Some of these wonky new vi's with their fancy colouring and extra modes which coincide with legacy vi commands are evil.
Er, and which ones are those?
I've used vi, nvi, vile, and vim. By far, vim is the most popular (and powerful) of those. And it does not have any modes or commands that coincide with standard vi in compatible mode; there are a few minor differences in non-compatible mode, but nothing that's likely to trip up even seasoned vi-ers (and yes, I used vi for nearly a decade before any of the others, and still use vi from time to time when I get on a box w/o vim).
If you're using vim and don't like color, disable it. In fact, it's disabled by default in compatible mode (which vim defaults to unless you have a.vimrc). If you find the colors "hard to read" then it's because you aren't using a real xterm and vim cannot properly detect your background -- do a:set bg=light or:set bg=dark for a light/dark background and the colors will become much better. Or use one of a few hundred different colorschemes that are available (for anything from 8/16 color standard consoles to 256 color enabled xterms; if you have no color, just:syntax off and go on your way).
vim is a vast improvement over vi -- and not for the coloring, but rather for the buffer management, the filetype capabilities (smarter indenting is the tip of the iceberg), text objects (daB to delete an entire block delimited by {['s is one example; objects exists for words/WORDS, sentences, paragraphs, tags, etc), and macros. There's much, much more, of course, but those are the big ones in my book. I personally don't care much about windows and the vim7 tabs are misnamed and misunderstood, but some love them. I have a strong vi background, and I think the things I mentioned are more relevant to others with a similar background than those other items are.
It is absolutely correct that in order to combat identity theft effectively, information sharing must be opt-in
No it's not. What should be freely available, however, with no requirements or costs, is a credit block -- the ability to prevent any new accounts from being opened on your credit reports as long as the block is in place (typically the block can be temporarily removed/disabled via phone and a PIN; that way you can still get new credit, but at least then you _know_ when you're getting new credit).
Funny thing though -- you cannot refuse this "benefit".
Sure you can. Just never give your social security number on any form that asks you for it.
Of course, you may also find that you can't get credit at all in such a situation. But that's basically what you're asking for anyway. After all, if it's an "opt-in" to share credit info, then why couldn't I just open a few lines of credit, refuse to allow them to send info on them, and then default on them? Oh sure, it's illegal, but what are they going to do? Send debt collectors after me? Relatively easy to deal with, especially if you're the kind of person who would pull this. They can't ruin my credit report -- I've told them they can't.
Look, credit has become ubiquitous purely because of the credit bureaus and their data aggregation. It's not an inherently bad thing, but it could certainly be improved. A freely available block would go a long way toward solving the issues. It wouldn't completely fix them; that's fine. The point isn't to stop it completely, as that would be too costly to both the creditors and to consumers, but to make it too difficult and expensive (in terms of money, time, effort, and/or likelihood of being arrested) for identity thieves to bother with.
If you think that credit aggregation is unnecessary -- well, then be prepared to have the credit industry go back to how it was prior to their existance (which started in the 1940s and 50s) -- short term, variable rate mortgages were the norm, credit cards didn't exist (unsecured credit? Are you kidding me?), and loans of all kinds were both more expensive and more difficult to get. Why? Because lenders had no real way of telling if a borrower would be a good risk. Pretty much your best bet was to have a bank with whom you did all your business (because then they know your credit), use them for years, and then ask for a loan. Young? New in town? Too bad. You're too high of a risk. Get lost.
Note that I'm not saying the aggregators are perfect. Far from it. But it's a far, far better scenario with them than without.
Oh, and note -- if you're a business that uses credit scores you can also forgo giving the bureaus any information. Of course, you'll pay 3-5x as much per inquiry (even in bulk, for partial data) than you will if you report back to them.
Which ones? There's a rather large array, and the modern ones are far better than those from just a few years ago -- they put out a spectrum closer to incandescent, have a lower warm up time, and reach full brightness in less time.
GE says they're working on more high efficiency incandescents, and hopefully that effort will bear fruit
That's great, except that the "high efficiency" is still only about half the efficiency of CFLs.
Frankly, the hubbub over mercury levels in CFLs is vastly overblown. If you use an incandescent bulb instead then the amount of mercury released by a typical coal fired power plant to power it is in excess of that contained in the bulb (and the power needed for it) over the lifetime of a CFL bulb. Yes, that mercury is allegedly easier to process. Except that it isn't processed, and the power industry is fighting any attempts to change that. Meanwhile the number of places to recycle CFLs (and other mercury containing items) is increasing simply due to the demand for it.
CFLs aren't a perfect answer though -- they aren't available in reasonable lumens for some applications (like chandeliers/type B sockets), and the typical 30-60s for full brightness means they're not useful in some places (I prefer incandescents for stairway lighting, and anywhere I'm likely to only have the light on for a few seconds at a time). Dimmable CFLs are typically excessively expensive as well. But I do put good quality CFLs as many places as I can.
Yes, it comes with distros like RHEL4, but it's not turned on.
Yes it is, and it's on by default in enforce mode. There's even been some reports (although I have not checked them) that you cannot automatically disable it via kickstart.
realised that I'd never really be able to single handedly use a system, administer it and run SELinux. There's nothing I do that's worth the effort.
No, the better question is -- is there anything you do where it would actually get in the way? In the two years I've been running CentOS4 I've had it bite me exactly once, and it was pretty easy to fix the issue.
