Better yet, don't rely on any one organization's DNS. Configure your network connection to use multiple DNS servers from different organizations; or, even better, run your own caching nameserver (it's really not that hard) that turns to several different organizations for resolving unknown or old records.
For example, I have a simple BIND setup on my PowerBook (and my wife's iBook) that is caching-only, and resolves to my ISP's primary DNS and two alternates provided by geographically disparate organizations. My total set-up time was 20m for the first install, and then about 3 minutes for the second (cloned config instead of writing it).
On my home network, I use a special-purpose caching nameserver package on my Linux-based fileserver, and DHCP instructs machines on my network to use that server for DNS. It, too, has multiple DNS sources to resolve against.
I second this! Templating systems abound, and are actually easier to use than embedding markup in code (or worse, code inside markup, as is possible with PHP[0]).
In fact, looking at Perl's HTML::Template module, one can see how easily and quickly anyone with HTML knowledge can make a template.
It's not just limited to HTML, either. The Template Toolkit is a very easy-to learn templating system that works for any kind of text-based templates. I've even seen it used to populate ODF documents...
Basically, there's just no excuse for not separating code and data this way in any kind of production code.
[0]: Not knocking PHP, here: good PHP programmers avoid escaping from markup into PHP, but PHP *does* make it possible. A lot of programmers abuse the capability.
I'm pleasantly surprised that a Slashdot discussion is proceeding this calmly, so thanks for your reply! I'd like to address two bits, though:
Interesting example - Harry Truman setup Project Shamrock as part of fighting WWII which was far more invasive.
I'll be the first to admit that our government has done some pretty scary things in the name of security during a time of war. Incarcerating citizens of Japanese descent is a poignant example. So, while I agree that much worse has been done than the NSA wiretaps, I don't want that to distract from the important point -- lots of people voluntarily put themselves in harms way to protect our freedoms, and many thousands of them died.
We make heroes of those that sacrificed in this way (though my generation and younger is starting to forget, sadly), and it bothers me that so few people are making the obvious connection. Those who died in the WTC terrorist attacks were victims, yes: but it's not hard to see that they died for our freedom. More exactly, they died because they were participating in our free society, which is hated by certain radical Muslims to the point that they committed an atrocity to make their point.
What bothers me most, though, is that these people's deaths are cheapened by our response to the whole thing; we are trying to take away precious freedom in order to prevent some few thousands of deaths, and that's just wrong in my book. This NSA fiasco is just the latest news on this front.
recent history proves that terrorist attacks cause wars.
That's somewhat spurious -- our political leaders allowed the WTC attacks to provoke a military response in Afghanistan. Not that I disagree with that response, but there were other options, and even the one we chose was not outright war.
Unless you were referring to Iraq? Well, anyone who still believes that the war in Iraq had anything to do with terrorism or the WTC attacks has just not been keeping up. Terrorism was a convenient excuse to go to war in Iraq; there's plenty of evidence to suggest that the current administration was looking for a reason to deal with Saddam from day 1 -- the WTC attacks were used as FUD to support that action.
Can't the actual human employees at the head of the line make this determination and alert whomever has the authority to open another lane? Seems like a solution looking for a problem if you ask me.
Yes, they can do that. But, their core function is to perform the security checks. From a management point of view, if I can have something that tells a supervisor to open another lane without having to distract an employee from that core function, I'll probably pay for it. Just like I'd pay more to have staff rotate more frequently, so that the repetitive work doesn't lead to a loss of focus that puts my customers and assets at risk.
So the claim is aircraft attacks on the Library Tower in LA and the Sears Tower in Chicago and a welding gas tank attack on the supports of the Brooklyn Bridge were thrwarted by this program.
Unfortunately, it doesn't matter whether or not attacks were thwarted by a warrantless wiretapping program; whether it works or not is not an issue. What is at issue, then?
Is there any evidence that the intelligence that thwarted these attacks would not have been gained under a targeted, FISA-warranted wiretap program?
Do we care more about our freedoms or preventing attacks?
Think about both of these carefully. It's easy to say "we got intelligence from this program, and that intelligence led to prevention of attacks." Unfortunately, that argument is akin to "we use Word to write our proposals, and our proposals got us $5,000,000 in profit this year." The question is left open "ok, but was that because of Word? Could you have used another tool and gotten the same result?" With wiretapping, that question is "ok, but how do we know that the FISA methodology would not have worked?"
Which comes down to issue #2, which is simply a specific case of "is it worth it?" Assuming we've resolved #1 to say that the warrantless approach is responsible for preventing these attacks (which is unproved): are you willing to give up everyone's freedom from search without due process to prevent these attacks?
