A coworker of mine has his desktop filled with icons. There's no room left for even one for icon in the lower left corner. This happened once before, and he increased his screen resolution to compensate. But now he's at 1600x1200, and can't go any higher. He says he can't work on anymore documents because of this (presumably out of fear that his desktop might explode). So the question is, should he change the way he works to fit the tool, or should the tool be changed to fit the way he works?
There's an old joke about some hillbillies who buy a vacumn cleaner. After a few weeks they take it back to the store to return, claiming that doesn't work. So the salesman examines the vacumn, plugs it in, and turns it on. Whereupon the hillbillies explaim, "what's that noise!" So the question is, should the hillbillies change the way they work, or should the vacumn cleaner be rebuilt to fit the way the hillbillies work?
It is inappropriate to use your email account as a surrogate home directory. As in the case of filling up the desktop with icons, or using a vacumn clean as an expensive pushbroom, the solution isn't the change the tool, the solution is to teach the user how to use the tool.
Why?!?!? There are people at my work who consider our 300Mb limit obscenely small as well. Why?!?!?!?
1) Trash the trash, spam and junk. Trash the messages the stuff that was never important. Trash the stuff that was important but no longer. Then delete your trash!
2) Save the stuff you want to save. Create new *local* email folders, and manually archive stuff to them as appropriate. If the mail is just an attachement, download the attachment.
3) If you need to keep your old email for accountability purposes, then print them out and file them. Or print them to PDF and burn them. or just keep them on a second harddrive.
4) If people are routinely sending you obscenely large emails, tell them to stop. Repeat, tell them to stop. Stop using email as a project directory. Use group websites, or shared folders, or Sharepoint, or something similar instead.
Biondi: What do you mean "why"? It's a law! You've got to pass laws! You were quite entitled to make any suggestions or protests at the appropriate time, you know.
Deja Vu! That's almost word for word what that New Jersey mayor, Adam Schneider, said about eminent domain while kicking senior citizens out of their homes. Life imitates Douglas Adams.
Explain to your Grandma about *YOUR* Solaris install procedure! You said that non-admin Solaris users does not install software, yet I just showed how it was done. And it was one step easier than *YOUR* Solaris installation procedure.
Unless you have a complete lack of short term memory, there's no excuse for you not remembering your own posts. Sheesh.
the fact that granting shell access over SSH leads to a non-administrative user gaining root access in 30 MINUTES makes the OS entirely unsuitable in a server environment.
Just don't give out any login accounts to non-administrative users! If you think you need to give one out, think again, because you probably don't.
You've got the Solaris install mechanism all wrong. I install software on my Solaris workstation all the time without having root access:
Step 1: download source package Step 2: gunzip package Step 3:./configure --prefix=~/apps Step 4: make Step 5: make install
You can even do this with most binary packages. To make a long story short, Solaris users can install to their home directories, just like OSX users can.
I don't believe (as some pundits seem to) that Mac OS is a Microsoft style security disaster only awaiting the attention of hackers to happen...
Yet that is how it is being reported. Every OS has local exploits. Even <gasp> OpenBSD! But people are going apeshit over this, in an attempt to validate their own choice of Windows.
Yes, this is indeed a serious security vulnerability. No, OSX still isn't the piece of security shit that Windows is.
p.s. Here's my security challenge: hack my Mac OSX box and win $100! I'll even give you its IP address. 192.168.0.15.
I hear you! There's nothing like a new framework to promote featuritus. It was hard to do anything in MFC, so now.NET is like a toy to Windows developers, and you can be assured that no application is so mundane that it won't end up being a demo showcase of.NET eyecandy.
On the economic pressure side, the usual enemy to movie theatres is gas pricing. I disagree -- gas prices in my home are not up much once you factor in inflation over the past 15 years. Greenspan did this country a huge disservice with his inflationary system -- making the cost of living go up much faster than our wages did. I believe the average home is poorer today than it was 10 and 20 years ago -- when you look at the cost of entertainment versus the available disposable income, you can see why entertainment is failing. Pile on huge consumer debt levels, and most families can't just Charge It! any longer.
I'm going to have to dispute most of that. While I am not arguing that the economic situation is a bed of roses, neither is it the basket of turds that you portray.
Adjusting for inflation, gas prices are the lowest they've been in twenty years. And that's with the additional gas taxes thrown on top. Take the increased fuel efficiency into account (even for SUVs), and the price for driving your family five miles to a movie is a bargain! A family of four driving a Honda Civic (non-Hybrid) to a theater five miles away on surface streets works out to about a dime per passenger. What a deal!
