You're not wrong. Is it just me, or does this de Raadt character get 'snippy' each and every time the world doesn't roll over and play the game how he wants them to?
An important point in a geek's career is the time when s/he recognises that if s/he's gonna get any further in said career, they're gonna have to maintain a business-benefiting attitude and act in business-benefiting ways else businesses won't employ you any more. Sheer guru-like skill only carries you so far, and then you've gotta play nice with others or others won't play with you anymore.
Some geeks come to that realisation early in their careers. I try to tell my geek.students that before they graduate. Some geeks never ever wake up, and they grow old on low incomes angry at the world.
de Raadt does some wonderful things, sure, but there's always this persistent undertone of a bad attitude waiting to sneak out and throw his weight around. Public nastygrams and "screw you, we'll ship with even less support for your product than we did before" dummy spits constitute "does not play nice with others" in my book.
Trouble is, geeks carry no weight in business, and the businessfolks have all the money. It's up to us to decide if we want some of that money or not.
will my daughters name make her the butt of loads of dingo jokes? is azaria a taboo name? it's going to be tough for her moving to another country without having to deal with that shit.
I dunno. It was a big big big news event when I was growing up (I was a kid then, in junior high school). If she was in my age group, I'd say she would have copped hell at school. Australian kids (no, wait, all kids!!) in her age group weren't even born then, so chances are that they'd no more know the significance of 'Azaria' than they would know about vinyl records.
Mind you, kids can be evil little feckers, you can bet your bottom dollar that one or two will figure it out. I'd hazard a small wager that it won't be wholesale teasing though.
I used the 1.9.97 (or thereabouts) first public release beta blah blah of OpenOffice.org in front of an undergrad business class on Friday night last. I was getting jack of some printing issues with version 1.1, so I took the bull by the horns and upgraded.
It froze on me during the class three times. I muttered things about me making a poor example of open source software and stuff, the class giggled, I think I carried it ok. I made it through the three hours and survived, albeit a little weary, but we made it!!!
OOo 2.0 beta is a bit of a risk now, but trust me, when it hits 'RELEASE', it's gonna rock. Go for it!
Recent Boeing and Airbus planes are already able to auto-takeoff, auto-land, and auto-navigate en route.
No they can't. Pressing the TO/GA (Take Off/Go Around) switch on Boeings that have that feature merely selects take-off thrust. Someone still needs to accept and read back the take-off clearance, release the brakes, steer the thing onto and down the runway, observe speed indications and take a decision to rotate at a speed determined in pre-flight calculations dependant on things like passenger/freight/fuel load, runway length, aerodrome altitude, temperature, engine ratings, etc. Someone needs to watch the instruments and confirm that the thing actually does start flying, then call "Gear Up" once a positive rate of climb is confirmed. Then someone needs to fly it 'out of town' manually according to pre-advised and en-route instructions from ATC all the way reeling bits of flap back in and making (or commanding) assorted trim adjuctments (though the aircraft will generally trim themselves pretty well). Typically, a 'modern' (and they really aren't very modern) Boeing or Airbus or similar is flown manually to cruise altitude, or at least to a point where they're pointed out of town, have their final clearance to climb to initial cruise, and the autopilots have been told to take over. The Captain leaves his seat when they're at or near cruise, and heads back to read his newspaper. (I'm talking long haul International ops with a couple of second officers on board teething at the bit to get a sit in the big seat).
AFAIK, the only thing they can't do is take direction from Air Traffic Control.
Actually, they can do that. Nav computers are routinely programmed from the operations office via ACARS before flight. Of course, pilots still check once on board. Moves are afoot to come up with an all electronic ATC system that obviates the requirement for voice communication. Delivering instructions direct to the aircraft is entirely possible, but not AFAIK, in actual service yet.
I'd like to see FedEx or UPS go fully robotic, so that a few years from now, commercial passenger planes would do likewise.
