Some of his *writing* is downright scary (EG, his infamous homophobic screed).
Despite the "infamous" status, I'd never heard of this screed. So I looked it up.
And you know, it just sounds like a reasonable opinion, and contains much sound advice. Sorry you haven't had the opportunity (yet) to raise children, and watch them blossom with positive role models of father and mother.
It's not homophobic to see that this is so, any more than it's racist to acknowledge that white-skinned people need more sunscreen on the beach. Marriage, as an institution, is an acknowledgement of this fact. As mature adults, we either acknowledge this, or pay the price with dysfunctional families and neurotic offspring.
I'm not advocating that we burn homosexuals. My heart truly goes out to a homosexual partner who is unable to accompany his partner through death, or who loses legal rights to property thereafter. I support efforts to address these wrongs.
But, by definition, a homosexual cannot "marry" a same-sex partner, any more than a bicycle can defecate.
For those who are currently computer programmers/engineers, would you say you really enjoy your job, or does it get extremely old and tedious after awhile?
Well, I'll step up to the plate and bat. I'm a freelance software engineer/coder/tech weenie, and have been doing this in various forms for about 10 years.
If I had a job, I'd probably learn to hate it pretty quickly. Being freelance, I own everything I write. It's very typical for me to get an idea or discover some new technology, and spend a few days just exploring it, tinkering, etc.
I'm in charge. I decide if something just isn't worth doing, and only rarely do I have to work on something I don't like. I don't have to justify my time to anybody but my wife, and since we live quite confortably, she won't complain at all if I spend a week playing with some new technology.
And, playing with the technology almost *ALWAYS* pays off in the long run! Probably 70% of my income today is based on technology I goofed with a few years back, experimenting ways to run PHP as a standalone daemon. I originally did it as a way of developing anti-spam technology quickly, using PHP as a wrapper for sendmail. Now, that base technology is used to coordinate many gigabytes worth of data in 30+ school districts all over the state of California, in a use completely unrelated to SPAM.
It's very rewarding, and, being freelance, I work on something a little different every day. I shudder to think what it would be like to work all day, and hate it.
I love my work. I hope you do, to. Do you code for fun, just to see if you can "do it"?
Is it too much to hope someone might build a strong tool for doing this that will run on Linux?
Some years ago, there was a product called "Excite for Web Servers" or "EWS". It was very good - I used it to index several hundred MB of text on my fire-breathing, 166 Mhz Pentium back in the day.
Unfortunately, it's getting real, real, real old and is almost impossible to get to work properly on a modern Linux install.
It's an excellent product, distributed with sources. Unfortunately, without a sufficiently free license behind it, there's no active fork for it, anywhere.
Anyway, to make it a "personal" tool, run it every night in a cron job against your home directory, then use a local copy of Apache to serve the said home directory.
Kludgy, but workable. It'd be nice to see this resurrected and turned into something a bit more modern...
Even in this day and age, most people see software as a magical phenomenon that can do anything provided the magician is powerful enough. Telling them "no" means you're but a lowly apprentice.
One common incantation I use frequently: Anything is possible if it can be clearly defined. It's only a question of what is feasible.
Works like a champ to A) keep me from ever appearing to be a lowly apprentice and B) divert their attention towards practical development instead of pie-in-the-sky possibilities.
Now, if only I could get out of the requirement to maintain existing code (however buggy and scary) I'd be in HOG HEAVEN!
I maintain a groupware application for a school. One of the things to coordinate is scheduling for classes.
There's two systems: One that's currently active, and a new (vastly improved) one under development. The currently active system was initially developed by somebody not particularly familiar with relational databases, and so is very, very cumbersome to work with.
People need *something* today. We can't commit our resources to something new without providing something today for people to use. But, the current one is so kludgy and terribly designed that it takes massive amounts of time just to keep that bug-infested, terrible thing alive.
So, 80% of the available time goes to maintaining something that really should be deleted, only because the new stuff isn't done yet.
Putting "uptime" and "game" together in the same sentence shows that you really are missing the point.
What is the point of uptime on a personal computer? "Uptime" is a statistic used in marketing "enterprise solutions". If you processed 10,000 transactions per minute on a high-end cluster, uptime is very, very important.
For a personal system running a browser, email, and maybe a game or two, uptime is as relevant as weather is to a fish. (IE: relevant in only the most abstract, indrect sort of way)
Also remember, it costs $$$ to keep that computer running 24x7. Lessee: 150 Watts, 24 hours per day, 30 days a month: 150*24*30=108,000 watt-hours/month. How much are YOU paying for your electricity?
