Or, you know, we could move beyond this petty carbon offset nonsense. It's just another guilt-driven cash cow where modern day hippies brow-beat each other into subsidizing carbon-negative companies that would fail without the handouts. It's large-scale corporate welfare.
You want people to reduce their environmental impact ? Forget the tree planting outfits, how about public transit options that don't royally suck. How about assassinating the OPEC cartel leaders and their immediate heirs. How about foreign policy that doesn't center on blowing other people's shit up. How about telling the WSJ to quit airing their jealousy on the web and in their navel-gazing rag.
There is so much low-hanging fruit in terms of energy efficiency, but nobody in the western world has the dedication to follow through, because we're all so used to being wasteful and nihilistic. That attitude needs to change, and is a million times more relevant than any one man's flight plans.
Please reread the parent, he said "employ people who are competent to teach programming", and THAT should be a prerequisite [to employment].
It is an all-too-common occurrence for some teachers to merely be "going through the motions", following a pre-written course guide that isn't in their field of expertise. I've seen used car salesmen teaching operating system fundamentals. I've seen accountants teaching SQL. I've seen a disbarred attorney teaching NT driver programming (not fucking kidding!).
As a coder/sysadmin/hardware guy myself, who tried teaching for a few semesters way back, I can appreciate that it's often difficult to take what know and bastardize it for human consumption, especially when it draws upon multiple "layers" of other knowledge. I remember the first time I tried to explain variables to a friend (pre-teaching); to me, it was the simplest, most obvious concept, because I had learned it as a little kid fooling with 8-bit computers. To someone who either hasn't done much algebra, or had sucky math profs in high school, it's not always so trivial.
It really takes someone who is good at picturing the student's perspective and what's going through their minds when all this foreign knowledge is being presented for the first time. I eventually got the hang of it, but man my first teaching class was brutal. I wished there had been some steps taken to prepare me for it, but no... the college just hired me on a whim, based on my technical qualifications. They asked me to produce a course outline by next week, and classes start the week after. It was all very slapdash and I can only assume the same thing happens in a lot of other colleges and universities. That's the business model...
Thunderbolt is NOT intended as a replacement for USB. Yeah, USB3 is supposed to be fast and sexy and all those superlatives, but the reality is that USB has always taken a while to mature, due to shoddy controlers and host-based processing. Thunderbolt is closer in spirit to Firewire, which, contrary to common belief, is still very much alive and kicking in the pro multimedia segment. Firewire video, firewire audio, firewire storage. It's still the hotness, and it will be a very long time before the bargain-basement USB3 with its batallion of corner-cutting taiwanese supporters even catches up to FW800.
Would it have been cooler if Thunderbolt were backward-compatible with USB2 and/or 3 ? Cooler, yes, but it would have enticed manufacturers to limit the number of ports due to cost, or have a half-assed setup where some ports are Thunderbolt, and others are just plain USB hanging off some slaved controller.
The way it is now, I can look forward to new, faster audio/video/storage gadgets that will benefit from the 10gbps interlink. Heck I want to look into designing a fat RAID enclosure that connects via Thunderbolt - it would beat the crap out of point-to-point FC, at a much lower price point, and the daisy chaining feature implies easy expandability. Need more storage ? Chain another RAID box, no need for a wider HBA or port multipliers. That right there is worth five figures to a ton of my clients.
I've long since moved on to ION based nettops, but curiosity makes me want to plug the old Xbox back in and see what they have accomplished. The big deal breaker for me was spotty and sluggish h.264 decoding, which has become the de-facto standard for 720p TV and movie rips.
I'm a bit concerned at the rapid rate at which these new kernels are minted. We're seeing more and more regressions and critical bugs while people ravenously add new, unrefined functionality to the kernel. Over the past year, I've spent (wasted) more time fixing crashes and data corruption than actually deploying new boxes. This isn't the Linux I used to know and love.
Me, I just want a 2.6 that's freakin' stable, so I can have one week where none of my servers throw a panic. One week! Older kernels aren't being properly patched, not even by downstream distro maintainers, so the result is a bunch of awesome gear that's not safe to use with Linux, because someone was in a hurry to make $SHINY_GADGET play nice with lspci. It's great that we have people interested in current hardware, but the whole project is now suffering from ADHD.
What was once the stable branch is practically beta, and beta is now bleeding edge nonsense.
Yep, I've been doing and saying this for years. If Asia, Russia, South America are not interesting markets for my site/service/product/email, I simply block the IP ranges from hitting the respective ports. I'm certainly not about to sell high-end gaming computers or consulting services to China, so they're more than welcome to find some other host to crack.
