attacker may be able to send the passwd (hopefully shadow) file
I stopped reading after that. If a computer system doesn't use shadow passwords by now, err, change or upgrade.
Any root compromise is bad enough to assume that ALL accounts and passwords have also been compromised. Its too easy with sniffers, trojened apps, or what have you to obtain a password. This is why I say that passwords are not secure at all, its simply too easy to just give them to someone else.
2 passwords, none of them are words, easy to remember. anyone else have a few standard passwords?
I'm wierd about my passwords.
I have a very long and wierd password that unlocks my ssh private key and then I march around from box to box w/o having to use a password. Usually I only have to use my own password if I use sudo for something. OS X's keychain comes in handy too for passwords that I do not care about.
Personally, I have 1 password for root access that I tell noone. If others "need" to know the root password, I let them set it to something stupid and I never even remotely try to remember it (sudo works well for me).
I then have a scheme that I use for passwords where they are unique for each machine/site, but have a common extra characters in it to make it "secure".
IMHO, passwords are insecure, period. Most password based "breakins" come in 2 flavors. 1) Its incredibly weak like "joshua" in Wargames (the name of the user's son) or most common is 2) people give the password away via plaintext, people looking at their typing, typing the password in a wrong field and its visable, sticky notes, or any other way that they feel like simply giving the password away. Back when bash was lax about the permissions on.bash_history, I would look for passwords there. People used to do something like:
us - root typo on 'su', then the shell would say: bash: command not found: us and then the user would do: rootpasswordhere followed by: bash: command not found: rootpasswordhere and bash would store it in history for future reference (why bash stores unfound commands in history anyway is another question)
One account at a DOE lab that I have and never use insists on changing my password every X months with insane rules to make it "secure". It pisses me off so much that I have a mail filter to securly store those email reminders in/dev/null for future reference.
Companies are only as good as its best engineers, and yet top managers think engineers are dime a dozen like an accountant, so the bean counters do what they can do reduce costs and get subpar loosers who only program because its a job, not a passion and get subpar crud as result.
Companies are only as good as their mission and vision is good.
Chick-fil-a is probably one of the best fast food places ever. I'm basing this on personal preference, and the fact that its almost impossible to get food from one at lunchtime because of all the people waiting to get theirs.
They are closed on Sunday and actually pay their employees well for that kind of work. I find that their employees are the nicest and simply better than other ff places. They do stuff like remember to give me cream for my coffee and utensils to eat with.
In our real world, the engineers should get the 80k, and the manager should be on 60k.
That would be nice, but the best engineer told to produce shit will only produce good shit.
IMHO, Another good one is Mplayer for OSX. Here is what mplayer is (from this website):
This is not a typical ask.slashdot.org question that can be found by clicking on the 1st 10 links by copying and pasting the question in google.
I've tried mplayer and EVERYTHING else. I think mplayer was just too buggy. Don't remember what the showstopper was.
Currently, I use Whamb. Very nice program but does not play many music formats.
I also use MacAmpLite. Plays everything. Crashes occasionally. It does not play songs gapless. The playlist sucks balls unless you like lisening to live performances in random order.
VLC would be nice if it worked while I used my computer for something besides playing music. I guess there are threaded callback functions for reading/decoding data that timeout and I get spammed with error message diaglog boxes and skips.
I've mailed the author of PureAudio asking if he wanted help getting the player up to speed in terms of a plugin API or something. No answer.
I can code, I don't have the time or really the desire to start something from scratch. I've never developed a GUI for OS X and I'd like to have the experience, but I don't want to do it by myself.
Slashdot recently had a story on Audion, which sounds like it might fit your needs.
Trust me, I've looked at everything that remotely returns a result from google about media players and OS X. I've downloaded and played with Audion. I don't remember what I didn't like about, and I went to run it to jog my memory, and I've deleted it.
First, didn't they do something like buy nullsoft or at least winamp and kill it recently?
I wish, really, really wish they or someone would create a robust plugin enabled medial player for OS X. It would be nice to use one player instead of 3 just to listen to music from time to time.
20 years ago they told us the kind of underwear you choose (and we can include going commando here as a choice) determines sperm count.
Yeah, there was a skit from SNL in the 80s when tight pants, especially jeans, were popular that had a pair of jeans with a thermometer with an alarm in the zipper area.
Men on that continent remain sexually active well into their 80's.
Not to be rude, but I didn't know dead people were sexually active.