The U.S. space program today is a shadow of its past. It's primarily a holdover from a pissing match between the budding USA and the USSR.
The USSR has ceased to be a "superpower", and the USA has established clear, military dominance. What's the point of NASA today?
What's really interesting is the kickoff of the private/commercial space age begun with SpaceShipOne. The Ansari X-Prize wasn't the goal - it was the starting line.
Within the next 1-2 decades, we'll see the old-style national space agencies dwarfed as pure economics brings scale to the space industry.
Space today is basically a high-dollar, cottage industry. Everything is hand/custom made at high expense, and in painfully small volumes.
It'll start with the obvious - people paying $25,000/seat to fly into space for an hour. Technology will be refined, prices will drop, and by the time I'm an old guy (I'm 32 now) I expect to be able to spend a week in space at a price I could actually afford.
But that's not so big, as the reality that new uses for the reduced-cost space travel will be discovered - uses we have no way of predicting.
Just like Edison could never have predicted micro-electronics, the future holds possibilities we can only begin to imagine!
A 9.0 earthquake would release the equivalent of 1,800 Megatons, so it would be in the same ballpark.
Come on, man! This is SLASHDOT! A "Megaton" is a measurement of the size of your average/.'ers girlfriend, but it's never actually used by the affected slashdotter.
Use a term that others can relate to. For example, how many LOCs would a 9.0 earthquake be?
The biggest problem with PHP-based virtual hosting is that any script running has full permissions as user "nobody".
PHP SafeMode is an ugly hack fraught with security holes. The real answer is RIGHT HERE but alas, it's been dropped.
these guys have done some more work with it, and the best bet (so far) seems to be this one which (at least) has active development on it.
I LOVE the idea - from a security standpoint, this is the best news for Apache/Unix shared hosting since the invention of the password. I have a fairly busy server (about 700 active domains) and I'll be slowly migrating over the next 6 months or so to using this tool.
It works with PHP and Apache2. I just won't use any non-threadsafe libs, so no issues there.
For my purposes PHP is well designed and is the best tool for the job I've found. I've looked into many other tools, but hands down the winner for my needs is PHP. Trust me, if there were another tool that offered the same power AND ease AND was more profitable for me to use overall, I'd be using it. If it exists, I haven't found it. This isn't a religous pursuit for me. I don't care what the "best" programming language is. I'm here to feed my family and PHP serves that purpose well.
I could have written your entire post myself, and almost did. I have written projects of every size from very, very small to large projects (~70,000 lines to date) and PHP has been stable, easy, and plenty fast.
I update all servers monthly unless (like with this one) there's a serious security issue. Big problems are rare. I'll have all 15 servers I manage done tonight; it will take about 3-4 hours. (I have build scripts to automate the nasties and make it easy, so I copy in a tar file, edit a settings file, and run the script)
PHP just fits in lots of places. mod_php is great on apache. php/cli is a wonderful scripting tool for system administration. php-gtk (with glade) is a wonderful tool for rapid construction of client-side programs that works on Windows, Mac and Linux together.
PHP is something like VB and ASP rolled together, only cross-platform - a powerful combo!
The 500-2000 resumes are examined VERY quickly. I've heard stories about the piles being arbitrarily halved with the other half being discarded.
You've never actually done it, have you?
in 1999 I, as the (then) owner of a small computer shop in small-town, USA, posted a job opening in the local paper, for the job of a "computer repair technician" at minimum wage in the local (small-town) newspaper.
I got over 100 resumes from that newspaper ad.
How would you deal with that properly? Your talking $7/hour, "fix the computer" stuff. Installing sound cards, network cards, video cards. And a stack of resumes 1 inch thick.
One of the things that's particularly endemic to the Slashdot community is the "black/white" point of view - the idea that something is secure, or not, it's white or it's black.
But that's not how security is! It's all shades of grey, and the darker the shade of grey, the worse off things are.
Nothing is ever bulletproof, and seldom is anything ever wide-ass open to the world. It's somewhere in between.
I have a remote-desktop package integrated with one of my apps. It makes for very easy tech support, and I've got it built right into the menu system of my most popular application, so that customers using my software package have access to instantaneous, high-quality tech support.
To prevent users from popping up on my development system anytime they have a question, I put a password in place. It requires a small, 4-digit numeric code, and it changes every day.
