Yep, there is. Virtually every smaller local ISP falls into this category now, as the inefficient ones have either gone bankrupt or have been bought out. They tend to cost a bit more, but provide a better level of service. I'm lucky in that I live in a metro area (Twin Cities) that has a few of these companies to choose from.
And if you do get divorced, don't remarry until the kids move out. Stepfamilies suck.
That is such wrong advice that I don't even know where to start. Look, kids need solid parental role models in their lives. My ex lives almost 2,000 miles away, so she only sees the kids on long school breaks. Not that she was all that available as a mom before the divorce. Not really her fault, though. Her own childhood is the stuff that nightmares are made of. I just wish I'd known about her upbringing before I proposed. Maybe we wouldn't have gotten married, maybe we would. I do know that I would have preferred knowing what the core problems were before I spent 18 years trying to figure it all out. But I digress.
Before we were divorced, my kids had been struggling in school. My youngest was nearly two years behind in reading, and my son was struggling to keep up with his class. At least he passed everything. If my ex and I watched everything he did, that is. (sigh)
After the divorce I was very worried about my younger child's reading issues, and devoted almost all of my spare time to getting her up to snuff. I was successful to the point that she's now reading about 18 months ahead of her grade, but my son suffered. It got so bad that last year he failed 3 classes in 9th grade and I had to withdraw him from a 4th to prevent another F on his transcript. I know that a lot of that had to do with how I was coping with being a single parent while working full time.
The last quarter of his 9th grade year, I met and fell in love with a wonderful woman. We were married the following August. She has been nothing but a strong, postive stepmom for my kids. In many ways she is a far better mom than their birth mom has ever been. She has also helped make me a better dad as well. My son's GPA is nearly a full point higher than it was last year. He's passed every class so far, and is slowly learning how to stay on top of stuff (something that I could never seem to get through to him on my own).
My wife's kids were also struggling. Her ex is a nice guy, but seems to be completely incapable of maintaining any boundaries for his kids. It made it virtually impossible for her to teach her kidsself discipline. The good side is that he lives close by, and sees them every other weekend and every Wednesday. He is also more than willing to run his kids around.
Still, my wife tells me that having me around and silently backing her up when she needed to discipline them was a real eye opener for her children. We've had some rocky incidents, but clearly her kids are happier and feel safer now than they did in the past. Their grades are up as well (although they didn't have as far to go as mine did).
Moral of the story for me is: MAKE SURE that whoever you consider marrying is both willing and capable of doing their part to make your marriage and family life a success. That is the secret to any successful marriage, regardless of whether or not kids are involved, and regardless of whether it's your first, second, or twenty second marriage.
Now, back on topic:
My kids have had access to their own accounts on my Linux boxes since they were four or five. They started out with things like Tux Paint and have moved on to playing games, using OpenOffice, gaim for the teens, etc. My stepkids had Windows XP growing up. The teen still prefers that. The younger one is more willing to experiment with Linux to get stuff done. We have two Linux PCs and a WinXP box at the moment.
The grades of all 4 have shown improvement since we got married. I attribute it more to a much happier home life for all than any technology availability. But I don't think that you can say that they've been hurt by the easy availability of tech, either.
The truth is that our kids are growing up in a far different world than we did. The rate of change itself continues to accelerate. It really doesn't matter how you teach your kids. WHAT you teach them is far more important; impart a strong sense of values, teach them self discipline, and teach them the skills necessary to continually learn new subjects as they come up.
I checked out your coordinates for the Shell gas works on maps.google.com. I don't see anything but empty ocean at that point. Are you sure you have the coordinates correct?
I've seen the 100% CPU problem myself on FF 1.07, 1.5, and 1.5.0.1. I've seen the problem on Windows and Gentoo Linux. The only extensions that I run are Adblock, NoScript, and TalkBack. Believe me, if it ever happens to you, you'll know it.
