First off, don't think based on my comments below that I think that Mormons compare to Scientology - as I said, Scientology takes these things to a whole, new extreme. (somewhat like your Mormon splinter group does - takes existing attributes of Mormonism to whole new levels) At some point, these extremes make you a 'cult', and that point is pretty subjective.
There are people who think that Mormonism is a 'cult' to this day, and it's justified, even if I don't agree with them.
What that means is that the leaders of congregations, the missionaries, the teachers, and up the ladder are volunteer (i.e. unpaid) positions--absolutely no monetary profit involved. The tithing instead goes to maintaining church buildings, production/distribution of materials, education, and (the greatest portion) charity work.
That's certainly true at the lower levels. Talk to the children of a Bishop to see just how busy they are. But what actually happens to money at the higher levels of your church? You have NO IDEA what happens to the money (really!) once your tithes pay for your local costs (which are minor) and are sent "upstairs".
(The LDS Church, despite being numerically smaller than many other religions, donated some of the largest portions of food, supplies, funds, and labor to various recent disaster sites over the last decade.)
So did Bill and Melinda Gates.
If you are referring to the odd culture of Utah-Mormons, that's a totally different story of odd cultural quirks arising from a largely homogenous group of people in a small area; however the majority of Mormons in the U.S. do not live in Utah, and the majority of Mormons in the world do not even live in the U.S.
My experience is with non-Utah Mormons, and there is most definitely pressure to "stay Mormon" - employers hire Hormons, youth are strongly encouraged to date Mormons, etc. Guess we'll have to disagree, here.
There is no new law or doctrine or secret that comes out in the temple ceremonies that hasn't been taught in so many ways so many times throughout scripture. There's nothing comparable to Scientology's holding back of the darkest secrets until you are too deep and too invested to turn around, as in their OT III texts.
Guess you haven't done your endowments, then. Or gotten married? Have you considered just how "close" your family will feel when they find out that they can't attend your wedding?
(If you are referring to polygamy, it has been illegal in the church for over a hundred years)
Polygamy? Well, yeah, it was necessary to join the United States and all that. =/
And I'm not saying that Mormonism skirts child labor laws or contacts, those are just examples of social norms that can be skirted by CULTS. (EG: Scientology - have you ever heard of a Billion year contract anywhere else?)
A social norm that Mormons DO skirt, however, is one of social relations - missionaries, both young and old, go door-to-door to "spread the word". It's a socially awkward situation when you have to tell two people in suits on a Tuesday that you aren't interested....
If the consumer thought it was a bad game, he would have probably asked for a refund even if it was only ten cents. Price paid is kind of irrelevant.
Years ago, my wife and I had a yard sale. A bunch of our shiat parked in the front yard with little signs made with white masking tape and a sharpie. We had a full set of Time-Life books that were fairly recent. We figured they'd go quickly at $0.25 apiece. And while we were asked about them repeatedly, they didn't sell.
But then we raised the price, from $0.25 to $2 apiece. Suddenly, they weren't "junk" books, they were suddenly valuable! They sold quickly, many of them "worked over" to $1 apiece.
Most of the value you see in things around you aren't based on your assessment of the value, but rather your acceptance of the assertion of value. You value things not for their relative qualities, but for the value asserted by the salesman.
I drive a 10-year-old Saturn 4-door car, a very common car in my town. It's very reliable, it's got a good safety record, mine has just shy of 200,000 miles on the original engine/transmission. Parts are widely available, and cheap to obtain. Even with over a decade of heavy driving and lots of miles, the exterior looks quite nice, and the interior is still together.
By any measure, this car delivers value upon value upon value. Yet it was a cheap car, even when new! Meanwhile, a BMW commands top notch prices even though merely copying a key costs well over $100.
Why? Well, they are a well-engineered piece of equipment, but it's definitely not 5-10x as reliable as my cheap Saturn. They are perhaps marginally safer, but certainly not 5-10x as safe as my cheap Saturn. Parts are expensive, they are expensive to repair by anybody's estimation.
So for what reason does the BMW continue to demand such a price premium if not the simple fact that it's asserted as a high-priced car?
And this isn't just true for cars. People assert themselves automatically, without thinking it. For example, women dress the part almost uniformly. For some reason, you can spot a cheap tramp a mile away. They dress/act "trampy". Geeks look "geeky". Assholes look rather.... "assholey".
People go to great lengths to look the part of who they are. Nearly all of them.
Both are fine with believinng idiocies like evil galactic overlords, Harems full of virgins, or deities that grant eternal life by dying on a wooden stake along with some criminals.
Both have memberships and generally some way to extract money from their populations.
But a religion becomes a cult when one or more of the following occur:
1) a clear bias towards profit. ( google for 'scientology make money'' to see this in action)
2) Membership policies that serve to isolate its mebership from external influence. (Oogle 'scientology disconnection policy' for more details)
3) Extreme polcies of secrecy and nondisclosure. (such as the Xenu story which Scientology still denies even though the cat it SOOOO out of the bag - they charge you some 300,000 dollars to find out the 'truth')
4) General skirting social norms and laws, such as child labor, marriage/sexuality, contracts, finance, education, etc. Note that Scientology has many, many horror stories from children that have been raised in or introduced at an early age. Additionally, it's composed of a complex labrynth of corporations and licensing that clearly is designed to withstand significant legal assault.
