These graphs consist of text and vector drawings. Why on earth would you suggest that PNG, a raster image file format, is at all appropriate? Secondly, Mozilla should easily let you set up what we in the biz call a "helper app". This will let you single-left-click and have the document automatically appear in the appropriate viewer.
I do agree, however, that raw PostScript is perhaps not the most appropriate format. May I suggest PDF? It's basically a wrapper for a large subset of PostScript, and there are viewers for most every platform. It also has compression built-in.
Personally, I'm just wondering why 2 images with no surrounding document for context, and no real discussion rather than a retarded blurb in italics would be regarded as an "article".
Assume that your users don't handle change well. In fact assume that they are as smart as a 5 year old just to be safe. They're not, but hell it can't hurt to plan that way.
You can force a 5 year old to learn new things. I believe we call it "school".
Never short change support contracts, they save you money.
Someone needs to be accountable for the software if things go wrong. If you don't have a support contract all eyes will be on you.
There are no garuntees in software unless you have an SLA. Get one!
These are all the same argument, really. I'm sure you could talk to Red Hat or another OS vendor about service contracts and SLAs, or to a third party support company, for that matter.
Remember that time is money, not just yours, but each and every end user that uses the software, those that support the software, those that have to implement the software in the network, etc. While you might find it easy, the 5 year old may not.
Nothing much should change for the 5 year olds, since they shouldn't be playing around with more than their work responsibilities anyway. If all they're doing is writing reports and the like, nothing much should change. Any changes that are required, just browbeat them with until they get it. Plus, any window manager can be configured to have the close button in the same place and whatnot.
I certainly hope you're not hiring the 5 year olds to manage your network.
There are 10 year olds with MCSEs for a reason. Go find me a 10 year old Linux Guru. Microsoft experts are plentiful and cheap. Linux experts tend to cost 20% to 40% more per hour.
I suspect the reason is that it isn't all that difficult to get an MCSE. I'm not bashing all MCSEs -- there are good ones and bad ones -- but it's certainly no objective measure of quality. Yes, Linux, and other UNIX-based OSes, are more complex, but they are more complex because they don't put up artificial shielding against the complexities of the real world. Therefore, I would posit that an average Linux admin will be better equipped to handle exceptional situations than an average MCSE with equivalent experience. The higher price comes for a reason.
We find that more or less formal standards of good practice exists in
every field of professional endeavor -- with the exception of
programming computers. For some unfathomable reason, computers should
be optimzed for those who are completely clueless, who cannot accept
the responsibility for their own actions, who do nothing to rectify
problems they run into, who are, plain and simple, incompetent at
their job.
-- Erik Naggum, <3221528480408972_-_@naggum.net> (
comp.lang.lisp)
Well, in all fairness, my experience with Microsoft's compilers would lead me to believe that you could just use a text editor and compile from the command line and a Makefile. That said, my experience with schools would lead me to believe that a teacher walking by and seeing anything but the Microsoft Project Editor would flunk the student on the spot.
Slashdot has disabled all character entities (except &... go figure). I think it has something to do with the link between CmdrTaco's insecure masculinity and his "lameness filter". See the end of this post for more details.
CmdrTaco, grow up. Stop trying to fight a useless battle you can't win, or at least stop breaking basic HTML in the process.
The reasons they advertise "No ID required" for Debit/Check cards is that most places want to see an id when you write a dead-tree check.
Well. Cheques and card-swipes are practically identical any more. Merchant cheque verification ensures that funds are in the account, and until CVV2 and smart-cards become more prevalent, the credit card interface provides no more proof of identity, and is more convenient to use for fraud.
I can't blame someone for wanting to see ID on a self-certifying document. If it's a card-present transaction, I guess it's the bank's loss, but I would expect them to request the most stringent checking possible.
As far as legality goes, I'm now puzzled about the legality of requiring IDs for cheques. Considering that just scribbling down your name, bank, and account number is more than required for a legal document, where do they get off? Is it just contractual obligations with the credit card issuers?
I never had anyone protest about me requiring ID, either. Guess we've all been brainwashed...
You can't turn down a credit card purchase just because they won't show you ID. I guarantee after a few people fill out this form you will change your tune.
Interesting. I did not know this, but it does appear that if MasterCard is calling it a "violation" that you are at least partly correct. Sigh. All I know is that I was ordered to require ID on any purchase over $100. Everything else was at my discretion.
Aren't you allowed to require ID if the signature doesn't match, though? (And yes, I know that the signature is authorization, not identification. I seem to be the only one who does.)
Until recently, I used to work at Office Depot. During this time, the store switched over to electronic signature pads. To their credit, they did tell us how to bypass this procedure and allow the occasional paranoid customer (with suitable rolling of eyes) to sign on paper. Unlike Best Buy, from what I've heard.
