That's about the time a large portion of/. became a joke. While I still enjoy many discussions here, there is a definite difference in the/. of today and the/. of ten years ago. As a rule, any industry (including IT) has always had its share of pretenders, but they certainly seem to be much more numerous in IT these days. I blame it on the ever increasing trend of people going to college to get a piece of paper that allegedly qualifies them to do technical work, regardless of their actual ability to do the work.
Signed,
A/. user of about 12 years who recently created a new user account.
It was supposed to be a joke that referenced different spellings for the term, making a tongue in cheek reference to corporate bylaws, in a sort of twisted nod to the influence of corporate entities in civil governance.
I was actually envisioning something of a more literal depiction of the GP's expressed image. In my mind, I can see a giant humanoid figure, composed of perhaps a few thousand people, sweeping its hands through a vast landscape of people, alternately cradling some in one arm and crushing the life from others in the opposing fist.
My first mental image also included some of the scenery described in passages involving the giant in Ender's Game.
How do you stop four friends talking to each other if they are not incarcerated?
You stop them by threatening to incarcerate them if they break the order. Add in a dash of behind the scenes, off the record, "if any of you violate this order, we'll be very nice to any of the others that report it to us" and you have a winning combination.
So if I go out in the middle of nowhere in the desert and build a house, it is kind of stupid for me to claim that my house is safer just because nobody tried to rob it in 15 years.
You might want to pick a better analogy. Many criminals have specifically targeted houses built in remote/rural locations, because of a perceived lessening of the odds that neighbors will notice their activities (there aren't any neighbors, or they're half a mile down a dirt road), coupled with greatly increased police response times.
The understood risk with such plans is the somewhat increased likelihood that the residents will own firearms and know how to use them, but rural homes getting assaulted, the inhabitants being raped and murdered, and the homes getting burned to the ground afterward aren't exactly unheard of.
Side note: Yes, there's a dirt road in front of my residence. There's also a rifle ten feet away from me.
More power to you for running your own mail server, but if you hadn't chosen a technical profession or hobby, I doubt you would even know where to start or that it was even possible. If you know what you're doing, it's always easy.
Sorry, that's just not true. I've seen several people who weren't IT professionals, had never seen a bash prompt before, and had nearly no starting knowledge get a VPS and get basic mail services up and running in less than a day. Guides like this help a lot with that sort of thing. Or you could just install Zimbra.
My telling you it's possible fixes the "not knowing it's possible" part, and now you can tell other people it's possible.
My point was that the statement "nobody uses IRC" is provably false, and if you're using IRC you can always invite others to do the same. It's not difficult, and the primary point here is that nobody is forced to use things like Facebook. Yes, things like Facebook are vastly more common, but they are by no means the only options available. Using something purely because "everybody else already does" and then claiming that as a strong supporting reason for using it, as opposed to just showing some folks other options and maybe letting them decide if they want to give it a shot, strikes me as disingenuous.
Speaking of mail servers, of course there's a minimum time investment required to learn some basics first. The same applies to virtually anything we do in life, whether it's driving a car, learning to cook a steak, getting through high school, getting a college degree, tying your shoes, etc. With the amazing amount of step by step documentation available for virtually any kind of mail server config you want, that time investment is not substantial. To get a basic setup working does not require weeks worth of cramming. It requires maybe an evening or two of reading some docs and following simple instructions. If you don't want to do that, there are options like Zimbra that essentially boil down to "run this installer, log into the web interface, add whatever accounts you want, and you're done." Either way, it's pretty painless, thanks to the work of countless others who have taken the time to build nice things and write nice docs for them.
I have dozens of friends and associates that I communicate with nearly exclusively on IRC. By nearly exclusively, I mean I might call them once every month or two, but I speak with them in IRC on a nearly daily basis. OFTC operates a ton of servers, and other outfits like freenode. Modern IRC is pretty feature rich; encryption, bouncers/relays, web-based clients, very rich native clients, and ANSI terminal clients (I use Irssi) are all supported.
Just using three degrees of separation from me, tens of thousands of people are using IRC at any given moment. Go further out in terms of separation and the number is much, much higher. Where did you get the idea that nobody uses IRC any more?
