And then we can discuss the Dvorak keyboard which is generally considered quicker to learn, quicker to type with, and much more comfortable on the wrists.
It makes more sense with the vowels together at left home and the common consonants on the right. Many professional writers make quite a fuss over the Dvorak keyboard if they hold a preference.
QWERTY is difficult to use and understand compared with other alternatives. We shouldn't stop improving simply because of inertia.
(No, I don't use the Dvorak keyboard myself. I jump between keyboards too often and I've been afraid of how difficult it would be to transition constantly between mine and someone else's. I should be less hypocritical in my life.)
Considering Stewart's report is working from the premise that most U.S. citizens don't actually know who provides them with the majority of their energy, I figure I can afford to inform a FEW along the way.
And considering that I'm sitting on top of some of that black Alberta goodness, I'm clearly too disillusioned by the federal government to bother staying on topic discussing the scandel. I just expect that. (grin)
I think they may have discovered a barrel or 180 billion of conventional oil in Canada already.
This omits the "frontier" resources such as the oil reserves found off the shore of Newfoundland and the enormous reserves in the Alberta Oil sands which, although the oil is difficult to extract, the quantities of reserves are stunning, at an estimated quantity of 1.6 trillion barrels remaining.
When you're finished being clever, an economic specialist at the American embassy wrote a very informative article on the state of Canada - U.S. energy trade relations. It can be found in.pdf form right here
I'd pay good money for a ticket to watch the USAF send a couple aircraft out to strafe those CD's. The entertainment value of shiny bits shredded and flying gracefully through the skies at high velocity would probably balance off the grave personal danger to myself.
Now if only I could think of ONE location to set up those MICROSOFT cd's as targets so they're out of the WAY of anything important...
Throughout this whole topic there have been some great comments, but this really grabs my attention. Mozilla is going to have to be MUCH better than IE to get on an equal standing simply because of the built-in momentum IE has because it's bundled.
The fact that that it is getting to be known demonstrates that it is very, very good indeed. (DISCLOSURE: Mozilla nightly on my laptop, Firefox on my w2k box, Galeon on my Linux box, plugs to anyone who will listen to me regarding browsers.)
The whole point of this is if the tide is turning, more and more of us are making friends for Mozilla. Faster than MS can get customers? I doubt it's happening yet. But if developers keep improving Mozilla the way they have been, and if we keep demonstrating the benefits we will create another mass exodus.
Restoring a piece of 20 year old hardware into a functional unit is certainly more cool than I've pulled off recently. And no, my backup server doesn't really count here.
I'm sitting here imagining what the mod is going to be in another twenty years...
"I wanted a [super-LCD|panel|unimaginably cool 3D display technology] but I couldn't find one for under $50. Fortunately, I was able to get the [64|128|258|1024] way mobo to slide in with room to spare!"
Dammit, the kids today.. They don't dream the way we dreamed when the amber screens first came out.
You know, I like to consider myself more-or-less with it and on top of patches.
"...you have to remember to visit Office Update manually..."
Office Update? Oh crap.. There goes my afternoon. Let me grab my CD and I'll start patching this afternoon. A slightly acerbic thank you for telling me what I should have already known.
Now if *I* didn't know about this - what hope does my dad have?
Dont give me that crap about being afraid of the patches, because if they damage your network, you can blame Microsoft and save your fucking job.
No way!
If one of my clients happened to have mission critical software that was taken down because I applied a patch, then I'd deserve to get turfed. I agree that patches breaking other software is used far too much as an excuse for laziness, but testing your patches before you go live is still critically important.
If I ended up costing a company a $10,000 gig (say I couldn't recover a database - or maybe just had so much downtime the company missed a deadline) I'm not going to last long enough to point the finger and say, "It's Microsoft's fault!" I'd likely have my ass grinding over the welcome mat on my way out the door. And in the small businesses that I deal with, losing more than one or two shows will bring the company down anyways.
Part of competency is understanding risk management. If I have the time to test patches before applying them, there is no excuse to patch blindly. If it's a nice standard shop that doesn't have anything exotic, then yeah I'll let auto-update take care of it. But you better understand the business and what kind of tolerance they have to down time or broken patches!
For the record, all of the systems have been clean and, knock on wood, I'll drop by the last of my clients this weekend and check theirs in person (I haven't got a complaint call yet, so I'm hoping things are as I left them.)
Doing a quick scan through/. just to see what's up...
Windows vulnerability... Yadda Yadda Yadda... I better do my laptop because I need it hang it behind someone else's firewall. Okay, nothing really new. I keep a minimal install on my laptop for just such occasions - there really isn't much (other than the data) that can get buggered by adding the patch anyhow.
