I think batteries and their regulating circuits are pretty expensive. I mean, look how little time you get out of a UPS. I've got a big ol' UPS at work powering two racks with two external battery packs and I can only get about an hour out of it. Add to this the fact that Lead/Acid batteries don't like being drained/charged regularly (read: you'll need to replace them regularly), and you've got a very expensive and high maintenance system on your hands.
Even with IPv6, I wonder if it will be practical to ditch NAT at home. Assuming (like the TFA does) that people will continue to use firewalls and/or wireless routers, how is one going to route one's subnet to the inside of the firewall? I would guess that most common residential ISPs are NOT goign to be very keen on setting up special routing arangements with you. You'll get your IPv6 subnet bridged across your modem and if you have a firewall, you'll pretty much have to do NAT to traverse the firewall at all. Sure, you'll be able to use one-to-one NAT, but it is NAT all the same and still causes some problems.
I'm looking at the Admin manual and it seems like the only external authentication scheme supported is Active Directory. Looks like it can use OpenLDAP to store information about users, but the authentication itself is AD only. WTF??
I'm going to make a leap here and guess that most open source development does NOT happen on company time unless the company sanctions it... usually for their own purposes. Not that SOME people can't get away with spending hours doing something other than their TPS report cover sheets, but most can't.
Though I have some doubts about this "boredom drives OSS idea." Sure, programmers might be bored if they didn't have some fun/intersting programming to do... but certainly that can't drive them. I mean, you have to really enjoy it to do it. Enjoyment or satisfaction has to be the motivator here. Otherwise you'd have to conclude that the only reason anyone does any non-essential life supporting activity is to avoid boredom.
Not that I'm supporting it, but the argument here would be that your basic skill set determines your class in life and the types of jobs you can hold. If "office worker" isn't in that skill set, there's a whole job sector cut off from you. Also, if we're to believe the hype behind modernization and globalization, we're losing blue-collar jobs to other countries, but gaining white-collar jobs in exchange, so the students need to be trained or risk not have a place in the workforce.
So we're training kids for the lowest end of the office workers... secretaries? Of course it is good to know how to use a computer in a office, but very few careers (and I say career here instead of just "job") actually make it a primary requirement. A college education is so much more important than just computer skills. And lets face it, if you've been through college there is a pretty good chance you have a pretty good grasp on basic computer skills.
A much more overall effective goal is just to get kids to move on to college after high school. Forget about laptops for each kid. That is worthless. You can teach kids just fine in computer labs. Make them do all their written homework on a computer (they can use lab computers if they have to). The main goal should be to get kids to learn the CAREER skills. Or even better, just make them well educated, free thinking individuals and their careers will more or less just fall into place. A smart person would seek out cmputer training if they thought that was holding them back.
A quick check of the dictionary [reference.com] doesn't use the word 'penetration' at all in defining 'rape', instead using more ambiguous term 'sexual intercourse' [reference.com]. In turn, you'll note that most of the subsequent definitions are quite specific in not limiting the term to penile penetration.
The terminology is important. If you go around claiming that online sexual harassment is "rape," few people are going to take you seriously. I'm certainly not. Imagine if someone wrote a blog article claiming that it is murder to destroy an online character (permanently) in a "game" such as 2nd Life. Is it wrong? Yes. Is it murder? Not even close. Am I going to take the blogger seriously? Not likely. Even if there are some important points, I'm lost at very mention of the word "murder." Same with "rape" in this case. Once you use the word rape to describe online sexual harassment, I'm going to tune you out and look for rational people to talk to.
I wonder if he actually believes that people "enjoy" content protection. How could you even say that with a straight face? It would be like a prison warden, after a jail break, saying, "soon the escapees will enjoy protection from the free world once again."
Ugh, no more XML! If I were going implement object passing between commandline programs, I'd use a dynamic scripting language such as Ruby and marshal (dump/load) objects to text and pass them that way. So any program that wanted to support it could link to libruby and use ruby to transform stdin/stdout. The program could automatically detect if it was recieving Ruby objects or just plain text like usual. And a commandline switch would tell it to output ruby objects to stdout. Of course the real problem then becomes getting enough programs to support it!
For example, a version of the 'cut' command that could output an array of strings would be useful. Or xargs that, instead of just dumbly just taking each line and an argument, coudl be passed Arrays or Hashes with more complex parameters for executing programs. Or a find command that could take a hash of paramters from another program (rather than building complex commandline arguments) and would output more detailed information for each found filesystem object in as Ruby arrays. Then again, maybe using Ruby is more complex than necessary. I mean, if the vast majority of data types are just Arrays and Hashes, you could just define a more generic serialization that programs could implement themselves. Though it would still be interesting to pass more complex objects even though I can't think of any use cases off hand.
I don't get it, what good are those projects if all your applications just import/export raw text or binary? How does osh help me manipulate log files, for example, if they all hve different formats?
