Ok, an example that happened very close to me. Imagine a village festival, several hundred people having fun, enjoying a concert. Young people, old people, children. The atmosphere is very relaxed, there are no irregularities.
Then, suddenly, without [b]any[/b] provocation, the riot squad (about one hundred cops in full gear) turns up and starts herding people towards town square. There isn't enough room for the number of people so not everyone can get out of the way. The riot police starts hitting people with their batons. People that have done [b]nothing[/b] wrong. Several people fall down and then they are savagely beaten with severe injuring as a result. Suddenly the police retreat and disappear.
This is all on video, from multiple angles. Ofcourse there is an outcry and an investigation is started. The results of this enquiry have been made public last week.
I'll summarize the report for you:
- The festive people did nothing wrong, the attack was unprovoked; - The police should not have used the amount of force they did;
However:
- The police has been exonerated because they thought they had to use this much force so they where automatically allowed to do so. (if it sounds weird, it is).
No cop has been reprimanded, the victims (some of them are maimed for life, including two small children) have no possibility to sue for damages. It's just though luck for them.
So, tell me again how it does fucking matter if you have video and how there is a fucking difference. And please tell me how my now paralysed from the neck down girlfriend can get her justice. You prick.
There are way more accounts of obvious and sanctioned power abuse than there are of people getting justice though there cellphone camera.
Big Brother, Little Brother... It doesn't matter if you can't get justice anyway because the abusive cops are protected by the whole justice and security chain.
Actually, I don't write in English all that much, it being my third language. Mostly I write in German and Rumanian, and on occasion I have to translate parts of my texts to Russian. The support for all these languages is acceptable but not always convenient. There are some rare cyrillic glyphs (ukranian 'ya', for example) that LaTeX refuses to set correctly in all fonts.
The problem for me isn't so much the handling of weird scripts, it's that some of my glyphs disappear when I switch fonts. I would imagine that shouldn't happen in a mature typesetting system.
I'm not submitter, but I share some of his frustration.
First, I've used LaTeX since around 1987 (that was on the Amiga, btw) and I'm still convinced that for most of the documents I write LaTeX is clearly superior to other systems I've tried.
That's not to say there aren't some obvious points for improvement. Font support is archaic and really not something from this decade (nor the previous). I understand that XeTeX has some improvements in this area, I'll check it out. I need/want to use the Gentium font but after jumping through all the hoops that are indicated in the sparse documentation, it no worky.
But, for me, the number one frustration is the sheer impossibility to create a new base class. I write software for a living and have used many obfuscated languages. However, I just don't "get" the intricacies of programming for LaTeX.
I would love to have a letter.cls that doesn't look like it's an afterthougth. There is dinbrief.cls, but that has all sorts of problems of its own. I've tried several times to create a letter class, for A4 paper, that looks professional to use in a business. No such luck, I just couldn't do it. And the lack of alternatives on the 'Net seem to indicate that there aren't many others that could do it either.
So, to summarize, LaTeX a wonderful tool for typesetting reports and articles. Especially if those are heavy on math. But for other correspondence it isn't so great, or at least, it hasn't kept up with modern developments in font technology and document design.
1. rsync your colo'd server os partition to your in-house test server; 2. patch your test server; 3. rsync your test server to your colo'd server. 4. profit?;-)
As your in-house test server should be more-or-less the same as your deployed server the rsync's should take too long.
Beats babysitting your server in a cold and dark datacenter.
Everytime a new framework or web development system gets hyped I can't but wonder why people get so excited about having reinvented the wheel, and a wonky one at that.
Everything you mentioned in your post has been solved for many, many years already. Just use Perl and the Template Toolkit. Or one of the mature frameworks (Catalyst, Mason) if you hang that way.
It is fast, stable and mature and gets the job done with little development time. Sure, it isn't the latest hype. But do you care? Should you care? If you want to get things done, use Perl.
The ONLY thing that has to be added, and needs to be added about ten years ago, is a date input field in forms.
One that is locale-aware (DD-MM-YYYY, MM-DD-YYYY, or whatever you're locale used). Currently you have to jump through several hoops and it is near impossible to get a foolproof date input.
How do you prevent the aluminum first-surface from oxidizing? I assume the mirror has to be really, really shiny. And as far as I know everything made of aluminum get oxidized (rust) immidiately to a matte finish.