While I'm not a fan of Greenspan, he has managed to produce a relatively stable low rate of inflation. Yes, inflation is real, and yes, it is entirely produced by the Fed under the reins of Greenspan. But then I look at other developed nations with their inflation rates, and I see that we're going quite well in this regard. We could be doing better, of course, but at least we aren't back in the 1970s.
I don't know what you mean by "average home". Most families are better off today then they were in 1986. And unless you were one of those riding the edge of the stock bubble in 1996, you're doing better now than in 1996 as well. Of course, this isn't uniform. Housing prices have skyrocketed in some areas. If you're lower-middle class and paying rent in Silicon Valley, for instance, you're probably worse off.
Consumer debt... you may be right. There's nothing wrong with debt, even consumer debt. A big chunk of the debt statistics are home mortgages, which is a good thing. But I do think easy credit has been oversold. I think the *consumer* has been stupid and taken on too much expensive credit card debt. But I still doubt this has a significant role in the decline of the American Movie Theater(tm).
The cost of movie entertainment *has* risen. But it hasn't risen because of a bad economy. It's risen because the *price* has gone up! Duh! $10 tickets, $3 drinks, and $3 popcorn, works out to $64 for a family of four. It's pricey enough that you end up being awful picky about the quality of movies you go see. Especially when renting movies has become so damned cheap.
It's too bad your place is like that. But fret not, while it is somewhat common, it isn't the norm. Out of all my friends working in technology, only one has a job vaguely resembling this.
I am really starting to loathe my own company, and will be leaving soon. But as much as I don't like them, stifling legitimate expression is not one of their sins. It wasn't for lack of trying. This is a US division of a German company, and I get this attitude from most of the German executives. But we don't stand for it. We let our professional opinions be known, and it has never been counted against us. Pure negativity is frowned on, but legitimate opinions and expressions are encouraged. Sometimes <gasp> they will even heed our professional advice!
Freedom, freedom, freedom... except for those brownskinned people in the Indian subcontinent! They must not be allowed to work for American employers! You can outsource to South Dakota, or even Canada or Germany if necessary. But not to India, or Mexico, China, or Dubai! They have the wrong skin color!
I think they didn't mod it down because it's a perfect summary of the statist position on any issue: "DIE! DIE! DIE!"
It's usually stated with a bit more tact though. The statist solution to every problem is invariably violence or the threat of violence. "More police (with guns), more armies (with guns), more laws and regulations (backed by police with guns), more diplomacy (backed with armies with guns)."
In this case it is very important that we figure out who is to blame. One of the suspects is government, but government is also the proposed solution. Giving the government the contract to fix market problems is like giving the Mafia the contract to fight organized crime.
Like communism, a free market is a very nice idea in theory, but doesn't exist in practice.
No, it doesn't exist. But we do have a great many markets to observe, some of which are freer, and some of which are not. Observation of the freer markets tells us a lot about what a true free market might be like. This is unlike communism, which requires 100% participation, after which we still have to wait for the totalitarian state to whither away before we see the final result.
In other words, experience tells us what a true free market will probably be like, which there is nothing in our experience to show us what true communism would be like.
I just bought an 12" iBook, and am very impressed with it. I never really liked laptops before, but this one is damned convenient. It's small, good wifi, long battery life, etc.
If you RTFA, you'd know that "Phone and cable companies largely agree that they should have the right to offer Internet companies the option of paying for faster delivery of their content."
I don't have a problem with that. Every since this whole brouhaha started I've been trying to figure out what the big deal is.
Everyone from your local liquor store to the national telcos want to charge more for their products and services. But they don't have the free reign to do so. Prices are not determined by the seller, they are determined by with input from BOTH the sellers and the buyers. Sure, you can slap a $500 price tag on that bottle of Ripple, but no one will buy it. Ditto for charging people $500 a byte for using their backbone lines. In the case of Ripple, winos will just go to another liquor store. Or switch brands. Or make their own. Or sober up. Likewise, if the price for certain nodes gets too high, the internet will start routing around them. If Cable gets too expensive people will switch to DSL. Or wifi. Or something else.