By slashdot standards, this is terrible security. It's numeric. No letters, just numbers. The code changes every day, but only based on the day of year. It can easily be predicted, if one has any understanding of the underlying, otherwise very simple algorithm used to guess these numbers.
Anybody with a packet sniffer could crack it with one support session.
But, in this case, it really doesn't matter. The worst that will happen is that your computer's desktop will appear on my screen without my Windows VM.
You could DOS me with 10,000 VM screens, but it would take a very short amount of time for me to block the port number for the VPN and kill that.
So, what's the purpose for improving security? It's secure enough. And that's the point. Many people around here will have a cow if something is potentially crackable, while sitting behind physical locks that can be compromised with an expired credit card.
Gosh! Somebody could pull out their credit card, slide it through the gap between the door and the jamb, and break into your home!
In a black/white world, your home would only be considered safe if it had 1/4 inch steel plate exterior, and locks that the NSA would have serious trouble with.
In the real (shades of grey) world, a deadbolt and a solid-core door is usually good enough, and people live with the odds. Heck, even in the worst ranked neighborhood, you have about a 3.5 to 4 percent chance of getting burgled in a given year. (http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/burg.htm) I almost never lock my back door, and I've never had a problem with it.
That's good enough security for most, as evidenced by the fact that the most important issue was national security or "the war in Iraq" in the recent election. (http://www.rasmussenreports.com/Issue%20Clusters_ Election%20Night.htm)
Notice that individual household crime isn't even on the list (unless you include the 6% "domestic issues", despite the relative insecurity of the average home.
Brought home to me by the book "Secrets and Lies" by Bruce Schneier, this world is not a black and white world. Relative risk must be evaluated, and the equation must be brought to something we can all live with.
PS: Link to sites with A tags appears to be broken on slashdot. I tried numerous times to post links to the aforementioned sites and could not do so.
never mention your competitor in advertising no such thing as bad publicity, people tend to forget the details but "brand reinforcement" still applies, if you have to mention your competitor then it implies your product wont/cant stand up on its own merits = you have LOST
See? This is a large part of why linux isn't mainstream yet. You have far too many luddites who have far too much influence and want to pretend it's still 1979.
and stuff.
Is it just me, or does this sound very oxymoronic coming from somebody whose sig line says
"He who cannot in 64k program, cannot in 512k." ??
I mean, if 64k isn't consistent with 1979 computer technology, what is?
Like most arguments put forth by copyright enthusiasts, it holds little water - for several reasons
Hear that? It's the sound of an idiot modded insightful on slashdot.
The claim is mostly inaccurate because it presupposes that the copying individual would otherwise have bought a copy from the publisher. That is occasionally true, but more often false; and when it is false, the claimed loss does not occur.
The value of goods is based on supply and demand. If supply is in shortened supply, generally the value goes up. That's the basis of copyrights - making sure that the value of authorized works retain their value by letting the copyright holder determine the supply.
Making additional copies works somewhat like inflation - it causes the value to drop. Thus, a real loss does, in fact occur. The challenge is to represent that loss in a reasonable fashion.
... But when your friend avoids the need to buy a copy of a book, the bookstore and the publisher do not lose anything they had...
They most definitely HAVE lost something - the value of their materials!
In other words, the "loss" comes from the copyright system; it is not an inherent part of copying.
This part you got right! Copyrights are a right granted by a government. However, you can be quite certain that the issue of the validity of copyrights will NOT be heard at this Supreme Court hearing - only whether or not P2P software providers are liable for the violations of copyright committed by their users.
The copyright system is here to stay. And, for my part, I think that with the exception of the copyright extensions, the copyright system is "right". I'd want to cut the term back to around 20 years, and leave the rest alone.
Note that nothing in copyright forbids stops you from writing a work, and gifting it to the world. You are not required to do anything at all with your works. You are, however, required to offer some basic respect for the works of others, and I like that.
Remember, the almighty GPL is based on copyrights - the very force that makes Linux such a durable legal entity is the same that makes it illegal for you to swap MP3s with strangers without permissions from the copyright holder.
A gentleman I worked with some time ago used to save anything he'd want to delete in a directory called "BLOAT".
It worked much like the Windows recycle bin - make a directory called BLOAT, put stuff in it. Later, if you run across a BLOAT directory, look to see what's in it. If you haven't missed in in a few months, go ahead and delete it!
