I never said avoid bugfixes and updates. Clearly if your machine is being attacked or is in danger of being attacked upgrade your machine. All I'm saying is there's people out there who upgrade just for the sake of upgrading. That, I dont get.
-Rich
Re:Selfish bastid. Think about the rest of us!
on
Info About Kernel 2.3
·
· Score: 1
Wow. You aparently read a different post than the one I typed. Let me try again...
I'm not telling anyone to NOT upgrade their kernel. I'm just question what the value of upgrading for the sake of upgrading is. If your machine is crashing, by all means, update the kernel. If you enjoy upgrading kernels or like learning about the code or whatever, upgrade the kernel.
All I was saying is there's a lot of people upgrading just to upgrade, just to have the latest version. They're machines dont crash, they dont read the changelogs, yet they MUST have the latest kernel... Why?
I dont see why people should be so thrilled about a new kernel unless it actually does something for them. I used to download the kernel every new patch for 0.99 and 1.0, but those were the days when each patch really addressed something important. If it aint broke, dont fix it, for the most part it aint broke, so I aint fixing it:-)
I cant even remember the last time one of my machines crashed due to a kernel bug '95 maybe. Possibly '94.
-Rich
Re:This is exactly why I got an MS in CS
on
The Dark Side of IT
·
· Score: 2
There's a lot of "meat" working the "janitor" jobs as well. I worked at an ISP for 3 years and I'll tell you right now keeping that perpetually overtaxed system running and preparing for future expansion taught me a lot more about the "meat" of computer science than my instructors did. I found myself digging back up my old texts and reading the chapters my foolish instructors had never covered. Re-writing our broken systems allowed me to finally apply and hone the skills of programming way more than writing contrived problems did. OS design and implementation was suddenly something I *needed* to know, not something I needed to complete so I could move on.
My point is that you can advance your knowledge at one of these "janitorial" jobs too. But only if you're really in it because you enjoy it. A person driven only by a quick buck in a grad program will still come out of college an idiot.
Put this into perspective. If you your free time developing, say, a webserver, and someone like Microsoft steals it from you, takes some features out of it and puts them into IIS and then makes millions off it, wont you want your cut?
I'm not sure if Mitnick should be in jail, as I've read some pretty differing accounts on the case from both sides, but I dont think anyone is doubting that he stole stuff. Stealing is illegal, whether it's Civil Disobedience or not. You must be prepared to pay the price for your crimes.
I dont want to argue hacking/cracking ideals or throw around accusations agaisnt the FBI or 2600 or whomever, I'd just like to know how many people here would be singing a different tune if they were on the other side of the fence. Most of/. are students and have not had crackers steal or attack the systems that put food on their respective tables. It will happen. Let's see who turns the other cheek in the name of hacker ideals then.
I thought the first three were great, but that's probably because I was a kid. The characters and conflicts were very classic, very well defined, very one-dimmensional. If SW or ESB or ROTJ were to come out now, I probably wouldn't even go.
That being said, I'm going to TPM. It's a story I've followed since I was 4 years old, and I'm not about to stop now:-) I also am looking forward to excellent cinnematography, sound, and effects, which Lucas always provides.
Now come on. I cant even name all the idiots I dealt with in college who had no idea how to program. At all. I once had to explain to a grad studnet how to remove white space from a file. In a group project I was working on a person in my group had to explain to others what a hash table is. I dont know ANYONE who learned how to program in college correctly. People I know from college who've gone on to become successful programmers were already good programmers when they got there. People who were not good programmers became worse programmers due to the emphasis on high level design rather than the fundamentals of good programming. In college we spent more time counting the lines in our functions and dealing with the imposed design contraints than we did learning the basics of good programming.
Lawyers send threatening letters to ISP's all the time, and most of the time they are threats which have little basis in law and are designed to frighten ISP's into caving. ISP's are very afraid of lawyers because the laws and precedents are not always clear, and litigation is expensive and time consuming for a small business. OTOH a good lawyer will make quick work of something like Lucas's letter which has dubious basis in law and is just trying to spread fear.
Our apologies, but our server is currently coping with a traffic peak, probably due to the/. effect. Please try your request again in about 10 seconds. If the condition persists, please send us mail at the address below, including any details you think relevant.
You know I was at my library the other day. I cant belive we allow our children in that place! Books about guns, war, The Catcher in the Rye, Mein Kampf, even The Communist Manifesto!!