So how do they do it? You could spray some varnish (or whatever) on it, but then it wouldn't be first-surface anymore.
The bright white leds that are currently used are not all that stable. Light output decreases with use because the phosphor coating degrades. Remember that white leds are actually UV-leds that need a phosphor coating not unlike fluorescent tubes.
It takes about 1000 hours for the led to reach 50% light output. The time from 100% to about 85% is measured in single digit hours!
So, no, light fixtures that last for decades are right out. With current technology, that is.
But will I use it? No, not before it has proven itself in the next few years. I'm not going to beta-test it and invest in a technology that might change consirably or disappear altogether.
I'll check it out in about five years. It will be mature by then, or it will be obsolete.
Web pages such as the one in TFA are information that you, at your option, may find useful.
True. I appreciate pages that are genuinely informative. The web can be a wonderful thing. On the other hand there are imperial truckloads of crappy sites. That, also, is the web.
Generating the content, and acquiring the bandwidth to provide it to you, costs money -- sometimes just a little bit (as in my case), and sometimes a lot (as, I suspect, in the case of TFA above -- destroying laptops in an abuse test can't be cheap).
Again, you are right. I publish several websites myself (only one of them has a significant number of visitors) and colocating isn't cheap.
The content provider is providing that information to you completely free (as in beer). How then, if you do not charge for access to the content, do you pay for the bandwidth, hardware and, well, content required to provide interesting, relevant content?
Well, how do people get money? By working for it, for example. That is what I do, in any case.
One way is to serve ads on the web page. Provided that the ads aren't the annoying, overly garish, flash-based crap that seriously detracts from the host web page, I don't believe this is too much to ask.
Here our viewpoint differs. I don't want to see ads. Not in real life, not on tv and certainly not on the internet.
As I said above, I put Google AdSense on my web pages because I don't think a simple text-based ad on the border of a web page is too intrusive. While other web hosts might disagree, I don't really give a rip if you want to run ad blockers, NoScript or edit your host files to block ads on my server.
No problem here then! You try to serve ads, I block them. You are happy, I am happy.
My web sites are primarily a hobby; I would just like to generate a little extra income to help offset the costs of bandwidth and servers. FWIW, I am a long way from breaking even on costs.
You aren't breaking even, by a long shot. Then why serve ads at all? It would only be slightly more costly to not serve them, right?
As I understand it, only first time visitors tend to click on ads. Once you get repeat visitors they mentally block them out and don't click any more. I don't know anything about your sites, but if it is anything that encourages return visits then you annoy your loyal visitors while not getting any revenue from them anyway. Just remove the ads, it amounts to nothing in the end.
On the flip side, if you are so morally opposed to ads on a web page, you are free to not visit my web sites;)
That's only fair!;-)
To be completely honest, I often don't mind a small text ad somewhere in the border. But the complete crapfest on most of the websites of the 'traditional media' is pretty horrific. For those sites, anything goes.
I'm getting better at completely blocking the ads, even if I have to write an interpreter for each and every site where the content might be mildly interesting.
Of course, I would be less of a hypocrite if I just didn't visit those sites at all, but hey, I'm only human too...
I have a Soekris 5501-70 in a 1u case. Currently it serves 14 smallish websites that get about 5000 hits a day (combined) and does DNS, email and several Postgress databases for my own use. It feels snappy enough.
I'm thinking about adding another 5501 in the same case for firewalling, routing and providing wireless for the rest of my network.
Power usage is minimal, it is *completely* silent (no fans) and it has been proven to be rock solid.
I tend to think of ads as electronic warfare. "They" try to get as much exposure, I try to minimize it. That means they get to try their latest pop-up/pop-under schemes, and I get to sharpen my skills with AdBlockPlus, NoScript and a very broad hostfile to exclude ad-domains.
I'm not interested in the crap they peddle. I'm also think it is morally wrong to let them enjoy ad-income. And if they can't exist without the money from ads, well, they are free to remove their website.
I have a 3c lying around that most certainly has a competent email client and a (simplistic) web browser. The latter isn't all that useful anymore, even if the screensize would allow for todays websites.