If disk space is getting low, you can do a simple "find / -mtime +NN | grep BLOAT" where NN is the number of days you want to keep files for to get a list of files to delete.
It's a safe, simple, logical way to delete stuff without risking anything.
PS: I am not a pack rat, but I HATE it when I really need a file I USED to have...
I want 128kbps. It shouldn't add more than 20-30 ms to a ping time. I want it anytime/anywhere. For a flat monthly fee, and don't count my minutes. I'd be happy to pay $75-$100/month for this. Much more and I probably wouldn't bite.
I'm an indie developer, and do *alot* of remote sessions by SSH. Such service would free me (at last) from having to plan trips and vacations around which hotels provide DSL Internet service to its guests. (although, to be fair, it's much easier to find that now than it used to be, but it does suck that I frequently have to pay $9.95/day)
(footnote: since we were dropped by our admittedly shitty label we've made decent money selling CDs and songs online at places like iTunes [apple.com] -- but still nowhere near the amount we received from our "free" loan which paid for our last CD's production and then some).
If you don't mind me asking, what do you mean by "decent money"?
To me, "decent money" is enough to pay for wife, 5 kids, 2 story house, college tuition, etc. Which, all told, is around $50,000 - $60,000 per year minimum. (I live in central California)
If enterprise users can be persuaded to migrate from MSOffice/Win32/x86 to OpenOffice/Win32/x86, they might later be persuaded to migrate from x86 workstations to a high-powered Sun server and SunFire terminals. At that point Sun has it made; they can sell systems, expansion components, service contracts, etc.
And that's part of the equation. The fact that it's cross-platform was present when Sun first bought Star Office.
The fact that it's open source is due to the "torpedo effect".
Slashdot Mirror
Some of his *writing* is downright scary (EG, his infamous homophobic screed).
Despite the "infamous" status, I'd never heard of this screed. So I looked it up.
And you know, it just sounds like a reasonable opinion, and contains much sound advice. Sorry you haven't had the opportunity (yet) to raise children, and watch them blossom with positive role models of father and mother.
It's not homophobic to see that this is so, any more than it's racist to acknowledge that white-skinned people need more sunscreen on the beach. Marriage, as an institution, is an acknowledgement of this fact. As mature adults, we either acknowledge this, or pay the price with dysfunctional families and neurotic offspring.
I'm not advocating that we burn homosexuals. My heart truly goes out to a homosexual partner who is unable to accompany his partner through death, or who loses legal rights to property thereafter. I support efforts to address these wrongs.
But, by definition, a homosexual cannot "marry" a same-sex partner, any more than a bicycle can defecate.
For those who are currently computer programmers/engineers, would you say you really enjoy your job, or does it get extremely old and tedious after awhile?
Well, I'll step up to the plate and bat. I'm a freelance software engineer/coder/tech weenie, and have been doing this in various forms for about 10 years.
If I had a job, I'd probably learn to hate it pretty quickly. Being freelance, I own everything I write. It's very typical for me to get an idea or discover some new technology, and spend a few days just exploring it, tinkering, etc.
I'm in charge. I decide if something just isn't worth doing, and only rarely do I have to work on something I don't like. I don't have to justify my time to anybody but my wife, and since we live quite confortably, she won't complain at all if I spend a week playing with some new technology.
And, playing with the technology almost *ALWAYS* pays off in the long run! Probably 70% of my income today is based on technology I goofed with a few years back, experimenting ways to run PHP as a standalone daemon. I originally did it as a way of developing anti-spam technology quickly, using PHP as a wrapper for sendmail. Now, that base technology is used to coordinate many gigabytes worth of data in 30+ school districts all over the state of California, in a use completely unrelated to SPAM.
It's very rewarding, and, being freelance, I work on something a little different every day. I shudder to think what it would be like to work all day, and hate it.
I love my work. I hope you do, to. Do you code for fun, just to see if you can "do it"?
You people still wondering why Linux sucks will never be accepted by anybody but the most hardcore nerds? Check this out.
Wanna hear a panty-waist, thumb-sucking loser whine when given something for free? Read the parent post.
If parent had a f-cking clue, he/she would realize that the proper thing to do would be to help fix it, or shut the h-ll up.
Posting anonymously as this is seriously off-topic.
Is it too much to hope someone might build a strong tool for doing this that will run on Linux?
Some years ago, there was a product called "Excite for Web Servers" or "EWS". It was very good - I used it to index several hundred MB of text on my fire-breathing, 166 Mhz Pentium back in the day.
