Slashdot was only ever 25% about the news
on
Introducing SlashBI
·
· Score: 2
First off, the new site looks terrible and I'm not likely to read it. When I first browsed over that way I thought it was April 1st and they had sent me to The Onion or CNN; the layout looked that similar.
That being said there are a lot of comments on here about how Slashdot has declined, and I disagree. There _are_ more stories each day which makes the geeky news seem less prominent, but you're always free to skip the articles you don't like! But the real reason I still read/. is because of the comments. The comments have _always_ been the greatest strength of the site. I often learn far more and see more alternate viewpoints about the topic being discussed in the comments than are covered in any article. As long as I keep getting that, I'll still be a/. reader.
Finally, the new site is obviously aimed at non-geeks. Look at the new site as a possible new interface to educate people who aren't geeky but would like to be. SlashBi: The gateway drug to the tech world.
tl;dr comments are Slashdot's real content, the news stories just point the way. Also the new site is ugly and probably not aimed at us.
Very carefully, though, they still keep your xbox live account active and charge you the subscription fee.
For those who want to cancel, check out http://www.xbox.com/accounts, change your subscription by clicking the link after subscription renewal (the link says "ON"). Then continue to click through the 5 or 6 pages detailing all the reasons you should stay. Click "Next" through all of that, and you're set.
Yeah, I'm surprised the summary didn't include the reasons for the decision.
From the article:
In Texas, the problem lies in getting power from the proposed site in the Panhandle to a distribution system, Pickens said in an interview with The Associated Press in New York. He'd hoped to build his own transmission lines but he said there were technical problems.
Locking your blackberry doesn't prevent you from accidentally making emergency calls, especially if you don't use the holster.
The way to avoid this is to press and hold the mute button on the top of the blackberry. It will put the bb into standby mode, where it will still receive emails, SMS's, and phone calls like normal, but with better keyboard/input locking.
vim is one of those tools that does way more than you'd ever reasonably expect. It's crazy the stuff that's out there. Here are some useful ones I can't live without.
Tabbed Editing
You can edit multiple files in tabs with vim. 'vim -p file1 file2' will open the listed files in tabs. While in vim ":tabe filename" will open the given file in a new tab. I have [ and ] mapped to:tabp (previous) and:tabn (next) for moving around.
Folds
I like folds for cleaning up my source code visually. Just add a comment that has {{{ in it at the beginning of the block and another comment with }}} in it at the end of the block. Press zc somewhere inside the block and presto! You've got a line instead of blocks of code. You can put a summary of the block of code in the fold marker comment at the beginning of the block which will show up when folded.
Word completion Pressing control-n while typing will have vim pop up a list of options. For common languages it's smart enough to offer suggestions for function and variable names, as well as library functions.
Printing a section of code I always work with line numbers enabled (:set no), because there are a lot of line oriented commands. e.g.:10,100!sort (sort lines 10 through 100). One of these commands is:10,100hardcopy, which will print just those lines.:hardcopy by itself will print the entire file.
So many more. You can have integrated spell checking (:set spelllang=en_us ,:set spell , z= will offer suggestions for misspelled words). Bookmarks,:g//,:v//, and that's just the core. There are hundreds of great plugins (and themes) out there.
It's done, move on already. You can discuss whether it was worth it or not, but it won't prove anything beyond the fact that people love to argue about things over which they have little control. We're not going to move back to the old date.
This discussion would've been a lot more productive back when the bill was passed, instead of after the change.
I guess I could see this. You could be learning how to target the turret (although there's a separate targetting skill). Maybe it's analogous to learning to use a gun... I could learn how to clean the gun, take it apart, put it together, maybe even throw it at people. But unless I knew how to use the gun in conjunction with bullets I don't think that anyone would say I know how to "use" a gun.
This is probably semantic squabling. I would've been happy if they had just given me basic rocket use along with the skill to use the turret. I could see a training path to use more advanced rocket technology. Telling me I have the skill to use a turret when I can't, in any conventional meaning of the word "use", doesn't make for a fun, satisfying game.
