because management is incompetent or lazy and thus leave code reviews and design meetings in a dusty book that could be called "good practices that most don't do".
You've mistaken laziness and incompetence for worship of the good ol' yankee buck and beating your competition to market. Management is impatient and short sighted because if they don't get their product out faster or cheaper or better (choose any two) then they're all out of a job, and by extention, so are you. Once their future (and yours) is secure, then they can actually *think* about thinking about the long term. For the most part, especially initially, their primary concern is making sure everyone has a paycheque. If you keep this simple concept in mind, a lot of management decisions suddenly become much easier to understand.
The trick of course, is to treat input from other programs and other APIs as if it were input from users, in no small part because it just might BE input from users. How does your server determine that its input is indeed coming from another program, and for that matter, that program is perfect in its implementation?
This is how a lot of buffer overrun vulnerabilities get coded into servers. Basically, the coder only tests it with a program because it's faster that way. And then said coder is programming to the test and not to the real world.
Because a) when ISP's first started selling broadband, they never figured that anyone not running a server could possibly use more than a gig a month.
b) Before broadband, they were tracking hours spent on the net. Broadband makes that unnecessary, thus not much point to bill for it.
c) Customers aren't even interested until it costs less than $50 a month. They would much prefer to pay $25 a month for totally unlimited service, and will complain endlessly if they don't get that.
d) At the super low price of $4 a gig, the upper tier would probably give the customer about 16 gigs a month for about $80. See point c). Also keep in mind that the bandwidth hogs typically use five to ten times that much bandwidth on average. They want more and will complain endlessly (see/.) if they don't get it. And that's all if e) ever takes effect. Also keep in mind that customers are now used to paying $35 a month (at most) for broadband.
e) Oops! $ISP has no way to bill bandwidth in a retail sort of way! They'd better make one!
f) Double oops! $ISP2 will immediately get 20% of $ISP's customers if they start doing e). And they're both fighting for dominant market share. The shareholders would never allow it.
When it comes to broadband, ISPs are stuck between a rock and a hard place that's been placed in a steel box two sizes too small. If you want to know why so many broadband providers recently went out of business and why so many will continue to do so, that's why.
In fact, I prefer they do when necessary, otherwise everybody ends up heavily subsidising a very small group of people.
Actually, it's a lot worse than that. It's more like the investors end up heavily subsidizing a very small group of people, because ISPs that provide "unlimited" bandwidth tend to do so at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars a year. If they don't fix this leak, then noone gets broadband because the company goes out of business.
Think of it this way: you could run an FTP or leech DCC bot 24/7 at a maximum upload speed of 640Kbps. That's 6.75 GB a day and 202 GB a month. If bandwidth is insanely cheap at only $4 a gig retail, then that amounts to an $808 bandwidth bill, and you haven't even touched on downloads. Subtract the $34.95 the customer actually pays, and you're losing $773. Per month. Multiply by 1,000 for the 1% of the customers that are using bandwidth like this at a large DSL or cable provider.
Suddenly you're thinking "wow, ISPs are getting bent over the barrel." It gets better. Between 10 and 20% of broadband customers use more than 20 gigs of bandwidth a month. If you figure that they have to be using less than 8.75 to even break even just in terms of bandwidth, then they're paying twice as much in bandwidth costs as they're getting back in service charges. Oh, and by the way, that doesn't even touch the normal overhead costs like paying for systems administration or even customer service.
I heard from my boss that in 2001, Telus figured that the cost of providing ADSL connections to their residential customers averaged to $55 a month each. Unfortunately, they were selling it at $39.95 at most (so they could compete with Shaw Cable), and they had somewhere around 50,000 residential ADSL customers. Most ISPs are competing like this - bleeding money to gain market share, and the one that dies last gets to raise rates by 3 times (at least in theory).
The other 99% of the people using way too much bandwidth are violating copyrights left right and center. Or, in other words, for totally illegitimate reasons; mostly warez, MP3s and porn, with the very occasional ripped Babylon 5 episode.
I'd have to admit that I'm not innocent of doing this, but amazingly, I can still stay within the monthly 4 GB limit my provider sets while still getting a goodly amount of warez, mp3s and porn; I just don't go *crazy* with it is all. It's called "moderation," something I've long since learned to exercise with other utilities like the telephone and electricity.
And why pay $40 a month for broadband when you don't use a billion megs of bandwidth a month? Because broadband is the way the Internet was meant to be experienced. Web pages *don't* take 3 minutes to download. You *don't* need to go through the ritual of dialing up every time you need to check your e-mail, you just check your e-mail. You *don't* need to suffer through hideous lag while using SSH. In my own opinion, the lack of irritation alone is worth $40, and I would rather be given an anal probe by aliens than go back to dialup.
There's plenty of stores (mostly convenience stores, I've noticed) that close up here when the power goes out because if they don't, they'll be robbed or looted. Although it's probably only at night really.