What do I get out of it? Peace of mind. No, my system isn't likely to get exploited, but on the random chance someone does find a vulnerability then SELinux will limit the damage and their abilities. What's it cost me? Nothing.
Sounds like a good deal to me.
And based on watching who wants to disable it, I'd say that it's the larger organizations that run into more problems and want to turn it off. Which is ironic, but I'll happily admit that SELinux in RHEL4/CentOS4 isn't easy to administer. I hope there are better utilities in 5.
One time I was driving around atlanta and was going about 15-20 over in the far left lane
You're lucky you didn't get a ticket... for impeding the flow of traffic. Particularly if you were on GA-400.
If you're only going to go 15-20 over the limit, please stay in the right most lane.
Re:I've been using vi for so long...
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The Birth of vi
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You can also think of text as regions within matching parentheses or other delimiters
The same is true in vim (which is used for vi on most Linux distros now) -- there are special motion commands for words, sentences, paragraphs, blocks (variously delimited -- [, (, {, and What makes all this powerful is that emacs can recognize what kind of file you're editing
As does vim, and it's pretty easy to add your own types and very easy to alter the default settings.
emacs has so many commands that there's not enough keys on a keyboard to have simple mnemonics for all the things it can do
Again, the same is true in vim, but I'd argue that the overloads are still more sane (and typist friendly) than those in emacs. And if you're concerned about hitting ESC, then Ctrl-[ does the same exact thing, and (in vim at least) so does ctrl-c (there's one difference, actually -- Ctrl-C will also interrupt long searches, while ESC will not). If you're using the stock Windows vim/gvim then ctrl-c will be remapped to cut, but that's easy to fix (and I recommend you get rid of mswin.vim anyway, as it is unadulterated evil if you're used to Unix vim).
By Debian's policy, package versions are kept the same, with only security fixes and major bug fixes being applied. There can be years between subsequent realeases.
So they adopted RH's business practice? How novel.
Redhat does the exact same thing, plus backporting major features and additional hardware support for major releases and (sometimes) quarterly updates (in that case, it's mostly additional HW support).
It's quite interesting to note that 64% of the entire federal budget is earmarked for military spending
No, 64% of the discretionary Federal budget is for military spending. Overall, it's closer to only about 17%, although I'm not sure that amount includes the "emergency" spending for the Iraq/Afghanistan wars or not.
Note that nowhere on that "graph" will you find monies allocated toward Social Security, Medicare, Unemployment/welfare, and paying the national debt. That alone accounts for the vast majority of government spending -- pretty much 1.8B of the 2.8B Federal budget (or nearly 2/3 if you prefer it that way).
That said, between "discretionary" and "non-discretionary", Defense is still #2 overall. So it's still big, but it's not 64% kind of big.
If you really want shocking, compare US Defense spending to other countries, or even the rest of the world's. Although raw numbers are somewhat misleading due to conversion rates, et. al. But even if you level it out with "parity purchasing power" kinds of numbers, it's still interesting.
Depends on your definition of "small" I suppose, but vim w/ minimal features is reasonably small. Vim with all features enabled is small in comparison to modern HD sizes and to equivalently functioned competitors. It's also more memory efficient than those competitors.
it does a lot of things that are useful for editing source files
And vim does as well. In fact, it does vastly more of them, for a rather dizzying list of source (and related) files. Even if you don't use filetypes the built-in settings are helpful.
it is very economical with bandwidth etc
And how has this changed with vim?
all commands map to keys that are found on all terminal keyboards
And they still do in vim. There's not a single default bind to a "special" key. Not even an F-key (hrm, I think F1 may be Help by default, but:help works just fine. I've never used F1).
getting used to all the extra features in vim can be a real pain, when you have to work with the classic form of vi.
I agree, but plain jane vi is a dying breed. I've had to deal with some boxes that the admin didn't install vim on, and after a bit I went ahead and compiled it in my local directory. Not being able to have multiple changed buffers is enough to piss me off, not to mention little things like syntax highlighting.
And yes, our code compiles on 7 different platforms currently. So I'm quite aware of what you're talking about.
But, frankly, denying yourself of a basic tool like a good text editor is stupid, particularly when you're a programmer. It's crippling and time wasting.
You claimed that vim is "becoming what vi was never intended to be" but you certainly haven't backed up your statements.
Mothers tasting their baby formula again? I recall an airport employee doing that years ago to a mother with breatmilk in a bottle, and she sued didn't she?
I don't recall that particular incident, but this is utterly and completely absurd.
If a terrorist is so intent on killing people that they would lace breast milk/formula with the requisite chemicals then it's fairly clear that their family's immediate welfare is not of particular concern. Do you honestly think they would blanche at sipping a little bit of the crap to get past security? It's unlikely to kill them (or even cause vomiting) instantly after all. And acting a bit strange about having to do it isn't unusual either.
Who thinks this stuff up? Honestly. It's not just pointless -- it's bad security since it creates a false sense of something being done.
There are obviously (and simply) WAY more open source apps for linux than there are for windows
Yes, but so what? Most of the major OSS apps are available on both platforms at this point (or, more likely, many platforms beyond just those two).
Most (not all) of the windows OSS apps are inferior by leaps and bounds to the closed source alternatives
Fine. So use the best tool for the job -- that's basically what the article is saying. As is the grandparent poster. As are you... I think. I'm not sure why you're taking issue with the GP for that matter -- you seem to be saying largely the same thing.
