For the record, I wasn't making fun of Java for being slow. I was making fun of Java because it is a legendary pain in the tit for user interfaces, although that has certainly changed.
There's even been some reports (although I have not checked them) that you cannot automatically disable it via kickstart.
I can pseudo-confirm those reports. I've installed RHEL 4 probably over a hundred times in various configurations, and I've often had problems getting SELinux to "stay dead" from the installer. The only problem is that I never really paid attention to the circumstances in which it wouldn't stay disabled, so I can't tell you if I was using kickstart or a regular interactive install.
For what it's worth, I've been doing this a long time and am an RHCE, so I'm not entirely dim with regard to this process.
I read Revelation Space recently on a business trip. I'd never heard of Reynolds before (I don't get to do a lot of leisure reading these days), but I really enjoyed it.
I had no idea there were sequels. Thanks for this suggestion!
People can say 'fuck you fag' after the kill, but it's different when you hear the barages of 'fuck you nigger' jarring from your television set. The best solution, I guess, it to get a new handle. Next solution is to block out the intolerable with this feature.
That tells us two things - that we still have a ways to go where race relations are concerned, and we have a long, long way to go where bigotry towards gays is concerned.
I know! Everything is "this was an evolutionary process," or "it just sort of evolved that way." It's just about at the point where it's impossible to find any stories on Slashdot containing the word "design,", fer Designer's sake.
I work for 8 hours a day (if I'm lucky - 9-10 is probably the more common case). Since I work in IT, close to all of that time is spent on a computer. Often, several.
If I get home around 5:30, then I have another five to seven hours before I'm likely to go to sleep. If I don't bother to check Slashdot, my personal e-mail, or my friends' blogs, or post-process any photos I've taken, or play any games, or chat up any friends online, that still leaves less total time to be with my spouse than I've already spent online.
Reset the permissions? I've been running multiple OS X systems since 10.0, and I've never had to "reset the permissions" even once. I'm not even sure I know where to look to do something like that. WTF is he talking about?
Yeah, I had the same thought.
My guess about the "repair permissions" option is that it someone thought that it looked like a promising way to fix some bug, clicked it, and nothing bad happened. Since it's easy to invoke the "repair permissions" option (it's in the Disk Utility), people do it as a sort of talisman against evil computer bugs.
The main thing that it does is to compare the UNIX permissions of certain files and directories on disk with a list of expected permissions, and if they don't line up, to change them back. It's been commented that it would probably better be labeled "restore" or "reset" permissions.
The permissions on a file may, of course, get out of whack, ususally for the same reason they'd get out of whack on any NIXy like machine - people screwing with them, a buggy installer, corruption on the disk, etc. If someone is running the repair permissions option every five minutes... hell, if they're doing it once a month, even, something is probably seriously wrong.
More info on repairing permissions (what it does and doesn't do) here.
The last place I worked essentially was its own IT department: we had a network administrator, a sysadmin (me), a guy who did a bit of both, and three non-technical staff, plus the occasional intern. Any time we needed computer work done, we did it ourselves. Because we were also a network ops center, we also had our own firewall, private IP range, et cetera.
One day, the boss gets a memo that a bunch of guys from the university were going to inspect all of our computers to make sure they were "in compliance" with software licensing. He found it as irritating as I did, and hinted that although we shouldn't outright prevent them from doing the jobs, we shouldn't find the need to make it easier for them, either.
So at about the time that the guys came by, I rebooted my machine and went out to lunch. Since the default boot option was SuSE, they were pretty puzzled when they got to my system, and left it unmolested.
Of course, they coulda just rebooted the thing and selected windows, but I suppose no one told them that.
"When we first came out no one knew what DVR was," said Richard Bullwinkle, vice president of products at entertainment networking company Mediabolic Inc., and formerly a senior member of TiVo's product marketing team. "So we made it hacker friendly."'"
"Hey Rocky! Watch me pull a brand new consumer electronics must-have out of this hat!"
Hmm, did she smile when you helped her? Flick her hair back? Give out hints about movies she'd like to go to, but doesn't have anyone to go with?
I think that the pretty girl (or hot guy, for those inclined) who calls over the tech support dude to see if he could just help with one more little thing is the unifying fantasy of all geeks, if you ignore the ones about Natalie Portman, etc. But trust me, that's not what what was going on here. And I'm just as glad.
Another quick story. The secretary had a terrible time with her phone, which was a multi-line model. She couldn't grasp the concept that she had multiple extensions connected to the phone: one which was the "main" extension for our group, and another which was specifically for her. As a result, she was constantly confusing her self by pressing the button to use the "main" extension, then trying to access her own personal mailbox. On one occasion, she called my coworker to complain that she'd forgotten her voicemail password, which he dutifully reset before going to her desk to help out. Since we were about to grab lunch, I accompanied him.