The problem here, and by extension the problem with all MAFIAA activity, is that they are misusing publicly funded law enforcement resources to push a corporate, profit-driven agenda.
Murder, larceny, rape. These are criminal offenses.
Copyright infringement is a CIVIL issue. The police has no business mediating such affairs. If the RIAA wants to fight the fight, they must do so using civil courts. Law enforcement officials have better things to worry about, like all the murder, larceny, and rape going on.
That entirely depends on your social circles. If said woman or dude hangs around a bunch of similarly airheaded magpies, yeah sure, the more shiny you got, the more people ooh and aah over your materialistic supremacy. I don't think that sort of reaction necessarily applies to geeks, at least not to the same extent, because we tend to pride ourselves on our mental/professional accomplishments, rather than the amount and size of stuff we've bought.
I bought my first Mac a month ago, and had some serious buyer remorse for 2-3 weeks. Am I praising the holy Steve ? Er, no. I think he's a dick for pricing every laptop $1000 higher than similar PC hardware. Do I feel superior for owning said Mac ? No, just ask my business partners, I am constantly swearing at the thing for slowing me down and making my head hurt with its dumbed-down OS. Does it make me attractive and famous ? Maybe, but I don't enjoy the creeps and hipsters hovering over my shoulder, staring at my work tool like they wanna stick their junk up the Thunderbolt port.
I could see some people treating Apple gear as a status symbol, but those tend to be failed humans who have nothing better to brag about. If not Apple, then they'll buy some other overpriced gadget or fashion accessory like an ugly-ass L.V. purse or a Rolex.
Me, I just want to get paid. I am socially accepted because I kick ass at what I do. I was before buying the Mac, and I will continue to be, long after the Mac gets smashed in an unfortunate "drop the 80lb PC on the mac" accident.
That's okay. Childs should countersue for 1.5 million for being stranded as the sole sysadmin for so long. If the city had any brains, they'd have gotten a redundant sysadmin to go with their rack full of overpriced Cisco gear, and this whole incident would have been a non-issue.
At every place I've ever worked, big or small, there was always a conversation about "What if Bill gets run over by a bus", which resulted in me training a 2nd guy, writing maintenance docs or printing off passwords to be filed and locked away. Even when I was in a 4-man shop where we winged everything, we still took the effort to secure the future of company that way. If the City of San Francisco is too smug to do the most basic contingency planning, they deserve everything that happened to them.
I've used ICQ, MSN, Google Talk and Yahoo Messenger, but never AIM. AIM was never my Facebook, and Gizmodo doesn't know shit about fuck. Since when does Gawker Media post anything of value anyway ?
I know about ZFS (somewhat), but what's the big appeal of Ext4 and BtrFS ? Cool that Grub can boot from them, but do they confer any tangible benefits for desktop users ?
For personal use, I care about two things:
1. How safe is my data
2. How quickly can I access it
Ext3 seems to address both concerns quite acceptably, so what do these newer filesystems do better ? And why would anyone want to use that on their boot partition ?
Yeahhh... but you usually stare at your phone from a shorter distance than your LCDs, at least I know I do. A while back I upgraded to the new 27" Dells with 2560x1440, up from 1920x1200 on my previous set. It took me a few days to get accustomed, and in the end I had to enlarge some of my fonts to be comfortable. I do get more real estate overall, but I did sacrifice some because the text was just too tiny.
The left/right split in Windows is also a limiting factor. It's just too convenient to hit Win+LeftArrow, I hardly bother with manual resizing anymore. That means one display is used as two 1280x1440 halves, which is more than I typically need, and I often zoom in to about 150% for text-heavy stuff.
Virtual desktops never really did it for me. I'll move a window to a virtual desktop if I don't need to think about it for a while, or if it is totally unrelated to my current task (out of sight, out of mind). I certainly don't want to be switching desktops just to read docs or copy/paste between windows.
Besides, having a huge display matrix scares the shit out of guests, and firmly establishes my ePeen superiority.
What exactly did Lodsys "invent" here ? And how can it not be considered trivial/obvious ?
Can I go ahead and patent In-Bar Purchasing (IBP) ? "A process where one person, robot, or legal entity, acquires food, beverage or short-lived sexual gratification in exchange for cash, credit, or barter."
I'll gladly take 0.575% of all bar revenue worldwide. Suuuuure.
It is just me, or is this the dumbest article posted here since Jon Katz' tour of duty ? Yeah, duh, 9 out of 10 PC repair guys are shady, and the article's anecdotes sound like they're from 20 years ago. Zip drive ? come on, guys...
... and then their prestigious degree becomes the laughingstock of the industry when word gets out that they can't even code a Hello World without googling for design petterns.
