> yes, but the secretary's workstation has an almost zero ROI. getting a new pc to let the secretary surf the interweb and play solitaire is usually not top priority for managers. having servers that stay up all the time usually is. esp. if your servers ARE the business.
Your managers must be more rational than any I've ever had. In my experience the secretary gets a new status-symbol PC every year, if only to stop the nagging. But getting stuff you actually need for doing your work requires jumping through all manner of hoops, and even then more likely results in a 'no' or some delay tactic than in an authorizing signature.
Maybe I've just worked a the wrong kind of places. But such places do exist, and for them the up-front price of Linux is a godsend.
> even if MS's linux myths page was correct about linux having a greater TCO, business types don't care that much about the initial cost.
Sometimes initial cost really does matter. For some businesses in some business cycles, getting your manager to sign off on something as small as the purchase of a single PC can be worse than getting your teeth drilled, no matter how badly your group needs the PC to get your work done. If you can take that "outgrown" secretarial PC and load it down with free software, you've got a server or developer's workstation that you simply couldn't get otherwise.
> One of the big wins for Linux was in the area of remote administration. Specifically noted was ssh.
I admin ~25 machines remotely, most of them in a room that I don't even have access to without special arrangements. With SSH I can do that without ever having to make those arrangements, except in the case of a major upgrade or a hardware failure.
You can write scripts that will take a shell command as an argument and then step through all your machines executing it on each in turn, greatly simplifying remote management.
You can also use pipes and redirects to channel information between processes on the remote machine and your local machine, e.g. -
The example is trivial, but you can do some powerful sysadmin stuff that way. However, there are a few gottchas: a few services crap out if you try to restart them with -
ssh remotehost service xyz restart
so you do have to be careful about some things. (Sure wish someone would figure out what causes that and fix it!)
> I do fine it ironic and irritating, though, that our own country (US) doesn't seem to like for us to do the same...trying to pass laws where anonymity, or falsifying online id in order to hide ones identity...
> If its good enough for US to pay for them to do it...should be open and good enough for us to use it in all our communications.
As Jay Leno said about the US plan for Iraq (paraphrasing) -
We're going to fix them up with fair elections, good education, and sound healthcare.
And if it works for them we'll try it over here too.
> We've got a related project called 'GridShell' that may be of some interest to the readers. Basically, it gives a slick WebUI as a front-end to an AI Grid Computing interface. As an added bonus, we've included our new implementation of the AWESOME new programming language 'SequenceL', which will AUTOMATICALLY and INTELLIGENTLY PARALLELIZE and DISTRIBUTE ITSELF across pretty much any Grid of Grids or Clusters or SuperComputers or whatever.
Does it automatically decide which words go in all-caps? Could be a useful language for spammers and netk00ks...
> man, when I went there last I saw a child freaking out when it had to leave Mickey mouse..
Or the other way around. I remember the old "dinamation" or whatever they called it, a touring exhibit of cheesy canvas-over-wire-frame dinosaurs with an occasional motorized neck to make the head swing back and forth slightly and a speaker inside to make them "roar" with the quality of an old transistor radio. (And at least one had the speaker back by its arse, giving a rather comical effect.)
At any rate, when I saw it a guy was holding a little boy who was squealing, but thought the kid was complaining because he couldn't get closer whereas in fact he was squealing out of terror. So the louder the kid squealed, the closer the guy would hold him over the barricade toward the dinosaur, causing the kid to scream even louder.
Physics Nerd: "That shouldn't have made such a big explosion" Me: "You're watching a tv series about that assumes the existance of vampires, demons, magic, hell dimensions, the appearance and reappearance of souls, spirits, mystic births, oracles, and a teenage-college age rich girl who has been imbued with the sacred and confusing powers to conveniently save the universe during sweeps, who's died and come back 3 times for some reason. I think your claim to the position of 'evangelist of science and reason' is hereby null and void." *silence* Physics Nerd: "That shouldn't have made such a big explosion"
Yeah, and when you watch it with a bunch of theologians they ignore the overloud explosions and say "That's a stupid name for a demon."
> Okay, where in Star Wars did you get the idea that it was science fiction? It's not. "Sci-Fi?" Maybe (Sci-Fi isn't Science Fiction). It is defintiely fantasy. The best litmus test of "Is it Science Fiction?" I've ever heard was "Does the science portion play a integral part in the story? is it almost like a character?" The answer for Star Wars is "no." It's a great fantasy that just happens to take place in space - but it isn't SF.
Yeah, the folk over at rec.arts.sf.written have a typology that separates SF, "skiffy", etc., though IMO it's just an exercise in snobbery and anal-retentivity. If you limit SF to stuff that abides "hard" science you must immediately reject 99.999% of the stuff that has traditionally been reckoned as part of the genre, mostly because the staples of SF plot such as FTL travel and time travel are not supported by "hard" science.
> Hindsight is sharp, but do not forget the film came out in 1985. Giga- was not in common usage until after the first commercial 1-gig drive came out in 1995.
Millions and millions of people were exposed to it in highschool physics classes long before 1995.