But at least Unix has cut, awk, and sort; what I haven't seen anyone write about yet is whether Windows Power Shell has anything like those utilities, or the scores of other utilities that make a shell useful. The entire Unix command-line suite, reworked with consistent syntax, would be nice. --
You can get those programs for Windows. That isnt' the issue. The issue is that there is very little on a Windows system that will benefit from them. It is like when I complain to Windows using friends that there is no decent commandline (before PowerShell), they just say "download bash and the cygwin tools." Uh, yeah, ok. Then what? I still have a system that, in a very fundamental way, is not designed to be manipulated that way. Normally you 'cut' some text from one program and pass it onto another program as an argument or something like that... what are you going to pass the results of cut to in Windows?
So I gave PS a try yesterday and my first impression is that it misses the mark of what a commandline is "supposed to" be. It was far too much like using a programming language. It is also very verbose. It helps that 50 or so basic commands have aliases but geez, too much typing (who'd a thought I'd ever been saying that about Windows). Regarding access to the registry as a filesytem.. well, it is STILL cryptic as heck. It is obviously not designed to be interacted with by users OR admins. And this hints at a much more fundamental problem that I think make Windows difficult to manage from a commandline: It just isn't designed to be accessed that way. PS, while clearly having some advantages over regular "dumb" unix scripting, almost seems like too little too late. In the PowerShell I didn't feel like I was really "inside" the system. I was in some programming sandbox. And finally, it feels like, yet again, Microsoft is trying to write a single tool that does everything. I still like the Unix theme (with the exception of Emacs) of having small tools that do one job efficiently and effectively.
Then again, I freely admit that I'm biased. PowerShell has a LOT that is has to overcome I mind before I take it seriously. This isn't an anti-MS thing and it isn't political: I just hate Windows. I hate using it. I hate administering it. I hate the way it is designed. I hate looking at it. I'm just not likely to make a serious effort at learning PowerShell. The only thing that would make me really try to use it is if my employer switched to Windows across the board. And even then, I'd probably quit first.
Oh well, maybe I'll get around to playing with PowerShell some more. Who knows,I might have some kind of epiphany or something. But for now I just say "meh."
From what I understand, powershell takes the shell scripting to a whole new level that no *nix does. For example, you can pass objects between applications and other scripts rather than piping text/raw data between them. I'd actually like to give it try some time. Too bad (yea right!) I don't have many Windows servers to put it to the test on.
I'm sure it depends on a few things such as where they take the wind energy from. Sure, you might slow down the air and create more drag, but I'm sure there is plenty of wind energy generated from cars that wouldn't otherwise reduce drag on the cars (because it is too far away from the cars, for example). It would just bleed off into the environment as waste energy. You'd definitly have to run simulations to get some real numbers, but I'm pretty sure you'd get a net gain in usable energy from the deal.
Hmm, it isn't that I mind the themes Good and Evil being examined in a story or game. I just don't really care for a story that portrays the "evil" side as soulless and devoid of any real purpose other than "evil for the sake of evil." This was a bit of a turn-off with Tolkien.
Oh. My. God. Some people will find ANY excuse to inject their views on Global Warming into a thread. Jesus Christ. It was a fucking joke about plasma helium on the Sun acting as a "greenhouse gas." Laugh or don't laugh, but whatever you do, don't try to make it a debate.
Sure, but after getting the cryptic mec message you can often go into the Console and get teh real error. The Event Viewer in Windows is useless. I can't remember the last tiem I found a helpful and readable "event" in there.
And with a comment like that, I can only assume that you've never read Tolkien and don't really know what you're talking about. Not trying to flame you, it's just honestly the way I see it. I really don't see how anyone could call Tolkien's "good" and "evil" labels "simplistic";
Insofar as it is about Good and Evil, it is rather simplistic... not to mention predictable. I mean, the good guy always wins in the end, right? There's a lot more going on in Tolkien than good vs. evil. And THAT is what is great about Tolkien. The Good vs. Evil theme is more a delivery agent for the other, more interesting, subjects. It gives the whole story a direction.. but it does not the story make.
I find his fantasy world far more rich, engaging and insightful than anything Blizzard could ever come up with.
WEll, it helps that there are specific books behind LotR that provide the richness and story. AFAIK, Blizzard just makes stuff up and the only real background you get is in cut scenes and whatever you happen to come across in the games. That can never compete with a book or even a goood movie for that matter.
But that's the whole point of fantasy: to have things different from the real world. I deal with real people every day that are somewhat good and somewhat evil.
There's different.. and then there's simplistic and predictable (e.g. good guy always overcomes a soulless evil). I think ultimately fantasy should reflect reality in very abstract and subtle ways.
