A good journalling filesystem (NTFS, XFS, ReiserFS, JFS) is pretty resistant to errors. You're right about the danger of human error, but as usual that isn't part of the discussion.
Not an option for everybody -- most work machines are behind firewalls. Fortunately, there are a lot of online backup companies.
...and use a VXA tape drive for regular backups.
The kind of solution every geek should have -- you really want regular restore points for your whole system. Alas, at $1K, not within everybody's budget. (My whole setup cost me about $1K.) There used to be a lot of cheap tape cartridge drives, but they were slow and unreliable -- and seem to have disappeared from the market. Sad to say, low-end backup technology seems to lack both providers and customers. Not a good thing.
To get even more profits, of course. Publically-held companies tend to be under constant pressure to up their profits, no matter how profitable they are already. Investors don't care about past increases in "shareholder value" -- they always want more.
It's a shortsighted attitude, of course, but pretty pervasive in today's business world. One reason Google dominates the search market is the short-sighted mismanagement of other search engines like Infoseek and Altavista, which got taken over by big companies that understood profit numbers, but knew nothing about the care and feeding of technology.
Which is precisely why it took Google so long to go public. Page and Brin were perfectly willing to cash in, but not until they could do so without surrending policy control to outsiders. Hopefully that means that Google will continue to be a good citizen.
Somebody has to point out that even if Google does try to make people pay for Wikipedia content, they can't prevent others from "forking" the site, since Wikipedia content is licensed by the GFDL. (Which is why there are so many lame "encyclopedia" sites that just mirror Wikipedia.) So the free version of Wikipedia will always survive in some form. And the unfree version would lose all the volunteer content creators.
CSS does have some usability issues. And it is difficult to do real tables in CSS. But that's irrelevent for two reasons: (a) this isn't a real table; (b) a simple flow like this is not very hard in CSS.
You do have a good point about the date. Seven years ago, using tables was pretty much the only way to do this kind of layout.
True. Personally, I would not consider any OS that didn't support a good journalling file system. It's a huge safety factor.
I guess my point was that Red Hat has pretty much lost interest in supporting non-server users. But even in that context, their refusal to upgrade their file system support is pretty shortsighted.
By far RedHat's biggest failing IMO is the lack of support for ReiserFS - JFS and XFS would be nice for others, but the former is all I really care for.
Ah, but you don't need a journalling file system to run Oracle, do you?
It didn't register because you simply didn't make it clear. The question being asked is, "What technology do you know that might be helpful." But you're not talking technology, you're steering the conversation into a completely non-tech subject. Which is OK, but you need to be explicit about it.
Everything you say makes perfect sense -- to somebody with a training in developmental psychology. Saying it here is as absurd as talking about case mods on a psychology development board.
You're not going to get precise understanding of somebody's neuropsychological problems from a typical Slashdotter. The best you're going to get is something like, "I tried out program x with my cousin who's mildly retarded, and he seemed to find it helpful." Your insistence on correct technical language is just plain pointless.
The question isn't how many people have access to AFS software. The question is how many people use AFS software. I could be wrong, but I'm doubtful that it's enough to justify space in this book.
Perhaps standard labels can be helpful in specific ways. But you can only do so much with them. I speak from painful experience when I say that labels very often serve as barrier to understanding the specific individual's specific problems. Too often I've seen mental health professionals underemphasize some problems and overemphasize others simply because the "diagnosis" said they had to.
In any case, it's pretty dumb to insist on "correct" labels when most of the people you're talking to have no idea what the labels mean.
I've never heard a neo-bolshevik marxist loony call himself a "liberal". Most, in fact, consider the term an insult. The confusion comes from the fact that crypto-fascist reactionary rabble rousers (or, as they're more commonly known, conservative commentators) find it it convenient to apply "liberal" to every political stance that's to the left of Ghengis Khan.
You have a more adept eye than I (excuse the pun). FF divides the table into two equal columns, making it difficult to connect the speaker with the dialogue. For me, anyway.