There has been a good amount of buzz lately in the news how African life expectancy was in the 30s now due to disease, famine, and other things that keep people from living.
Japanese are fanatics about thier elecronics. I had a Japanese friend from college and the last time I saw him, I guess he was 23 to 25 years old, and he and his girlfriend came to visit me and they had these little goofy digital pedometers that looked kinda like those pikachu (sp? whatever those things are) character guys or a cute little cat or something.
This was just a pedometer that counted steps. But these things had little messages that corresponded to I think the time of day and how much you walked, and they had little sayings on their LCD screens, and he and his girlfriend would compare and share what they said and laugh and giggle at them.
I didn't know his girlfriend, but I lived with the guy, and I knew him pretty well. He was not a geek. Not into computers, not engineering minded, I believe he was a business major, don't remember.
Another example that I saw on TV was with camera phones. We don't really want them here. I know noone that has one. We knock them all the time here on/. We say, I just want a phone dammit!
So, I was watching some show and Avril Lavine was doing a tour in Japan and she was doing something like walking from point A to B, and I saw a flood of phones up in the air taking pictures. I immediatly thought to myself, "Wow, that is where all that extra feature crap comes from. Some people actually like this stuff."
Also, you know the stereotyped Japanese tourist taking pictures all the time:)
The Japanese are largely status-seeking early-adopters, says the article, while most Americans just don't care. Fewer Americans are early adopters, and those of us who are into conspicuous consumption prefer non-technological money wasters, like big houses, Persian rugs, and so on.
Americans are early adaptors in things like music, movies, and fashion. Yeah, we can buy big houses here. Its difficult to find land for a place to live in Japan. Everything is smaller there like those pod type hotel rooms. That would not fly at all here in the US.
I've noticed similar kinds of cultural behavior with other Asian countries like Korea. They have these crazy robot toys (something I saw here on/. at some time ago). We Americans like toys that blow stuff up:)
I personally believe that the Firefox name kinda sucks for "normal" users. We all know what it is, but "Internet Explorer" is fairly descriptive. Albeit not creative, like most of Microsoft's product names, but easy to remember and intuitive.
I have a public account on my Mac for my friends and they could not figure out which thingy "got them on the internet". I created an alias for Camino, a Mac native port of Mozilla, on the desktop named "Internet", and the problem went away.
Just because it is listed in Add/Remove Software doesn't mean it is removed entirely.
Sad, but true.
FWIW, if a program is "Designed for Windows", with a logo and whatnot, it is supposed to register itself (and I guess work too, I doubt MSFT is that stringent though) in the Add/Remove Software control panel.
We should require by law that when a spyware application installs itself, it must uninstall another spyware application without damaging the host system, and further that it put itself into add/remove programs.
No we shouldn't. Fraud, deception, or other existing laws should be sufficient.
Regardless of the stored games being on the Xbox or not, is this a MSFT issue at all? (I'm assuming the copyrights of the games are not MSFT and someone elses. If any of them are indeed MSFT copyrighted games, I'm completly wrong).
Would you PLEASE, for the love of all that is good and holy, learn the freakin' difference between "communist" and "totalitarian".
Hold on. We have been fed this "communism" crap for around 60 years now, no need to get hostile over someone listening to the news and reading the newspaper for ones whole life filled with FUD and then expect informed opinions to be made.
Here in America, we have been taught that democracy == capitolism and that communism != democracy. Democracy == good, therefore communism != good.
Communism is more of an economic system than a government. Under ideal communism the government would disappear, its wierd, but not bad. Looks great on paper and seems to work best with smaller societies. Capitolism is an economic system. Democracy is a government system. And totalitarianism is a government system. Most communist economies have socialist governments. We have and like socialist-like things in our society like government paid for and maintained roads. Nobody likes tolls. We have and like socialist programs like fire and police being owned by the government. People used to have to pay for fire service, and if they didn't have a fire plaque on their house, the fire department would go back to the firehouse. I'm not the best to describe these things but this should be OK for/.
When I was a child and we suffered through the long and terrible "Cold War" (survivors can get thier medals here no this is not a joke), I was taught to hate and fear "communists". Their economic system was going to start WWIII and poof, the whole world is going to disappear because of them.
Guess which brand of enemy has replaced the commies now?
Man, sometimes I wish I liked playing these kinds of games on people. It looks kind fun, but I'm way too upfront and honest for that.
"College has little to do with learning" No, College has EVERYTHING to do with learning.