Re:I'm more amazed....
on
Baked Apple
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· Score: 1
I very highly doubt that Apple will be forced to eat the repair costs of this. It's certainly not their policy to do warranty work on anything that can't be classified as "manufacturer defects."
Unfortunately, I know quite well the uphill battle you'd be facing if the customer were to insist on it being fixed under warranty. Plenty of people really don't get it in this respect.
Except that I overheard this conversation in physics 101 back in the day:
"Well look at him, he's teaching this class." (Implying that being a physics professor in a dinky college was the worst possible job for someone with his qualifications)
to which I heartily responded:
"Yeah, and he's clearly doing *exactly* what he loves to do. That's a good definition of success in my book."
Send him $1 by paypal. He'll probably appreciate it more.:)
It sounds more like communism to me.
on
NARAS vs. the RIAA
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· Score: 2, Insightful
One of the points made by this article is that these companies aren't just trying to keep people from stealing from them like they say they are.
"The RIAA and the music business are trying to legislate profitability."
Essentially, what they're doing is creating a structured economy that pays tribute to them. They're trying to legislate away all the things that it thinks are causing it to lose money. This is made ever more clear by how Canada's government has dealt with the issue: charge a tax on all blank recordable media to be paid to a large, amorphous blob called "The music industry," regardless of whether or not they're selling products that we even *want* to buy.
Perhaps communism isn't the best term for it, since after all, under a communist government there's a social contract between the people and the government that directly controls the entire econonomy. That contract basically says that the people gives up their free will in return for benefits such as a guaranteed job, and guaranteed health care, and other such. Instead, this contract with the RIAA says basically we've given up the right to free choice about what products we buy and we pay for them anyway.
What the RIAA wants is a total dictatorship over music and music consumers. That's not pro-capitalism, that's Evil.
I'll give you a piece of my open mind.
on
Top of the Crops 2002
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· Score: 1, Informative
I'll be the first fool to cross where angels fear to tread - namely to argue with someone who wouldn't know a logical argument if it bit him in the ass. But hey, isn't that what slashdot is for?
Hypothesis: All crop circles are made by human beings.
Evidence: (as taken from this post, apparently a Difinitive Source) "99% of the posts I'm seeing here are people who have heard something once or twice on the radio about some hoaxters with a tow-by-four." From this statement we can confirm that a) there are hoaxsters out there who delight in the media attention they get from creating crop circles, and b) this knowledge is widespread and by no means a new thing. It's knowledge so common that every farmer out in the middle of nowhere with a short-wave radio or a TV posesses it. Keep in mind that I come from a rural area, and yes, every farmer in the world has some kind of contact with the outside world, even in the poorest parts of it.
Knowing this, and knowing that there are almost as many scams as there are suckers (for reference: PT Barnum), one could easily come to the conclusion that a tiny minority of farmers could easily account for every crop circle there ever was, especially considering the amount of attention said circles get. More interesting is how any evidence about their appearance (sudden or otherwise) is purely subjective on the part of the owner of the field and his neighbours, who were likely involved if there was a conspiracy against yonder city folk. Even more interesting is how crop circles have been getting more and more complex over time, probably in direct relation to media coverage and its availability to rural people.
The size and geometric precision and/or complexity can easily be explained by the fact that yes, farmers and other rural citizens are indeed clever, even intelligent. In fact, about the only thing that you can discern from the existence of these patterns is that they were made by someone with a little knowledge of geometry, indicating an intelligence of some kind. To assume that this sort of precision is beyond human beings is insane. We are obviously capable of much more than this. If you want an excellent example of what simple people can do with simple tools, the pyramids in Egypt were built by them. We don't know exactly what methods they used, and we aren't exactly sure why they did it that way because the process was largely undocumented (or the documents were lost), but they did. Sound familiar?
Already, we have a means, a motive, and an opportunity. All it would really take to create one is for a single person to say "hey, I can do that," draw up a coherent plan for doing so, get support from as many as four surrounding landowners for corroborating statements and labour, and then do the deed on a Sunday. This is far from a complicated plan, and the engineering/landscaping/surveying work is admittedly easily in the grasp of human beings. It's in fact so simple that it could conceivably be done without the landowner's knowledge or consent.
So now we've narrowed it down to two possible choices as to who implemented this plan. On the one hand, we have human beings. They're already there, they're intelligent enough, and they have a reason to do it (namely, because there's plenty of fools out there who would believe that it wasn't people). Alternatively, we have some other, non-human force at work here. Perhaps aliens, or perhaps gods. Assuming aliens, it would take them a great deal of effort to get here, and then the only way they attempt to communicate with us is by making mysterious patterns in wheat fields in the middle of the night, or when noone is looking otherwise. Moreover, these patterns can only be deciphered from the air and consist of very simple geometric shapes (well, until recently anyway). This is by far the most preposterous way to communicate. It is open to so much interpretation as to render itself completely meaningless, unless it is merely a code known only to the aliens themselves, not unlike the human activity of warchalking. In this case, it's merely interstellar graffiti and thus completely irrelevent to us.
