What the commenter doesn't get is that the movie is about fantasy. It's not trying to be a realistic portrayal of life as a spy, it's about selling copies, giving kids a fantastical role model, and being down right entertaining.
But that's the point. In a case of perfect timing,
I've just got back to the office having come from
seeing "Die another day", and here I find a Slashdot
article about it. My biggest complaint about the
film is that the gadgets (and the stunts) are
just *too* unrealistic, and yes, that does spoil
the entertainment factor of the whole film. Sure,
I enjoyed it, but I would have enjoyed it more if
I hadn't been sitting there imagining some
clueless creative type saying "it would be really
cool if Bond did this, or had that gadget". I can
suspend belief for a film as much as anyone, but
they're just pushing it too far nowadays. Oh, and
the theme tune was a big let down, too. Definitely
not in the same category as Bond films of
yesteryear. Don't get me wrong, it's a decent
film, and worth seeing, but I just think it could
have been much better with a little more attention
to detail, and a little less sensationalism.
Well, not to offend, but as a woman I'd like to see this sort of nasty, abusive, objectifying, revolting stuff removed entirely from the system.
The point you're missing is that I wouldn't
want this removed.
People have different points of view about what's
offensive, and what's not. For example, I fail to
see how the post was any of the things you listed,
apart from perhaps revolting, but even that's
completely subjective. So why should your wishes override mine? The only solution to this
problem is to let the community decide what's
suitable, and the mechanism for that is moderation.
Sure, it was offtopic. But moderation
had already taken care of it by the time I got to it.
'm not sure I could code as well without the underlying knowledge of what was happening under the abstraction. It's just too useful when something goes wrong...
I can't agree with this strongly enough. Anyone can
become a competent coder with relative ease. But
unless you can write assembly, you'll never become
a truly great coder. I'm not claiming
you'll need to actually write any assembly -- I haven't
had to for probably 10 years or so. But the very
fact that you can means that you'll
have a better understanding of what's happening
underneath your high level abstractions, which
will in turn make you a better coder. In 20 years
or writing code, I haven't yet seen any exceptions
to this...
I'm surprised no one's mentioned tesco.com yet. It's
the world's largest online grocery delivery service,
with revenues of over $560m last year, and it's
running an operating profit. They've just started
expanding out of the UK and have launched in the
US in a partnership with Safeway. The unique thing
about them is that rather than have a huge
distribution centre somewhere, they make use of
their existing bricks and mortar infrastructure.
When you place an order, it gets sent through to
your nearest store where a member of staff goes
and picks it off the shelf for you, and it's
delivered the next day (within a 2 hour timeslot
you request, too). I've been using them for a
while now, and have few complaints (other than
a few IE-isms on the web site).
So how *do* I get pictures in web-pages? Is it only PNG now and stuff the older browsers?
Yes. And you have to be getting really quite old
before you hit a browser that doesn't support PNG
in *some* fashion. If you avoid PNG's alpha channel,
then virtually all browsers will support it, and
you're no worse off than you were with GIFs. In
time, enough browsers will properly support
transparent PNGs that it'll be sensible to use
them (IMHO, that cutoff time is almost here
anyway).
Not quite... it's been 15 years since X moved
from X10 to X11. That's a testament to the strength
of the design -- that the protocol hasn't needed
to change despite all the changes that have happened
since 1987. It was designed to be extensible, so
that now all the new goodies are available via
extensions without
breaking backwards compatibility. I only wish all
software was as well designed as X.
Even Real Networks has a community supported player for UNIX/Linux.
Yes. Interesting naming they've chosen there.
It's closed source, and hence not even remotely supportable by the community. What they're trying
to say is "unsupported by Real Networks". There
really isn't anything the community can do. It
either works or it doesn't in the form they supply
it.
In a lot of MoD places the hard drives in sensitive machines are removable.... and are locked in a safe overnight.