People dying sucks: only a sociopath would feel that these people dying is a good thing. But is it better or worse than losing an important freedom? Before you answer, ask a WWII vet if this country's freedoms are worth dying for. Ask yourself if you'd be willing to go to war to protect our freedoms. Think on this, and try to figure out the difference between giving up freedoms to prevent terrorism and giving up freedoms rather than going to war. And remember, a lot fewer people die in terrorist attacks than in wars.
No,... we got those from legal wiretaps with warrants. If anything, it shows that the legal method worked. What we need is translators.
I entirely agree with you. The thing that saddens me most about the current "debate" over wiretapping needs is how it exposes the sheer ignorance of the American populace. We live in a great, free country, and we're demonstrating that we don't care enough about that to educate ourselves about why it's so great -- and certainly not enough to actually do anything about it.
Our freedom is largely predicated on belief in the rule of law and due process. When we give these up -- by, say, allowing the NSA to short-circuit due process with indescriminate wiretaps -- we lose a large chunk of what makes this country great. And to do so in response to the actions a group of terrorists, who have demonstrated such powerful loathing toward our nation that they were willing to die to deprive us of a symbol, is to give victory and power to terrorism.
Legal wiretaps work -- the NSA can even get a FISC warrant ex post facto in urgent situations. That is, they can wiretap first and get the warrant later; all the "rapid response" justifications for warrantless wiretaps are so much FUD. Let's invest our intelligence dollars into measures that improve the quality of our intelligence (not just the quantity, as massive wiretaps would), and reducing our response time to that intelligence.
Again, legal wiretaps work. Following due process works. And even if it didn't, why are we unwilling to trade a few thousand lives for our freedom? Have we become so divorced from our ideals that we are willing to sacrifice our freedom to avoid the risk that a few thousand people will occasionally die in terrorist attacks?
My heart truly goes out to the victims of the WTC attacks, and to their friends, family, and loved ones. We dishonor their memory by giving up the freedoms we hold so dear; we make their deaths meaningless, when we should be rallying behind their sacrifice to demonstrate that our ideals stand regardless of what our enemies do.
Blackboard, an excellent and widely-used online education tool at every level of education (K-12, college, even the US Military Academy at WestPoint) would be blocked if the current wording of this bill were to become law.
"Complete and udder stupidity" doesn't even begin to cover this...
You may have some re-reading to do yourself. It said he used his *former* employer's email server. That most likely is criminal.
If you took two seconds to think critically or read carefully, you'd realize that he sent this e-mail while employed there. They fired him and pressed charges, so now they're his former employer.
There's no "hacking" going on here: this guy was convicted of unauthorized access when he used a system he was allowed to use to send e-mail his then-employer didn't like.
Even if what he did was "wrong" in the sense that he did something unauthorized, he certainly didn't commit the crime he was charged with.
before the bankruptcy trustees pull the plug on the server:
This isn't Chapter 7, and SGI aren't having plugs pulled on anything, nor are they going out of business. This is Chapter 11: corporate reorganization.
In short, SGI has said "we got in over our heads, and we need help digging ourselves out". They've gotten the courts to help them by mandating that they be allowed to pay creditors off at some percentage of what they are actually owed. But, they get to continue operating, aren't required to sell assets, etc.
Doesn't the fact that a process died mean that something is wrong and needs to be fixed?
Yep. It also means that the services the process was providing are not available to my customers. Like most things, you have to weigh the tradeoffs before deciding to roll out a watchdog.
Ideally, you'd set up a watchdog to do something like:
Note problem with service
Restart the service, saving off logs to a problem record
Send an e-mail to the admin, attach the logs (or point to them)
If it's restarting too often (n times in x minutes), leave service down and open an incident/page the admin/etc.
That's a pretty good balance between making sure the issue gets fixed and continuing to make services available. Of course, it doesn't hold a candle to true high-availability configurations (clusters and the like), but it can work very well in a pinch.
The hardest tasks you have when trying to persuade someone are:
Getting them to pay attention
Not pissing them off before they've heard and processed your argument
So, perhaps coffee is useful for persuasion. The connection between persuasion and "yes-men", though, is spurrious at best. Essentially, TFA is saying that caffeine helps people listen to -- and makes them slightly more open-minded towards -- arguments.
Listening to and being open-minded toward arguments is a good thing. In fact, it's the very antithesis of being a yes-man. Yes-men don't process arguments, they simply go along with authority. TFA is talking about the former, not the latter.
Apparently, while caffeine enhances the capacity for rational thought, any given Slashdot story deadens such capacity entirely.
Violent video games don't make kids violent; being human makes kids violent. Some are worse than others, and need special care and attention; despite my favouring violent games, films, etc I've never actually been in a fight in my life.
When did representatives lose the ability to get the facts and communicate them to their constituents, rather than enact farcical legislation that will accomplish nothing?