As Americans we cant let our youth be corrupted by this kind of evil. Get out the matches it's book-burning time!
(For the sarcasm impaired, It's important to note that the Internet is not the only source of information on the planet, just the most hyped. For every web site these killers visited I'm sure there's many more paper related publications in the Littleton Public Library)
Sanford Wallace could be the only other registrar and I'd still run from NSI. I cant even put into words how hideous their service is.
Hell, I'll even use Verio if I have to and dont get me started on what's wrong with that company (I worked there for 6 months while they destroyed the ISP I worked for).
Of course SCO is going to whine about RedHat. They realize that Linux has been a better product for about 5 years now and they need to do something to keep their installed base. Has anyone here every met anyone who likes SCO? I haven't.
I think it's the only true way to level the playing field, and it still allows for MS to be the first/best implementer of an API or format. Just because Microsoft no longer holds all the cards does not mean they wont have a winnning hand. It does mean they'll play a fair game though.
Also, these kinds of regulations should be required for ALL software. Besides making competion between vendors more fair, it also sets up a framework that can be binding in some way. A company can guarantee they they conform to a known standard. A company can guarantee that their software functions in a known configuration Setting those standards is the first step to being able to guarantee quality of product in the IT world. This kind of guarantee is something we will eventually all need since technology has taken on such an important role.
It depends on what you have to do. As a sysadmin everything I wrote was in ksh, or tcl, with some C hackery to extend the functonality of existing programs. System administration does not require complicated software, most if it is generating or reading some sort of report automatically and for those kinds of things interpreted languages excel. We used TCL becasue my boss, the original author of most of the systems, had extensive background in TCL.
At my new job I've done very little coding at all, and everything I write at home is in perl.
These results are exactly what any person who understands both NT and Linux would expect.
The problem is the test was not set up to test Linux/Apache vs. NT/IIS, it was setup to test Linux/Apache vs. NT/IIS on the Dell PowerEdge 6300. They were not thorough in configuring optimal systems for both setups. An optimal Linux solution would include more, less expensive machines in a cooperative network, not one hulking monster.
I agree. Keep it. It's cool. It'll be a geek thing. I used to have a very large sticker of the old logo on my door. I wonder if it's still around anywhere...
It boggles my mind that RMS is the guy here with the best grasp on reality. At least he has good reason for his holy war and continues to fight it without resulting to petty threats orname calling...
If they could all just be like Linus and stay out of the holy wars. *sigh*
Those three points pretty much sum it up for me.:-)
It's important for the education naysayers to note that although you may not be learning anything directly in college, (I can count the actualy useful technical concepts on two hands) You are given access to vast amounts of resources. The real learning takes place outside of the classroom. I would certainly not be in the position I am in today had I not met the people and had access to the resources that I did in college. In a real job you pick up skills, in college you have a clean slate to find a direction. It's important to realize that your boss is not a thinker, and your professor is not a pragmatist. There's something to learn from both of them.
The claim that MP3 sound quality is not up to snuff is (IMHO) ridiculous.
I play/encode my MP3's through a professional grade audio card (DAL CardD+) and they most certainly do not sound noticibly worse than my CD's. Is the quality worse? Probably, but if you have to listen to them head to head and scrutinize it, it probably wont make a difference through a $9.95 pair of headphones or $29.95 pair of Labtec's, it might not even make a difference through your stereo system.
The Rio ships with a TERRIBLE set of headphones, When I plug it into my mixing board it sounds great. When I plug it into my good set of headphones, It sounds great. When I listen to it though my Sony Sports fold-up headphones, it's not so great.
I question whether this person has really put MP3 to the test with studio grade monitors and a group discriminating audiophiles, making sure that the Mp3's are recorded from high-resolution audio sources using professional gear and audio engineers. It wont beat CD, but it will stand it's own.
As a long-time Linux advocate, (6.5 years now?) I cant help but feel a little guilty. Just like in 1992 when i told everyone they wanted to be on the Internet, and then in 1995 when they arrived I'm a little uneasy about the bed I've made in asking for commerical Linux products. We wanted games, we wanted office suites, we wanted databases, well here they are, like it or not.
I suppose that in a couple of years I'll look back and see that commercialism was good for linux just like it was good for the net (well except for spam). Linux needs commercial software to attract commercial interests. We all know here how great Linux is, but it's a tough sell to decision makers. Money aligns the interests of software companies and customers in that a software company wants to keep your money so they will work hard to that end. The FSF does not care about your money so if it comes down to your needs or the community's needs, the community wins. This doesn't fly in commercial settings where a paying customer has an implicit power over the vendor in the form of future revenue to define the path of the product.