So since I'm on a patching spree anyhow, I might as well check my Mandrake box.
"The list of updates is void. This means that there is either no available update for the packages installed on your computer, or you already installed all of them."
WTF??
C'mon, Mandrake... Throw me a few bugs here!
Seriously, I EXPECT to have a bunch of small updates from Mandrake and to have few and far between major updates for my Windows systems.. I'm most disappointed with this ratio today...
(sigh)
Posted from the only computer that isn't rebooting.
I used to think I wanted a cell phone and PDA all-in-one device. I've waffled again and flipped back.
I genuinely like my m125. But hold it up to my ear and talk? Nope, it's not a comfortable size and shape. My phone has a scheduler and various unused contact management features, mostly because it's a pain to input.
I drool at the gadget stores each time I see a new version, but so far I've been disappointed in what I've gotten my hands on.
My current thought: Bluetooth running from a PDA to a bug in my ear would be really cool. But cool does not make practical, and I expect to be disappointed with that, as well.
I think I'll stick with single-purpose tools that do their one job well, and hope that everyone gets their poop in a pile and offers good interoperability. It's a time honored tradition!
If there weren't too many good questions for this interview I'm sure the Doug Miller is going to get there.:)
Someone has to pick between overlapping questions, different angles on the same question, and questions tangental to the topic. We've seen more than 10 questions formally put forward before, I'm sure we'll see it again.
I doubt a significantly large problem will develop so long as all the questions are posted openly and we're free to Question the Questionable Question Quality.
Now I've clearly gone on a Quest for silliness.
-- Mark
I felt really honoured to have moderator points to burn, and I burned them all on this conversation.
Some questions were very difficult to choose between. Let's be serious, DCMA was going to come up a hundred times with a slightly different bend on each of them. Q1 and Q6 were quite similar questions, but to me at least, were both interesting. I thought Q1 focused on the government's role while Q6 focused more upon individuals.
I, being Canajun, would have liked to see one of the questions of being outside of the US formally asked. It didn't. Scratch one point.
I picked my favourite question on getting swamped with email. Another was chosen. C'est la vie.
Enough "good" questions were modded up to pick from. Redundant questions were dropped. I think some questions may have been better to ask than others, but I had already done my share by modding.
"Susie the secretary will not understand *Nix vs. point and click."
With GNOME / KDE up front she'll never have to.
The problem I have with the arguement, "Secretaries just want to get their job done" usually assumes they people aren't willing to learn anything to improve themselves. I don't usually see this as the case and don't like tarring with a brush that big.
"Too many variations of Linux
Which one is really better as they all claim one or two niches over the other."
Variations within Distros are really small compared with Win9x / WinNT. I'm no Linux guru, but I can already switch between distros confidently. The underpinings ("Linux") remains constant, and the biggest problem I personally had to deal with was a different directory structure. Now, I became comfortable with RH / Mandrake early on and come with that slant, but I personally don't find Debian jarring.
"Gnome vs. KDE vs. etc.
Why so many desktop environments, sure alternatives are good, but when work needs to be done, money is burnt by time spent figuring out whats what on Linux vs. point and click MS"
Oho -- I love arguing with someone on this one. After half an hour of arguing configurability vs. a standard "look and feel", and arguing the strength of choices vs. the strength of a known method of plugging into the GUI, I usually have made a point or two that there are some advantages with alternatives.
That's when I tell them to log off and change to another window manager. "They're already there. Once you've picked your favourite, you can stick with it on most machines."
KDE & GNOME still need work to interoperate, but this is work that's happening and is clearly improving. From a Mandrake view-point, I hardly care which I'm in because I can use my commonly used apps in either.
With a few more details under your belt and you'll argue that guy into the ground and leave him spinning in the wind.:)
For the network at my wife's school which I put together and administrate on a volunteer basis? I think I've been taken out to dinner a couple of times.
Although the pace seems a little on the slow side for me personally (get it to the Supreme Court and get it over with!) it seems to me the DoJ has been measured and calm in their approach while M$ seems overly aggressive and defensive. Hope this bodes well.
May the rest of the judges in the appeal process take as much time looking at the issues.
Slashdot Mirror
And then we can discuss the Dvorak keyboard which is generally considered quicker to learn, quicker to type with, and much more comfortable on the wrists.
It makes more sense with the vowels together at left home and the common consonants on the right. Many professional writers make quite a fuss over the Dvorak keyboard if they hold a preference.
QWERTY is difficult to use and understand compared with other alternatives. We shouldn't stop improving simply because of inertia.
(No, I don't use the Dvorak keyboard myself. I jump between keyboards too often and I've been afraid of how difficult it would be to transition constantly between mine and someone else's. I should be less hypocritical in my life.)