I was one of those paranoid customers whenever I bought something from the store, and I disliked having to allow customers to use the pads, for several reasons:
You can guess a lot by how someone signs their card, and having the card in hand allows you to verify the pattern of hand movements for the signature, as well as check expiration date, holograms, etc. With the self-swiper, the customer retains the card at all times. Sure, you can watch the hand movements and compare to the signature if you get a glance at it, but regardless, most people put their card away quickly and furtively, triggering mental red flags, and then get pissy if you ask "Sir, may I see the card and a photo ID please?". So you lose either way.
Secondly, the company would have a perfect digital record of the signature. Note that I said "company", not "store". While it's true that signatures could easily be forged from paper receipts, having a single giant database of signatures presents a much more tempting target, and a much greater reward should it be compromised. Keep in mind that Office Depot is the same company that has all their "locked-down" in-store kiosks brag about the need to enable unsigned ActiveX controls, so I'm not the most confident in their data security.
This annoys me as a customer of other stores, too. "See ID" means nothing if the retailer never gets a chance to see it written on my card.
The world of credit cards is rife with fraud and incompetence anyway. Gas stations and convenience stores are the worst. (I was recently in a gas station where the clerk told me, "Well, your signature matches, so I won't ask for your ID." Gee, thanks, lady.) And they're as obsolete as cheques -- we won't be remotely secure until we have smart chips in every card and deprecate all legacy swipers -- but I'm not sure if being secure in my identity can make me feel more secure overall. There are good reasons to keep the anonymity of cash around.
Note that I wanted to use em dashes (— HTML character entity) in my penultimate sentence, but I guess Taco has decided to disallow the ampersand escape and further muddy the waters of HTML. Way to go, guy. Is it too complicated to equate with the space character in your joke of a "lameness filter", instead of restricting those of us with US keyboards to ASCII-7? I notice you've already made an exception for &.
Interesting. I've had some horrible build problems myself with Linux... Mainly on PPC and Alpha. I haven't tried doing much with my iMac recently, but I don't think I was ever able to successfully build a 2.3 kernel on that machine. Things like invalid arguments to asm opcodes, syntax errors in nested-include macros, etc.
My Alpha has the same problem, but I also get fun situations like the USB HID driver not functioning. I can use the usbmouse driver, but hid just sits there and doesn't transmit events.
Odd. My friend and I guess that Marcello doesn't put too much importance on non-x86 architectures. Not that it's ever really been a priority for anyone.:-(
The lib/modules directory got messed up the day I installed it, and I still can't replicate some of the modules I need so I have to manually install some old ones.
Installing a new version of Linux or doing a full reinstall of your current one should fix that.
First, from a quick glance at the bill, copyright owners are only allowed to DoS the distribution of a particular file, not the entire connection:
''(b) EXCEPTIONS.--Subsection (a) shall not apply to
a copyright owner in a case in which--
''(1) in the course of taking an action permitted
by subsection (a), the copyright owner-- ''(A) impairs the availability within a pub-
licly accessible peer-to-peer file trading network
of a computer file or data that does not contain
a work, or portion thereof, in which the copy-
right owner has an exclusive right granted
under section 106,
But! Look closer:
except as may be reasonably
necessary to impair the distribution, display,
performance, or reproduction of such a work, or
portion thereof, in violation of any of the exclu-
sive rights of the copyright owner under section
106;
Although a horrible clich, Sun was mostly right. In today's world, the network is the computer. If they disable my network connectivity (only "as reasonably necessary", of course), they have rendered my system useless, especially as I use my system on a regular basis to download drivers for clients. That is serious economic damage to me.
Plus, it appears I have to show that they "knowingly and intentionally" disabled my connectivity, and caused >$250 in damage, per incident. So they can cause me $50 or $100 of damage at a time, with immunity. Oops!
If I think my neighbor stole my lawnmower, and I break into his garage to get it, I'm liable for the damage caused, regardless of whether I was malicious or simply mistaken. Why do the RIAA and the MPAA get more protection than I do?
I use Emacs on *nix, Mac, and Windows. It works fine everywhere, which means 1 set of keybindings to remember, 1 macro language to learn, and 1 configuration to share between machines.
One editor to rule them all, one editor to find them...
So does the WSJ, although they want money for their logins. Worth it in my mind, although I think that I deserve not to be bombarded by Flash ads on the front page if I pay for it.
Just curious why the NYT insists on spelling it "Icann". It's a set of initials and therefore should be spelled "ICANN". Odd that a publication as prestigious as the New York Times would make a 3rd-grade spelling error.
In fact, I question the original HFS, who would design a file system that required a new incompatible file system just to have a different size of allocation blocks?
Try EMusic. $10/month for unlimited downloads, fast servers, categorization and cataloging. They don't have every band in the world, but they do cover a lot of genres and they pick up new labels every so often. They also sponsor GPLed software development.