For some examples of stories that go well beyond good and evil, read some Anne Rice novels. She very much gives a "face" to vampires. They're still blood sucking killers, but they're terribly conflicted and they have incredibly rich backgrounds such that you can even identify with them. Traditional fantasy does not allow much empathy with "evil" (with the exception of Smeagol, perhaps).
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I think batteries and their regulating circuits are pretty expensive. I mean, look how little time you get out of a UPS. I've got a big ol' UPS at work powering two racks with two external battery packs and I can only get about an hour out of it. Add to this the fact that Lead/Acid batteries don't like being drained/charged regularly (read: you'll need to replace them regularly), and you've got a very expensive and high maintenance system on your hands.
-matthew
Even with IPv6, I wonder if it will be practical to ditch NAT at home. Assuming (like the TFA does) that people will continue to use firewalls and/or wireless routers, how is one going to route one's subnet to the inside of the firewall? I would guess that most common residential ISPs are NOT goign to be very keen on setting up special routing arangements with you. You'll get your IPv6 subnet bridged across your modem and if you have a firewall, you'll pretty much have to do NAT to traverse the firewall at all. Sure, you'll be able to use one-to-one NAT, but it is NAT all the same and still causes some problems.
-matthew
Perhaps it shouldn't be considered a disease?
-matthew
What would an example of "any other system" be and what are "preauth keys?"
-matthew
I'm looking at the Admin manual and it seems like the only external authentication scheme supported is Active Directory. Looks like it can use OpenLDAP to store information about users, but the authentication itself is AD only. WTF??
o n_guide/5_Zimbra_LDAP.5.1.html#1036410
Can anyone clarify this?
http://www.zimbra.com/docs/ne/latest/administrati
-matthew
I'm going to make a leap here and guess that most open source development does NOT happen on company time unless the company sanctions it... usually for their own purposes. Not that SOME people can't get away with spending hours doing something other than their TPS report cover sheets, but most can't.
Though I have some doubts about this "boredom drives OSS idea." Sure, programmers might be bored if they didn't have some fun/intersting programming to do... but certainly that can't drive them. I mean, you have to really enjoy it to do it. Enjoyment or satisfaction has to be the motivator here. Otherwise you'd have to conclude that the only reason anyone does any non-essential life supporting activity is to avoid boredom.
-matthew
So we're training kids for the lowest end of the office workers... secretaries? Of course it is good to know how to use a computer in a office, but very few careers (and I say career here instead of just "job") actually make it a primary requirement. A college education is so much more important than just computer skills. And lets face it, if you've been through college there is a pretty good chance you have a pretty good grasp on basic computer skills.
A much more overall effective goal is just to get kids to move on to college after high school. Forget about laptops for each kid. That is worthless. You can teach kids just fine in computer labs. Make them do all their written homework on a computer (they can use lab computers if they have to). The main goal should be to get kids to learn the CAREER skills. Or even better, just make them well educated, free thinking individuals and their careers will more or less just fall into place. A smart person would seek out cmputer training if they thought that was holding them back.
-matthew
Heck why not just go all the way an cut them loose?
So without disc encryption, you are forced to watch excrement?
-mtthew
Is that you, Mr. Clinton?
-matthew
The terminology is important. If you go around claiming that online sexual harassment is "rape," few people are going to take you seriously. I'm certainly not. Imagine if someone wrote a blog article claiming that it is murder to destroy an online character (permanently) in a "game" such as 2nd Life. Is it wrong? Yes. Is it murder? Not even close. Am I going to take the blogger seriously? Not likely. Even if there are some important points, I'm lost at very mention of the word "murder." Same with "rape" in this case. Once you use the word rape to describe online sexual harassment, I'm going to tune you out and look for rational people to talk to.
-matthew
Heard of it? I've seen it! And I must say it did look very anti-fascist.
I wonder if he actually believes that people "enjoy" content protection. How could you even say that with a straight face? It would be like a prison warden, after a jail break, saying, "soon the escapees will enjoy protection from the free world once again."
Ugh, no more XML! If I were going implement object passing between commandline programs, I'd use a dynamic scripting language such as Ruby and marshal (dump/load) objects to text and pass them that way. So any program that wanted to support it could link to libruby and use ruby to transform stdin/stdout. The program could automatically detect if it was recieving Ruby objects or just plain text like usual. And a commandline switch would tell it to output ruby objects to stdout. Of course the real problem then becomes getting enough programs to support it!
For example, a version of the 'cut' command that could output an array of strings would be useful. Or xargs that, instead of just dumbly just taking each line and an argument, coudl be passed Arrays or Hashes with more complex parameters for executing programs. Or a find command that could take a hash of paramters from another program (rather than building complex commandline arguments) and would output more detailed information for each found filesystem object in as Ruby arrays.
Then again, maybe using Ruby is more complex than necessary. I mean, if the vast majority of data types are just Arrays and Hashes, you could just define a more generic serialization that programs could implement themselves. Though it would still be interesting to pass more complex objects even though I can't think of any use cases off hand.
