In all the years I've been programming, more times than not the program I'm writing is called, for most of its initial design "test", or more likely because I dumped the original test2.c.
You generally find yourself starting with an idea, trying out a data structure, and trying not to cloud your mind with that big bit that you can't quite get a handle on. Eventually you either find your way roung that boulder, finally get to it to discover that it was easy after all, or totally give up three quarters down the line.
I've always found that programming is A LOT like writing. The only difference is that you have to be stricter with you lexicon, clearer of mind and more patient in the rewrite (a process generally known as debugging).
If you've every smacked head long into a problem you can't manage to think round, you KNOW what writers block is about. And it's worse: the more stressed you get the least you can think straight, and the deeper the block gets.
The point I'm trying gamely to make is that very few of us of mechanical, logical automitons, most of us are working at three in the morning, having not eaten for 15 hours, desperately coxing the computer in a slightly-to-loud voice that if this compile works, with no problems, that you'll buy that 128Mb dimm you promised it, you'll like that won't you.
I have some statistics, this compares the "uniform Crime Report" from the FBI for 1997 (the last I could get) and the same statistics for 1998 from the Metropolitan Police in London.
This compares two cities, New York and London, with similar populations, Ethnic diversity and, to a lesser extent, social deprivation - we have proper social welfare.
Murder: New York 770 London 52
Rape: NY: 2,157 L: 602
Robbery: NY: 44,707 L: 8,331
GBH/Aggrivated Assault: NY: 45,229 L: 1,429
Burglary: NY: 54,099 L:31,172
The rest the Met doesn't provide information about.
In addition, the "drunk at 18" thing is just the law, it bears very little relationship with real life.
When I lived in South Wales, there was a pub near where I lived and a school across the road - quite frequently when you went in the pub during the day it was full of people in school uniform.
Generally sixth formers (school kids between 16 and 18) don't wear uniform, so that kind of suggests that the pubs daytime clientelle were, somewhat ignorant of the letter of the law.
Irrespective of everything else (not least because I like putting my little cross with my little stub pencil, on my crappy piece of paper, it's tradition, I say) I'm a bit gutted by this suggestion of moving the election to Saturday.
In Britain, General Elections (those used to populate the House of commons) are generally considered a good excuse to get pissed (drunk).
Vote, got to pub, go home, watch the election program on the BBC, finally go to bed in a state of pure, drunken, bliss when Michael Portillo loses his seat.
Won't be the same sat in front of your computer, lacks the feeling of importance.
(Mind you, couldn't be bothered to vote in the last two, the Welsh Assembly and European Elections - so maybe that contradicts my point.)
My view of abortion is the same with drugs, making something illegal doesn't stop it from happening.
I'd rather have a trained and qualified doctor performing the abortion, than some lab assistant with a bottle of dubious chemicals or some scared teenage girl trying to abort herself with a heated knitting needle.
Also, abortion isn't a modern creation. In the old days, the village wise woman, who generally served as the midwife, was quite able to provide the villagers with the right potion to sort out there little problem.
Related to cloning, the thing I don't understand is, ignoring the can't-have-children idea, the classical use of cloning is to create another you.
Who on earth is vain enough to assume that they are physically perfect, there's always something you would like to change, I'd love to have perfect eye sight.
What would be preferable, and what cloning can't provide, is to allow you consiousness to be preserved. You then have the ability to live different lives in different bodies. You grew up once male, next have a crack at being female.
Mind you, ethically speaking this would open one hell of a can of beans.........
total change of subject here people but, in reference to:
> This whole bill was smuggled though while there > was a tax debate.
A similar ploy was recently adopted by the European Union to enable people accused to pan-European fraud to be arrested and taken to any other member country. The law was created in a mainland country and totally undermines one the basic tenants of British (and virtually any other country who's judicial system is based on it) common law - Habius Corpus (badly spelling attack).
What this means is that somebody can be arrested in Britain or Ireland can face illegal imprisonment, be succeptible to "guilty until proved innocent".
How did they do it? They hid the documentation amongst a load of boring Budget proposal, and all the British MEPs who no doubt had a big fat lunch on expenses to go to, just signed it away.