I have met very few recent graduates that have learned sufficient knowledge, skills, and abilities from school to be of any use to me from from college to be of any value in the workforce.
Job ads say things like "college degree required". I have never seen one that says "one must have learned X from college". My degree is in Psychology. I have never had a computer class in my life. I am currently a UNIX sysadmin, and have done that or programmed for a carrer for the past 7 or 8 years.
I've taken a few classes over the internet, and have learned just as well in them as I did in my regular classes.
That is great for your personal learning and achievements, but an employer probably could care less if you learned whatever from an internet class or not.
Remember, I got a degree in Psych, and I was taught that learning was "a relatively permanant change in behavior". If you "learned" how to be a brain surgeon from taking an online course or even by getting a degree, you will _never_ be operating on people's brains until you have _demonstrated_, ie learned, the proper skills to do such a thing. Things like residency, hands on expierience, etc.
Few college graduates truly learn much in their field after 4 years of college. Those that do have done things outside of class. There are exceptions, especiall for better schools, but I'm confident that this applies to well over 95% of the college graduates out there.
The best part of classes over the net is that you can show up in your underware and drink through the ENTIRE class without ever getting in trouble.
And those perks are not valuable in the workforce. Again, its great for your personal achievements, but not too valuable elsewhere.
The real victim here is any online College or University that's trying to become a credible institution.
Not really. I've never known anyone to take online classes, nor have I looked at them, but when seeing stuff like TV ads for "Phoenix University Online", I would not put too much credibility for someone that "went" there.
College has little to do with learning or grades, its a rite of passage, and a general skills game for things like problem solving, meeting deadlines, communication, etc. Very few of these skills, especially communication, can be done via an online course.
I'm glad you're happy with mac, and I hope you can accept that I'm happy with Linux.
Dude, I've got some kind of masochistic whatever with this tread. Its amusing I guess.
The deal here is that it appears as though we are in some kind of Ford vs Chevy argument, but we are not. Its more like Ford or Chevy vs Porsche or Ferrari.
I mean really. There is not that much functional difference between Macs and Linux. As I have said, I've used Linux for a good while. I'm paid quite well to do it, and the same people bought me my PowerBook. I used Linux for my personal computer exclusively from 1997 until earlier this year. Before that I dual booted windows 95. I hated Macs up to OS X.
Lets compare my last laptop to my current one.
Old laptop. HP something. Came with XP on it, so I had to go and find a Linux CD and put Linux on it. Come to find out that that only a CVS version of X works on it after emailing with people at Intel about the video chipset on my laptop. I get the CVS version of X and compile it. Now I have violated the whole package management system (yes, I could have put this in a package, but whatever). Regardless of what kernel I tried or which ACPI patches I applied, power management and fancy stuff like knowing when my battery was going to die did not work. The modem never worked with Linux. Yeah, it wasn't really a modem, but rather a winmodem, but I guess I don't need a modem that bad in case of an emergency. I already said what I had to do with symlinks to get mobile network connectivity to work. The laptop never had a wireless card, and although its been a year or so since I've played with the CVS wireless stuff that did not work for 802.11a access points, that might be working now, but wireless does not seem to be Linux' forte either. Then I had to do something to get TTF fonts to work so X was bearable. I had to steal the ttf fonts from Windows. Then there was RPM fun, and tweaking, etc.
All that to get to a less than functional level of Windows that came with the laptop.
For my Mac, I basically turned it on, and within minutes I was downloading updates over my wireless access point that I had never used before. I installed fink to get some extra software that I'm used to using, and sudo apt-get installed away. I downloaded cool apps and either went through a simple installer or just DNDed the app into/Applications, and was done. I then downloaded my dotfiles from CVS and had to change one line in the path statement, and my shell (zsh) was working like it does on my Solaris and Linux accounts.
What have I come to like about OS X? Printing is easy to set up and works nicely. The dialog boxes make sense. Something that Windows developers never got a hold of. For example, dialog boxes in Linux or Windows typically always have OK and Cancel buttons on them. On OS X, the save dialog says Save and Cancel or in some cases, clearly "Don't Save". The network stuff works. The wireless stuff works. Power management works. The terminal application is clearly the best I have every used. I was blown away when text that was wider than the screen would auto adjust when resizing a window -- something that annoyed me for years just went away. Drop shadows look nice and give a sense of depth between applications and windows. Widgets are uniform and nice looking in all apps. Keyboard shortcust are consistant between apps. Cut and paste works. DND works. Transparancy in windows is cool. Dual monitors just worked. The time is always correct. Expose is cool. Quicksilver is cool. I could really go on, and on. Its just a very professional, nice looking, and non annoying OS. Aside from the OS, the laptop itself is nicer than any laptop in the PC world has to offer. The keys are backlit. The battery has a battery level indicator on it. The power button shuts down the system cleanly. It sleeps and wakes up nice when closing the display. The display is nice. It auto adjusts according to ambien
I see American society focused more on work than education.