Why is it that even after I complete the training on using a rocket launcher, I have to train in rockets? What was I doing all that time I was playing with the launcher?!?
Sounds like Elebits is a rehash of Katamari. Progression in the game is limited to the ability to affect larger objects, but the gameplay is essentially the same throughout. Multiplayer is the same thing, just competing to see who reaches the goal first.
"Net Neutrality" is an attempt by the Telcos to shift their problem to the backs of content providers and end users, leaving nothing but profit for them.
Let's take an example. Verizon and Google seem to be popular. Let's say Google is hosted with AT&T. So now we have Verizon's customers using their bandwidth to access Google on AT&T's network, and not getting any money for it. This in and of itself is false. The customers pay for the access, and if they didn't use it for Google then they would use it elsewhere. Since AT&T is the funnel for the traffic from all other ISPs, they charge Google a large amount. It seems like everyone got their money -- AT&T from Google and Verizon from its customers.
If there were an imbalance it would be up to the ISPs to negotiate between themselves. The content providers pay their bandwidth fees to provide the content and the users pay their fees to get access to everything any content provider (from blogs to Amazon) wish to offer.
I had trouble coming up with an imbalance in this equation, but let's say that somehow the user's bandwidth usage to access Google's content drives Verizon's finances into the red, while AT&T is making a mint. In this case I would say that Verizon needs to negotiate some sort of equalization payment from AT&T that would sound like Verizon to AT&T: "Pay me some relief for all this traffic or I will block access to your network from mine".
The advantage here is that the ISP's problem remains their problem, and doesn't move to any scapegoat(s). There is no tiered network, since the costs would be balanced on a monthly/quaterly/yearly/what-have-you basis.
Welcome to capitalism. The government doesn't have the right to tell companies how to practice their business. The argument dismissing common carrier status went out the window when the government decided they had the right to phone tap anyone without any authorisation.
Common Carriers were supposed to be content agnostic -- meaning that all content (phone calls, faxes, anything passing over the phone line) would be treated equally and the contents would not be examined by the carrier. To deviate from this standard would mean that the carriers were responsible for the content carried by their network, including incriminating evidence that would make the carrier legally liable. The common carrier status protects the carrier as much as the individual subscribers.
But now with the willy-nilly wire taps, and complete lack of accountability in the government, carriers now believe they can do what they like with traffic on their networks and still not be accountable. And who would blame them for believing this?
So now you have carriers who feel like they control not only the networks but also the content on those networks in a responsibility free environment, and they will do what all corporations do: grab for da money. Why not charge extra for "premium" (read: basic utilities of the net) services? Sure, it's immoral. But it's also a capitalist society. We all know that the people who can afford broadband can also afford an extra 10$/mo to access stuff they used to access for free. And they're only there to feed the corporate beast anyway.
I can't fault these people for wanting to make more money. But if they think they can have their cake and eat it too, then they will be facing lots of lawsuits from individuals who's children have been exposed to goatse.cx because those same carriers (now content providers) didn't filter their content. The circle of life continues.
I'd think there comes a point where code separation and performance have to be balanced. Performance would be great, but I don't see people rushing to make the internet one big token-ring network. Routers and firewalls provide separation and security with minimal impact to performance.
So the code is unbreakable. It's also highly susceptible to DOS attacks. As soon as someone attempts to view the photons, they disrupt the key, which will disrupt the transmission of information. In the case of surveillance, I would think that this is as least as useful as being able to watch the stream itself.
These claims (server proliferation, cpu/resource under utilisation) have been made before with utility computing. A company called Ejascent (later purchased by Veritas) offered utility computing software that very closely resembled Solaris 10's containers. And now, of course, Solaris 10 is offering containers natively. So the technology to consolidate servers has already been around for quite a while.