She demonstrated how she was trying to dial her voicemail: she pressed the wrong extension, dialed the voicemail extension, and when the automated attendant asked her for her mailbox number, she entered her password. Because she didn't bother listening to the actual content of the error, which was along the lines of "Unknown mailbox. Please enter your mailbox number," she then hung up and said, "See? My password doesn't work."
Coworker explains her error for her, she grumbles about how ridiculous the phones are, and then: "Wait. Why isn't my password working now?" Coworker explains that in keeping with policy, he reset her password when she said she'd forgotten it. She flipped out at him, saying that that was "completely unacceptable," and "how dare he" change her password to something else?
It was about all I could do to keep from jumping across her desk and putting my hands around her throat, so I walked away while he explained - politely - why she was being dumb.
Having typed all that, I shall know go home, have a beer, and daydream about Natalie Portman asking me to show her the art and science of kernel parameter tuning.
I spend about 1 hour a day telling other members of staff how things work in Excel. That's Excel 97 by the way, which we have had deployed for over 6 years.
When I was a very young - okay, not that young, but young - sysadmin, we had a secretary who was constantly asking me over to help her out with something in MS Word or Powerpoint. I believe that the only reason I wasn't also getting requests for help with Excel was that management knew better than to ask her to work on a spreadsheet, but that's another story.
After one particularly frustrating day in which she'd dominated my time with a completely trivial issue, I finally suggested that she might benefit from taking a course on the various Office products. We worked for a university, and they were offered free of charge to staff.
She pooh-poohed me, suggesting that it was just experience. "I'd be as good at this as you are if I spent as much time in Powerpoint as you do." I had to tell her, as gently as possible, that I had no reason to use Powerpoint in my regular duties, hadn't done a Powerpoint presentation in several years, and in fact hadn't even used the program in the last several months for any purpose other than answering her questions.
This brings to mind something I read on someone's blog recently: a consultant who was somewhat frustrated with what he perceived as silly research questions from one of his clients finally asked: "Look, I could go look this up for you on Google, but is that what you really want to pay me for?" Their answer was an unequivocal yes.
Yeah. Instead they're using that nasty old cell tower triangulation thing, which is only what pretty much every other mobile phone offering GPS functionality does.
(In other words, yes, it really does know where you are, probably down to about 50 meters or so.)
Because you can't slip a PS3 into your pocket, drive into town, and have it show you your present location on Google Maps, then automatically find the nearest Starbucks and phone it for you, all things which Jobs demoed in the keynote.
(Minus the pocket and the driving. That was dramatic license.)
Next up, "Why US$150K may be a reasonable price for a house, but probably isn't for an AMC Gremlin
More seriously, though: the phone is cool as hell, but I just can't justify spending the kind of money they're asking on it.
Another, subtle frustration is the pathing your friendly ships use when circling a target. While sometimes ships do 'the right thing' and orbit their prey at an appropriate range, trying to keep weapons locked on the target at all times, that's not always a given. Often, ships locked onto a target attempt something I can best refer to as a 'strafing run', where they move directly at a target, allowing firing on the enemy for a brief period of time, before overshooting and swinging around for another pass.
Oh, I dunno. I seem to recall tons of starship combat sequences from the movies and various series which involved exactly that kind of maneuvering. I couldn't tell you why it seemed appropriate to have spacecraft the size of cities dogfight like they were just slightly clunky fighters - maybe those inertial dampeners work better than you'd think.
Or maybe the firing arc of the weapons isn't as wide in the game as it is in the series? The Galaxy class phaser arrays could fire with a pretty wide arc.
Rather than say that this is a defect in the game AI, I'd say that it's an accurate representation of the odd combat sequences from the entire series.
(Hey, know what would have been cool? Port and starboard mounted photon torpedo launchers, so we could have heard Riker saying, "Give 'em a broadside.")
(IANAL, although I assume you are from your post.)
My answer was simple. American law (I can't speak for others as I am trained in American law) favors the "best interests of the child," even over that of society. It is decidedly not in a child's interest to be harvested before it can draw breath---the harvesting rather impedes one's chance at life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Second, if harvesting before 14 days is good for society, then all embryos should be harvested. I know this is an ad infinitum argument, but stopping introduction of new life to society is decidedly against the interests of society.
In response to your first argument: I'm surprised that your claim left the bioethicist without response. If he is arguing that law should define the start of life at fourteen days post conception, the "best interest of the child" argument can't even come into play. You can't take "the best interest of the child" into account if the child isn't alive yet. That's the whole point of putting a mark at 14 days.
In response to your second argument: the same logic would argue that if the right to abortion is a good thing, then all pregnancies should be terminated. This isn't just an "ad infinitum" argument, it's silly at best, and deliberately misrepresentative at worst.