The only thing that I noticed was that certain websites seemed to trigger it pretty reliably. Maybe the thing those of us seeing the problem is to start making lists of websites that cause the problems. Set up a new bug to track them. There may be a common feature/bug/HTML rendering issue/malicious act that FF is stumbling over.
Of course, that assumes that Mozilla QA will finally accept the bug as valid....
When I was in high school, I had one of the first programmable TI calculator that was marketed to the masses. I also had access to the only terminal in the building that had a dial-up connection to the U of MN mainframe. (anyone else remember fighting acoustic couplers?)
The first PC that I bought for myself was the original gray case, chiclet key Color Computer. I bought it initially with a little ink jet printer that used 4 inch wide rolls and a tape player/recorder for storage. I later upgraded the RAM from 64 K to 256K, added an Okidate Microline 82 dot matrix printer, and added a 5 1/4" floppy drive (double sided, I think).
So far as I know, the thing still runs. I saw it sitting on the shelf at my Dad's a few years ago. Tough old beast. The PC, not my Dad.:)
I know your list wasn't meant to be complete, but you missed one case that tends to get ignored a lot on slashdot. That's OK, the bulk of the people hanging out here are developers or have a development focus, so they tend to forget about the rest of the IT staff.;)
Think of all the scripting that gets done by the network and system administrators to keep everything humming along. It's almost always unrealistic for that staff to fall into line behind a single corporate wide language that was chosen to support a completely different set of design requirements. Heck, in their case it's virtually impossible to pick a single language due to differences between platforms and availability of tools. For example, in most cases they're happy if they only have to worry about choosing between Perl, Python, shell scripts, and/or batch files on *nices and/or Windows. Then there's JCL or ?? for the big iron plus Ghu knows what for rarer platforms like Tandems.
None of the above takes into account the network admins who, in addition to worrying about the differences between (again, for example only) Cisco and Juniper, also have to have at least a basic understanding of whatever scripting language(s) their management consoles support.
Anyhow, I agree that the idea that all coding done by a company can be done in a single language is wrong for all the reasons that you enumerated, and I agree that a list of standard choices based upon requirements is very important. That single sheet of paper probably needs to grow to a sheet and a half or two sheets to cover all the possibilities, though.
We need to stand up for our rights as citizens and consumers and demand not only a free and competitive market for these works, but public oversight and control of the means of production and distribution and the rights of the consumers who purchase these goods.
(boggle!) Do you even have a clue what the inherent contradiction is in that single sentence?
Besides, there are literally hundreds if not thousands of small publishers out there. Don't like what the big houses are doing? Then vote with your wallet and don't buy their books!
When you are looking at the Windows platform, there really isn't anything else in Visio's league for doing network and system diagrams at that price point. Note the final qualifier.:)
I'd love to see a discussion of futurists' predictions that HAVE been surprisingly accurate.
I would suggest reading Alvin Toffler's _Future_Shock_ (1970) and _The_Third_Wave_ (1980). Still the best two texts that I've ever read for understanding how technology is affecting how society changes. The overall view represented by these two books is fairly accurate. Naturally, he didn't get all the details right. Still, well worth a read.
I've been running Gentoo for about 4 years, I think. I'm not positive of the exact starting time, but I think I popped in my first Gentoo CD some time in 2001. I was a Mandrake user for a few years before that, and a Redhat user before that. When I got dissatisfied with RPM dependency hell, I looked at attempting to resolve it with Suse and Debian. I've built a few boxes using Debian sarge and Debian unstable. I don't consider myself an expert by any means, but I have built enough boxes with the various distros to have a pretty good feel for what works for me.
I'm familiar with some of the problems with portage, as I've stumbled across my fair share of them over time. It's certainly not perfect. I don't think it's "chock full of problems", personally. I would still far rather use a Gentoo based system to any RPM based system. But, that's just one geek's personal opinion.
Back (semi) on topic. There really isn't anything wrong with Python. It does what it does very well. It has no pretensions of being a speed demon. As for any language acheiving world domination? Assembler all the way, baby! Put that in your.Net pipe and smoke it!:D (joke!)
