It's a minor detail, but why is it that elections in the US are on workdays?
Finally, one of the poll workers got a cardboard box, wrote 'votes' on the side, and said we could just leave our ballots in the box and they would feed them into the vote scanning machine later when it was 'fixed.' So...that's what everyone did since people had to get on to work and such.
To the best of my recollection, most elections in Europe are held on a Sunday, so that voters have a real opportunity to cast their vote. Since having the election on a workday disadvantages people who have to actually work to earn a living, I have to wonder whether that's intentional...
The chances of a better designed syntax resulting in a faster database is slim.
That is most certainly wrong: by using a more expressive syntax, you are able to convey more exactly what it is you are requesting, and thereby enable the database to optimize better.
Case in point: hierarchical relations. (Standard) SQL does not allow you to retrieve a list of nodes in a tree, so you have to emulate that query by issuing multiple queries in your application, in some stored procedure, etc. If SQL had proper support for relationships like that, the database could tell what you're requesting, and optimize the query.
Proper support is also key: while Oracle does support the CONNECT BY mechanism, it's only a kludge. For example, you can't order the result set so that siblings are ordered in a specific way while still preserving the tree structure. There are work-arounds for all of these issues, but direct, proper support in the language would still go a long way.
OK, I admit I'm going with the flow here, but seriously:
I once had someone try to tell me that pop3 was mail, and imap4 was for file transfer, which while it's kinda sorta technically correct, it takes a lot of lenience to let that go.
Sorry, I don't know about your experience with IMAP4, but your applicant was either very smart or very stupid. Describing IMAP4 as a remote filesystem would make me think that the person has thought at least a bit about what IMAP4 does in particular; indeed, you can find a number of discussions on the very topic of the protocol being redundant as "yet another network file protocol" on the relevant mailing lists.
Give them a weird scenario (server rebooting every 5 minutes on its own), and ask them how they'd troubleshoot it.
Install a proper OS? Get proper hardware?
I believe, for what job description I would hire a MCSE, the appropriate answer would simply be "call vendor service", because the system is not functioning properly. Luckily enough, I don't need to run Windows based systems...
Modern nuclear power plants are the way to go for cleanish energy (there is still a mining requirement, of course).
But you guys never mention the waste that needs to be kept out of the environment for at least 10.000 years before it has decayed to a degree that make it only as dangerous as the naturally occuring isotopes. As far as I know, there's no good solution to that even though mines and similar locations have been scouted for at least 50 years.
France and parts of Canada get their power from nuclear sources.
I thought the French were evil?:-) Just because some countries have decided to follow this route doesn't make it right. And (see above) they too haven't found a solution to the waste problem, unless you accept "making bombs" as a waste disposal solution.
This is the biological basis for shopping. And this is why, even today, most men, when they shop, are yak-whompers. They do not wander: They go straight for the kill. I know I do. When I enter a store, I have a definite, practical, no-nonsense objective in mind, which is to locate, and secure, an electronic gizmo that I already have, except the new one has more features.
The Microsoft Windows 2000 operating system family supports a feature
called Accessibility Options. [...] The Utility Manager runs as a Windows service [...] within the interactive desktop with Local System privileges. [...] winhlp32.exe was executed under the Local System account.
Microsoft originally fixed this in MS04-11. But how? They just removed the menu entry, but forgot about all the other ways the help system can be invoked.
Really assistive of them to help 'em gain Admin...
I'd love to get a Mac so that I could improve the project on Mac myself, but sadly they are too expensive to acquire.
I have mod-points, and I was tempted to just mod you down, but this is too easy to refute...
If you need a Mac to do device-driver development (yeah, I know I fell for a troll...) you can pick up one easily for around $400 or less on eBay. And if your software is valuable to your users, as you imply, I would be surprised if not one of your Mac users wouldn't be able to help you to a decent deal to a decent machine. You're just moaning...
I have mod points, but I'd rather reply to this: why did this get moderated "Insightful"? At best, it's flamebait, but I'd rather think troll.
wtf this does to ls, chown and chgrp is anyone's guess.
Where have you been the last, um, 10 or 15 years? Can't be bothered to justGoogleeven for a second before going off like this?
I don't pretend to know much about ACLs or their history, but they have been part of many commercial UNIXes for quite some time (first time I came around them was on OSF/1), and they have been implemented semi-recently in Linux and the *BSDs. Samba has had ACL support since the late 2.x days, IIRC. And I have a hunch that Windows NT got it's model from adopting DCE.
