Remember, it takes 4 minutes for light from our closest neighboring star to reach earth...
Oooh! Oooh! I just KNEW it. I just KNEW there were aliens among us. This writer is clearly a Venusian who has been living among us! He/she/it remebered to type the word 'earth' while forgetting to change the value of 4 minutes to our own well-known 8 minutes! It's always those little slips that give them away, isn't it. OK, it's time to break out your tin-foil helmets, folks. We finally have proof. They really are among us.
Here's another good reason to quit washing your hands: WWJD? (What Would Jesus Do?)
All you folks who are teaching your kids to wash their hands before they eat are going against the teachings of Jesus! I mean, compared to an eternity in hell, an antibiotic-resistant staph infection is a walk in the park!
Please moderate this as "+1, saving your sorry soul from eternal damnation."
As a footnote - the band Rube Waddell on their album "Stinkbait" has a selection from McCarthy's Blood Meridian. It's not my favorite piece on the album but it's an interesting quirk to see it there.
Overall, though, the album is really bitchin'. If you like your music laced with some cynical philosophy check these guys out. Their cover of "Ode to Joy" is like nothing I've ever heard before, yet somehow it seems authentic in a way that Beethoven couldn't begin to understand, I suspect.
'Scuse, please, for taking it even further off topic.
Not sure about LDAP, but I have yet to see anyone who actually deploys both AD and NDS for living prefer AD.
I've deployed both in production environments. At the moment I have a slight preference for AD. Group Policy rocks, and the drag-and-drop of NDS never felt intuitive to me. But NDS seems more forgiving to operate and is clearly more mature.
LDAP on *nix, though, seems higher maintenance to set up, with less reward than you get straight out of the proprietary systems' shrinkwrap. (Caveat: I've only played with *nix LDAP it in the lab, not in production.)
It depends on which tool you use to look at it. If you look at it the way you're supposed to, using Active Directory Users and Computers, you get lovely tabbed windows. Who cares what it looks like under the hood? Some of us would rathr USE computers than fart around with them. They're just tools, you know? Not ends in themselves. (I've used 3 different x500-based systems in business environments. They each have their strenghts and weaknesses. And they're all just tools to get a job done. This is not a knee-jerk pro-Microsoft comment.)
To invert an old saying: If you want to be a duck you need to walk like a duck and talk like a duck. Or dress like a duck.
I've seen it more than once where a senior tech person with 10 years of experience applies for a junior management position. They think they deserve it. They know the technology. They know the operation. They're bright and analytical. But they don't get the job. Some outsider in a suit gets it instead.
Why? Because the managers wear ties and the geeks don't, and the managers' comfort levels lie with those who wear ties.
If you want to progress into management -- and that's definitely an "if" -- then 1) always dress better than you need to and 2) always communicate better than you need to (including spell-checking even the most casual emails that your boss or the end-users will see).
So, walk like a duck and talk like a duck and some day you too may be a duck.
Does Windows have a net-based install that only requires a couple of floppies to get going?
If your computer has a PXE-enabled NIC you don't even need floppies to do your net-based install of Windows. It's called RIS. Still, most folks prefer to Ghost. But see here for a discussion of a voice-activated RIS-based install of Windows.
Apparently, this is what they say is their scariest server room.
That reminds me of a story about my daughter. The emergency off switch on a mid-1990's model AS/400 (one of the smaller ones, I forget which) is just at the perfect height to catch the attention of an 18 month-old. The switch is bright red on an otherwise black box. Mom takes daughter in to server room while mom has to make a quick tape change. Daughter sees pretty red button. Click! AS400 scrams. Fortunately only one user was on at the time, and a OS/400 has a very robust RDB so no corruption happened.
Shades of "Angela's Airplane", eh, all you parents out there?
<pedantic>The carrot and the stick are used together, not as opposites. To make a donkey bear you forward you tie a carrot to a stick then sit on the donkey's back. You hold the stick such that it dangles the carrot in front of the donkey, who moves forward to try to eat the carrot, carrying you and the stick & carrot forward. The stick is not used to beat the donkey.</pedantic>
But why do you give $950M away in the first place? If your goal is to make the world a better place through philanthropy (feed the world) or through strategic investments (building space-based power stations and orbiting colonies), wouldn't the world be twice as good a place if you kept the $950M used it to earn another billion, thereby giving you and your heirs $1950M to build yet more Good Things?
Ancient Chinese proverb: Beware man who says he wishes to become rich so that he can help the poor.
Two things have always bugged me about Hungarian notation. 1) It puts the least distinguishing data first. If your compiler only recognizes the 1st 14 characters of the variable name as significant, you can get a lot of namespace collisions because you've taken up your most important character positions with stuff that is identical with a whole lot of other variable names. 2) It makes an alphabetically sorted list of variable names a lot less useful, particularly if someone has invented a bunch of similar datatypes so you have to look two or three places in your list to find the correct spelling (e.g. does "Gizmo" have one z or two? Well, was that intGizmo or longGizmo or charGizmo?).
