1) Don't base a society on Greeks or Romans or Nazis or Prohibition-era gangsters or virtual reality or too much coffee. 2) When it's that cold out, it's better to stay inside and get drunk. 3) People can always out-argue computers. 4) Mental health care is just as bad in the future. 5) Avoid aliens who look and act like Liberace. 6) Future pizzas are made of silicon. The little ones can control your brain. 7) Hippies will always be a pain in the butt. 8) Radiation does everything *except* give you cancer. 9) Aliens made entirely of energy will fuck you up. 10) The future has way better sound effects.
...and, just perhaps, it takes a little hubris to call a collection The "Best" American Comics, but it's hard to argue with a grouping this good. Sure, you can quibble here and there, but as a whole, The Best American Comics 2008 is about as good as the art form gets, showing the remarkable highs comics can--and regularly do--reach. And as a bonus, it's a wonderful entry for someone who is unfamiliar with comics but who wants to know more or read something in the format.
The stories are brief and varied and run the spectrum of themes and moods. Series editors Jessica Abel and Matt Madden (creators of the excellent Drawing Words and Writing Pictures) teamed up this year with editor Lynda Barry (the artist behind the wildly inventive What It Is), and their combined viewpoint yields a unique collection of some truly thought-provoking work here. Both Drawing Words and Writing Pictures and What It Is mined a similar territory--the forces of creativity, what makes the visionary mind bring forth clearly defined work, and how to turn thoughts into comic art--that informs the choices they've made in The Best American Comics 2008. It's not surprising, then, that most of the choices here are from single writer/artists rather than writer-artist teams, which shows how powerful the creative combination can be.
They've also passed over standard superhero fare (although a note at the beginning explains they would have liked to include an excerpt from Batman: Year 100 but couldn't, due to licensing issues). Instead, they offer up work from a varying swath of comics luminaries, some well-known and long-established in the industry (Matt Groening, Jaime Hernandez, Chris Ware) and others less known but equally provocative (Gene Luen Yang's stunning American Born Chinese is excerpted here; if you haven't fallen in love with this work yet, now's your chance).
Some comics benefit more than others from this presentation. Alison Bechdel's long-running comic series Dykes to Watch Out For is one of the best examples of how brilliant, funny, and poignant comics can be, and while it's wonderful to see it getting recognition here, the five one-page strips collected seem out of place and out of context. As a whole, though, most of the samples in the book come as sweet surprises, something new coming out of the blue (Kevin Pyle's The Forbidden Zone is a wonderfully pleasant surprise that pops out toward the end).
Barry and series editors Abel and Madden deserve credit for the fine pacing they've given The Best American Comics 2008. The mood flows naturally and smoothly from one work to the next, which is not an easy feat given the variety of works they've chosen to work with. It's a major pitfall of most anthology collections--the juxtaposition of voices can be a jarring reminder of how uncohesive the books can be--but the editors of The Best American Comics 2008 sagely avoid it. When you finish, you're aware you've read more than two dozen different creators' works, but they've all been selected so well, that the lingering effect is the seamlessness of the artful quality contained within.
"Reding believes "The US, so far, has done this in a reasonable manner", referring to the oversight that the US government has given ICANN."
Oh. My. God. In the era of Web 2.0, it appears that Slashdot has Jumped The Shark. The question now, is when did this happen? I remember in the early 2000s, Slashdot was THE geek website, but something has changed and it appears they have lost the magic. I mean, seriously, ICANN? I can...what, exactly? I can haz cheezebrgr?
I therefore decided, today, to cancel my account (Smidge207) take them off of my RSS Reader, and cancel my Time Warner broadband "service". I am off the grid; I am off the 'net as of today. I am a free man, now; I own my own mind. I have piece of mind, now. I am free. Lordy, lordy I am free. See, the thing is, Taco, I find your stories trite, boring and dare I say, irrelevant to IT.
So the questions of the day are:
When was the exact day, and, what was the exact story, that caused Slashdot to jump the shark? What is your best bet to the cause of their demise?
This is just my opinion, and I am sure each and ever person that uses RSS at some point has made the same decision about another website. If you get angry easily you might not want to read the rest of this post:
1. I am 32, openly homosexual, and I have outgrown any interest in the usual stories that appear on Slashdot. A specific example is this story, about a "Coup" attempt in an Apple Underground User Group. I have absolutely zero interesting in ever reading something like this for the rest of my life.
I felt violated by Rob Malda's minions by reading something that stupid today, and I will admit it may be because of my age, and due to the fact that I now have a wonderful husband (RMS) and a fucking life.
2. I never really participated in the community much, I only read stories, and as I mentioned the stories are getting very bad. Terrible one should say.
3. I am bored of the terms, "Troll", "Trolling", and "Dvork", they make my skin crawl just like it would make my skin crawl to hear someone use the terms, "Your playa hatin", or "Give me the bling, bling", "Smidge is a sock-puppet troll faggot" or "Far out man". These terms are so commonly used on Slashdot that it is impossible to avoid them and the only possible alternative is to never read anything on Slashdot.
