I'd drop ABP in a heartbeat if advertisers simply stopped using animation. I don't object to adwords or quiet banners - someone has to pay the bills after all. But those noisy, CPU-soaking, neurotic pleas for attention drive me to do something about it.
If they want my eyeballs back, they'll have to become more civilized about it.
... to see what might lie beyond 50 years. The technological singularity is going to slam us hard. Try to visualize something other than Flash Gordon serials, or Star Trek, or Ray Kurzweil's fantasies about virtual sex.
I mean, look: you're going to be obsolete in 50 years. You'll be functionally replaced by an intelligence that is jaw-droppingly greater than your own, and which doesn't live in the same meatspace.
That new intelligence may view the greater universe around us as just an endless permutation of the same old shit. Really, how could exploring EPOTSOS at stellar distances, and at glacial speed C possibly be interesting? Here's the real frontier: deep below 11 dimensions of string theory. The answer to who we are is way down there, not way *out* there.
I've said it before. There are probably lots and lots of civilizations out there. They'll all become introspective before you ever find them. The ones that have the means to find you won't be inclined, you poor unremarkable Permutation, and in the relatively near term you'll understand their lack of motivation.
Lighting and sound is geeky enough to be interesting, and easy to apprentice if you know little about the subject. There's likely a children's or community theater group in your area that can use a hand. Bog knows it's absorbed all my free time...
Find the people who do this for fun, who pull all-nighters 'cause they were in the zone.
Ask: "Tell me about a recent hack of yours that was interesting."
Ask: "Tell me about your home network."
Ask: "What is the last book you read?" (The actual answer is not all that important, but an indication that s/he reads is.)
Ask for opinions: "Which is better, Python or Ruby?" And then whatever the response is, ask "Why?" Those "why" questions are a gold mine of information.
Because it lets us continue to run applications that are 30 years old or more.
See, bureaucracy gets a bad rap. It isn't, after all, a four-letter word. Bureaucracies let your business grind through the day-to-day stuff without constant intervention. Set up a proper bureaucracy and business can keep running through that flu epidemic, or those retiring employees, or that corporate takeover.
Sure they can be cumbersome and inflexible. But they can by god run themselves, if done right.
Now a 30 year old collection of custom COBOL code is an important part of our bureaucracy, and a contributor to our competitive advantage. (C.f. our poor brethren who had to shoehorn their business practices into a one-size-fits-some SAP implementation.) Sure we could rewrite our code base in something more fashionable... but why? If we GUI-fied it, Web-2.0ed it, XMLed and Guidoed it... at the end we would be doing the same stuff. (And someone would be nagging us to rewrite it in The Next Big Thing!)
But I'll meet you halfway. I would support SOAPing the code base. I'm not adverse to using a newfangled whizbang for a new application, but our existing applications were coded long before SOAP, and integration is a bugaboo. For us the expedient thing is to continue to write new COBOL code. Limited resources, lots of things to do. You know how that goes.
When my employer got on the 'net, we discovered that another guy had registered xxxx.com as a vanity domain barely a month before us. This was pretty much before the day of the domain squatter, so I sent the guy a nice letter. Introduced our company, sent him glossies and stuff, told him what we do. I didn't offer to buy the name from him (remember, it was when the domain name system was a gentleman's game), but I did offer to reprint his business cards and stationery, cover any expenses he had.
Guess he could have taken us to the cleaners, but he was a nice guy - he declined to take anything for xxxx.com and just signed it over, taking xxxx.org instead. For years afterward I sent him every new piece of schwag our marketing people produced that had our (and his) name on it. Oh, and I also maintained several email accounts for him and his family, and forwarded mail to his new system.
Cutting a deal doesn't always mean someone has to be screwed over.
SuSE, Redhat, Debian and Slackware will run in a virtual machine (or an LPAR). As for "flying", m/f processors are relatively slow compared to desktop processors. But they are built for monster I/O, virtualization, easy provisioning, hardware redundancy, and concurrent maintenance, and they make for a nice compact reliable server farm.
Last SHARE I went to was in Orlando, and I was surprised by the uptake of Linux there. In one ballroom a show of hands suggested that half of the attendees were using or looking at Linux on zSeries. Cool!
... that you don't have the money to do? In my own little 501(c)3 we've always found that people are more likely to give if they know specifically what the money is going to be used for. If we just say "to help support the cause..." then it's nickels and dimes for us instead of dollars.