I'm confused by this. You're on slashdot, so you probably work with computers, yet you're advocating allowing computers to take over something that they're clearly gonna fubar up in a really really big way. I've yet to see a computer that can reliably make me a cup of decent coffee - I'll be buggered (not literally, it's Australian slang) if I'm gonna let a computer fly me anywhere!!!
Ambulance chaser of the month award goes to Mark D Hopkins at a pissant little jack-of-all-trades law 'firm' (though it's more of a 'closet' than a 'firm') in Texas.:Mark D. Hopkins
Partner, Austin Office
mark@ssjmlaw.com
Born: Houston, Texas; admitted to the State Bar of Texas in 1995. Undergraduate education, The Univeristy of Texas, Bachelor of Arts with Honors and Special Honors in Economics, 1992. Legal education, The University of Texas, Juris Doctorate, 1995.
Areas of Practice
Mr. Hopkins litigation practices focuses heavily on matters relating to real estate transactions, construction matters, and state taxation issues. Mr. Hopkins also has considerable experience in litigating personal injury and wrongful death matters, as well as handling complex insurance coverage matters in both State and Federal court.
Funny how he left 'stooge for scumware authors' out of his specialities...
Markie works at the Austin office. You can contact him here: Telephone: (512) 347-1604,
Fax: (512) 347-1676,
The Overlook at Gaines Ranch,
4330 S. Mopac, Ste. 150,
Austin, Texas, 78735
This is hardly news to me. When I need a handy-dandy credit card number with which to sign up for one of those, er, 'adult hygeine' web sites, I just google for a string like "SQL Dump" or "CREATE TABLE" or "INSERT INTO" with filetype:sql and reap the harvest. No need to piss about with hours of spamming, setting up phisching hosts, etc, etc:-)
Thankfully, in states like Arizona which still have a measure of freedom, we're allowed to carry guns around all we want
How the hell can you be thankfull that maladjusted retards get to carry weapons in the street? In the civilised world, you'd be shot on sight for such a thing - doubly so for carrying the weapon. Sheesh! Only in america!
"It is a fundamental principle of law that everyone knows the law". That's what they drummed into me at law school, before they even got thinking about drumming anything else in. That principle exists to defeat the "but, I didn't know what I did was illegal" defence - things are so much simpler if everyone is deemed to know the law.
It's one thing to 'define' that I 'know' the law, but it's a different ball game if they want to 'define' that I 'know' a law that I'm not allowed to see.
(It's not really, they just make another law that says I know the law I can't see even though I can't see it, and it's all my fault, again.
I thought I recognised this story. A quick google revealed this article, the original of which this article is an effective dupe (along with a bunch of other slashdot stories about the long-standing axis of evil print cartridges that is Lexmark/HP/Epson.
Me, I buy Canon inkjets. They've gone off in a completely opposite direction: Imagine a world where ink refill cartridges were little plastic containers that hold only ink, no 'chips', no replacing jets each time you run out of ink, no corporate attempt to dictate who you shall buy your ink and/or ink refills from. That's Canon Think Tank.
Damned if I could get it out, into tab-delimited text so that I could put it in a database and into some format that Microsoft would find familiar.
I do a lot of that stuff all the time. Perl is your friend. Specifically, perl and Spreadsheet::ParseExcel and Spreadsheet::WriteExcel.
The initial parsing of an excel spreadsheet takes a little while, particularly with large sheets, but then you can access the whole sheet on an addressable cell-by-cell basis really quickly. Outputting a new spreadsheet takes, literally, seconds even for large data sets. Wonderful tools for making sense out of Excel stuff.
(A trap for young players I'll mention. I tried to install Spreadsheet::WriteExcel on a Win32/Activestate perl installation a couple of days ago using Activestate's ppm. Turns out that the latest ppd package of WriteExcel doesn't have Win32 support. If you manually browse ppm.activestate.com you'll find that the WriteExcel ppd file a couple of versions old works just fine with win32)
I could tell the difference between just about anything at 128kbps and 64kbps too.
That's all well and good, but if you can't tell the difference between measured commentary, sarcasm, satire, and/or trolling, then you'll never make it on slashdot, or on usenet.