> I recall actual discussion about the pronunciation -- is it a Jig-a byte, or, to avoid the potential negative racial connotations, a Gig-a byte.
No, it's a purely linguistic phenomenon. "Giga" is the classical Greek pronunciation, "Jiga" is how it would be pronounced if it were a native English word. The 'i' is the key, and it's the reason we pronounce "giant" the way we do too. (English "giant" is ultimately from the same Greek root too, which just means "big".)
> In the language of origin, a consonent's pronunciation is influenced by the vowel that follows it. "GI" is "ji", and "GA" is "ga". The subsequent vowel makes all the difference. Hope that simplifies things. It's a definite pattern in the Mediterranean languages.
It's a very common cross-linguistic phenomenon known as "palatization", though the ultimate outcome can be more extreme than simple palatization of the consonant. It's the same reason we pronounce "nation" like we do, even though the 't' really was a 't' in classical Latin.
The linguistic phenomenon also affects spelling rules in Modern English, e.g. "date" + "-able" ==> "datable" (dropped the -e) but "manage" + "-able" ==> "manageable" (preserved the -e, to hint at the pronunciation of the 'g').
> Patents could be, and perhaps once were, beneficial to society. They do not currently have a net posititve impact on society. On the bottom lines of certain companies, perhaps, but that's a separate matter.
Due to the widespread habit of tit-for-tat licensing, the net effect of the patent system, to a first approximation, is to keep the have-nots out of the game.
> Patents are essentially nothing more or less than one particular method for creating monopolies. Monopolies have, except when relatively weak, a net negative impact on society. Thus when an individual owns a patent, there can be an argument that the net impact on society is positive. It distributes the power base, and thus strengthens democracy. But when some centralized agency, say an employer, owns or controls the patent then net benefit on society becomes negative because it acts of further strengthen already unusually strong elements.
Think of the US patent system as neo-mercantilism.
> This sounds like the kind of doll that comes to life at night, eyes glowing red, saying "You must kill mommy and daddy," while its head spins completely around.
Slashdot Mirror
> This was an example of the IT staff knowing they have a much larger than normal project budget and milking it for all it was worth.
Ye Gods! They spent it on SCSI RAID controllers instead of new chairs???
> grep [pattern] [somefile]
Doesn't work very well for the example though, does it.
> yes, but the secretary's workstation has an almost zero ROI. getting a new pc to let the secretary surf the interweb and play solitaire is usually not top priority for managers. having servers that stay up all the time usually is. esp. if your servers ARE the business.
Your managers must be more rational than any I've ever had. In my experience the secretary gets a new status-symbol PC every year, if only to stop the nagging. But getting stuff you actually need for doing your work requires jumping through all manner of hoops, and even then more likely results in a 'no' or some delay tactic than in an authorizing signature.
Maybe I've just worked a the wrong kind of places. But such places do exist, and for them the up-front price of Linux is a godsend.
> even if MS's linux myths page was correct about linux having a greater TCO, business types don't care that much about the initial cost.
Sometimes initial cost really does matter. For some businesses in some business cycles, getting your manager to sign off on something as small as the purchase of a single PC can be worse than getting your teeth drilled, no matter how badly your group needs the PC to get your work done. If you can take that "outgrown" secretarial PC and load it down with free software, you've got a server or developer's workstation that you simply couldn't get otherwise.
will put the flags in temp.text on your local machine, but -will put it on the remote machine instead.> One of the big wins for Linux was in the area of remote administration. Specifically noted was ssh.
I admin ~25 machines remotely, most of them in a room that I don't even have access to without special arrangements. With SSH I can do that without ever having to make those arrangements, except in the case of a major upgrade or a hardware failure.
You can write scripts that will take a shell command as an argument and then step through all your machines executing it on each in turn, greatly simplifying remote management.
You can also use pipes and redirects to channel information between processes on the remote machine and your local machine, e.g. -
Or, if you want to do all the work on the remote machine and only redirect the output to your local machine, use -and the grep will actually execute on remotehost.
The example is trivial, but you can do some powerful sysadmin stuff that way. However, there are a few gottchas: a few services crap out if you try to restart them with -so you do have to be careful about some things. (Sure wish someone would figure out what causes that and fix it!)
> > The fact is, you can make windows as secure as any other OS out there, as long as you know what you're doing.
> Can you?
Yep. That's what God invented concrete and deep ocean trenches for.
> But what will the RIAA do when there are no more artists ?
That's what they're doing now.
> For the love of god, we will give your our women and our money, but make it stop!
I notice you didn't offer your sheep.
> Linux runs on smart vibrators?
It did until they found out about the patent on plug-ins.
> I don't mind it at all...
> I do fine it ironic and irritating, though, that our own country (US) doesn't seem to like for us to do the same...trying to pass laws where anonymity, or falsifying online id in order to hide ones identity...
> If its good enough for US to pay for them to do it...should be open and good enough for us to use it in all our communications.
As Jay Leno said about the US plan for Iraq (paraphrasing) -
> The kid actually did not write the MSBlaster worm, he modified it to make it more potent and released it.