I've used the 3c for on-the-road email and dial-up shell access up to around 2004. Then I bought a second hand 5mx but I haven't used it much as the screen has very poor contrast. And my boss gave me a laptop, so I didn't need it anymore.
That said, if someone comes out with a Psion 5 form factor PDA/micro-notebook with a decent screen and (IMPORTANT!) powered off of two AA batteries, with a battery life measured in days, I don't care what it costs because I will have one no matter what!
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, an example that happened very close to me. Imagine a village festival, several hundred people having fun, enjoying a concert. Young people, old people, children. The atmosphere is very relaxed, there are no irregularities.
Then, suddenly, without [b]any[/b] provocation, the riot squad (about one hundred cops in full gear) turns up and starts herding people towards town square. There isn't enough room for the number of people so not everyone can get out of the way. The riot police starts hitting people with their batons. People that have done [b]nothing[/b] wrong. Several people fall down and then they are savagely beaten with severe injuring as a result. Suddenly the police retreat and disappear.
This is all on video, from multiple angles. Ofcourse there is an outcry and an investigation is started. The results of this enquiry have been made public last week.
I'll summarize the report for you:
- The festive people did nothing wrong, the attack was unprovoked;
- The police should not have used the amount of force they did;
However:
- The police has been exonerated because they thought they had to use this much force so they where automatically allowed to do so. (if it sounds weird, it is).
No cop has been reprimanded, the victims (some of them are maimed for life, including two small children) have no possibility to sue for damages. It's just though luck for them.
So, tell me again how it does fucking matter if you have video and how there is a fucking difference. And please tell me how my now paralysed from the neck down girlfriend can get her justice. You prick.
There are way more accounts of obvious and sanctioned power abuse than there are of people getting justice though there cellphone camera.
Big Brother, Little Brother... It doesn't matter if you can't get justice anyway because the abusive cops are protected by the whole justice and security chain.
Actually, I don't write in English all that much, it being my third language. Mostly I write in German and Rumanian, and on occasion I have to translate parts of my texts to Russian. The support for all these languages is acceptable but not always convenient. There are some rare cyrillic glyphs (ukranian 'ya', for example) that LaTeX refuses to set correctly in all fonts. The problem for me isn't so much the handling of weird scripts, it's that some of my glyphs disappear when I switch fonts. I would imagine that shouldn't happen in a mature typesetting system.
I'm not submitter, but I share some of his frustration.
First, I've used LaTeX since around 1987 (that was on the Amiga, btw) and I'm still convinced that for most of the documents I write LaTeX is clearly superior to other systems I've tried.
That's not to say there aren't some obvious points for improvement. Font support is archaic and really not something from this decade (nor the previous). I understand that XeTeX has some improvements in this area, I'll check it out. I need/want to use the Gentium font but after jumping through all the hoops that are indicated in the sparse documentation, it no worky.
But, for me, the number one frustration is the sheer impossibility to create a new base class. I write software for a living and have used many obfuscated languages. However, I just don't "get" the intricacies of programming for LaTeX.
I would love to have a letter.cls that doesn't look like it's an afterthougth. There is dinbrief.cls, but that has all sorts of problems of its own. I've tried several times to create a letter class, for A4 paper, that looks professional to use in a business. No such luck, I just couldn't do it. And the lack of alternatives on the 'Net seem to indicate that there aren't many others that could do it either.
So, to summarize, LaTeX a wonderful tool for typesetting reports and articles. Especially if those are heavy on math. But for other correspondence it isn't so great, or at least, it hasn't kept up with modern developments in font technology and document design.
1. rsync your colo'd server os partition to your in-house test server; ;-)
2. patch your test server;
3. rsync your test server to your colo'd server.
4. profit?
As your in-house test server should be more-or-less the same as your deployed server the rsync's should take too long.
Beats babysitting your server in a cold and dark datacenter.
Everytime a new framework or web development system gets hyped I can't but wonder why people get so excited about having reinvented the wheel, and a wonky one at that.
Everything you mentioned in your post has been solved for many, many years already. Just use Perl and the Template Toolkit. Or one of the mature frameworks (Catalyst, Mason) if you hang that way.
It is fast, stable and mature and gets the job done with little development time. Sure, it isn't the latest hype. But do you care? Should you care? If you want to get things done, use Perl.
The ONLY thing that has to be added, and needs to be added about ten years ago, is a date input field in forms.
