I have found Open-AudIT to be a good tool for tracking the 'soft' side of the house with minimal pain while Kwok Information Server was a better tool for tracking 'hard' assets. Both are open source.
The US is a tad larger than New Jersey. Hell, there are many counties in the Desert West that are much larger than New Jersey.
I know people out East tend to think '20 miles' is a long way, but there are places in the Desert West where 'towns' (meaning two houses and the gas station/store) exist for the sole purpose of providing gasoline so you don't run your tank dry before the next 'town'. When you see a sign saying 'last gas next 100 miles' they mean it.
The US is freaking huge. We are only talking about roughly 830,000 acres of land (200 sites of 4160 acres spread over the entire country would do the whole trick). Compare that with the more than 8 MILLION acres of land that burned in last year's fires in the US.
Solar Thermal is a comparatively 'low impact' power source. You don't need to bring thousands of tons of coal to it annually by strip mining it, you don't have to pump hundreds of thousands gallons of oil, dig up and refine and dispose of nuclear fuel, or drown entire canyon ecologies to build a dam.
Environmentalists generally LOVE Solar Thermal. It is one of the most eco-friendly energy sources around.
I have to second this point. I am in the process of setting up a new site that needs to use a PHP based knowledgebase system. The raw performance numbers of the knowledgebase were absolutely abysmal (6 pages/second). I spent half a day working with the Apache 2.2 reverse proxy and got it up to 350 pages/second.
In real (that is inflation adjusted) dollars the minimum wage of $5.15/hour is only about 56% of what it was in 1968. You would have to earn $9.12/hour in 2005 dollars to have exactly the same earning power you would have had in 1968 earning minimum wage.
What your job managing a fast food joint demonstrated was not that US workers were lazy, but that only workers with virtually no bargaining power (because either they didn't have legal status or because they were too incompetent to hold any job) would work for $6.00/hour. And that to get competent workers at that wage that they had to dip into the illegal workers pool.
I remain contininually bemused by the news reports this year coming from the agricultural sector complaining about how they couldn't find enough workers this year because the crackdown on illegal immigration had scared away a large percentage of potential workers. But the one thing you didn't hear even suggested by the farmers was the possibility of hiring US citizens at a better wage. It wasn't that they could find workers: It was that they couldn't find workers willing to work at slave wages once you subtracted the illegal workers.
You don't understand: The election districts have been so gerrymandered (by both the Democrats and the Republicans) that the number of seats where it is thought to be even theoretically possible to defeat the incumbent of each party is generally considered to be less than 10% of the total seats. For the Democrats to take 4-6 Senate seats (out of only 33 up for election this year) and 28-30 House seats without losing a single seat of their own is an absolutely stunning thing.
Pollsters had characterized this election as a irresistible force (the 'tsunami' of public opinion against the Bush and the Republicans) vs the immovable object (the incredibly rigged system of incumbent protecting districts plus the advantages of incumbency in getting re-elected in general). Apparently the immovable object wasn't quite as immovable as the Republicans had hoped.
Google Trends for Fedora and other distributions
on
Fedora Core 6 Preview
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I'm still using FC5 on my desktop for now, largely because I found it the simplest to 'extend' with non-vendor apps and drivers (such as the proprietary ATI drivers and the intense multimedia support available via the Livna repository to replace the frankly useless sound and video "support" in the vanilla FC5). I am fairly likely to stick with it either until FC7 or until Ubuntu reaches the critical mass where most app and driver vendors explicitly support it as a preferred distro.
XSS is not unavoidable and it is a security vulnerability. Slashdot has a cookie based login system. This means that if there is an XSS vulnerability in Slashdot I can cause any action a logged in user (maybe, Commander Taco?) can cause by doing something as simple as tricking them into loading a web page with an 'invisible' 1 pixel tall frame exploiting the XSS.
Saying XSS isn't a security vulnerability is like claiming that leaving your house keys under the doormat isn't a security vulnerability.
You're right. I'll bet you that the University re-assigned the IP to another machine at some point without really being aware that it hosted openlinux.org once upon a time (while SCO completely forgot about it being in their DNS at all). And the new owner got funny HTTP access attempts to their Apache caused by old links. And one thing lead to another....
