I just had a guy in the class with me (on another team) ask me how to check that the last four letters of a string are.xml in Java.
These folks are easy to handle. You just have to channel their questions through a text medium, like e-mail, IRC, or AIM. When the dumb question comes, look up the answer on Google. Paste the URL for the Google query into your reply, and tell them that they can read about the answer at that URL.
It may take a couple of repetitions, but the lovely thing about it is that you can subtly point out that they should do their own research without generating complaints to your boss, as might happen if you called them stupid.
What's worse is that the price for cabinets has gone through the roof. In 1989 you could buy a used Ms. Pac Man for less than $400. Lately I haven't seen one for less than $1500. The revival in their popularity has driven the price up substantially.
It irks me too that the combination Ms. Pac Man/Galaga machines now charge.50 per play - why is it double the price to play an old game??
Hmm, I wonder. Could the two be somehow connected?
Exactly. The biggest threat to humans from Fermilab is that someone will steal another chunk of slightly radioactive copper from the hot dump and sell it off-site. Scrap dealers in the area are on the look-out for that, though -- last time it happened, the dealer called the lab.
If someone got into the beam control sytems, they could cost a lot of money, but even then, I seriously doubt they could harm anybody on-site, let alone in the surrounding communities.
Seems pretty obvious that senstive computers should be physically separated from any connection to the internet?
Fermilab is attached to the Internet because the benefits of having it attached to the Internet exceed the risks.
The research done at Fermilab is of a very basic nature -- nothing classified is done there, and I'd even take issue with the BBCs (and your) description of it as "sensitive," for that matter.
The most "sensitive" systems would be the ones that control the accelerator and beamlines, but all you are likely to do with those is to steer a beam into one of the berms.
Balance that against the fact that high-energy (particle) physics research is highly collaborative, and hundreds of researchers at the Lab use Internet on a daily basis to communicate with other researchers, download preprints of research papers, and other stuff, and you'll see that access to the Internet is nothing to give up lightly.
We need crackers because without them there would be no one to point out how incredibly vulnerable these systems really are. I'd rather have a crack root a box to download mp3s now then have a real threat root a box and perform much more covert and dubious actions.
"We need robbers because without them there would be no one to point out how easy it would be to be murdered. I'd rather have someone rob me now, than to have someone else murder me later."
What's your address, and what brand of lock do you use? I'd like to give you a security lesson.
...now rather than just taking my ATM card and pistol-whipping me until they get my PIN, the muggers are going to have to lop off a finger or spoon out an eyeball!
...put enough high-energy physics grad students in a room with enough duct tape, cable ties, and Unistrut, eventually one of them will build the Empire State Building.
Copyright gives you exclusive rights to do things with your creation; you may choose to reserve any or all of these rights to yourself, or to share them with others under the terms of a license. That's all copyright does.
If I GPL something I created from scratch[1], I do not restrict myself in the least. The GPL is where others get their right to use my creation -- my right comes from the fact that I hold the copyright, and can do any damn thing I want with it, including making proprietary branches. If I wrote all of it, I am not bound by any license, including the GPL.
If I use someone else's code licensed to me under the GPL, it's different, and I am bound by the GPL, but that's the price I pay for using that code.
Ooooh, you're awfully brave when it's not your ass in the sling. Why don't you mortgage your house and send them the money for their legal fees, or something?
In about a year, you're going to be almost as big as I am, and you'll never have to worry about being beaten up again.
The flute player you're going to meet in marching band in a couple of years is cute and interesting, but she's never going to be hot for you and you're just going to drive her nuts.
Oh, and there's going to be this canoe trip in about seven years. Don't be too thick to realize that your date really likes you.
Re:I was hoping they would wait.
on
New Red Hat Beta
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· Score: 2
Cool!
Re:I was hoping they would wait.
on
New Red Hat Beta
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
KDE 3.1 has been delayed until early/mid January for a security audit.... KDE 3.1 has been delayed until early/mid January for a security audit.
I think you just answered your question before you asked it. RedHat has no assurance that the release of KDE 3.1 won't be delayed further. At some point, you just have to go with what you have.
"If my parents didn't live where the HOA frowned upon it, I'd tell them to get DirecTV."