4. Slashdot played an interesting role in the early 2000's, as it was a human funneled aggregator for news stories. As technology has progressed, a different model of story submission has started to thrive and it does not require a select group of humans to filter which stories are good and which stories are not good. I believe the model that Digg, Reddit, and DZone use are far superior to the method of story submission and approval that Slashdot uses.
I feel that the method that Slashdot uses is a dying art, and the very poor quality of stories suggests that the human element responsible for editorial content is either very young, or not very good.
5. RSS Readers have changed the way people read technology and other news, and it has caused people to stop having a "home page" anymore. People now have the ability to create their own custom filters and get their own news in anyway they see fit. The role of Slashdot as the only aggregator for IT news has ended. Given a choice, I would much rather use RSS than the editorial process at Slashdot to get news stories.
6. As evidenced by the responses to MY WELL THOUGHT-OUT POSTS JUST TODAY, it is quite impossible to have a discussion with some outspoken members of the Slashdot community. I call out Eldavojohn in particular. It would take a large amount of patience, time and energy that I, frankly, am not willing to part with, to discuss why I am "liar, hypocrite, troll, etc". It is just not interesting to me, and even if it was I would probably need to quit my job just to respond full time to the complaints.
If you feel the urge to yell at me, please remember this is just m
...and it *is* a nice intro book for anyone that is new to databases and wants a DIFFERENT way of learning the basics. The key word here is different and in this case I am not sure if that is a good thing or not. The Manga guides take concepts and present them in a cutesy anime way. I feel that the approach probably works well in Japan but I am not sure how much of a market there is for this in the USA. There are other books that teach subjects in a different way such as the 'Head First' line. I guess this is one of those cases where you dilute the market with a whole bunch of different ways to get concepts out to people and some stick better than others. This book certainly presents the ideas that you would want any database newbie to know but its a very select group.
If you are into manga/anime and are a computer person this is probably right up your alley. The writing is good and the artwork is very good. My only concern is I don't know if there is enough of a client base long term.
Office SP2 seems to have speeded performance on my machine, but the Outlook junk mail filter is nuts -- it swept up 10 or 12 senders I've been getting for years with no issues in Outlook or Gmail. To compound the problem, Outlook still doesn't automatically move a junk message to Inbox after you click "Add to safe senders list". I can't understand why I have to go through two procedures to move a "safe sender" from junk to inbox.
*sigh* My dear frined eldavojohn is suffering from a case of naivety, I fear.
In fact most of my FOIA requests have been with the FBI. To date, I've filed 57 requests with them. Of these, 8 have resulted in documents, 18 were "no records" (including cases where records had been destroyed), and the remainder are still open. The most important thing to know about the FBI is that their records system is decentralized. By this I mean that every FBI field office keeps its own records, and there is no centralized database for searching all records at once. Yes, FBI Headquarters (HQ) in Washington, D.C. keep lots of files, but just because FBI HQ doesn't have any records on a topic doesn't mean that the field offices don't. For example, I requested information on an organization called the Youth International Party Line, or YIPL, which was based in New York City during the 1970s. FBI HQ had no records on YIPL, but the New York field office did.
What this means for you is that you need to send FOIA requests to both FBI HQ and to any FBI field office that you think might have records responsive to your request. This is a pain, but it's not the end of the world. There are about 56 FBI field offices and you can use the same FOIA request letter for each one, so we're talking about at most $22 in postage to spam all of their field offices with your request. This link provides a list of all the FBI field offices, and this other link provides the same list in Microsoft Word mailing label format. The second important thing to know about the FBI is that their records system is broken up into "automated" (i.e., computerized) and "manual" indices. The manual indices are for criminal investigations prior to 1973 and security investigations prior to 1958. By default, the FBI generally searches only the automated indices, since it's much easier for them to do so. If your request covers times prior to 1973, you should add a big bold note specifically asking them to search both the automated and manual indices. Wise up or shut up, eldavojohn, my dear twisted sister.
I got the impression (remember, this is a kdawson green light *sigh*) that it was more of a super gigantic database rather than a data mining system. That is, any information derived from the data is done by humans. Data mining is incredibly difficult even WITH perfectly clean data, much less the gigantic mess that seems to be the everything bucket. Meh, color me unimpressed.
Btrfs is mainly created for the Oracle client that doesn't want to use "raw device". It's to improve performance reading/writing large files with high concurrency. So it have to be fast on concurrent request.
What should be looked is : how mysql perform on BTRFS how postgres perform on BTRFS how firebird perform on BTRFS
As there is no magical solution, btrfs is no exception. It's not a general usage FS as is ext (imho). On the desktop, xfs will be the way to go. Performance-wise it's obviously not so great (I do realise that it's still in development and this might change in the future), and the features it delivers are not very interesting as well imho, except maybe for the online defragmentation thingy. But I'm not an enterprise user whis is what this fs aims at I assume.