Firefox's "bug" here is that it doesn't try to make a column with unspecified width as narrow as possible. Or at least it doesn't try hard enough in this case. That's not really a bug, since no HTML specification requires a browser to do that, even though most browsers do. A classic case of coding to the browser instead of the specification.
So you seem to have two points: Slashdotters shouldn't be asked the question, and if they are, they should be provided with information they don't know how to interpret. Yeah, that's helpful.
I worked on the Delphi API documentation from 2000 to 2002. (If you want to pick a nit, I actually spent more time working on C++Builder and Kylix. But those products are just the C++ and Linux manifestations of Delphi.) A good chunk of the current docs for the object hierarchy under TComponent is my work. I spent a lot of time staring at Delphi (AKA Object Pascal) source code, and I really came to appreciate the language's ability to describe powerful objects with simple code. And how easy it is to create really good software even if you're not a gifted programmer. Which pretty much describes me.
Alas, my experience at Borland left me with a total aversion to the whole scene. It wasn't just that Borland is badly managed, or that everybody who works there seems to have a bad case of "I know what I'm doing, the rest of you can fuck off." It's how great Borland could be if they just developed a general sense of teamwork. There isn't an IDE on the planet that could compete it, if it were just a little more user friendly, a lot better documented, and sanely marketed.
Nowadays I find it unbearably depressing to even fire up my copy of Delphi. I've been boning up on Java...
How many people at Slashdot know the DSM? The questioner is appealing to out knowledge of computer software, not our training in developmental psychology. From our point of view, "He can't read or write very well" is a perfectly adequate description.
I actually do have some familiarity with the DSM having had my own mental abberations submitted to its Procrustean taxonomy. I'm tempted to make some critical comments, but life's too short. Suffice to say that the headshrinkers I most respect consider it useful for finding appropriate rituals to appease the Insurance Gods, nothing more.
This is one of those occasions I'm grateful I still have Internet Explorer (and the IEView extension). The authors of this page made the classic blunder of coding their HTML to the browser, not the the standard. Specifically, they used tables to encode non-tabular text. The result looks like a play script on whatever browser they tested it on, but Firefox doesn't have the smarts to deal with a table that long. And why should it, except to accomodate inept page designers? A goal that deserves some priority, but not an infinite amount.
Getting too arrogant? O'Reilly's books have been badly edited as long as I can remember. Although this is the first time I've heard of them failing to run a spell check. What they usually do is let the author free-associate all over the landscape, with no overall structure and too many footnotes, irrelevencies, and grade-school-level jokes. Doesn't matter if the author has some self-discipline, but most of them don't. Smart people, but not good at expressing themselves clearly or concisely.
I never buy the O'Reilly book if another publisher has a decent title on the same subject. But it's often the case that O'Reilly has the only title on a particular subject, or the only one by an author who really knows the subject. So they kind of have a guaranteed audience. Which, as you say, tends to make them arrogant.
What makes this particular frustrating is that somebody at O'Reilly sat down and wrote one of the best writer's guides I've ever seen. If only they'd make their writers actually read it!
Slashdot Mirror
I guess I agree with your statement. But it does nothing to answer my question.
I don't understand. PHP turns web pages into little programs. If you're not happy with that idea (I admit I'm not), why do you use PHP at all?
Political movements with 10 or fewer members don't count. Next you'll be telling me that I should take the Green Libertarian Nazis seriously.
A good journalling filesystem (NTFS, XFS, ReiserFS, JFS) is pretty resistant to errors. You're right about the danger of human error, but as usual that isn't part of the discussion.
Nice to hear that there are plenty of resources. You wouldn't happen to know what they are, would you?
Offtopic. Plus their animated Slashdot adds are very irritating.
IMDB isn't covered by the GFDL.
It's a shortsighted attitude, of course, but pretty pervasive in today's business world. One reason Google dominates the search market is the short-sighted mismanagement of other search engines like Infoseek and Altavista, which got taken over by big companies that understood profit numbers, but knew nothing about the care and feeding of technology.