The 'www.openlinux.org' site is being served from the IP of a German University (131.188.40.90), and it is SCO's own name servers that are pointing there as far as I can tell. Also, although the 'Press Release' looks like it is being dynamically generated via ColdFusion, deleting the CGI parameters _delivers the same page_. It is a static page masquerading as a dynamic page.
Additionally, the webserver appears to be running the version of SSH that Fedora Core 3 uses...
An OpenLinux press announcement pretending to be delivered from a content management system released via a German University site running Fedora Core. Riiiiight.
Having actually RTFA, the author seems to make no distinction between feature requests and bugs. His first example of people wanting the product to run using something other than Microsoft SQL server isn't a bug: It's a feature request. His second example looked like a real bug: People using the company's product actually couldn't use it because it mis-behaved when it should not have.
He treated them as if they were an apples to apples comparision in terms of the decision of whether or not to 'fix' when in fact he was comparing a feature request to a bug fix.
Regardless, I found his entire argument weak. Software makers routinely ship software which, if it were a physical consumer product, would get the manufacturer their asses sued off for product defectiveness. I doubt an auto company would get very far in court by saying "the tires only fall off occasionally while driving." The stunning thing is that software companies don't get sued very often. They have done a phenomenal job of persuading the consumer that it is only to be expected that occasionally the steering wheel locks and the car drives over a cliff.
That is actually his complaint: Putting it in CVS DOESN'T allow most users to test the code. Putting it in a downloadable binary, tarball, RPM, SRPM or other essentially self-contained form DOES. Too many developers check things into CVS and ignore the fact that CVS/SubVersion/Other Revision Control System is a guarantee that you won't be able to readily obtain and compile it for the average person. There is a distinctly non-trivial learning curve associated with even the simplest RCS. As simple a thing as exporting a tarballed nighly snapshot of a CVS system helps non-developers tremendously.
You are committing the classic 'nature/nurture' error: It isn't 'Nature' OR 'Nurture' - it is 'Nature' AND 'Nurture'. If you don't have the talent - no amount of learning will make you the "best". Conversely, no amount of talent can overcome a fundamental lack of learned skills: Having the potential to be an Olympic athlete doesn't make you an Olympic athlete. That takes training in addition to having the innate potential.
Someone with low talent and weak learned skills isn't a programmer.
Someone with high talent and weak learned skills isn't a programmer, either.
Someone with low talent and strong learned skills is a good programmer, but not a "great" one.
Someone with high talent and strong learned skills is a great programmer.
Learning interacts with talent: The more talent you have, the easier it is to learn and apply skills.
Something I keep around for "young people are illiterate" discussions like this one.
"Students today can't prepare bark to calculate their problems.
They depend upon their slates which are more expensive. What will
they do when their slate is dropped and it breaks? They will be
unable to write!"
-Teachers Conference,1790
"Students today depend upon paper too much. They don't know how to
write on slate without getting chalk dust all over themselves. They
can't clean a slate properly. What will they do when they run out of
paper?"
-Principals Association, 1815
"Students today depend too much upon ink. They don't know how to use a
pen knife to sharpen a pencil. Pen and ink will never replace the
pencil!"
-National Association of Teachers, 1907
"Students today depend upon store bought ink. They don't know how to
make their own. When they run our of ink they will be unable to write
words or ciphers until their next trip to the settlement. This is a
sad commentary on modern education."
-The Rural American Teacher, 1929
"Students today depend upon these expensive fountain pens. They can
no longer write with a straight pen and nib (not to mention
sharpening their own quills). We parents must not allow them to
wallow in such luxury to the detriment of learning how to cope in
the real business world, which is not so extravagant."
-PTA Gazette,1941
"Ball point pens will be the ruin of education in our country. Students use these devices and then throw them away. The American virtues of thrift and frugality being discarded. Business and banks will never allow such expensive luxuries."
Do a Google groupd search for MySQL. Do a second one for Oracle.
Surprise! MySQL has 75% as many messages about it as Oracle does.
They damn well are competition. They are eating Oracle's entry market. Not everyone needs a super-duper database. A good enough free database trumps a extremely overpriced 'perfect' one in most applications.
BDB is used as a backend engine in MySQL. It is one of the two best backends - the other being InnoDB. Oddly enough, Oracle bought InnoDB about 3 months ago.
Thank you for omitting the detail that he is pushing Federal legislation with the backing of most of the Utah Congressional delegation. Which you would have known if you actually read the linked article.