I just went to my Preferences page and unchecked Scuttle Monkey as Author. That's the first time that I've ever taken that step. One way to avoid BB, though.:)
Granted, that doesn't cover all subjects. Nor is there much out there that is current. However, I think that you'll find that at least a few smaller publishers are following Baen's lead and opening up their back catalogs. It's a great way for authors to get exposure, after all.
I lose on 1 out of 10 companies, usually my entire investment. On the 9 out of 10 that don't fail, I make 20-50% annually. I double my money as a profit in 2-4 years, and I still own the company. Even factoring in the 100% loss on the failed investments, I double my money in approximately 5.5 years and I still retain control. Anyone can do this, and it doesn't require a stock broker who is making money on you if you win or if you lose. (emphasis added)
THIS is where your entire argument falls apart. The fact is that you are not a representative member of the general population. Heck, I'm not exactly an idiot (top 1 or 2 percent on every standardized test that I've ever taken) and I can guarantee you that I would never be able to duplicate your performance in picking businesses (local or otherwise) to invest in. It's just not an area that I have a feel for, even after spending years studying the market. Off the top of my head, the more spectacular misses that I've made:
Cisco Microsoft IBM RedHat
While I will stipulate that most new wealth in this country comes from small businesses, the truth is that most people suck at running their own shop. The last numbers that I saw showed that 50% of all businesses in the US fail in the first 12 months. Another 20% or so fail in the next 6 or 12 months. If you have the right type of personality and the brains to do extremely well at it, I applaud you. You are are an exceptional individual in that regard.
Most people choose to invest in 401Ks, mutual funds, and the like because they know that they don't have a clue as to how to choose good investments. They have to trust someone else to do it for them. At least their money is safer there than in a mattress. At least it's not depreciating quite so fast.
Yep, that's about the time that American vehicles started copying Japanese frame and body designs (with some innovations of their own). All passenger vehicles since that time are designed to absorb an impact while protecting the cab itself. The accident that you describe sounds like that's what happened.
And the hardware of that laptop is decent enough. Just overloaded with bells, whistles, and security systems by IT, to the point where it barely worked.
Did you even read the GP? The guy told you why all sysadmins (in the US, anyway) are now forced to do all this crap; the auditors are forcing us to do it because of GLBA, SarBox, and HIPAA. We no longer have a choice.
You don't want it? Fine, you sign up for the orange jumpsuit. I can guarantee your CIO doesn't want to.
In terms of who we should be sorry wasn't saved, I'd trade one child for Christopher Reeve any day.
From what I've read of the man, I think he would have agreed with you. That still doesn't take away the fact that he was a prime mover in getting publicity for the cause.
It was a shame he didn't get to live to see it reach this stage. If you can't see why we should, then I can only feel sorrow for you.
Mr. Matthews obviously isn't well versed in the areas of high finance, nor business/economics in general. The whole point of running a company is to MAXIMIZE shareholder value -- any actions taken outside of that context and you better start calling yourself a charity.
Too bad you haven't taken a couple of econ courses yourself. When you have a partnership or sole proprietorship (e.g., most of the businesses in existence since the dawn of time) the only actions that you take are the ones that benefit you. The only true means of maintaining control of your company is to forego any and all outside investments. THAT's what the GP meant.
You clearly live in a neighborhood that suffers from far more crime than most. That can really suck, especially if it's a place that you grew up in. I can sympathize to some extent. I've lived in bad neighborhoods myself in the past, although not one that I had any kind of emotional tie to. I solved the problem for me by moving as soon as I could. If you don't want to move, then I would think that you have to take constructive action to improve your surroundings to the best of your ability.
So the message is, your life is just not worth merchandise.
True as far as it goes. When someone pulls a gun, the stakes have gone way up. However, I would argue that mistakes were made by the victims in at least two of the cases that you cite (the bagger and the senior citizen). Mistakes that ultimately got them killed.