I realise that it's not quite the same -- virtualisation offers multiple operating systems on a single system while containers only offer multiple instances of a single OS. Virtualisation seems quite attrative. But I didn't ever see utility computing take off, or even the technology used to consolidate servers.
Virtualisation is a fun toy and may be a useful tool if you're a multi-platform developer. But it does not seem to be a serious enterprise solution for the datacenter. And talk about a patching nightmare! A virtualisation solution running on Windows with, say 5 instances of Windows. That's 6 copies of patches to apply, resulting in at least 11 reboots (1 for each instance and 1+5 for the primary OS).
The cons, administrative overhead and the resource overhead of running multiple images don't really add up to a significant cost savings.
So it's started. Go read Oryx and Crake. Bio-engineered piggins that grow food on their backs, and the eventual downfall of humanity caused by bio-engineering. I'm sure other people have written about it, but this wasn't a bad book.
You'd think this type of thing would be prime for public key encryption technology. Each person would be issued with a private key and have their public key registered within a lender's database. All information coming from a person for financial transactions would be signed by their key and verified against their registered public key. As an example, let's take a simple credit transaction.
Store charges you 12.50$ with an itemized bill.
You put in your credit device, which works as a black box. It takes the bill and encodes it with your private key and returns the result to the cash register.
The register transmits the original bill, encoded with their private key, to the bank along with your version. The two versions are decoded and checked against their respective public keys. If they match, then great, the transaction goes through.
If either version does not match then no game.
This example shows proof of identity as well as security. In the event that you lose your credit card then you call up and they issue you a new one with a new public/private key pair.
This also does away with a single source authentication, since the identification method would be carried with the token, and so easily replaceable.
For online or remote transactions, a store could encode their public key with their private key, which would be encoded by your private key (e.g. (your private key ( their private key ( their public key ) ) ) ). This is sent to the authenticating agent and if it unravels properly, then the authentication is successful.
This is another case of a word that was used to describe and act (having a sexual relationship with someone of the same gender) changing to be used to describe an identity (a lifestyle). What is laughable about it in this case is that people are apparently so hung up on their sexuality that they can't play an online game without their sexual orientation becoming an issue. I mean, I realise it's difficult not to identify your orientation when you're running around Hillsbrad killing bears, but surely you would be able to restrain your proclimations for the first 25 levels or so.
The bad part of this trend (act -> identity) is that gay people are themselves victims of their own propaganda. The Onion got it spot on with their satirical article. The gay community is so anxious to be given equal rights that they're actively labelling themselves. They are no longer regular people who have sex with same-gender partners. They are people who have sex with same-gender partners who also happen to have jobs, etc.
Just as I don't walk around telling everyong I prefer brunettes to blondes, I don't walk around telling people I prefer women to men for sexual relationships. It's a private part of my life. While important to me and whomever I am going out with at the time, it is no-one else's business. I also have a job, I go to the gym, and have a number of hobbies. There is plenty of other, non-intensely personal subjects on which to discourse.
Why people can't keep their sexual lives to themselves is a bit of a mystery. You wouldn't think it would be that hard . . .
I read your article, and I think you're already starting off from a flawed point of view. Your mother couldn't care less about the history of the internet. She really couldn't. There are a whole lot of people out there who don't want to know the why or the how. I know it's hard to understand that what you hold near and dear to your heart isn't really of interest to other people, but it's a fact.
Don't try to teach someone how computers work by telling them about CPU utilisation, memory utilisation, memory leaks, and good programming techniques. That's for IT people to know and care about. Focus on easy to understand and largely correct analogies to things that they would understand ("Your computer as a human body" type of thing).
At the end of the day, most people will want to use their computers rather than tinker with them. There are plenty of resources out there for people to learn basic usage, and if they haven't yet, they probably don't care enough to do it now. So you, as an IT person, should work on making programs easier to use, more secure, and less bloated. You will be doing a much better service to people everywhere than writing a book no-one will read.