Yes, the mormons have many of these attributes, but Scientology takes these to a whole new extreme.
I'm a private pilot and routinely see cities from the air. Numbers like this really don't surprise me much - it is simply amazing how much of a city consists of roads, parking lots, and rooftops. Especially parking lots....
But painting roads and parking lots white seems impractical. But what if we covered them with solar panels? Then we'd all have cooler cars to get into at the mall, a 15% heat reduction (converted to electricity) and most importantly, a clear profit motive to do it in the first place.
Not only would this generate cash for mall owners while keeping their patrons' cars cool, it would also help economies of scale push PV prices down further! It's a win-win-win situation for all involved, and the only thing we need to do is change a law for the CA PUC to allow micro-electric plants to feed the grid!
Why we aren't doing this already just baffles me....
I realize that all forms of steganography are basically security through obscurity, but this one is even more inane. Unless subjected to additional protection, anyone aware of this form of steganography could easily track it, and more importantly, it would look suspicious in traffic logs (drastically increased retrans requests, but only for a small subset of the TCP connections logged). Steganography should look innocuous, in addition to hiding information, if you want it to work.
I guess you haven't seen what it *really* looks like underneath your standard wifi connection, then? It's very normal to have packets, retry packets, duplicate packets, all kinds of weirdnesses. Just pinging my gateway in my *quite secure* WPA2 hotspot, I see at least 1 in 25 "duplicate packet" notices, and about 1/100 missing packets, and this is very typical, and this for a very small (56 byte) ping packet! Imagine what it's like when you are actually sending legit data?
Having 1/1000 resends won't show up as weird at all, IMHO.
Likes? Fast, simple, doesn't-get-in-the-way, good syntax highlighting.
Dislikes? Just one: Search is weak. Search is regex by default, which requires an extra step to search for a particular codeblock. Worse, it doesn't wrap by default, so I have to scroll to the top before I search for something near the top.
It's a project that was developed for a while, dropped,picked up again, dropped, etc. so there are multiple "versions" of it floating around as of a year or two ago. I linked to one of them.
Yes, you can go 'cheap' and spend 'only' 800 dollars on a machine. But that's not REAL cheap - that's just a budget, new computer. Me, I can go REAL cheap and still have a reasonable gaming experience.
I bought a used Pentium IV with a 40 GB HDD and 1 GB of RAM for 50 dollars, with a crashed O/S. It's a Dell, and I have a Dell install CD, so don't need to worry about the OS code or Genuine Advantage. I dug for a bit at pricewatch.com to get a new AGP video card with decent 3D performance in a low profile. Reviews just a year or two ago indicated it was a good chipset. It came with a DVD drive, no burner. 25 dollars got me generic mouse, KB and speakers.
Spent an afternoon, loaded a new OS, (WinXP) drivers from Dell support, and video card drivers, and I now have a system that plays newish games like Star Wars, WoW, and GTA 3 SA and GTA IV at 1024x768 on the 17 inch CRT monitor bought at a yard sale. High end? Not a chance. But for bang/buck, the 650 bucks saved on this rig will go a long way towards helping to pay for my kids' college.
The wacky shit that Scientologists are taught to believe is no more wacky than the shit Christians are taught to believe in.
I would like to agree with you - Scientologists can believe in the evil galactic overlord Xenu as they see fit. Except that one of the basic tenets of religion is that it exists for the betterment of mankind, not personal profit. And it's pretty clear that Scientology is a business cloaked in Religious cloth. Here's a quote from the illustrious L. Ron Hubbard:
"MAKE MONEY. MAKE MORE MONEY. MAKE OTHER PEOPLE PRODUCE SO AS TO MAKE MORE MONEY." - L. Ron Hubbard, Hubbard Communications Office Policy Letter, 9 March 1972
Re:That is not real, is cynical and unprofessional
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Documenting a Network?
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How a professional can hide behind the "let's be real" nonsense is beyond the pale.
Hey, I would *LOVE* to be wrong with "let's be real" except that you don't know how many times I've said: "You'll find it in the documentation I left for you" only to find that, despite me leaving VERY EXPLICIT INSTRUCTIONS about how important the docs are, with each element in the system identified and tabbed as such, only to find out that they NEVER BOTHERED TO MOVE IT from the spot on the shelf where I left it, even after reminding them that it's in the docs repeatedly.
You do this a couple of times, and then you discover that there's no point at all to producing concise, descriptive documentation that nobody ever reads.
Short answer: don't worry about it too much. Put together enough that it looks like you've done something then go have a beer.
You could have the most amazing docs the world has ever known - with passwords and clear instructions - ad the odds are about 20% that the next guy will even read them.
The next guy will figure that he/she knows much more than you as evidenced by the fact that they are there and you are not. And, the cheaper they are (read: inexperienced) the more likely this is to be the case. When things go wrong, they will blame you anyway.
So document away, but for YOUR sake so that if/when you are called in after the new guy horkens everything, you can have an easy time putting it all back together. But don't wait for the call... people will put up with almost anything when pride is on the line.
