or possibly the "National Almost Space Association"
I had a feeling that Obama was going to be bad for the space program since Day 1. I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt with it all, but apparently my fears were not just arbitraty.
It's really too bad that what was once the cream of the crop for technology and exploration is now being turned into nothing more than an extra-terrestrial u-Haul. I'm not saying that Obama is completely responsible for that aspect of it, but it looks like he's going to be responsible for making sure it happens.
I agree fully. The domain is pretty much out of your hands, unless you go and get your own domain. What is in front of the domain is more or less the internet equivalent of the visual first impression. I virtually ignore the domain, and will make judgements based on the username. If I'm going to treat someone as a serious candidate for anything, it's hard to do that when I have to respond to Par-Tee-D00d@domain.com.
As they say, you only get one chance to make a first impression, and I'd equate a non-professional e-mail username up there with showing up at an interview with bad breath and a ketchup stain on your shirt.
There's so many good sci-fi stories out there that Hollywood shouldn't need to resort to rehashing old ideas into modern blockbuster performances. The problem is that with the emphasis that is placed on sex appeal and special effects, most of what's good about science fiction gets left out, and turned into what I like to call "science fantasy". Now I've always been a big fan of Star Trek, and was impressed with the treatment that was given to the latest movie, but I still consider it to be in the realm of science fantasy as well. It's showy, and glitzy and impressive, but the story gets sacrificed in order to get butts into the seats. Science fiction, while providing excellent entertainment, also maintains a strong intellectual element. That gets lost once the focus is put into other areas, and the whole genre suffers as a result.
Science fiction afficionados are able to sit and watch something that is more cerebral without getting bored with it, and appreciate the story more than the general public. All of the focus on reboots and sequels is making science fiction stagnate. It doesn't make it more mainstream, but it pollutes it with all of the elements that Hollywood needs to make money. Take a look at "I, Robot" for example. There's a good example of a story (set of stories, actually) that had excellent potential to become a great science fiction movie, but got bastardized by Hollywood in order to sell more tickets. by the end of it, other than the title, Asimov's "3 laws" and a few minor story elements (lying robot, mind reading robot, Susan Calvin, USR) there was nothing that even identified the movie to Asimov's original text. To me, that's poor story adaptation, and made for poor science fiction.
I'd like to see Hollywood take a real chance on some proper science fiction. They probably won't get a $300 million blockbuster out of it, but they'd get a good movie for a change.
I'd always joke with people, saying that my job would be a whole lot easier if we could just keep all those pesky users off the servers.
The reality of it all is that (obviously) without the users, there's no need for the servers, and therefore no need for the admins either. The admins provide an appropriate space for the users to work in, but also have to be able to maintain control from the standpoint of "IT practices".
Developers have different goals than admins, but I don't think that means that they don't see the big picture. I think it means that they just see a different big picture than the admin. I've worked with a number of developers that were more than competent at managing the system as well as working the development side, but corporate practice forbid them to perform admin functions. When it's come to restarting applications or installing application libraries or anything of that sort, I've had no problems with developers making the changes as they need to. The difference is that they would have privileged accounts to allow those changes to be made, but not to make changes to the Operating system or to restart a box. Those practices generally fall outside of a developers normal set of responsibilities.
Now I've worked in environments where developers have had full admin rights on their systems, but at the same time, that was also part of an informed management decision, which also removed my responsibility for those particular systems.
The admin is ultimately responsible for the health and well being of a system, not the developer, which means that the admin needs to do whatever is necessary in order to ensure that system integrity is maintained, while also allowing the developer as much access as is feasible within this context. More often than not, this ends up being a compromise that neither the developer or the admin is happy with.
As an admin, I've supported both types of environment. Depending on what the development project is, sometimes it's just better to allow the developers to have full admin rights in order to add compilers and other development tools required for project completion. The developers were responsible for all O/S issues related to installation of non-standard development tools, but would rely on the sysadmins for hardware support, as the service contracts were part of the corporate global service contracts.
There's no easy answer on this one, and it pretty much depends on company policy around allowing admin access to non-admins. Personally, as an admin, I prefer to maintain control of what is installed on the systems under my umbrella, as it makes patching and upgrading easier when I know what's already there, and what dependencies are required.