So I guess I'm saying, don't write the book. Some people will always be users, just as some people will always be creators and tinkerers. Just as I don't expect an artist to try to teach me the reason why pink and red don't go together (I just accept that as fact), I don't expect everyone to know how to write their own compilers. I can enjoy art just as that artist can enjoy surfing the web, and we both leave it at that.
Is it just me, or should the government be focusing on monitoring external threats? This increasing focus on "policing" its own citizens seems:
a) Counter intuitive - These initiatives, especially Homeland Security, stemmed from the September 11th tragedies. None of these were perpetrated by US citizens.
b) Counter productive - People distrust authority. Nobody likes being helpless (which you are when dealing with authority figures), and authority figures have been proven to be corrupt in many occasions. And let's face it, the rampant incestuous relationship between the Bush administration and large corporate concerns makes the information mined from these "infotaps" as likely to be used for marketing and political reasons as for any kind of preventative defense. By relaxing the requirements to get an infotap, you are completely undermining the faith that people have in their governments. And before you get into the argument along the lines of "nothing wrong, nothing to hide", ask yourself if you'd be comfortable with your neighbor finding out your sexual preferences, fetishes, your embarrassing moments, or when you've just gone through a terrible break up with your significant other.
[rant] More and more the federal government is adopting an adversarial role when it comes to its citizens. Control is valued over freedom, economies are valued over civil liberties, and international relationships are being sacrificed for maintaining private interests. [/rant]
Anyway, to sum up, why don't you spend your budget and monitor people who have beefs with the US instead of the people who pay their taxes. Or better yet, FIX YOUR FOREIGN POLICY. These people didn't choose the US at random to attack. Figure out what the fuck you're doing wrong when you stomp (not step) on other people's toes, and fix it. If you have to persecute someone, try not to make it people that voted you into power and pay your salaries.
PVP ranks and titles were introduced late into the actual game. If the CmdrTaco character was created before the PVP system was introduced, then he shouldn't have his name changed.
Adding new elements to the game, then taking a naming bat to all players that conflict with the new elements seems to be a good way to piss people off. Revisionist history as it were (or retcon [wikipedia]).
How inefficient is horribly inefficient? The gas motors that powers all our vehicles is only 30% efficient, but that's when it's at its peak output (pedal to the metal). Most of the time it averages 17% efficient (17% of the energy generated actually makes it to the wheels).
I don't know if this is the case on all Windows flavours, but it works on 2000 and XP.
Windows seems to consider all IPs in the 127.0.0.0/8 network as loop backs. You can try it for yourself and see. I can successfully ping 127.3.15.2 on my machine, and any IP in that network, and it hits the loopback.
Just something to consider in case there are script kiddies out there who have heard of 127.0.0.1.
If we're going to lay blame, let's make sure we're spreading it evenly. A lot of contracts, and especially government ones, suffer from extreme scope creep. I have seen projects that started out with a 20 page description grow to over 150 pages by the end of the project.
EDS and other large IT vendors try their best to discourage scope creep by making changes-after-the-fact billable for time and materials, instead of a negotiated cost. This makes the project go over budget. If the clients knew what they wanted at the begining, instead of wasting time and money doing engineering on the fly during the project, then the costs wouldn't be so high.
Don't be so quick to slag EDS about the outage either. There are lots of factors out there that could have contributed. I have worked on projects where the clients say the servers are mission critical, yet can't be bothered to shell out money to upgrade from ultra-1 and ultra-5s, let alone pay for an HA solution. The technical people keep providing the justification and making the requests, but it's the project managers and accountants that really determine what kind of solution is feasible.
Taxation is only rational when the government actually provides a service. I realise that at the end of the posting, it said that revenues would go towards increasing bandwidth (like anybody believes that), but right now there are thousands of kilometers of dark fibre -- bandwidth ain't the issue.
