It seems the basic concept of a boycott is lost on people. Folks, the idea here is to deprive the company of revenue. Your Mom already bought the card, it will not hurt the company one bit to send a card back that she sent you. That is as stupid as purchasing French wine and dumping it on the sidewalk in protest of the French. They already sold the wine could care less if you drink it.
If your goal is to educate your Mom (or whoever else sends you cards) about AG, perhaps you can find a less offensive and heartless method of getting your message out.
Right, but that only works for a few shapes (the circle being the simplest). A square with a lip could easily fall in if turned to the right angle.
By "not falling in" I don't mean when inserted properly, I mean it is impossible to put the manhole cover through the manhole at all, not matter how you position it. No accidently drops when being worked on in other words.
The first answer sounds like a better reason. Granted yours is valid, but does not strike me as important as the "manhole cover falling into the manhole" problem.
No, people invest in companies because it is reletivly easy, it is a way to make money and (for the majority) it is a retirement plan (think 401k).
Slow the economy quite a bit? It would destroy it. People would be terrified to invest in a company, there would be no more mutual funds, no more retirement funds, it would be nearly impossible for anyone but the very rich to start a company (where would the funding come from?). This is not about "Dirk Billionaire" and his portfolio, this is about companies using stock as a form of profit sharing with employees, this is about average people planning for retirement, or someone simply speculating on a stock in a business they hope will grow. These people get fucked over enough when a mismanaged corporation screws up and renders their stock worthless, now you want them to be leagally liable for the company's actions as well??! Should all forms of lending be held to this standard? If I take out a house loan and do something illegal in my house should the bank be legally responsible?
I would suggest taking an economics class, you would likely find that limited liability this is the best way of doing things. Certainly there can be improvements. For example, make the board or directors personally liable for the companies they oversee, not the investors. The people who are actually paid to run the company.
No matter what you think of this, I really doubt this can, in any way, be construed as "silencing" Theo. That is a bit far. His ability to speak his mind has not been affected at all by this grant retraction.
Don't get me wrong, I like GNOME a lot and use both it and KDE (also pretty good) at work all the time. However, anyone who thinks those two are even comparable to OSX (or even windows 2000 or above) in terms of ease of use, stability, etc is deluding themselves. They have a LONG way to go, however I do not doubt they will be there someday soon.
The Mac is slower, although really the difference between a 1GHz and 3GHz x86 machine means nothing to me. I have consoles for gaming, so what the heck do I need that performance for (that said, my 800Mhz imac plays q3a, civ3, and warcraft3 just fine). I'm a programmer who browses the web, does email and im, and occationally needs to use openoffice for stuff, it isn't like I'm calculating pi to a million decimal places or rendering the fightscenes for the next LOTR film:)
Everyone fights over the difference in speed, so let me throw my opinion in. My 800Mhz G4 iMac performs almost EXACTLY like my IBM 1.2GHz laptop (except for graphics, the iMac blows the laptop out of the water on that). Either way, I never feel like I need more speed on either. Other than bragging rights, I really wouldn't have much of a use for it.
Plus it is good to learn as many platforms as possible, are you telling me you just pick one OS and don't bother investigating and learning anything else?:)
So I guess to answer your question, I don't consider raw MHz to be the only benchmark with which to measure a computer's utility. I run a Mac at home because to me it is worth the tradeoff in raw speed to have a really clean, polished GUI on top of a unix box.
In arizona, the you don't need a special license (unless the law has since changed)
Sure you, in fact to get said license you need 16 hours of instruction (more than most CCW states). You are thinking of Vermont, where no license is required to carry a concealed weapon.
Actually this is a role very well suited to him. I would have liked to see that, and I am by no means a Nadar fan (as far as his presidential run was concerned)
I have the same machine and my video lags behind the audio in full screen mode, and actually hiccups in windowed mode. Do you have 17inch model with the upgraded nVidia video?
No, but I had nothing else running at the time. I also have the paid version of QT, but that shouldn't matter.
Well, let's see. People who are updating this remotly (meaning they are not sitting in front of the physical computer) probably care. And that is what this thread is about....