So, let's think, what's Apple going to do? Considering that they track FreeBSD 5 closely, and FreeBSD 5 has ACLs?
Your Very Own iChat and Blog Servers
You can now host your own iChat server. Instant Messaging serves as a vital means of communication for organizations of all sizes, so it's useful to deploy and run your own private and secure IM server. Based on the open source Jabber project, the new iChat server in Tiger Server lets your company protect its internal communications by defining its own namespace, using SSL/TLS encryption to ensure privacy, and Kerboros for authorization. The iChat server works with both the iChat client in Mac OS X Tiger and popular open source clients available for Windows, Linux and even PDAs.
I had heard about the eventual switch-over some months ago, but never found the time to play around with the beta, so I took the opportunity now to install the client and check it out.
On Mac OS X, all went well, and my PowerBook is munching on it's first unit, fans spinning. However, when I tried to start the client on a Sun box at work, it failed with "ld.so.1:./boinc_3.18_sparc-sun-solaris2.7: fatal: libstdc++.so.3: open failed: No such file or directory." A quick Google confirmed my suspicions: the client is linked against the GCC stdlib, which is not a standard part of Solaris. Now, that's easy enough to fix if you've worked with Solaris before: just go to sunfreeware.com, and find a suitable binary package to put on.
However, someone not knowing about Solaris, GCC, and sunfreeware.com might be a bit stumped. And the boinc/setiboinc boards reveal that quite a number of beta testers are confused about this, not only on Solaris but also on Linux. It's not completely obvious which GCC/libgcc packages contains libstc++.so.3 (as opposed to.2.x or.4.x).
The real kicker is that I couldn't find any hint of this problem or a solution on the site. I probably looked in all the wrong places in the last half hour... And I couldn't find a feedback form or email address either. This definitly needs to be improved if they want people to move over to boinc.
This old argument about Mac having no apps is very old, very tired, and very tiresome.
MS Project and Visio. I need those day in, day out, and they're not available. Neither are apps that give me the same functionality. Let alone file format compatibility (yes I know it's MS fault). But the few alternatives I looked at were crashy, had an arcane user interface (neither proper Cocoa nor copied from the originals, just wierd), and simply lacking in functionality. Not that I would think that Project or Visio are the best possible apps in their space; they're just as sucky as most MS apps.
If you use computers professionally, and you need to work with people outside your own organization, then using a Mac is harder. Many problems are soluble, but there are problems to be solved.
But I agree with Joel's outlook: many apps will eventually move to the Web, and as Mozilla and WebKit/KHTML improve, all these troubles will disappear. Who knows, maybe Mac OS X Java support might push Java far enough to make it a viable desktop platform...
These sorts of word games are one of the most basic concepts in propaganda. It's like the whole apocryphal story about Bush bringing up 9/11 everytime Iraq was mentioned, and although he never specifically stated that the two were related, the end result was that most Americans thought the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqi citizens. This may actually be true but I'll be skeptical since I don't have a link to back it up, but anecdotally it demonstrates the point well.
Most of them were Saudi citizens. This page lists the citizenship of all attackers that were on-board the planes, and it's fairly close to what I remember from various news reports.
It's the iSeries, and OS/400 seems to be called i5/OS nowadays...
Reminds me of some companies effort to replace their aging AS/400 with NT systems around y2k:
Dr. Frank Soltis, the IBM engineer who has been called "the AS/400's Elvis," recently shared a success story during a keynote speech at a user conference in Florida. This particular company was in the software distribution business and at one point had 23 AS/400s located around the world. The company was a very good customer, went from CISC to RISC, and was always one of the first to upgrade to new technology, he said.
Then came the Year 2000 problem, and despite five years of dedicated service during a period of great revenue growth, the company decided that it was time to move off the AS/400. So in June of 1999, the company unplugged its AS/400s and powered up the 1,200 NT servers it needed to replace them. But things didn't quite go as planned. "They found they couldn't make it work," Soltis told the crowd. "Today, one year after unplugging their AS/400s, they're back on the AS/400."
That company is Microsoft. "They viewed that as a point of embarrassment," Soltis said. "We thought it was kind of fun....Can you think of a company with greater incentive to move to NT, and they couldn't do it?"
For a wireless telephone company to take this position is simply insane:
they are in the technology business.