The entire argument boils down to the exercise of Occum's Razor: The simplest explanation is the usually the right one. The simple explanation is that people did it as a prank, it caught on and only they know how they do it, because it's an exercise left up to the prankster. The best alternative explanation is that something that noone can see, and with methods some of us can't comprehend, made these things for deliberately mysterious reasons. This latter explanation isn't even my own, but the same one presented by the sort of kooks you can expect to try to explain the phenomenon with aliens and UFO's and ghosts. It is for this reason alone I can definitively say that every last crop circle is made by humans, because the alternative means a leap of faith so large that only a sucker would make it.
Well, no. I'm one of those sick bastards that knows and uses various versions of vi. And while it's user interface isn't the greatest in the world, it's at least consistent with other things in the unix world, like regular expressions.
Were you even around for all of the builds for Unix Netscape?
Yes, actually. I remember using an early, early version of Netscape (probably 1.0 or 1.1 or therabouts) on a unix box years ago. And I've even used it on my own boxen throughout the years. I'd admit that it had its quirks and irritations, but otherwise it was an okay interface, and not completely unusable. It's worth noting though that nowhere were there completely non-intuitive buttons, or stupidly shaped windows with no title bars, and most of all, you had no trouble at all bringing windows to the top.
I'm not saying JWZ is a guru on GUI design or anything, and I'm willing to bet (just judging by his frustration) that he know's he's not a guru on GUI design, and thus knowing that he doesn't know a lot, when he finds people that know less than he does he gets pretty annoyed with their lack of knowledge. One of the few great things about windows is its (almost, with the exception of stupid, skinnable interfaces like winamp) total consistency of interface. Once you learn to use one program, you've pretty much set to use any other program. It makes learning how to use new programs easier. Perhaps all JWZ knows about making GUIs he learned by copying other programs, but you know, that's NOT a bad thing.
No, he says the UI is completely inconsistent with, well, everything else. This goes against everything he knows about creating user interfaces. And he knows a couple things about that.
gstreamer -- doesn't want to install the required libs
You know what? *I* don't want to install the required libs. For anything. Usually because there's a litany of them for a fairly large number of programs. "Oh, there. I've got dependency A fulfilled. Now it should compile. Oops. No, it needs dependency B too. Oh damn. Dependency B also requires packages X, Y, and Z. And then there's dependency C, which wasn't actually mentioned in any documentation." For this reason I use FreeBSD, which at the very least, will automatically install any depenency needed. And if it starts installing X windows or some other huge bit of stupidity, I can cancel the install.
Apparently, I'm not alone in not wanting to bother with this because that's why the ports collection was created oh, 10 years ago.
xine -- doesn't know how to use a file browser (or pass args on the CL)
Correction: "doesn't know how to use a completely brain damaged, non-intuitive file browser for which there aren't any docs, and gave up in frustration."
Note: JWZ knows how to make a user interface, which might explain why he's so frustrated by people who can't.
ogle -- doesn't do what he wants, even though it makes no claims that it does
"What a grumpy asshole" is the exact phrase used by everyone that recieves complaints about a product, about which they have their heads so far up their asses as to believe that it's perfect in every way.
THIS IS A CUSTOMER COMPLAINT! The louder, noisier, and more obnoxious the complaint, the more the person wants it fixed. If he wanted the product to please die quietly, he wouldn't even bother to complain. He would merely go away. He would let the product die in its own feces like he thinks it ought to. He wouldn't complain, because he doesn't want the product to improve and heave itself out of the pool of shit that it currently sleeps in.
And you know what? In order for this to happen, especially when the producers of said product honestly believe there's nothing wrong, the people making the product in question need to have their egos adjusted, probably in a brutal manner which will leave them lying on the floor in a fetal position, crying for their mommy. I have personally been through this before, so shut up, take the man's advice, and do it right. Stop fucking complaining that he's a mean old man, because believe it or not, he IS helping. He DOES give a damn. And if you're too weak minded to see this and adjust your own damn attitude, you deserve to die by choking on your own shit.
Heh. And much more importantly, is the fact that this picture was the result of an exposeure of several hours, meaning that if this was a real UFO, then it's clearly not moving at all.
But much more likely is what you said.
What I really like is the bit where the site infers "NASA clams up about this, and therefore it must be true." Rather than NASA saying "You know, you guys are a pack of loonies," which would be the truth, but really they're being polite and biting their tongues. That, and the fact that no matter *what* they say, they know that this guy's already made up his mind about what this picture is, and won't stop badgering them until they say what he wants to hear.
Think about how much money you have to pay when some asshole backdoors your Exchange server and pumps out spam at a full 1.5 megabits per second over the long weekend while you're not paying attention. Perhaps this means you're a bonehead for using Exchange in the first place, but that's a little like saying it's your fault you were raped because you didn't keep a close watch on your drinks at the bar, and some asshole slipped you a roofie.
Information is replaceable. That's what backups are for. People are not.