Thats kinda ironic. Being that there are those "stay in school" programs are BS. Its been demonstrated that people that drop out of HS and go to work are better off than those who finish and stop at a HS diploma. Why? Because they work and make money and gain skills, experience and seniority vs those that sit in class.
Although those in the US expect more, they also work more hours than other countries.
I personally have a big problem with this. Shouldn't people do more for themselves and thier families besides leave them and work for someone else?
My roomate works 50-60 hours a week. However, he can't seem to manage to pay me a meager $300 that he owes me for rent. This is in a 4 bedroom house in a nice neighborhood. My morgage is about $1,000 a month. I don't need the money, but if someone can't afford $300 a month for a nice place to live (ie, cheaper than any other place I know of including some pretty ghetto stuff) and works 50-60 hours a week. My God! I suggested he should do something besides volunteer work, but he never listens to my suggestions. I guess he's too busy working.
The construction worker looks down on the engineer because they don't know "hard work." It extends even to intellectual professions, the coder who believes they are doing all the "hard work" looks down upon the designer/manager.
I've worked constuction and I've been the coder before. The reason that this resentment exists is twofold. 1) The coder/construction worker has to go though hoops and various BS because the engineer/designer/manager usually have no clue as to what is really required to make something happen. Trust me, looking at blueprints sometimes, we would look at each other and question what in the world the engineer was thinking. 2) They work "harder" with less pay and all of thier work only makes the upper guys look good. Ask an engineer and a construction worker about their experience on something like a bridge. The engineer says "Look at what I designed, and had built" The construction worker says "I put rivets on that bridge". There is a big cognative difference between the two.
And you get to sit in your air conditioned office for 8 hours a day.
Yeah, and my blue collar friends are actually in shape and have women want to fuck them.
Then when you are hungry you go to have meals prepared by the guy sweating over a hot stove for 10 hours a day before he works his other part time job delivering papers, yet he only makes 20k.
Yup:) I'll never, ever forget when I worked at a place and I saw some guy come every week with his stinky truck and clean out the portapoties. I'm sorry dude, but I would never do that job. For any pay. Some people simply have lower opinions of themselves. In India, they had the caste system to take care of the "dirty work". Now everyone is told they are equal, so go and suck that shit out of the portapoty. Gross.
Some people are naturally smart, some people are naturally beautiful, its just luck of genetics.
The problem with American education is that it doesn't take into account genetic differences. It tries to keep everybody at the same level, thus slowing down the progress of those who could learn more.
Very true. I hate the American myth that "every man is created equal". That is so far from the truth. Taller men have significant advantage over shorter ones (something like all but 2 presidents of the US are in the 90th percentile for height or something like that). Good looking people earn more and have more friends, etc than those that are less attractive. Smarter people, people from better familes, etc. Those are the breaks.
That "every man is created equal" myth definitely applies to education as well. We used to have "talented and gifted" programs in school, but had to do away from them because they excluded stupid people, or at least anyone not in that program was viewed as being neither talented nor gifted. Its OK to have tryouts for football though.
Slashdot Mirror
attacker may be able to send the passwd (hopefully shadow) file
I stopped reading after that. If a computer system doesn't use shadow passwords by now, err, change or upgrade.
Any root compromise is bad enough to assume that ALL accounts and passwords have also been compromised. Its too easy with sniffers, trojened apps, or what have you to obtain a password. This is why I say that passwords are not secure at all, its simply too easy to just give them to someone else.
2 passwords, none of them are words, easy to remember. anyone else have a few standard passwords?
.bash_history, I would look for passwords there. People used to do something like:
/dev/null for future reference.
I'm wierd about my passwords.
I have a very long and wierd password that unlocks my ssh private key and then I march around from box to box w/o having to use a password. Usually I only have to use my own password if I use sudo for something. OS X's keychain comes in handy too for passwords that I do not care about.