I think the main difference is one of cultural identity.
America, as a society believes that the only way to forge a coherent country is to get everybody to conform, teaching them what it means to be American, suggesting that somebody born there could plausibly be "unamerican" because their beliefs differ from the norm.
Australia, like Britain, prides non-conformity (this is particularly the case it Australia, a country obsessed with ridding itself of the rest of our cultural baggage), so although you may get some hassles for being different, everybody makes a point of being different, so it balances out.
In America (from what I can tell) if you don't fit into the bad eighties coming-of-age-movie stereotype you are castigated and denighed all the freedoms that the rest of the countries idenfies as part of their cultural heritage.
Remember that America is a democratic which makes its children pledge allegence to the flag every morning, seemingly in order to remind then what they are supposed to be. It has got to be an bit of an arse if you don't happen to agree.
It's sixteen for hetrosexual sex, and for lesbians - technically there's no actual law, Queen Victoria wouln't sign the bill becuase she didn't believe that lesbian's existed - however, presently it's 18 for male homosexual sex.
This is soon to change, at present the house of lords is crushing the bill, but they'll be gone soon, the undemocratic inbred fuckwits.
Mind you, anal sex is only legal in Britain if your gay - so they get something back.
In my last job, I was doing a RAM upgrade on an pre-war 486 (Gulf War, obviously), the box had 1Mb, in 4 256K SIMMS, I removed the old SIMMS, and the clips, which more attached more on hope than anything else, broke.
I plugged the new SIMMS, sat them up, and repeatedly rebooted the PC until it found all its RAM.
I then put the computer on a little pedestal between two desks and jammed the desks against it so that it didn't move.
If the computer stayed where it was it would be fine, if the moved?
I'm not sure masturbations going to make you naturally violent.
During the Clinton empeachment trial, on the BBC's intensely sarcastic "Newsnight" programme they were talking about how, at the time the Clinton was being blown off by Lewinskey, he was considering what (I think) he should be doing in Bosnia - the woman who was saying this said she didn't what Clinton having (or not having, or whatever) sex during this time, I couldn't help thinking, if a man is considering killing people, I would rather he have sex before hand, as he will have a much more relaxed view of the world.
(flame bait alert!)
One of the most facinating things - at least from a British perspective - is that during the times when, in the last year, there was that slew of kid killers, America TV concerned itself with morality, prostitution, etc. Nobody thought to question the fact that these bloody kids were armed to the teeth.
Sys Admin is a strange field, basically you get quite a few arseholes. This is true in most fields, but whereas an idiot programmer is generally bothersome to his team, and his team alone, a difficult system adminstrator is difficult to everyone.
Most systems administrators have a difficult job, most of these comments are by programmers who insist that we can't do there job. To be honest, I'm a great programmer. I haven't been good at much in my life, but I've always been great at that - however, I can't be arsed to write Databases or bloody awful Access based kludged which look good but do bugger all.
And we know about Access....
As a systems administrator you get this a lot, a manager outsources the project to a software house, or IS services company. The company produces a piece of shit program which only just fills the spec (which hasn't been back to the systems admin or even the poor buggers who have to use the application - it may have been to there manager, who hasn't the slightest idea). The program is implemented, with out IS even seeing it before hand. And then its up to the systems adminstrator to support it.
This is not the fault of the programmers who wrote what they expected to be a prototype, or the admins who have to support the shite afterwards, and its definately not the fault to the users who have to use it. It's the fault of the management who haven't got the slightest clue, but insist on making the decisions.
But the point is (after that I have a point), the question is you have to know how to deal with it. Yes you get bad sys admins, this is because either management employ seemly competent techies which no personal skills, or morons who can answer the phone well but finds Windows 98 complicated. When I was still doing desktop support, many of the agency staff we were allocated had never used DOS before, I daren't let them near UNIX.
Also, programmers aren't really users - they are techies, whenever I've worked anywhere with programmers we general allow them to "heal thyself". As long and they don't screw the box and respect the fact that the real users - those that make the company money, are more important than they are.
People ask me what I do for a living. To those that know I'm a solaris sysadmin. To everybody else?