Most 'airport food' that I've had is on par with Mall food and frequently, there's a midline restaurant or too. Perhaps 25% more expensive than Mall fare - not cheap but you can usually get a sub sandwich for around 8 dollars or so.
Look into the logs on our computing cluster on any given work day ad you'll find between 1,000 and 2,000 users using our hosted software. 9 GNU/Linux systems, lightly loaded. But that's thousands of Windows terminals, and a hundred or two Macs.
But the work is being done on NINE midrange servers!
A funny scenario - one of our clients had their own database system running on a dozen Windows servers. Performance was at a crawl, and I can't tell you how many times I had to reassure them that performance wouldn't be a issue. Well, the cutover happened, and the increase on our systems was so severe that we didn't even notice!
PostgreSQL scales well, but is fairly slow on average.
Really? Because any recent review of Postgres shows that it stomps the pants off MySQL in all cases except very simple queries against very small tables. (And really, who gives a !@#% about that scenario?)
Also....
1) It's data validation is excellent.
2) It's extremely stable. In YEARS of working with it, I've had ZERO integrity issues despite managing rather large data sets.
3) Particularly important: it maintains good performance as the query complexity soars. While it can take a bit of tuning, I've done 12 table joins with combined inner, outer, and subqueries and millions of records, with an average return time of around 0.2 seconds. The statement alone was two pages, printed form, on a single-core Athlon 64 with ATAPI drives and 1 GB of RAM.
4) It's FREE FREE FREE!
5) It includes excellent near-realtime replication. (functionally analogous to MySQL replication, which is nice when it works, but since it usually doesn't, well...)
If having an open system was suffucient, then yum, apt, portage, and similar tools for *nix would be non-starters. I would argue that there doesn't exist a more 'open' environment than the free UNIX movement. Yet nobody wants to go back to the old ways of downloading tarballs and hunting deps.
People want to get to their apps easily, they want to have confidence that the apps won't hork their systems, etc. I avoid packages that aren't in one of a few repos just because of the hassle of updates, etc.
This isn't just a good idea, it's one that Sun shoulda done years ago and if they do it right, we'll all be talking about how Larry pulled the rug out from under MS in a few years. Seriously, I'd consider switching my company's flagship product to Java just so I could sell it on this app store if they make it actually work, and don't kill the brilliance of this idea with lameness!
We are entering an age of information awareness. We literally have machines that can now read our minds. We would be remiss to not take advantage of this!
I'm a pilot, and for a long time, I stubbornly stuck to the "old way" of navigation using VOR radio navigation rather than the newer GPS-based systems. Basically, every 50 miles or so, there's a radio beacon that broadcasts a directional radio signal that you can triangulate from. My logic was that virtually all planes have some kind of VOR in them, while perhaps 1/3 of planes have GPS units.
But I recently "bit the bullet" and learned to use the GPS in the newer rental plane at the local airport. I noticed it immediately: what a difference! Last week, I flew to an airport I hadn't landed at before - something that's always just a bit nerve-racking with radio navigation due to the unfamiliarity. Typically, I've made it a habit to fly in direct to the "new" airport 1,000 feet above the local traffic pattern to get my bearings and prepare an approach - adding a fair amount of time circling around and so on.
But with the GPS locating me to within a few feet on a "moving map", I was confidently making calls as to my location and whereabouts, and made a direct base approach right to the numbers on the runway! No hunting, no worries about traffic patterns. Just straight in.
No, I didn't surgically implant the GPS unit, but it's clearly a case of technology using the sense of sight to improve informational awareness. I'm all for it! If I could (safely) have a bluetooth display of my mobile phone surgically implanted into my brain so that I could, at any time, access google maps, etc. it would dramatically change how I interface with the world. Just think of the advantages:
1) I'd never get lost.
2) I'd be able to look up new words and concepts as needed, seamlessly.
3) I'd be able to make use of "dead time" such as while driving/flying. (most of the latter is spent at cruise altitude letting the auto-pilot get you there)
This is the future. We already approximate it with our mobile phones - technology will become ever more intimate as we approach the technology singularity.
You, as an IT knowing guy, tell your friend, the retard, that his hard drive is broken. Instead of buying a new hard drive, he buys a new PC, on your recommendation. Language is language and it's important that we are all synced.
But even in your example, for the end user, there is no penalty for the confusion.
If the user replaces the actual HDD, the drive itself costs $100, and then he/she has to pay somebody who has a clue a few hours of qualified tech time to come up with a working system. Total cost: $300 to get essentially the same computer back, with an expired warranty.
If the user replaces the computer itself, he/she gets a computer that works (pretty much) right away. Total cost: $300, for a new system with a warranty and most likely significantly better specs.
So the confusion actually works to the end users' benefit in a large percentage of cases. So why would he/she care? Heck, even tech weenies often call the "hard drive" a "CPU", even though the actual CPU is a small part thereof. Aren't we guilty of the same thing?
Some people do nice things because they want to do nice things. Some people do nice things because it makes them feel good, and they enjoy the good feeling. Are they selfish? Is it selfish to donate to charity in order to qualify for a tax deduction, or to keep your income below a tax bracket?