To put forward idea that we pay taxes on e-mail is to display your ignorance of how e-mail works. If I set up an e-mail server at my own expense, and send an e-mail through it to another server, set up at the recipients own expense, I fail to see where the government's services come into it. After running a few traceroutes to my most common e-mail destinations, all the hops belonged to corporations, not the government.
And those are just the techno-political reasons why taxes don't make sense. What about internation e-mails. I live/work in Canada, but a lot of our business is international (States, UK, etc).
I also don't think that the spam-killers-for-hire is a good idea either (difficult to regulate, and a good chance of a lot of innocent bystanders getting hurt.)
I personally like signed e-mails, and much stiffer penalties for spammers. This may seem like a soft solution, but laws end up being the last recourse. As many on Slashdot jump at pointing out, technological barriers are easily overcome, especially by a large group of determined people.
Slashdot Mirror
First off, the new site looks terrible and I'm not likely to read it. When I first browsed over that way I thought it was April 1st and they had sent me to The Onion or CNN; the layout looked that similar.
That being said there are a lot of comments on here about how Slashdot has declined, and I disagree. There _are_ more stories each day which makes the geeky news seem less prominent, but you're always free to skip the articles you don't like! But the real reason I still read /. is because of the comments. The comments have _always_ been the greatest strength of the site. I often learn far more and see more alternate viewpoints about the topic being discussed in the comments than are covered in any article. As long as I keep getting that, I'll still be a /. reader.
Finally, the new site is obviously aimed at non-geeks. Look at the new site as a possible new interface to educate people who aren't geeky but would like to be. SlashBi: The gateway drug to the tech world.
tl;dr comments are Slashdot's real content, the news stories just point the way. Also the new site is ugly and probably not aimed at us.
Very carefully, though, they still keep your xbox live account active and charge you the subscription fee.
For those who want to cancel, check out http://www.xbox.com/accounts, change your subscription by clicking the link after subscription renewal (the link says "ON"). Then continue to click through the 5 or 6 pages detailing all the reasons you should stay. Click "Next" through all of that, and you're set.
Yeah, I'm surprised the summary didn't include the reasons for the decision.
From the article:
In Texas, the problem lies in getting power from the proposed site in the Panhandle to a distribution system, Pickens said in an interview with The Associated Press in New York. He'd hoped to build his own transmission lines but he said there were technical problems.
Locking your blackberry doesn't prevent you from accidentally making emergency calls, especially if you don't use the holster.
The way to avoid this is to press and hold the mute button on the top of the blackberry. It will put the bb into standby mode, where it will still receive emails, SMS's, and phone calls like normal, but with better keyboard/input locking.
vim is one of those tools that does way more than you'd ever reasonably expect. It's crazy the stuff that's out there. Here are some useful ones I can't live without.
Tabbed Editing
You can edit multiple files in tabs with vim. 'vim -p file1 file2' will open the listed files in tabs. While in vim ":tabe filename" will open the given file in a new tab. I have [ and ] mapped to :tabp (previous) and :tabn (next) for moving around.
Folds
I like folds for cleaning up my source code visually. Just add a comment that has {{{ in it at the beginning of the block and another comment with }}} in it at the end of the block. Press zc somewhere inside the block and presto! You've got a line instead of blocks of code. You can put a summary of the block of code in the fold marker comment at the beginning of the block which will show up when folded.
Word completion
Pressing control-n while typing will have vim pop up a list of options. For common languages it's smart enough to offer suggestions for function and variable names, as well as library functions.
Printing a section of code :10,100!sort (sort lines 10 through 100). One of these commands is :10,100hardcopy, which will print just those lines. :hardcopy by itself will print the entire file.
I always work with line numbers enabled (:set no), because there are a lot of line oriented commands. e.g.
So many more. You can have integrated spell checking (:set spelllang=en_us , :set spell , z= will offer suggestions for misspelled words). Bookmarks, :g//, :v//, and that's just the core. There are hundreds of great plugins (and themes) out there.