So what specific projects would you like to be funding, that aren't being adequately funded today?
I ran an old 32MB Compaq Armada with a cracked case and no battery for a couple of years as my home firewall, running OBSD. Sat on a bookshelf drawing little power and quietly did its job. I rarely opened it up. Ended up replacing it with a Soekris box when the HD started to whine.
A lot of people have faith in Sergey Brin's corporate motto. The creation of class B stock at Google, which gives Sergey and Larry ten votes for every share, ensures that they will be able to keep Google from being corrupted, so long as they themselves remain uncorrupt.
Microsoft has no such public image. They were found to use their monopolist position to kill Navigator and hurt Java. Their CEO is belligerent and takes shots at the FOSS community. More recently they've tried to buy the ISO vote for OOXML. They don't trust their own customers, as evidenced by periodic, rude and disruptive Genuine Advantage challenges.
We're about to enjoy a big, fat, open class C block in the US spectrum, courtesy of Google. They purchased Android, and then opened its SDK to the world. In contrast, Microsoft has promoted hardware restrictions, media restrictions, and discourages use of unemcumbered codecs such as Ogg Vorbis.
Which company would you rather do business with, all things being equal? That is Microsoft's problem. They can spend all the $billions they like on buying market share... but they can't buy a reputation. When the FTC clears the Yahoo deal... Microsoft will still be Microsoft.
You're right, of course. The Segway was way over-hyped, and the media has been pretty unforgiving about it.
But... I've put well over a thousand miles on mine since I bought it in late February of this year. My Volvo sits in the driveway unused. I get 20 miles on a charge, and do all my commuting and many small errands on the Segway.
Change my life? No. Save me money? No. But it's a heckuva lot of fun, and I take notice of the neighbors and the birds and the gardenias on the way in to the office every morning. It's the best five grand I've spent on a personal luxury in a very long time.
Excuse my nitpick, but I just endured a staff meeting yesterday where the CFO prattled about "best practice", "best of class" and "world class" information systems. I sat biting my tongue, absorbing this puffery while the bullshitometer pegged.
Feel free to tell me how you want things done. You're the boss, and you pay me to do things your way. But do take responsibility for it! Nobody is buying your decision as so-called best practice as if you had just carried stone tablets down from Mount Sinai.
I mean, who labels things "best practice" anyway? The UN Commission on Best Practices? Best Practices Magazine? The Best Practices counter at your local Kroger? Bah.
(Sorry. I feel better, thanks for asking. In retrospect I don't know if the above should be modded flamebait or troll. There should be a "catharsis" mod, but I guess we have to work with what we have.)
... were Boolean algebra, numerical analysis, matrices, queueing theory, and a semester of descriptive stat. I didn't find linear algebra of any use to me, nor the year of formal stat. Calculus is kinda like long division -- I don't use it much (if at all), but it's good to know it's there.
Oh, and some of my pals recommended formal logic. I skipped that, 'cause I wasn't terribly interested in spending a semester playing word games. I don't think I've ever missed it, but someone else who actually took the class might straighten me out here.
Bar none, the best math class I ever took was a freshman seminar with no textbook, no lecture, no assignments and no exams. You were graded 100% on class participation, and the topic was... math. The prof stood off to the side and would start the conversation: "How many integers are there?" might be a typical query. He'd sit back while we discussed the matter in Socratic fashion, sometimes nudging us in a particular direction. That semester we "invented" limits, cardinalities, discontinuous functions and other groovy things. I doubt that this particular class had much direct application in my professional life, but it was the first fun math I'd ever done in my short life.
My 501(c)(3) is a member of Techsoup Stock, a sort of clearinghouse for corporate nonprofit programs. Through the Microsoft Software Donation Program an XP-Pro upgrade from an existing licensed copy of Windows is US$8.00 through Techsoup Stock.
"... it almost gives me hope that the world might one day be united in space exploration."
I hope that doesn't happen. International cooperation gave us the ISS: a project without a mission. Competition got us into orbit and to the Moon. Competition is good.
IANAC (cosmologist) and my last physics class was over 30 years ago, so bear with me.
From TFA:
"...the universe is instead about 15.8 billion years old and about 180 billion light-years wide."
If I just think in terms of poor old antiquated Euclidean 3-space, and accept that C is as fast as you can go, then doesn't that make the universe's size about 150 billion LY at birth?