The problem I see here is that you've now got a touch screen that is custom built for a specific, single-screen (or possibly dual-screen, since buttons can be concave or convex) application. If you've looked at a restaurant console, there's multiple screens- not just one, so for each different application, there needs to be a different screen. One to show the tables in the restaurant, one to place a kitchen order, one to place a bar order, one to generate the bill, and so on. The advantage of the touch screen is that you can have the single monitor become a custom interface for any application. It would seem to me that this air-bubble system removes that, unless there's cards that can be removed an inserted to provide the alternate interfaces in a single device. Seems a little too cumbersome and rigid to be functional at this point. If it was something that could be built to represent each individual pixel on the screen, so that the monitor could become a dynamically configurable device, as with the current touch screens, then it might potentially have some usability.
Agreed- As a tool that I could use in order to access some of my non-critical data on the fly, it would be useful. I wouldn't want to use it as a replacement for my desktop or laptop systems though. I use my Google G1 in that capacity now, but it would be nice to have a little more functionality than what can be provided over a small Android device. The obvious problem that I would see with it is battery life. As a portable tool, it doesn't have much value if I'd need to be tied to an electrical outlet 50% of the time in order to make use of it.
For checking e-mail and Facebook, or surfing the CNN page, or checking out the sports scores, or even modifying and sending out a resume, I see this as something that I would use. I wouldn't want to do my banking or make online purchases with it though.
Like many of the posters so far, I don't like users having the ability to install packages either. While there's exceptions, "users" are generally people who don't have the skills to do the administrative tasks on the system. If they have the skills, then they should have root (or sudo) access, plain and simple. Why? Dependencies.
Virtually anything that someone would want to install has dependencies. Admins know about dependencies, and understand the risks associated with making changes to them. So Joe User grabs the latest and greatest music app and wants it installed, so he installs it- along with it's 3 dependencies, one of which complains that library ld.so.1 will be replaced and is needed by some other installed program. Joe User just wants his music player, so he overrides the install and forces it to overwrite the library and redirect the related links to the new library. One or more apps are now cratered because of a failed dependency.
The admin now has to go through and rectify a library that was there at one point, but is now gone because of a user. Anything that has potential to change the functionality of the system should not be in the hands of a non-privileged user.
Slashdot Mirror
or possibly the "National Almost Space Association"
I had a feeling that Obama was going to be bad for the space program since Day 1. I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt with it all, but apparently my fears were not just arbitraty.
It's really too bad that what was once the cream of the crop for technology and exploration is now being turned into nothing more than an extra-terrestrial u-Haul. I'm not saying that Obama is completely responsible for that aspect of it, but it looks like he's going to be responsible for making sure it happens.
If you light your fart will it give you extra thrust?
I agree fully. The domain is pretty much out of your hands, unless you go and get your own domain. What is in front of the domain is more or less the internet equivalent of the visual first impression. I virtually ignore the domain, and will make judgements based on the username. If I'm going to treat someone as a serious candidate for anything, it's hard to do that when I have to respond to Par-Tee-D00d@domain.com.
As they say, you only get one chance to make a first impression, and I'd equate a non-professional e-mail username up there with showing up at an interview with bad breath and a ketchup stain on your shirt.
There's so many good sci-fi stories out there that Hollywood shouldn't need to resort to rehashing old ideas into modern blockbuster performances. The problem is that with the emphasis that is placed on sex appeal and special effects, most of what's good about science fiction gets left out, and turned into what I like to call "science fantasy". Now I've always been a big fan of Star Trek, and was impressed with the treatment that was given to the latest movie, but I still consider it to be in the realm of science fantasy as well. It's showy, and glitzy and impressive, but the story gets sacrificed in order to get butts into the seats. Science fiction, while providing excellent entertainment, also maintains a strong intellectual element. That gets lost once the focus is put into other areas, and the whole genre suffers as a result.
Science fiction afficionados are able to sit and watch something that is more cerebral without getting bored with it, and appreciate the story more than the general public. All of the focus on reboots and sequels is making science fiction stagnate. It doesn't make it more mainstream, but it pollutes it with all of the elements that Hollywood needs to make money. Take a look at "I, Robot" for example. There's a good example of a story (set of stories, actually) that had excellent potential to become a great science fiction movie, but got bastardized by Hollywood in order to sell more tickets. by the end of it, other than the title, Asimov's "3 laws" and a few minor story elements (lying robot, mind reading robot, Susan Calvin, USR) there was nothing that even identified the movie to Asimov's original text. To me, that's poor story adaptation, and made for poor science fiction.