I would suggest that a better response is that the criminal's life is not worth the merchandise. Take every means necessary to protect yourself, but DON'T let them get away with it. Each time they do, the odds continue to go up that they will continue to escalate their violent tendencies. Take away the risk by any means necessary, but STOP the bastards.
If instead you don't want to be in a situation where you are forced to defend yourself, at least be in a position to get the information necessary to nail them later.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, there is. Virtually every smaller local ISP falls into this category now, as the inefficient ones have either gone bankrupt or have been bought out. They tend to cost a bit more, but provide a better level of service. I'm lucky in that I live in a metro area (Twin Cities) that has a few of these companies to choose from.
That is such wrong advice that I don't even know where to start. Look, kids need solid parental role models in their lives. My ex lives almost 2,000 miles away, so she only sees the kids on long school breaks. Not that she was all that available as a mom before the divorce. Not really her fault, though. Her own childhood is the stuff that nightmares are made of. I just wish I'd known about her upbringing before I proposed. Maybe we wouldn't have gotten married, maybe we would. I do know that I would have preferred knowing what the core problems were before I spent 18 years trying to figure it all out. But I digress.
Before we were divorced, my kids had been struggling in school. My youngest was nearly two years behind in reading, and my son was struggling to keep up with his class. At least he passed everything. If my ex and I watched everything he did, that is. (sigh)
After the divorce I was very worried about my younger child's reading issues, and devoted almost all of my spare time to getting her up to snuff. I was successful to the point that she's now reading about 18 months ahead of her grade, but my son suffered. It got so bad that last year he failed 3 classes in 9th grade and I had to withdraw him from a 4th to prevent another F on his transcript. I know that a lot of that had to do with how I was coping with being a single parent while working full time.
The last quarter of his 9th grade year, I met and fell in love with a wonderful woman. We were married the following August. She has been nothing but a strong, postive stepmom for my kids. In many ways she is a far better mom than their birth mom has ever been. She has also helped make me a better dad as well. My son's GPA is nearly a full point higher than it was last year. He's passed every class so far, and is slowly learning how to stay on top of stuff (something that I could never seem to get through to him on my own).
My wife's kids were also struggling. Her ex is a nice guy, but seems to be completely incapable of maintaining any boundaries for his kids. It made it virtually impossible for her to teach her kidsself discipline. The good side is that he lives close by, and sees them every other weekend and every Wednesday. He is also more than willing to run his kids around.
Still, my wife tells me that having me around and silently backing her up when she needed to discipline them was a real eye opener for her children. We've had some rocky incidents, but clearly her kids are happier and feel safer now than they did in the past. Their grades are up as well (although they didn't have as far to go as mine did).
Moral of the story for me is: MAKE SURE that whoever you consider marrying is both willing and capable of doing their part to make your marriage and family life a success. That is the secret to any successful marriage, regardless of whether or not kids are involved, and regardless of whether it's your first, second, or twenty second marriage.
Now, back on topic:
My kids have had access to their own accounts on my Linux boxes since they were four or five. They started out with things like Tux Paint and have moved on to playing games, using OpenOffice, gaim for the teens, etc. My stepkids had Windows XP growing up. The teen still prefers that. The younger one is more willing to experiment with Linux to get stuff done. We have two Linux PCs and a WinXP box at the moment.
The grades of all 4 have shown improvement since we got married. I attribute it more to a much happier home life for all than any technology availability. But I don't think that you can say that they've been hurt by the easy availability of tech, either.
The truth is that our kids are growing up in a far different world than we did. The rate of change itself continues to accelerate. It really doesn't matter how you teach your kids. WHAT you teach them is far more important; impart a strong sense of values, teach them self discipline, and teach them the skills necessary to continually learn new subjects as they come up.
I checked out your coordinates for the Shell gas works on maps.google.com. I don't see anything but empty ocean at that point. Are you sure you have the coordinates correct?
I've seen the 100% CPU problem myself on FF 1.07, 1.5, and 1.5.0.1. I've seen the problem on Windows and Gentoo Linux. The only extensions that I run are Adblock, NoScript, and TalkBack. Believe me, if it ever happens to you, you'll know it.