Which is precisely why it took Google so long to go public. Page and Brin were perfectly willing to cash in, but not until they could do so without surrending policy control to outsiders. Hopefully that means that Google will continue to be a good citizen.
Somebody has to point out that even if Google does try to make people pay for Wikipedia content, they can't prevent others from "forking" the site, since Wikipedia content is licensed by the GFDL. (Which is why there are so many lame "encyclopedia" sites that just mirror Wikipedia.) So the free version of Wikipedia will always survive in some form. And the unfree version would lose all the volunteer content creators.
I've said it before: Dvorak's a pompous twit.
Still works for me. Perhaps your browser has been hijacked.
You do have a good point about the date. Seven years ago, using tables was pretty much the only way to do this kind of layout.
I guess my point was that Red Hat has pretty much lost interest in supporting non-server users. But even in that context, their refusal to upgrade their file system support is pretty shortsighted.
It didn't register because you simply didn't make it clear. The question being asked is, "What technology do you know that might be helpful." But you're not talking technology, you're steering the conversation into a completely non-tech subject. Which is OK, but you need to be explicit about it.
You're not going to get precise understanding of somebody's neuropsychological problems from a typical Slashdotter. The best you're going to get is something like, "I tried out program x with my cousin who's mildly retarded, and he seemed to find it helpful." Your insistence on correct technical language is just plain pointless.
The question isn't how many people have access to AFS software. The question is how many people use AFS software. I could be wrong, but I'm doubtful that it's enough to justify space in this book.
In any case, it's pretty dumb to insist on "correct" labels when most of the people you're talking to have no idea what the labels mean.
I've never heard a neo-bolshevik marxist loony call himself a "liberal". Most, in fact, consider the term an insult. The confusion comes from the fact that crypto-fascist reactionary rabble rousers (or, as they're more commonly known, conservative commentators) find it it convenient to apply "liberal" to every political stance that's to the left of Ghengis Khan.
Firefox's "bug" here is that it doesn't try to make a column with unspecified width as narrow as possible. Or at least it doesn't try hard enough in this case. That's not really a bug, since no HTML specification requires a browser to do that, even though most browsers do. A classic case of coding to the browser instead of the specification.
So you seem to have two points: Slashdotters shouldn't be asked the question, and if they are, they should be provided with information they don't know how to interpret. Yeah, that's helpful.
Alas, my experience at Borland left me with a total aversion to the whole scene. It wasn't just that Borland is badly managed, or that everybody who works there seems to have a bad case of "I know what I'm doing, the rest of you can fuck off." It's how great Borland could be if they just developed a general sense of teamwork. There isn't an IDE on the planet that could compete it, if it were just a little more user friendly, a lot better documented, and sanely marketed.
Nowadays I find it unbearably depressing to even fire up my copy of Delphi. I've been boning up on Java...
I actually do have some familiarity with the DSM having had my own mental abberations submitted to its Procrustean taxonomy. I'm tempted to make some critical comments, but life's too short. Suffice to say that the headshrinkers I most respect consider it useful for finding appropriate rituals to appease the Insurance Gods, nothing more.
This is one of those occasions I'm grateful I still have Internet Explorer (and the IEView extension). The authors of this page made the classic blunder of coding their HTML to the browser, not the the standard. Specifically, they used tables to encode non-tabular text. The result looks like a play script on whatever browser they tested it on, but Firefox doesn't have the smarts to deal with a table that long. And why should it, except to accomodate inept page designers? A goal that deserves some priority, but not an infinite amount.
I assume you meant the Andrew File System and not another AFS? As the obscurity of the name attests, its not that popular a file system.
I never buy the O'Reilly book if another publisher has a decent title on the same subject. But it's often the case that O'Reilly has the only title on a particular subject, or the only one by an author who really knows the subject. So they kind of have a guaranteed audience. Which, as you say, tends to make them arrogant.
What makes this particular frustrating is that somebody at O'Reilly sat down and wrote one of the best writer's guides I've ever seen. If only they'd make their writers actually read it!