Tell them anyway. The FCC has ruled that homeowners' associations cannot stop people from installing satellite dishes of 1 m diameter or less (among other things, like wireless broadband antennae.)
You have a good point there, but in most localities, how much you get paid, and what your client is buying, are spelled out in the contract. Even the customary total ownership that goes with traditional employment is not a matter of custom, but of the words in the documents you are required to sign upon employment.
As you say, a good lawyer is the place to turn for advice on this.
Hmmm. This must be a recent thing, because I definitely remember buying oil-change supplies at the Target in Batavia IL a few years back. I remember this because I'd also bought bedsheets, and the cutie at the register commented on how few people come in and buy both motor oil and bedsheets.
"I'm having a wild party this weekend" was my reply. If she'd looked a little older, I would have invited her.
Doesn't anybody read these articles...
on
Is Linux Dead?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
... past the first paragraph?
This is just the same old "Linux is dominating the server market, progress on the desktop is slow, but it's getting better" story we've been seeing all year.
So since you have no fortran programers, and probably can't find a good one, what happens when your pay-roll program breaks, not have payroll for 4 months until you can get another written?
I believe that's sort of covered here:
For the sake of argument let's say that it costs you three times as much to add small new features to the old FORTRAN program because you have to hire retired consultants who charge extra to be dragged away from their golf games.
OK, so tell me the net present value of the stream of the marginal extra cost of those extra-expensive consultants for all future expected repairs. If that number exceeds the NPV of the rewrite, OK, fine, rewrite it, you have made an economic argument that it pays off. Not an emotional argument about old fashioned programming languages, which doesn't impress me -- an economic argument.
I believe Spolsky would say that if it's more expensive to fix the problems than to rewrite, you should rewrite. After all, you don't have to rewrite the payroll system whenever it breaks, you just have to fix the bug.
From my point of view, this is just a gratuitous slam at the least mature members of the GPL community. I suspect that the real problem is that the Kivio business model is not working out too well, but a slap at the "nasty GPL people" plays a lot better in the press.
If Kivio were making a lot of money for The Kompany, I have a hard time believing that *any* amount of bitching from non-paying customers would cause them to change their minds.
Slashdot Mirror
I just had a guy in the class with me (on another team) ask me how to check that the last four letters of a string are .xml in Java.
These folks are easy to handle. You just have to channel their questions through a text medium, like e-mail, IRC, or AIM. When the dumb question comes, look up the answer on Google. Paste the URL for the Google query into your reply, and tell them that they can read about the answer at that URL.
It may take a couple of repetitions, but the lovely thing about it is that you can subtly point out that they should do their own research without generating complaints to your boss, as might happen if you called them stupid.
What's worse is that the price for cabinets has gone through the roof. In 1989 you could buy a used Ms. Pac Man for less than $400. Lately I haven't seen one for less than $1500. The revival in their popularity has driven the price up substantially.
.50 per play - why is it double the price to play an old game??
It irks me too that the combination Ms. Pac Man/Galaga machines now charge
Hmm, I wonder. Could the two be somehow connected?
Exactly. The biggest threat to humans from Fermilab is that someone will steal another chunk of slightly radioactive copper from the hot dump and sell it off-site. Scrap dealers in the area are on the look-out for that, though -- last time it happened, the dealer called the lab.
If someone got into the beam control sytems, they could cost a lot of money, but even then, I seriously doubt they could harm anybody on-site, let alone in the surrounding communities.
Seems pretty obvious that senstive computers should be physically separated from any connection to the internet?
Fermilab is attached to the Internet because the benefits of having it attached to the Internet exceed the risks.
The research done at Fermilab is of a very basic nature -- nothing classified is done there, and I'd even take issue with the BBCs (and your) description of it as "sensitive," for that matter.
The most "sensitive" systems would be the ones that control the accelerator and beamlines, but all you are likely to do with those is to steer a beam into one of the berms.
Balance that against the fact that high-energy (particle) physics research is highly collaborative, and hundreds of researchers at the Lab use Internet on a daily basis to communicate with other researchers, download preprints of research papers, and other stuff, and you'll see that access to the Internet is nothing to give up lightly.
We need crackers because without them there would be no one to point out how incredibly vulnerable these systems really are. I'd rather have a crack root a box to download mp3s now then have a real threat root a box and perform much more covert and dubious actions.
