A rigorous analysis of the cost-benefit value of luggage-handling research versus airplane safety research is beyond my ability (and yours too, I would guess). All I have to go on is an intuitive notion that efforts expended to keep airplanes from crashing are more likely to have positive effects on human existance than efforts expended to reunite people with their clean underwear.
How do you do the install if you need to adjust something before your null-modem/network services are loaded? i.e. change bios settings
You describe one task for which you have to use the KVM ports. But how often do you have to do this? Unless you work for a QA department, not very. Most of the time, you can do everything through the serial port -- if you've had the forsight to make your serial port your console.
I used to work at a internet services company, where we had little carts with monitors, keyboards and mice so techs and colo customers could plug them into servers as needed. I grew to hate these carts, because there were never enough of them, the monitors were always going bad, and I kept getting the mouse and keyboard ports reversed.
These "colo carts" were no good with the few Sun servers we had, since the default Sun console is a serial port. So if you wanted to console-in to a Sun server, you had to find a laptop and a null modem cable. Most of the other techs had grown up in the Linux world, and thought this exceedingly strange, but I'm old enough to remember when a computer with builtin video, keyboard, and mouse ports was a novelty. Indeed, it occurred to me that our jobs would have been a lot easier if we had configured our own Linux boxes to use a serial port as a console. Then we could have just run serial cables out to our own servers (we had about 20 of them, mostly for our own shared hosting business) instead of hunting for a colo cart every time we needed to console in.
It's another case of people doing things a certain way because of habit, rather than logic.
Developing a new technology isn't cheap. If you believe in capitalism, you have to accept that the people who take the financial risks are usually going to get the lion's share of the rewards. Otherwise they have no incentive to take those risks.
What was unfair was that the inventor of a crucial new technology was only rewarded with a pat on the back. And now that's been corrected.
Good point. Except that nowadays, paying a civil claim doesn't mean admitting you fucked up. It just means that it was cheaper to pay the claim than the lawyers.
Sure, this guy deserves to be punished, as he will be. But a share of the blame belongs to the people at Ford Motor Credit and Teledata, whose sloppy security enabled this crime. Nothing's been about any penalties for them, and I'm guessing there won't be any.
I suppose you're right. But that basically goes to the "Microsoft is evil/no they're not" debate. Which I'm not finding very productive -- people basically take one side or the other in that debate depending on their loyalties and prejudices. Not the kind of discussion that'l likely to influence actual events.
On the other hand, if we talk about how Microsoft's domination of their marketplace is affecting how we all live, work, and do business, maybe we can get some practical changes in place.
Too often we're bounded by thinking of events in human time scales...
Very true. It's the main problem in the evolution-creation debate. When creationists are not simply asserting the ultimate authority of scripture, they're insisting that living things are simply too complex to have been created by a series of random events. That argument only makes sense if you fail to consider just how huge the history of this planet is.
But then, who can? I can accept that the earth is billions of years old in a detached, abstract way, the same way I accept a mathematical formula I can work my way through, but never appreciate as a whole. When I try to wrap my imagination around the difference between my own lifetime and the lifetime of the earth, I just fail.
Why is that a major disadvantage? People who want a phone for their home want a phone they can plug in and not worry about. If they want a mobile solution, they'll get a cell. The ability to answer your home phone from your laptop is cool, but not something many people actually need.
Assuming that they're talking about the 3D games (the only GTA games most of us have even seen), it's difficult to see how this could work on a portable. First, the processing power needed to render that pocket universe is immense. (On a medium-power PC, you have to turn the rendering distance way down, or else it lags horribly trying to render buildings you can't even see.) But what really makes me skeptical is the difficulty of playing this kind of game on a very small screen. There's an incredible amount of detail, and I just don't see any way of scaling it down.
I've done a little project management myself, and I've also worked with a lot of full-time project managers, both very good and very bad. My own experience, and my observation of the best project managers tells me this: it's a serious mistake to get hung up on tools.
I once worked at company where the PMs were treated like royalty -- and with good reason. You saw them fighting Murphy's Law every day, and usually winning. I worked closely two of the most respected PMs ("respected project manager" sounds strange, since most companies treat them like shit) and neither of them relied on fancy tech. One simply kept a lot of notes on hard copy, email, and internal web sites. The other mostly did the same, but also hacked together a simple web-based database to help the developers on his team not trip over each other. Both did a really great job.