So, the question is: How are the monkeys able to see who is dominant and who is not?
Aww, geee, I dunno. It's just a wild and crazy guess on my part, and I certainly don't know exactly how it works with monkeys, but as far as squirrels go, I reckon that this squirrel is a dominant one.
Police are already experts....
on
No Pictures, Thanks
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
What's to prevent this being used by police to block their images when they're beating or otherwise mistreating people?
This isn't going to be a problem for police. With a couple of notable exceptions *cough*Rodney*cough*King*cough*, they're already well skilled in hiding their own wrongdoing.
Why, the New South Wales Police (Sydney, Australia) Senior Constable with badge number 66312 simply left the room and removed his official badge and other identifying stuff before he started beating up on me in the old North Sydney Police Station. There were lots of other police in the room at the time, but none of them saw a thing. (Good thing I'd already committed the number to memory huh!)
No, cops won't need to worry about electronic gadgets to blur faces - they'll just turn the other, er, cheek like they've been doing for years!
Go to your local GP (General Practitioner). Ask him or her... "Do you have your children vaccinated?".
A bit of research on the subject of vaccination is pretty eye opening actually. Turns out, vaccination != immunisation. A lot of the 'scientific' evidence that supports the "vaccination == immunisation" myth gives wonderful stats that show disease rates dropping dramatically at approx the same time as vaccination was introduced, but completely ignores other data, like the general improvement of public hygeine, the introduction of running water, the recognition that things like washing hands and sterilising surgical instruments are good.
Now a lot of the stuff I've read that claims that vaccination != immunisation and/or vaccination is bad has been written by total crackpots with not a single ounce of actual scientific or academic validity, but at the same time, some of it is valid. A close look, as I've said, at a lot of the 'proof' that vaccination is good is also fatally flawed.
It's a really difficult psychological situation. There's plenty of scientific evidence to show that vaccination is bad. But since the day we grokked what was going on around us, we've been told that vaccination is good, necessary, and that people who don't vaccinate their kids are nutbags. It's really tough, when you become a parent, to decide which way to go.
Which brings me full circle. After your GP/Doctor answers that question honestly (and in the negative), ask them why.
The real story is that the government has millions of IBMs bought in the past two years that are now just so much scrap due to lack of support.
With respect, those millions of IBM PCs were scrap the moment they left the factory.
Every time I say something bad about IBM PCs on slashdot, an IBM employee with mod points mods me down as a Troll. I don't understand why, but hey, I'll try again...
I'm responsible for a fleet of around 100 personal computers - some desktops, most laptops. In years past, there was a corporate rule that said "Must Buy IBM" (they gave us a 'free' teaching lab worth of computers, we sold out, something, something)... So a significant magority of that fleet of computers are IBM PCs. P3-500, P3-650 and early P4 desktops, and a lot of 600E, 600X, and T21 laptops.
All of the IBM equipment, without exception, has failed at three years of age, plus or minus two months. The desktops have two failure modes: either the power supply just dies, or the brittle plastic bracket that holds the power switch inside the case breaks and falls off. You can generally jury-rig a solution for the brittle plastic, but the power supplys are made from unobtanium - exactly the physical opposite of an otherwise identical power supply that Gateway and many others used - and so you simply can't replace a power supply short of paying IBM prices for spares.
The 600 series stinkpads have a single failure mode: The battery charging circuit fails at precisely three years of age. If that damned blinking orange "I'm not working" light doesn't drive you mad, the fact that your laptop is now a desktop will!
The T21 laptops have two failure modes: either someone farts in the general direction of the grossly under-engineered screens and they either break, or just go a terrible pink colour, -or- the mini-PCI slot fails, and you lose modem and ethernet. Motherboard replacement.
Now these failures aren't one or two machines. These are all machines. They all fail that way.
Now you can't tell me that these failures aren't in the product by design.
By comparison, I have old P1, P2, and P3 gateway and Dell machines lying around everywhere, and those damn things just won't die!!!! I still have one old P1-60 gateway box with about 120Mb RAM in it running FreeBSD, MySQL, Apache and stuff, and with an uptime of about 2 years. It won't go away!!!