I use Windows at both work and home for my desktop, and Linux/Unix at both for servers. I develop C++ apps for *nix; at work our server code compiles under Windows for one and only one reason -- debugging. And it's a helluva lot easier to use Visual C++ for debugging than trying to beat TotalView into not crashing, or attempting to use gdb on AIX (pain... agony... coredumps).
Most of the apps I use on a daily basis (vim, putty, firefox, virtuawin, cygwin, numerous command line tools, tortoisecvs, and numerous others) are OSS and they or equivalents are available on both platforms. But other apps that I use are not free (in either sense), nor are the games that I like to play at home. And they're all Windows only. The availability of so much OSS software on Windows, however, means that I really can have the best of both worlds.
And for the rare stuff that's just better on *nix -- again, that's where putty and Cygwin come in. But, as you note, the need to run X apps is increasingly rare.
Aw crap... in researching the judge I did a more general search and pulled up the wrong judge.
Oddly, the real Judge Vaughn Walker was also appointed by Reagan and then appointed Chief Justice by George H. W. Bush. But, as you state, to the N.D. of California, not to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals (which is in an entirely different part of the country).
So this probably was a "career limiting" move if the neo-cons retain control of the Republican party. They certainly won't reward him with a Appelatte court position and the Democrats are unlikely to appoint a conservative judge to the 9th.
Which makes it an even better story really... since it means that he's likely ruling with the law rather than with politics. And, better yet, it means the appeal has to go to the 9th Appellate court, which is unlikely to overturn his decision.
True, however if you were to assume that the current political power balance was to continue then the judge could kiss any hopes of moving to the Supreme Court goodbye.
And since he was appointed by Reagan in 1985 to Federal District court, and George H.W. Bush to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in the 1989, I'm going to guess that he's not a left-leaning judge (I couldn't determine for certain). He's currently Chief Justice for that court, and so the only place up at this point is the SCOTUS (or maybe a specialized court like FISA, but that's more of a sideways move at best).
So odds are that, yes, this could be considered a "career limiting" move. But that's like saying that Larry Ellison has pissed off Microsoft so much he's not going to become CEO there... there's really not much "up" left.
Don't worry, presidential pardons are around the corner...
Yes, but the president cannot pardon himself.
Of course, it's unclear that he's broken any law; even if it's found to be unconstitutional and circumvents FISA, then it's unclear that anything could be done about it. By the time it's resolved it will be well past 2008, and there's no method for impeaching a President who is no longer in office (and there's not much else that you could do).
Violating the public trust is not illegal, as countless politicians of all parties have repeatedly shown (elected and unelected, including Karl Rove).
To date Bush, et. al. haven't said anything about this under oath. Rove apparantly lied to Scott McClellan, but told the truth where it counted legally -- to the special prosecutor.
What he was getting at is that intel is likely to release a quad-core chip to fill the role that the dual Xeons have filled
Yes they are. It's even on their Roadmap. Kentsfield is the quad core desktop chip and Clovertown is the quad core server chip. But they're not scheduled for release unti 1Q2007 and 4Q2006 respectively -- Apple would have to delay nearly 6 months if they want to go down that route. That's just silly when they can provide Xeon 5100 based systems now that will provide nearly the same level of performance (it's likely that the quad core systems would be a good bit cheaper though, just as it's cheaper to buy a dual core CPU than two single core ones).
has taken numerous steps in the past year to make sure such a breach is never made public again.
That's not up to them, however. The only way they can do that currently is to not keep any information whatsoever on a resident of California. Why? Because California has some of the best consumer privacy protection laws on the books. In this case the one that matters is the legally required disclosure of any potential privacy breach of residents. You are required to notify the residents that are affected... and if the media gets a whiff of it, the first question out of their mouths will be "how many people outside of California?" followed by "And are you going to notify them as well?".
Of course, ChoicePoint, along with all of the other big credit aggregators, are currently lobbying the Federal government for an "improved" consumer information protection bill. One of the major points of the bill is that it would supercede all state laws -- thus rendering California's (and a dozen or so other states) better laws invalid. All in the name of unified laws across the nation -- and at the consumer's expense.
q[the ONLY consequence a company like this suffers from a breach is negative publicity]q
And you don't think that's significant? ChoicePoint isn't the only game in town, even in their specialized arena (they're a spinoff of Equifax). If they get a bad reputation for poor security then companies will stop doing business with them and start doing business with a competitor.
And, contrary to many people, I do think these companies serve a valuable purpose. We would not have nearly the level of easily available credit in the US if it wasn't for them. And easily available credit leads to more home ownership, more small business startups, and numerous other advantages. Sure, it leads to some people drowning in credit debt as well, but that's due to irresponsibility on the part of both the person and the creditor -- in fact, accurate credit data is more likely to help avoid this problem than increase it.
The issue is that consumers have little to no control over the data at this point -- you're only allowed to place a credit freeze in a handful of states (and the "warning" that you can place on your report is universally ignored). There's insufficient protections against inaccurate data. And getting access to your own report is still overly difficult (although it's improved greatly in the last year, now that everyone can get a free copy every year (twice a year in Georgia)).
All this "achievment".... and traffic is as bad as ever and getting worse every single day
And you've completely missed the point of the system. It wasn't designed to act as commuter routes, it was designed to foster intrastate and interstate commerce. And it's done exactly that, and wildly exceeded the original expectations as well.