Sure... or they could use programmatic synthesis tools like Max/MSP and countless others to create the same sounds without the slapdash practice of circuit bending.
Yeah, but you know... as much as I hate the DLC business model, particularly when the payee is Bobby "Money" Kotick, I kind of like the idea of new maps being added later in the lifecycle. I prefer that periodic refresh, over having them all available up-front and being overwhelmed. A big part of these games is learning the maps and figuring out strategies. If you start out with 20 maps, you'll end up playing each one half as often as if there were only 10 maps. I'd rather get good at the first 10, then when things start getting dull, get another 5 tacked on to mix things up. Then another 5 maps a few months later. I guess I got used to this with Quake, CS and TF, since the first few months had only the baked-in maps, then people started producing and distributing their own and things stayed interesting...
Ideally, those maps should be free, but I don't think the gaming industry will ever go back to "not screwing the customer".
You must be new here (looks at UID), yep, balls haven't even dropped yet.
Kotaku is, pretty much, a press release site. In case you hadn't noticed, it is part of Gawker Media. They have about as much originally-researched content as IGN, which is to say, Zero.
I'm not saying I condone mass murder, I'm saying sometimes the ones in power can be hard of hearing (read: fascist). In such cases, a coup is often the only remaining recourse.
If you still believe the vote has any power or meaning, well I'm afraid I am wasting my words on you.
Evangelist, bullshitter, to anyone with a working prefrontal cortex, are synonyms. The fact that corporations would associate a job title with the likes of Jimmy Swaggart and Jerry Falwell, that right there should raise a million red flags.
If you need to pay someone to convince people, you are selling lies, plain and simple. If they were providing verifiable facts, they'd be instructors, educators, professors... not evangelists.
How is that any different from what the U.S. military has been doing to the middle east ?
Is the U.S. government then a terrorist organisation ? They blow up foreign governments to install their own brand of culture.
At least Fawkes wanted to blow up his own government. That is far more noble and democratic than today's racially-charged wars and mercantile marauding.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, you know, we could move beyond this petty carbon offset nonsense. It's just another guilt-driven cash cow where modern day hippies brow-beat each other into subsidizing carbon-negative companies that would fail without the handouts. It's large-scale corporate welfare.
You want people to reduce their environmental impact ? Forget the tree planting outfits, how about public transit options that don't royally suck. How about assassinating the OPEC cartel leaders and their immediate heirs. How about foreign policy that doesn't center on blowing other people's shit up. How about telling the WSJ to quit airing their jealousy on the web and in their navel-gazing rag.
There is so much low-hanging fruit in terms of energy efficiency, but nobody in the western world has the dedication to follow through, because we're all so used to being wasteful and nihilistic. That attitude needs to change, and is a million times more relevant than any one man's flight plans.
Please reread the parent, he said "employ people who are competent to teach programming", and THAT should be a prerequisite [to employment].
It is an all-too-common occurrence for some teachers to merely be "going through the motions", following a pre-written course guide that isn't in their field of expertise. I've seen used car salesmen teaching operating system fundamentals. I've seen accountants teaching SQL. I've seen a disbarred attorney teaching NT driver programming (not fucking kidding!).
As a coder/sysadmin/hardware guy myself, who tried teaching for a few semesters way back, I can appreciate that it's often difficult to take what know and bastardize it for human consumption, especially when it draws upon multiple "layers" of other knowledge. I remember the first time I tried to explain variables to a friend (pre-teaching); to me, it was the simplest, most obvious concept, because I had learned it as a little kid fooling with 8-bit computers. To someone who either hasn't done much algebra, or had sucky math profs in high school, it's not always so trivial.
It really takes someone who is good at picturing the student's perspective and what's going through their minds when all this foreign knowledge is being presented for the first time. I eventually got the hang of it, but man my first teaching class was brutal. I wished there had been some steps taken to prepare me for it, but no... the college just hired me on a whim, based on my technical qualifications. They asked me to produce a course outline by next week, and classes start the week after. It was all very slapdash and I can only assume the same thing happens in a lot of other colleges and universities. That's the business model...
Ever heard of iptables-save ?
Heck, Fedora/RHEL/CentOS bootscripts do it for you during shutdown, and reload them during startup.
Thunderbolt is NOT intended as a replacement for USB. Yeah, USB3 is supposed to be fast and sexy and all those superlatives, but the reality is that USB has always taken a while to mature, due to shoddy controlers and host-based processing. Thunderbolt is closer in spirit to Firewire, which, contrary to common belief, is still very much alive and kicking in the pro multimedia segment. Firewire video, firewire audio, firewire storage. It's still the hotness, and it will be a very long time before the bargain-basement USB3 with its batallion of corner-cutting taiwanese supporters even catches up to FW800.