Personally, I have 1 password for root access that I tell noone. If others "need" to know the root password, I let them set it to something stupid and I never even remotely try to remember it (sudo works well for me).
I then have a scheme that I use for passwords where they are unique for each machine/site, but have a common extra characters in it to make it "secure".
IMHO, passwords are insecure, period. Most password based "breakins" come in 2 flavors. 1) Its incredibly weak like "joshua" in Wargames (the name of the user's son) or most common is 2) people give the password away via plaintext, people looking at their typing, typing the password in a wrong field and its visable, sticky notes, or any other way that they feel like simply giving the password away. Back when bash was lax about the permissions on
us - root typo on 'su', then the shell would say:
bash: command not found: us and then the user would do:
rootpasswordhere followed by:
bash: command not found: rootpasswordhere and bash would store it in history for future reference (why bash stores unfound commands in history anyway is another question)
One account at a DOE lab that I have and never use insists on changing my password every X months with insane rules to make it "secure". It pisses me off so much that I have a mail filter to securly store those email reminders in
Passwords suck.
Companies are only as good as its best engineers, and yet top managers think engineers are dime a dozen like an accountant, so the bean counters do what they can do reduce costs and get subpar loosers who only program because its a job, not a passion and get subpar crud as result.
Companies are only as good as their mission and vision is good.
Chick-fil-a is probably one of the best fast food places ever. I'm basing this on personal preference, and the fact that its almost impossible to get food from one at lunchtime because of all the people waiting to get theirs.
They are closed on Sunday and actually pay their employees well for that kind of work. I find that their employees are the nicest and simply better than other ff places. They do stuff like remember to give me cream for my coffee and utensils to eat with.
In our real world, the engineers should get the 80k, and the manager should be on 60k.
That would be nice, but the best engineer told to produce shit will only produce good shit.
The software is just a means to an end: To make money selling music.
Note to self: Software companies write software to make money.
IMHO, Another good one is Mplayer for OSX. Here is what mplayer is (from this website):
This is not a typical ask.slashdot.org question that can be found by clicking on the 1st 10 links by copying and pasting the question in google.
I've tried mplayer and EVERYTHING else. I think mplayer was just too buggy. Don't remember what the showstopper was.
Currently, I use Whamb. Very nice program but does not play many music formats.
I also use MacAmpLite. Plays everything. Crashes occasionally. It does not play songs gapless. The playlist sucks balls unless you like lisening to live performances in random order.
The PureAudio url is http://homepage.mac.com/steve_bryan/FileSharing11
I've tried EVERYTHING available for OS X.
VLC would be nice if it worked while I used my computer for something besides playing music. I guess there are threaded callback functions for reading/decoding data that timeout and I get spammed with error message diaglog boxes and skips.
I've mailed the author of PureAudio asking if he wanted help getting the player up to speed in terms of a plugin API or something. No answer.
The same with Whamb. No answer.
I can code, I don't have the time or really the desire to start something from scratch. I've never developed a GUI for OS X and I'd like to have the experience, but I don't want to do it by myself.
Slashdot recently had a story on Audion, which sounds like it might fit your needs.
Trust me, I've looked at everything that remotely returns a result from google about media players and OS X. I've downloaded and played with Audion. I don't remember what I didn't like about, and I went to run it to jog my memory, and I've deleted it.
Thanks, but Audion doesn't cut it either.
First, didn't they do something like buy nullsoft or at least winamp and kill it recently?
I wish, really, really wish they or someone would create a robust plugin enabled medial player for OS X. It would be nice to use one player instead of 3 just to listen to music from time to time.
20 years ago they told us the kind of underwear you choose (and we can include going commando here as a choice) determines sperm count.
Yeah, there was a skit from SNL in the 80s when tight pants, especially jeans, were popular that had a pair of jeans with a thermometer with an alarm in the zipper area.
Pretty funny.
Men on that continent remain sexually active well into their 80's.
Not to be rude, but I didn't know dead people were sexually active.
There has been a good amount of buzz lately in the news how African life expectancy was in the 30s now due to disease, famine, and other things that keep people from living.
1) don't really want them very badly
/. We say, I just want a phone dammit!
:)
/. at some time ago). We Americans like toys that blow stuff up :)
That is it. Its a cultural difference.
Japanese are fanatics about thier elecronics. I had a Japanese friend from college and the last time I saw him, I guess he was 23 to 25 years old, and he and his girlfriend came to visit me and they had these little goofy digital pedometers that looked kinda like those pikachu (sp? whatever those things are) character guys or a cute little cat or something.