Unfortunately, it's getting real, real, real old and is almost impossible to get to work properly on a modern Linux install.
It's an excellent product, distributed with sources. Unfortunately, without a sufficiently free license behind it, there's no active fork for it, anywhere.
Anyway, to make it a "personal" tool, run it every night in a cron job against your home directory, then use a local copy of Apache to serve the said home directory.
Kludgy, but workable. It'd be nice to see this resurrected and turned into something a bit more modern...
Even in this day and age, most people see software as a magical phenomenon that can do anything provided the magician is powerful enough. Telling them "no" means you're but a lowly apprentice.
One common incantation I use frequently: Anything is possible if it can be clearly defined. It's only a question of what is feasible
Works like a champ to A) keep me from ever appearing to be a lowly apprentice and B) divert their attention towards practical development instead of pie-in-the-sky possibilities.
Now, if only I could get out of the requirement to maintain existing code (however buggy and scary) I'd be in HOG HEAVEN!
I maintain a groupware application for a school. One of the things to coordinate is scheduling for classes.
There's two systems: One that's currently active, and a new (vastly improved) one under development. The currently active system was initially developed by somebody not particularly familiar with relational databases, and so is very, very cumbersome to work with.
People need *something* today. We can't commit our resources to something new without providing something today for people to use. But, the current one is so kludgy and terribly designed that it takes massive amounts of time just to keep that bug-infested, terrible thing alive.
So, 80% of the available time goes to maintaining something that really should be deleted, only because the new stuff isn't done yet.
AUGH!
Why ruin my uptime just for a game?
Putting "uptime" and "game" together in the same sentence shows that you really are missing the point.
What is the point of uptime on a personal computer? "Uptime" is a statistic used in marketing "enterprise solutions". If you processed 10,000 transactions per minute on a high-end cluster, uptime is very, very important.
For a personal system running a browser, email, and maybe a game or two, uptime is as relevant as weather is to a fish. (IE: relevant in only the most abstract, indrect sort of way)
Also remember, it costs $$$ to keep that computer running 24x7. Lessee: 150 Watts, 24 hours per day, 30 days a month: 150*24*30=108,000 watt-hours/month. How much are YOU paying for your electricity?
-Ben
The U.S. space program today is a shadow of its past. It's primarily a holdover from a pissing match between the budding USA and the USSR.
The USSR has ceased to be a "superpower", and the USA has established clear, military dominance. What's the point of NASA today?
What's really interesting is the kickoff of the private/commercial space age begun with SpaceShipOne. The Ansari X-Prize wasn't the goal - it was the starting line.
Within the next 1-2 decades, we'll see the old-style national space agencies dwarfed as pure economics brings scale to the space industry.
Space today is basically a high-dollar, cottage industry. Everything is hand/custom made at high expense, and in painfully small volumes.
It'll start with the obvious - people paying $25,000/seat to fly into space for an hour. Technology will be refined, prices will drop, and by the time I'm an old guy (I'm 32 now) I expect to be able to spend a week in space at a price I could actually afford.
But that's not so big, as the reality that new uses for the reduced-cost space travel will be discovered - uses we have no way of predicting.
Just like Edison could never have predicted micro-electronics, the future holds possibilities we can only begin to imagine!
A 9.0 earthquake would release the equivalent of 1,800 Megatons, so it would be in the same ballpark.
/.'ers girlfriend, but it's never actually used by the affected slashdotter.
Come on, man! This is SLASHDOT! A "Megaton" is a measurement of the size of your average
Use a term that others can relate to. For example, how many LOCs would a 9.0 earthquake be?
Actually, I put in the wrong link. I meant to say that this is where active development is happening.
He says it works well on his modest server. I'm going to be trialling it in a production environment, one site at a time.
-Ben
The biggest problem with PHP-based virtual hosting is that any script running has full permissions as user "nobody".
PHP SafeMode is an ugly hack fraught with security holes. The real answer is RIGHT HERE but alas, it's been dropped.
these guys have done some more work with it, and the best bet (so far) seems to be this one which (at least) has active development on it.
I LOVE the idea - from a security standpoint, this is the best news for Apache/Unix shared hosting since the invention of the password. I have a fairly busy server (about 700 active domains) and I'll be slowly migrating over the next 6 months or so to using this tool.
It works with PHP and Apache2. I just won't use any non-threadsafe libs, so no issues there.