Would it have been cooler if Thunderbolt were backward-compatible with USB2 and/or 3 ? Cooler, yes, but it would have enticed manufacturers to limit the number of ports due to cost, or have a half-assed setup where some ports are Thunderbolt, and others are just plain USB hanging off some slaved controller.
The way it is now, I can look forward to new, faster audio/video/storage gadgets that will benefit from the 10gbps interlink. Heck I want to look into designing a fat RAID enclosure that connects via Thunderbolt - it would beat the crap out of point-to-point FC, at a much lower price point, and the daisy chaining feature implies easy expandability. Need more storage ? Chain another RAID box, no need for a wider HBA or port multipliers. That right there is worth five figures to a ton of my clients.
I've long since moved on to ION based nettops, but curiosity makes me want to plug the old Xbox back in and see what they have accomplished. The big deal breaker for me was spotty and sluggish h.264 decoding, which has become the de-facto standard for 720p TV and movie rips.
Didn't 2.6.38 come out just a few months ago ?
I'm a bit concerned at the rapid rate at which these new kernels are minted. We're seeing more and more regressions and critical bugs while people ravenously add new, unrefined functionality to the kernel. Over the past year, I've spent (wasted) more time fixing crashes and data corruption than actually deploying new boxes. This isn't the Linux I used to know and love.
Me, I just want a 2.6 that's freakin' stable, so I can have one week where none of my servers throw a panic. One week! Older kernels aren't being properly patched, not even by downstream distro maintainers, so the result is a bunch of awesome gear that's not safe to use with Linux, because someone was in a hurry to make $SHINY_GADGET play nice with lspci. It's great that we have people interested in current hardware, but the whole project is now suffering from ADHD.
What was once the stable branch is practically beta, and beta is now bleeding edge nonsense.
Yep, I've been doing and saying this for years. If Asia, Russia, South America are not interesting markets for my site/service/product/email, I simply block the IP ranges from hitting the respective ports. I'm certainly not about to sell high-end gaming computers or consulting services to China, so they're more than welcome to find some other host to crack.
The problem here, and by extension the problem with all MAFIAA activity, is that they are misusing publicly funded law enforcement resources to push a corporate, profit-driven agenda.
Murder, larceny, rape. These are criminal offenses.
Copyright infringement is a CIVIL issue. The police has no business mediating such affairs. If the RIAA wants to fight the fight, they must do so using civil courts. Law enforcement officials have better things to worry about, like all the murder, larceny, and rape going on.
That entirely depends on your social circles. If said woman or dude hangs around a bunch of similarly airheaded magpies, yeah sure, the more shiny you got, the more people ooh and aah over your materialistic supremacy. I don't think that sort of reaction necessarily applies to geeks, at least not to the same extent, because we tend to pride ourselves on our mental/professional accomplishments, rather than the amount and size of stuff we've bought.
I bought my first Mac a month ago, and had some serious buyer remorse for 2-3 weeks. Am I praising the holy Steve ? Er, no. I think he's a dick for pricing every laptop $1000 higher than similar PC hardware. Do I feel superior for owning said Mac ? No, just ask my business partners, I am constantly swearing at the thing for slowing me down and making my head hurt with its dumbed-down OS. Does it make me attractive and famous ? Maybe, but I don't enjoy the creeps and hipsters hovering over my shoulder, staring at my work tool like they wanna stick their junk up the Thunderbolt port.
I could see some people treating Apple gear as a status symbol, but those tend to be failed humans who have nothing better to brag about. If not Apple, then they'll buy some other overpriced gadget or fashion accessory like an ugly-ass L.V. purse or a Rolex.
Me, I just want to get paid. I am socially accepted because I kick ass at what I do. I was before buying the Mac, and I will continue to be, long after the Mac gets smashed in an unfortunate "drop the 80lb PC on the mac" accident.
That's okay. Childs should countersue for 1.5 million for being stranded as the sole sysadmin for so long. If the city had any brains, they'd have gotten a redundant sysadmin to go with their rack full of overpriced Cisco gear, and this whole incident would have been a non-issue.
At every place I've ever worked, big or small, there was always a conversation about "What if Bill gets run over by a bus", which resulted in me training a 2nd guy, writing maintenance docs or printing off passwords to be filed and locked away. Even when I was in a 4-man shop where we winged everything, we still took the effort to secure the future of company that way. If the City of San Francisco is too smug to do the most basic contingency planning, they deserve everything that happened to them.