That minor detail.
Sorry to interrupt. You can go back contemplating your lower colon now.
Not an urban legend: Concerned Women for America - Tell Department of Commerce to Nix.XXX Domain. It's the old "You can't give it legal recognition because that would imply approval of it." You see the same behavior from the Christian Right regarding condom distribution, sex education, needle exchange programs, anti-homophobia campaigns and any other thing they view as 'enabling sin'.
PHP is and will be continue to be popular with the masses simply because, like HTML, the entry barrier is very low. It will fail to make deep inroads at the high end for the same reason: The entry barrier is very low.
Sounds like a contradiction? Not really. The entry barrier for PHP is so low that we are seeing zillions of poorly written, insecure and unscalable PHP apps written by amateur programmers. Resulting in numerous security scares about PHP and contributing more than slightly to the infamous Slashdot Effect where a site that gets a sudden traffic surge craters as it runs out not of datapipe but simple CPU power. This scares the hell out of anyone who considers using PHP in the enterprise.
Don't get me wrong: It is possible to write good, secure, scalable code in PHP. It just isn't very common.
Uh huh. Try again. I'm neither trolling nor trying to be funny. I use Firefox on Linux as my primary browser on multiple machines - except when I need to be SURE that my browser won't decide to randomly crash when doing something as simple as loading my bookmark on google.com or clicking on a link to just about anywhere. Then I fire up VMWare and run either MSIE or Firefox for Windows.
I've been using browsers since Mosaic was state-of-the-art and that funny IMG tag was getting Marc A. flamed. Firefox on Linux is bar none the most unstable browser I use. I like the browser (why else would I use it as my primary browser?) - but even 1.0.7 is NOT terribly solid. If you use it heavily - it WILL crash.
Slashdot Mirror
I have found Open-AudIT to be a good tool for tracking the 'soft' side of the house with minimal pain while
Kwok Information Server was a better tool for tracking 'hard' assets. Both are open source.
The US is a tad larger than New Jersey. Hell, there are many counties in the Desert West that are much larger than New Jersey.
I know people out East tend to think '20 miles' is a long way, but there are places in the Desert West where 'towns' (meaning two houses and the gas station/store) exist for the sole purpose of providing gasoline so you don't run your tank dry before the next 'town'. When you see a sign saying 'last gas next 100 miles' they mean it.
The US is freaking huge. We are only talking about roughly 830,000 acres of land (200 sites of 4160 acres spread over the entire country would do the whole trick). Compare that with the more than 8 MILLION acres of land that burned in last year's fires in the US.
Solar Thermal is a comparatively 'low impact' power source. You don't need to bring thousands of tons of coal to it annually by strip mining it, you don't have to pump hundreds of thousands gallons of oil, dig up and refine and dispose of nuclear fuel, or drown entire canyon ecologies to build a dam.
Environmentalists generally LOVE Solar Thermal. It is one of the most eco-friendly energy sources around.
Right. So innovative that I only put a CPAN Perl module (CGI::PathInfo) up for that kind of crap, oh, SEVEN YEARS ago.
Looks like an elliptical with a dust lane obscuring a line across it. Could be an edge on spiral that happens to be in between us and the elliptical.
Yes. You can mount the old snapshot (while your current one is still running, mind you) and retrieve anything you want. Then unmount the old snapshot.
In real (that is inflation adjusted) dollars the minimum wage of $5.15/hour is only about 56% of what it was in 1968. You would have to earn $9.12/hour in 2005 dollars to have exactly the same earning power you would have had in 1968 earning minimum wage.
What your job managing a fast food joint demonstrated was not that US workers were lazy, but that only workers with virtually no bargaining power (because either they didn't have legal status or because they were too incompetent to hold any job) would work for $6.00/hour. And that to get competent workers at that wage that they had to dip into the illegal workers pool.
I remain contininually bemused by the news reports this year coming from the agricultural sector complaining about how they couldn't find enough workers this year because the crackdown on illegal immigration had scared away a large percentage of potential workers. But the one thing you didn't hear even suggested by the farmers was the possibility of hiring US citizens at a better wage. It wasn't that they could find workers: It was that they couldn't find workers willing to work at slave wages once you subtracted the illegal workers.