The more profit liquor stores make, the more incentive there is for people to open new liquor stores. The more SBC makes off of broadband access, the more incentive there is to start new businesses offering broadband access. Profits encourage competition. If there's a lot of money to be made in an industry, people will enter it to get their piece of pie. That is, if there isn't regulatory barriers to entry. In the case of liquor stores, there are state regulations limiting their number. In the case of broadband, there are state and federal regulations keeping competition out. (The solution is to decrease the regulation, not increase it).
In the end, providers can only effectively charge the market price. If people aren't willing to pay more for faster delivery, then they won't. Period. If there's a problem with monopolies, then start thinking about eliminating the regulations that create and maintain them.
Yeah, except unregulated markets tend to concentrate to the point where the market isn't really driving change, it's the two or three major players on the top who are.
Tomatoes are relatively regulated, with the result that I can get tomatoes of great variety from numerous suppliers at numerous distribution points. Ditto for pears, beer, laundry detergent and ballpoint pens.
Milk is more regulated, and I only have the choice of two local brands. There is a dairy nearby me to found a loophole in the laws, and is starting to give the local monopolists some serious competition. The result is that the monopolists are lobbying for MORE regulations.
Computers are relatively unregulated, with the result that I have a bewildering variety of choices when it comes to buying a computer. Dell, Gateway, IBM, Toshiba, Apple G4, Apple x86, DIY, Windows, Linux, BSD, Solaris, OpenOffice, MSOffice, KOffice, etc., etc., etc.
On the other hand, internet access is heavily regulated (albeit indirectly via telecommunications). The result is that my options for access are greatly limited. This is due to regulation and government interference in the market. The only way out seems to be the decentralized wifi, but with the heavy regulation of the radio spectrum, it doesn't look to promising.
And what is the number one proposed solution to this lack of choice? Another monopoly in the form of municipal wifi. Yup, the same people who created the telephone and cable monopolies are going to save us from the telephone and cable monopolies by creating a wifi monopoly. Sigh.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, that's want I'm saying.
A coworker of mine has his desktop filled with icons. There's no room left for even one for icon in the lower left corner. This happened once before, and he increased his screen resolution to compensate. But now he's at 1600x1200, and can't go any higher. He says he can't work on anymore documents because of this (presumably out of fear that his desktop might explode). So the question is, should he change the way he works to fit the tool, or should the tool be changed to fit the way he works?
There's an old joke about some hillbillies who buy a vacumn cleaner. After a few weeks they take it back to the store to return, claiming that doesn't work. So the salesman examines the vacumn, plugs it in, and turns it on. Whereupon the hillbillies explaim, "what's that noise!" So the question is, should the hillbillies change the way they work, or should the vacumn cleaner be rebuilt to fit the way the hillbillies work?
It is inappropriate to use your email account as a surrogate home directory. As in the case of filling up the desktop with icons, or using a vacumn clean as an expensive pushbroom, the solution isn't the change the tool, the solution is to teach the user how to use the tool.
I consider this obscenely small...
Why?!?!? There are people at my work who consider our 300Mb limit obscenely small as well. Why?!?!?!?
1) Trash the trash, spam and junk. Trash the messages the stuff that was never important. Trash the stuff that was important but no longer. Then delete your trash!
2) Save the stuff you want to save. Create new *local* email folders, and manually archive stuff to them as appropriate. If the mail is just an attachement, download the attachment.
3) If you need to keep your old email for accountability purposes, then print them out and file them. Or print them to PDF and burn them. or just keep them on a second harddrive.
4) If people are routinely sending you obscenely large emails, tell them to stop. Repeat, tell them to stop. Stop using email as a project directory. Use group websites, or shared folders, or Sharepoint, or something similar instead.
I was joking! Sheesh, you Slashdotters have no sense of humour.
Biondi: What do you mean "why"? It's a law! You've got to pass laws! You were quite entitled to make any suggestions or protests at the appropriate time, you know.
Deja Vu! That's almost word for word what that New Jersey mayor, Adam Schneider, said about eminent domain while kicking senior citizens out of their homes. Life imitates Douglas Adams.
Hee hee :-)
But will the hotspot be strong enough to reach Detroit?
Explain to your Grandma about *YOUR* Solaris install procedure! You said that non-admin Solaris users does not install software, yet I just showed how it was done. And it was one step easier than *YOUR* Solaris installation procedure.
Unless you have a complete lack of short term memory, there's no excuse for you not remembering your own posts. Sheesh.
Here's my Mac's IP address: 192.168.0.15
By far the most popular vector into a Windows machine are unpatched services...