The only thing that I noticed was that certain websites seemed to trigger it pretty reliably. Maybe the thing those of us seeing the problem is to start making lists of websites that cause the problems. Set up a new bug to track them. There may be a common feature/bug/HTML rendering issue/malicious act that FF is stumbling over.
Of course, that assumes that Mozilla QA will finally accept the bug as valid....
When I was in high school, I had one of the first programmable TI calculator that was marketed to the masses. I also had access to the only terminal in the building that had a dial-up connection to the U of MN mainframe. (anyone else remember fighting acoustic couplers?)
:)
The first PC that I bought for myself was the original gray case, chiclet key Color Computer. I bought it initially with a little ink jet printer that used 4 inch wide rolls and a tape player/recorder for storage. I later upgraded the RAM from 64 K to 256K, added an Okidate Microline 82 dot matrix printer, and added a 5 1/4" floppy drive (double sided, I think).
So far as I know, the thing still runs. I saw it sitting on the shelf at my Dad's a few years ago. Tough old beast. The PC, not my Dad.
Tons of fun. Lots of notalgia.
I know your list wasn't meant to be complete, but you missed one case that tends to get ignored a lot on slashdot. That's OK, the bulk of the people hanging out here are developers or have a development focus, so they tend to forget about the rest of the IT staff. ;)
Think of all the scripting that gets done by the network and system administrators to keep everything humming along. It's almost always unrealistic for that staff to fall into line behind a single corporate wide language that was chosen to support a completely different set of design requirements. Heck, in their case it's virtually impossible to pick a single language due to differences between platforms and availability of tools. For example, in most cases they're happy if they only have to worry about choosing between Perl, Python, shell scripts, and/or batch files on *nices and/or Windows. Then there's JCL or ?? for the big iron plus Ghu knows what for rarer platforms like Tandems.
None of the above takes into account the network admins who, in addition to worrying about the differences between (again, for example only) Cisco and Juniper, also have to have at least a basic understanding of whatever scripting language(s) their management consoles support.
Anyhow, I agree that the idea that all coding done by a company can be done in a single language is wrong for all the reasons that you enumerated, and I agree that a list of standard choices based upon requirements is very important. That single sheet of paper probably needs to grow to a sheet and a half or two sheets to cover all the possibilities, though.
(boggle!) Do you even have a clue what the inherent contradiction is in that single sentence?
Besides, there are literally hundreds if not thousands of small publishers out there. Don't like what the big houses are doing? Then vote with your wallet and don't buy their books!
Sooo, rather than complain and drag their feet, maybe Microsoft should /thank/ the EU for making them clean up their docs? :lol:
When you are looking at the Windows platform, there really isn't anything else in Visio's league for doing network and system diagrams at that price point. Note the final qualifier. :)
I haven't read that one. I'll have to look it up. Thanks for the tip.
That's why I suggested _The_Third_Wave_ as well. :)
I would suggest reading Alvin Toffler's _Future_Shock_ (1970) and _The_Third_Wave_ (1980). Still the best two texts that I've ever read for understanding how technology is affecting how society changes. The overall view represented by these two books is fairly accurate. Naturally, he didn't get all the details right. Still, well worth a read.
I've been running Gentoo for about 4 years, I think. I'm not positive of the exact starting time, but I think I popped in my first Gentoo CD some time in 2001. I was a Mandrake user for a few years before that, and a Redhat user before that. When I got dissatisfied with RPM dependency hell, I looked at attempting to resolve it with Suse and Debian. I've built a few boxes using Debian sarge and Debian unstable. I don't consider myself an expert by any means, but I have built enough boxes with the various distros to have a pretty good feel for what works for me.
.Net pipe and smoke it! :D (joke!)
I'm familiar with some of the problems with portage, as I've stumbled across my fair share of them over time. It's certainly not perfect. I don't think it's "chock full of problems", personally. I would still far rather use a Gentoo based system to any RPM based system. But, that's just one geek's personal opinion.