I'd like to see Hollywood take a real chance on some proper science fiction. They probably won't get a $300 million blockbuster out of it, but they'd get a good movie for a change.
I'd always joke with people, saying that my job would be a whole lot easier if we could just keep all those pesky users off the servers. The reality of it all is that (obviously) without the users, there's no need for the servers, and therefore no need for the admins either. The admins provide an appropriate space for the users to work in, but also have to be able to maintain control from the standpoint of "IT practices". Developers have different goals than admins, but I don't think that means that they don't see the big picture. I think it means that they just see a different big picture than the admin. I've worked with a number of developers that were more than competent at managing the system as well as working the development side, but corporate practice forbid them to perform admin functions. When it's come to restarting applications or installing application libraries or anything of that sort, I've had no problems with developers making the changes as they need to. The difference is that they would have privileged accounts to allow those changes to be made, but not to make changes to the Operating system or to restart a box. Those practices generally fall outside of a developers normal set of responsibilities. Now I've worked in environments where developers have had full admin rights on their systems, but at the same time, that was also part of an informed management decision, which also removed my responsibility for those particular systems. The admin is ultimately responsible for the health and well being of a system, not the developer, which means that the admin needs to do whatever is necessary in order to ensure that system integrity is maintained, while also allowing the developer as much access as is feasible within this context. More often than not, this ends up being a compromise that neither the developer or the admin is happy with.
As an admin, I've supported both types of environment. Depending on what the development project is, sometimes it's just better to allow the developers to have full admin rights in order to add compilers and other development tools required for project completion. The developers were responsible for all O/S issues related to installation of non-standard development tools, but would rely on the sysadmins for hardware support, as the service contracts were part of the corporate global service contracts. There's no easy answer on this one, and it pretty much depends on company policy around allowing admin access to non-admins. Personally, as an admin, I prefer to maintain control of what is installed on the systems under my umbrella, as it makes patching and upgrading easier when I know what's already there, and what dependencies are required.
The problem I see here is that you've now got a touch screen that is custom built for a specific, single-screen (or possibly dual-screen, since buttons can be concave or convex) application. If you've looked at a restaurant console, there's multiple screens- not just one, so for each different application, there needs to be a different screen. One to show the tables in the restaurant, one to place a kitchen order, one to place a bar order, one to generate the bill, and so on. The advantage of the touch screen is that you can have the single monitor become a custom interface for any application. It would seem to me that this air-bubble system removes that, unless there's cards that can be removed an inserted to provide the alternate interfaces in a single device. Seems a little too cumbersome and rigid to be functional at this point. If it was something that could be built to represent each individual pixel on the screen, so that the monitor could become a dynamically configurable device, as with the current touch screens, then it might potentially have some usability.
Agreed- As a tool that I could use in order to access some of my non-critical data on the fly, it would be useful. I wouldn't want to use it as a replacement for my desktop or laptop systems though. I use my Google G1 in that capacity now, but it would be nice to have a little more functionality than what can be provided over a small Android device. The obvious problem that I would see with it is battery life. As a portable tool, it doesn't have much value if I'd need to be tied to an electrical outlet 50% of the time in order to make use of it. For checking e-mail and Facebook, or surfing the CNN page, or checking out the sports scores, or even modifying and sending out a resume, I see this as something that I would use. I wouldn't want to do my banking or make online purchases with it though.
Like many of the posters so far, I don't like users having the ability to install packages either. While there's exceptions, "users" are generally people who don't have the skills to do the administrative tasks on the system. If they have the skills, then they should have root (or sudo) access, plain and simple. Why? Dependencies. Virtually anything that someone would want to install has dependencies. Admins know about dependencies, and understand the risks associated with making changes to them. So Joe User grabs the latest and greatest music app and wants it installed, so he installs it- along with it's 3 dependencies, one of which complains that library ld.so.1 will be replaced and is needed by some other installed program. Joe User just wants his music player, so he overrides the install and forces it to overwrite the library and redirect the related links to the new library. One or more apps are now cratered because of a failed dependency. The admin now has to go through and rectify a library that was there at one point, but is now gone because of a user. Anything that has potential to change the functionality of the system should not be in the hands of a non-privileged user.