You don't want traffic? Then move closer to your job. Oh... that's right... you probably live many miles away from your job because you have a road system that's designed to take you rapidly from your home to your workplace. And while you may whine about that it's traffic laden, and that you can't go the posted speed limit on it, you also seem to forget that if it ceased to exist then you'd have to deal with the exact same number of cars, but now with stop signs, traffic signals, and narrower streets.
And you also forget that outside of rush hours the highway systems work exceptionally well -- or do you routinely do 55-75 mph through residential areas?
Wait a minute, that would be more than one bridge per mile, on average/blockquote
Entirely possible. It depends on how they count -- in many cases when you cross something that needs a bridge you build two bridges, one for each direction of traffic, not one. Additionally if you count on-ramps/off-ramps, bridges over the interstate, and figure in the miles of interstate in Louisianna (where you basically have I-10 and a few N/S interstates running through swamp, going from high point to high point) then you can start adding up the numbers fast.
Well, each "group" should have a different Google login. Ultimately this account for the type of security you want that separates home and work bookmarks.
And then how are you supposed to synch bookmarks that are common between the two? When I add a general use bookmark at work, how is it going to appear on my home systems?
You're completely and utterly missing the point. In fact, for the simple case (1 work system, 1 home system) you're "solution" does nothing at all.
Wait, I don't want all my bookmarks from home in my work browser!
And I don't want all of my work bookmarks in my home browser. I have a number of work-related bookmarks that point to local files (such as Oracle docs) and to places on the corporate intranet. Both are useless to me from home (the intranet ones may be useful if I was VPN'd, but that's exceptionally rare).
I would love to find a bookmarks synchronizer that allows you to exclude bookmarks and still work through the regular bookmarks menu.
Ultimately I'd like to have "groups" of bookmarks and be able to synch particular groups between systems. I've seen some that have this concept, but they don't work through the regular bookmark menu.
Plus who has room (and power) in their case for 7 drives? Datacenters, sure, but not home users.
My server currently has 5 drives - 1 40 GB, 1 120 GB, 2x250 GB (RAID1), and 1 300 GB. Plus a DVD-ROM. I still have space for another 3 or 4 drives (I've left space between drives for now, to improve circulation). The system already has 2 additional IDE controllers, and if I add more drives then I'll add another one (everything is on master) or a SATA controller.
And yes, this is a home server sitting under my stairs, all of it running on a 350W PSU. I could safely add several more drives without worrying about overtaxing the PSU. People really, really don't have any idea how much power their systems draw, either at boot (the only really stressful time for drives, esp. if you can't/don't stagger the power up) or during operation.
Personally, I'd love a couple of 750GB drives. Or even another 500 GB drive. I'm really uncomfy with not having the data on the 300GB drive backed up (and there's only 5GB free right now), and would like an offsite copy of the entire system for that matter.
I noticed pretty much all of the replies to this guy used the same bad math
Except that your math only stands if you're calculating the loss of the entire drive (or drive set) as opposed to any data loss. The chance of data loss (of any kind) is greater with 7 drives than it is with a single drive. The difference is merely how much data is lost. Which is of little comfort if the drive that fails is the "really important" one.
You're still playing Russian Roulette, but this time you're aiming at various body parts instead of just your head.
That's simply untrue. And your statement that we "evolved this way" is completely invalid unless you also change the rest of the environment to be similar to the majority of human evolution. Namely, outdoors, on the ground, with only minor bedding (straw/needles/etc), and with potential predators nearby. Oh, and in a small tribal village or communal setting.
We don't live that way anymore and most of the risk factors that necessitated an infant to be sleeping with an adult have also been eliminated. Repeated studies have shown that the safest place for an infant to sleep is in a separate bed, with a very firm mattress, on their back, without any loose blankets/crib cushions/pillows/etc., and in the same room as a parent.
Study after study after study has shown this. The risk factor for co-sleeping is not tremendous, barring your listed issues, but it is greater than sleeping in a separate crib in the same room.
Legally, that's not necessarilly true. Disclosure of a trade secret only leads to its loss of status if its disclosed in such a way that shows the compant did not do due diligence in protecting it. If I make you sign a NDA and make it very clear that certain things are trade secrets and that you are not allowed to disclose them, then even if you do it does not cease being a trade secret -- you're in violation of the NDA and can be held responsible for any damages from the unlawful disclosure.
That said, even if it is an unlawful disclosure sometimes it's too late to "put the toothpaste back in the tube", and it ceases being a trade secret. But whoever disclosed it could be in for a world of hurt -- including, in your example, repairyourmac.com since they're distributing illegally released material.
And, obviously, there's a question of whether or not distributing a repair manual to a very large group of people (all the repair techs) is really due diligence when it comes to protecting a trade secret. Obviously the more people you release the info to, the more likely there is to be a leak, and the less likely you are to be able to show that you covered your bases appropriately. I suspect that Apple could have a tough time of it if they actually went to a judge over this.
but what do the two challenges have to do with each other from a technical standpoint?
When you boil it down, they're the exact same thing -- this is just a couple orders of magnitude more difficult. The previous challenge didn't have them dealing with any dynamic variables -- no passing vehicles, no being passed by vehicles, no boulders rolling off a mountain, etc.
And if you're going to solve those problems, why not do it for real? A boulder falling off the side of the road is reasonably uncommon. A car cutting you off is not (n.b. -- the challenge doesn't actually talk about this as an issue, and it may not be; we'll know more after May 20).
It's still all about road detection, object detection, and avoidance. And you're asking what they have to do with each other technically?
Are they going to give the robots the GPS location of all the stop signs and traffic circles?