That kind of relationship is what ultimately strengthens both commercial and free software. Just because we're not selling the stuff does not mean we dont benefit from the competion. Apache,KDE,GIMP, and Samba all directly benefit from competition, the difference is we want mind share and they want dollars. All of these free packages have becomre more powerful in response to their commercial counterparts. The commercialization of Linux will hopefully only make the software better.
You know it's not only/. that causes this sort of thing. I used to work at an ISP in Chicago, and we used to dread when a customer would call us and say "We're going to be cool site of the day tomorrow, is that a problem?" If the people would have ever given us more than 24 hours of notice we would never have had a problem, but generally it was at 5pm the day before, or 9am the day of.:-) (Hmm warning.. Something to consider, Rob?)
#define ISP_WAR_STORY Mac people might remember when Bungie relased the first Marathon demo. Our core routers were pegged at %110 capacity and our UNIX servers were between 11 and 30 load average for about a day. Ah.. the good old days. #undef ISP_WAR_STORY
-Rich
Say what you want, the idiots will flock to buy it
on
The Cost of Bug Fixes
·
· Score: 1
MS has proven again and again and again that people dont want software that's bug free, they want buzzword compliant feature piles. Personally, it doesn't make any sense to me, but it never ceases to amaze me how fast the community embraces a new feature locking themselves into using otherwise crappy or buggy software. By far the worst products from MS are their OS's and their Office suite (strangely enough their best selling products as well), They're slow, buggy, unreliable, and inconsistent, yet people still buy the stuff. I hear of a lot of great ideas for future MS software but when it comes down to it, people dont want great ideas they want great marketing. MS knows this, and their packaging, marketing, and programming reflect it.
Slashdot Mirror
I never said avoid bugfixes and updates. Clearly if your machine is being attacked or is in danger of being attacked upgrade your machine. All I'm saying is there's people out there who upgrade just for the sake of upgrading. That, I dont get.
-Rich
Wow. You aparently read a different post than the one I typed. Let me try again...
I'm not telling anyone to NOT upgrade their kernel. I'm just question what the value of upgrading for the sake of upgrading is. If your machine is crashing, by all means, update the kernel. If you enjoy upgrading kernels or like learning about the code or whatever, upgrade the kernel.
All I was saying is there's a lot of people upgrading just to upgrade, just to have the latest version. They're machines dont crash, they dont read the changelogs, yet they MUST have the latest kernel... Why?
-Rich
I dont see why people should be so thrilled about a new kernel unless it actually does something for them. I used to download the kernel every new patch for 0.99 and 1.0, but those were the days when each patch really addressed something important. If it aint broke, dont fix it, for the most part it aint broke, so I aint fixing it :-)
I cant even remember the last time one of my machines crashed due to a kernel bug '95 maybe. Possibly '94.
-Rich
There's a lot of "meat" working the "janitor" jobs as well. I worked at an ISP for 3 years and I'll tell you right now keeping that perpetually overtaxed system running and preparing for future expansion taught me a lot more about the "meat" of computer science than my instructors did. I found myself digging back up my old texts and reading the chapters my foolish instructors had never covered. Re-writing our broken systems allowed me to finally apply and hone the skills of programming way more than writing contrived problems did. OS design and implementation was suddenly something I *needed* to know, not something I needed to complete so I could move on.
My point is that you can advance your knowledge at one of these "janitorial" jobs too. But only if you're really in it because you enjoy it. A person driven only by a quick buck in a grad program will still come out of college an idiot.
-Rich
Put this into perspective. If you your free time developing, say, a webserver, and someone like Microsoft steals it from you, takes some features out of it and puts them into IIS and then makes millions off it, wont you want your cut?
/. are students and have not had crackers steal or attack the systems that put food on their respective tables. It will happen. Let's see who turns the other cheek in the name of hacker ideals then.
I'm not sure if Mitnick should be in jail, as I've read some pretty differing accounts on the case from both sides, but I dont think anyone is doubting that he stole stuff. Stealing is illegal, whether it's Civil Disobedience or not. You must be prepared to pay the price for your crimes.