That doesn't square much with the idea of a point-source Big Bang. Or is there some space warp voodoo going on here that I'm missing?
That sounds a little hypocritical, seeing as it comes from the guys who, not so long ago, distributed an unstable and unsupported release ("2.96") of GCC with their product.
"Linux geeks admit that the open source OS isn't necessarily a better platform for important applications..."
Merde, Mr. Lam1969. That's your opinion, unsupported by the article you cite. The nearest evidence that I can find in TFA is Bob Hecht's quote: "But the Alfresco application doesn't necessarily run better under Linux."
At best your assertion is overbroad, and at worst suggests you have some sort of agenda. Which is it?
"Running mail at home is a waste of my time. It can be done, but you get nothing but hassle out of it..."
After you set up your mail server (admittedly a bunch of upfront hassle) there is precious little maintenance to do. And I get lots of features I couldn't get otherwise:
Mail clients are filtered through my firewall: I blackhole bogons for example, and certain abusive networks.
RBLs of my choice: There are good RBLs and bad RBLs. I like the
ORDB list,
DSBL list,
the Spamhaus SBL and
XBL lists,
the SORBS DUL list,
and the Spamcop blocking list.
Greylisting: This is effective for eliminating the remaining spam that makes it through your SMTP-time filters.
Challenge-response: Yeah, I know... love 'em or hate 'em.
TMDA has been useful to me in the past, though I'm not sure I'm going to keep it much longer.
One-time email addresses: If you maintain your own server and domain, then you can have as many email addresses as you want. Expire them on your schedule, or perform special processing for mail received at those addresses.
Forget about artificial mail-size limits: My ISP's email accounts cut off attachments at something like 2MB. So much for that camping video my friend wanted to send me. My personal mail server is much more forgiving.
Flexible and secure access: My mail clients use POP3 and IMAP inside the firewall, and IMAP via SSH port-forwarding from the outside.
As I said: nontrivial to set up, but easy to run afterward. I don't touch it except to update the code from time to time or to review the logs. Maybe one of these days I'll put up a webmail interface if I can figure out this newfangled SSL thing.
I'm one who considered the post newsworthy. OO.o is an important app to me; I just rolled 2.0.0 out to my wife's and daughter's MS-Windows machines, and Gentoo-emerged it on my home and work systems. (Takes a lonnnnng time to compile on a 350MHz P-II, let me tell you. I'm not looking forward to doing that again!)
May I suggest that you try one of the RSS aggregators? Liferea (e.g.) will reduce those posts to one-liners for you.
Federico's proof-of-concept code didn't try to do any lookahead staging. He suggested that Firefox decompress images adjacent to, as well as within the currently visible screen area.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd drop ABP in a heartbeat if advertisers simply stopped using animation. I don't object to adwords or quiet banners - someone has to pay the bills after all. But those noisy, CPU-soaking, neurotic pleas for attention drive me to do something about it.
If they want my eyeballs back, they'll have to become more civilized about it.
... to see what might lie beyond 50 years. The technological singularity is going to slam us hard. Try to visualize something other than Flash Gordon serials, or Star Trek, or Ray Kurzweil's fantasies about virtual sex.
I mean, look: you're going to be obsolete in 50 years. You'll be functionally replaced by an intelligence that is jaw-droppingly greater than your own, and which doesn't live in the same meatspace.
That new intelligence may view the greater universe around us as just an endless permutation of the same old shit. Really, how could exploring EPOTSOS at stellar distances, and at glacial speed C possibly be interesting? Here's the real frontier: deep below 11 dimensions of string theory. The answer to who we are is way down there, not way *out* there.
I've said it before. There are probably lots and lots of civilizations out there. They'll all become introspective before you ever find them. The ones that have the means to find you won't be inclined, you poor unremarkable Permutation, and in the relatively near term you'll understand their lack of motivation.
Cheaper than having to re-write all the COBOL that's out there...
Lighting and sound is geeky enough to be interesting, and easy to apprentice if you know little about the subject. There's likely a children's or community theater group in your area that can use a hand. Bog knows it's absorbed all my free time...
Find the people who do this for fun, who pull all-nighters 'cause they were in the zone. Ask: "Tell me about a recent hack of yours that was interesting." Ask: "Tell me about your home network." Ask: "What is the last book you read?" (The actual answer is not all that important, but an indication that s/he reads is.) Ask for opinions: "Which is better, Python or Ruby?" And then whatever the response is, ask "Why?" Those "why" questions are a gold mine of information.