Again, we won't know until after the Participant Conference on May 20, but I'd actually suspect they will, along with info on what speed limits apply in different areas (as they did last time). This is not unreasonable -- GPS mapping a city is pretty trivial when it comes down to it, and I doubt that the challenge is geared toward being fully dynamic -- e.g. you'll still follow a predetermined route, there won't be sudden changes in traffic rules (no road crews), and so forth.
That said, even if you have full GPS info on stop signs and so forth the most that's useful for is that you need to be watching out for a sign coming up soon. GPS isn't accurate enough (at least on a moving vehicle) to rely on it for road signs -- coming to a complete stop 3m beyond the stop sign doesn't work so well. So they'll still have to visually recognize a lot of traffic signage.
In some ways this will be easier than the previous challenge -- this is all low speed, so the issue of not being able to process the incoming data in real time will be reduced. On the flip side, you'll have to process a lot more data this time -- as you said, you must be able to recognize the difference between a boulder and a bush for this challenge.
I'll be impressed with no crashing into each other, before they worry about compliance with all traffic laws.
I'll be absolutely stunned if anyone succeeds this year, and moderately surprised if anyone succeeds at the one after.
But once this is complete, on to the next challenge -- mixed mode driving (urban, suburban, highway, maybe offroad). Then you can't tailor your algorithm toward a specific goal.
Slashdot Mirror
Er, and which ones are those?
I've used vi, nvi, vile, and vim. By far, vim is the most popular (and powerful) of those. And it does not have any modes or commands that coincide with standard vi in compatible mode; there are a few minor differences in non-compatible mode, but nothing that's likely to trip up even seasoned vi-ers (and yes, I used vi for nearly a decade before any of the others, and still use vi from time to time when I get on a box w/o vim).
If you're using vim and don't like color, disable it. In fact, it's disabled by default in compatible mode (which vim defaults to unless you have a
vim is a vast improvement over vi -- and not for the coloring, but rather for the buffer management, the filetype capabilities (smarter indenting is the tip of the iceberg), text objects (daB to delete an entire block delimited by {['s is one example; objects exists for words/WORDS, sentences, paragraphs, tags, etc), and macros. There's much, much more, of course, but those are the big ones in my book. I personally don't care much about windows and the vim7 tabs are misnamed and misunderstood, but some love them. I have a strong vi background, and I think the things I mentioned are more relevant to others with a similar background than those other items are.
No it's not. What should be freely available, however, with no requirements or costs, is a credit block -- the ability to prevent any new accounts from being opened on your credit reports as long as the block is in place (typically the block can be temporarily removed/disabled via phone and a PIN; that way you can still get new credit, but at least then you _know_ when you're getting new credit).
Sure you can. Just never give your social security number on any form that asks you for it.
Of course, you may also find that you can't get credit at all in such a situation. But that's basically what you're asking for anyway. After all, if it's an "opt-in" to share credit info, then why couldn't I just open a few lines of credit, refuse to allow them to send info on them, and then default on them? Oh sure, it's illegal, but what are they going to do? Send debt collectors after me? Relatively easy to deal with, especially if you're the kind of person who would pull this. They can't ruin my credit report -- I've told them they can't.
Look, credit has become ubiquitous purely because of the credit bureaus and their data aggregation. It's not an inherently bad thing, but it could certainly be improved. A freely available block would go a long way toward solving the issues. It wouldn't completely fix them; that's fine. The point isn't to stop it completely, as that would be too costly to both the creditors and to consumers, but to make it too difficult and expensive (in terms of money, time, effort, and/or likelihood of being arrested) for identity thieves to bother with.
If you think that credit aggregation is unnecessary -- well, then be prepared to have the credit industry go back to how it was prior to their existance (which started in the 1940s and 50s) -- short term, variable rate mortgages were the norm, credit cards didn't exist (unsecured credit? Are you kidding me?), and loans of all kinds were both more expensive and more difficult to get. Why? Because lenders had no real way of telling if a borrower would be a good risk. Pretty much your best bet was to have a bank with whom you did all your business (because then they know your credit), use them for years, and then ask for a loan. Young? New in town? Too bad. You're too high of a risk. Get lost.
Note that I'm not saying the aggregators are perfect. Far from it. But it's a far, far better scenario with them than without.
Oh, and note -- if you're a business that uses credit scores you can also forgo giving the bureaus any information. Of course, you'll pay 3-5x as much per inquiry (even in bulk, for partial data) than you will if you report back to them.
Which ones? There's a rather large array, and the modern ones are far better than those from just a few years ago -- they put out a spectrum closer to incandescent, have a lower warm up time, and reach full brightness in less time.
That's great, except that the "high efficiency" is still only about half the efficiency of CFLs.
Frankly, the hubbub over mercury levels in CFLs is vastly overblown. If you use an incandescent bulb instead then the amount of mercury released by a typical coal fired power plant to power it is in excess of that contained in the bulb (and the power needed for it) over the lifetime of a CFL bulb. Yes, that mercury is allegedly easier to process. Except that it isn't processed, and the power industry is fighting any attempts to change that. Meanwhile the number of places to recycle CFLs (and other mercury containing items) is increasing simply due to the demand for it.
CFLs aren't a perfect answer though -- they aren't available in reasonable lumens for some applications (like chandeliers/type B sockets), and the typical 30-60s for full brightness means they're not useful in some places (I prefer incandescents for stairway lighting, and anywhere I'm likely to only have the light on for a few seconds at a time). Dimmable CFLs are typically excessively expensive as well. But I do put good quality CFLs as many places as I can.