Linux users need to understand that when disillusioned Windows users come to them asking for help with Linux, they effectively become representatives of Linux...ambassadors, if you will...and they need to behave accordingly. Abusing new Linux users for their lack of knowledge, rather than helping them to learn more, only harms the cause.
I agree that some fora for Linux help can be rather abusive to neophytes. However, there are also a lot of neophytes who simply over-react. This happens because many users are used to some major corporation paying people to help them -- they can rail against helpdesk folk, and still get reasonably curteous responses. If the don't, they can escalate until a manager solves their problem.
In the Linux world (unless, of course, you pay for support), the public fora are support. Many neophytes expect these volunteers to hand-hold them and to accept abuse, and said volunteers don't have time for it, nor do they have motivation to put up with that abuse. Neophytes also tend to post things like "X is crap and doesn't work, how do I fix it?" When volunteers respond with perfectly reasonable "what do you mean by 'doesn't work'? What have you tried, and what results were you expecting?", there is a large subclass of new users who become abusive or give up. These users feel "disaffected", but they are the ones who were unreasonable.
A user who feels entitled to quality support from a free distro is most likely going to hate their Linux experience; but I say a good chunk of the issue is with them. If you are inexperienced, buy a Linux distro: accept the paid support!
And to those "but Linux will never be accepted if we aren't nice to n00bs!" responders, I say: who gives a crap? As long as there are people maintaining Linux and software for it, I get to use it. It doesn't need to have huge market share, be accepted by everyone, etc. People who identify themselves with Linux so much that they behave as though everyone should like it, and therefore we should all behave like a well-groomed corporate help desk need to seriously rexamine their priorities.
My own take has been to *LITERALLY* discuss how etiquette changes with nontechie friends and family
Bravo! The real problem isn't that "cellphone conversations are distracting", but rather the twofold problem that we allow them to distract us, and that societal standards pressure us to do so. As for the latter, business people are some of the biggest culprits -- many of the sales folks I know, for example, can't imagine not giving a customer on the phone their complete attention. At the same time, though, they find it equally horrifying to say something like "sorry, I'm on the road at the moment and so I can't give you my full attention. Can I call you back?"
Being in an on-call B2B support rotation means answering my phone on the road is mandatory. However, I've found a few tips help me keep it from taking precedence over driving safely:
At the beginning of the call, I inform the caller that I'm driving, and apologize for any seeming distraction. In this way, when I tune out a conversation for a moment to deal with a situation on the road, the caller is understanding.
Given the above, I routinely tune out portions of conversation when the road needs significant attention. I then merely say, "I'm sorry, I missed that, could you repeat?"
If it becomes obvious at any point that the conversation will require more attention than I can safely give it, I will interrupt with "excuse me, but I can't give you my full attention until I can get off the road. Can I call you back in 5-10 minutes?" I then find a safe place to stop (rest area, fuel station, etc.) and return the call.
I have never yet had any customer complain that I was rude when doing this, but I have recieved several positive comments along the lines of "I really appreciate the concern for safety".
As with most things, it's a matter of education and reinforcement. We need to teach people that being "distracted" on the phone is acceptable under certain circumstances, and that safe driving is more important than the conversation.
Unfortunately, that would also prevent passengers from using mobile phones. As a regular driver-to-others, I'd be personally pleased. On the other hand, I know plenty of people who hire drivers for longer trips so they can conduct business on the road safely. I'd rather not set rules that limit all in-motion uses of a cell.
Your brain tunes out the radio when you need to concentrate, but it makes more effort to keep up with the conversation when you are talking... and it's worse when you're on the cell phone because you're not hearing the other person with as much clarity as you would if they were sitting next to you, so your brain has to divert even more resources to deciphering what the other person is saying.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that everyone is different. I'm willing to concede that talking on the phone might require more focus than a conversation with a passenger. However, that's not the problem, it's that people aren't willing to be a tad impolite to be safer drivers. If you can't tune out the conversation when you need to, don't have it in the first place!
So, here's what I do. First, I do use a handsfree set, as it's one less thing to manage. Second, I tell everyone I call or receive a call from that I'm driving and apologize up front if I act distracted. Then, I drive and let the conversation be background-tasked, asking people to repeat themselves if necessary. If it's an important conversation, and I need more than background focus, I simply tell the other party that I need to call them back at a more appropriate time.
Is this as safe as not talking on the phone at all? Of course not. Is it well within the realm of acceptably safe driving? You bet! Over half a million miles driven, and I've never been involved in an accident while driving. The loss of safety isn't in talking on the phone, it's in people refusing to make the task of driving take priority over the call.