"We need robbers because without them there would be no one to point out how easy it would be to be murdered. I'd rather have someone rob me now, than to have someone else murder me later."
What's your address, and what brand of lock do you use? I'd like to give you a security lesson.
...now rather than just taking my ATM card and pistol-whipping me until they get my PIN, the muggers are going to have to lop off a finger or spoon out an eyeball!
...put enough high-energy physics grad students in a room with enough duct tape, cable ties, and Unistrut, eventually one of them will build the Empire State Building.
Pretty soon, not only are you getting the regular fees from your ordinary subscribers, you also own the pirate decoder market as well.
LOL! Genius! Pure genius!
Copyright gives you exclusive rights to do things with your creation; you may choose to reserve any or all of these rights to yourself, or to share them with others under the terms of a license. That's all copyright does.
If I GPL something I created from scratch[1], I do not restrict myself in the least. The GPL is where others get their right to use my creation -- my right comes from the fact that I hold the copyright, and can do any damn thing I want with it, including making proprietary branches. If I wrote all of it, I am not bound by any license, including the GPL.
If I use someone else's code licensed to me under the GPL, it's different, and I am bound by the GPL, but that's the price I pay for using that code.
Too bad they removed it. Now you'll have to look for it on google
Hope the PA guys get some backbone.
Ooooh, you're awfully brave when it's not your ass in the sling. Why don't you mortgage your house and send them the money for their legal fees, or something?
In about a year, you're going to be almost as big as I am, and you'll never have to worry about being beaten up again.
The flute player you're going to meet in marching band in a couple of years is cute and interesting, but she's never going to be hot for you and you're just going to drive her nuts.
Oh, and there's going to be this canoe trip in about seven years. Don't be too thick to realize that your date really likes you.
Cool!
KDE 3.1 has been delayed until early/mid January for a security audit. ... KDE 3.1 has been delayed until early/mid January for a security audit.
I think you just answered your question before you asked it. RedHat has no assurance that the release of KDE 3.1 won't be delayed further. At some point, you just have to go with what you have.
"If my parents didn't live where the HOA frowned upon it, I'd tell them to get DirecTV."
Tell them anyway. The FCC has ruled that homeowners' associations cannot stop people from installing satellite dishes of 1 m diameter or less (among other things, like wireless broadband antennae.)
You have a good point there, but in most localities, how much you get paid, and what your client is buying, are spelled out in the contract. Even the customary total ownership that goes with traditional employment is not a matter of custom, but of the words in the documents you are required to sign upon employment.
As you say, a good lawyer is the place to turn for advice on this.
This company is paying you for the code, and so, when you are done, then the code belongs to them.
Wrong. The company is paying you for whatever the contract says they are paying you for. No more, no less.
Which Animal Planet do you watch? The one *I* watch has ads.
No, I changed the oil in my car, dummy!
Hmmm. This must be a recent thing, because I definitely remember buying oil-change supplies at the Target in Batavia IL a few years back. I remember this because I'd also bought bedsheets, and the cutie at the register commented on how few people come in and buy both motor oil and bedsheets.
"I'm having a wild party this weekend" was my reply. If she'd looked a little older, I would have invited her.
Not "bupkis." Means "beans."
... past the first paragraph?
This is just the same old "Linux is dominating the server market, progress on the desktop is slow, but it's getting better" story we've been seeing all year.
It's definitely not a "Linux is dead" story.
disclaimer: I sent my check to GeekPAC two days ago, and I'm not even an american citizen. So what are you waiting for ?
Dude, major illegality there. They'll send it back, because GeekPAC can't take your money.
I believe that's sort of covered here:
I believe Spolsky would say that if it's more expensive to fix the problems than to rewrite, you should rewrite. After all, you don't have to rewrite the payroll system whenever it breaks, you just have to fix the bug.
From my point of view, this is just a gratuitous slam at the least mature members of the GPL community. I suspect that the real problem is that the Kivio business model is not working out too well, but a slap at the "nasty GPL people" plays a lot better in the press.
If Kivio were making a lot of money for The Kompany, I have a hard time believing that *any* amount of bitching from non-paying customers would cause them to change their minds.
but we named ours after the thugs in Reservoir Dogs -- mrwhite,mrpink,mrorange,mrblonde.