Well, that's OK then.
> We've got a related project called 'GridShell' that may be of some interest to the readers. Basically, it gives a slick WebUI as a front-end to an AI Grid Computing interface. As an added bonus, we've included our new implementation of the AWESOME new programming language 'SequenceL', which will AUTOMATICALLY and INTELLIGENTLY PARALLELIZE and DISTRIBUTE ITSELF across pretty much any Grid of Grids or Clusters or SuperComputers or whatever.
Does it automatically decide which words go in all-caps? Could be a useful language for spammers and netk00ks...
> man, when I went there last I saw a child freaking out when it had to leave Mickey mouse..
Or the other way around. I remember the old "dinamation" or whatever they called it, a touring exhibit of cheesy canvas-over-wire-frame dinosaurs with an occasional motorized neck to make the head swing back and forth slightly and a speaker inside to make them "roar" with the quality of an old transistor radio. (And at least one had the speaker back by its arse, giving a rather comical effect.)
At any rate, when I saw it a guy was holding a little boy who was squealing, but thought the kid was complaining because he couldn't get closer whereas in fact he was squealing out of terror. So the louder the kid squealed, the closer the guy would hold him over the barricade toward the dinosaur, causing the kid to scream even louder.
> Also, every bomb has a huge clock timer with red glowing digits, counting down to zero
Yeah, when I'm the master villain I'll build a bomb that explodes when it says there are five seconds left.
Or maybe eight, in case James Bond is the one who disarms it.
> There's another option: perhaps it was all a "dream". Part of his secret agent package.
What's the consensus on that interpretation of the movie?
Also, regardless of the high-level interpretation, what's the consensus on whether Quaid was a renegade or a plant?
> Okay, where in Star Wars did you get the idea that it was science fiction? It's not. "Sci-Fi?" Maybe (Sci-Fi isn't Science Fiction). It is defintiely fantasy. The best litmus test of "Is it Science Fiction?" I've ever heard was "Does the science portion play a integral part in the story? is it almost like a character?" The answer for Star Wars is "no." It's a great fantasy that just happens to take place in space - but it isn't SF.
Yeah, the folk over at rec.arts.sf.written have a typology that separates SF, "skiffy", etc., though IMO it's just an exercise in snobbery and anal-retentivity. If you limit SF to stuff that abides "hard" science you must immediately reject 99.999% of the stuff that has traditionally been reckoned as part of the genre, mostly because the staples of SF plot such as FTL travel and time travel are not supported by "hard" science.
> Hindsight is sharp, but do not forget the film came out in 1985. Giga- was not in common usage until after the first commercial 1-gig drive came out in 1995.
Millions and millions of people were exposed to it in highschool physics classes long before 1995.
> I recall actual discussion about the pronunciation -- is it a Jig-a byte, or, to avoid the potential negative racial connotations, a Gig-a byte.
No, it's a purely linguistic phenomenon. "Giga" is the classical Greek pronunciation, "Jiga" is how it would be pronounced if it were a native English word. The 'i' is the key, and it's the reason we pronounce "giant" the way we do too. (English "giant" is ultimately from the same Greek root too, which just means "big".)
> In the language of origin, a consonent's pronunciation is influenced by the vowel that follows it. "GI" is "ji", and "GA" is "ga". The subsequent vowel makes all the difference. Hope that simplifies things. It's a definite pattern in the Mediterranean languages.
It's a very common cross-linguistic phenomenon known as "palatization", though the ultimate outcome can be more extreme than simple palatization of the consonant. It's the same reason we pronounce "nation" like we do, even though the 't' really was a 't' in classical Latin.
The linguistic phenomenon also affects spelling rules in Modern English, e.g. "date" + "-able" ==> "datable" (dropped the -e) but "manage" + "-able" ==> "manageable" (preserved the -e, to hint at the pronunciation of the 'g').
> Exactly what they will be taxing isn't clear, since the tax amounts to 9% of... something.
Clearly, they'll charge you 94,371.84 bytes per megabyte.
Presumably you can pay by simply sending them a big e-message.
> Patents could be, and perhaps once were, beneficial to society. They do not currently have a net posititve impact on society. On the bottom lines of certain companies, perhaps, but that's a separate matter.
Due to the widespread habit of tit-for-tat licensing, the net effect of the patent system, to a first approximation, is to keep the have-nots out of the game.
> Patents are essentially nothing more or less than one particular method for creating monopolies. Monopolies have, except when relatively weak, a net negative impact on society. Thus when an individual owns a patent, there can be an argument that the net impact on society is positive. It distributes the power base, and thus strengthens democracy. But when some centralized agency, say an employer, owns or controls the patent then net benefit on society becomes negative because it acts of further strengthen already unusually strong elements.
Think of the US patent system as neo-mercantilism.
> This sounds like the kind of doll that comes to life at night, eyes glowing red, saying "You must kill mommy and daddy," while its head spins completely around.
"Chainsaw not included."
Ken says he'd rather have a beowulf cluster of Barbies.