Still I appreciate the work. Let's hope it doesn't get axed now that Oracle owns Sun and thus already has ZFS.
cheers
=Smidge=
Sewing Machines?! Slashdot has Jumped The Shark!
on
The Sewing Machine War
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
In the era of Web 2.0, it appears that Slashdot has Jumped The Shark. The question now, is when did this happen? I remember in the early 2000s, Slashdot was THE geek website, but something has changed and it appears they have lost the magic. I mean, seriously, sewing machines?
I therefore decided, today, to cancel my account (Smidge207) take them off of my RSS Reader, and cancel my Time Warner broadband "service". I am off the grid; I am off the 'net as of today. I find your stories trite, boring and dare I say, irrelevant to IT.
So the questions of the day are:
When was the exact day, and, what was the exact story, that caused Slashdot to jump the shark? What is your best bet to the cause of their demise?
This is just my opinion, and I am sure each and ever person that uses RSS at some point has made the same decision about another website. If you get angry easily you might not want to read the rest of this post:
1. I am 32, openly homosexual, and I have outgrown any interest in the usual stories that appear on Slashdot. A specific example is this story, about a "Coup" attempt in an Apple Underground User Group. I have absolutely zero interesting in ever reading something like this for the rest of my life.
I felt violated by Rob Malda's minions by reading something that stupid today, and I will admit it may be because of my age, and due to the fact that I now have a wonderful husband (RMS) and a fucking life.
2. I never really participated in the community much, I only read stories, and as I mentioned the stories are getting very bad. Terrible one should say.
3. I am bored of the terms, "Troll", "Trolling", and "Dvork", they make my skin crawl just like it would make my skin crawl to hear someone use the terms, "Your playa hatin", or "Give me the bling, bling", "Smidge is a sock-puppet troll faggot" or "Far out man". These terms are so commonly used on Slashdot that it is impossible to avoid them and the only possible alternative is to never read anything on Slashdot.
4. Slashdot played an interesting role in the early 2000's, as it was a human funneled aggregator for news stories. As technology has progressed, a different model of story submission has started to thrive and it does not require a select group of humans to filter which stories are good and which stories are not good. I believe the model that Digg, Reddit, and DZone use are far superior to the method of story submission and approval that Slashdot uses.
I feel that the method that Slashdot uses is a dying art, and the very poor quality of stories suggests that the human element responsible for editorial content is either very young, or not very good.
5. RSS Readers have changed the way people read technology and other news, and it has caused people to stop having a "home page" anymore. People now have the ability to create their own custom filters and get their own news in anyway they see fit. The role of Slashdot as the only aggregator for IT news has ended. Given a choice, I would much rather use RSS than the editorial process at Slashdot to get news stories.
6. As evidenced by the responses to MY WELL THOUGHT-OUT POSTS JUST TODAY, it is quite impossible to have a discussion with some outspoken members of the Slashdot community. I call out Eldavojohn in particular. It would take a large amount of patience, time and energy that I, frankly, am not willing to part with, to discuss why I am "liar, hypocrite, troll, etc". It is just not interesting to me, and even if it was I would probably need to quit my job just to respond full time to the complaints.
If you feel the urge to yell at me, please remember this is just my opinion and I am very sure other people feel very differently. I do not have the time to discuss the matter anymore due to work and personal obligations, but thank you to the people that did respond. I did learn one very important lesson today though, some opinions are probably best left unsaid, as the effort
Ultimately for a contract to be valid, both sides have to agree to it.
Exactly. Plus, the Statute of Frauds requires certain transactions to be documented in a signed "writing." But what is a "writing" under the law? Does this mean hard copy? Will the courts really enforce the Statute of Frauds strictly enough to avoid liability under electronic contracts as the Internet proliferates? Now that handwriting software and peripherals are an alternative to keyboard input, the signature requirement of the Statute of Frauds may no longer be an issue.
And what about the three-day right of rescission afforded consumers in certain transactions in California? For example, home solicitation contracts may be rescinded within three days of formation of the contract. These agreements are the result of solicitations by vendors at the consumer's home. The consumer must be provided with a hard-copy form that simply requires his or her signature and mailing within the three day period to void the contract. This "change of mind" provision may or may not apply to solicitations on the Internet if received on a PC at home. But perhaps they should. Likewise, seminar sales solicitations also allow a three-day right of rescission under different provisions of the California Civil Code.
And what about the Mailbox Rule? If contracts are accepted upon dispatch, does the sending of email cut off the right of an offeror to withdraw his or her offer notwithstanding the fact that the emailed acceptance has not yet been received? And what if the offeror sends his or her withdrawal of the offer before the acceptance is emailed, but the withdrawal is not received until after dispatch of the acceptance? Issues such as these must be addressed within the context of a technology that causes email delivery to be unpredictable and delivery records to be easily manipulated. The solution to these issues may be dealt with on a case-by-case basis as the specific fact patterns surface in the courts. However, a more efficient approach would be legislative committee research and formulation of a set of commercial statutes that will accommodate virtual contracts before litigation proliferates. Legislatures need not be visionaries to anticipate and resolve the inadequacy of present-day commercial law. The "Internet Commercial Code" would facilitate the free flow of commerce in the new medium and avoid the unnecessary burden of what is now foreseeable litigation. Indeed, an organization called the National Conference of Commissioners of Uniform State Laws is already working on a revised Uniform Commercial Code that will accommodate the new legal issues created by virtual contracts.