Safari is about as "innovative" as my left ass-cheek.
I don't want my web browser to be "innovative", that nearly always means the same as "fucking around with HTML standards and breaking stuff". I want it to be fast and W3C compliant. Safari is doing pretty good toward that goal. Frankly I don't even care so much about tabs, I just want it to be a web browser, nothing more, nothing less.
Mr. de Raadt is no fan of the U.S. military at the moment. He calls the war in Iraq an oil grab. "It just sickens me."
It sickens me too, the things we are learning about regarding how Saddam has treated his people. The torture, kidnappings, rape, etc. The way he lives like a king while his people starve all the while claiming US sanctions are to blame (while stockpiling food and other supplied no less). I'm really pissed that the US&UK forces are uncovering all of this, I liked it better when the UN and the world looked the other way because he had oil.
Except that port 135 is the endpoint mapper for DCE's RPC portmapper (which microsoft took, stripped all the kerberos security out of, and called DCOM). Granted this does not affect most people, but those of us running DCE are fearing that people will block this port then wonder why their applications broke.
Way to go MS. Take the port used by the DCE endpoint mapper, use it in your own broken, buggy, and insecure version of DCE RPC (also known as DCOM), then refuse to fix it.
My University uses DCE all over the place, from a financial application to the distributed filesystem. Now people are going to start blocking this port (135) to protect against then start complaining when some of the applications they use and their file system access stops working.
And how does one "break in" to the mainframe operator industry?
(1) You do not want to be an operator (although you may have to for a while to break in, I did for 8 months), you want to be a systems programmer (or sysprog). Operators DO have mind numbing jobs and usually are paid poorly. 'Tape Monkeys' is the term usually used:)
(2) Universities. Plenty of large Universities run Mainframes and they need people. They also cannot pay as well as industry so they will willingly hire "less qualified" people and train them. It's a good way to get experience and get paid for it.
I was a Systems Programmer from 21 to 24 (I'm still 24, I changed jobs last summer)
It was completly different than I (and I suspect most people on/.) thought it would be.
First up, I generally worked with people somewhat older than me (like the article suggests, this isn't a field populated with 20somethings). I considered this a good thing because these people had more experience than any three recent comp sci grads put together. I learned a different perspective on computing that I was not exposed to previously. Namely an obsession with stability, uptime, performance, and attention to detail. When new versions of software came out, we didn't test it real quick an put it into production. We would install it on a test system and abuse the heck out of it for weeks (sometimes months) to ensure it performed up to snuff, was stable, and did not break anything in our environment. Configuration options were painstakenly set after a ton of research.
Because it was a small team that maintained our installation (which was a fairly large IBM s/390 setup) I got to experience a pretty wide range of tasks. I installed various software packages, programmed in s/390 assembler, did some performance testing and tuning, lots of troubleshooting, hardware, and even got to port a very large DCE application server from AIX to OS/390. I didn't get too involved with DBA stuff (that was a seperate group) but I did a lot of operating system related work. Speaking of, upgrading the operating system was such a meticilous production that it makes the most complicated unix install look like a DOS install.
Not to say that it was boring or mindnumbing (there was a little of that but just about every job has that aspect). i found it very challanging and rewarding. Maintaining a website that serves data to a few thousand people is nothing compared to being (at least partially) responsible for the machine that runs the administrative, business and academic record keeping functions of Penn State:)
Also the people I worked with (for the most part) were very excited about Linux and the open source movement (even before it came to the mainframe). Many of them remember their early days when the mainframe OS and important components was open source (think MVT, MVS 3.8, HASP, etc). People took pride in modifying the code to fit their shop's needs better and improve functionality, fix bugs, all the stuff people do with OSS today. To them the open source movement is a long overdue return to the way things used to be.
As for the learning curve, it is steep. Be prepared to be confronted with a mountain of documentation and accept that you will have to learn a different way of doing things. If you are a person who cannot manage a Linux box wihout X windows installed, or you cannot program without an IDE than it is probably not for you. If you are a somewhat meticulous person who, when learning a new language/program/concept likes to really get into it and learn everything, not just what you need to get by, then consider it.