This was just a pedometer that counted steps. But these things had little messages that corresponded to I think the time of day and how much you walked, and they had little sayings on their LCD screens, and he and his girlfriend would compare and share what they said and laugh and giggle at them.
I didn't know his girlfriend, but I lived with the guy, and I knew him pretty well. He was not a geek. Not into computers, not engineering minded, I believe he was a business major, don't remember.
Another example that I saw on TV was with camera phones. We don't really want them here. I know noone that has one. We knock them all the time here on
So, I was watching some show and Avril Lavine was doing a tour in Japan and she was doing something like walking from point A to B, and I saw a flood of phones up in the air taking pictures. I immediatly thought to myself, "Wow, that is where all that extra feature crap comes from. Some people actually like this stuff."
Also, you know the stereotyped Japanese tourist taking pictures all the time
The Japanese are largely status-seeking early-adopters, says the article, while most Americans just don't care. Fewer Americans are early adopters, and those of us who are into conspicuous consumption prefer non-technological money wasters, like big houses, Persian rugs, and so on.
Americans are early adaptors in things like music, movies, and fashion. Yeah, we can buy big houses here. Its difficult to find land for a place to live in Japan. Everything is smaller there like those pod type hotel rooms. That would not fly at all here in the US.
I've noticed similar kinds of cultural behavior with other Asian countries like Korea. They have these crazy robot toys (something I saw here on
Is anyone out there giving any thought to how a programming language should be structured to make it easy to code using a speech recognition engine?
Wow. Never thought of that. (f)lex for spoken language.
Scary.
Soon we will have yalc. Where l = language and c = compiler, so we will have "yet another language compiler" like we have yacc.
I personally believe that the Firefox name kinda sucks for "normal" users. We all know what it is, but "Internet Explorer" is fairly descriptive. Albeit not creative, like most of Microsoft's product names, but easy to remember and intuitive.
I have a public account on my Mac for my friends and they could not figure out which thingy "got them on the internet". I created an alias for Camino, a Mac native port of Mozilla, on the desktop named "Internet", and the problem went away.
Just because it is listed in Add/Remove Software doesn't mean it is removed entirely.
Sad, but true.
FWIW, if a program is "Designed for Windows", with a logo and whatnot, it is supposed to register itself (and I guess work too, I doubt MSFT is that stringent though) in the Add/Remove Software control panel.
We should require by law that when a spyware application installs itself, it must uninstall another spyware application without damaging the host system, and further that it put itself into add/remove programs.
No we shouldn't. Fraud, deception, or other existing laws should be sufficient.
IANAG (I Am Not A Gamer) and of course IANAL
Regardless of the stored games being on the Xbox or not, is this a MSFT issue at all? (I'm assuming the copyrights of the games are not MSFT and someone elses. If any of them are indeed MSFT copyrighted games, I'm completly wrong).
Would you PLEASE, for the love of all that is good and holy, learn the freakin' difference between "communist" and "totalitarian".
/.
Hold on. We have been fed this "communism" crap for around 60 years now, no need to get hostile over someone listening to the news and reading the newspaper for ones whole life filled with FUD and then expect informed opinions to be made.
Here in America, we have been taught that democracy == capitolism and that communism != democracy. Democracy == good, therefore communism != good.
Communism is more of an economic system than a government. Under ideal communism the government would disappear, its wierd, but not bad. Looks great on paper and seems to work best with smaller societies. Capitolism is an economic system. Democracy is a government system. And totalitarianism is a government system. Most communist economies have socialist governments. We have and like socialist-like things in our society like government paid for and maintained roads. Nobody likes tolls. We have and like socialist programs like fire and police being owned by the government. People used to have to pay for fire service, and if they didn't have a fire plaque on their house, the fire department would go back to the firehouse. I'm not the best to describe these things but this should be OK for
When I was a child and we suffered through the long and terrible "Cold War" (survivors can get thier medals here no this is not a joke), I was taught to hate and fear "communists". Their economic system was going to start WWIII and poof, the whole world is going to disappear because of them.
Guess which brand of enemy has replaced the commies now?
Man, sometimes I wish I liked playing these kinds of games on people. It looks kind fun, but I'm way too upfront and honest for that.
"College has little to do with learning" No, College has EVERYTHING to do with learning.