Nah man, this IBM stuff... it has the technical potential to be good stuff, but whilever they keep designing that shit to fail at three years of age, I'll not ever buy it.
There is very little good that come out of government meddling in the affairs of private companies when no one is being harmed
You're exactly right, when no-one is being harmed! There's a very good reason for the gummint to meddle in this affair though: national security. You guys (ie: America) have a lot of tight restrictions on export of technology to try to keep a lid on The Bad Guys(tm) advancing their technology too quickly and becoming more of a military threat than they might otherwise be.
Now I'll admit that it only takes a bit of industrial espionage to take the lid off a lot of secrets, but that doesn't mean you should hand the blueprints for everything over, no questions asked.
I, for one, would be a damn sight happier if y'all would stop pissing about with nail files in carry-on luggage and concentrate on stuff, like this, that actuallymatters.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I admit that it's hardly fair to the RIAA/MPAA, but hey, they fired the first shot.
You're not wrong. Is it just me, or does this de Raadt character get 'snippy' each and every time the world doesn't roll over and play the game how he wants them to?
An important point in a geek's career is the time when s/he recognises that if s/he's gonna get any further in said career, they're gonna have to maintain a business-benefiting attitude and act in business-benefiting ways else businesses won't employ you any more. Sheer guru-like skill only carries you so far, and then you've gotta play nice with others or others won't play with you anymore.
Some geeks come to that realisation early in their careers. I try to tell my geek.students that before they graduate. Some geeks never ever wake up, and they grow old on low incomes angry at the world.
de Raadt does some wonderful things, sure, but there's always this persistent undertone of a bad attitude waiting to sneak out and throw his weight around. Public nastygrams and "screw you, we'll ship with even less support for your product than we did before" dummy spits constitute "does not play nice with others" in my book.
Trouble is, geeks carry no weight in business, and the businessfolks have all the money. It's up to us to decide if we want some of that money or not.
I dunno. It was a big big big news event when I was growing up (I was a kid then, in junior high school). If she was in my age group, I'd say she would have copped hell at school. Australian kids (no, wait, all kids!!) in her age group weren't even born then, so chances are that they'd no more know the significance of 'Azaria' than they would know about vinyl records.
Mind you, kids can be evil little feckers, you can bet your bottom dollar that one or two will figure it out. I'd hazard a small wager that it won't be wholesale teasing though.
It froze on me during the class three times. I muttered things about me making a poor example of open source software and stuff, the class giggled, I think I carried it ok. I made it through the three hours and survived, albeit a little weary, but we made it!!!
OOo 2.0 beta is a bit of a risk now, but trust me, when it hits 'RELEASE', it's gonna rock. Go for it!
No they can't. Pressing the TO/GA (Take Off/Go Around) switch on Boeings that have that feature merely selects take-off thrust. Someone still needs to accept and read back the take-off clearance, release the brakes, steer the thing onto and down the runway, observe speed indications and take a decision to rotate at a speed determined in pre-flight calculations dependant on things like passenger/freight/fuel load, runway length, aerodrome altitude, temperature, engine ratings, etc. Someone needs to watch the instruments and confirm that the thing actually does start flying, then call "Gear Up" once a positive rate of climb is confirmed. Then someone needs to fly it 'out of town' manually according to pre-advised and en-route instructions from ATC all the way reeling bits of flap back in and making (or commanding) assorted trim adjuctments (though the aircraft will generally trim themselves pretty well). Typically, a 'modern' (and they really aren't very modern) Boeing or Airbus or similar is flown manually to cruise altitude, or at least to a point where they're pointed out of town, have their final clearance to climb to initial cruise, and the autopilots have been told to take over. The Captain leaves his seat when they're at or near cruise, and heads back to read his newspaper. (I'm talking long haul International ops with a couple of second officers on board teething at the bit to get a sit in the big seat).
AFAIK, the only thing they can't do is take direction from Air Traffic Control.