Every once in a while, I wish that the mod system wasn't capped at 5 points. This is one of those times. +1 insightful to parent!
It's done, move on already. You can discuss whether it was worth it or not, but it won't prove anything beyond the fact that people love to argue about things over which they have little control. We're not going to move back to the old date.
This discussion would've been a lot more productive back when the bill was passed, instead of after the change.
This is probably semantic squabling. I would've been happy if they had just given me basic rocket use along with the skill to use the turret. I could see a training path to use more advanced rocket technology. Telling me I have the skill to use a turret when I can't, in any conventional meaning of the word "use", doesn't make for a fun, satisfying game.
Why is it that even after I complete the training on using a rocket launcher, I have to train in rockets? What was I doing all that time I was playing with the launcher?!?
Sounds like Elebits is a rehash of Katamari. Progression in the game is limited to the ability to affect larger objects, but the gameplay is essentially the same throughout. Multiplayer is the same thing, just competing to see who reaches the goal first.
"Net Neutrality" is an attempt by the Telcos to shift their problem to the backs of content providers and end users, leaving nothing but profit for them.
Let's take an example. Verizon and Google seem to be popular. Let's say Google is hosted with AT&T. So now we have Verizon's customers using their bandwidth to access Google on AT&T's network, and not getting any money for it. This in and of itself is false. The customers pay for the access, and if they didn't use it for Google then they would use it elsewhere. Since AT&T is the funnel for the traffic from all other ISPs, they charge Google a large amount. It seems like everyone got their money -- AT&T from Google and Verizon from its customers.
If there were an imbalance it would be up to the ISPs to negotiate between themselves. The content providers pay their bandwidth fees to provide the content and the users pay their fees to get access to everything any content provider (from blogs to Amazon) wish to offer.
I had trouble coming up with an imbalance in this equation, but let's say that somehow the user's bandwidth usage to access Google's content drives Verizon's finances into the red, while AT&T is making a mint. In this case I would say that Verizon needs to negotiate some sort of equalization payment from AT&T that would sound like Verizon to AT&T: "Pay me some relief for all this traffic or I will block access to your network from mine".
The advantage here is that the ISP's problem remains their problem, and doesn't move to any scapegoat(s). There is no tiered network, since the costs would be balanced on a monthly/quaterly/yearly/what-have-you basis.
Welcome to capitalism. The government doesn't have the right to tell companies how to practice their business. The argument dismissing common carrier status went out the window when the government decided they had the right to phone tap anyone without any authorisation.
Common Carriers were supposed to be content agnostic -- meaning that all content (phone calls, faxes, anything passing over the phone line) would be treated equally and the contents would not be examined by the carrier. To deviate from this standard would mean that the carriers were responsible for the content carried by their network, including incriminating evidence that would make the carrier legally liable. The common carrier status protects the carrier as much as the individual subscribers.
But now with the willy-nilly wire taps, and complete lack of accountability in the government, carriers now believe they can do what they like with traffic on their networks and still not be accountable. And who would blame them for believing this?
So now you have carriers who feel like they control not only the networks but also the content on those networks in a responsibility free environment, and they will do what all corporations do: grab for da money. Why not charge extra for "premium" (read: basic utilities of the net) services? Sure, it's immoral. But it's also a capitalist society. We all know that the people who can afford broadband can also afford an extra 10$/mo to access stuff they used to access for free. And they're only there to feed the corporate beast anyway.
I can't fault these people for wanting to make more money. But if they think they can have their cake and eat it too, then they will be facing lots of lawsuits from individuals who's children have been exposed to goatse.cx because those same carriers (now content providers) didn't filter their content. The circle of life continues.
I'd think there comes a point where code separation and performance have to be balanced. Performance would be great, but I don't see people rushing to make the internet one big token-ring network. Routers and firewalls provide separation and security with minimal impact to performance.