I dont want to argue hacking/cracking ideals or throw around accusations agaisnt the FBI or 2600 or whomever, I'd just like to know how many people here would be singing a different tune if they were on the other side of the fence. Most of
-Rich
I'm not a SW uber-fan.
:-) I also am looking forward to excellent cinnematography, sound, and effects, which Lucas always provides.
I thought the first three were great, but that's probably because I was a kid. The characters and conflicts were very classic, very well defined, very one-dimmensional. If SW or ESB or ROTJ were to come out now, I probably wouldn't even go.
That being said, I'm going to TPM. It's a story I've followed since I was 4 years old, and I'm not about to stop now
-Rich
*Laugh*
Now come on. I cant even name all the idiots I dealt with in college who had no idea how to program. At all. I once had to explain to a grad studnet how to remove white space from a file. In a group project I was working on a person in my group had to explain to others what a hash table is. I dont know ANYONE who learned how to program in college correctly. People I know from college who've gone on to become successful programmers were already good programmers when they got there. People who were not good programmers became worse programmers due to the emphasis on high level design rather than the fundamentals of good programming. In college we spent more time counting the lines in our functions and dealing with the imposed design contraints than we did learning the basics of good programming.
-Rich
Lawyers send threatening letters to ISP's all the time, and most of the time they are threats which have little basis in law and are designed to frighten ISP's into caving. ISP's are very afraid of lawyers because the laws and precedents are not always clear, and litigation is expensive and time consuming for a small business. OTOH a good lawyer will make quick work of something like Lucas's letter which has dubious basis in law and is just trying to spread fear.
-Rich
Our apologies, but our server is currently coping with a traffic peak, probably due to the /. effect. Please try your request again
in about 10 seconds. If the condition persists, please send us mail at the address below, including any details you think relevant.
You know I was at my library the other day. I cant belive we allow our children in that place! Books about guns, war, The Catcher in the Rye, Mein Kampf, even The Communist Manifesto!!
As Americans we cant let our youth be corrupted by this kind of evil. Get out the matches it's book-burning time!
(For the sarcasm impaired, It's important to note that the Internet is not the only source of information on the planet, just the most hyped. For every web site these killers visited I'm sure there's many more paper related publications in the Littleton Public Library)
Sanford Wallace could be the only other registrar and I'd still run from NSI. I cant even put into words how hideous their service is.
Hell, I'll even use Verio if I have to and dont get me started on what's wrong with that company (I worked there for 6 months while they destroyed the ISP I worked for).
-Rich
So who's next.
The guy who made SLS will tell you all about how SLS was the #1 distribution until Slackware unleashed a snappy install and better package management.
The Slackware guys will tell you all about how they were the #1 distribution until RedHat unleashed a snappy install and better package management.
It's not tough to see a trend here. History repeats itself. Who's next?
-Rich
Of course SCO is going to whine about RedHat. They realize that Linux has been a better product for about 5 years now and they need to do something to keep their installed base. Has anyone here every met anyone who likes SCO? I haven't.
-Rich
I think it's the only true way to level the playing field, and it still allows for MS to be the first/best implementer of an API or format. Just because Microsoft no longer holds all the cards does not mean they wont have a winnning hand. It does mean they'll play a fair game though.
Also, these kinds of regulations should be required for ALL software. Besides making competion between vendors more fair, it also sets up a framework that can be binding in some way. A company can guarantee they they conform to a known standard. A company can guarantee that their software functions in a known configuration Setting those standards is the first step to being able to guarantee quality of product in the IT world. This kind of guarantee is something we will eventually all need since technology has taken on such an important role.
My $.02
-Rich
*runs*
Scheme! No! AGH!
Actually just the other day I was talking with some friends on how effective the old Scheme interpreter was at making UIUC's NeXT's crawl.
I still get a chill when I see that little purple book.
-Rich
It depends on what you have to do. As a sysadmin everything I wrote was in ksh, or tcl, with some C hackery to extend the functonality of existing programs. System administration does not require complicated software, most if it is generating or reading some sort of report automatically and for those kinds of things interpreted languages excel. We used TCL becasue my boss, the original author of most of the systems, had extensive background in TCL.
At my new job I've done very little coding at all, and everything I write at home is in perl.
-Rich
What percentage of the code was written for an employer and what percentage was written for a personal or free project.
-Rich
These results are exactly what any person who
understands both NT and Linux would expect.