You don't understand: The election districts have been so gerrymandered (by both the Democrats and the Republicans) that the number of seats where it is thought to be even theoretically possible to defeat the incumbent of each party is generally considered to be less than 10% of the total seats. For the Democrats to take 4-6 Senate seats (out of only 33 up for election this year) and 28-30 House seats without losing a single seat of their own is an absolutely stunning thing.
Pollsters had characterized this election as a irresistible force (the 'tsunami' of public opinion against the Bush and the Republicans) vs the immovable object (the incredibly rigged system of incumbent protecting districts plus the advantages of incumbency in getting re-elected in general). Apparently the immovable object wasn't quite as immovable as the Republicans had hoped.
Based on http://www.google.com/trends?q=ubuntu%2C+fedora+%7 C+fc5+%7C+fc4+%7C+fc3%2C+RHEL+%7C+redhat+%7C+red+h at%2C++suse%2C+debian&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all at Google Trends, my belief is that RH and Fedora are losing ground while Ubuntu is making a serious run at becoming the most popular distribution.
I'm still using FC5 on my desktop for now, largely because I found it the simplest to 'extend' with non-vendor apps and drivers (such as the proprietary ATI drivers and the intense multimedia support available via the Livna repository to replace the frankly useless sound and video "support" in the vanilla FC5). I am fairly likely to stick with it either until FC7 or until Ubuntu reaches the critical mass where most app and driver vendors explicitly support it as a preferred distro.
XSS is not unavoidable and it is a security vulnerability. Slashdot has a cookie based login system. This means that if there is an XSS vulnerability in Slashdot I can cause any action a logged in user (maybe, Commander Taco?) can cause by doing something as simple as tricking them into loading a web page with an 'invisible' 1 pixel tall frame exploiting the XSS. Saying XSS isn't a security vulnerability is like claiming that leaving your house keys under the doormat isn't a security vulnerability.
You're right. I'll bet you that the University re-assigned the IP to another machine at some point without really being aware that it hosted openlinux.org once upon a time (while SCO completely forgot about it being in their DNS at all). And the new owner got funny HTTP access attempts to their Apache caused by old links. And one thing lead to another....
The 'www.openlinux.org' site is being served from the IP of a German University (131.188.40.90), and it is SCO's own name servers that are pointing there as far as I can tell. Also, although the 'Press Release' looks like it is being dynamically generated via ColdFusion, deleting the CGI parameters _delivers the same page_. It is a static page masquerading as a dynamic page.
Additionally, the webserver appears to be running the version of SSH that Fedora Core 3 uses...
An OpenLinux press announcement pretending to be delivered from a content management system released via a German University site running Fedora Core. Riiiiight.
I think SCO's nameserver has been subverted.
Having actually RTFA, the author seems to make no distinction between feature requests and bugs. His first example of people wanting the product to run using something other than Microsoft SQL server isn't a bug: It's a feature request. His second example looked like a real bug: People using the company's product actually couldn't use it because it mis-behaved when it should not have.
He treated them as if they were an apples to apples comparision in terms of the decision of whether or not to 'fix' when in fact he was comparing a feature request to a bug fix.
Regardless, I found his entire argument weak. Software makers routinely ship software which, if it were a physical consumer product, would get the manufacturer their asses sued off for product defectiveness. I doubt an auto company would get very far in court by saying "the tires only fall off occasionally while driving." The stunning thing is that software companies don't get sued very often. They have done a phenomenal job of persuading the consumer that it is only to be expected that occasionally the steering wheel locks and the car drives over a cliff.
"also allow users to test the code"
That is actually his complaint: Putting it in CVS DOESN'T allow most users to test the code. Putting it in a downloadable binary, tarball, RPM, SRPM or other essentially self-contained form DOES. Too many developers check things into CVS and ignore the fact that CVS/SubVersion/Other Revision Control System is a guarantee that you won't be able to readily obtain and compile it for the average person. There is a distinctly non-trivial learning curve associated with even the simplest RCS. As simple a thing as exporting a tarballed nighly snapshot of a CVS system helps non-developers tremendously.
Bingo.
The last sentence is the whole thing in the most concise form I have ever seen it stated.
You are committing the classic 'nature/nurture' error: It isn't 'Nature' OR 'Nurture' - it is 'Nature' AND 'Nurture'. If you don't have the talent - no amount of learning will make you the "best". Conversely, no amount of talent can overcome a fundamental lack of learned skills: Having the potential to be an Olympic athlete doesn't make you an Olympic athlete. That takes training in addition to having the innate potential.