Email is a different story -- you can try to host your own mail server but it's a huge PITA to set up SPF records and whatnot to keep your outgoing mail from getting bounced.
How is one TXT or SPF record in DNS a huge PITA? It's incredibly simple. I host my own mail, along with mail for a bunch of other people and organizations. It's not that difficult, and my mail doesn't get bounced. My total involvement with my mail servers amounts to perhaps one hour per month, the total time taken to install security updates and make sure automated backups are running properly. If you don't want to invest this minimum of effort, that's fine, but please don't use the excuse that it's too difficult.
RBL subscriptions are entirely optional. Nothing, aside from taking the time to set it up, is stopping you from setting up your own mail server with SpamAssassin and/or various other filtering options controlled exclusively by you. Like anything, it's not perfect, but in my ten years of using it, it's proven to be immensely effective. With freedom comes responsibility and work.
I don't use Facebook at all, and I'm not about to start any time soon. Anything private gets sent via GPG/PGP encrypted mail. I've helped quite a few people configure their mail clients to support PKI, and all it cost me was a bit of time. Yes, that takes a little bit of effort, but with freedom comes responsibility and work.
As for the XMPP points, as long as you're operating your own XMPP server (which is incredibly easy), you're not depending on a monopoly. While others may indeed be using mass market services that offer XMPP functionality, that's their choice, and if you feel like it you can teach family and friends how to operate their own servers as well. With freedom comes responsibility and work.
Regarding IP numbers, go ahead and get your own allocation from ARIN (or whoever your RIR happens to be). It's not that difficult, and if you want to go ahead and get an IPv6 allocation, you're going to have more IPs right off the bat than you'll know what to do with. You can then either help others understand why IPv6 is awesome, or wait until adoption becomes more widespread, or use 6-to-4 gateways, or a combination thereof. Sure, IP space isn't free of charge, but it's a fixed cost, and there's no such thing as a free lunch. Freedom to do what you want does not necessarily imply freedom from monetary cost.
For domain names, which of course aren't even strictly necessary for Internet communications, you have many options for registrars. Some are better than others. Some cost more, some cost less. Some are known for great service, and some are known for people like Bob Parsons, who I'd love to drag into a field and beat senseless. If you don't like the usual suspects for TLDs, you're free to choose a registrar in Whothefuckknowswhereitisistan if you like. With freedom comes responsibility and work.
Now, after saying all this, you're also totally free to set up something completely different that you exclusively control and convince other people to use it. However, that will probably cost you a lot more than everything described here, and then you have a completely different problem. The single point of control will indeed be you, with all the issues that entails. With freedom comes responsibility and work.
Human beings live in societies. To some extent, you will always be dependent on goods and services from someone else if you want to participate in society. You also have the option of living in a shack in the frozen north. You can probably guess what I'm going to say next.
I still don't have a Facebook account, and am no worse the wear for it. I have noted that of my family and friends who do have accounts, the ones who typically talk about their Facebook activity the most are definitely the women, and a lot of that talk seems to swing between gossip and outright vicious assaults. I'll just stay out of that mess, thanks.
See, what actually happened was Motorola engineers used faster than light neutrinos to retroactively prevent themselves from being retroactively sued, and thus nothing of the sort ever happened after it happened the first time it didn't happen.
I agree. That still doesn't change the fact that those same people will continue to buy products with Foxconn components in them, regardless of how much you tell them about the evils of Foxconn.
How many people here are willing to forgo purchases of anything that Foxconn is involved with from a manufacturing standpoint? Regardless of all the noble bluff and bluster that will inevitably fill the comments here, my guess is that approximately zero people here will actually vote with their wallets. Yes, that includes me.
Foxconn doesn't care about justifying their actions, or about being honest. Far from it, that's the entire point of hiring major league PR firms. There will be confessing of any truths, but there will be plenty of shiny happy propaganda spewed around the globe.