I've been a happy EMusic subscriber for months now and I can't see getting rid of it.
Actually, the cartridges have the ink volume printed on the side ("28ml", "17ml", etc) and printers mention on the box that they are "starter" cartridges. For the record, most HP starter cartridges are 2/3 full. And of course the salesperson mentions this. It's so they can upsell and get the customer to buy a few more ink cartridges in the store.
And quite frankly, knowing the language du jour is incredibly valuable, and picking up Java, or any other language, in your "spare time" in college is so preposterous that it only serves to make you look foolish for even suggesting it.
Really.
As I said, I haven't gone to college, but the fact that it seems as if it would prevent you from learning anything even the slightest bit outside the official curriculum is making me less enthusiastic about ever trying it.
I'd just like to note that I learned Java in my spare time in high school (I'm guessing freshman year, when the world is a very strange and confusing place). I found one of Sun's very early basic Java training guides (one that refers to HotJava 0.9, etc) and just went for it. And I kept coding.
You mention later in this thread that you were forced to get a job answering phones. I don't really have much sympathy, considering that I'm stuck in retail selling furniture right now. A coworker of mine was a Navy reactor operator, got a BS in CS, and is now a stockboy. Another coworker completed most of an aerospace engineering degree (and possibly completed an MIS degree) and is now a cashier.
I'm still coding (although sadly I haven't gotten some of my more recent projects posted yet). In my current job, I implemented an (admittedly somewhat simple) application in Scheme, on my PDA, in the tiny little 15min breaks I get, over the course of a week and a half or so, just to make my job easier and for the fun of it. I've just about finished a second and more complex app, in the same circumstances. And I'd never used Scheme before, nor programmed for PalmOS.
Slashdot Mirror
Trying out new albums on EMusic and loading them onto my player is about the extent of my musical prowess.
I play the occasional game of chess and checkers and get beaten every time. I've never tried Go.
I'm right handed.
Crossword puzzles annoy me, and my girlfriend just trounced me at Scrabble.
I... I think I'm good, but no one hires me. Oh well.
I do agree, however, that raw PostScript is perhaps not the most appropriate format. May I suggest PDF? It's basically a wrapper for a large subset of PostScript, and there are viewers for most every platform. It also has compression built-in.
Personally, I'm just wondering why 2 images with no surrounding document for context, and no real discussion rather than a retarded blurb in italics would be regarded as an "article".
You can force a 5 year old to learn new things. I believe we call it "school".
These are all the same argument, really. I'm sure you could talk to Red Hat or another OS vendor about service contracts and SLAs, or to a third party support company, for that matter.
Nothing much should change for the 5 year olds, since they shouldn't be playing around with more than their work responsibilities anyway. If all they're doing is writing reports and the like, nothing much should change. Any changes that are required, just browbeat them with until they get it. Plus, any window manager can be configured to have the close button in the same place and whatnot.
I certainly hope you're not hiring the 5 year olds to manage your network.
I suspect the reason is that it isn't all that difficult to get an MCSE. I'm not bashing all MCSEs -- there are good ones and bad ones -- but it's certainly no objective measure of quality. Yes, Linux, and other UNIX-based OSes, are more complex, but they are more complex because they don't put up artificial shielding against the complexities of the real world. Therefore, I would posit that an average Linux admin will be better equipped to handle exceptional situations than an average MCSE with equivalent experience. The higher price comes for a reason.
Then again, my school experiences sucked.
CmdrTaco, grow up. Stop trying to fight a useless battle you can't win, or at least stop breaking basic HTML in the process.
Well. Cheques and card-swipes are practically identical any more. Merchant cheque verification ensures that funds are in the account, and until CVV2 and smart-cards become more prevalent, the credit card interface provides no more proof of identity, and is more convenient to use for fraud.
I can't blame someone for wanting to see ID on a self-certifying document. If it's a card-present transaction, I guess it's the bank's loss, but I would expect them to request the most stringent checking possible.
As far as legality goes, I'm now puzzled about the legality of requiring IDs for cheques. Considering that just scribbling down your name, bank, and account number is more than required for a legal document, where do they get off? Is it just contractual obligations with the credit card issuers?
I never had anyone protest about me requiring ID, either. Guess we've all been brainwashed...
Interesting. I did not know this, but it does appear that if MasterCard is calling it a "violation" that you are at least partly correct. Sigh. All I know is that I was ordered to require ID on any purchase over $100. Everything else was at my discretion.
Aren't you allowed to require ID if the signature doesn't match, though? (And yes, I know that the signature is authorization, not identification. I seem to be the only one who does.)