More importantly: Does it matter?
I argue that it makes no difference at all what the reasons for a decision are, that the only really important thing is what your decision actually IS. As an employer, I don't care if an employee shows up every morning on time because he/she feels morally obligated to do so, or is simply terrified of losing the job. Does he/she show up on time in the morning?
Performance is, all by itself, a good enough indicator. And by this metric, if taxing junk food causes a net reduction in their use, that makes it worthy. And it's silly to think that taxes have no effect: "everybody knows" that taxing gasoline more will result in less of it being consumed.
As far as cutting the budget: there's only about 16% of the budget that's discretionary. The rest is tied up in interest payments and pre-obligated spending. So there's not really all that much that can be cut, without actually changing the laws around spending.
Everytime you pass a law to guarantee that XX% of YY budget gets spent on ZZ, you take away from your legislators the power to "make cuts". Do you enjoy the double-edge on that sword now?
Thanks to the neo-right, the USA has, for the last 30 years, committed to a course of distrust, anti-authoritarianism, and anti-educationalism. As a result of this, we've taken much of the control out of the hands of our elected representatives, and giving that power instead to private entities that we didn't elect and can't control. In many circles, being competent in an area is considered a direct sign of untrustworthiness. Don't believe me? Try listening to talk radio sometime, especially night time talk radio. It's just sickening.
We're only beginning to pay the price for rewarding idiocy, now. It will get much worse.
Huh? No, these aren't going anywhere. Windows netbooks are now outselling Linux netbooks.
This may be true, but there weren't any netbooks at all being sold 3 years ago. Since Netbooks are cannibalizing the laptop market segment, the net effect is an increase of Linux in overall market share.
OO isn't cutting into Office
Maybe in YOUR office, but given that whole nations are standardizing on OO.o, and even the newest MS Office contains (limited) support for ODF, it would seem you are just wrong, here.
Postgre isn't even in the same league as a database server,
Have you USED Postgres? I didn't think so. It's a *very* solid performer, with an excellent implementation of ANSI SQL, very low defect rate, excellent data validation, excellent multi-core support, and good fail over support.
and Chrome seems pretty much dead after an initial lovefest.
Chrome rose, then fell, and then has been rising consistently ever since. Since both FF and Chrome are gaining market share, and IE is LOSING market share, it's hard to argue that it's "pretty much dead".
Don't delude yourself into thinking that FOSS is taking off... the only thing denting MS at the moment is Apple and FF. We'll see how the recession shakes out Apple as well.
I don't have to delude myself. FOSS is making a killing in the server space, where I work most, anyway, and Linux is showing solid growth. No, it's not commanding the desktop marketplace - yet. But that's not the point. They are GAINING marketshare, posting solid growth numbers, and Windows, by default, is LOSING marketshare.
Of course because you're outlawing something you have no business outlawing, you drive it underground and force up prices (thus enticing more people into the act you want to ban) and make it dangerous for all involved. Instead of blasting CL for allowing the ads, they should be rethinking the law making the ads illegal in the first place. It's not like legalizing this would lead to the collapse of society... even the Church at one point allowed it.
Careful, now! Explain to me how this type of reasoning couldn't be used to legalize burglary, or kiddie porn?
There is a significant Bellwether for the future in the tech industry - find out what the Nerds are recommending! True of any industry, find out what the pros in the industry are happiest with, and you'll find the up-and-comings if they aren't already on top.
People come to the "computer nerds" in order to get advice. Sure, many sales happen at the local Best Buy with whatever's on the shelf, but the trends start with nerds who identify new technologies, use them, and then recommend them to friends.
Microsoft has had a pretty tarnished name among the nerd community for a long time. Is it any wonder that their products are losing market share? It's really only inertia that's propping them up now. ALL of the following are gaining market share at the expense of Microsoft:
What's more, these technologies represent *core* technologies for Microsoft. Windows + Office are the cash cows for Microsoft, and they are what's most under attack by the Open Source crowd.
Listen to the nerds. They are the quiet whisper that define the future of the industry!
Atheism is the absense of religion. Agnosticism is an acknowledgement that god has not yet been proven to not exist. It's just simple honesty, though I feel that god like in the Bible is about as likely as having god be a 7 foot tall bunny made of spaghetti, used video tape and lug nuts.
Have you ever tried to argue with a fundamentalist?
Anything that disagrees with their point of view is wrong. That is all. Seriously.
And if you think that evidence that Jesus was really a pedophile would really make a difference, you are wrong. They don't care, but the fact that you bring it up is reason for them to hate you.
Fundamentalists are proof to the world that Satan does, in fact, exists.
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First off, don't think based on my comments below that I think that Mormons compare to Scientology - as I said, Scientology takes these things to a whole, new extreme. (somewhat like your Mormon splinter group does - takes existing attributes of Mormonism to whole new levels) At some point, these extremes make you a 'cult', and that point is pretty subjective.
There are people who think that Mormonism is a 'cult' to this day, and it's justified, even if I don't agree with them.
What that means is that the leaders of congregations, the missionaries, the teachers, and up the ladder are volunteer (i.e. unpaid) positions--absolutely no monetary profit involved. The tithing instead goes to maintaining church buildings, production/distribution of materials, education, and (the greatest portion) charity work.