Because it lets us continue to run applications that are 30 years old or more.
See, bureaucracy gets a bad rap. It isn't, after all, a four-letter word. Bureaucracies let your business grind through the day-to-day stuff without constant intervention. Set up a proper bureaucracy and business can keep running through that flu epidemic, or those retiring employees, or that corporate takeover.
Sure they can be cumbersome and inflexible. But they can by god run themselves, if done right.
Now a 30 year old collection of custom COBOL code is an important part of our bureaucracy, and a contributor to our competitive advantage. (C.f. our poor brethren who had to shoehorn their business practices into a one-size-fits-some SAP implementation.) Sure we could rewrite our code base in something more fashionable... but why? If we GUI-fied it, Web-2.0ed it, XMLed and Guidoed it... at the end we would be doing the same stuff. (And someone would be nagging us to rewrite it in The Next Big Thing!)
But I'll meet you halfway. I would support SOAPing the code base. I'm not adverse to using a newfangled whizbang for a new application, but our existing applications were coded long before SOAP, and integration is a bugaboo. For us the expedient thing is to continue to write new COBOL code. Limited resources, lots of things to do. You know how that goes.
Civilizations that manage to survive reach technological singularity, and simply hole up.
Ephemeral civilizations have only a short time to detect each other; I doubt that happens often.
When my employer got on the 'net, we discovered that another guy had registered xxxx.com as a vanity domain barely a month before us. This was pretty much before the day of the domain squatter, so I sent the guy a nice letter. Introduced our company, sent him glossies and stuff, told him what we do. I didn't offer to buy the name from him (remember, it was when the domain name system was a gentleman's game), but I did offer to reprint his business cards and stationery, cover any expenses he had.
Guess he could have taken us to the cleaners, but he was a nice guy - he declined to take anything for xxxx.com and just signed it over, taking xxxx.org instead. For years afterward I sent him every new piece of schwag our marketing people produced that had our (and his) name on it. Oh, and I also maintained several email accounts for him and his family, and forwarded mail to his new system.
Cutting a deal doesn't always mean someone has to be screwed over.
SuSE, Redhat, Debian and Slackware will run in a virtual machine (or an LPAR). As for "flying", m/f processors are relatively slow compared to desktop processors. But they are built for monster I/O, virtualization, easy provisioning, hardware redundancy, and concurrent maintenance, and they make for a nice compact reliable server farm.
Last SHARE I went to was in Orlando, and I was surprised by the uptake of Linux there. In one ballroom a show of hands suggested that half of the attendees were using or looking at Linux on zSeries. Cool!
... that you don't have the money to do? In my own little 501(c)3 we've always found that people are more likely to give if they know specifically what the money is going to be used for. If we just say "to help support the cause..." then it's nickels and dimes for us instead of dollars.
So what specific projects would you like to be funding, that aren't being adequately funded today?
I ran an old 32MB Compaq Armada with a cracked case and no battery for a couple of years as my home firewall, running OBSD. Sat on a bookshelf drawing little power and quietly did its job. I rarely opened it up. Ended up replacing it with a Soekris box when the HD started to whine.
IBM's just-announced z10 mainframe, with 1.5 TB memory.
A lot of people have faith in Sergey Brin's corporate motto. The creation of class B stock at Google, which gives Sergey and Larry ten votes for every share, ensures that they will be able to keep Google from being corrupted, so long as they themselves remain uncorrupt.
Microsoft has no such public image. They were found to use their monopolist position to kill Navigator and hurt Java. Their CEO is belligerent and takes shots at the FOSS community. More recently they've tried to buy the ISO vote for OOXML. They don't trust their own customers, as evidenced by periodic, rude and disruptive Genuine Advantage challenges.
We're about to enjoy a big, fat, open class C block in the US spectrum, courtesy of Google. They purchased Android, and then opened its SDK to the world. In contrast, Microsoft has promoted hardware restrictions, media restrictions, and discourages use of unemcumbered codecs such as Ogg Vorbis.
Which company would you rather do business with, all things being equal? That is Microsoft's problem. They can spend all the $billions they like on buying market share... but they can't buy a reputation. When the FTC clears the Yahoo deal... Microsoft will still be Microsoft.