The problem is the test was not set up to test Linux/Apache vs. NT/IIS, it was setup to test Linux/Apache vs. NT/IIS on the Dell PowerEdge 6300. They were not thorough in configuring optimal systems for both setups. An optimal Linux
solution would include more, less expensive machines in a cooperative network, not one hulking monster.
-Rich
I agree. Keep it. It's cool. It'll be a geek thing. I used to have a very large sticker of the old logo on my door. I wonder if it's still around anywhere...
-Rich
It boggles my mind that RMS is the guy here with
the best grasp on reality. At least he has good reason for his holy war and continues to fight it without resulting to petty threats orname calling...
If they could all just be like Linus and stay out of the holy wars. *sigh*
-Rich
Those three points pretty much sum it up for me. :-)
It's important for the education naysayers to note that although you may not be learning anything directly in college, (I can count the actualy useful technical concepts on two hands) You are given access to vast amounts of resources. The real learning takes place outside of the classroom. I would certainly not be in the position I am in today had I not met the people and had access to the resources that I did in college. In a real job you pick up skills, in college you have a clean slate to find a direction. It's important to realize that your boss is not a thinker, and your professor is not a pragmatist. There's something to learn from both of them.
The claim that MP3 sound quality is not up to snuff is (IMHO) ridiculous.
I play/encode my MP3's through a professional grade audio card (DAL CardD+) and they most certainly do not sound noticibly worse than my CD's. Is the quality worse? Probably, but if you have to listen to them head to head and scrutinize it, it probably wont make a difference through a $9.95 pair of headphones or $29.95 pair of Labtec's, it might not even make a difference through your stereo system.
The Rio ships with a TERRIBLE set of headphones, When I plug it into my mixing board it sounds great. When I plug it into my good set of headphones, It sounds great. When I listen to it though my Sony Sports fold-up headphones, it's not so great.
I question whether this person has really put MP3 to the test with studio grade monitors and a group discriminating audiophiles, making sure that the Mp3's are recorded from high-resolution audio sources using professional gear and audio engineers. It wont beat CD, but it will stand it's own.
-Rich
As a long-time Linux advocate, (6.5 years now?) I cant help but feel a little guilty. Just like in 1992 when i told everyone they wanted to be on the Internet, and then in 1995 when they arrived I'm a little uneasy about the bed I've made in asking for commerical Linux products. We wanted games, we wanted office suites, we wanted databases, well here they are, like it or not.
I suppose that in a couple of years I'll look back and see that commercialism was good for linux just like it was good for the net (well except for spam). Linux needs commercial software to attract commercial interests. We all know here how great Linux is, but it's a tough sell to decision makers. Money aligns the interests of software companies and customers in that a software company wants to keep your money so they will work hard to that end. The FSF does not care about your money so if it comes down to your needs or the community's needs, the community wins. This doesn't fly in commercial settings where a paying customer has an implicit power over the vendor in the form of future revenue to define the path of the product.
That kind of relationship is what ultimately strengthens both commercial and free software. Just because we're not selling the stuff does not mean we dont benefit from the competion. Apache,KDE,GIMP, and Samba all directly benefit from competition, the difference is we want mind share and they want dollars. All of these free packages have becomre more powerful in response to their commercial counterparts. The commercialization of Linux will hopefully only make the software better.
-Rich
You know it's not only /. that causes this sort of thing. I used to work at an ISP in Chicago, and we used to dread when a customer would call us and say "We're going to be cool site of the day tomorrow, is that a problem?" If the people would have ever given us more than 24 hours of notice we would never have had a problem, but generally it was at 5pm the day before, or 9am the day of. :-) (Hmm warning.. Something to consider, Rob?)
#define ISP_WAR_STORY
Mac people might remember when Bungie relased the first Marathon demo. Our core routers were pegged at %110 capacity and our UNIX servers were between 11 and 30 load average for about a day. Ah.. the good old days.
#undef ISP_WAR_STORY
-Rich
MS has proven again and again and again that people dont want software that's bug free, they want buzzword compliant feature piles. Personally, it doesn't make any sense to me, but it never ceases to amaze me how fast the community embraces a new feature locking themselves into using otherwise crappy or buggy software. By far the worst products from MS are their OS's and their Office suite (strangely enough their best selling products as well), They're slow, buggy, unreliable, and inconsistent, yet people still buy the stuff. I hear of a lot of great ideas for future MS software but when it comes down to it, people dont want great ideas they want great marketing. MS knows this, and their packaging, marketing, and programming reflect it.
I wish I knew why.
-Rich