At the same company, I worked for the one department(publications) that refused to have a professional PM. (Manager was a socially challenged empire builder.) A lot of PM chores fell to me, because of the nature of my job (production for an online document bundle) and because I was the lowest-status member of the department. I knew jack about project management, and had to learn by doing. I made a lot of stupid mistakes, but the biggest was putting my faith in a Lotus Notes database to help me coordinate workflow. It looked cool, and it satisfied my long-frustrated desire to learn Notes, but it just didn't come close to repaying the amount of time I spent working on it.
Later I worked at another company where everybody had the more usual attitude towards PMs: they're petty bureaucrats whose only role is to waste everybody's time. Since there was no coordination, projects were always going off the tracks. Management lacked the ability to change the way people worked, so they kept coming up with silly magic bullets: weird organizational changes, rules for how people were supposed to do things (always ignored), and of course lots of fancy project management tools.
I spent hours learning and fighting this software. It wasn't totally hopeless, but it was overdesigned and inflexible. We would have been better off with simple web pages and databases. Wikis come to mind.
My point is this: you need to learn how to be a Project Manager first of all. Then you'll know enough to chose the right tools.
Your the second person to assert that a mugger deserves points because he's taken personal risk. You can admire someone for being an intrepid risk taker -- but that doesn't mitigate any crimes that peson commits.
I have to admit that I neglected the concept of the effect of the criminal's action. And it's certainly more wrong to victimize somebody who's defenseless. But stealing from somebody, however badly off they are, just isn't in the same class as inflicting harm on a person. If I hit you over the head, I risk damaging a lot more than your sense of security. I probably give you a concussion, maybe fracture your skull. I am immorally inflicting on you the risk of permanent neurological damage and death.
Perhaps we've all seen too many TV shows and movies where people get knocked out, then recover a little later, maybe feeling a little groggy. Pure Hollywood bullshit -- you can't knock somebody out without inflicting serious, possibly fatal harm.
How can they sleep at night? Well, siphoning off some charitable contributions is evil, but not as evil as, say, hitting somebody over the head and taking their wallet.
And let's not forget all those "legitimate" charities that spend as much as 80% of their contributions on their own "expenses". (The standard of the "charity industry" is supposed to be 25% overhead -- but I find even that much repulsive.) Which is why, when I reach for my own wallet, I examine the organization I'm giving to as carefully as the cause they're raising funds for.
Sure, CP/M was available. Lots of OSs have been available for the PC over the years. But good luck getting support from IBM if you had anything except MS-DOS or Windows. This was true even after the Microsoft/IBM "divorce", when the leading alternative to Windows was an IBM OS! DOS/Windows had heavy lockin early on and never lost it -- so much so that not even IBM's sales or support people cared to fight the trend.
Damn right I'm claiming QDOS was an inferior copy. As I understand it, the authors had no understanding of how an OS was supposed to work, and simply implemented as much of the CP/M API as they could. Their only source was the CP/M documentation. The complete functionality was never there, just a bare pretense of compatibility.
Slashdot Mirror
A rigorous analysis of the cost-benefit value of luggage-handling research versus airplane safety research is beyond my ability (and yours too, I would guess). All I have to go on is an intuitive notion that efforts expended to keep airplanes from crashing are more likely to have positive effects on human existance than efforts expended to reunite people with their clean underwear.
Sharks? How absurd! Wouldn't werewolves or mutant eagles be more practical for most applications?
These "colo carts" were no good with the few Sun servers we had, since the default Sun console is a serial port. So if you wanted to console-in to a Sun server, you had to find a laptop and a null modem cable. Most of the other techs had grown up in the Linux world, and thought this exceedingly strange, but I'm old enough to remember when a computer with builtin video, keyboard, and mouse ports was a novelty. Indeed, it occurred to me that our jobs would have been a lot easier if we had configured our own Linux boxes to use a serial port as a console. Then we could have just run serial cables out to our own servers (we had about 20 of them, mostly for our own shared hosting business) instead of hunting for a colo cart every time we needed to console in.
It's another case of people doing things a certain way because of habit, rather than logic.
You know how it is these days -- branding is everything!
What was unfair was that the inventor of a crucial new technology was only rewarded with a pat on the back. And now that's been corrected.
He/she is actually a Lindsay stalker. So the get-a-life factor is not totally absent...
Good point. Except that nowadays, paying a civil claim doesn't mean admitting you fucked up. It just means that it was cheaper to pay the claim than the lawyers.