Yes it is, and it's on by default in enforce mode. There's even been some reports (although I have not checked them) that you cannot automatically disable it via kickstart.
No, the better question is -- is there anything you do where it would actually get in the way? In the two years I've been running CentOS4 I've had it bite me exactly once, and it was pretty easy to fix the issue.
What do I get out of it? Peace of mind. No, my system isn't likely to get exploited, but on the random chance someone does find a vulnerability then SELinux will limit the damage and their abilities. What's it cost me? Nothing.
Sounds like a good deal to me.
And based on watching who wants to disable it, I'd say that it's the larger organizations that run into more problems and want to turn it off. Which is ironic, but I'll happily admit that SELinux in RHEL4/CentOS4 isn't easy to administer. I hope there are better utilities in 5.
You're lucky you didn't get a ticket... for impeding the flow of traffic. Particularly if you were on GA-400.
If you're only going to go 15-20 over the limit, please stay in the right most lane.
The same is true in vim (which is used for vi on most Linux distros now) -- there are special motion commands for words, sentences, paragraphs, blocks (variously delimited -- [, (, {, and What makes all this powerful is that emacs can recognize what kind of file you're editing
As does vim, and it's pretty easy to add your own types and very easy to alter the default settings.
Again, the same is true in vim, but I'd argue that the overloads are still more sane (and typist friendly) than those in emacs. And if you're concerned about hitting ESC, then Ctrl-[ does the same exact thing, and (in vim at least) so does ctrl-c (there's one difference, actually -- Ctrl-C will also interrupt long searches, while ESC will not). If you're using the stock Windows vim/gvim then ctrl-c will be remapped to cut, but that's easy to fix (and I recommend you get rid of mswin.vim anyway, as it is unadulterated evil if you're used to Unix vim).
So they adopted RH's business practice? How novel.
Redhat does the exact same thing, plus backporting major features and additional hardware support for major releases and (sometimes) quarterly updates (in that case, it's mostly additional HW support).
No, 64% of the discretionary Federal budget is for military spending. Overall, it's closer to only about 17%, although I'm not sure that amount includes the "emergency" spending for the Iraq/Afghanistan wars or not.
Note that nowhere on that "graph" will you find monies allocated toward Social Security, Medicare, Unemployment/welfare, and paying the national debt. That alone accounts for the vast majority of government spending -- pretty much 1.8B of the 2.8B Federal budget (or nearly 2/3 if you prefer it that way).
That said, between "discretionary" and "non-discretionary", Defense is still #2 overall. So it's still big, but it's not 64% kind of big.
If you really want shocking, compare US Defense spending to other countries, or even the rest of the world's. Although raw numbers are somewhat misleading due to conversion rates, et. al. But even if you level it out with "parity purchasing power" kinds of numbers, it's still interesting.
Depends on your definition of "small" I suppose, but vim w/ minimal features is reasonably small. Vim with all features enabled is small in comparison to modern HD sizes and to equivalently functioned competitors. It's also more memory efficient than those competitors.
And vim does as well. In fact, it does vastly more of them, for a rather dizzying list of source (and related) files. Even if you don't use filetypes the built-in settings are helpful.
And how has this changed with vim?
And they still do in vim. There's not a single default bind to a "special" key. Not even an F-key (hrm, I think F1 may be Help by default, but
I agree, but plain jane vi is a dying breed. I've had to deal with some boxes that the admin didn't install vim on, and after a bit I went ahead and compiled it in my local directory. Not being able to have multiple changed buffers is enough to piss me off, not to mention little things like syntax highlighting.
And yes, our code compiles on 7 different platforms currently. So I'm quite aware of what you're talking about.
But, frankly, denying yourself of a basic tool like a good text editor is stupid, particularly when you're a programmer. It's crippling and time wasting.
You claimed that vim is "becoming what vi was never intended to be" but you certainly haven't backed up your statements.
I don't recall that particular incident, but this is utterly and completely absurd.
If a terrorist is so intent on killing people that they would lace breast milk/formula with the requisite chemicals then it's fairly clear that their family's immediate welfare is not of particular concern. Do you honestly think they would blanche at sipping a little bit of the crap to get past security? It's unlikely to kill them (or even cause vomiting) instantly after all. And acting a bit strange about having to do it isn't unusual either.
Who thinks this stuff up? Honestly. It's not just pointless -- it's bad security since it creates a false sense of something being done.
Yes, but so what? Most of the major OSS apps are available on both platforms at this point (or, more likely, many platforms beyond just those two).
Fine. So use the best tool for the job -- that's basically what the article is saying. As is the grandparent poster. As are you... I think. I'm not sure why you're taking issue with the GP for that matter -- you seem to be saying largely the same thing.
I use Windows at both work and home for my desktop, and Linux/Unix at both for servers. I develop C++ apps for *nix; at work our server code compiles under Windows for one and only one reason -- debugging. And it's a helluva lot easier to use Visual C++ for debugging than trying to beat TotalView into not crashing, or attempting to use gdb on AIX (pain... agony... coredumps).
Most of the apps I use on a daily basis (vim, putty, firefox, virtuawin, cygwin, numerous command line tools, tortoisecvs, and numerous others) are OSS and they or equivalents are available on both platforms. But other apps that I use are not free (in either sense), nor are the games that I like to play at home. And they're all Windows only. The availability of so much OSS software on Windows, however, means that I really can have the best of both worlds.