- Zarq
(snicker)
Considering Stewart's report is working from the premise that most U.S. citizens don't actually know who provides them with the majority of their energy, I figure I can afford to inform a FEW along the way.
And considering that I'm sitting on top of some of that black Alberta goodness, I'm clearly too disillusioned by the federal government to bother staying on topic discussing the scandel. I just expect that. (grin)
- Zarq
I think they may have discovered a barrel or 180 billion of conventional oil in Canada already.
This omits the "frontier" resources such as the oil reserves found off the shore of Newfoundland and the enormous reserves in the Alberta Oil sands which, although the oil is difficult to extract, the quantities of reserves are stunning, at an estimated quantity of 1.6 trillion barrels remaining.
When you're finished being clever, an economic specialist at the American embassy wrote a very informative article on the state of Canada - U.S. energy trade relations. It can be found in .pdf form right here
I'd pay good money for a ticket to watch the USAF send a couple aircraft out to strafe those CD's. The entertainment value of shiny bits shredded and flying gracefully through the skies at high velocity would probably balance off the grave personal danger to myself.
Now if only I could think of ONE location to set up those MICROSOFT cd's as targets so they're out of the WAY of anything important...
I'm not sure that's a good idea.
I mean, SCO is somewhat ephemeral. It's not really the same as BSD where they'll be hanging around dying for years...
- Zarq
"Lindash. Lindash. I like it. It sounds fast. It will make your computer run quickly. And it's Linux, so you know it'll be stable.
"Yeah, I like Lindash a lot. And it sounds WAY better than Laguar or Lanther."
+1 Insightful
+1 Ironic
+1 Really depressing
+1 Prescience?
Aww, crap. I'm commenting so I can't mod anyways.
Throughout this whole topic there have been some great comments, but this really grabs my attention. Mozilla is going to have to be MUCH better than IE to get on an equal standing simply because of the built-in momentum IE has because it's bundled.
The fact that that it is getting to be known demonstrates that it is very, very good indeed. (DISCLOSURE: Mozilla nightly on my laptop, Firefox on my w2k box, Galeon on my Linux box, plugs to anyone who will listen to me regarding browsers.)
The whole point of this is if the tide is turning, more and more of us are making friends for Mozilla. Faster than MS can get customers? I doubt it's happening yet. But if developers keep improving Mozilla the way they have been, and if we keep demonstrating the benefits we will create another mass exodus.
- Zarq
A hack on a budget is still a hack.
Restoring a piece of 20 year old hardware into a functional unit is certainly more cool than I've pulled off recently. And no, my backup server doesn't really count here.
I'm sitting here imagining what the mod is going to be in another twenty years...
"I wanted a [super-LCD|panel|unimaginably cool 3D display technology] but I couldn't find one for under $50. Fortunately, I was able to get the [64|128|258|1024] way mobo to slide in with room to spare!"
Dammit, the kids today.. They don't dream the way we dreamed when the amber screens first came out.
- Zarq
You know, I like to consider myself more-or-less with it and on top of patches.
"...you have to remember to visit Office Update manually..."
Office Update? Oh crap.. There goes my afternoon. Let me grab my CD and I'll start patching this afternoon. A slightly acerbic thank you for telling me what I should have already known.
Now if *I* didn't know about this - what hope does my dad have?
No way!
If one of my clients happened to have mission critical software that was taken down because I applied a patch, then I'd deserve to get turfed. I agree that patches breaking other software is used far too much as an excuse for laziness, but testing your patches before you go live is still critically important.
If I ended up costing a company a $10,000 gig (say I couldn't recover a database - or maybe just had so much downtime the company missed a deadline) I'm not going to last long enough to point the finger and say, "It's Microsoft's fault!" I'd likely have my ass grinding over the welcome mat on my way out the door. And in the small businesses that I deal with, losing more than one or two shows will bring the company down anyways.
Part of competency is understanding risk management. If I have the time to test patches before applying them, there is no excuse to patch blindly. If it's a nice standard shop that doesn't have anything exotic, then yeah I'll let auto-update take care of it. But you better understand the business and what kind of tolerance they have to down time or broken patches!
For the record, all of the systems have been clean and, knock on wood, I'll drop by the last of my clients this weekend and check theirs in person (I haven't got a complaint call yet, so I'm hoping things are as I left them.)
- Zarquil
Doing a quick scan through /. just to see what's up...
Windows vulnerability... Yadda Yadda Yadda... I better do my laptop because I need it hang it behind someone else's firewall. Okay, nothing really new. I keep a minimal install on my laptop for just such occasions - there really isn't much (other than the data) that can get buggered by adding the patch anyhow.
So since I'm on a patching spree anyhow, I might as well check my Mandrake box.