If someone nukes Los Angeles, then people are going to have more than just a little bit of a headache sending their e-mail. If someone nukes your mail server, then mail gets bounced for a few days, and that's it. It's not that important.
Collateral damage is *good* in this instance. Yes, people will have problems sending mail. Yes, people will complain to their ISP's about the REALLY IMPORTANT E-MAIL THAT MUST GET THROUGH. Yes, Tech support at said ISP (if there is any) will live through hell. Yes, customers will go elsewhere when the ISP doesn't fix the problem. And yes, people will be irritated, annoyed, and even lose money, but it's all because the ISP in question is run by boneheads who don't want to hire a sysadmin, and think that the spammer market is an untapped resource. Companies like this *deserve* to go broke. People who sell services to scammers are running around with huge blinking neon signs on their backs that say "kick me!"
The collateral damage we're looking for is exactly the sort of thing that unions do when they go on strike. They go out of their way to scare away the very customers that feed them in the hopes that upper management will starve first. When the workers go back to work, the company *will* be damaged in some way by the strike, but in the end, things advance, life goes on, and things improve for the better for everyone. The sooner people see the cluetrain coming, the better, but sometimes the whistle has to blow loud and long before anyone notices.
The point of shell scripting in UNIX (and I dare say, period) is to patch together a bunch of pre-existing programs so that you don't have to build the functionality of each one from the ground up every time you want to use it.
Command.com (and cmd.exe) already has the functionality to do this. There's just a tiny little problem with doing it with all windows programs and most DOS-based programs too. They were never built to be scripted.
Here's a perfect example. Say that as a sysadmin you want to check to see how many times "foo" shows up in your system logs on a daily basis. And since you administer 20 such servers, you don't want to have to log into each of them every day and search the logs yourself. Here's how you'd do that in Unix: (no, I haven't tested this, and undoubtedly my syntax is wrong. It's called pseudocode.)
Place a line in the crontab like this: (every day, 3pm) mail -s "system report" edunbar93@youknowhere grep foo/var/log/bar | wc
Yes, there are better, more elegant ways of doing this. This is the simplest. In windows, you'd have to somehow do the following, assuming the default toolset that comes with windows 2000:
Get the "Find files or folders" program to somehow spit out only the line that says how many results were found, somehow get that information into Outlook Express, and somehow get OE to send it automatically.
Of course, the first person that accomplishes this feat will win a Nobel prize in computer science, because it's nearly impossible.
Of course, you could "just" make a scripting language that would make the process easier. For instance, you could make function calls/objects for mailto(), grep(), and wordcount(). Not to mention any number of other function calls that might be needed, which would undoubtedly be added by future include files, patches, and upgrades. It's still a far cry from a one liner, because your program would now look like this:
And, it's worth noting, you're also still a far cry from a scripting language. This is closer to perl than it is to sh. Why bother at all, when you can just use perl? It doesn't matter if you're using the.NET framework, or VB, or whatever, because it's missing the entire point. The point here shouldn't be to create a huge behemoth to perform small tasks, it's to create an army of mice to work together to perform big tasks. Make programs in such a way that you can take one program, glue it to another, and make it into something completely different. Also, the entire raison d'etre should be that the sysadmin should be able to build these constructs in seconds, not hours or days.
Microsoft's operating system works on the basis of complexity. Unix works on the concept of simplicity. Guess which one is better at doing simple things, and always will be better at doing simple things.
This is an interesting article, in a way. But it sounds remarkably like a heroin user complaining to his dealer about how his product is fun at first but it really begins to suck after a while, that the dealer isn't really his friend but a money-grubbing bastard, and that he's upset that the roller coaster has to stop sometime.
Well guess what. This is always what happens when someone starts hawking addictive wares. The gladhands inviting you back to the casino are psychotic sharks. There is no support, and the complaints inbox goes directly to the shredder. Suggestions aren't wanted because as far as the dealer is concerned, it couldn't get any better. After all, you're still coming back, right? Why change anything at all? It's a perfect way to extract money from the public in large amounts and abuse them at the same time.
This sort of industry needs to be regulated closely by the government because normal captialistic tendencies do not benefit the customer.
See, this is the problem right there. It should be the other way around. You should have to turn *on* VBA with a couple of clicks. It's kind of like saying that RedHat 6.2 was secure once you turned everything off...
There's almost no reason to have this in an e-mail client at all anyway, except for viruses and spam. This feature is nothing less than a huge blinking neon sign attracting ne'er-do-wells to your front door, and Microsoft was too stupid to see that putting it up would be a hugely bad idea. Oddly enough, they keep up the good work.
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because management is incompetent or lazy and thus leave code reviews and design meetings in a dusty book that could be called "good practices that most don't do".