Uh, oh. I'm working as a consultant on a project at a major mobile telecom company in Europe, helping them to update their intranet.
The intranet contents is instrumental to the call centers, which I believe are profit centers, which in turn means that the intranet must be "always" available to the call center agents, while the intranet budget is quite limited (i.e. have to re-use old hardware).
Here's the bummer: they have a couple of call centers strewn all over the place, and they want the contents replicated as static HTML files to each call center location, because they can't keep up the network connections between the remote offices and headquarters. At the same time, all call center calls are obviously routed through their own network, as well. So why can they keep voice going, but not data over the same fiber links they're running?
Essentially, because internal IT is a cost center.
Because this little known company called SGI didn't develop OpenGL back in 1992.
I understand your frustration, but the language is actually quite correct. And Microsoft did manage to push their own API before OpenGL did manage to gain any foothold on Windows. In the mid-nineties 3D acceleration just was starting up in the Wintel sector, and a full-blown OpenGL implementation was a serious task for any video card or game developer; Microsoft "giving away" the API and a sample implementation meant that there would be less doubts about interoperability, and also less doubt which standards would win eventually. Thus is the power of the monopoly...
Slashdot Mirror
You have to go to itunes.co.uk.
The voice over on those videos sounds strange. It's probably better that having a Japanese sound track, but it's freaking me out...
It's a minor detail, but why is it that elections in the US are on workdays?
To the best of my recollection, most elections in Europe are held on a Sunday, so that voters have a real opportunity to cast their vote. Since having the election on a workday disadvantages people who have to actually work to earn a living, I have to wonder whether that's intentional...
That is most certainly wrong: by using a more expressive syntax, you are able to convey more exactly what it is you are requesting, and thereby enable the database to optimize better.
Case in point: hierarchical relations. (Standard) SQL does not allow you to retrieve a list of nodes in a tree, so you have to emulate that query by issuing multiple queries in your application, in some stored procedure, etc. If SQL had proper support for relationships like that, the database could tell what you're requesting, and optimize the query.
Proper support is also key: while Oracle does support the CONNECT BY mechanism, it's only a kludge. For example, you can't order the result set so that siblings are ordered in a specific way while still preserving the tree structure. There are work-arounds for all of these issues, but direct, proper support in the language would still go a long way.
OK, I admit I'm going with the flow here, but seriously:
Sorry, I don't know about your experience with IMAP4, but your applicant was either very smart or very stupid. Describing IMAP4 as a remote filesystem would make me think that the person has thought at least a bit about what IMAP4 does in particular; indeed, you can find a number of discussions on the very topic of the protocol being redundant as "yet another network file protocol" on the relevant mailing lists.
Install a proper OS? Get proper hardware?
I believe, for what job description I would hire a MCSE, the appropriate answer would simply be "call vendor service", because the system is not functioning properly. Luckily enough, I don't need to run Windows based systems...
But you guys never mention the waste that needs to be kept out of the environment for at least 10.000 years before it has decayed to a degree that make it only as dangerous as the naturally occuring isotopes. As far as I know, there's no good solution to that even though mines and similar locations have been scouted for at least 50 years.
I thought the French were evil? :-) Just because some countries have decided to follow this route doesn't make it right. And (see above) they too haven't found a solution to the waste problem, unless you accept "making bombs" as a waste disposal solution.
Since I haven't seen it, and I think it's a nice summary about differences between the two:
Americans think that 100 years is a long time.
Europeans think that 100 kilometers is a long distance.
Slightly OT, but particularly ironic, I think, is little problem in Utility Manager:
Microsoft originally fixed this in MS04-11. But how? They just removed the menu entry, but forgot about all the other ways the help system can be invoked.
Really assistive of them to help 'em gain Admin...
I have mod-points, and I was tempted to just mod you down, but this is too easy to refute...
If you need a Mac to do device-driver development (yeah, I know I fell for a troll...) you can pick up one easily for around $400 or less on eBay. And if your software is valuable to your users, as you imply, I would be surprised if not one of your Mac users wouldn't be able to help you to a decent deal to a decent machine. You're just moaning...
I have mod points, but I'd rather reply to this: why did this get moderated "Insightful"? At best, it's flamebait, but I'd rather think troll.
Where have you been the last, um, 10 or 15 years? Can't be bothered to just Google even for a second before going off like this?