"The list of updates is void. This means that there is either no available update for the packages installed on your computer, or you already installed all of them."
WTF??
C'mon, Mandrake... Throw me a few bugs here!
Seriously, I EXPECT to have a bunch of small updates from Mandrake and to have few and far between major updates for my Windows systems.. I'm most disappointed with this ratio today...
(sigh)
Posted from the only computer that isn't rebooting.
- Zarquil
PSHAW!
Packets? We had to hand-separate electrons and jam them into the serial port individually..
It was hell filing the tweezers down fine enough!
I used to think I wanted a cell phone and PDA all-in-one device. I've waffled again and flipped back.
I genuinely like my m125. But hold it up to my ear and talk? Nope, it's not a comfortable size and shape. My phone has a scheduler and various unused contact management features, mostly because it's a pain to input.
I drool at the gadget stores each time I see a new version, but so far I've been disappointed in what I've gotten my hands on.
My current thought: Bluetooth running from a PDA to a bug in my ear would be really cool. But cool does not make practical, and I expect to be disappointed with that, as well.
I think I'll stick with single-purpose tools that do their one job well, and hope that everyone gets their poop in a pile and offers good interoperability. It's a time honored tradition!
Must begin regimen of diet and exercise.. Which should be easy since I never seem to be able to get the DVD I want.
Saaaaay, that's great kids!
I really like where you placed the bathroom this time. Very apropos.
I promise, next time we're going spend a little more and get the Mindstorm Dream Home so everyone else on the block knows we're going places!
I was starting to worry, but fortunately not only is the first hit appropriate, but it includes a picture - and is that a tight sweater I see?
2 2C indy+McCaffrey%22
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en=ISO-8859-1=%
Zarquil
Let's go out and get BOMBED and CRASH in the BUSH beside the WHITE HOUSE.
Does that translate well to French, German, and Spanish?
I just knew they'd have ONE reason to make me want to upgrade.
Someone has to pick between overlapping questions, different angles on the same question, and questions tangental to the topic. We've seen more than 10 questions formally put forward before, I'm sure we'll see it again.
I doubt a significantly large problem will develop so long as all the questions are posted openly and we're free to Question the Questionable Question Quality.
Now I've clearly gone on a Quest for silliness. -- Mark
Some questions were very difficult to choose between. Let's be serious, DCMA was going to come up a hundred times with a slightly different bend on each of them. Q1 and Q6 were quite similar questions, but to me at least, were both interesting. I thought Q1 focused on the government's role while Q6 focused more upon individuals.
I, being Canajun, would have liked to see one of the questions of being outside of the US formally asked. It didn't. Scratch one point.
I picked my favourite question on getting swamped with email. Another was chosen. C'est la vie.
Enough "good" questions were modded up to pick from. Redundant questions were dropped. I think some questions may have been better to ask than others, but I had already done my share by modding.
It's not perfect, but hey, that's politics!
With GNOME / KDE up front she'll never have to.
The problem I have with the arguement, "Secretaries just want to get their job done" usually assumes they people aren't willing to learn anything to improve themselves. I don't usually see this as the case and don't like tarring with a brush that big.
"Too many variations of Linux Which one is really better as they all claim one or two niches over the other."
Variations within Distros are really small compared with Win9x / WinNT. I'm no Linux guru, but I can already switch between distros confidently. The underpinings ("Linux") remains constant, and the biggest problem I personally had to deal with was a different directory structure. Now, I became comfortable with RH / Mandrake early on and come with that slant, but I personally don't find Debian jarring.
"Gnome vs. KDE vs. etc. Why so many desktop environments, sure alternatives are good, but when work needs to be done, money is burnt by time spent figuring out whats what on Linux vs. point and click MS"
Oho -- I love arguing with someone on this one. After half an hour of arguing configurability vs. a standard "look and feel", and arguing the strength of choices vs. the strength of a known method of plugging into the GUI, I usually have made a point or two that there are some advantages with alternatives.
That's when I tell them to log off and change to another window manager. "They're already there. Once you've picked your favourite, you can stick with it on most machines."
KDE & GNOME still need work to interoperate, but this is work that's happening and is clearly improving. From a Mandrake view-point, I hardly care which I'm in because I can use my commonly used apps in either.
With a few more details under your belt and you'll argue that guy into the ground and leave him spinning in the wind. :)
Never on Sysadmin Appreciation Day, though.
Although the pace seems a little on the slow side for me personally (get it to the Supreme Court and get it over with!) it seems to me the DoJ has been measured and calm in their approach while M$ seems overly aggressive and defensive. Hope this bodes well.
May the rest of the judges in the appeal process take as much time looking at the issues.