-matthew
-matthew
I don't get it, what good are those projects if all your applications just import/export raw text or binary? How does osh help me manipulate log files, for example, if they all hve different formats?
-matthew
You can get those programs for Windows. That isnt' the issue. The issue is that there is very little on a Windows system that will benefit from them. It is like when I complain to Windows using friends that there is no decent commandline (before PowerShell), they just say "download bash and the cygwin tools." Uh, yeah, ok. Then what? I still have a system that, in a very fundamental way, is not designed to be manipulated that way. Normally you 'cut' some text from one program and pass it onto another program as an argument or something like that... what are you going to pass the results of cut to in Windows?
-matthew
So I gave PS a try yesterday and my first impression is that it misses the mark of what a commandline is "supposed to" be. It was far too much like using a programming language. It is also very verbose. It helps that 50 or so basic commands have aliases but geez, too much typing (who'd a thought I'd ever been saying that about Windows). Regarding access to the registry as a filesytem.. well, it is STILL cryptic as heck. It is obviously not designed to be interacted with by users OR admins. And this hints at a much more fundamental problem that I think make Windows difficult to manage from a commandline: It just isn't designed to be accessed that way. PS, while clearly having some advantages over regular "dumb" unix scripting, almost seems like too little too late. In the PowerShell I didn't feel like I was really "inside" the system. I was in some programming sandbox. And finally, it feels like, yet again, Microsoft is trying to write a single tool that does everything. I still like the Unix theme (with the exception of Emacs) of having small tools that do one job efficiently and effectively.
Then again, I freely admit that I'm biased. PowerShell has a LOT that is has to overcome I mind before I take it seriously. This isn't an anti-MS thing and it isn't political: I just hate Windows. I hate using it. I hate administering it. I hate the way it is designed. I hate looking at it. I'm just not likely to make a serious effort at learning PowerShell. The only thing that would make me really try to use it is if my employer switched to Windows across the board. And even then, I'd probably quit first.
Oh well, maybe I'll get around to playing with PowerShell some more. Who knows,I might have some kind of epiphany or something. But for now I just say "meh."
-matthew
From what I understand, powershell takes the shell scripting to a whole new level that no *nix does. For example, you can pass objects between applications and other scripts rather than piping text/raw data between them. I'd actually like to give it try some time. Too bad (yea right!) I don't have many Windows servers to put it to the test on.
-matthew
I'm sure it depends on a few things such as where they take the wind energy from. Sure, you might slow down the air and create more drag, but I'm sure there is plenty of wind energy generated from cars that wouldn't otherwise reduce drag on the cars (because it is too far away from the cars, for example). It would just bleed off into the environment as waste energy. You'd definitly have to run simulations to get some real numbers, but I'm pretty sure you'd get a net gain in usable energy from the deal.
-matthew
Hmm, it isn't that I mind the themes Good and Evil being examined in a story or game. I just don't really care for a story that portrays the "evil" side as soulless and devoid of any real purpose other than "evil for the sake of evil." This was a bit of a turn-off with Tolkien.
Windows has some limited POSIX support. Lack of fork() is one of the limitations.
Oh. My. God. Some people will find ANY excuse to inject their views on Global Warming into a thread. Jesus Christ. It was a fucking joke about plasma helium on the Sun acting as a "greenhouse gas." Laugh or don't laugh, but whatever you do, don't try to make it a debate.
Sure, but after getting the cryptic mec message you can often go into the Console and get teh real error. The Event Viewer in Windows is useless. I can't remember the last tiem I found a helpful and readable "event" in there.
-matthew
Probably the fact that Windows doesn't have a fork() system call.
-matthew
Insofar as it is about Good and Evil, it is rather simplistic... not to mention predictable. I mean, the good guy always wins in the end, right? There's a lot more going on in Tolkien than good vs. evil. And THAT is what is great about Tolkien. The Good vs. Evil theme is more a delivery agent for the other, more interesting, subjects. It gives the whole story a direction.. but it does not the story make.
WEll, it helps that there are specific books behind LotR that provide the richness and story. AFAIK, Blizzard just makes stuff up and the only real background you get is in cut scenes and whatever you happen to come across in the games. That can never compete with a book or even a goood movie for that matter.
There's different.. and then there's simplistic and predictable (e.g. good guy always overcomes a soulless evil). I think ultimately fantasy should reflect reality in very abstract and subtle ways.
For some examples of stories that go well beyond good and evil, read some Anne Rice novels. She very much gives a "face" to vampires. They're still blood sucking killers, but they're terribly conflicted and they have incredibly rich backgrounds such that you can even identify with them. Traditional fantasy does not allow much empathy with "evil" (with the exception of Smeagol, perhaps).
-matthew