Personally I loved it and only changed jobs because I was offered a really good job that I couldn't pass up. However I could easily see myself going back to it someday (heck, if the market is that deperate maybe I should start consulting on the side:)
It is a shame that schools do not teach (if they are even aware of the existance of) mainframes and mainframe technology. They have been quietly running the backbone of most large business and universities for decades now, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
My experience matches what you said, Millitary experience does help a career in many cases, and there are some pretty intelligent people who served in the military (and some drolling morons, fortunatly they rarely go far in their service)
However, had you have expressed your point with a little less profanity and without the insults, you might have convinced someone.
Lesson: Never solve your girlfriends computer problems completely or she'll devalue your relationship./
Ugh My ex dumped me after five years of not wanting to hear anything about "that stupid Linux thing" (not that I ever tried to push it on her or talked about it all the time or anything). Now, months after the breakup, her boss at work installs Linux on all their computers. Now she decides she loves it and now thinks I'm her personal Linux support/training/guru. The irony just kills me. Of course, I'm providing her some help because...well...I'm an idiot.
A web server is more than pushing html out to the internet. A web server is a way of interacting with users in a manner that is meaningful to your business.
You are confusing market-speak with technical terms.
Market-speak - Webserver: A way to meaningfuly interact with your customers and aid in b2b information exchange.
Technical term - Webserver: Software that responds to web browser requests by returning html.
Actually, now that I think about it, your defination of a webserver is actually an "application server" (think tomcat, coldfusion, websphere, etc). Those still require a webserver to serve up the html.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems the basic concept of a boycott is lost on people. Folks, the idea here is to deprive the company of revenue. Your Mom already bought the card, it will not hurt the company one bit to send a card back that she sent you. That is as stupid as purchasing French wine and dumping it on the sidewalk in protest of the French. They already sold the wine could care less if you drink it.
If your goal is to educate your Mom (or whoever else sends you cards) about AG, perhaps you can find a less offensive and heartless method of getting your message out.
Finkployd
Right, but that only works for a few shapes (the circle being the simplest). A square with a lip could easily fall in if turned to the right angle.
By "not falling in" I don't mean when inserted properly, I mean it is impossible to put the manhole cover through the manhole at all, not matter how you position it. No accidently drops when being worked on in other words.
Finkployd
The first answer sounds like a better reason. Granted yours is valid, but does not strike me as important as the "manhole cover falling into the manhole" problem.
finkployd
No, people invest in companies because it is reletivly easy, it is a way to make money and (for the majority) it is a retirement plan (think 401k).
Slow the economy quite a bit? It would destroy it. People would be terrified to invest in a company, there would be no more mutual funds, no more retirement funds, it would be nearly impossible for anyone but the very rich to start a company (where would the funding come from?). This is not about "Dirk Billionaire" and his portfolio, this is about companies using stock as a form of profit sharing with employees, this is about average people planning for retirement, or someone simply speculating on a stock in a business they hope will grow. These people get fucked over enough when a mismanaged corporation screws up and renders their stock worthless, now you want them to be leagally liable for the company's actions as well??! Should all forms of lending be held to this standard? If I take out a house loan and do something illegal in my house should the bank be legally responsible?
I would suggest taking an economics class, you would likely find that limited liability this is the best way of doing things. Certainly there can be improvements. For example, make the board or directors personally liable for the companies they oversee, not the investors. The people who are actually paid to run the company.
Finkployd
No matter what you think of this, I really doubt this can, in any way, be construed as "silencing" Theo. That is a bit far. His ability to speak his mind has not been affected at all by this grant retraction.
Finkployd
Unix with a good stable GUI.
:)
:)
Don't get me wrong, I like GNOME a lot and use both it and KDE (also pretty good) at work all the time. However, anyone who thinks those two are even comparable to OSX (or even windows 2000 or above) in terms of ease of use, stability, etc is deluding themselves. They have a LONG way to go, however I do not doubt they will be there someday soon.