For my purposes PHP is well designed and is the best tool for the job I've found. I've looked into many other tools, but hands down the winner for my needs is PHP. Trust me, if there were another tool that offered the same power AND ease AND was more profitable for me to use overall, I'd be using it. If it exists, I haven't found it. This isn't a religous pursuit for me. I don't care what the "best" programming language is. I'm here to feed my family and PHP serves that purpose well.
I could have written your entire post myself, and almost did. I have written projects of every size from very, very small to large projects (~70,000 lines to date) and PHP has been stable, easy, and plenty fast.
I update all servers monthly unless (like with this one) there's a serious security issue. Big problems are rare. I'll have all 15 servers I manage done tonight; it will take about 3-4 hours. (I have build scripts to automate the nasties and make it easy, so I copy in a tar file, edit a settings file, and run the script)
PHP just fits in lots of places. mod_php is great on apache. php/cli is a wonderful scripting tool for system administration. php-gtk (with glade) is a wonderful tool for rapid construction of client-side programs that works on Windows, Mac and Linux together.
PHP is something like VB and ASP rolled together, only cross-platform - a powerful combo!
The 500-2000 resumes are examined VERY quickly. I've heard stories about the piles being arbitrarily halved with the other half being discarded.
You've never actually done it, have you?
in 1999 I, as the (then) owner of a small computer shop in small-town, USA, posted a job opening in the local paper, for the job of a "computer repair technician" at minimum wage in the local (small-town) newspaper.
I got over 100 resumes from that newspaper ad.
How would you deal with that properly? Your talking $7/hour, "fix the computer" stuff. Installing sound cards, network cards, video cards. And a stack of resumes 1 inch thick.
Really, what what would you do?
One of the things that's particularly endemic to the Slashdot community is the "black/white" point of view - the idea that something is secure, or not, it's white or it's black.
_ Election%20Night.htm)
But that's not how security is! It's all shades of grey, and the darker the shade of grey, the worse off things are.
Nothing is ever bulletproof, and seldom is anything ever wide-ass open to the world. It's somewhere in between.
I have a remote-desktop package integrated with one of my apps. It makes for very easy tech support, and I've got it built right into the menu system of my most popular application, so that customers using my software package have access to instantaneous, high-quality tech support.
To prevent users from popping up on my development system anytime they have a question, I put a password in place. It requires a small, 4-digit numeric code, and it changes every day.
By slashdot standards, this is terrible security. It's numeric. No letters, just numbers. The code changes every day, but only based on the day of year. It can easily be predicted, if one has any understanding of the underlying, otherwise very simple algorithm used to guess these numbers.
Anybody with a packet sniffer could crack it with one support session.
But, in this case, it really doesn't matter. The worst that will happen is that your computer's desktop will appear on my screen without my Windows VM.
You could DOS me with 10,000 VM screens, but it would take a very short amount of time for me to block the port number for the VPN and kill that.
So, what's the purpose for improving security? It's secure enough. And that's the point. Many people around here will have a cow if something is potentially crackable, while sitting behind physical locks that can be compromised with an expired credit card.
Gosh! Somebody could pull out their credit card, slide it through the gap between the door and the jamb, and break into your home!
In a black/white world, your home would only be considered safe if it had 1/4 inch steel plate exterior, and locks that the NSA would have serious trouble with.
In the real (shades of grey) world, a deadbolt and a solid-core door is usually good enough, and people live with the odds. Heck, even in the worst ranked neighborhood, you have about a 3.5 to 4 percent chance of getting burgled in a given year. (http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/burg.htm) I almost never lock my back door, and I've never had a problem with it.
That's good enough security for most, as evidenced by the fact that the most important issue was national security or "the war in Iraq" in the recent election. (http://www.rasmussenreports.com/Issue%20Clusters
Notice that individual household crime isn't even on the list (unless you include the 6% "domestic issues", despite the relative insecurity of the average home.
Brought home to me by the book "Secrets and Lies" by Bruce Schneier, this world is not a black and white world. Relative risk must be evaluated, and the equation must be brought to something we can all live with.
PS: Link to sites with A tags appears to be broken on slashdot. I tried numerous times to post links to the aforementioned sites and could not do so.
never mention your competitor in advertising
no such thing as bad publicity, people tend to forget the details but "brand reinforcement" still applies, if you have to mention your competitor then it implies your product wont/cant stand up on its own merits = you have LOST
So.... does this mean that Microsoft has already lost when they mention 'get the facts'???