Agreed and I'll start using postgres when I see replication supported.;-) Seriously, if dead Chinese fetuses can cure the twitching muscle in that weird space just above my eyelid and just beneath my eyebrow I will be impressed, good sir.
Agreed and THIS: more people than that die every hour from:
Pencil sharpener mishaps Loose shoelaces Ennui Swine flu (aka Captain Tripps) Paper cuts Choking on midgets Fox News Staring too long at Rob Malda Nail biting Ugliness Smoking cigarettes Bad haircuts Forgetting to breathe Segway vs. Prius collisions Snorting bleach Coding in CSS Auto-erotic asphyxiation Cricket attacks Playing cricket while intoxicated E.coli E.fail Fork/toaster/musical chairs Chair falls Chainsaw juggling Country music Posting about POSIX compliance on Slashdot Chewing tinfoil
The thing that bugs me, is why in the hell do we allow churches to hold bingo tournaments with cash prizes in places that ban gambling!?
I LOL'd. Reverse psychology is a funny thing. A "do not touch" sign makes exposed high-voltage wiring seem like an adorably cuddly kitten begging to be petted. The allure of defecating in one's pants is irresistible when the goal is precisely the contrary. And naturally, the next words to come out of a someone's mouth after "don't tase me, bro" are probably going to be "Aaowwwgh!"
Thank GOD you brought this point up so I don't have to. I thought NOBODY was going to pick up on the stock-market == gambling bit. Gawd.
01)Fund an account. 02)Buy some stocks. 03)Print out your transactions. 04)Put it on a wooden table. 05)Bend over. 06)Take a picture. 07)Scan the picture. 08)Send it in. 09)Sell. 10)Profit!
People! People! People! Have we learned NOTHING over the years?
Maybe in a few years CSS (and the browser base) with catchup, but the blue-sky designers of CSS did practically everything in their power to make CSS layouts difficult (if not impossible) to use.
Everything from the infamous box model (padding the INSIDE of a box requires a change in it's OUTSIDE dimensions? Excuse me, WTF?) to positioning nonsense (the height of an absolutely positioned object has no effect on its container) contribute greatly to the number of hacks and other measures needed to create even simple layouts.
Add cross-browser-specific nonsense and the whole thing simply bogs down.
Yes, separation of data and presentation is desirable. Yes, it's POSSIBLE to do so. But all too often it takes round-after-round of testing and retesting, only to find that the Opera patch breaks IE (again).
I've found a lot of people who are stuck on table layouts are stuck because they can only think of HTML pages in terms of how tables work. You have to break free from that mindset and CSS design makes much more sense.
After designing sites for 10 years, 3 of those in the dark ages of tables, I wouldn't touch tables with 100 foot pole. But if using tables makes it easier for you, more power to you. It's just really sad to see people bash CSS because it's too hard for them to implement.
Starting in 2002 we gave away our dominance in software technology to other nations. The policy of China was to subsidize tens of thousands of students studying in the computer sciences. In 2002 American companies subsidized this policy of China by shipping over American jobs so that Chinese students could gain the necessary and hard to obtain experience of working on real systems. American programming jobs were shipped to India, China, and Russia and subsidized these nations in their ability to build expertise in software technology.
Now very few American students are enrolled in the computer sciences departments of America to provide the expertize necessary for threats to American computer systems, while other nations have tens of thousands that can obtain all of the benefits of software technology. American students will not enroll in the computer sciences when the policy of America is simply to ship programming jobs overseas. Now many American systems are dependent upon offshore foreign programmers. There have already been incidents where offshore foreign workers were bribed to provide account information on bank customers.
The reality is that major American system may have already been compromised by bribes to offshore foreign workers to insert malicious code into the American systems where they have direct access. Hollywood movies show complex schemes and supposedly sophisticated attacks to access computer system when the reality is that you can simply walk in the front door with a bribe and have complete access. It is meaningless to protect these systems from attacks over the internet when they may already have been seriously compromised.
Christ, kids, for the last time, OpenOffice is part of a patent cross-licensing deal between Sun and Microsoft that resulted from all the anti-trust cases that Sun won. If OO is detached from Sun, it loses that umbrella patent protection and would likely be targeted by Microsoft. Looking at the big picture it would take a tiny amount of Oracle's R&D budget to improve OO. The first thing would be to support macros. A bi-directional translator would be acceptable. A more viable OO could do nothing but help Oracle in its epic battle with MSFT. So piss off.
Slashdot Mirror
Listen up, arsehole:
1) Don't base a society on Greeks or Romans or Nazis or Prohibition-era gangsters or virtual reality or too much coffee.
2) When it's that cold out, it's better to stay inside and get drunk.
3) People can always out-argue computers.
4) Mental health care is just as bad in the future.
5) Avoid aliens who look and act like Liberace.
6) Future pizzas are made of silicon. The little ones can control your brain.
7) Hippies will always be a pain in the butt.