I was one of those paranoid customers whenever I bought something from the store, and I disliked having to allow customers to use the pads, for several reasons:
You can guess a lot by how someone signs their card, and having the card in hand allows you to verify the pattern of hand movements for the signature, as well as check expiration date, holograms, etc. With the self-swiper, the customer retains the card at all times. Sure, you can watch the hand movements and compare to the signature if you get a glance at it, but regardless, most people put their card away quickly and furtively, triggering mental red flags, and then get pissy if you ask "Sir, may I see the card and a photo ID please?". So you lose either way.
Secondly, the company would have a perfect digital record of the signature. Note that I said "company", not "store". While it's true that signatures could easily be forged from paper receipts, having a single giant database of signatures presents a much more tempting target, and a much greater reward should it be compromised. Keep in mind that Office Depot is the same company that has all their "locked-down" in-store kiosks brag about the need to enable unsigned ActiveX controls, so I'm not the most confident in their data security.
This annoys me as a customer of other stores, too. "See ID" means nothing if the retailer never gets a chance to see it written on my card.
The world of credit cards is rife with fraud and incompetence anyway. Gas stations and convenience stores are the worst. (I was recently in a gas station where the clerk told me, "Well, your signature matches, so I won't ask for your ID." Gee, thanks, lady.) And they're as obsolete as cheques -- we won't be remotely secure until we have smart chips in every card and deprecate all legacy swipers -- but I'm not sure if being secure in my identity can make me feel more secure overall. There are good reasons to keep the anonymity of cash around.
Note that I wanted to use em dashes (— HTML character entity) in my penultimate sentence, but I guess Taco has decided to disallow the ampersand escape and further muddy the waters of HTML. Way to go, guy. Is it too complicated to equate with the space character in your joke of a "lameness filter", instead of restricting those of us with US keyboards to ASCII-7? I notice you've already made an exception for &.
My Alpha has the same problem, but I also get fun situations like the USB HID driver not functioning. I can use the usbmouse driver, but hid just sits there and doesn't transmit events.
Odd. My friend and I guess that Marcello doesn't put too much importance on non-x86 architectures. Not that it's ever really been a priority for anyone. :-(
Don't you keep your .config around?
Installing a new version of Linux or doing a full reinstall of your current one should fix that.
But! Look closer:
Although a horrible clich, Sun was mostly right. In today's world, the network is the computer. If they disable my network connectivity (only "as reasonably necessary", of course), they have rendered my system useless, especially as I use my system on a regular basis to download drivers for clients. That is serious economic damage to me.
Plus, it appears I have to show that they "knowingly and intentionally" disabled my connectivity, and caused >$250 in damage, per incident. So they can cause me $50 or $100 of damage at a time, with immunity. Oops!
If I think my neighbor stole my lawnmower, and I break into his garage to get it, I'm liable for the damage caused, regardless of whether I was malicious or simply mistaken. Why do the RIAA and the MPAA get more protection than I do?
One editor to rule them all, one editor to find them...
Give them free Internet access.
So does the WSJ, although they want money for their logins. Worth it in my mind, although I think that I deserve not to be bombarded by Flash ads on the front page if I pay for it.
Just curious why the NYT insists on spelling it "Icann". It's a set of initials and therefore should be spelled "ICANN". Odd that a publication as prestigious as the New York Times would make a 3rd-grade spelling error.
Yep. If you're curious, I drive a 1986 Honda Civic.
Microsoft?
Are you on crack? I have a GPS unit that I use when driving all the time. After a few minutes it has no trouble getting a perfect 3D fix.
I've been a happy EMusic subscriber for months now and I can't see getting rid of it.
On Windows 2000, sure. Windows 98 doesn't support USB mass storage, though, and so requires that drivers be installed.
Yes, I'm working retail right now.
But tar.gz is compressed. Maybe you just meant .tar.
microsoft.com :P
Really.
As I said, I haven't gone to college, but the fact that it seems as if it would prevent you from learning anything even the slightest bit outside the official curriculum is making me less enthusiastic about ever trying it.
I'd just like to note that I learned Java in my spare time in high school (I'm guessing freshman year, when the world is a very strange and confusing place). I found one of Sun's very early basic Java training guides (one that refers to HotJava 0.9, etc) and just went for it. And I kept coding.
You mention later in this thread that you were forced to get a job answering phones. I don't really have much sympathy, considering that I'm stuck in retail selling furniture right now. A coworker of mine was a Navy reactor operator, got a BS in CS, and is now a stockboy. Another coworker completed most of an aerospace engineering degree (and possibly completed an MIS degree) and is now a cashier.
I'm still coding (although sadly I haven't gotten some of my more recent projects posted yet). In my current job, I implemented an (admittedly somewhat simple) application in Scheme, on my PDA, in the tiny little 15min breaks I get, over the course of a week and a half or so, just to make my job easier and for the fun of it. I've just about finished a second and more complex app, in the same circumstances. And I'd never used Scheme before, nor programmed for PalmOS.