The Mac is slower, although really the difference between a 1GHz and 3GHz x86 machine means nothing to me. I have consoles for gaming, so what the heck do I need that performance for (that said, my 800Mhz imac plays q3a, civ3, and warcraft3 just fine). I'm a programmer who browses the web, does email and im, and occationally needs to use openoffice for stuff, it isn't like I'm calculating pi to a million decimal places or rendering the fightscenes for the next LOTR film
Everyone fights over the difference in speed, so let me throw my opinion in. My 800Mhz G4 iMac performs almost EXACTLY like my IBM 1.2GHz laptop (except for graphics, the iMac blows the laptop out of the water on that). Either way, I never feel like I need more speed on either. Other than bragging rights, I really wouldn't have much of a use for it.
Plus it is good to learn as many platforms as possible, are you telling me you just pick one OS and don't bother investigating and learning anything else?
So I guess to answer your question, I don't consider raw MHz to be the only benchmark with which to measure a computer's utility. I run a Mac at home because to me it is worth the tradeoff in raw speed to have a really clean, polished GUI on top of a unix box.
Finkployd
In arizona, the you don't need a special license (unless the law has since changed)
Sure you, in fact to get said license you need 16 hours of instruction (more than most CCW states).
You are thinking of Vermont, where no license is required to carry a concealed weapon.
Finkployd
Actually this is a role very well suited to him. I would have liked to see that, and I am by no means a Nadar fan (as far as his presidential run was concerned)
Finkployd
Besides... we all know there will be someone [nsa.gov] M$ won't be able to stop.
Ummm, exactly WHY do you think the NSA seems to have suddenly stopped contributing code to the NSA security enhanced linux project?
Hint
Finkployd
I have the same machine and my video lags behind the audio in full screen mode, and actually hiccups in windowed mode. Do you have 17inch model with the upgraded nVidia video?
No, but I had nothing else running at the time. I also have the paid version of QT, but that shouldn't matter.
Finkployd
Who cares if there is a command line version?
Well, let's see. People who are updating this remotly (meaning they are not sitting in front of the physical computer) probably care. And that is what this thread is about....
Finkployd
Safari is about as "innovative" as my left ass-cheek.
I don't want my web browser to be "innovative", that nearly always means the same as "fucking around with HTML standards and breaking stuff". I want it to be fast and W3C compliant. Safari is doing pretty good toward that goal. Frankly I don't even care so much about tabs, I just want it to be a web browser, nothing more, nothing less.
Finkployd
My 800MHz flat panal iMac plays it just perfectly, but then it IS quicktime, it better freaking play perfectly on a mac.
Finkployd
Mr. de Raadt is no fan of the U.S. military at the moment. He calls the war in Iraq an oil grab. "It just sickens me."
It sickens me too, the things we are learning about regarding how Saddam has treated his people. The torture, kidnappings, rape, etc. The way he lives like a king while his people starve all the while claiming US sanctions are to blame (while stockpiling food and other supplied no less). I'm really pissed that the US&UK forces are uncovering all of this, I liked it better when the UN and the world looked the other way because he had oil.
Finkployd
You are the most rational thinker I have seen on Slashdot for a long time. Please keep posting :)
Finkployd
DCE on z/OS didn't seem to fail :)
Finkployd
Except that port 135 is the endpoint mapper for DCE's RPC portmapper (which microsoft took, stripped all the kerberos security out of, and called DCOM). Granted this does not affect most people, but those of us running DCE are fearing that people will block this port then wonder why their applications broke.
Finkployd
Way to go MS. Take the port used by the DCE endpoint mapper, use it in your own broken, buggy, and insecure version of DCE RPC (also known as DCOM), then refuse to fix it.
My University uses DCE all over the place, from a financial application to the distributed filesystem. Now people are going to start blocking this port (135) to protect against then start complaining when some of the applications they use and their file system access stops working.
Finkployd
Local Hero
The soundtrack ALONE gives this movie my vote. Mark Knoffler at his best
Finkployd
And how does one "break in" to the mainframe operator industry?
:)
(1) You do not want to be an operator (although you may have to for a while to break in, I did for 8 months), you want to be a systems programmer (or sysprog). Operators DO have mind numbing jobs and usually are paid poorly. 'Tape Monkeys' is the term usually used
(2) Universities. Plenty of large Universities run Mainframes and they need people. They also cannot pay as well as industry so they will willingly hire "less qualified" people and train them. It's a good way to get experience and get paid for it.