I used to do hardware work - then I fixed computers, then I did Desktop support, then I turned computers on in a way that made the users not feel stupid (which they were, frightenly. These people had slip on shoes because they couldn't handle laces).
Now, er, I "do stuff with computers to keep them working". They look at me as if to say that doesn't seem so hard.
You try and automatically produce a web page to show the revisions of the operating system in Perl while at the same time, incorperate new, non standard, hardware, with virtually no documentation, and then write an ISO compliant document to tell the rest of your team how to do it again, while being constantly interrupted because NIS-bastardly-plus isn't working again.
Nothing paranoid about this - the Potato famine in Ireland was caused by the fact that all potato plants in Europe in the last century were bred from two plants brought over centuries before.
And so, when the blight caught - It caught big time
I don't necessarily want to comment on Swedish racism at present, or your argument about all countries being racist, I'm British and therefore can't really comment.
However, to flesh out my orginal point, I hate to see a country oblivious to its past responsibilies, and Sweden seems distinctly oblivious to theirs. Please see http://www.itv.se/boreale/history.htm (admittedly a swedish site, albeit one that uses an NT server, if that page name is anything to go by) and consider the entry:
"1913-1920: The Swedish race-segregation politic creates a system of institutional racism. The use of the Sami language is forbidden in the "Nomadicschools" A racebiological institute is created in Uppsala."
Aparthied, I think you will agree.
We're all guilty of something, and that fact that Sweden has some immigration, not a large amount but some, doesn't absolve them of anything.
Slashdot Mirror
I've got to agree about the programming bit.
In all the years I've been programming, more times than not the program I'm writing is called, for most of its initial design "test", or more likely because I dumped the original test2.c.
You generally find yourself starting with an idea, trying out a data structure, and trying not to cloud your mind with that big bit that you can't quite get a handle on. Eventually you either find your way roung that boulder, finally get to it to discover that it was easy after all, or totally give up three quarters down the line.
I've always found that programming is A LOT like writing. The only difference is that you have to be stricter with you lexicon, clearer of mind and more patient in the rewrite (a process generally known as debugging).
If you've every smacked head long into a problem you can't manage to think round, you KNOW what writers block is about. And it's worse: the more stressed you get the least you can think straight, and the deeper the block gets.
The point I'm trying gamely to make is that very few of us of mechanical, logical automitons, most of us are working at three in the morning, having not eaten for 15 hours, desperately coxing the computer in a slightly-to-loud voice that if this compile works, with no problems, that you'll buy that 128Mb dimm you promised it, you'll like that won't you.
Mark.
I have some statistics, this compares the "uniform Crime Report" from the FBI for 1997 (the last I could get) and the same statistics for 1998 from the Metropolitan Police in London.
This compares two cities, New York and London, with similar populations, Ethnic diversity and, to a lesser extent, social deprivation - we have proper social welfare.
Murder:
New York 770 London 52
Rape:
NY: 2,157 L: 602
Robbery:
NY: 44,707 L: 8,331
GBH/Aggrivated Assault:
NY: 45,229 L: 1,429
Burglary:
NY: 54,099 L:31,172
The rest the Met doesn't provide information about.
God took a while, hope somebody reads it.
Mark.
References NY: http://www.fbi.gov.uc.htm
Met: http://www.met.police.uk/mps/mps/press/stats.htm
They both use NT, ain't that special!
In addition, the "drunk at 18" thing is just the law, it bears very little relationship with real life.
When I lived in South Wales, there was a pub near where I lived and a school across the road - quite frequently when you went in the pub during the day it was full of people in school uniform.
Generally sixth formers (school kids between 16 and 18) don't wear uniform, so that kind of suggests that the pubs daytime clientelle were, somewhat ignorant of the letter of the law.
WONDERFUL
Irrespective of everything else (not least because I like putting my little cross with my little stub pencil, on my crappy piece of paper, it's tradition, I say) I'm a bit gutted by this suggestion of moving the election to Saturday.
In Britain, General Elections (those used to populate the House of commons) are generally considered a good excuse to get pissed (drunk).
Vote, got to pub, go home, watch the election program on the BBC, finally go to bed in a state of pure, drunken, bliss when Michael Portillo loses his seat.