So the code is unbreakable. It's also highly susceptible to DOS attacks. As soon as someone attempts to view the photons, they disrupt the key, which will disrupt the transmission of information. In the case of surveillance, I would think that this is as least as useful as being able to watch the stream itself.
These claims (server proliferation, cpu/resource under utilisation) have been made before with utility computing. A company called Ejascent (later purchased by Veritas) offered utility computing software that very closely resembled Solaris 10's containers. And now, of course, Solaris 10 is offering containers natively. So the technology to consolidate servers has already been around for quite a while.
I realise that it's not quite the same -- virtualisation offers multiple operating systems on a single system while containers only offer multiple instances of a single OS. Virtualisation seems quite attrative. But I didn't ever see utility computing take off, or even the technology used to consolidate servers.
Virtualisation is a fun toy and may be a useful tool if you're a multi-platform developer. But it does not seem to be a serious enterprise solution for the datacenter. And talk about a patching nightmare! A virtualisation solution running on Windows with, say 5 instances of Windows. That's 6 copies of patches to apply, resulting in at least 11 reboots (1 for each instance and 1+5 for the primary OS).
The cons, administrative overhead and the resource overhead of running multiple images don't really add up to a significant cost savings.
So it's started. Go read Oryx and Crake. Bio-engineered piggins that grow food on their backs, and the eventual downfall of humanity caused by bio-engineering. I'm sure other people have written about it, but this wasn't a bad book.
You'd think this type of thing would be prime for public key encryption technology. Each person would be issued with a private key and have their public key registered within a lender's database. All information coming from a person for financial transactions would be signed by their key and verified against their registered public key. As an example, let's take a simple credit transaction.
This example shows proof of identity as well as security. In the event that you lose your credit card then you call up and they issue you a new one with a new public/private key pair.
This also does away with a single source authentication, since the identification method would be carried with the token, and so easily replaceable.
For online or remote transactions, a store could encode their public key with their private key, which would be encoded by your private key (e.g. (your private key ( their private key ( their public key ) ) ) ). This is sent to the authenticating agent and if it unravels properly, then the authentication is successful.
The bad part of this trend (act -> identity) is that gay people are themselves victims of their own propaganda. The Onion got it spot on with their satirical article. The gay community is so anxious to be given equal rights that they're actively labelling themselves. They are no longer regular people who have sex with same-gender partners. They are people who have sex with same-gender partners who also happen to have jobs, etc.
Just as I don't walk around telling everyong I prefer brunettes to blondes, I don't walk around telling people I prefer women to men for sexual relationships. It's a private part of my life. While important to me and whomever I am going out with at the time, it is no-one else's business. I also have a job, I go to the gym, and have a number of hobbies. There is plenty of other, non-intensely personal subjects on which to discourse.
Why people can't keep their sexual lives to themselves is a bit of a mystery. You wouldn't think it would be that hard . . .
Don't try to teach someone how computers work by telling them about CPU utilisation, memory utilisation, memory leaks, and good programming techniques. That's for IT people to know and care about. Focus on easy to understand and largely correct analogies to things that they would understand ("Your computer as a human body" type of thing).
At the end of the day, most people will want to use their computers rather than tinker with them. There are plenty of resources out there for people to learn basic usage, and if they haven't yet, they probably don't care enough to do it now. So you, as an IT person, should work on making programs easier to use, more secure, and less bloated. You will be doing a much better service to people everywhere than writing a book no-one will read.
So I guess I'm saying, don't write the book. Some people will always be users, just as some people will always be creators and tinkerers. Just as I don't expect an artist to try to teach me the reason why pink and red don't go together (I just accept that as fact), I don't expect everyone to know how to write their own compilers. I can enjoy art just as that artist can enjoy surfing the web, and we both leave it at that.