8) Radiation does everything *except* give you cancer.
9) Aliens made entirely of energy will fuck you up.
10) The future has way better sound effects.
...and, just perhaps, it takes a little hubris to call a collection The "Best" American Comics, but it's hard to argue with a grouping this good. Sure, you can quibble here and there, but as a whole, The Best American Comics 2008 is about as good as the art form gets, showing the remarkable highs comics can--and regularly do--reach. And as a bonus, it's a wonderful entry for someone who is unfamiliar with comics but who wants to know more or read something in the format.
The stories are brief and varied and run the spectrum of themes and moods. Series editors Jessica Abel and Matt Madden (creators of the excellent Drawing Words and Writing Pictures) teamed up this year with editor Lynda Barry (the artist behind the wildly inventive What It Is), and their combined viewpoint yields a unique collection of some truly thought-provoking work here. Both Drawing Words and Writing Pictures and What It Is mined a similar territory--the forces of creativity, what makes the visionary mind bring forth clearly defined work, and how to turn thoughts into comic art--that informs the choices they've made in The Best American Comics 2008. It's not surprising, then, that most of the choices here are from single writer/artists rather than writer-artist teams, which shows how powerful the creative combination can be.
They've also passed over standard superhero fare (although a note at the beginning explains they would have liked to include an excerpt from Batman: Year 100 but couldn't, due to licensing issues). Instead, they offer up work from a varying swath of comics luminaries, some well-known and long-established in the industry (Matt Groening, Jaime Hernandez, Chris Ware) and others less known but equally provocative (Gene Luen Yang's stunning American Born Chinese is excerpted here; if you haven't fallen in love with this work yet, now's your chance).
Some comics benefit more than others from this presentation. Alison Bechdel's long-running comic series Dykes to Watch Out For is one of the best examples of how brilliant, funny, and poignant comics can be, and while it's wonderful to see it getting recognition here, the five one-page strips collected seem out of place and out of context. As a whole, though, most of the samples in the book come as sweet surprises, something new coming out of the blue (Kevin Pyle's The Forbidden Zone is a wonderfully pleasant surprise that pops out toward the end).
Barry and series editors Abel and Madden deserve credit for the fine pacing they've given The Best American Comics 2008. The mood flows naturally and smoothly from one work to the next, which is not an easy feat given the variety of works they've chosen to work with. It's a major pitfall of most anthology collections--the juxtaposition of voices can be a jarring reminder of how uncohesive the books can be--but the editors of The Best American Comics 2008 sagely avoid it. When you finish, you're aware you've read more than two dozen different creators' works, but they've all been selected so well, that the lingering effect is the seamlessness of the artful quality contained within.
You'll love it!
=Smidge=
"Reding believes "The US, so far, has done this in a reasonable manner", referring to the oversight that the US government has given ICANN."
Oh. My. God. In the era of Web 2.0, it appears that Slashdot has Jumped The Shark. The question now, is when did this happen? I remember in the early 2000s, Slashdot was THE geek website, but something has changed and it appears they have lost the magic. I mean, seriously, ICANN? I can...what, exactly? I can haz cheezebrgr?
I therefore decided, today, to cancel my account (Smidge207) take them off of my RSS Reader, and cancel my Time Warner broadband "service". I am off the grid; I am off the 'net as of today. I am a free man, now; I own my own mind. I have piece of mind, now. I am free. Lordy, lordy I am free. See, the thing is, Taco, I find your stories trite, boring and dare I say, irrelevant to IT.
So the questions of the day are:
When was the exact day, and, what was the exact story, that caused Slashdot to jump the shark? What is your best bet to the cause of their demise?
This is just my opinion, and I am sure each and ever person that uses RSS at some point has made the same decision about another website. If you get angry easily you might not want to read the rest of this post:
1. I am 32, openly homosexual, and I have outgrown any interest in the usual stories that appear on Slashdot. A specific example is this story, about a "Coup" attempt in an Apple Underground User Group. I have absolutely zero interesting in ever reading something like this for the rest of my life.
I felt violated by Rob Malda's minions by reading something that stupid today, and I will admit it may be because of my age, and due to the fact that I now have a wonderful husband (RMS) and a fucking life.
2. I never really participated in the community much, I only read stories, and as I mentioned the stories are getting very bad. Terrible one should say.
3. I am bored of the terms, "Troll", "Trolling", and "Dvork", they make my skin crawl just like it would make my skin crawl to hear someone use the terms, "Your playa hatin", or "Give me the bling, bling", "Smidge is a sock-puppet troll faggot" or "Far out man". These terms are so commonly used on Slashdot that it is impossible to avoid them and the only possible alternative is to never read anything on Slashdot.
4. Slashdot played an interesting role in the early 2000's, as it was a human funneled aggregator for news stories. As technology has progressed, a different model of story submission has started to thrive and it does not require a select group of humans to filter which stories are good and which stories are not good. I believe the model that Digg, Reddit, and DZone use are far superior to the method of story submission and approval that Slashdot uses.