You've mistaken laziness and incompetence for worship of the good ol' yankee buck and beating your competition to market. Management is impatient and short sighted because if they don't get their product out faster or cheaper or better (choose any two) then they're all out of a job, and by extention, so are you. Once their future (and yours) is secure, then they can actually *think* about thinking about the long term. For the most part, especially initially, their primary concern is making sure everyone has a paycheque. If you keep this simple concept in mind, a lot of management decisions suddenly become much easier to understand.
The trick of course, is to treat input from other programs and other APIs as if it were input from users, in no small part because it just might BE input from users. How does your server determine that its input is indeed coming from another program, and for that matter, that program is perfect in its implementation?
This is how a lot of buffer overrun vulnerabilities get coded into servers. Basically, the coder only tests it with a program because it's faster that way. And then said coder is programming to the test and not to the real world.
Because
/.) if they don't get it. And that's all if e) ever takes effect. Also keep in mind that customers are now used to paying $35 a month (at most) for broadband.
a) when ISP's first started selling broadband, they never figured that anyone not running a server could possibly use more than a gig a month.
b) Before broadband, they were tracking hours spent on the net. Broadband makes that unnecessary, thus not much point to bill for it.
c) Customers aren't even interested until it costs less than $50 a month. They would much prefer to pay $25 a month for totally unlimited service, and will complain endlessly if they don't get that.
d) At the super low price of $4 a gig, the upper tier would probably give the customer about 16 gigs a month for about $80. See point c). Also keep in mind that the bandwidth hogs typically use five to ten times that much bandwidth on average. They want more and will complain endlessly (see
e) Oops! $ISP has no way to bill bandwidth in a retail sort of way! They'd better make one!
f) Double oops! $ISP2 will immediately get 20% of $ISP's customers if they start doing e). And they're both fighting for dominant market share. The shareholders would never allow it.
When it comes to broadband, ISPs are stuck between a rock and a hard place that's been placed in a steel box two sizes too small. If you want to know why so many broadband providers recently went out of business and why so many will continue to do so, that's why.
In fact, I prefer they do when necessary, otherwise everybody ends up heavily subsidising a very small group of people.
Actually, it's a lot worse than that. It's more like the investors end up heavily subsidizing a very small group of people, because ISPs that provide "unlimited" bandwidth tend to do so at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars a year. If they don't fix this leak, then noone gets broadband because the company goes out of business.
Think of it this way: you could run an FTP or leech DCC bot 24/7 at a maximum upload speed of 640Kbps. That's 6.75 GB a day and 202 GB a month. If bandwidth is insanely cheap at only $4 a gig retail, then that amounts to an $808 bandwidth bill, and you haven't even touched on downloads. Subtract the $34.95 the customer actually pays, and you're losing $773. Per month. Multiply by 1,000 for the 1% of the customers that are using bandwidth like this at a large DSL or cable provider.
Suddenly you're thinking "wow, ISPs are getting bent over the barrel." It gets better. Between 10 and 20% of broadband customers use more than 20 gigs of bandwidth a month. If you figure that they have to be using less than 8.75 to even break even just in terms of bandwidth, then they're paying twice as much in bandwidth costs as they're getting back in service charges. Oh, and by the way, that doesn't even touch the normal overhead costs like paying for systems administration or even customer service.
I heard from my boss that in 2001, Telus figured that the cost of providing ADSL connections to their residential customers averaged to $55 a month each. Unfortunately, they were selling it at $39.95 at most (so they could compete with Shaw Cable), and they had somewhere around 50,000 residential ADSL customers. Most ISPs are competing like this - bleeding money to gain market share, and the one that dies last gets to raise rates by 3 times (at least in theory).
The other 99% of the people using way too much bandwidth are violating copyrights left right and center. Or, in other words, for totally illegitimate reasons; mostly warez, MP3s and porn, with the very occasional ripped Babylon 5 episode.
I'd have to admit that I'm not innocent of doing this, but amazingly, I can still stay within the monthly 4 GB limit my provider sets while still getting a goodly amount of warez, mp3s and porn; I just don't go *crazy* with it is all. It's called "moderation," something I've long since learned to exercise with other utilities like the telephone and electricity.
And why pay $40 a month for broadband when you don't use a billion megs of bandwidth a month? Because broadband is the way the Internet was meant to be experienced. Web pages *don't* take 3 minutes to download. You *don't* need to go through the ritual of dialing up every time you need to check your e-mail, you just check your e-mail. You *don't* need to suffer through hideous lag while using SSH. In my own opinion, the lack of irritation alone is worth $40, and I would rather be given an anal probe by aliens than go back to dialup.
There's plenty of stores (mostly convenience stores, I've noticed) that close up here when the power goes out because if they don't, they'll be robbed or looted. Although it's probably only at night really.
I very highly doubt that Apple will be forced to eat the repair costs of this. It's certainly not their policy to do warranty work on anything that can't be classified as "manufacturer defects."
Unfortunately, I know quite well the uphill battle you'd be facing if the customer were to insist on it being fixed under warranty. Plenty of people really don't get it in this respect.
IRC: Where men are MEN, women are too half the time, and children are most certainly FBI agents.