Why would one bother using Linux if OS X offers all the features (well ok, most) of Linux
Well, it depends on what you mean by "all the features". I have a G4-based PowerBook, and I dual-boot Linux and OSX. Let me explain why.
First and foremost, I'm a developer and tester; not just professionally, but also as a hobby. This means testing in multiple environments, and having Windows, Linux, and OSX handy is a boon (even if I only get Windows via slow emulation). Not to mention that things like Rational Application Developer, that are required professionally, don't run on OSX. (To be fair, they don't run on PPC Linux either, which is why I keep a ThinkPad around -- but on an Intel Mac...).
Secondly, there are tasks that are better suited to a Linux environment, IMO. For example, when I'm doing heavy document production, I like to use OpenOffice. OpenOffice on OSX is extremely limited (no access to font library, native printers, app-to-app drag-n-drop, etc.), and the "native" port NeoOffice/J has performance and some compatibility issues. So, I boot to Linux for such tasks (instead of forking over a couple hundred dollars for MS-Office).
Thirdly, there are a number of nice tools and applications available under Linux that are either not ported to, or incomplete for, OSX. Fink and the like are great, but there's a long way to go if the goal is "every Linux and BSD app working perfectly under OSX".
Also, while booted into Linux, I have access to Mac-on-Linux -- so I can have a virtualized (not emulated) OSX session in a window or on another vt/desktop. This is extremely happy for software testing!
Corporations are the only ones who have enough money for things like benefits.
Bull. I have worked for everything from Mom-n-pop to huge healthcare, and I will tell you this -- small, well-run organizations almost always have better health benefits than corporations. Why? Because they can least afford their employees to be sick.
It's true that some small-business owners don't offer health benefits, largely due to poor cost planning. Such places usually suck to work at anyhow, and the market tends to take care of them.
The central point to this whole thread is being hugely missed: employers offer health benefits because it attracts better applicants. The rising costs of health care are making health benefits an even bigger consideration when one is looking for employment. Of course, socializing health care would probably result in better salary competition as organizations are relieved of the benefits burden, but public healthcare is a complex issue.
Well, I think evil might be too strong a word. Still, I do consider patents on business processes -- as opposed to patents on technology without which a business process can't exist -- to be an abuse of the patent system.
If this turns out to be that type of abusive patent, Google will loose a lot in my estimation.
Note that the guy you replied to mentioned "games" in his post.
Note also that he didn't say "the newest, greatest 3D FPS games." I've played a few RPG's and sim games under VPC, and it works just fine. For those buying an Intel Mac, you can look forward to VMware support (hopefully soon).
Virtualization can cut both ways -- if VMware does the work, one could have a Windows PC (even if it's Apple hardware) booted for the heavier gaming requirements, and virtualize the OSX session.
My advice is to take 90% of them (as we know, 90% of everything is crap) and donate them to your school library where they might actually get used instead of just sitting on your shelves gathering dust.
Culling one's collection is a good idea, and donating the excess to libraries is wonderful, at least on the surface. I believe in Public Libraries, but I also believe in Private Libraries. I let my good friends borrow books at will (and borrow from them as well), and I keep an eye out for hard-to-find books that the Library either doesn't want or just won't keep.
Public Libraries are great things, but they are funded and managed by bereauocracies. They need to work in concert with private libraries, to ensure that books -- even unusual, unpopular, or just "too old" volumes remain available to the community. Not everyone can afford a one-off reprint from the LoC!
In just the same way, if I was forced to choose between os x & windows, I'd choose os x, but it would be nice to have a copy of windows hanging around in case I wanted to play some games.
I completely agree, and the solution is VirtualPC. Yeah, you need to have a little more RAM to support the virtualization layer and still have plenty available to the Windows instance running on VirtualPC, but it's less expensive than two PCs, and less annoying by far than dual-booting.
Oh, and doesn't require the Intel hardware.
Dual-booting can be important and all, but with the relatively inexpensive options for virtualization (especially the upcoming free [gratis] VMWare Server product), there's almost no point.
>Why shouldn't a single user of a host login as root, or just have root privileges for their named account? Switching contexts with su/sudo makes it more likely to make mistakes.
Maybe that's true for you, but if so it's the exception and not the rule. I have my OSX desktop set up in the same way as my Linux desktop: there's a user I log in as for normal use, and a user I use for admin. The latter is allowed to sudo and do whatever it wishes.
The idea works like this:
When I'm the "normal" user, I can't accidentally make administrative changes; more importantly, any software I run that tries (innocently or otherwise) will fail.
When I'm the administrative user, I can do "safe" administrative tasks without becoming root (i.e. I have rights to restart services, establish new file shares, etc.). But, more dangerous behavior (like installing a new binary in OSX's/Applications directory) requires root privileges.