The solution seemed to me to be simple: Put the type identifiers at the END of the variable name rather than at the beginning (gizmoInt rather than intGizmo). Alas, I was a voice in the wilderness.
It's the like that age old question: "All I want to know is who the man is that looked at a cow and said 'I think I drink from whatever comes out of those things when I squeeze them.'"
I've always thought that joke was rather shallow. Surely this was easily learned by watching a calf (or any other young mammal, including humans) suck. In many cultures children breastfeed to supplement their diet and for comfort until over four years of age. It's not a long stretch, then, for inquisitive adult humans to try the milk of other species.
Tangent: I've heard one naturalist say that seal and whale milk is disgusting stuff to most humans, reeking strongly of blubber.
Another tangent: I've also seen a whale display in a museum that indicated a baby blue whale gains an average of 8 pounds per hour just by suckling. Big momma!
Orlando, FL -- the number one vacation destination in the world. Thus, your personal boycott won't be noticed as we have plenty of others vacationing here.
Chill. I wasn't proposing a boycott. It's really simple. I'd rather take my family to a place where sysadmins (a rather innocuous occupation by and large) don't feel so unsafe that they need to own guns. Perhaps I'm naive, but I had no idea that Orlando was that way. There go the Disney World plans. Do sysadmins in California face similar problems? I'm thinking of Disneyland. Maybe we'll just go to France; I've always wanted to do that too.
And quite frankly, I don't want pretty. I want functional. I want an easy to use system, not one that sparkles and gleams. I don't want bells and whistles.
Yes, but what you want doesn't matter. What matters is what their marketing department wants. And their marketing department doesn't care about Slashdot readers' opinions very much.
In the end it's all about adding value to the company's stock. As that begins to feel the impact of the bad press we may begin to see changes, because the stockholders will either demand it or vote with their feet. Until then, Bells and Whistles sell product. That's capitalism for you.
There are a lot of comments in this discussion about "loyalty." A colleague once recommended to me that in the business world we would be better off talking about 'commitment' rather than 'loyalty'. 'Loyalty' gets us into a personal, emotional realm, parallel to religion or marriage or nationalism. 'Commitment' on the other hand means, more simply, keeping to your word and honoring mutual agreements. Your employment contract, job description, the benefits package, all those things are part of the mutual commitment that you and the employer can both agree to without a huge emotionally-laden scene. You commit to doing X hours of work a week (presumably during your most alert and productive hours), and the company commits to giving you an agreed-upon compensation package in return. If they're smart they'll also commit to trying to find interesting, challenging work for you (or assisting you in finding that work for yourself).
If you expect loyalty from one another, someone will eventually be hurt and disappointed, because let's face it the odds are small that you and the company will be in the same relationship 20 years from now. You'll have some sort of break-up and someone will end up feeling betrayed. If you expect commitment from one another, on the other hand, it's a lot easier to see that some day this relationship will come to a natural end and both parties will move on to other things, hopefully without feelings of betrayal.
Re:The problem with all these equations...
on
Rare Earth
·
· Score: 1
Outlook - now that gives us virus headaches Lotus Notes + Domino - digital signatures on code transparent to user - end of virus threat - works for us really well - cross-platform - easily worth the conversion cost - you do the math:-)
Have you ever tried to run it over a T1 or slower? Pretty painful, eh? I think that's why VNC is so popular. I think the basic chattiness of X protocol is a fundamental problem. But I'm new to these discussions, so please forgive me if this is old ground. All I know is, I won't try it again.
"Microsoft has had a dominant business share for as long as I can remember."
Perhaps you're very young then, kikta. I, on the other hand, can remember back to the 1990's when it looked like Netscape's web browser appeared set to dominate the world. It had problems adhering to standards, it rode roughshod over users' complaints, it commercialized the (at that time) excellent freeware called "Mosaic," the company made a sickening ton of money with its public offering, and there was no serious competition in sight. Then Microsoft announced Internet Explorer, and we cheered -- finally there was some serious competition for the Netscape juggernaut!
Sheesh, brush up on your availability theory, man. It's cheaper to have a robust database than it is to shoot your IT staff. All those years in jail tend to harm your bottom line.
Taiko wrote: There are some posts by Linus and Alan Cox about the nature of design, computer science, Linux development, evolution, and more. Quite interesting and funny.
I don't disagree that it's interesting and funny. But it's also good to remember that while these are outstanding developers, the level of "Philosophy of Science" being discussed here is still in the undergraduate range. You could go to any Philosophy of Science 201 class in any university and hear these points. If you enjoyed the discussion, consider enrolling. And keep in mind that there's a whole level of discussion beyond this, for those who have been debating philosophy of science for decades, that'll make your head spin.
And once you've delved into that level long enough you want to say "Well, that was a fun break" and go back to hacking. It all goes round and round and round.
Excuse me, I just needed to dump some Karma. I've been asked to moderate too many times lately.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Oooh! Oooh! I just KNEW it. I just KNEW there were aliens among us. This writer is clearly a Venusian who has been living among us! He/she/it remebered to type the word 'earth' while forgetting to change the value of 4 minutes to our own well-known 8 minutes! It's always those little slips that give them away, isn't it. OK, it's time to break out your tin-foil helmets, folks. We finally have proof. They really are among us.