I don't pretend to know much about ACLs or their history, but they have been part of many commercial UNIXes for quite some time (first time I came around them was on OSF/1), and they have been implemented semi-recently in Linux and the *BSDs. Samba has had ACL support since the late 2.x days, IIRC. And I have a hunch that Windows NT got it's model from adopting DCE.
So, let's think, what's Apple going to do? Considering that they track FreeBSD 5 closely, and FreeBSD 5 has ACLs?
I haven't really done any research on this, but this
caught my eye. Looks like the next version of iChat (to be included in 10.4) will be Jabber-compatible: (from http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/tiger/
(Emphasis mine)
That's a very welcome addition!
Also, I can't download the US freebie with by German account, so it's not a matter of paying, but of distribution rights. Right as I expected.
I had heard about the eventual switch-over some months ago, but never found the time to play around with the beta, so I took the opportunity now to install the client and check it out.
On Mac OS X, all went well, and my PowerBook is munching on it's first unit, fans spinning. However, when I tried to start the client on a Sun box at work, it failed with "ld.so.1: ./boinc_3.18_sparc-sun-solaris2.7: fatal: libstdc++.so.3: open failed: No such file or directory." A quick Google confirmed my suspicions: the client is linked against the GCC stdlib, which is not a standard part of Solaris. Now, that's easy enough to fix if you've worked with Solaris before: just go to sunfreeware.com, and find a suitable binary package to put on.
However, someone not knowing about Solaris, GCC, and sunfreeware.com might be a bit stumped. And the boinc/setiboinc boards reveal that quite a number of beta testers are confused about this, not only on Solaris but also on Linux. It's not completely obvious which GCC/libgcc packages contains libstc++.so.3 (as opposed to .2.x or .4.x).
The real kicker is that I couldn't find any hint of this problem or a solution on the site. I probably looked in all the wrong places in the last half hour... And I couldn't find a feedback form or email address either. This definitly needs to be improved if they want people to move over to boinc.
Bah! You try doing conversions like that when you're going as fast as 100 000 furlongs per fortnight!
MS Project and Visio. I need those day in, day out, and they're not available. Neither are apps that give me the same functionality. Let alone file format compatibility (yes I know it's MS fault). But the few alternatives I looked at were crashy, had an arcane user interface (neither proper Cocoa nor copied from the originals, just wierd), and simply lacking in functionality. Not that I would think that Project or Visio are the best possible apps in their space; they're just as sucky as most MS apps.
If you use computers professionally, and you need to work with people outside your own organization, then using a Mac is harder. Many problems are soluble, but there are problems to be solved.
But I agree with Joel's outlook: many apps will eventually move to the Web, and as Mozilla and WebKit/KHTML improve, all these troubles will disappear. Who knows, maybe Mac OS X Java support might push Java far enough to make it a viable desktop platform...
Most of them were Saudi citizens. This page lists the citizenship of all attackers that were on-board the planes, and it's fairly close to what I remember from various news reports.
Mirror of the PeriodicTable.pdf here.
It's the iSeries, and OS/400 seems to be called i5/OS nowadays...
Reminds me of some companies effort to replace their aging AS/400 with NT systems around y2k:
But it appears that Microsoft was not quite so amused, and denied the whole thing.
Be careful though who listens in -- if the tune resembles anything well-known, the *AA will come right after you!.
And another mirror, for your enjoyment...
Uh, oh. I'm working as a consultant on a project at a major mobile telecom company in Europe, helping them to update their intranet.
The intranet contents is instrumental to the call centers, which I believe are profit centers, which in turn means that the intranet must be "always" available to the call center agents, while the intranet budget is quite limited (i.e. have to re-use old hardware).
Here's the bummer: they have a couple of call centers strewn all over the place, and they want the contents replicated as static HTML files to each call center location, because they can't keep up the network connections between the remote offices and headquarters. At the same time, all call center calls are obviously routed through their own network, as well. So why can they keep voice going, but not data over the same fiber links they're running?
Essentially, because internal IT is a cost center.
I understand your frustration, but the language is actually quite correct. And Microsoft did manage to push their own API before OpenGL did manage to gain any foothold on Windows. In the mid-nineties 3D acceleration just was starting up in the Wintel sector, and a full-blown OpenGL implementation was a serious task for any video card or game developer; Microsoft "giving away" the API and a sample implementation meant that there would be less doubts about interoperability, and also less doubt which standards would win eventually. Thus is the power of the monopoly...