One that is locale-aware (DD-MM-YYYY, MM-DD-YYYY, or whatever you're locale used). Currently you have to jump through several hoops and it is near impossible to get a foolproof date input.
So how do they do it? You could spray some varnish (or whatever) on it, but then it wouldn't be first-surface anymore.
It takes about 1000 hours for the led to reach 50% light output. The time from 100% to about 85% is measured in single digit hours!
So, no, light fixtures that last for decades are right out. With current technology, that is.
But will I use it? No, not before it has proven itself in the next few years. I'm not going to beta-test it and invest in a technology that might change consirably or disappear altogether.
I'll check it out in about five years. It will be mature by then, or it will be obsolete.
True. I appreciate pages that are genuinely informative. The web can be a wonderful thing. On the other hand there are imperial truckloads of crappy sites. That, also, is the web.
Generating the content, and acquiring the bandwidth to provide it to you, costs money -- sometimes just a little bit (as in my case), and sometimes a lot (as, I suspect, in the case of TFA above -- destroying laptops in an abuse test can't be cheap).
Again, you are right. I publish several websites myself (only one of them has a significant number of visitors) and colocating isn't cheap.
The content provider is providing that information to you completely free (as in beer). How then, if you do not charge for access to the content, do you pay for the bandwidth, hardware and, well, content required to provide interesting, relevant content?
Well, how do people get money? By working for it, for example. That is what I do, in any case.
One way is to serve ads on the web page. Provided that the ads aren't the annoying, overly garish, flash-based crap that seriously detracts from the host web page, I don't believe this is too much to ask.
Here our viewpoint differs. I don't want to see ads. Not in real life, not on tv and certainly not on the internet.
As I said above, I put Google AdSense on my web pages because I don't think a simple text-based ad on the border of a web page is too intrusive. While other web hosts might disagree, I don't really give a rip if you want to run ad blockers, NoScript or edit your host files to block ads on my server.
No problem here then! You try to serve ads, I block them. You are happy, I am happy.
My web sites are primarily a hobby; I would just like to generate a little extra income to help offset the costs of bandwidth and servers. FWIW, I am a long way from breaking even on costs.
You aren't breaking even, by a long shot. Then why serve ads at all? It would only be slightly more costly to not serve them, right?
As I understand it, only first time visitors tend to click on ads. Once you get repeat visitors they mentally block them out and don't click any more. I don't know anything about your sites, but if it is anything that encourages return visits then you annoy your loyal visitors while not getting any revenue from them anyway. Just remove the ads, it amounts to nothing in the end.
On the flip side, if you are so morally opposed to ads on a web page, you are free to not visit my web sites ;)
That's only fair! ;-)
To be completely honest, I often don't mind a small text ad somewhere in the border. But the complete crapfest on most of the websites of the 'traditional media' is pretty horrific. For those sites, anything goes.
I'm getting better at completely blocking the ads, even if I have to write an interpreter for each and every site where the content might be mildly interesting.
Of course, I would be less of a hypocrite if I just didn't visit those sites at all, but hey, I'm only human too...
I'm thinking about adding another 5501 in the same case for firewalling, routing and providing wireless for the rest of my network.
Power usage is minimal, it is *completely* silent (no fans) and it has been proven to be rock solid.
More info at Soekris or kd85.
Disclosure: I'm just a happy customer.
I tend to think of ads as electronic warfare. "They" try to get as much exposure, I try to minimize it. That means they get to try their latest pop-up/pop-under schemes, and I get to sharpen my skills with AdBlockPlus, NoScript and a very broad hostfile to exclude ad-domains. I'm not interested in the crap they peddle. I'm also think it is morally wrong to let them enjoy ad-income. And if they can't exist without the money from ads, well, they are free to remove their website.
Hey! Someone rediscovered Markov chains!
I've used the 3c for on-the-road email and dial-up shell access up to around 2004. Then I bought a second hand 5mx but I haven't used it much as the screen has very poor contrast. And my boss gave me a laptop, so I didn't need it anymore.
That said, if someone comes out with a Psion 5 form factor PDA/micro-notebook with a decent screen and (IMPORTANT!) powered off of two AA batteries, with a battery life measured in days, I don't care what it costs because I will have one no matter what!