See? This is a large part of why linux isn't mainstream yet. You have far too many luddites who have far too much influence and want to pretend it's still 1979.
and stuff.
Is it just me, or does this sound very oxymoronic coming from somebody whose sig line says
"He who cannot in 64k program, cannot in 512k." ??
I mean, if 64k isn't consistent with 1979 computer technology, what is?
Hear that? It's the sound of an idiot modded insightful on slashdot.
The value of goods is based on supply and demand. If supply is in shortened supply, generally the value goes up. That's the basis of copyrights - making sure that the value of authorized works retain their value by letting the copyright holder determine the supply.
Making additional copies works somewhat like inflation - it causes the value to drop. Thus, a real loss does, in fact occur. The challenge is to represent that loss in a reasonable fashion.
They most definitely HAVE lost something - the value of their materials!
This part you got right! Copyrights are a right granted by a government. However, you can be quite certain that the issue of the validity of copyrights will NOT be heard at this Supreme Court hearing - only whether or not P2P software providers are liable for the violations of copyright committed by their users.
The copyright system is here to stay. And, for my part, I think that with the exception of the copyright extensions, the copyright system is "right". I'd want to cut the term back to around 20 years, and leave the rest alone.
Note that nothing in copyright forbids stops you from writing a work, and gifting it to the world. You are not required to do anything at all with your works. You are, however, required to offer some basic respect for the works of others, and I like that.
Remember, the almighty GPL is based on copyrights - the very force that makes Linux such a durable legal entity is the same that makes it illegal for you to swap MP3s with strangers without permissions from the copyright holder.
A gentleman I worked with some time ago used to save anything he'd want to delete in a directory called "BLOAT".
It worked much like the Windows recycle bin - make a directory called BLOAT, put stuff in it. Later, if you run across a BLOAT directory, look to see what's in it. If you haven't missed in in a few months, go ahead and delete it!
If disk space is getting low, you can do a simple "find / -mtime +NN | grep BLOAT" where NN is the number of days you want to keep files for to get a list of files to delete.
It's a safe, simple, logical way to delete stuff without risking anything.
PS: I am not a pack rat, but I HATE it when I really need a file I USED to have...
Also, how would you say:Keyboard for me....
You mean, right this second, I'm KILLIN' MY LITTLE FISHIES RIGHT NOW!?!?!?
My lovely wife would be SO UPSET to find that our 5 kids is ALL WE'LL EVER HAVE. I mean, dead fishies... What's the point of that?
Of course, there was this little operation I had a few years ago, so my wife wouldn't have to remember those stupid little green pills....
I want 128kbps. It shouldn't add more than 20-30 ms to a ping time. I want it anytime/anywhere. For a flat monthly fee, and don't count my minutes. I'd be happy to pay $75-$100/month for this. Much more and I probably wouldn't bite.
I'm an indie developer, and do *alot* of remote sessions by SSH. Such service would free me (at last) from having to plan trips and vacations around which hotels provide DSL Internet service to its guests. (although, to be fair, it's much easier to find that now than it used to be, but it does suck that I frequently have to pay $9.95/day)
Verizon Wireless, are you listening?
...and where to put periods and commas (overuse of which are probably the most common non-spelling error I see)...
I, for one, welcome, to the full extent possible, our new, lovely, comma, overlords!
(footnote: since we were dropped by our admittedly shitty label we've made decent money selling CDs and songs online at places like iTunes [apple.com] -- but still nowhere near the amount we received from our "free" loan which paid for our last CD's production and then some).
If you don't mind me asking, what do you mean by "decent money"?
To me, "decent money" is enough to pay for wife, 5 kids, 2 story house, college tuition, etc. Which, all told, is around $50,000 - $60,000 per year minimum. (I live in central California)
Go here to get the full skinny on the REAL lawn chair pilot, complete with streaming audio, pictures, maps, the works.
It was on Art Bell a few years ago....
If enterprise users can be persuaded to migrate from MSOffice/Win32/x86 to OpenOffice/Win32/x86, they might later be persuaded to migrate from x86 workstations to a high-powered Sun server and SunFire terminals. At that point Sun has it made; they can sell systems, expansion components, service contracts, etc.
And that's part of the equation. The fact that it's cross-platform was present when Sun first bought Star Office.
The fact that it's open source is due to the "torpedo effect".