I got questions like "what's a mode?" and "why are these little arrow keys for?"
Um... what's a mode?
I'm not being facetious - various editors having differing input modes, monitors have modes, most *NIX systems have a single user mode, et cetera. I'm wondering what you're referring to.
Slashdot Mirror
My kingdom for a mod point.
For the record, I wasn't making fun of Java for being slow. I was making fun of Java because it is a legendary pain in the tit for user interfaces, although that has certainly changed.
Could be worse.
Could be Java.
I can pseudo-confirm those reports. I've installed RHEL 4 probably over a hundred times in various configurations, and I've often had problems getting SELinux to "stay dead" from the installer. The only problem is that I never really paid attention to the circumstances in which it wouldn't stay disabled, so I can't tell you if I was using kickstart or a regular interactive install.
For what it's worth, I've been doing this a long time and am an RHCE, so I'm not entirely dim with regard to this process.
Okay, someone look at the official announcement... er, official "thank you" page for RHEL 5, and watch the embedded video.
Then tell me someone at Red Hat hasn't been playing too much Katamari Damacy.
I read Revelation Space recently on a business trip. I'd never heard of Reynolds before (I don't get to do a lot of leisure reading these days), but I really enjoyed it.
I had no idea there were sequels. Thanks for this suggestion!
Jack Thompson, is that you?
That tells us two things - that we still have a ways to go where race relations are concerned, and we have a long, long way to go where bigotry towards gays is concerned.
"Total Freaking Database Error!"
Best 500 error I've ever seen. (Although I'm not sure it actually sent a 500.)
I know! Everything is "this was an evolutionary process," or "it just sort of evolved that way." It's just about at the point where it's impossible to find any stories on Slashdot containing the word "design,", fer Designer's sake.
Are we counting waking hours only?
I work for 8 hours a day (if I'm lucky - 9-10 is probably the more common case). Since I work in IT, close to all of that time is spent on a computer. Often, several.
If I get home around 5:30, then I have another five to seven hours before I'm likely to go to sleep. If I don't bother to check Slashdot, my personal e-mail, or my friends' blogs, or post-process any photos I've taken, or play any games, or chat up any friends online, that still leaves less total time to be with my spouse than I've already spent online.
So who cares?
Thanks. Now I will be unable to think about anything but the phrase "yogurt pirates" for the rest of the day.
"Yar, matey. Yo ho ho, and a packet of acidophilus."
Yeah, I had the same thought.
My guess about the "repair permissions" option is that it someone thought that it looked like a promising way to fix some bug, clicked it, and nothing bad happened. Since it's easy to invoke the "repair permissions" option (it's in the Disk Utility), people do it as a sort of talisman against evil computer bugs.
The main thing that it does is to compare the UNIX permissions of certain files and directories on disk with a list of expected permissions, and if they don't line up, to change them back. It's been commented that it would probably better be labeled "restore" or "reset" permissions.
The permissions on a file may, of course, get out of whack, ususally for the same reason they'd get out of whack on any NIXy like machine - people screwing with them, a buggy installer, corruption on the disk, etc. If someone is running the repair permissions option every five minutes... hell, if they're doing it once a month, even, something is probably seriously wrong.
More info on repairing permissions (what it does and doesn't do) here.
Obligatory quote:
I see you have constructed a new lightsaber. Your skills are complete. Indeed, you are powerful as the Emperor has foreseen.
That reminds me of a story...
The last place I worked essentially was its own IT department: we had a network administrator, a sysadmin (me), a guy who did a bit of both, and three non-technical staff, plus the occasional intern. Any time we needed computer work done, we did it ourselves. Because we were also a network ops center, we also had our own firewall, private IP range, et cetera.
One day, the boss gets a memo that a bunch of guys from the university were going to inspect all of our computers to make sure they were "in compliance" with software licensing. He found it as irritating as I did, and hinted that although we shouldn't outright prevent them from doing the jobs, we shouldn't find the need to make it easier for them, either.
So at about the time that the guys came by, I rebooted my machine and went out to lunch. Since the default boot option was SuSE, they were pretty puzzled when they got to my system, and left it unmolested.
Of course, they coulda just rebooted the thing and selected windows, but I suppose no one told them that.
"Hey Rocky! Watch me pull a brand new consumer electronics must-have out of this hat!"
"Aw, that trick never works!"
*ROOOOAR!*
"I gotta get a new hat!"
I think that the pretty girl (or hot guy, for those inclined) who calls over the tech support dude to see if he could just help with one more little thing is the unifying fantasy of all geeks, if you ignore the ones about Natalie Portman, etc. But trust me, that's not what what was going on here. And I'm just as glad.