Actually, they can do that. Nav computers are routinely programmed from the operations office via ACARS before flight. Of course, pilots still check once on board. Moves are afoot to come up with an all electronic ATC system that obviates the requirement for voice communication. Delivering instructions direct to the aircraft is entirely possible, but not AFAIK, in actual service yet.
I'd like to see FedEx or UPS go fully robotic, so that a few years from now, commercial passenger planes would do likewise.
I'm confused by this. You're on slashdot, so you probably work with computers, yet you're advocating allowing computers to take over something that they're clearly gonna fubar up in a really really big way. I've yet to see a computer that can reliably make me a cup of decent coffee - I'll be buggered (not literally, it's Australian slang) if I'm gonna let a computer fly me anywhere!!!
We forgave you for Mork and Mindy, we even forgave you for Knight Rider, but this! /gazes at the heavens/ Lord, why do they punish us so?
Funny how he left 'stooge for scumware authors' out of his specialities...
Markie works at the Austin office. You can contact him here: Telephone: (512) 347-1604, Fax: (512) 347-1676, The Overlook at Gaines Ranch, 4330 S. Mopac, Ste. 150, Austin, Texas, 78735
How the hell can you be thankfull that maladjusted retards get to carry weapons in the street? In the civilised world, you'd be shot on sight for such a thing - doubly so for carrying the weapon. Sheesh! Only in america!
It's one thing to 'define' that I 'know' the law, but it's a different ball game if they want to 'define' that I 'know' a law that I'm not allowed to see.
(It's not really, they just make another law that says I know the law I can't see even though I can't see it, and it's all my fault, again.
Me, I buy Canon inkjets. They've gone off in a completely opposite direction: Imagine a world where ink refill cartridges were little plastic containers that hold only ink, no 'chips', no replacing jets each time you run out of ink, no corporate attempt to dictate who you shall buy your ink and/or ink refills from. That's Canon Think Tank.
They're all MILFs now.
I do a lot of that stuff all the time. Perl is your friend. Specifically, perl and Spreadsheet::ParseExcel and Spreadsheet::WriteExcel. The initial parsing of an excel spreadsheet takes a little while, particularly with large sheets, but then you can access the whole sheet on an addressable cell-by-cell basis really quickly. Outputting a new spreadsheet takes, literally, seconds even for large data sets. Wonderful tools for making sense out of Excel stuff.
(A trap for young players I'll mention. I tried to install Spreadsheet::WriteExcel on a Win32/Activestate perl installation a couple of days ago using Activestate's ppm. Turns out that the latest ppd package of WriteExcel doesn't have Win32 support. If you manually browse ppm.activestate.com you'll find that the WriteExcel ppd file a couple of versions old works just fine with win32)
I left a '1' out of the subject line. My 13in chinese cooking scoop cost me in the order of AUD$15.00.
A friend pointed the site out to me about a week before it hit slashdot, so by the time the original story broke here, I had built one.
Long story short. They work really well. I've pwned every wireless access point within a 3Km radius of my house. Free Internet anyone? :-)
That's all well and good, but if you can't tell the difference between measured commentary, sarcasm, satire, and/or trolling, then you'll never make it on slashdot, or on usenet.
s/\/\./Usenet/
Anybody who had the vaguest clue how humor, and in particular sarcasm works, would not have modded the original post up +5 Insightful.
(Whassamatter, are todays mods all from AOL, or does no-one know about the 'Funny' mod option?)
Aww, geee, I dunno. It's just a wild and crazy guess on my part, and I certainly don't know exactly how it works with monkeys, but as far as squirrels go, I reckon that this squirrel is a dominant one.
This isn't going to be a problem for police. With a couple of notable exceptions *cough*Rodney*cough*King*cough*, they're already well skilled in hiding their own wrongdoing.
Why, the New South Wales Police (Sydney, Australia) Senior Constable with badge number 66312 simply left the room and removed his official badge and other identifying stuff before he started beating up on me in the old North Sydney Police Station. There were lots of other police in the room at the time, but none of them saw a thing. (Good thing I'd already committed the number to memory huh!)