I feel that the method that Slashdot uses is a dying art, and the very poor quality of stories suggests that the human element responsible for editorial content is either very young, or not very good.
5. RSS Readers have changed the way people read technology and other news, and it has caused people to stop having a "home page" anymore. People now have the ability to create their own custom filters and get their own news in anyway they see fit. The role of Slashdot as the only aggregator for IT news has ended. Given a choice, I would much rather use RSS than the editorial process at Slashdot to get news stories.
6. As evidenced by the responses to MY WELL THOUGHT-OUT POSTS JUST TODAY, it is quite impossible to have a discussion with some outspoken members of the Slashdot community. I call out Eldavojohn in particular. It would take a large amount of patience, time and energy that I, frankly, am not willing to part with, to discuss why I am "liar, hypocrite, troll, etc". It is just not interesting to me, and even if it was I would probably need to quit my job just to respond full time to the complaints.
If you feel the urge to yell at me, please remember this is just m
You can get it for free at the Pirate Bay. ;-)
=Smidge=
Remember HIV? It's back! In flu form!
=Smidge=
Dude, you forgot Velikovsky's "Worlds in Collision"
=Smidge=
6. Surak's "A Concise History of Vulcan Logic" (2430)
=Smidge=
...and it *is* a nice intro book for anyone that is new to databases and wants a DIFFERENT way of learning the basics. The key word here is different and in this case I am not sure if that is a good thing or not. The Manga guides take concepts and present them in a cutesy anime way. I feel that the approach probably works well in Japan but I am not sure how much of a market there is for this in the USA. There are other books that teach subjects in a different way such as the 'Head First' line. I guess this is one of those cases where you dilute the market with a whole bunch of different ways to get concepts out to people and some stick better than others. This book certainly presents the ideas that you would want any database newbie to know but its a very select group.
If you are into manga/anime and are a computer person this is probably right up your alley. The writing is good and the artwork is very good. My only concern is I don't know if there is enough of a client base long term.
=Smidge=
Office SP2 seems to have speeded performance on my machine, but the Outlook junk mail filter is nuts -- it swept up 10 or 12 senders I've been getting for years with no issues in Outlook or Gmail. To compound the problem, Outlook still doesn't automatically move a junk message to Inbox after you click "Add to safe senders list". I can't understand why I have to go through two procedures to move a "safe sender" from junk to inbox.
=Smidge=
I remember in 1996 seeing a job posting requiring "5 years Java experience"... I wonder if it is the same job posting you are referring to.
I read the same one. Turns out they left off the decimal point. Should've read .5 years experience. ;-)
=Smidge=
How about the kdawson flu?
=Smidge=
*sigh* My dear frined eldavojohn is suffering from a case of naivety, I fear.
In fact most of my FOIA requests have been with the FBI. To date, I've filed 57 requests with them. Of these, 8 have resulted in documents, 18 were "no records" (including cases where records had been destroyed), and the remainder are still open. The most important thing to know about the FBI is that their records system is decentralized. By this I mean that every FBI field office keeps its own records, and there is no centralized database for searching all records at once. Yes, FBI Headquarters (HQ) in Washington, D.C. keep lots of files, but just because FBI HQ doesn't have any records on a topic doesn't mean that the field offices don't. For example, I requested information on an organization called the Youth International Party Line, or YIPL, which was based in New York City during the 1970s. FBI HQ had no records on YIPL, but the New York field office did.
What this means for you is that you need to send FOIA requests to both FBI HQ and to any FBI field office that you think might have records responsive to your request. This is a pain, but it's not the end of the world. There are about 56 FBI field offices and you can use the same FOIA request letter for each one, so we're talking about at most $22 in postage to spam all of their field offices with your request. This link provides a list of all the FBI field offices, and this other link provides the same list in Microsoft Word mailing label format. The second important thing to know about the FBI is that their records system is broken up into "automated" (i.e., computerized) and "manual" indices. The manual indices are for criminal investigations prior to 1973 and security investigations prior to 1958. By default, the FBI generally searches only the automated indices, since it's much easier for them to do so. If your request covers times prior to 1973, you should add a big bold note specifically asking them to search both the automated and manual indices. Wise up or shut up, eldavojohn, my dear twisted sister.
=Smidge=
I got the impression (remember, this is a kdawson green light *sigh*) that it was more of a super gigantic database rather than a data mining system. That is, any information derived from the data is done by humans. Data mining is incredibly difficult even WITH perfectly clean data, much less the gigantic mess that seems to be the everything bucket. Meh, color me unimpressed.
=Smidge=
Btrfs is mainly created for the Oracle client that doesn't want to use "raw device". It's to improve performance reading/writing large files with high concurrency. So it have to be fast on concurrent request.
What should be looked is :
how mysql perform on BTRFS
how postgres perform on BTRFS
how firebird perform on BTRFS
As there is no magical solution, btrfs is no exception. It's not a general usage FS as is ext (imho). On the desktop, xfs will be the way to go. Performance-wise it's obviously not so great (I do realise that it's still in development and this might change in the future), and the features it delivers are not very interesting as well imho, except maybe for the online defragmentation thingy. But I'm not an enterprise user whis is what this fs aims at I assume.