"Services" are otherwise known as "open ports". Duh!
the fact that granting shell access over SSH leads to a non-administrative user gaining root access in 30 MINUTES makes the OS entirely unsuitable in a server environment.
Just don't give out any login accounts to non-administrative users! If you think you need to give one out, think again, because you probably don't.
You've got the Solaris install mechanism all wrong. I install software on my Solaris workstation all the time without having root access:
./configure --prefix=~/apps
Step 1: download source package
Step 2: gunzip package
Step 3:
Step 4: make
Step 5: make install
You can even do this with most binary packages. To make a long story short, Solaris users can install to their home directories, just like OSX users can.
I don't believe (as some pundits seem to) that Mac OS is a Microsoft style security disaster only awaiting the attention of hackers to happen...
Yet that is how it is being reported. Every OS has local exploits. Even <gasp> OpenBSD! But people are going apeshit over this, in an attempt to validate their own choice of Windows.
Yes, this is indeed a serious security vulnerability. No, OSX still isn't the piece of security shit that Windows is.
p.s. Here's my security challenge: hack my Mac OSX box and win $100! I'll even give you its IP address. 192.168.0.15.
I hear you! There's nothing like a new framework to promote featuritus. It was hard to do anything in MFC, so now .NET is like a toy to Windows developers, and you can be assured that no application is so mundane that it won't end up being a demo showcase of .NET eyecandy.
On the economic pressure side, the usual enemy to movie theatres is gas pricing. I disagree -- gas prices in my home are not up much once you factor in inflation over the past 15 years. Greenspan did this country a huge disservice with his inflationary system -- making the cost of living go up much faster than our wages did. I believe the average home is poorer today than it was 10 and 20 years ago -- when you look at the cost of entertainment versus the available disposable income, you can see why entertainment is failing. Pile on huge consumer debt levels, and most families can't just Charge It! any longer.
I'm going to have to dispute most of that. While I am not arguing that the economic situation is a bed of roses, neither is it the basket of turds that you portray.
Adjusting for inflation, gas prices are the lowest they've been in twenty years. And that's with the additional gas taxes thrown on top. Take the increased fuel efficiency into account (even for SUVs), and the price for driving your family five miles to a movie is a bargain! A family of four driving a Honda Civic (non-Hybrid) to a theater five miles away on surface streets works out to about a dime per passenger. What a deal!
While I'm not a fan of Greenspan, he has managed to produce a relatively stable low rate of inflation. Yes, inflation is real, and yes, it is entirely produced by the Fed under the reins of Greenspan. But then I look at other developed nations with their inflation rates, and I see that we're going quite well in this regard. We could be doing better, of course, but at least we aren't back in the 1970s.
I don't know what you mean by "average home". Most families are better off today then they were in 1986. And unless you were one of those riding the edge of the stock bubble in 1996, you're doing better now than in 1996 as well. Of course, this isn't uniform. Housing prices have skyrocketed in some areas. If you're lower-middle class and paying rent in Silicon Valley, for instance, you're probably worse off.
Consumer debt... you may be right. There's nothing wrong with debt, even consumer debt. A big chunk of the debt statistics are home mortgages, which is a good thing. But I do think easy credit has been oversold. I think the *consumer* has been stupid and taken on too much expensive credit card debt. But I still doubt this has a significant role in the decline of the American Movie Theater(tm).
The cost of movie entertainment *has* risen. But it hasn't risen because of a bad economy. It's risen because the *price* has gone up! Duh! $10 tickets, $3 drinks, and $3 popcorn, works out to $64 for a family of four. It's pricey enough that you end up being awful picky about the quality of movies you go see. Especially when renting movies has become so damned cheap.
By fast forwarding through all the commericals I gain an hour or more of time.
You could skip the crap altogether and save yourself eight hours each day!
It's too bad your place is like that. But fret not, while it is somewhat common, it isn't the norm. Out of all my friends working in technology, only one has a job vaguely resembling this.
I am really starting to loathe my own company, and will be leaving soon. But as much as I don't like them, stifling legitimate expression is not one of their sins. It wasn't for lack of trying. This is a US division of a German company, and I get this attitude from most of the German executives. But we don't stand for it. We let our professional opinions be known, and it has never been counted against us. Pure negativity is frowned on, but legitimate opinions and expressions are encouraged. Sometimes <gasp> they will even heed our professional advice!