And for the rare stuff that's just better on *nix -- again, that's where putty and Cygwin come in. But, as you note, the need to run X apps is increasingly rare.
Aw crap... in researching the judge I did a more general search and pulled up the wrong judge.
Oddly, the real Judge Vaughn Walker was also appointed by Reagan and then appointed Chief Justice by George H. W. Bush. But, as you state, to the N.D. of California, not to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals (which is in an entirely different part of the country).
So this probably was a "career limiting" move if the neo-cons retain control of the Republican party. They certainly won't reward him with a Appelatte court position and the Democrats are unlikely to appoint a conservative judge to the 9th.
Which makes it an even better story really... since it means that he's likely ruling with the law rather than with politics. And, better yet, it means the appeal has to go to the 9th Appellate court, which is unlikely to overturn his decision.
Someone go mod down my earlier post. Thanks.
True, however if you were to assume that the current political power balance was to continue then the judge could kiss any hopes of moving to the Supreme Court goodbye.
And since he was appointed by Reagan in 1985 to Federal District court, and George H.W. Bush to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in the 1989, I'm going to guess that he's not a left-leaning judge (I couldn't determine for certain). He's currently Chief Justice for that court, and so the only place up at this point is the SCOTUS (or maybe a specialized court like FISA, but that's more of a sideways move at best).
So odds are that, yes, this could be considered a "career limiting" move. But that's like saying that Larry Ellison has pissed off Microsoft so much he's not going to become CEO there... there's really not much "up" left.
Yes, but the president cannot pardon himself.
Of course, it's unclear that he's broken any law; even if it's found to be unconstitutional and circumvents FISA, then it's unclear that anything could be done about it. By the time it's resolved it will be well past 2008, and there's no method for impeaching a President who is no longer in office (and there's not much else that you could do).
Violating the public trust is not illegal, as countless politicians of all parties have repeatedly shown (elected and unelected, including Karl Rove).
To date Bush, et. al. haven't said anything about this under oath. Rove apparantly lied to Scott McClellan, but told the truth where it counted legally -- to the special prosecutor.
Yes they are. It's even on their Roadmap. Kentsfield is the quad core desktop chip and Clovertown is the quad core server chip. But they're not scheduled for release unti 1Q2007 and 4Q2006 respectively -- Apple would have to delay nearly 6 months if they want to go down that route. That's just silly when they can provide Xeon 5100 based systems now that will provide nearly the same level of performance (it's likely that the quad core systems would be a good bit cheaper though, just as it's cheaper to buy a dual core CPU than two single core ones).
That's not up to them, however. The only way they can do that currently is to not keep any information whatsoever on a resident of California. Why? Because California has some of the best consumer privacy protection laws on the books. In this case the one that matters is the legally required disclosure of any potential privacy breach of residents. You are required to notify the residents that are affected... and if the media gets a whiff of it, the first question out of their mouths will be "how many people outside of California?" followed by "And are you going to notify them as well?".
Of course, ChoicePoint, along with all of the other big credit aggregators, are currently lobbying the Federal government for an "improved" consumer information protection bill. One of the major points of the bill is that it would supercede all state laws -- thus rendering California's (and a dozen or so other states) better laws invalid. All in the name of unified laws across the nation -- and at the consumer's expense.
q[the ONLY consequence a company like this suffers from a breach is negative publicity]q
And you don't think that's significant? ChoicePoint isn't the only game in town, even in their specialized arena (they're a spinoff of Equifax). If they get a bad reputation for poor security then companies will stop doing business with them and start doing business with a competitor.
And, contrary to many people, I do think these companies serve a valuable purpose. We would not have nearly the level of easily available credit in the US if it wasn't for them. And easily available credit leads to more home ownership, more small business startups, and numerous other advantages. Sure, it leads to some people drowning in credit debt as well, but that's due to irresponsibility on the part of both the person and the creditor -- in fact, accurate credit data is more likely to help avoid this problem than increase it.
The issue is that consumers have little to no control over the data at this point -- you're only allowed to place a credit freeze in a handful of states (and the "warning" that you can place on your report is universally ignored). There's insufficient protections against inaccurate data. And getting access to your own report is still overly difficult (although it's improved greatly in the last year, now that everyone can get a free copy every year (twice a year in Georgia)).
And you've completely missed the point of the system. It wasn't designed to act as commuter routes, it was designed to foster intrastate and interstate commerce. And it's done exactly that, and wildly exceeded the original expectations as well.
You don't want traffic? Then move closer to your job. Oh... that's right... you probably live many miles away from your job because you have a road system that's designed to take you rapidly from your home to your workplace. And while you may whine about that it's traffic laden, and that you can't go the posted speed limit on it, you also seem to forget that if it ceased to exist then you'd have to deal with the exact same number of cars, but now with stop signs, traffic signals, and narrower streets.
And you also forget that outside of rush hours the highway systems work exceptionally well -- or do you routinely do 55-75 mph through residential areas?
And then how are you supposed to synch bookmarks that are common between the two? When I add a general use bookmark at work, how is it going to appear on my home systems?
You're completely and utterly missing the point. In fact, for the simple case (1 work system, 1 home system) you're "solution" does nothing at all.
And I don't want all of my work bookmarks in my home browser. I have a number of work-related bookmarks that point to local files (such as Oracle docs) and to places on the corporate intranet. Both are useless to me from home (the intranet ones may be useful if I was VPN'd, but that's exceptionally rare).