Another quick story. The secretary had a terrible time with her phone, which was a multi-line model. She couldn't grasp the concept that she had multiple extensions connected to the phone: one which was the "main" extension for our group, and another which was specifically for her. As a result, she was constantly confusing her self by pressing the button to use the "main" extension, then trying to access her own personal mailbox. On one occasion, she called my coworker to complain that she'd forgotten her voicemail password, which he dutifully reset before going to her desk to help out. Since we were about to grab lunch, I accompanied him.
She demonstrated how she was trying to dial her voicemail: she pressed the wrong extension, dialed the voicemail extension, and when the automated attendant asked her for her mailbox number, she entered her password. Because she didn't bother listening to the actual content of the error, which was along the lines of "Unknown mailbox. Please enter your mailbox number," she then hung up and said, "See? My password doesn't work."
Coworker explains her error for her, she grumbles about how ridiculous the phones are, and then: "Wait. Why isn't my password working now?" Coworker explains that in keeping with policy, he reset her password when she said she'd forgotten it. She flipped out at him, saying that that was "completely unacceptable," and "how dare he" change her password to something else?
It was about all I could do to keep from jumping across her desk and putting my hands around her throat, so I walked away while he explained - politely - why she was being dumb.
Having typed all that, I shall know go home, have a beer, and daydream about Natalie Portman asking me to show her the art and science of kernel parameter tuning.
When I was a very young - okay, not that young, but young - sysadmin, we had a secretary who was constantly asking me over to help her out with something in MS Word or Powerpoint. I believe that the only reason I wasn't also getting requests for help with Excel was that management knew better than to ask her to work on a spreadsheet, but that's another story.
After one particularly frustrating day in which she'd dominated my time with a completely trivial issue, I finally suggested that she might benefit from taking a course on the various Office products. We worked for a university, and they were offered free of charge to staff.
She pooh-poohed me, suggesting that it was just experience. "I'd be as good at this as you are if I spent as much time in Powerpoint as you do." I had to tell her, as gently as possible, that I had no reason to use Powerpoint in my regular duties, hadn't done a Powerpoint presentation in several years, and in fact hadn't even used the program in the last several months for any purpose other than answering her questions.
This brings to mind something I read on someone's blog recently: a consultant who was somewhat frustrated with what he perceived as silly research questions from one of his clients finally asked: "Look, I could go look this up for you on Google, but is that what you really want to pay me for?" Their answer was an unequivocal yes.
That secretary never did take the class.
Yeah, I'm sure they're crying all the way to the bank.
(For the record, I no longer buy from iTMS. I do have an eMusic.com subscription.)
CmdrTaco on the release of the original iPod: "Lame."
Result: Arguably, Apple's most successful product ever.
CmdrTaco on the new iPhone: "They're going to print money with this thing."
Predicted result: Sell AAPL. Now.
Yeah. Instead they're using that nasty old cell tower triangulation thing, which is only what pretty much every other mobile phone offering GPS functionality does.
(In other words, yes, it really does know where you are, probably down to about 50 meters or so.)
Because you can't slip a PS3 into your pocket, drive into town, and have it show you your present location on Google Maps, then automatically find the nearest Starbucks and phone it for you, all things which Jobs demoed in the keynote.
(Minus the pocket and the driving. That was dramatic license.)
Next up, "Why US$150K may be a reasonable price for a house, but probably isn't for an AMC Gremlin
More seriously, though: the phone is cool as hell, but I just can't justify spending the kind of money they're asking on it.
Oh, I dunno. I seem to recall tons of starship combat sequences from the movies and various series which involved exactly that kind of maneuvering. I couldn't tell you why it seemed appropriate to have spacecraft the size of cities dogfight like they were just slightly clunky fighters - maybe those inertial dampeners work better than you'd think.
Or maybe the firing arc of the weapons isn't as wide in the game as it is in the series? The Galaxy class phaser arrays could fire with a pretty wide arc.
Rather than say that this is a defect in the game AI, I'd say that it's an accurate representation of the odd combat sequences from the entire series.
(Hey, know what would have been cool? Port and starboard mounted photon torpedo launchers, so we could have heard Riker saying, "Give 'em a broadside.")
(Hey, know what else? I'm a big dork.)
In response to your first argument: I'm surprised that your claim left the bioethicist without response. If he is arguing that law should define the start of life at fourteen days post conception, the "best interest of the child" argument can't even come into play. You can't take "the best interest of the child" into account if the child isn't alive yet. That's the whole point of putting a mark at 14 days.
In response to your second argument: the same logic would argue that if the right to abortion is a good thing, then all pregnancies should be terminated. This isn't just an "ad infinitum" argument, it's silly at best, and deliberately misrepresentative at worst.
Um... what's a mode?
I'm not being facetious - various editors having differing input modes, monitors have modes, most *NIX systems have a single user mode, et cetera. I'm wondering what you're referring to.