Except that I overheard this conversation in physics 101 back in the day:
"Well look at him, he's teaching this class." (Implying that being a physics professor in a dinky college was the worst possible job for someone with his qualifications)
to which I heartily responded:
"Yeah, and he's clearly doing *exactly* what he loves to do. That's a good definition of success in my book."
He promptly shut up.
Send him $1 by paypal. He'll probably appreciate it more. :)
One of the points made by this article is that these companies aren't just trying to keep people from stealing from them like they say they are.
"The RIAA and the music business are trying to legislate profitability."
Essentially, what they're doing is creating a structured economy that pays tribute to them. They're trying to legislate away all the things that it thinks are causing it to lose money. This is made ever more clear by how Canada's government has dealt with the issue: charge a tax on all blank recordable media to be paid to a large, amorphous blob called "The music industry," regardless of whether or not they're selling products that we even *want* to buy.
Perhaps communism isn't the best term for it, since after all, under a communist government there's a social contract between the people and the government that directly controls the entire econonomy. That contract basically says that the people gives up their free will in return for benefits such as a guaranteed job, and guaranteed health care, and other such. Instead, this contract with the RIAA says basically we've given up the right to free choice about what products we buy and we pay for them anyway.
What the RIAA wants is a total dictatorship over music and music consumers. That's not pro-capitalism, that's Evil.
I'll be the first fool to cross where angels fear to tread - namely to argue with someone who wouldn't know a logical argument if it bit him in the ass. But hey, isn't that what slashdot is for?
Hypothesis: All crop circles are made by human beings.
Evidence: (as taken from this post, apparently a Difinitive Source) "99% of the posts I'm seeing here are people who have heard something once or twice on the radio about some hoaxters with a tow-by-four." From this statement we can confirm that a) there are hoaxsters out there who delight in the media attention they get from creating crop circles, and b) this knowledge is widespread and by no means a new thing. It's knowledge so common that every farmer out in the middle of nowhere with a short-wave radio or a TV posesses it. Keep in mind that I come from a rural area, and yes, every farmer in the world has some kind of contact with the outside world, even in the poorest parts of it.
Knowing this, and knowing that there are almost as many scams as there are suckers (for reference: PT Barnum), one could easily come to the conclusion that a tiny minority of farmers could easily account for every crop circle there ever was, especially considering the amount of attention said circles get. More interesting is how any evidence about their appearance (sudden or otherwise) is purely subjective on the part of the owner of the field and his neighbours, who were likely involved if there was a conspiracy against yonder city folk. Even more interesting is how crop circles have been getting more and more complex over time, probably in direct relation to media coverage and its availability to rural people.
The size and geometric precision and/or complexity can easily be explained by the fact that yes, farmers and other rural citizens are indeed clever, even intelligent. In fact, about the only thing that you can discern from the existence of these patterns is that they were made by someone with a little knowledge of geometry, indicating an intelligence of some kind. To assume that this sort of precision is beyond human beings is insane. We are obviously capable of much more than this. If you want an excellent example of what simple people can do with simple tools, the pyramids in Egypt were built by them. We don't know exactly what methods they used, and we aren't exactly sure why they did it that way because the process was largely undocumented (or the documents were lost), but they did. Sound familiar?
Already, we have a means, a motive, and an opportunity. All it would really take to create one is for a single person to say "hey, I can do that," draw up a coherent plan for doing so, get support from as many as four surrounding landowners for corroborating statements and labour, and then do the deed on a Sunday. This is far from a complicated plan, and the engineering/landscaping/surveying work is admittedly easily in the grasp of human beings. It's in fact so simple that it could conceivably be done without the landowner's knowledge or consent.
So now we've narrowed it down to two possible choices as to who implemented this plan. On the one hand, we have human beings. They're already there, they're intelligent enough, and they have a reason to do it (namely, because there's plenty of fools out there who would believe that it wasn't people). Alternatively, we have some other, non-human force at work here. Perhaps aliens, or perhaps gods. Assuming aliens, it would take them a great deal of effort to get here, and then the only way they attempt to communicate with us is by making mysterious patterns in wheat fields in the middle of the night, or when noone is looking otherwise. Moreover, these patterns can only be deciphered from the air and consist of very simple geometric shapes (well, until recently anyway). This is by far the most preposterous way to communicate. It is open to so much interpretation as to render itself completely meaningless, unless it is merely a code known only to the aliens themselves, not unlike the human activity of warchalking. In this case, it's merely interstellar graffiti and thus completely irrelevent to us.
The entire argument boils down to the exercise of Occum's Razor: The simplest explanation is the usually the right one. The simple explanation is that people did it as a prank, it caught on and only they know how they do it, because it's an exercise left up to the prankster. The best alternative explanation is that something that noone can see, and with methods some of us can't comprehend, made these things for deliberately mysterious reasons. This latter explanation isn't even my own, but the same one presented by the sort of kooks you can expect to try to explain the phenomenon with aliens and UFO's and ghosts. It is for this reason alone I can definitively say that every last crop circle is made by humans, because the alternative means a leap of faith so large that only a sucker would make it.