That's certainly true at the lower levels. Talk to the children of a Bishop to see just how busy they are. But what actually happens to money at the higher levels of your church? You have NO IDEA what happens to the money (really!) once your tithes pay for your local costs (which are minor) and are sent "upstairs".
(The LDS Church, despite being numerically smaller than many other religions, donated some of the largest portions of food, supplies, funds, and labor to various recent disaster sites over the last decade.)
So did Bill and Melinda Gates.
If you are referring to the odd culture of Utah-Mormons, that's a totally different story of odd cultural quirks arising from a largely homogenous group of people in a small area; however the majority of Mormons in the U.S. do not live in Utah, and the majority of Mormons in the world do not even live in the U.S.
My experience is with non-Utah Mormons, and there is most definitely pressure to "stay Mormon" - employers hire Hormons, youth are strongly encouraged to date Mormons, etc. Guess we'll have to disagree, here.
There is no new law or doctrine or secret that comes out in the temple ceremonies that hasn't been taught in so many ways so many times throughout scripture. There's nothing comparable to Scientology's holding back of the darkest secrets until you are too deep and too invested to turn around, as in their OT III texts.
Guess you haven't done your endowments, then. Or gotten married? Have you considered just how "close" your family will feel when they find out that they can't attend your wedding?
(If you are referring to polygamy, it has been illegal in the church for over a hundred years)
Polygamy? Well, yeah, it was necessary to join the United States and all that. =/
And I'm not saying that Mormonism skirts child labor laws or contacts, those are just examples of social norms that can be skirted by CULTS. (EG: Scientology - have you ever heard of a Billion year contract anywhere else?)
A social norm that Mormons DO skirt, however, is one of social relations - missionaries, both young and old, go door-to-door to "spread the word". It's a socially awkward situation when you have to tell two people in suits on a Tuesday that you aren't interested....
If the consumer thought it was a bad game, he would have probably asked for a refund even if it was only ten cents. Price paid is kind of irrelevant.
Years ago, my wife and I had a yard sale. A bunch of our shiat parked in the front yard with little signs made with white masking tape and a sharpie. We had a full set of Time-Life books that were fairly recent. We figured they'd go quickly at $0.25 apiece. And while we were asked about them repeatedly, they didn't sell.
But then we raised the price, from $0.25 to $2 apiece. Suddenly, they weren't "junk" books, they were suddenly valuable! They sold quickly, many of them "worked over" to $1 apiece.
Most of the value you see in things around you aren't based on your assessment of the value, but rather your acceptance of the assertion of value. You value things not for their relative qualities, but for the value asserted by the salesman.
I drive a 10-year-old Saturn 4-door car, a very common car in my town. It's very reliable, it's got a good safety record, mine has just shy of 200,000 miles on the original engine/transmission. Parts are widely available, and cheap to obtain. Even with over a decade of heavy driving and lots of miles, the exterior looks quite nice, and the interior is still together.
By any measure, this car delivers value upon value upon value. Yet it was a cheap car, even when new! Meanwhile, a BMW commands top notch prices even though merely copying a key costs well over $100.
Why? Well, they are a well-engineered piece of equipment, but it's definitely not 5-10x as reliable as my cheap Saturn. They are perhaps marginally safer, but certainly not 5-10x as safe as my cheap Saturn. Parts are expensive, they are expensive to repair by anybody's estimation.
So for what reason does the BMW continue to demand such a price premium if not the simple fact that it's asserted as a high-priced car?
And this isn't just true for cars. People assert themselves automatically, without thinking it. For example, women dress the part almost uniformly. For some reason, you can spot a cheap tramp a mile away. They dress/act "trampy". Geeks look "geeky". Assholes look rather.... "assholey".
People go to great lengths to look the part of who they are. Nearly all of them.
(oh ok "religions" what's the difference?)
Both are fine with believinng idiocies like evil galactic overlords, Harems full of virgins, or deities that grant eternal life by dying on a wooden stake along with some criminals.
Both have memberships and generally some way to extract money from their populations.
But a religion becomes a cult when one or more of the following occur:
1) a clear bias towards profit. ( google for 'scientology make money'' to see this in action)
2) Membership policies that serve to isolate its mebership from external influence. (Oogle 'scientology disconnection policy' for more details)
3) Extreme polcies of secrecy and nondisclosure. (such as the Xenu story which Scientology still denies even though the cat it SOOOO out of the bag - they charge you some 300,000 dollars to find out the 'truth')
4) General skirting social norms and laws, such as child labor, marriage/sexuality, contracts, finance, education, etc. Note that Scientology has many, many horror stories from children that have been raised in or introduced at an early age. Additionally, it's composed of a complex labrynth of corporations and licensing that clearly is designed to withstand significant legal assault.
Yes, the mormons have many of these attributes, but Scientology takes these to a whole new extreme.
I'm a private pilot and routinely see cities from the air. Numbers like this really don't surprise me much - it is simply amazing how much of a city consists of roads, parking lots, and rooftops. Especially parking lots....