So how come we don't care if a few jobs go to Canada, but when they go to Mexico we have a shitfit?
Again, this shows that Bush and his ilk have no connection with the citizens of this country.
Amen brother! What this country really needs is a forty foot wall all around its borders!
Freedom, freedom, freedom... except for those brownskinned people in the Indian subcontinent! They must not be allowed to work for American employers! You can outsource to South Dakota, or even Canada or Germany if necessary. But not to India, or Mexico, China, or Dubai! They have the wrong skin color!
I think they didn't mod it down because it's a perfect summary of the statist position on any issue: "DIE! DIE! DIE!"
It's usually stated with a bit more tact though. The statist solution to every problem is invariably violence or the threat of violence. "More police (with guns), more armies (with guns), more laws and regulations (backed by police with guns), more diplomacy (backed with armies with guns)."
In this case it is very important that we figure out who is to blame. One of the suspects is government, but government is also the proposed solution. Giving the government the contract to fix market problems is like giving the Mafia the contract to fight organized crime.
Like communism, a free market is a very nice idea in theory, but doesn't exist in practice.
No, it doesn't exist. But we do have a great many markets to observe, some of which are freer, and some of which are not. Observation of the freer markets tells us a lot about what a true free market might be like. This is unlike communism, which requires 100% participation, after which we still have to wait for the totalitarian state to whither away before we see the final result.
In other words, experience tells us what a true free market will probably be like, which there is nothing in our experience to show us what true communism would be like.
I just bought an 12" iBook, and am very impressed with it. I never really liked laptops before, but this one is damned convenient. It's small, good wifi, long battery life, etc.
If you RTFA, you'd know that "Phone and cable companies largely agree that they should have the right to offer Internet companies the option of paying for faster delivery of their content."
I don't have a problem with that. Every since this whole brouhaha started I've been trying to figure out what the big deal is.
Everyone from your local liquor store to the national telcos want to charge more for their products and services. But they don't have the free reign to do so. Prices are not determined by the seller, they are determined by with input from BOTH the sellers and the buyers. Sure, you can slap a $500 price tag on that bottle of Ripple, but no one will buy it. Ditto for charging people $500 a byte for using their backbone lines. In the case of Ripple, winos will just go to another liquor store. Or switch brands. Or make their own. Or sober up. Likewise, if the price for certain nodes gets too high, the internet will start routing around them. If Cable gets too expensive people will switch to DSL. Or wifi. Or something else.
The more profit liquor stores make, the more incentive there is for people to open new liquor stores. The more SBC makes off of broadband access, the more incentive there is to start new businesses offering broadband access. Profits encourage competition. If there's a lot of money to be made in an industry, people will enter it to get their piece of pie. That is, if there isn't regulatory barriers to entry. In the case of liquor stores, there are state regulations limiting their number. In the case of broadband, there are state and federal regulations keeping competition out. (The solution is to decrease the regulation, not increase it).
In the end, providers can only effectively charge the market price. If people aren't willing to pay more for faster delivery, then they won't. Period. If there's a problem with monopolies, then start thinking about eliminating the regulations that create and maintain them.
Yeah, except unregulated markets tend to concentrate to the point where the market isn't really driving change, it's the two or three major players on the top who are.
Tomatoes are relatively regulated, with the result that I can get tomatoes of great variety from numerous suppliers at numerous distribution points. Ditto for pears, beer, laundry detergent and ballpoint pens.
Milk is more regulated, and I only have the choice of two local brands. There is a dairy nearby me to found a loophole in the laws, and is starting to give the local monopolists some serious competition. The result is that the monopolists are lobbying for MORE regulations.
Computers are relatively unregulated, with the result that I have a bewildering variety of choices when it comes to buying a computer. Dell, Gateway, IBM, Toshiba, Apple G4, Apple x86, DIY, Windows, Linux, BSD, Solaris, OpenOffice, MSOffice, KOffice, etc., etc., etc.
On the other hand, internet access is heavily regulated (albeit indirectly via telecommunications). The result is that my options for access are greatly limited. This is due to regulation and government interference in the market. The only way out seems to be the decentralized wifi, but with the heavy regulation of the radio spectrum, it doesn't look to promising.
And what is the number one proposed solution to this lack of choice? Another monopoly in the form of municipal wifi. Yup, the same people who created the telephone and cable monopolies are going to save us from the telephone and cable monopolies by creating a wifi monopoly. Sigh.