Have you ever actually used XEmacs?
Well, no. I'm one of those sick bastards that knows and uses various versions of vi. And while it's user interface isn't the greatest in the world, it's at least consistent with other things in the unix world, like regular expressions.
Were you even around for all of the builds for Unix Netscape?
Yes, actually. I remember using an early, early version of Netscape (probably 1.0 or 1.1 or therabouts) on a unix box years ago. And I've even used it on my own boxen throughout the years. I'd admit that it had its quirks and irritations, but otherwise it was an okay interface, and not completely unusable. It's worth noting though that nowhere were there completely non-intuitive buttons, or stupidly shaped windows with no title bars, and most of all, you had no trouble at all bringing windows to the top.
I'm not saying JWZ is a guru on GUI design or anything, and I'm willing to bet (just judging by his frustration) that he know's he's not a guru on GUI design, and thus knowing that he doesn't know a lot, when he finds people that know less than he does he gets pretty annoyed with their lack of knowledge. One of the few great things about windows is its (almost, with the exception of stupid, skinnable interfaces like winamp) total consistency of interface. Once you learn to use one program, you've pretty much set to use any other program. It makes learning how to use new programs easier. Perhaps all JWZ knows about making GUIs he learned by copying other programs, but you know, that's NOT a bad thing.
mplayer -- doesn't like the UI
No, he says the UI is completely inconsistent with, well, everything else. This goes against everything he knows about creating user interfaces. And he knows a couple things about that.
gstreamer -- doesn't want to install the required libs
You know what? *I* don't want to install the required libs. For anything. Usually because there's a litany of them for a fairly large number of programs. "Oh, there. I've got dependency A fulfilled. Now it should compile. Oops. No, it needs dependency B too. Oh damn. Dependency B also requires packages X, Y, and Z. And then there's dependency C, which wasn't actually mentioned in any documentation." For this reason I use FreeBSD, which at the very least, will automatically install any depenency needed. And if it starts installing X windows or some other huge bit of stupidity, I can cancel the install.
Apparently, I'm not alone in not wanting to bother with this because that's why the ports collection was created oh, 10 years ago.
xine -- doesn't know how to use a file browser (or pass args on the CL)
Correction: "doesn't know how to use a completely brain damaged, non-intuitive file browser for which there aren't any docs, and gave up in frustration."
Note: JWZ knows how to make a user interface, which might explain why he's so frustrated by people who can't.
ogle -- doesn't do what he wants, even though it makes no claims that it does
Well, you're right. But perhaps he's desperate.
"What a grumpy asshole" is the exact phrase used by everyone that recieves complaints about a product, about which they have their heads so far up their asses as to believe that it's perfect in every way.
THIS IS A CUSTOMER COMPLAINT! The louder, noisier, and more obnoxious the complaint, the more the person wants it fixed. If he wanted the product to please die quietly, he wouldn't even bother to complain. He would merely go away. He would let the product die in its own feces like he thinks it ought to. He wouldn't complain, because he doesn't want the product to improve and heave itself out of the pool of shit that it currently sleeps in.
And you know what? In order for this to happen, especially when the producers of said product honestly believe there's nothing wrong, the people making the product in question need to have their egos adjusted, probably in a brutal manner which will leave them lying on the floor in a fetal position, crying for their mommy. I have personally been through this before, so shut up, take the man's advice, and do it right. Stop fucking complaining that he's a mean old man, because believe it or not, he IS helping. He DOES give a damn. And if you're too weak minded to see this and adjust your own damn attitude, you deserve to die by choking on your own shit.
Heh. And much more importantly, is the fact that this picture was the result of an exposeure of several hours, meaning that if this was a real UFO, then it's clearly not moving at all.
But much more likely is what you said.
What I really like is the bit where the site infers "NASA clams up about this, and therefore it must be true." Rather than NASA saying "You know, you guys are a pack of loonies," which would be the truth, but really they're being polite and biting their tongues. That, and the fact that no matter *what* they say, they know that this guy's already made up his mind about what this picture is, and won't stop badgering them until they say what he wants to hear.
*GASP* *sputter* Holy shit!
Heh heh. Mikey, I think he likes it! How 'bout some more?
Hell yeah!
Page 3.
Come on guys. It's a tad different across the pond.
Sure, except when you go to Greenland and you realize that the ice is now about 100 yards further back this winter than it was 100 years ago.
Where bandwidth costs $6 a gig.
Think about how much money you have to pay when some asshole backdoors your Exchange server and pumps out spam at a full 1.5 megabits per second over the long weekend while you're not paying attention. Perhaps this means you're a bonehead for using Exchange in the first place, but that's a little like saying it's your fault you were raped because you didn't keep a close watch on your drinks at the bar, and some asshole slipped you a roofie.
It's information, not people.
Information is replaceable. That's what backups are for. People are not.