Won't be the same sat in front of your computer, lacks the feeling of importance.
(Mind you, couldn't be bothered to vote in the last two, the Welsh Assembly and European Elections - so maybe that contradicts my point.)
Mark.
I've never been in a pub with a Billiard table, Snooker, pool, yes - Billiards no...
Played skittles in a Pub once though, that was a bit antiquated, kept on exprecting a buxom wench carrying flagons of ale to crash towards me.
Bit of a pity she didn't, if she said something, I could use that old Blackadder line, "okay you can stop that talk, I'm not a tourist."
mark.
-- "Ho hum, It's all a load of bollocks, Eddie", Ricky in "Bottom".
My view of abortion is the same with drugs, making something illegal doesn't stop it from happening.
I'd rather have a trained and qualified doctor performing the abortion, than some lab assistant with a bottle of dubious chemicals or some scared teenage girl trying to abort herself with a heated knitting needle.
Also, abortion isn't a modern creation. In the old days, the village wise woman, who generally served as the midwife, was quite able to provide the villagers with the right potion to sort out there little problem.
Related to cloning, the thing I don't understand is, ignoring the can't-have-children idea, the classical use of cloning is to create another you.
Who on earth is vain enough to assume that they are physically perfect, there's always something you would like to change, I'd love to have perfect eye sight.
What would be preferable, and what cloning can't provide, is to allow you consiousness to be preserved. You then have the ability to live different lives in different bodies. You grew up once male, next have a crack at being female.
Mind you, ethically speaking this would open one hell of a can of beans.........
total change of subject here people but, in reference to:
> This whole bill was smuggled though while there > was a tax debate.
A similar ploy was recently adopted by the European Union to enable people accused to pan-European fraud to be arrested and taken to any other member country. The law was created in a mainland country and totally undermines one the basic tenants of British (and virtually any other country who's judicial system is based on it) common law - Habius Corpus (badly spelling attack).
What this means is that somebody can be arrested in Britain or Ireland can face illegal imprisonment, be succeptible to "guilty until proved innocent".
How did they do it? They hid the documentation amongst a load of boring Budget proposal, and all the British MEPs who no doubt had a big fat lunch on expenses to go to, just signed it away.
Ah... And we pay for these fuckwits.
Mark.
I think the main difference is one of cultural identity.
America, as a society believes that the only way to forge a coherent country is to get everybody to conform, teaching them what it means to be American, suggesting that somebody born there could plausibly be "unamerican" because their beliefs differ from the norm.
Australia, like Britain, prides non-conformity (this is particularly the case it Australia, a country obsessed with ridding itself of the rest of our cultural baggage), so although you may get some hassles for being different, everybody makes a point of being different, so it balances out.
In America (from what I can tell) if you don't fit into the bad eighties coming-of-age-movie stereotype you are castigated and denighed all the freedoms that the rest of the countries idenfies as part of their cultural heritage.
Remember that America is a democratic which makes its children pledge allegence to the flag every morning, seemingly in order to remind then what they are supposed to be. It has got to be an bit of an arse if you don't happen to agree.
Mark.
It's sixteen for hetrosexual sex, and for lesbians - technically there's no actual law, Queen Victoria wouln't sign the bill becuase she didn't believe that lesbian's existed - however, presently it's 18 for male homosexual sex.
This is soon to change, at present the house of lords is crushing the bill, but they'll be gone soon, the undemocratic inbred fuckwits.
Mind you, anal sex is only legal in Britain if your gay - so they get something back.
Mark.
In my last job, I was doing a RAM upgrade on an pre-war 486 (Gulf War, obviously), the box had 1Mb, in 4 256K SIMMS, I removed the old SIMMS, and the clips, which more attached more on hope than anything else, broke.
I plugged the new SIMMS, sat them up, and repeatedly rebooted the PC until it found all its RAM.
I then put the computer on a little pedestal between two desks and jammed the desks against it so that it didn't move.
If the computer stayed where it was it would be fine, if the moved?
Don't tell the users, that the thing
Back when I did hardware, my favourite job was kicking in the CRT before scrapping monitors, I LOVED that pop.