Still I appreciate the work. Let's hope it doesn't get axed now that Oracle owns Sun and thus already has ZFS.
cheers
=Smidge=
In the era of Web 2.0, it appears that Slashdot has Jumped The Shark. The question now, is when did this happen? I remember in the early 2000s, Slashdot was THE geek website, but something has changed and it appears they have lost the magic. I mean, seriously, sewing machines?
I therefore decided, today, to cancel my account (Smidge207) take them off of my RSS Reader, and cancel my Time Warner broadband "service". I am off the grid; I am off the 'net as of today. I find your stories trite, boring and dare I say, irrelevant to IT.
So the questions of the day are:
When was the exact day, and, what was the exact story, that caused Slashdot to jump the shark? What is your best bet to the cause of their demise?
This is just my opinion, and I am sure each and ever person that uses RSS at some point has made the same decision about another website. If you get angry easily you might not want to read the rest of this post:
1. I am 32, openly homosexual, and I have outgrown any interest in the usual stories that appear on Slashdot. A specific example is this story, about a "Coup" attempt in an Apple Underground User Group. I have absolutely zero interesting in ever reading something like this for the rest of my life.
I felt violated by Rob Malda's minions by reading something that stupid today, and I will admit it may be because of my age, and due to the fact that I now have a wonderful husband (RMS) and a fucking life.
2. I never really participated in the community much, I only read stories, and as I mentioned the stories are getting very bad. Terrible one should say.
3. I am bored of the terms, "Troll", "Trolling", and "Dvork", they make my skin crawl just like it would make my skin crawl to hear someone use the terms, "Your playa hatin", or "Give me the bling, bling", "Smidge is a sock-puppet troll faggot" or "Far out man". These terms are so commonly used on Slashdot that it is impossible to avoid them and the only possible alternative is to never read anything on Slashdot.
4. Slashdot played an interesting role in the early 2000's, as it was a human funneled aggregator for news stories. As technology has progressed, a different model of story submission has started to thrive and it does not require a select group of humans to filter which stories are good and which stories are not good. I believe the model that Digg, Reddit, and DZone use are far superior to the method of story submission and approval that Slashdot uses.
I feel that the method that Slashdot uses is a dying art, and the very poor quality of stories suggests that the human element responsible for editorial content is either very young, or not very good.
5. RSS Readers have changed the way people read technology and other news, and it has caused people to stop having a "home page" anymore. People now have the ability to create their own custom filters and get their own news in anyway they see fit. The role of Slashdot as the only aggregator for IT news has ended. Given a choice, I would much rather use RSS than the editorial process at Slashdot to get news stories.
6. As evidenced by the responses to MY WELL THOUGHT-OUT POSTS JUST TODAY, it is quite impossible to have a discussion with some outspoken members of the Slashdot community. I call out Eldavojohn in particular. It would take a large amount of patience, time and energy that I, frankly, am not willing to part with, to discuss why I am "liar, hypocrite, troll, etc". It is just not interesting to me, and even if it was I would probably need to quit my job just to respond full time to the complaints.
If you feel the urge to yell at me, please remember this is just my opinion and I am very sure other people feel very differently. I do not have the time to discuss the matter anymore due to work and personal obligations, but thank you to the people that did respond. I did learn one very important lesson today though, some opinions are probably best left unsaid, as the effort
Ultimately for a contract to be valid, both sides have to agree to it.
Exactly. Plus, the Statute of Frauds requires certain transactions to be documented in a signed "writing." But what is a "writing" under the law? Does this mean hard copy? Will the courts really enforce the Statute of Frauds strictly enough to avoid liability under electronic contracts as the Internet proliferates? Now that handwriting software and peripherals are an alternative to keyboard input, the signature requirement of the Statute of Frauds may no longer be an issue.
And what about the three-day right of rescission afforded consumers in certain transactions in California? For example, home solicitation contracts may be rescinded within three days of formation of the contract. These agreements are the result of solicitations by vendors at the consumer's home. The consumer must be provided with a hard-copy form that simply requires his or her signature and mailing within the three day period to void the contract. This "change of mind" provision may or may not apply to solicitations on the Internet if received on a PC at home. But perhaps they should. Likewise, seminar sales solicitations also allow a three-day right of rescission under different provisions of the California Civil Code.
And what about the Mailbox Rule? If contracts are accepted upon dispatch, does the sending of email cut off the right of an offeror to withdraw his or her offer notwithstanding the fact that the emailed acceptance has not yet been received? And what if the offeror sends his or her withdrawal of the offer before the acceptance is emailed, but the withdrawal is not received until after dispatch of the acceptance? Issues such as these must be addressed within the context of a technology that causes email delivery to be unpredictable and delivery records to be easily manipulated. The solution to these issues may be dealt with on a case-by-case basis as the specific fact patterns surface in the courts. However, a more efficient approach would be legislative committee research and formulation of a set of commercial statutes that will accommodate virtual contracts before litigation proliferates. Legislatures need not be visionaries to anticipate and resolve the inadequacy of present-day commercial law. The "Internet Commercial Code" would facilitate the free flow of commerce in the new medium and avoid the unnecessary burden of what is now foreseeable litigation. Indeed, an organization called the National Conference of Commissioners of Uniform State Laws is already working on a revised Uniform Commercial Code that will accommodate the new legal issues created by virtual contracts.