.nosig
I'll bet their "trustworthy computing" initiative took up so many cycles that other things are getting pushed back. .nosig
Here's another good reason to quit washing your hands: WWJD? (What Would Jesus Do?)
All you folks who are teaching your kids to wash their hands before they eat are going against the teachings of Jesus! I mean, compared to an eternity in hell, an antibiotic-resistant staph infection is a walk in the park!
Please moderate this as "+1, saving your sorry soul from eternal damnation."
.nosig
.nosig
As a footnote - the band Rube Waddell on their album "Stinkbait" has a selection from McCarthy's Blood Meridian. It's not my favorite piece on the album but it's an interesting quirk to see it there.
Overall, though, the album is really bitchin'. If you like your music laced with some cynical philosophy check these guys out. Their cover of "Ode to Joy" is like nothing I've ever heard before, yet somehow it seems authentic in a way that Beethoven couldn't begin to understand, I suspect.
'Scuse, please, for taking it even further off topic.
.nosig
I've deployed both in production environments. At the moment I have a slight preference for AD. Group Policy rocks, and the drag-and-drop of NDS never felt intuitive to me. But NDS seems more forgiving to operate and is clearly more mature.
LDAP on *nix, though, seems higher maintenance to set up, with less reward than you get straight out of the proprietary systems' shrinkwrap. (Caveat: I've only played with *nix LDAP it in the lab, not in production.)
.nosig
.nosig
I've seen it more than once where a senior tech person with 10 years of experience applies for a junior management position. They think they deserve it. They know the technology. They know the operation. They're bright and analytical. But they don't get the job. Some outsider in a suit gets it instead.
Why? Because the managers wear ties and the geeks don't, and the managers' comfort levels lie with those who wear ties.
If you want to progress into management -- and that's definitely an "if" -- then 1) always dress better than you need to and 2) always communicate better than you need to (including spell-checking even the most casual emails that your boss or the end-users will see).
So, walk like a duck and talk like a duck and some day you too may be a duck.
If your computer has a PXE-enabled NIC you don't even need floppies to do your net-based install of Windows. It's called RIS. Still, most folks prefer to Ghost. But see here for a discussion of a voice-activated RIS-based install of Windows.
Shades of "Angela's Airplane", eh, all you parents out there?
<pedantic>The carrot and the stick are used together, not as opposites. To make a donkey bear you forward you tie a carrot to a stick then sit on the donkey's back. You hold the stick such that it dangles the carrot in front of the donkey, who moves forward to try to eat the carrot, carrying you and the stick & carrot forward. The stick is not used to beat the donkey.</pedantic>
.nosig
.nosig
.nosig
The solution seemed to me to be simple: Put the type identifiers at the END of the variable name rather than at the beginning (gizmoInt rather than intGizmo). Alas, I was a voice in the wilderness.
.nosig
.nosig
Yes, but what you want doesn't matter. What matters is what their marketing department wants. And their marketing department doesn't care about Slashdot readers' opinions very much.
In the end it's all about adding value to the company's stock. As that begins to feel the impact of the bad press we may begin to see changes, because the stockholders will either demand it or vote with their feet. Until then, Bells and Whistles sell product. That's capitalism for you.
If you expect loyalty from one another, someone will eventually be hurt and disappointed, because let's face it the odds are small that you and the company will be in the same relationship 20 years from now. You'll have some sort of break-up and someone will end up feeling betrayed. If you expect commitment from one another, on the other hand, it's a lot easier to see that some day this relationship will come to a natural end and both parties will move on to other things, hopefully without feelings of betrayal.
Someone mod this guy up as informative.
Outlook - now that gives us virus headaches Lotus Notes + Domino - digital signatures on code transparent to user - end of virus threat - works for us really well - cross-platform - easily worth the conversion cost - you do the math :-)
Have you ever tried to run it over a T1 or slower? Pretty painful, eh? I think that's why VNC is so popular. I think the basic chattiness of X protocol is a fundamental problem. But I'm new to these discussions, so please forgive me if this is old ground. All I know is, I won't try it again.
What, a.c., you've never had a power supply fail?
Got redundant ones, you say? Ever had TWO fail?
Sheesh, brush up on your availability theory, man. It's cheaper to have a robust database than it is to shoot your IT staff. All those years in jail tend to harm your bottom line.
I don't disagree that it's interesting and funny. But it's also good to remember that while these are outstanding developers, the level of "Philosophy of Science" being discussed here is still in the undergraduate range. You could go to any Philosophy of Science 201 class in any university and hear these points. If you enjoyed the discussion, consider enrolling. And keep in mind that there's a whole level of discussion beyond this, for those who have been debating philosophy of science for decades, that'll make your head spin.
And once you've delved into that level long enough you want to say "Well, that was a fun break" and go back to hacking. It all goes round and round and round.
Excuse me, I just needed to dump some Karma. I've been asked to moderate too many times lately. :-)