I've used ICQ, MSN, Google Talk and Yahoo Messenger, but never AIM. AIM was never my Facebook, and Gizmodo doesn't know shit about fuck. Since when does Gawker Media post anything of value anyway ?
This is just begging for someone to come up with a SheevaPlug-style jammer that dumps random onto your power lines.
I know about ZFS (somewhat), but what's the big appeal of Ext4 and BtrFS ? Cool that Grub can boot from them, but do they confer any tangible benefits for desktop users ?
For personal use, I care about two things:
1. How safe is my data
2. How quickly can I access it
Ext3 seems to address both concerns quite acceptably, so what do these newer filesystems do better ? And why would anyone want to use that on their boot partition ?
Overuse of reproduction leads to idiocracy, but the government would never dare even speak of eugenics. How is anything any different ?
Oh, right. Eugenics doesn't make a bunch of english expats fucktons of money.
Yeahhh... but you usually stare at your phone from a shorter distance than your LCDs, at least I know I do. A while back I upgraded to the new 27" Dells with 2560x1440, up from 1920x1200 on my previous set. It took me a few days to get accustomed, and in the end I had to enlarge some of my fonts to be comfortable. I do get more real estate overall, but I did sacrifice some because the text was just too tiny.
The left/right split in Windows is also a limiting factor. It's just too convenient to hit Win+LeftArrow, I hardly bother with manual resizing anymore. That means one display is used as two 1280x1440 halves, which is more than I typically need, and I often zoom in to about 150% for text-heavy stuff.
Virtual desktops never really did it for me. I'll move a window to a virtual desktop if I don't need to think about it for a while, or if it is totally unrelated to my current task (out of sight, out of mind). I certainly don't want to be switching desktops just to read docs or copy/paste between windows.
Besides, having a huge display matrix scares the shit out of guests, and firmly establishes my ePeen superiority.
What exactly did Lodsys "invent" here ? And how can it not be considered trivial/obvious ?
Can I go ahead and patent In-Bar Purchasing (IBP) ? "A process where one person, robot, or legal entity, acquires food, beverage or short-lived sexual gratification in exchange for cash, credit, or barter."
I'll gladly take 0.575% of all bar revenue worldwide. Suuuuure.
It is just me, or is this the dumbest article posted here since Jon Katz' tour of duty ? Yeah, duh, 9 out of 10 PC repair guys are shady, and the article's anecdotes sound like they're from 20 years ago. Zip drive ? come on, guys...
... and then their prestigious degree becomes the laughingstock of the industry when word gets out that they can't even code a Hello World without googling for design petterns.
Sure ... or they could use programmatic synthesis tools like Max/MSP and countless others to create the same sounds without the slapdash practice of circuit bending.
Yeah, but you know... as much as I hate the DLC business model, particularly when the payee is Bobby "Money" Kotick, I kind of like the idea of new maps being added later in the lifecycle. I prefer that periodic refresh, over having them all available up-front and being overwhelmed. A big part of these games is learning the maps and figuring out strategies. If you start out with 20 maps, you'll end up playing each one half as often as if there were only 10 maps. I'd rather get good at the first 10, then when things start getting dull, get another 5 tacked on to mix things up. Then another 5 maps a few months later. I guess I got used to this with Quake, CS and TF, since the first few months had only the baked-in maps, then people started producing and distributing their own and things stayed interesting...
Ideally, those maps should be free, but I don't think the gaming industry will ever go back to "not screwing the customer".
You must be new here (looks at UID), yep, balls haven't even dropped yet.
Kotaku is, pretty much, a press release site. In case you hadn't noticed, it is part of Gawker Media. They have about as much originally-researched content as IGN, which is to say, Zero.
As the Demotivator goes:
"None of us is as dumb as all of us."
I'm not saying I condone mass murder, I'm saying sometimes the ones in power can be hard of hearing (read: fascist). In such cases, a coup is often the only remaining recourse.
If you still believe the vote has any power or meaning, well I'm afraid I am wasting my words on you.
Evangelist, bullshitter, to anyone with a working prefrontal cortex, are synonyms. The fact that corporations would associate a job title with the likes of Jimmy Swaggart and Jerry Falwell, that right there should raise a million red flags.
If you need to pay someone to convince people, you are selling lies, plain and simple. If they were providing verifiable facts, they'd be instructors, educators, professors... not evangelists.
A religious coup.
How is that any different from what the U.S. military has been doing to the middle east ?
Is the U.S. government then a terrorist organisation ? They blow up foreign governments to install their own brand of culture.
At least Fawkes wanted to blow up his own government. That is far more noble and democratic than today's racially-charged wars and mercantile marauding.