The second is the key. It gives me an opportunity to think a second time about my choice (did I really want to overwrite Eclipse?); more importantly, it means that I'm less likely to be caught unawares if an application does something "risky" that I didn't expect.
A real world example on my Mac. The backup software I used required access to a directory where it kept tabs on what was backed up last time -- the files there were allowed to be modified by the admin user. Worked great. Then I upgraded the backup tool, and the next time I backed up I was prompted for my password to authorize root access. This caused me to cancel my operation and discover that on first run, the backup tool wanted to install a network service, which I definitely didn't want. I denied the access and switched vendors.
I would never have known it happened unless I'd had sudo as a gatekeeper.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't rely on your ISP's DNS
Better yet, don't rely on any one organization's DNS. Configure your network connection to use multiple DNS servers from different organizations; or, even better, run your own caching nameserver (it's really not that hard) that turns to several different organizations for resolving unknown or old records.
For example, I have a simple BIND setup on my PowerBook (and my wife's iBook) that is caching-only, and resolves to my ISP's primary DNS and two alternates provided by geographically disparate organizations. My total set-up time was 20m for the first install, and then about 3 minutes for the second (cloned config instead of writing it).
On my home network, I use a special-purpose caching nameserver package on my Linux-based fileserver, and DHCP instructs machines on my network to use that server for DNS. It, too, has multiple DNS sources to resolve against.
I second this! Templating systems abound, and are actually easier to use than embedding markup in code (or worse, code inside markup, as is possible with PHP[0]).
In fact, looking at Perl's HTML::Template module, one can see how easily and quickly anyone with HTML knowledge can make a template.
It's not just limited to HTML, either. The Template Toolkit is a very easy-to learn templating system that works for any kind of text-based templates. I've even seen it used to populate ODF documents...
Basically, there's just no excuse for not separating code and data this way in any kind of production code.
[0]: Not knocking PHP, here: good PHP programmers avoid escaping from markup into PHP, but PHP *does* make it possible. A lot of programmers abuse the capability.
I'm pleasantly surprised that a Slashdot discussion is proceeding this calmly, so thanks for your reply! I'd like to address two bits, though:
Interesting example - Harry Truman setup Project Shamrock as part of fighting WWII which was far more invasive.
I'll be the first to admit that our government has done some pretty scary things in the name of security during a time of war. Incarcerating citizens of Japanese descent is a poignant example. So, while I agree that much worse has been done than the NSA wiretaps, I don't want that to distract from the important point -- lots of people voluntarily put themselves in harms way to protect our freedoms, and many thousands of them died.
We make heroes of those that sacrificed in this way (though my generation and younger is starting to forget, sadly), and it bothers me that so few people are making the obvious connection. Those who died in the WTC terrorist attacks were victims, yes: but it's not hard to see that they died for our freedom. More exactly, they died because they were participating in our free society, which is hated by certain radical Muslims to the point that they committed an atrocity to make their point.
What bothers me most, though, is that these people's deaths are cheapened by our response to the whole thing; we are trying to take away precious freedom in order to prevent some few thousands of deaths, and that's just wrong in my book. This NSA fiasco is just the latest news on this front.
recent history proves that terrorist attacks cause wars.
That's somewhat spurious -- our political leaders allowed the WTC attacks to provoke a military response in Afghanistan. Not that I disagree with that response, but there were other options, and even the one we chose was not outright war.
Unless you were referring to Iraq? Well, anyone who still believes that the war in Iraq had anything to do with terrorism or the WTC attacks has just not been keeping up. Terrorism was a convenient excuse to go to war in Iraq; there's plenty of evidence to suggest that the current administration was looking for a reason to deal with Saddam from day 1 -- the WTC attacks were used as FUD to support that action.
Can't the actual human employees at the head of the line make this determination and alert whomever has the authority to open another lane? Seems like a solution looking for a problem if you ask me.
Yes, they can do that. But, their core function is to perform the security checks. From a management point of view, if I can have something that tells a supervisor to open another lane without having to distract an employee from that core function, I'll probably pay for it. Just like I'd pay more to have staff rotate more frequently, so that the repetitive work doesn't lead to a loss of focus that puts my customers and assets at risk.
Seems like a reasonable decision to me.
Unfortunately, it doesn't matter whether or not attacks were thwarted by a warrantless wiretapping program; whether it works or not is not an issue. What is at issue, then?
Think about both of these carefully. It's easy to say "we got intelligence from this program, and that intelligence led to prevention of attacks." Unfortunately, that argument is akin to "we use Word to write our proposals, and our proposals got us $5,000,000 in profit this year." The question is left open "ok, but was that because of Word? Could you have used another tool and gotten the same result?" With wiretapping, that question is "ok, but how do we know that the FISA methodology would not have worked?"