If someone nukes Los Angeles, then people are going to have more than just a little bit of a headache sending their e-mail. If someone nukes your mail server, then mail gets bounced for a few days, and that's it. It's not that important.
Collateral damage is *good* in this instance. Yes, people will have problems sending mail. Yes, people will complain to their ISP's about the REALLY IMPORTANT E-MAIL THAT MUST GET THROUGH. Yes, Tech support at said ISP (if there is any) will live through hell. Yes, customers will go elsewhere when the ISP doesn't fix the problem. And yes, people will be irritated, annoyed, and even lose money, but it's all because the ISP in question is run by boneheads who don't want to hire a sysadmin, and think that the spammer market is an untapped resource. Companies like this *deserve* to go broke. People who sell services to scammers are running around with huge blinking neon signs on their backs that say "kick me!"
The collateral damage we're looking for is exactly the sort of thing that unions do when they go on strike. They go out of their way to scare away the very customers that feed them in the hopes that upper management will starve first. When the workers go back to work, the company *will* be damaged in some way by the strike, but in the end, things advance, life goes on, and things improve for the better for everyone. The sooner people see the cluetrain coming, the better, but sometimes the whistle has to blow loud and long before anyone notices.
Who cares? Just so long as I can set up a honey pot and make a living off of nailing the suckers. :)
THAT would be a dream job.
The point of shell scripting in UNIX (and I dare say, period) is to patch together a bunch of pre-existing programs so that you don't have to build the functionality of each one from the ground up every time you want to use it.
/var/log/bar | wc
/var/log/bar)$ x)
.NET framework, or VB, or whatever, because it's missing the entire point. The point here shouldn't be to create a huge behemoth to perform small tasks, it's to create an army of mice to work together to perform big tasks. Make programs in such a way that you can take one program, glue it to another, and make it into something completely different. Also, the entire raison d'etre should be that the sysadmin should be able to build these constructs in seconds, not hours or days.
Command.com (and cmd.exe) already has the functionality to do this. There's just a tiny little problem with doing it with all windows programs and most DOS-based programs too. They were never built to be scripted.
Here's a perfect example. Say that as a sysadmin you want to check to see how many times "foo" shows up in your system logs on a daily basis. And since you administer 20 such servers, you don't want to have to log into each of them every day and search the logs yourself. Here's how you'd do that in Unix:
(no, I haven't tested this, and undoubtedly my syntax is wrong. It's called pseudocode.)
Place a line in the crontab like this:
(every day, 3pm) mail -s "system report" edunbar93@youknowhere grep foo
Yes, there are better, more elegant ways of doing this. This is the simplest. In windows, you'd have to somehow do the following, assuming the default toolset that comes with windows 2000:
Get the "Find files or folders" program to somehow spit out only the line that says how many results were found, somehow get that information into Outlook Express, and somehow get OE to send it automatically.
Of course, the first person that accomplishes this feat will win a Nobel prize in computer science, because it's nearly impossible.
Of course, you could "just" make a scripting language that would make the process easier. For instance, you could make function calls/objects for mailto(), grep(), and wordcount(). Not to mention any number of other function calls that might be needed, which would undoubtedly be added by future include files, patches, and upgrades. It's still a far cry from a one liner, because your program would now look like this:
#include grep
#include wordcount
#include mail
$x = grep("foo",
$x = wordcount($x)
mailto("edunbar@youknowwhere.com",
And, it's worth noting, you're also still a far cry from a scripting language. This is closer to perl than it is to sh. Why bother at all, when you can just use perl? It doesn't matter if you're using the
Microsoft's operating system works on the basis of complexity. Unix works on the concept of simplicity. Guess which one is better at doing simple things, and always will be better at doing simple things.
This is an interesting article, in a way. But it sounds remarkably like a heroin user complaining to his dealer about how his product is fun at first but it really begins to suck after a while, that the dealer isn't really his friend but a money-grubbing bastard, and that he's upset that the roller coaster has to stop sometime.
Well guess what. This is always what happens when someone starts hawking addictive wares. The gladhands inviting you back to the casino are psychotic sharks. There is no support, and the complaints inbox goes directly to the shredder. Suggestions aren't wanted because as far as the dealer is concerned, it couldn't get any better. After all, you're still coming back, right? Why change anything at all? It's a perfect way to extract money from the public in large amounts and abuse them at the same time.
This sort of industry needs to be regulated closely by the government because normal captialistic tendencies do not benefit the customer.
You can turn off VBA with a couple of clicks.
See, this is the problem right there. It should be the other way around. You should have to turn *on* VBA with a couple of clicks. It's kind of like saying that RedHat 6.2 was secure once you turned everything off...
There's almost no reason to have this in an e-mail client at all anyway, except for viruses and spam. This feature is nothing less than a huge blinking neon sign attracting ne'er-do-wells to your front door, and Microsoft was too stupid to see that putting it up would be a hugely bad idea. Oddly enough, they keep up the good work.