Someone with low talent and weak learned skills isn't a programmer.
Someone with high talent and weak learned skills isn't a programmer, either.
Someone with low talent and strong learned skills is a good programmer, but not a "great" one.
Someone with high talent and strong learned skills is a great programmer.
Learning interacts with talent: The more talent you have, the easier it is to learn and apply skills.
Something I keep around for "young people are illiterate" discussions like this one.
"Students today can't prepare bark to calculate their problems.
They depend upon their slates which are more expensive. What will
they do when their slate is dropped and it breaks? They will be
unable to write!"
-Teachers Conference,1790
"Students today depend upon paper too much. They don't know how to
write on slate without getting chalk dust all over themselves. They
can't clean a slate properly. What will they do when they run out of
paper?"
-Principals Association, 1815
"Students today depend too much upon ink. They don't know how to use a
pen knife to sharpen a pencil. Pen and ink will never replace the
pencil!"
-National Association of Teachers, 1907
"Students today depend upon store bought ink. They don't know how to
make their own. When they run our of ink they will be unable to write
words or ciphers until their next trip to the settlement. This is a
sad commentary on modern education."
-The Rural American Teacher, 1929
"Students today depend upon these expensive fountain pens. They can
no longer write with a straight pen and nib (not to mention
sharpening their own quills). We parents must not allow them to
wallow in such luxury to the detriment of learning how to cope in
the real business world, which is not so extravagant."
-PTA Gazette,1941
"Ball point pens will be the ruin of education in our country. Students
use these devices and then throw them away. The American virtues of
thrift and frugality being discarded. Business and banks will never
allow such expensive luxuries."
-Federal Teacher, 1950
Do a Google groupd search for MySQL. Do a second one for Oracle.
Surprise! MySQL has 75% as many messages about it as Oracle does.
They damn well are competition. They are eating Oracle's entry market. Not everyone needs a super-duper database. A good enough free database trumps a extremely overpriced 'perfect' one in most applications.
BDB is used as a backend engine in MySQL. It is one of the two best backends - the other being InnoDB. Oddly enough, Oracle bought InnoDB about 3 months ago.
Sense a pattern?
Thank you for omitting the detail that he is pushing Federal legislation with the backing of most of the Utah Congressional delegation. Which you would have known if you actually read the linked article.
That minor detail.
Sorry to interrupt. You can go back contemplating your lower colon now.
Not an urban legend: Concerned Women for America - Tell Department of Commerce to Nix .XXX Domain. It's the old "You can't give it legal recognition because that would imply approval of it." You see the same behavior from the Christian Right regarding condom distribution, sex education, needle exchange programs, anti-homophobia campaigns and any other thing they view as 'enabling sin'.
Something about other governments wanting to impose censorship on the net?
Oh, you meant evil censorship of things the US government approves of rather than good censorship of things it disapproves of....
Glad to know they think they can crack it in only 90 days with a mere "super-computer".
Stupid gits.
PHP is and will be continue to be popular with the masses simply because, like HTML, the entry barrier is very low. It will fail to make deep inroads at the high end for the same reason: The entry barrier is very low.
Sounds like a contradiction? Not really. The entry barrier for PHP is so low that we are seeing zillions of poorly written, insecure and unscalable PHP apps written by amateur programmers. Resulting in numerous security scares about PHP and contributing more than slightly to the infamous Slashdot Effect where a site that gets a sudden traffic surge craters as it runs out not of datapipe but simple CPU power. This scares the hell out of anyone who considers using PHP in the enterprise.
Don't get me wrong: It is possible to write good, secure, scalable code in PHP. It just isn't very common.
Uh huh. Try again. I'm neither trolling nor trying to be funny. I use Firefox on Linux as my primary browser on multiple machines - except when I need to be SURE that my browser won't decide to randomly crash when doing something as simple as loading my bookmark on google.com or clicking on a link to just about anywhere. Then I fire up VMWare and run either MSIE or Firefox for Windows.
I've been using browsers since Mosaic was state-of-the-art and that funny IMG tag was getting Marc A. flamed. Firefox on Linux is bar none the most unstable browser I use. I like the browser (why else would I use it as my primary browser?) - but even 1.0.7 is NOT terribly solid. If you use it heavily - it WILL crash.