I would love to find a bookmarks synchronizer that allows you to exclude bookmarks and still work through the regular bookmarks menu.
Ultimately I'd like to have "groups" of bookmarks and be able to synch particular groups between systems. I've seen some that have this concept, but they don't work through the regular bookmark menu.
Plus who has room (and power) in their case for 7 drives? Datacenters, sure, but not home users.
My server currently has 5 drives - 1 40 GB, 1 120 GB, 2x250 GB (RAID1), and 1 300 GB. Plus a DVD-ROM. I still have space for another 3 or 4 drives (I've left space between drives for now, to improve circulation). The system already has 2 additional IDE controllers, and if I add more drives then I'll add another one (everything is on master) or a SATA controller.
And yes, this is a home server sitting under my stairs, all of it running on a 350W PSU. I could safely add several more drives without worrying about overtaxing the PSU. People really, really don't have any idea how much power their systems draw, either at boot (the only really stressful time for drives, esp. if you can't/don't stagger the power up) or during operation.
Personally, I'd love a couple of 750GB drives. Or even another 500 GB drive. I'm really uncomfy with not having the data on the 300GB drive backed up (and there's only 5GB free right now), and would like an offsite copy of the entire system for that matter.
I noticed pretty much all of the replies to this guy used the same bad math
Except that your math only stands if you're calculating the loss of the entire drive (or drive set) as opposed to any data loss. The chance of data loss (of any kind) is greater with 7 drives than it is with a single drive. The difference is merely how much data is lost. Which is of little comfort if the drive that fails is the "really important" one.
You're still playing Russian Roulette, but this time you're aiming at various body parts instead of just your head.
Sleeping with the adult is safest
That's simply untrue. And your statement that we "evolved this way" is completely invalid unless you also change the rest of the environment to be similar to the majority of human evolution. Namely, outdoors, on the ground, with only minor bedding (straw/needles/etc), and with potential predators nearby. Oh, and in a small tribal village or communal setting.
We don't live that way anymore and most of the risk factors that necessitated an infant to be sleeping with an adult have also been eliminated. Repeated studies have shown that the safest place for an infant to sleep is in a separate bed, with a very firm mattress, on their back, without any loose blankets/crib cushions/pillows/etc., and in the same room as a parent.
Study after study after study has shown this. The risk factor for co-sleeping is not tremendous, barring your listed issues, but it is greater than sleeping in a separate crib in the same room.
If it was a trade secret, it isn't any more.
Legally, that's not necessarilly true. Disclosure of a trade secret only leads to its loss of status if its disclosed in such a way that shows the compant did not do due diligence in protecting it. If I make you sign a NDA and make it very clear that certain things are trade secrets and that you are not allowed to disclose them, then even if you do it does not cease being a trade secret -- you're in violation of the NDA and can be held responsible for any damages from the unlawful disclosure.
That said, even if it is an unlawful disclosure sometimes it's too late to "put the toothpaste back in the tube", and it ceases being a trade secret. But whoever disclosed it could be in for a world of hurt -- including, in your example, repairyourmac.com since they're distributing illegally released material.
And, obviously, there's a question of whether or not distributing a repair manual to a very large group of people (all the repair techs) is really due diligence when it comes to protecting a trade secret. Obviously the more people you release the info to, the more likely there is to be a leak, and the less likely you are to be able to show that you covered your bases appropriately. I suspect that Apple could have a tough time of it if they actually went to a judge over this.
but what do the two challenges have to do with each other from a technical standpoint?
When you boil it down, they're the exact same thing -- this is just a couple orders of magnitude more difficult. The previous challenge didn't have them dealing with any dynamic variables -- no passing vehicles, no being passed by vehicles, no boulders rolling off a mountain, etc.
And if you're going to solve those problems, why not do it for real? A boulder falling off the side of the road is reasonably uncommon. A car cutting you off is not (n.b. -- the challenge doesn't actually talk about this as an issue, and it may not be; we'll know more after May 20).
It's still all about road detection, object detection, and avoidance. And you're asking what they have to do with each other technically?
Are they going to give the robots the GPS location of all the stop signs and traffic circles?
Again, we won't know until after the Participant Conference on May 20, but I'd actually suspect they will, along with info on what speed limits apply in different areas (as they did last time). This is not unreasonable -- GPS mapping a city is pretty trivial when it comes down to it, and I doubt that the challenge is geared toward being fully dynamic -- e.g. you'll still follow a predetermined route, there won't be sudden changes in traffic rules (no road crews), and so forth.
That said, even if you have full GPS info on stop signs and so forth the most that's useful for is that you need to be watching out for a sign coming up soon. GPS isn't accurate enough (at least on a moving vehicle) to rely on it for road signs -- coming to a complete stop 3m beyond the stop sign doesn't work so well. So they'll still have to visually recognize a lot of traffic signage.
In some ways this will be easier than the previous challenge -- this is all low speed, so the issue of not being able to process the incoming data in real time will be reduced. On the flip side, you'll have to process a lot more data this time -- as you said, you must be able to recognize the difference between a boulder and a bush for this challenge.
I'll be impressed with no crashing into each other, before they worry about compliance with all traffic laws.
I'll be absolutely stunned if anyone succeeds this year, and moderately surprised if anyone succeeds at the one after.
But once this is complete, on to the next challenge -- mixed mode driving (urban, suburban, highway, maybe offroad). Then you can't tailor your algorithm toward a specific goal.