You're right, of course. The Segway was way over-hyped, and the media has been pretty unforgiving about it. But... I've put well over a thousand miles on mine since I bought it in late February of this year. My Volvo sits in the driveway unused. I get 20 miles on a charge, and do all my commuting and many small errands on the Segway. Change my life? No. Save me money? No. But it's a heckuva lot of fun, and I take notice of the neighbors and the birds and the gardenias on the way in to the office every morning. It's the best five grand I've spent on a personal luxury in a very long time.
Excuse my nitpick, but I just endured a staff meeting yesterday where the CFO prattled about "best practice", "best of class" and "world class" information systems. I sat biting my tongue, absorbing this puffery while the bullshitometer pegged.
Feel free to tell me how you want things done. You're the boss, and you pay me to do things your way. But do take responsibility for it! Nobody is buying your decision as so-called best practice as if you had just carried stone tablets down from Mount Sinai.
I mean, who labels things "best practice" anyway? The UN Commission on Best Practices? Best Practices Magazine? The Best Practices counter at your local Kroger? Bah.
(Sorry. I feel better, thanks for asking. In retrospect I don't know if the above should be modded flamebait or troll. There should be a "catharsis" mod, but I guess we have to work with what we have.)
... were Boolean algebra, numerical analysis, matrices, queueing theory, and a semester of descriptive stat. I didn't find linear algebra of any use to me, nor the year of formal stat. Calculus is kinda like long division -- I don't use it much (if at all), but it's good to know it's there.
Oh, and some of my pals recommended formal logic. I skipped that, 'cause I wasn't terribly interested in spending a semester playing word games. I don't think I've ever missed it, but someone else who actually took the class might straighten me out here.
Bar none, the best math class I ever took was a freshman seminar with no textbook, no lecture, no assignments and no exams. You were graded 100% on class participation, and the topic was... math. The prof stood off to the side and would start the conversation: "How many integers are there?" might be a typical query. He'd sit back while we discussed the matter in Socratic fashion, sometimes nudging us in a particular direction. That semester we "invented" limits, cardinalities, discontinuous functions and other groovy things. I doubt that this particular class had much direct application in my professional life, but it was the first fun math I'd ever done in my short life.
My 501(c)(3) is a member of Techsoup Stock, a sort of clearinghouse for corporate nonprofit programs. Through the Microsoft Software Donation Program an XP-Pro upgrade from an existing licensed copy of Windows is US$8.00 through Techsoup Stock.
From TFA: If I just think in terms of poor old antiquated Euclidean 3-space, and accept that C is as fast as you can go, then doesn't that make the universe's size about 150 billion LY at birth?
That doesn't square much with the idea of a point-source Big Bang. Or is there some space warp voodoo going on here that I'm missing?
That sounds a little hypocritical, seeing as it comes from the guys who, not so long ago, distributed an unstable and unsupported release ("2.96") of GCC with their product.
At best your assertion is overbroad, and at worst suggests you have some sort of agenda. Which is it?
- Mail clients are filtered through my firewall: I blackhole bogons for example, and certain abusive networks.
- RBLs of my choice: There are good RBLs and bad RBLs. I like the
ORDB list,
DSBL list,
the Spamhaus SBL and
XBL lists,
the SORBS DUL list,
and the Spamcop blocking list.
- Greylisting: This is effective for eliminating the remaining spam that makes it through your SMTP-time filters.
- Challenge-response: Yeah, I know... love 'em or hate 'em.
TMDA has been useful to me in the past, though I'm not sure I'm going to keep it much longer.
- One-time email addresses: If you maintain your own server and domain, then you can have as many email addresses as you want. Expire them on your schedule, or perform special processing for mail received at those addresses.
- Forget about artificial mail-size limits: My ISP's email accounts cut off attachments at something like 2MB. So much for that camping video my friend wanted to send me. My personal mail server is much more forgiving.
- Flexible and secure access: My mail clients use POP3 and IMAP inside the firewall, and IMAP via SSH port-forwarding from the outside.
As I said: nontrivial to set up, but easy to run afterward. I don't touch it except to update the code from time to time or to review the logs. Maybe one of these days I'll put up a webmail interface if I can figure out this newfangled SSL thing.May I suggest that you try one of the RSS aggregators? Liferea (e.g.) will reduce those posts to one-liners for you.
Federico's proof-of-concept code didn't try to do any lookahead staging. He suggested that Firefox decompress images adjacent to, as well as within the currently visible screen area.