I'm not sure masturbations going to make you naturally violent.
During the Clinton empeachment trial, on the BBC's intensely sarcastic "Newsnight" programme they were talking about how, at the time the Clinton was being blown off by Lewinskey, he was considering what (I think) he should be doing in Bosnia - the woman who was saying this said she didn't what Clinton having (or not having, or whatever) sex during this time, I couldn't help thinking, if a man is considering killing people, I would rather he have sex before hand, as he will have a much more relaxed view of the world.
(flame bait alert!)
One of the most facinating things - at least from a British perspective - is that during the times when, in the last year, there was that slew of kid killers, America TV concerned itself with morality, prostitution, etc. Nobody thought to question the fact that these bloody kids were armed to the teeth.
Sys Admin is a strange field, basically you get quite a few arseholes. This is true in most fields, but whereas an idiot programmer is generally bothersome to his team, and his team alone, a difficult system adminstrator is difficult to everyone.
Most systems administrators have a difficult job, most of these comments are by programmers who insist that we can't do there job. To be honest, I'm a great programmer. I haven't been good at much in my life, but I've always been great at that - however, I can't be arsed to write Databases or bloody awful Access based kludged which look good but do bugger all.
And we know about Access....
As a systems administrator you get this a lot, a manager outsources the project to a software house, or IS services company. The company produces a piece of shit program which only just fills the spec (which hasn't been back to the systems admin or even the poor buggers who have to use the application - it may have been to there manager, who hasn't the slightest idea). The program is implemented, with out IS even seeing it before hand. And then its up to the systems adminstrator to support it.
This is not the fault of the programmers who wrote what they expected to be a prototype, or the admins who have to support the shite afterwards, and its definately not the fault to the users who have to use it. It's the fault of the management who haven't got the slightest clue, but insist on making the decisions.
But the point is (after that I have a point), the question is you have to know how to deal with it. Yes you get bad sys admins, this is because either management employ seemly competent techies which no personal skills, or morons who can answer the phone well but finds Windows 98 complicated. When I was still doing desktop support, many of the agency staff we were allocated had never used DOS before, I daren't let them near UNIX.
Also, programmers aren't really users - they are techies, whenever I've worked anywhere with programmers we general allow them to "heal thyself". As long and they don't screw the box and respect the fact that the real users - those that make the company money, are more important than they are.
Cor, that was a long post.
Mark.
People ask me what I do for a living. To those that know I'm a solaris sysadmin. To everybody else?
I used to do hardware work - then I fixed computers, then I did Desktop support, then I turned computers on in a way that made the users not feel stupid (which they were, frightenly. These people had slip on shoes because they couldn't handle laces).
Now, er, I "do stuff with computers to keep them working". They look at me as if to say that doesn't seem so hard.
You try and automatically produce a web page to show the revisions of the operating system in Perl while at the same time, incorperate new, non standard, hardware, with virtually no documentation, and then write an ISO compliant document to tell the rest of your team how to do it again, while being constantly interrupted because NIS-bastardly-plus isn't working again.
Mark.
Nothing paranoid about this - the Potato famine in
Ireland was caused by the fact that all potato plants in Europe in the last century were bred from two plants brought over centuries before.
And so, when the blight caught - It caught big time
Trust me, I'm British, the "Brit disinformation society" could find it's arse with both hands and a map.
Okay, found by login password.
I don't necessarily want to comment on Swedish racism at present, or your argument about all countries being racist, I'm British and therefore can't really comment.
However, to flesh out my orginal point, I hate to see a country oblivious to its past responsibilies, and Sweden seems distinctly oblivious to theirs. Please see http://www.itv.se/boreale/history.htm (admittedly a swedish site, albeit one that uses an NT server, if that page name is anything to go by) and consider the entry:
"1913-1920: The Swedish race-segregation politic creates a system of institutional racism. The use of the Sami language is forbidden in the "Nomadicschools" A racebiological institute is created in Uppsala."
Aparthied, I think you will agree.
We're all guilty of something, and that fact that Sweden has some immigration, not a large amount but some, doesn't absolve them of anything.
Mark.
(This is called being majorly off topic)