Which comes down to issue #2, which is simply a specific case of "is it worth it?" Assuming we've resolved #1 to say that the warrantless approach is responsible for preventing these attacks (which is unproved): are you willing to give up everyone's freedom from search without due process to prevent these attacks?
People dying sucks: only a sociopath would feel that these people dying is a good thing. But is it better or worse than losing an important freedom? Before you answer, ask a WWII vet if this country's freedoms are worth dying for. Ask yourself if you'd be willing to go to war to protect our freedoms. Think on this, and try to figure out the difference between giving up freedoms to prevent terrorism and giving up freedoms rather than going to war. And remember, a lot fewer people die in terrorist attacks than in wars.
No, ... we got those from legal wiretaps with warrants. If anything, it shows that the legal method worked. What we need is translators.
I entirely agree with you. The thing that saddens me most about the current "debate" over wiretapping needs is how it exposes the sheer ignorance of the American populace. We live in a great, free country, and we're demonstrating that we don't care enough about that to educate ourselves about why it's so great -- and certainly not enough to actually do anything about it.
Our freedom is largely predicated on belief in the rule of law and due process. When we give these up -- by, say, allowing the NSA to short-circuit due process with indescriminate wiretaps -- we lose a large chunk of what makes this country great. And to do so in response to the actions a group of terrorists, who have demonstrated such powerful loathing toward our nation that they were willing to die to deprive us of a symbol, is to give victory and power to terrorism.
Legal wiretaps work -- the NSA can even get a FISC warrant ex post facto in urgent situations. That is, they can wiretap first and get the warrant later; all the "rapid response" justifications for warrantless wiretaps are so much FUD. Let's invest our intelligence dollars into measures that improve the quality of our intelligence (not just the quantity, as massive wiretaps would), and reducing our response time to that intelligence.
Again, legal wiretaps work. Following due process works. And even if it didn't, why are we unwilling to trade a few thousand lives for our freedom? Have we become so divorced from our ideals that we are willing to sacrifice our freedom to avoid the risk that a few thousand people will occasionally die in terrorist attacks?
My heart truly goes out to the victims of the WTC attacks, and to their friends, family, and loved ones. We dishonor their memory by giving up the freedoms we hold so dear; we make their deaths meaningless, when we should be rallying behind their sacrifice to demonstrate that our ideals stand regardless of what our enemies do.
Blackboard, an excellent and widely-used online education tool at every level of education (K-12, college, even the US Military Academy at WestPoint) would be blocked if the current wording of this bill were to become law.
"Complete and udder stupidity" doesn't even begin to cover this...
You may have some re-reading to do yourself. It said he used his *former* employer's email server. That most likely is criminal.
If you took two seconds to think critically or read carefully, you'd realize that he sent this e-mail while employed there. They fired him and pressed charges, so now they're his former employer.
There's no "hacking" going on here: this guy was convicted of unauthorized access when he used a system he was allowed to use to send e-mail his then-employer didn't like.
Even if what he did was "wrong" in the sense that he did something unauthorized, he certainly didn't commit the crime he was charged with.
before the bankruptcy trustees pull the plug on the server:
This isn't Chapter 7, and SGI aren't having plugs pulled on anything, nor are they going out of business. This is Chapter 11: corporate reorganization.
In short, SGI has said "we got in over our heads, and we need help digging ourselves out". They've gotten the courts to help them by mandating that they be allowed to pay creditors off at some percentage of what they are actually owed. But, they get to continue operating, aren't required to sell assets, etc.
There's more than one kind of Bankrupt, folks...
Yep. It also means that the services the process was providing are not available to my customers. Like most things, you have to weigh the tradeoffs before deciding to roll out a watchdog.
Ideally, you'd set up a watchdog to do something like:
That's a pretty good balance between making sure the issue gets fixed and continuing to make services available. Of course, it doesn't hold a candle to true high-availability configurations (clusters and the like), but it can work very well in a pinch.
The hardest tasks you have when trying to persuade someone are:
So, perhaps coffee is useful for persuasion. The connection between persuasion and "yes-men", though, is spurrious at best. Essentially, TFA is saying that caffeine helps people listen to -- and makes them slightly more open-minded towards -- arguments.
Listening to and being open-minded toward arguments is a good thing. In fact, it's the very antithesis of being a yes-man. Yes-men don't process arguments, they simply go along with authority. TFA is talking about the former, not the latter.
Apparently, while caffeine enhances the capacity for rational thought, any given Slashdot story deadens such capacity entirely.
Violent video games don't make kids violent; being human makes kids violent. Some are worse than others, and need special care and attention; despite my favouring violent games, films, etc I've never actually been in a fight in my life.
Thank you!