From my understanding, it wasn't the RCS that determined the sequence of events, not in the scope you're discussing. That was done one layer up. However, the changes were indeed tracked properly. It should be noted that I don't pretend to understand how this was done, as I didn't write the code that did it. Just as a stab in the dark, maybe it utilized keystroke logging as part of its sauce; again, I didn't have any hand in creating the system. What I do know is meaningful diffs, represented as native file format changes, with histories viewable as such, were represented across a huge variety of file formats. This was accomplished completely out of band from any of the applications that created the documents in the first place, and I agree that there is serious commercial value in it.
Unfortunately, I can virtually guarantee it will never see the light of day as a standalone document management system. My previous statements on the mentality surrounding "super secret IP" apply here, and that sucks, but the decision makers involved just aren't going to see eye to eye with me on it. Virtually any industry are packed full of really neat internal systems that solve all sorts of problems, with a ton of potential for application to other industries, but most of that code will never be available to anyone outside the organizations that created it. Again, it's unfortunate, but the people who pay to have systems developed and maintained get the privilege of determining where that code does or doesn't go.
Two of the SSDs I've seen suffer catastrophic failure were Intel. Maybe nobody ever got fired for buying Intel, but the drives became instant paperweights anyhow.
Everybody put on your flame retardant suits in preparation for the inevitable flame war between global warming believers and deniers, which will almost certainly drown out discussion of the technical specifics of the referenced materials.
Oh, I'm not referring to using RAM drives. I'm mostly referring to in-memory filesystem cache, which has a serious effect on performance. That said, using a RAM disk (notably things like/dev/shm on Linux, other platforms have different implementations) for temporary data instead of a disk (whether HDD or SSD) can provide fairly ridiculous additional performance improvements without having to modify any application code.
Put simply, I've got systems where the addition of a few GB of RAM essentially tripled overall performance.
Slashdot Mirror
That's about the time a large portion of /. became a joke. While I still enjoy many discussions here, there is a definite difference in the /. of today and the /. of ten years ago. As a rule, any industry (including IT) has always had its share of pretenders, but they certainly seem to be much more numerous in IT these days. I blame it on the ever increasing trend of people going to college to get a piece of paper that allegedly qualifies them to do technical work, regardless of their actual ability to do the work.
Signed,
A /. user of about 12 years who recently created a new user account.
Quite, thanks!
When you prefix commands with '#', it typically indicates that you are running as root already.
When I prefix commands with '#', it typically means I'm using sh or bash, and they're actually comments ;).
It was supposed to be a joke that referenced different spellings for the term, making a tongue in cheek reference to corporate bylaws, in a sort of twisted nod to the influence of corporate entities in civil governance.
Hey, I thought it was funny.
Are byelaws the sort of laws that bid you farewell as you're carried off to prison?
(I'm in the United States, you insensitive clod!)
I was actually envisioning something of a more literal depiction of the GP's expressed image. In my mind, I can see a giant humanoid figure, composed of perhaps a few thousand people, sweeping its hands through a vast landscape of people, alternately cradling some in one arm and crushing the life from others in the opposing fist.
My first mental image also included some of the scenery described in passages involving the giant in Ender's Game.
I very much want someone with far better visual arts skills than me to produce what you've described in a painting or other rendering. I'd buy it.
How do you stop four friends talking to each other if they are not incarcerated?
You stop them by threatening to incarcerate them if they break the order. Add in a dash of behind the scenes, off the record, "if any of you violate this order, we'll be very nice to any of the others that report it to us" and you have a winning combination.
On windows, notepad can save a file as foo.exe, and you have an executable.
No, you don't. Try to run that.
success project
Obligatory
So if I go out in the middle of nowhere in the desert and build a house, it is kind of stupid for me to claim that my house is safer just because nobody tried to rob it in 15 years.
You might want to pick a better analogy. Many criminals have specifically targeted houses built in remote/rural locations, because of a perceived lessening of the odds that neighbors will notice their activities (there aren't any neighbors, or they're half a mile down a dirt road), coupled with greatly increased police response times.
The understood risk with such plans is the somewhat increased likelihood that the residents will own firearms and know how to use them, but rural homes getting assaulted, the inhabitants being raped and murdered, and the homes getting burned to the ground afterward aren't exactly unheard of.
