quid to Wikileaks."
Illustration: Rupert Murdoch with the precioussssssssss.
And was the songwriter for Britney Spears's recent hits, before releasing her own album.
You fail comprehension. This blog was purchased advertising designed to fraudulently look like a blog. The only reason Pepsico did that was the good reputation produced by the other sciencebloggers. The managementspeak is trying to work out how to get away with such lucrative deception again.
"How do we empower top scientists working in industry to lead science-minded positive change within their organizations? ... How do companies who seek genuine dialogue with this community engage?"
Translation: "Damn, how do we get away with this next time? Do you know how much money Pepsi was giving us for selling out your reputations? This 'wall between editorial and advertising' concept is so outmoded and pre-Web 2.0, you know."
THE LAB, Borg Cube, Wednesday (NotScientist) — Dedicated Monsanto geneticists, working for the good of humanity and a badly-written space filler in the newspapers, have produced a fabulous array of valuable new cash crops with 100% all-natural artificial flavors that developing countries can grow to pay the interest on their ludicrous debts to the International Monetary Fund.
"Bananas that taste like banana flavoring!" said Cylon Number Six of Monsanto Public Relations. "Strawberries that taste like strawberry flavoring! Brewed coffee that tastes like instant! I was really disappointed the time I ate a strawberry as a kid, it didn't taste anything like strawberry flavor. Now your kids will never have to suffer the same way."
The wholly natural artificial flavoring builds on examples from nature: bacon with the magical taste of bacon, Quorn with the magical taste of Quorn and Budweiser with the magical taste of urine. The latter example also produces urine with the magical taste of Budweiser.
Some flavors for specialist niches were not a success. "Ice cream that tastes like vanilla dental dams turned out too gritty for the lesbian market, probably because no-one actually uses them." Authentic ManJuice chewing gum for the gay market was considered too "outré" at this time, as no-one could actually bring themselves to use the word "tasteless."
The company looks forward to continuing to feed the world at very reasonable rates on heavily patented non-breeding seed. "Without us, the poor would starve. Starve, you hear? Naturally grown Big Macs with the magical taste of a New Jersey chemical vat will save the world. Anyone who hates Monsanto hates humanity and probably turns tortoises upside-down in the desert," said Six, nibbling on a Red Dye No. 1 fruit fresh off the vine. "We do what we must because we can."