Despite the row about violent media in, well, the media (conflict of interest, anyone?), the CDC says that school violence is declining. And They aren't alone, either.
When did representatives lose the ability to get the facts and communicate them to their constituents, rather than enact farcical legislation that will accomplish nothing?
It's just QuickSilver with a more Spotlight-like interface.
I agree that it's nifty to have an app like that on Linux, but I wouldn't wave the "Innovation in Linux" flag just yet...
It seems like most of the innovation that happens for Linux is fairly low-level stuff, like new kernel features &c.
Linux users need to understand that when disillusioned Windows users come to them asking for help with Linux, they effectively become representatives of Linux...ambassadors, if you will...and they need to behave accordingly. Abusing new Linux users for their lack of knowledge, rather than helping them to learn more, only harms the cause.
I agree that some fora for Linux help can be rather abusive to neophytes. However, there are also a lot of neophytes who simply over-react. This happens because many users are used to some major corporation paying people to help them -- they can rail against helpdesk folk, and still get reasonably curteous responses. If the don't, they can escalate until a manager solves their problem.
In the Linux world (unless, of course, you pay for support), the public fora are support. Many neophytes expect these volunteers to hand-hold them and to accept abuse, and said volunteers don't have time for it, nor do they have motivation to put up with that abuse. Neophytes also tend to post things like "X is crap and doesn't work, how do I fix it?" When volunteers respond with perfectly reasonable "what do you mean by 'doesn't work'? What have you tried, and what results were you expecting?", there is a large subclass of new users who become abusive or give up. These users feel "disaffected", but they are the ones who were unreasonable.
A user who feels entitled to quality support from a free distro is most likely going to hate their Linux experience; but I say a good chunk of the issue is with them. If you are inexperienced, buy a Linux distro: accept the paid support!
And to those "but Linux will never be accepted if we aren't nice to n00bs!" responders, I say: who gives a crap? As long as there are people maintaining Linux and software for it, I get to use it. It doesn't need to have huge market share, be accepted by everyone, etc. People who identify themselves with Linux so much that they behave as though everyone should like it, and therefore we should all behave like a well-groomed corporate help desk need to seriously rexamine their priorities.
Bravo! The real problem isn't that "cellphone conversations are distracting", but rather the twofold problem that we allow them to distract us, and that societal standards pressure us to do so. As for the latter, business people are some of the biggest culprits -- many of the sales folks I know, for example, can't imagine not giving a customer on the phone their complete attention. At the same time, though, they find it equally horrifying to say something like "sorry, I'm on the road at the moment and so I can't give you my full attention. Can I call you back?"
Being in an on-call B2B support rotation means answering my phone on the road is mandatory. However, I've found a few tips help me keep it from taking precedence over driving safely:
I have never yet had any customer complain that I was rude when doing this, but I have recieved several positive comments along the lines of "I really appreciate the concern for safety".
As with most things, it's a matter of education and reinforcement. We need to teach people that being "distracted" on the phone is acceptable under certain circumstances, and that safe driving is more important than the conversation.
Unfortunately, that would also prevent passengers from using mobile phones. As a regular driver-to-others, I'd be personally pleased. On the other hand, I know plenty of people who hire drivers for longer trips so they can conduct business on the road safely. I'd rather not set rules that limit all in-motion uses of a cell.
Your brain tunes out the radio when you need to concentrate, but it makes more effort to keep up with the conversation when you are talking... and it's worse when you're on the cell phone because you're not hearing the other person with as much clarity as you would if they were sitting next to you, so your brain has to divert even more resources to deciphering what the other person is saying.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that everyone is different. I'm willing to concede that talking on the phone might require more focus than a conversation with a passenger. However, that's not the problem, it's that people aren't willing to be a tad impolite to be safer drivers. If you can't tune out the conversation when you need to, don't have it in the first place!
So, here's what I do. First, I do use a handsfree set, as it's one less thing to manage. Second, I tell everyone I call or receive a call from that I'm driving and apologize up front if I act distracted. Then, I drive and let the conversation be background-tasked, asking people to repeat themselves if necessary. If it's an important conversation, and I need more than background focus, I simply tell the other party that I need to call them back at a more appropriate time.
Is this as safe as not talking on the phone at all? Of course not. Is it well within the realm of acceptably safe driving? You bet! Over half a million miles driven, and I've never been involved in an accident while driving. The loss of safety isn't in talking on the phone, it's in people refusing to make the task of driving take priority over the call.
Why would one bother using Linux if OS X offers all the features (well ok, most) of Linux
Well, it depends on what you mean by "all the features". I have a G4-based PowerBook, and I dual-boot Linux and OSX. Let me explain why.