No, cops won't need to worry about electronic gadgets to blur faces - they'll just turn the other, er, cheek like they've been doing for years!
A bit of research on the subject of vaccination is pretty eye opening actually. Turns out, vaccination != immunisation. A lot of the 'scientific' evidence that supports the "vaccination == immunisation" myth gives wonderful stats that show disease rates dropping dramatically at approx the same time as vaccination was introduced, but completely ignores other data, like the general improvement of public hygeine, the introduction of running water, the recognition that things like washing hands and sterilising surgical instruments are good.
Now a lot of the stuff I've read that claims that vaccination != immunisation and/or vaccination is bad has been written by total crackpots with not a single ounce of actual scientific or academic validity, but at the same time, some of it is valid. A close look, as I've said, at a lot of the 'proof' that vaccination is good is also fatally flawed.
It's a really difficult psychological situation. There's plenty of scientific evidence to show that vaccination is bad. But since the day we grokked what was going on around us, we've been told that vaccination is good, necessary, and that people who don't vaccinate their kids are nutbags. It's really tough, when you become a parent, to decide which way to go.
Which brings me full circle. After your GP/Doctor answers that question honestly (and in the negative), ask them why.
With respect, those millions of IBM PCs were scrap the moment they left the factory.
Every time I say something bad about IBM PCs on slashdot, an IBM employee with mod points mods me down as a Troll. I don't understand why, but hey, I'll try again...
I'm responsible for a fleet of around 100 personal computers - some desktops, most laptops. In years past, there was a corporate rule that said "Must Buy IBM" (they gave us a 'free' teaching lab worth of computers, we sold out, something, something)... So a significant magority of that fleet of computers are IBM PCs. P3-500, P3-650 and early P4 desktops, and a lot of 600E, 600X, and T21 laptops.
All of the IBM equipment, without exception, has failed at three years of age, plus or minus two months. The desktops have two failure modes: either the power supply just dies, or the brittle plastic bracket that holds the power switch inside the case breaks and falls off. You can generally jury-rig a solution for the brittle plastic, but the power supplys are made from unobtanium - exactly the physical opposite of an otherwise identical power supply that Gateway and many others used - and so you simply can't replace a power supply short of paying IBM prices for spares.
The 600 series stinkpads have a single failure mode: The battery charging circuit fails at precisely three years of age. If that damned blinking orange "I'm not working" light doesn't drive you mad, the fact that your laptop is now a desktop will!
The T21 laptops have two failure modes: either someone farts in the general direction of the grossly under-engineered screens and they either break, or just go a terrible pink colour, -or- the mini-PCI slot fails, and you lose modem and ethernet. Motherboard replacement.
Now these failures aren't one or two machines. These are all machines. They all fail that way.
Now you can't tell me that these failures aren't in the product by design.
By comparison, I have old P1, P2, and P3 gateway and Dell machines lying around everywhere, and those damn things just won't die!!!! I still have one old P1-60 gateway box with about 120Mb RAM in it running FreeBSD, MySQL, Apache and stuff, and with an uptime of about 2 years. It won't go away!!!
Nah man, this IBM stuff... it has the technical potential to be good stuff, but whilever they keep designing that shit to fail at three years of age, I'll not ever buy it.
You're exactly right, when no-one is being harmed! There's a very good reason for the gummint to meddle in this affair though: national security. You guys (ie: America) have a lot of tight restrictions on export of technology to try to keep a lid on The Bad Guys(tm) advancing their technology too quickly and becoming more of a military threat than they might otherwise be.
Now I'll admit that it only takes a bit of industrial espionage to take the lid off a lot of secrets, but that doesn't mean you should hand the blueprints for everything over, no questions asked.
I, for one, would be a damn sight happier if y'all would stop pissing about with nail files in carry-on luggage and concentrate on stuff, like this, that actuallymatters.
Local calls are free in Hong Kong too.
How is this news? My toothbrush has been recharging this way for oh, at least the last six or eight years.