=Smidge=
Agreed and I'll start using postgres when I see replication supported. ;-) Seriously, if dead Chinese fetuses can cure the twitching muscle in that weird space just above my eyelid and just beneath my eyebrow I will be impressed, good sir.
=Smidge=
Agreed and THIS: more people than that die every hour from:
Pencil sharpener mishaps
Loose shoelaces
Ennui
Swine flu (aka Captain Tripps)
Paper cuts
Choking on midgets
Fox News
Staring too long at Rob Malda
Nail biting
Ugliness
Smoking cigarettes
Bad haircuts
Forgetting to breathe
Segway vs. Prius collisions
Snorting bleach
Coding in CSS
Auto-erotic asphyxiation
Cricket attacks
Playing cricket while intoxicated
E.coli
E.fail
Fork/toaster/musical chairs
Chair falls
Chainsaw juggling
Country music
Posting about POSIX compliance on Slashdot
Chewing tinfoil
=Smidge=
The thing that bugs me, is why in the hell do we allow churches to hold bingo tournaments with cash prizes in places that ban gambling!?
I LOL'd. Reverse psychology is a funny thing. A "do not touch" sign makes exposed high-voltage wiring seem like an adorably cuddly kitten begging to be petted. The allure of defecating in one's pants is irresistible when the goal is precisely the contrary. And naturally, the next words to come out of a someone's mouth after "don't tase me, bro" are probably going to be "Aaowwwgh!"
=Smidge=
Thank GOD you brought this point up so I don't have to. I thought NOBODY was going to pick up on the stock-market == gambling bit. Gawd.
01)Fund an account.
02)Buy some stocks.
03)Print out your transactions.
04)Put it on a wooden table.
05)Bend over.
06)Take a picture.
07)Scan the picture.
08)Send it in.
09)Sell.
10)Profit!
People! People! People! Have we learned NOTHING over the years?
=Smidge=
Maybe in a few years CSS (and the browser base) with catchup, but the blue-sky designers of CSS did practically everything in their power to make CSS layouts difficult (if not impossible) to use.
Everything from the infamous box model (padding the INSIDE of a box requires a change in it's OUTSIDE dimensions? Excuse me, WTF?) to positioning nonsense (the height of an absolutely positioned object has no effect on its container) contribute greatly to the number of hacks and other measures needed to create even simple layouts.
Add cross-browser-specific nonsense and the whole thing simply bogs down.
Yes, separation of data and presentation is desirable. Yes, it's POSSIBLE to do so. But all too often it takes round-after-round of testing and retesting, only to find that the Opera patch breaks IE (again).
=Smidge=
I've found a lot of people who are stuck on table layouts are stuck because they can only think of HTML pages in terms of how tables work. You have to break free from that mindset and CSS design makes much more sense.
After designing sites for 10 years, 3 of those in the dark ages of tables, I wouldn't touch tables with 100 foot pole. But if using tables makes it easier for you, more power to you. It's just really sad to see people bash CSS because it's too hard for them to implement.
=Smidge=
Did you mean: Apache XOR GPL?
=Smidge=
Starting in 2002 we gave away our dominance in software technology to other nations. The policy of China was to subsidize tens of thousands of students studying in the computer sciences. In 2002 American companies subsidized this policy of China by shipping over American jobs so that Chinese students could gain the necessary and hard to obtain experience of working on real systems. American programming jobs were shipped to India, China, and Russia and subsidized these nations in their ability to build expertise in software technology.
Now very few American students are enrolled in the computer sciences departments of America to provide the expertize necessary for threats to American computer systems, while other nations have tens of thousands that can obtain all of the benefits of software technology. American students will not enroll in the computer sciences when the policy of America is simply to ship programming jobs overseas. Now many American systems are dependent upon offshore foreign programmers. There have already been incidents where offshore foreign workers were bribed to provide account information on bank customers.
The reality is that major American system may have already been compromised by bribes to offshore foreign workers to insert malicious code into the American systems where they have direct access. Hollywood movies show complex schemes and supposedly sophisticated attacks to access computer system when the reality is that you can simply walk in the front door with a bribe and have complete access. It is meaningless to protect these systems from attacks over the internet when they may already have been seriously compromised.
=Smidge=
Christ, kids, for the last time, OpenOffice is part of a patent cross-licensing deal between Sun and Microsoft that resulted from all the anti-trust cases that Sun won. If OO is detached from Sun, it loses that umbrella patent protection and would likely be targeted by Microsoft. Looking at the big picture it would take a tiny amount of Oracle's R&D budget to improve OO. The first thing would be to support macros. A bi-directional translator would be acceptable. A more viable OO could do nothing but help Oracle in its epic battle with MSFT. So piss off.
=Smidge=