Sure, this guy deserves to be punished, as he will be. But a share of the blame belongs to the people at Ford Motor Credit and Teledata, whose sloppy security enabled this crime. Nothing's been about any penalties for them, and I'm guessing there won't be any.
In other words, you lack any feeling for just how long 1.5 million years is. Which was my very point.
On the other hand, if we talk about how Microsoft's domination of their marketplace is affecting how we all live, work, and do business, maybe we can get some practical changes in place.
...is a cliche on steroids...
But then, who can? I can accept that the earth is billions of years old in a detached, abstract way, the same way I accept a mathematical formula I can work my way through, but never appreciate as a whole. When I try to wrap my imagination around the difference between my own lifetime and the lifetime of the earth, I just fail.
That's not so much a sense of humor as the absence of a sense of irony!
Why is that a major disadvantage? People who want a phone for their home want a phone they can plug in and not worry about. If they want a mobile solution, they'll get a cell. The ability to answer your home phone from your laptop is cool, but not something many people actually need.
Assuming that they're talking about the 3D games (the only GTA games most of us have even seen), it's difficult to see how this could work on a portable. First, the processing power needed to render that pocket universe is immense. (On a medium-power PC, you have to turn the rendering distance way down, or else it lags horribly trying to render buildings you can't even see.) But what really makes me skeptical is the difficulty of playing this kind of game on a very small screen. There's an incredible amount of detail, and I just don't see any way of scaling it down.
I once worked at company where the PMs were treated like royalty -- and with good reason. You saw them fighting Murphy's Law every day, and usually winning. I worked closely two of the most respected PMs ("respected project manager" sounds strange, since most companies treat them like shit) and neither of them relied on fancy tech. One simply kept a lot of notes on hard copy, email, and internal web sites. The other mostly did the same, but also hacked together a simple web-based database to help the developers on his team not trip over each other. Both did a really great job.
At the same company, I worked for the one department(publications) that refused to have a professional PM. (Manager was a socially challenged empire builder.) A lot of PM chores fell to me, because of the nature of my job (production for an online document bundle) and because I was the lowest-status member of the department. I knew jack about project management, and had to learn by doing. I made a lot of stupid mistakes, but the biggest was putting my faith in a Lotus Notes database to help me coordinate workflow. It looked cool, and it satisfied my long-frustrated desire to learn Notes, but it just didn't come close to repaying the amount of time I spent working on it.
Later I worked at another company where everybody had the more usual attitude towards PMs: they're petty bureaucrats whose only role is to waste everybody's time. Since there was no coordination, projects were always going off the tracks. Management lacked the ability to change the way people worked, so they kept coming up with silly magic bullets: weird organizational changes, rules for how people were supposed to do things (always ignored), and of course lots of fancy project management tools.
I spent hours learning and fighting this software. It wasn't totally hopeless, but it was overdesigned and inflexible. We would have been better off with simple web pages and databases. Wikis come to mind.
My point is this: you need to learn how to be a Project Manager first of all. Then you'll know enough to chose the right tools.
I have to admit that I neglected the concept of the effect of the criminal's action. And it's certainly more wrong to victimize somebody who's defenseless. But stealing from somebody, however badly off they are, just isn't in the same class as inflicting harm on a person. If I hit you over the head, I risk damaging a lot more than your sense of security. I probably give you a concussion, maybe fracture your skull. I am immorally inflicting on you the risk of permanent neurological damage and death.
Perhaps we've all seen too many TV shows and movies where people get knocked out, then recover a little later, maybe feeling a little groggy. Pure Hollywood bullshit -- you can't knock somebody out without inflicting serious, possibly fatal harm.
Bah. Violence against innocent people is an evil in itself, a whole class worse than simple theft.
And let's not forget all those "legitimate" charities that spend as much as 80% of their contributions on their own "expenses". (The standard of the "charity industry" is supposed to be 25% overhead -- but I find even that much repulsive.) Which is why, when I reach for my own wallet, I examine the organization I'm giving to as carefully as the cause they're raising funds for.
Damn right I'm claiming QDOS was an inferior copy. As I understand it, the authors had no understanding of how an OS was supposed to work, and simply implemented as much of the CP/M API as they could. Their only source was the CP/M documentation. The complete functionality was never there, just a bare pretense of compatibility.
That's evidence of a short memory, not intentional deceit. Standard for political discussions these days.