I have met very few recent graduates that have learned sufficient knowledge, skills, and abilities from school to be of any use to me from from college to be of any value in the workforce.
Job ads say things like "college degree required". I have never seen one that says "one must have learned X from college". My degree is in Psychology. I have never had a computer class in my life. I am currently a UNIX sysadmin, and have done that or programmed for a carrer for the past 7 or 8 years.
I've taken a few classes over the internet, and have learned just as well in them as I did in my regular classes.
That is great for your personal learning and achievements, but an employer probably could care less if you learned whatever from an internet class or not.
Remember, I got a degree in Psych, and I was taught that learning was "a relatively permanant change in behavior". If you "learned" how to be a brain surgeon from taking an online course or even by getting a degree, you will _never_ be operating on people's brains until you have _demonstrated_, ie learned, the proper skills to do such a thing. Things like residency, hands on expierience, etc.
Few college graduates truly learn much in their field after 4 years of college. Those that do have done things outside of class. There are exceptions, especiall for better schools, but I'm confident that this applies to well over 95% of the college graduates out there.
The best part of classes over the net is that you can show up in your underware and drink through the ENTIRE class without ever getting in trouble.
And those perks are not valuable in the workforce. Again, its great for your personal achievements, but not too valuable elsewhere.
The real victim here is any online College or University that's trying to become a credible institution.
Not really. I've never known anyone to take online classes, nor have I looked at them, but when seeing stuff like TV ads for "Phoenix University Online", I would not put too much credibility for someone that "went" there.
College has little to do with learning or grades, its a rite of passage, and a general skills game for things like problem solving, meeting deadlines, communication, etc. Very few of these skills, especially communication, can be done via an online course.
1) Don't take candy from strangers.
2) Don't open email attachments from strangers.
-Mom and Dad
You must mean OS/2. But they didn't sell that off. I don't even think they could give that thing away, much less sell it.
No, I believe he did mean PS/2.
Oh, and you do realize that many banks use OS/2 and many if not most ATM machines currently run OS/2 right? And its supported until 2006?
And yet, Dell's tech support is in India, whereas IBM's tech support is in the US. Hmm...
IBM is known for "bigiron" stuff that works well with support that is borderline insane. Example, OS/2 is still supported.
Dell is known for cheap, decent quality PCs. Example, "Dude, your getting a Dell!"
Yeah, OS X can spell check in any text widget. Oh and take this example. You have this in a text box:
this stuff
You double click on stuff, it highlights the word. Now cut the text to the clipboard. You get:
this[ no space here]
Pretty slick.
I'm glad you're happy with mac, and I hope you can accept that I'm happy with Linux.
/Applications, and was done. I then downloaded my dotfiles from CVS and had to change one line in the path statement, and my shell (zsh) was working like it does on my Solaris and Linux accounts.
Dude, I've got some kind of masochistic whatever with this tread. Its amusing I guess.
The deal here is that it appears as though we are in some kind of Ford vs Chevy argument, but we are not. Its more like Ford or Chevy vs Porsche or Ferrari.
I mean really. There is not that much functional difference between Macs and Linux. As I have said, I've used Linux for a good while. I'm paid quite well to do it, and the same people bought me my PowerBook. I used Linux for my personal computer exclusively from 1997 until earlier this year. Before that I dual booted windows 95. I hated Macs up to OS X.
Lets compare my last laptop to my current one.
Old laptop. HP something. Came with XP on it, so I had to go and find a Linux CD and put Linux on it. Come to find out that that only a CVS version of X works on it after emailing with people at Intel about the video chipset on my laptop. I get the CVS version of X and compile it. Now I have violated the whole package management system (yes, I could have put this in a package, but whatever). Regardless of what kernel I tried or which ACPI patches I applied, power management and fancy stuff like knowing when my battery was going to die did not work. The modem never worked with Linux. Yeah, it wasn't really a modem, but rather a winmodem, but I guess I don't need a modem that bad in case of an emergency. I already said what I had to do with symlinks to get mobile network connectivity to work. The laptop never had a wireless card, and although its been a year or so since I've played with the CVS wireless stuff that did not work for 802.11a access points, that might be working now, but wireless does not seem to be Linux' forte either. Then I had to do something to get TTF fonts to work so X was bearable. I had to steal the ttf fonts from Windows. Then there was RPM fun, and tweaking, etc.
All that to get to a less than functional level of Windows that came with the laptop.