But painting roads and parking lots white seems impractical. But what if we covered them with solar panels? Then we'd all have cooler cars to get into at the mall, a 15% heat reduction (converted to electricity) and most importantly, a clear profit motive to do it in the first place.
Not only would this generate cash for mall owners while keeping their patrons' cars cool, it would also help economies of scale push PV prices down further! It's a win-win-win situation for all involved, and the only thing we need to do is change a law for the CA PUC to allow micro-electric plants to feed the grid!
Why we aren't doing this already just baffles me....
I realize that all forms of steganography are basically security through obscurity, but this one is even more inane. Unless subjected to additional protection, anyone aware of this form of steganography could easily track it, and more importantly, it would look suspicious in traffic logs (drastically increased retrans requests, but only for a small subset of the TCP connections logged). Steganography should look innocuous, in addition to hiding information, if you want it to work.
I guess you haven't seen what it *really* looks like underneath your standard wifi connection, then? It's very normal to have packets, retry packets, duplicate packets, all kinds of weirdnesses. Just pinging my gateway in my *quite secure* WPA2 hotspot, I see at least 1 in 25 "duplicate packet" notices, and about 1/100 missing packets, and this is very typical, and this for a very small (56 byte) ping packet! Imagine what it's like when you are actually sending legit data?
Having 1/1000 resends won't show up as weird at all, IMHO.
... my favorite free IDE, Dev C++, yesterday and noticed that it had not been updated since 2005!
Me? I've been using Dev PHP for a long time, so long that I just now noticed it hasn't been updated since 2007!
Likes? Fast, simple, doesn't-get-in-the-way, good syntax highlighting.
Dislikes? Just one: Search is weak. Search is regex by default, which requires an extra step to search for a particular codeblock. Worse, it doesn't wrap by default, so I have to scroll to the top before I search for something near the top.
It's a project that was developed for a while, dropped,picked up again, dropped, etc. so there are multiple "versions" of it floating around as of a year or two ago. I linked to one of them.
Yes, you can go 'cheap' and spend 'only' 800 dollars on a machine. But that's not REAL cheap - that's just a budget, new computer. Me, I can go REAL cheap and still have a reasonable gaming experience.
I bought a used Pentium IV with a 40 GB HDD and 1 GB of RAM for 50 dollars, with a crashed O/S. It's a Dell, and I have a Dell install CD, so don't need to worry about the OS code or Genuine Advantage. I dug for a bit at pricewatch.com to get a new AGP video card with decent 3D performance in a low profile. Reviews just a year or two ago indicated it was a good chipset. It came with a DVD drive, no burner. 25 dollars got me generic mouse, KB and speakers.
Spent an afternoon, loaded a new OS, (WinXP) drivers from Dell support, and video card drivers, and I now have a system that plays newish games like Star Wars, WoW, and GTA 3 SA and GTA IV at 1024x768 on the 17 inch CRT monitor bought at a yard sale. High end? Not a chance. But for bang/buck, the 650 bucks saved on this rig will go a long way towards helping to pay for my kids' college.
And still lots of fun!
The wacky shit that Scientologists are taught to believe is no more wacky than the shit Christians are taught to believe in.
I would like to agree with you - Scientologists can believe in the evil galactic overlord Xenu as they see fit. Except that one of the basic tenets of religion is that it exists for the betterment of mankind, not personal profit. And it's pretty clear that Scientology is a business cloaked in Religious cloth. Here's a quote from the illustrious L. Ron Hubbard:
"MAKE MONEY. MAKE MORE MONEY. MAKE OTHER PEOPLE PRODUCE SO AS TO MAKE MORE MONEY."
- L. Ron Hubbard, Hubbard Communications Office Policy Letter, 9 March 1972
To see for yourself, google "Scientology make money"
How a professional can hide behind the "let's be real" nonsense is beyond the pale.
Hey, I would *LOVE* to be wrong with "let's be real" except that you don't know how many times I've said: "You'll find it in the documentation I left for you" only to find that, despite me leaving VERY EXPLICIT INSTRUCTIONS about how important the docs are, with each element in the system identified and tabbed as such, only to find out that they NEVER BOTHERED TO MOVE IT from the spot on the shelf where I left it, even after reminding them that it's in the docs repeatedly.
You do this a couple of times, and then you discover that there's no point at all to producing concise, descriptive documentation that nobody ever reads.
Short answer: don't worry about it too much. Put together enough that it looks like you've done something then go have a beer.
You could have the most amazing docs the world has ever known - with passwords and clear instructions - ad the odds are about 20% that the next guy will even read them.
The next guy will figure that he/she knows much more than you as evidenced by the fact that they are there and you are not. And, the cheaper they are (read: inexperienced) the more likely this is to be the case. When things go wrong, they will blame you anyway.
So document away, but for YOUR sake so that if/when you are called in after the new guy horkens everything, you can have an easy time putting it all back together. But don't wait for the call... people will put up with almost anything when pride is on the line.
And go have a beer.
What kind of airports do you fly out of?
Most 'airport food' that I've had is on par with Mall food and frequently, there's a midline restaurant or too. Perhaps 25% more expensive than Mall fare - not cheap but you can usually get a sub sandwich for around 8 dollars or so.