Finkployd
I was a Systems Programmer from 21 to 24 (I'm still 24, I changed jobs last summer)
/.) thought it would be.
:)
:)
It was completly different than I (and I suspect most people on
First up, I generally worked with people somewhat older than me (like the article suggests, this isn't a field populated with 20somethings). I considered this a good thing because these people had more experience than any three recent comp sci grads put together. I learned a different perspective on computing that I was not exposed to previously. Namely an obsession with stability, uptime, performance, and attention to detail. When new versions of software came out, we didn't test it real quick an put it into production. We would install it on a test system and abuse the heck out of it for weeks (sometimes months) to ensure it performed up to snuff, was stable, and did not break anything in our environment. Configuration options were painstakenly set after a ton of research.
Because it was a small team that maintained our installation (which was a fairly large IBM s/390 setup) I got to experience a pretty wide range of tasks. I installed various software packages, programmed in s/390 assembler, did some performance testing and tuning, lots of troubleshooting, hardware, and even got to port a very large DCE application server from AIX to OS/390. I didn't get too involved with DBA stuff (that was a seperate group) but I did a lot of operating system related work. Speaking of, upgrading the operating system was such a meticilous production that it makes the most complicated unix install look like a DOS install.
Not to say that it was boring or mindnumbing (there was a little of that but just about every job has that aspect). i found it very challanging and rewarding. Maintaining a website that serves data to a few thousand people is nothing compared to being (at least partially) responsible for the machine that runs the administrative, business and academic record keeping functions of Penn State
Also the people I worked with (for the most part) were very excited about Linux and the open source movement (even before it came to the mainframe). Many of them remember their early days when the mainframe OS and important components was open source (think MVT, MVS 3.8, HASP, etc). People took pride in modifying the code to fit their shop's needs better and improve functionality, fix bugs, all the stuff people do with OSS today. To them the open source movement is a long overdue return to the way things used to be.
As for the learning curve, it is steep. Be prepared to be confronted with a mountain of documentation and accept that you will have to learn a different way of doing things. If you are a person who cannot manage a Linux box wihout X windows installed, or you cannot program without an IDE than it is probably not for you. If you are a somewhat meticulous person who, when learning a new language/program/concept likes to really get into it and learn everything, not just what you need to get by, then consider it.
Personally I loved it and only changed jobs because I was offered a really good job that I couldn't pass up. However I could easily see myself going back to it someday (heck, if the market is that deperate maybe I should start consulting on the side
It is a shame that schools do not teach (if they are even aware of the existance of) mainframes and mainframe technology. They have been quietly running the backbone of most large business and universities for decades now, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
Finkployd
My experience matches what you said, Millitary experience does help a career in many cases, and there are some pretty intelligent people who served in the military (and some drolling morons, fortunatly they rarely go far in their service)
However, had you have expressed your point with a little less profanity and without the insults, you might have convinced someone.
Finkployd
Lesson: Never solve your girlfriends computer problems completely or she'll devalue your relationship./
Ugh
My ex dumped me after five years of not wanting to hear anything about "that stupid Linux thing" (not that I ever tried to push it on her or talked about it all the time or anything). Now, months after the breakup, her boss at work installs Linux on all their computers. Now she decides she loves it and now thinks I'm her personal Linux support/training/guru. The irony just kills me. Of course, I'm providing her some help because...well...I'm an idiot.
Finkployd
I understand your point, but where did you get "racist"? Or did you just throw that in for impact.
Finkployd
A web server is more than pushing html out to the internet. A web server is a way of interacting with users in a manner that is meaningful to your business.
You are confusing market-speak with technical terms.
Market-speak - Webserver: A way to meaningfuly interact with your customers and aid in b2b information exchange.
Technical term - Webserver: Software that responds to web browser requests by returning html.
Actually, now that I think about it, your defination of a webserver is actually an "application server" (think tomcat, coldfusion, websphere, etc). Those still require a webserver to serve up the html.
Finkployd