Side note: Yes, there's a dirt road in front of my residence. There's also a rifle ten feet away from me.
More power to you for running your own mail server, but if you hadn't chosen a technical profession or hobby, I doubt you would even know where to start or that it was even possible. If you know what you're doing, it's always easy.
Sorry, that's just not true. I've seen several people who weren't IT professionals, had never seen a bash prompt before, and had nearly no starting knowledge get a VPS and get basic mail services up and running in less than a day. Guides like this help a lot with that sort of thing. Or you could just install Zimbra.
My telling you it's possible fixes the "not knowing it's possible" part, and now you can tell other people it's possible.
My point was that the statement "nobody uses IRC" is provably false, and if you're using IRC you can always invite others to do the same. It's not difficult, and the primary point here is that nobody is forced to use things like Facebook. Yes, things like Facebook are vastly more common, but they are by no means the only options available. Using something purely because "everybody else already does" and then claiming that as a strong supporting reason for using it, as opposed to just showing some folks other options and maybe letting them decide if they want to give it a shot, strikes me as disingenuous.
Speaking of mail servers, of course there's a minimum time investment required to learn some basics first. The same applies to virtually anything we do in life, whether it's driving a car, learning to cook a steak, getting through high school, getting a college degree, tying your shoes, etc. With the amazing amount of step by step documentation available for virtually any kind of mail server config you want, that time investment is not substantial. To get a basic setup working does not require weeks worth of cramming. It requires maybe an evening or two of reading some docs and following simple instructions. If you don't want to do that, there are options like Zimbra that essentially boil down to "run this installer, log into the web interface, add whatever accounts you want, and you're done." Either way, it's pretty painless, thanks to the work of countless others who have taken the time to build nice things and write nice docs for them.
nobody uses IRC or Usenet anymore
I have dozens of friends and associates that I communicate with nearly exclusively on IRC. By nearly exclusively, I mean I might call them once every month or two, but I speak with them in IRC on a nearly daily basis. OFTC operates a ton of servers, and other outfits like freenode. Modern IRC is pretty feature rich; encryption, bouncers/relays, web-based clients, very rich native clients, and ANSI terminal clients (I use Irssi) are all supported.
Just using three degrees of separation from me, tens of thousands of people are using IRC at any given moment. Go further out in terms of separation and the number is much, much higher. Where did you get the idea that nobody uses IRC any more?
Email is a different story -- you can try to host your own mail server but it's a huge PITA to set up SPF records and whatnot to keep your outgoing mail from getting bounced.
How is one TXT or SPF record in DNS a huge PITA? It's incredibly simple. I host my own mail, along with mail for a bunch of other people and organizations. It's not that difficult, and my mail doesn't get bounced. My total involvement with my mail servers amounts to perhaps one hour per month, the total time taken to install security updates and make sure automated backups are running properly. If you don't want to invest this minimum of effort, that's fine, but please don't use the excuse that it's too difficult.
RBL subscriptions are entirely optional. Nothing, aside from taking the time to set it up, is stopping you from setting up your own mail server with SpamAssassin and/or various other filtering options controlled exclusively by you. Like anything, it's not perfect, but in my ten years of using it, it's proven to be immensely effective. With freedom comes responsibility and work.
I don't use Facebook at all, and I'm not about to start any time soon. Anything private gets sent via GPG/PGP encrypted mail. I've helped quite a few people configure their mail clients to support PKI, and all it cost me was a bit of time. Yes, that takes a little bit of effort, but with freedom comes responsibility and work.
As for the XMPP points, as long as you're operating your own XMPP server (which is incredibly easy), you're not depending on a monopoly. While others may indeed be using mass market services that offer XMPP functionality, that's their choice, and if you feel like it you can teach family and friends how to operate their own servers as well. With freedom comes responsibility and work.