Add a beer for 2 dollars and I'm happy.
The guy that printed/posted these is sitting somewhere laughing his fool arse off. Srsly - it's obviously a fake, and it made /. front page!
Ever wonder about the dark red glass on the I/R sensor? It's ridiculous to think there's a camera in there...
chuckle chuckle...
Look into the logs on our computing cluster on any given work day ad you'll find between 1,000 and 2,000 users using our hosted software. 9 GNU/Linux systems, lightly loaded. But that's thousands of Windows terminals, and a hundred or two Macs.
But the work is being done on NINE midrange servers!
A funny scenario - one of our clients had their own database system running on a dozen Windows servers. Performance was at a crawl, and I can't tell you how many times I had to reassure them that performance wouldn't be a issue. Well, the cutover happened, and the increase on our systems was so severe that we didn't even notice!
VIVE Linux and Postgre!
What makes you think that there was not a Terminator 3 ?!?!?!
You should try to know before you speak.
PostgreSQL scales well, but is fairly slow on average.
Really? Because any recent review of Postgres shows that it stomps the pants off MySQL in all cases except very simple queries against very small tables. (And really, who gives a !@#% about that scenario?)
Also....
1) It's data validation is excellent.
2) It's extremely stable. In YEARS of working with it, I've had ZERO integrity issues despite managing rather large data sets.
3) Particularly important: it maintains good performance as the query complexity soars. While it can take a bit of tuning, I've done 12 table joins with combined inner, outer, and subqueries and millions of records, with an average return time of around 0.2 seconds. The statement alone was two pages, printed form, on a single-core Athlon 64 with ATAPI drives and 1 GB of RAM.
4) It's FREE FREE FREE!
5) It includes excellent near-realtime replication. (functionally analogous to MySQL replication, which is nice when it works, but since it usually doesn't, well...)
1994 called. It wants its stale information back.
If having an open system was suffucient, then yum, apt, portage, and similar tools for *nix would be non-starters. I would argue that there doesn't exist a more 'open' environment than the free UNIX movement. Yet nobody wants to go back to the old ways of downloading tarballs and hunting deps.
People want to get to their apps easily, they want to have confidence that the apps won't hork their systems, etc. I avoid packages that aren't in one of a few repos just because of the hassle of updates, etc.
This isn't just a good idea, it's one that Sun shoulda done years ago and if they do it right, we'll all be talking about how Larry pulled the rug out from under MS in a few years. Seriously, I'd consider switching my company's flagship product to Java just so I could sell it on this app store if they make it actually work, and don't kill the brilliance of this idea with lameness!
We are entering an age of information awareness. We literally have machines that can now read our minds. We would be remiss to not take advantage of this!
I'm a pilot, and for a long time, I stubbornly stuck to the "old way" of navigation using VOR radio navigation rather than the newer GPS-based systems. Basically, every 50 miles or so, there's a radio beacon that broadcasts a directional radio signal that you can triangulate from. My logic was that virtually all planes have some kind of VOR in them, while perhaps 1/3 of planes have GPS units.
But I recently "bit the bullet" and learned to use the GPS in the newer rental plane at the local airport. I noticed it immediately: what a difference! Last week, I flew to an airport I hadn't landed at before - something that's always just a bit nerve-racking with radio navigation due to the unfamiliarity. Typically, I've made it a habit to fly in direct to the "new" airport 1,000 feet above the local traffic pattern to get my bearings and prepare an approach - adding a fair amount of time circling around and so on.
But with the GPS locating me to within a few feet on a "moving map", I was confidently making calls as to my location and whereabouts, and made a direct base approach right to the numbers on the runway! No hunting, no worries about traffic patterns. Just straight in.
No, I didn't surgically implant the GPS unit, but it's clearly a case of technology using the sense of sight to improve informational awareness. I'm all for it! If I could (safely) have a bluetooth display of my mobile phone surgically implanted into my brain so that I could, at any time, access google maps, etc. it would dramatically change how I interface with the world. Just think of the advantages:
1) I'd never get lost.
2) I'd be able to look up new words and concepts as needed, seamlessly.
3) I'd be able to make use of "dead time" such as while driving/flying. (most of the latter is spent at cruise altitude letting the auto-pilot get you there)
This is the future. We already approximate it with our mobile phones - technology will become ever more intimate as we approach the technology singularity.
Get ready for it! Weeeeeeeh!
You, as an IT knowing guy, tell your friend, the retard, that his hard drive is broken. Instead of buying a new hard drive, he buys a new PC, on your recommendation. Language is language and it's important that we are all synced.
But even in your example, for the end user, there is no penalty for the confusion.
If the user replaces the actual HDD, the drive itself costs $100, and then he/she has to pay somebody who has a clue a few hours of qualified tech time to come up with a working system. Total cost: $300 to get essentially the same computer back, with an expired warranty.
If the user replaces the computer itself, he/she gets a computer that works (pretty much) right away. Total cost: $300, for a new system with a warranty and most likely significantly better specs.
So the confusion actually works to the end users' benefit in a large percentage of cases. So why would he/she care? Heck, even tech weenies often call the "hard drive" a "CPU", even though the actual CPU is a small part thereof. Aren't we guilty of the same thing?