For my Mac, I basically turned it on, and within minutes I was downloading updates over my wireless access point that I had never used before. I installed fink to get some extra software that I'm used to using, and sudo apt-get installed away. I downloaded cool apps and either went through a simple installer or just DNDed the app into
What have I come to like about OS X? Printing is easy to set up and works nicely. The dialog boxes make sense. Something that Windows developers never got a hold of. For example, dialog boxes in Linux or Windows typically always have OK and Cancel buttons on them. On OS X, the save dialog says Save and Cancel or in some cases, clearly "Don't Save". The network stuff works. The wireless stuff works. Power management works. The terminal application is clearly the best I have every used. I was blown away when text that was wider than the screen would auto adjust when resizing a window -- something that annoyed me for years just went away. Drop shadows look nice and give a sense of depth between applications and windows. Widgets are uniform and nice looking in all apps. Keyboard shortcust are consistant between apps. Cut and paste works. DND works. Transparancy in windows is cool. Dual monitors just worked. The time is always correct. Expose is cool. Quicksilver is cool. I could really go on, and on. Its just a very professional, nice looking, and non annoying OS. Aside from the OS, the laptop itself is nicer than any laptop in the PC world has to offer. The keys are backlit. The battery has a battery level indicator on it. The power button shuts down the system cleanly. It sleeps and wakes up nice when closing the display. The display is nice. It auto adjusts according to ambien
I see American society focused more on work than education.
:) I'll never, ever forget when I worked at a place and I saw some guy come every week with his stinky truck and clean out the portapoties. I'm sorry dude, but I would never do that job. For any pay. Some people simply have lower opinions of themselves. In India, they had the caste system to take care of the "dirty work". Now everyone is told they are equal, so go and suck that shit out of the portapoty. Gross.
Thats kinda ironic. Being that there are those "stay in school" programs are BS. Its been demonstrated that people that drop out of HS and go to work are better off than those who finish and stop at a HS diploma. Why? Because they work and make money and gain skills, experience and seniority vs those that sit in class.
Although those in the US expect more, they also work more hours than other countries.
I personally have a big problem with this. Shouldn't people do more for themselves and thier families besides leave them and work for someone else?
My roomate works 50-60 hours a week. However, he can't seem to manage to pay me a meager $300 that he owes me for rent. This is in a 4 bedroom house in a nice neighborhood. My morgage is about $1,000 a month. I don't need the money, but if someone can't afford $300 a month for a nice place to live (ie, cheaper than any other place I know of including some pretty ghetto stuff) and works 50-60 hours a week. My God! I suggested he should do something besides volunteer work, but he never listens to my suggestions. I guess he's too busy working.
The construction worker looks down on the engineer because they don't know "hard work." It extends even to intellectual professions, the coder who believes they are doing all the "hard work" looks down upon the designer/manager.
I've worked constuction and I've been the coder before. The reason that this resentment exists is twofold. 1) The coder/construction worker has to go though hoops and various BS because the engineer/designer/manager usually have no clue as to what is really required to make something happen. Trust me, looking at blueprints sometimes, we would look at each other and question what in the world the engineer was thinking. 2) They work "harder" with less pay and all of thier work only makes the upper guys look good. Ask an engineer and a construction worker about their experience on something like a bridge. The engineer says "Look at what I designed, and had built" The construction worker says "I put rivets on that bridge". There is a big cognative difference between the two.
And you get to sit in your air conditioned office for 8 hours a day.
Yeah, and my blue collar friends are actually in shape and have women want to fuck them.
Then when you are hungry you go to have meals prepared by the guy sweating over a hot stove for 10 hours a day before he works his other part time job delivering papers, yet he only makes 20k.
Yup
Some people are naturally smart, some people are naturally beautiful, its just luck of genetics.
The problem with American education is that it doesn't take into account genetic differences. It tries to keep everybody at the same level, thus slowing down the progress of those who could learn more.
Very true. I hate the American myth that "every man is created equal". That is so far from the truth. Taller men have significant advantage over shorter ones (something like all but 2 presidents of the US are in the 90th percentile for height or something like that). Good looking people earn more and have more friends, etc than those that are less attractive. Smarter people, people from better familes, etc. Those are the breaks.
That "every man is created equal" myth definitely applies to education as well. We used to have "talented and gifted" programs in school, but had to do away from them because they excluded stupid people, or at least anyone not in that program was viewed as being neither talented nor gifted. Its OK to have tryouts for football though.