Back (semi) on topic. There really isn't anything wrong with Python. It does what it does very well. It has no pretensions of being a speed demon. As for any language acheiving world domination? Assembler all the way, baby! Put that in your
I just went to my Preferences page and unchecked Scuttle Monkey as Author. That's the first time that I've ever taken that step. One way to avoid BB, though. :)
Not all ebooks have DRM. Someone else already mentioned Baen Publishing's Free Library. Great source of science fiction and fantasy. There's always Project Gutenberg, the http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/>University of Pennsylvania's Online Books Page, and just about anything with a Creative Commons License.
Granted, that doesn't cover all subjects. Nor is there much out there that is current. However, I think that you'll find that at least a few smaller publishers are following Baen's lead and opening up their back catalogs. It's a great way for authors to get exposure, after all.
A Gentoo user complaining about Python????????????????
(blink)(shakes head in confusion)
Umm, do you know what language all the tools that make Gentoo Gentoo are written in? I'll give you a couple clues. It's not Perl, C, or ruby.
THIS is where your entire argument falls apart. The fact is that you are not a representative member of the general population. Heck, I'm not exactly an idiot (top 1 or 2 percent on every standardized test that I've ever taken) and I can guarantee you that I would never be able to duplicate your performance in picking businesses (local or otherwise) to invest in. It's just not an area that I have a feel for, even after spending years studying the market. Off the top of my head, the more spectacular misses that I've made:
Cisco
Microsoft
IBM
RedHat
While I will stipulate that most new wealth in this country comes from small businesses, the truth is that most people suck at running their own shop. The last numbers that I saw showed that 50% of all businesses in the US fail in the first 12 months. Another 20% or so fail in the next 6 or 12 months. If you have the right type of personality and the brains to do extremely well at it, I applaud you. You are are an exceptional individual in that regard.
Most people choose to invest in 401Ks, mutual funds, and the like because they know that they don't have a clue as to how to choose good investments. They have to trust someone else to do it for them. At least their money is safer there than in a mattress. At least it's not depreciating quite so fast.
Yep, that's about the time that American vehicles started copying Japanese frame and body designs (with some innovations of their own). All passenger vehicles since that time are designed to absorb an impact while protecting the cab itself. The accident that you describe sounds like that's what happened.
Did you even read the GP? The guy told you why all sysadmins (in the US, anyway) are now forced to do all this crap; the auditors are forcing us to do it because of GLBA, SarBox, and HIPAA. We no longer have a choice.
You don't want it? Fine, you sign up for the orange jumpsuit. I can guarantee your CIO doesn't want to.
Based upon what criteria? Python error prone? How? Care to cite specific cases?
From what I've read of the man, I think he would have agreed with you. That still doesn't take away the fact that he was a prime mover in getting publicity for the cause.
It was a shame he didn't get to live to see it reach this stage. If you can't see why we should, then I can only feel sorrow for you.
Too bad you haven't taken a couple of econ courses yourself. When you have a partnership or sole proprietorship (e.g., most of the businesses in existence since the dawn of time) the only actions that you take are the ones that benefit you. The only true means of maintaining control of your company is to forego any and all outside investments. THAT's what the GP meant.
I'd say Python and Tk if there was an IDE to compare with the Eclipse/pydev combination for Windows.
True as far as it goes. When someone pulls a gun, the stakes have gone way up. However, I would argue that mistakes were made by the victims in at least two of the cases that you cite (the bagger and the senior citizen). Mistakes that ultimately got them killed.
I would suggest that a better response is that the criminal's life is not worth the merchandise. Take every means necessary to protect yourself, but DON'T let them get away with it. Each time they do, the odds continue to go up that they will continue to escalate their violent tendencies. Take away the risk by any means necessary, but STOP the bastards.
If instead you don't want to be in a situation where you are forced to defend yourself, at least be in a position to get the information necessary to nail them later.