This is a slow news day...
Learn more about "mandatory" spending in the US Govt: an excellent talk at TED.
Some people do nice things because they want to do nice things. Some people do nice things because it makes them feel good, and they enjoy the good feeling. Are they selfish? Is it selfish to donate to charity in order to qualify for a tax deduction, or to keep your income below a tax bracket?
More importantly: Does it matter?
I argue that it makes no difference at all what the reasons for a decision are, that the only really important thing is what your decision actually IS. As an employer, I don't care if an employee shows up every morning on time because he/she feels morally obligated to do so, or is simply terrified of losing the job. Does he/she show up on time in the morning?
Performance is, all by itself, a good enough indicator. And by this metric, if taxing junk food causes a net reduction in their use, that makes it worthy. And it's silly to think that taxes have no effect: "everybody knows" that taxing gasoline more will result in less of it being consumed.
As far as cutting the budget: there's only about 16% of the budget that's discretionary. The rest is tied up in interest payments and pre-obligated spending. So there's not really all that much that can be cut, without actually changing the laws around spending.
Everytime you pass a law to guarantee that XX% of YY budget gets spent on ZZ, you take away from your legislators the power to "make cuts". Do you enjoy the double-edge on that sword now?
Thanks to the neo-right, the USA has, for the last 30 years, committed to a course of distrust, anti-authoritarianism, and anti-educationalism. As a result of this, we've taken much of the control out of the hands of our elected representatives, and giving that power instead to private entities that we didn't elect and can't control. In many circles, being competent in an area is considered a direct sign of untrustworthiness. Don't believe me? Try listening to talk radio sometime, especially night time talk radio. It's just sickening.
We're only beginning to pay the price for rewarding idiocy, now. It will get much worse.
Huh? No, these aren't going anywhere. Windows netbooks are now outselling Linux netbooks.
This may be true, but there weren't any netbooks at all being sold 3 years ago. Since Netbooks are cannibalizing the laptop market segment, the net effect is an increase of Linux in overall market share.
OO isn't cutting into Office
Maybe in YOUR office, but given that whole nations are standardizing on OO.o, and even the newest MS Office contains (limited) support for ODF, it would seem you are just wrong, here.
Postgre isn't even in the same league as a database server,
Have you USED Postgres? I didn't think so. It's a *very* solid performer, with an excellent implementation of ANSI SQL, very low defect rate, excellent data validation, excellent multi-core support, and good fail over support.
and Chrome seems pretty much dead after an initial lovefest.
Chrome rose, then fell, and then has been rising consistently ever since. Since both FF and Chrome are gaining market share, and IE is LOSING market share, it's hard to argue that it's "pretty much dead".
Don't delude yourself into thinking that FOSS is taking off... the only thing denting MS at the moment is Apple and FF. We'll see how the recession shakes out Apple as well.
I don't have to delude myself. FOSS is making a killing in the server space, where I work most, anyway, and Linux is showing solid growth. No, it's not commanding the desktop marketplace - yet. But that's not the point. They are GAINING marketshare, posting solid growth numbers, and Windows, by default, is LOSING marketshare.
And it's the nerds that are leading the charge.
Of course because you're outlawing something you have no business outlawing, you drive it underground and force up prices (thus enticing more people into the act you want to ban) and make it dangerous for all involved. Instead of blasting CL for allowing the ads, they should be rethinking the law making the ads illegal in the first place. It's not like legalizing this would lead to the collapse of society... even the Church at one point allowed it.
Careful, now! Explain to me how this type of reasoning couldn't be used to legalize burglary, or kiddie porn?
There is a significant Bellwether for the future in the tech industry - find out what the Nerds are recommending! True of any industry, find out what the pros in the industry are happiest with, and you'll find the up-and-comings if they aren't already on top.
People come to the "computer nerds" in order to get advice. Sure, many sales happen at the local Best Buy with whatever's on the shelf, but the trends start with nerds who identify new technologies, use them, and then recommend them to friends.
Microsoft has had a pretty tarnished name among the nerd community for a long time. Is it any wonder that their products are losing market share? It's really only inertia that's propping them up now. ALL of the following are gaining market share at the expense of Microsoft:
* MacOS
* Ubuntu
* OpenOffice
* PostgreSQL
* Fedora
* Zimbra
* Firefox
* Chrome
* Safari
Any I missed?
What's more, these technologies represent *core* technologies for Microsoft. Windows + Office are the cash cows for Microsoft, and they are what's most under attack by the Open Source crowd.
Listen to the nerds. They are the quiet whisper that define the future of the industry!
Atheism is the absense of religion. Agnosticism is an acknowledgement that god has not yet been proven to not exist. It's just simple honesty, though I feel that god like in the Bible is about as likely as having god be a 7 foot tall bunny made of spaghetti, used video tape and lug nuts.
Have you ever tried to argue with a fundamentalist?
Anything that disagrees with their point of view is wrong. That is all. Seriously.
And if you think that evidence that Jesus was really a pedophile would really make a difference, you are wrong. They don't care, but the fact that you bring it up is reason for them to hate you.
Fundamentalists are proof to the world that Satan does, in fact, exists.