Is it just me, or should the government be focusing on monitoring external threats? This increasing focus on "policing" its own citizens seems:
a) Counter intuitive - These initiatives, especially Homeland Security, stemmed from the September 11th tragedies. None of these were perpetrated by US citizens.
b) Counter productive - People distrust authority. Nobody likes being helpless (which you are when dealing with authority figures), and authority figures have been proven to be corrupt in many occasions. And let's face it, the rampant incestuous relationship between the Bush administration and large corporate concerns makes the information mined from these "infotaps" as likely to be used for marketing and political reasons as for any kind of preventative defense. By relaxing the requirements to get an infotap, you are completely undermining the faith that people have in their governments. And before you get into the argument along the lines of "nothing wrong, nothing to hide", ask yourself if you'd be comfortable with your neighbor finding out your sexual preferences, fetishes, your embarrassing moments, or when you've just gone through a terrible break up with your significant other.
[rant]
More and more the federal government is adopting an adversarial role when it comes to its citizens. Control is valued over freedom, economies are valued over civil liberties, and international relationships are being sacrificed for maintaining private interests.
[/rant]
Anyway, to sum up, why don't you spend your budget and monitor people who have beefs with the US instead of the people who pay their taxes. Or better yet, FIX YOUR FOREIGN POLICY. These people didn't choose the US at random to attack. Figure out what the fuck you're doing wrong when you stomp (not step) on other people's toes, and fix it. If you have to persecute someone, try not to make it people that voted you into power and pay your salaries.
Adding new elements to the game, then taking a naming bat to all players that conflict with the new elements seems to be a good way to piss people off. Revisionist history as it were (or retcon [wikipedia]).
How inefficient is horribly inefficient? The gas motors that powers all our vehicles is only 30% efficient, but that's when it's at its peak output (pedal to the metal). Most of the time it averages 17% efficient (17% of the energy generated actually makes it to the wheels).
Windows seems to consider all IPs in the 127.0.0.0/8 network as loop backs. You can try it for yourself and see. I can successfully ping 127.3.15.2 on my machine, and any IP in that network, and it hits the loopback.
Just something to consider in case there are script kiddies out there who have heard of 127.0.0.1.
If we're going to lay blame, let's make sure we're spreading it evenly. A lot of contracts, and especially government ones, suffer from extreme scope creep. I have seen projects that started out with a 20 page description grow to over 150 pages by the end of the project.
EDS and other large IT vendors try their best to discourage scope creep by making changes-after-the-fact billable for time and materials, instead of a negotiated cost. This makes the project go over budget. If the clients knew what they wanted at the begining, instead of wasting time and money doing engineering on the fly during the project, then the costs wouldn't be so high.
Don't be so quick to slag EDS about the outage either. There are lots of factors out there that could have contributed. I have worked on projects where the clients say the servers are mission critical, yet can't be bothered to shell out money to upgrade from ultra-1 and ultra-5s, let alone pay for an HA solution. The technical people keep providing the justification and making the requests, but it's the project managers and accountants that really determine what kind of solution is feasible.
Taxation is only rational when the government actually provides a service. I realise that at the end of the posting, it said that revenues would go towards increasing bandwidth (like anybody believes that), but right now there are thousands of kilometers of dark fibre -- bandwidth ain't the issue.
To put forward idea that we pay taxes on e-mail is to display your ignorance of how e-mail works. If I set up an e-mail server at my own expense, and send an e-mail through it to another server, set up at the recipients own expense, I fail to see where the government's services come into it. After running a few traceroutes to my most common e-mail destinations, all the hops belonged to corporations, not the government.
And those are just the techno-political reasons why taxes don't make sense. What about internation e-mails. I live/work in Canada, but a lot of our business is international (States, UK, etc).
I also don't think that the spam-killers-for-hire is a good idea either (difficult to regulate, and a good chance of a lot of innocent bystanders getting hurt.)
I personally like signed e-mails, and much stiffer penalties for spammers. This may seem like a soft solution, but laws end up being the last recourse. As many on Slashdot jump at pointing out, technological barriers are easily overcome, especially by a large group of determined people.