First and foremost, I'm a developer and tester; not just professionally, but also as a hobby. This means testing in multiple environments, and having Windows, Linux, and OSX handy is a boon (even if I only get Windows via slow emulation). Not to mention that things like Rational Application Developer, that are required professionally, don't run on OSX. (To be fair, they don't run on PPC Linux either, which is why I keep a ThinkPad around -- but on an Intel Mac...).
Secondly, there are tasks that are better suited to a Linux environment, IMO. For example, when I'm doing heavy document production, I like to use OpenOffice. OpenOffice on OSX is extremely limited (no access to font library, native printers, app-to-app drag-n-drop, etc.), and the "native" port NeoOffice/J has performance and some compatibility issues. So, I boot to Linux for such tasks (instead of forking over a couple hundred dollars for MS-Office).
Thirdly, there are a number of nice tools and applications available under Linux that are either not ported to, or incomplete for, OSX. Fink and the like are great, but there's a long way to go if the goal is "every Linux and BSD app working perfectly under OSX".
Also, while booted into Linux, I have access to Mac-on-Linux -- so I can have a virtualized (not emulated) OSX session in a window or on another vt/desktop. This is extremely happy for software testing!
The bloom is off the rose for me.
Hey, we all get thorny sometimes.
Corporations are the only ones who have enough money for things like benefits.
Bull. I have worked for everything from Mom-n-pop to huge healthcare, and I will tell you this -- small, well-run organizations almost always have better health benefits than corporations. Why? Because they can least afford their employees to be sick.
It's true that some small-business owners don't offer health benefits, largely due to poor cost planning. Such places usually suck to work at anyhow, and the market tends to take care of them.
The central point to this whole thread is being hugely missed: employers offer health benefits because it attracts better applicants. The rising costs of health care are making health benefits an even bigger consideration when one is looking for employment. Of course, socializing health care would probably result in better salary competition as organizations are relieved of the benefits burden, but public healthcare is a complex issue.
Well, I think evil might be too strong a word. Still, I do consider patents on business processes -- as opposed to patents on technology without which a business process can't exist -- to be an abuse of the patent system.
If this turns out to be that type of abusive patent, Google will loose a lot in my estimation.
Note that the guy you replied to mentioned "games" in his post.
Note also that he didn't say "the newest, greatest 3D FPS games." I've played a few RPG's and sim games under VPC, and it works just fine. For those buying an Intel Mac, you can look forward to VMware support (hopefully soon).
Virtualization can cut both ways -- if VMware does the work, one could have a Windows PC (even if it's Apple hardware) booted for the heavier gaming requirements, and virtualize the OSX session.
My advice is to take 90% of them (as we know, 90% of everything is crap) and donate them to your school library where they might actually get used instead of just sitting on your shelves gathering dust.
Culling one's collection is a good idea, and donating the excess to libraries is wonderful, at least on the surface. I believe in Public Libraries, but I also believe in Private Libraries. I let my good friends borrow books at will (and borrow from them as well), and I keep an eye out for hard-to-find books that the Library either doesn't want or just won't keep.
Public Libraries are great things, but they are funded and managed by bereauocracies. They need to work in concert with private libraries, to ensure that books -- even unusual, unpopular, or just "too old" volumes remain available to the community. Not everyone can afford a one-off reprint from the LoC!
In just the same way, if I was forced to choose between os x & windows, I'd choose os x, but it would be nice to have a copy of windows hanging around in case I wanted to play some games.
I completely agree, and the solution is VirtualPC. Yeah, you need to have a little more RAM to support the virtualization layer and still have plenty available to the Windows instance running on VirtualPC, but it's less expensive than two PCs, and less annoying by far than dual-booting.
Oh, and doesn't require the Intel hardware.
Dual-booting can be important and all, but with the relatively inexpensive options for virtualization (especially the upcoming free [gratis] VMWare Server product), there's almost no point.
Maybe that's true for you, but if so it's the exception and not the rule. I have my OSX desktop set up in the same way as my Linux desktop: there's a user I log in as for normal use, and a user I use for admin. The latter is allowed to sudo and do whatever it wishes.
The idea works like this:
The second is the key. It gives me an opportunity to think a second time about my choice (did I really want to overwrite Eclipse?); more importantly, it means that I'm less likely to be caught unawares if an application does something "risky" that I didn't expect.
A real world example on my Mac. The backup software I used required access to a directory where it kept tabs on what was backed up last time -- the files there were allowed to be modified by the admin user. Worked great. Then I upgraded the backup tool, and the next time I backed up I was prompted for my password to authorize root access. This caused me to cancel my operation and discover that on first run, the backup tool wanted to install a network service, which I definitely didn't want. I denied the access and switched vendors.
I would never have known it happened unless I'd had sudo as a gatekeeper.