Regarding IP numbers, go ahead and get your own allocation from ARIN (or whoever your RIR happens to be). It's not that difficult, and if you want to go ahead and get an IPv6 allocation, you're going to have more IPs right off the bat than you'll know what to do with. You can then either help others understand why IPv6 is awesome, or wait until adoption becomes more widespread, or use 6-to-4 gateways, or a combination thereof. Sure, IP space isn't free of charge, but it's a fixed cost, and there's no such thing as a free lunch. Freedom to do what you want does not necessarily imply freedom from monetary cost.
For domain names, which of course aren't even strictly necessary for Internet communications, you have many options for registrars. Some are better than others. Some cost more, some cost less. Some are known for great service, and some are known for people like Bob Parsons, who I'd love to drag into a field and beat senseless. If you don't like the usual suspects for TLDs, you're free to choose a registrar in Whothefuckknowswhereitisistan if you like. With freedom comes responsibility and work.
Now, after saying all this, you're also totally free to set up something completely different that you exclusively control and convince other people to use it. However, that will probably cost you a lot more than everything described here, and then you have a completely different problem. The single point of control will indeed be you, with all the issues that entails. With freedom comes responsibility and work.
Human beings live in societies. To some extent, you will always be dependent on goods and services from someone else if you want to participate in society. You also have the option of living in a shack in the frozen north. You can probably guess what I'm going to say next.
I still don't have a Facebook account, and am no worse the wear for it. I have noted that of my family and friends who do have accounts, the ones who typically talk about their Facebook activity the most are definitely the women, and a lot of that talk seems to swing between gossip and outright vicious assaults. I'll just stay out of that mess, thanks.
See, what actually happened was Motorola engineers used faster than light neutrinos to retroactively prevent themselves from being retroactively sued, and thus nothing of the sort ever happened after it happened the first time it didn't happen.
I agree. That still doesn't change the fact that those same people will continue to buy products with Foxconn components in them, regardless of how much you tell them about the evils of Foxconn.
How many people here are willing to forgo purchases of anything that Foxconn is involved with from a manufacturing standpoint? Regardless of all the noble bluff and bluster that will inevitably fill the comments here, my guess is that approximately zero people here will actually vote with their wallets. Yes, that includes me.
s/be confessing/be no confessing/
Foxconn doesn't care about justifying their actions, or about being honest. Far from it, that's the entire point of hiring major league PR firms. There will be confessing of any truths, but there will be plenty of shiny happy propaganda spewed around the globe.
From my understanding, it wasn't the RCS that determined the sequence of events, not in the scope you're discussing. That was done one layer up. However, the changes were indeed tracked properly. It should be noted that I don't pretend to understand how this was done, as I didn't write the code that did it. Just as a stab in the dark, maybe it utilized keystroke logging as part of its sauce; again, I didn't have any hand in creating the system. What I do know is meaningful diffs, represented as native file format changes, with histories viewable as such, were represented across a huge variety of file formats. This was accomplished completely out of band from any of the applications that created the documents in the first place, and I agree that there is serious commercial value in it.
Unfortunately, I can virtually guarantee it will never see the light of day as a standalone document management system. My previous statements on the mentality surrounding "super secret IP" apply here, and that sucks, but the decision makers involved just aren't going to see eye to eye with me on it. Virtually any industry are packed full of really neat internal systems that solve all sorts of problems, with a ton of potential for application to other industries, but most of that code will never be available to anyone outside the organizations that created it. Again, it's unfortunate, but the people who pay to have systems developed and maintained get the privilege of determining where that code does or doesn't go.
Two of the SSDs I've seen suffer catastrophic failure were Intel. Maybe nobody ever got fired for buying Intel, but the drives became instant paperweights anyhow.
Everybody put on your flame retardant suits in preparation for the inevitable flame war between global warming believers and deniers, which will almost certainly drown out discussion of the technical specifics of the referenced materials.
Oh, I'm not referring to using RAM drives. I'm mostly referring to in-memory filesystem cache, which has a serious effect on performance. That said, using a RAM disk (notably things like /dev/shm on Linux, other platforms have different implementations) for temporary data instead of a disk (whether HDD or SSD) can provide fairly ridiculous additional performance improvements without having to modify any application code.
Put simply, I've got systems where the addition of a few GB of RAM essentially tripled overall performance.