When I worked there, the hard drives for non-sensitive
machines were removed and locked in a safe overnight. They were in what they called 4-hour
storage cupboards -- fireproof, and rated to take
at least 4 hours to break in without
damaging the contents.
I remember when the keys were lost for one of
them. It took many, many hours to drill out the
lock to gain access.
The sensitive machines were already effectively
in a safe anyway. Physical access to the main
server rooms was nigh on impossible in the first
place.
but unless every machine allowed to connect to those networks is physically locked down, every IO port disabled, and every removable media drive locked with a physical device, you're going to have people downloading sensitive material and moving it on to unsecured networks.
When I worked for the British Ministry of Defense,
yes, every machine on sensitive networks
had physical access restrictions,
none of them came with any form of removable media, and there was an air gap between them and
the rest of the world.
On the flip side, implementing for "The X Window System" (I think I got that right. ..) means that development is always going to be playing catch up to Microsoft.
Sigh. No. There's nothing about X11 that dictates
that. In fact, in many respects, X11 is far more
advanced than Windows. It's down to the authors of
the application as to whether they want to copy
or to innovate. Sadly with Evolution, they seem to
mostly be going for the former, but that's their
choice. If Ximian were targeting Windows instead
of X11, I'm sure they'd still be bringing out
essentially the same product.
I'm not too bothered about the whole LSB issue.
But I'd love it if Solaris at least adopted the
Linux FHS.
This is one of the best thought out and best
documented standards I've seen in a long time.
Everything has its place, and everything
is given a rationale to explain why it's there.
Solaris has inherited too many things from Unix
that were poorly thought through at the time, but
have stuck due to inertia.
Now call me old fashioned, but just because your
car now comes with a remote, there's no reason to
actually use it. Why not just continue using the
key as normal? That way you're not exposed. Of
course, that won't work with cars like the new Renault Laguna that are only
accessible with the remote. But the vast majority
(at least here in Europe) still have a key. Use it.
The remote is a useless gimmick anyway.
You mean 50 nots. there are diffrences between the notical mile and the land mile. I can not think what they are though.
A nautical mile is one minute of arc of the Earth's
circumference at the equator. That works out at
approximately 1.15 miles. 1 knot is 1 nautical
mile per hour.
So don't count on it to build a day-to-day production system, yet.
Huh? Who on earth has a day to day production
system that isn't headless? And one that requires
accelerated OpenGL? I guess you could say that if
you're talking about workstations for 3D modelling,
perhaps. But who uses FreeBSD for that? The
applications just aren't there. Don't get me wrong,
the drivers are a step in the right direction,
and without them, the applications will never
follow.
But the warning about not using it for production
use is a little premature methinks...
Chimera 0.6 (released yesterday), a stable Cocoa-based Mac OS X browser also based on Gecko rendering
I'm still stunned that someone was brainless enough
to name this Chimera. Surely even the most basic of Google
checks would have found that there's already another
web browser called Chimera.
I used to use it many years ago on machines for
which Netscape was too bloated.
160 million, or 160 thousand? Millions would seem a bit high to me, but of course that's just off the top of my head.
No, it genuinely is millions. The
last published figures were for 2000, in which
Nokia sold 128 million handsets (out of a global
market of 405 million). The 160 million was an
estimate from a friend who works in the business.
Staggering, isn't it?
why should a dedicated webserver/firewall/database need X running?
Because Oracle, in their infinite wisdom, no longer
support a text-mode install. Yes, you can use a
response file, but it's a pain in the ass, and I
don't think you can do the same for patches. Thus,
none of my servers have X installed with the
exception of the database machines (no, moving
away from Oracle isn't a viable option at this
point -- too many PL/SQL stored procedures, and
not enough development resources to port them to
anything else). I despise Oracle for this. It's
a server for $deity's sake. It doesn't need X.
Your typical off the shelf PCI scsi adapter, in fact ANY scsi adapter that can set it's own ID works in a multi-host setup.
While I'm sure you already know this, there's a
big difference between having a "working"
multi-initiator setup, and having one that doesn't
corrupt your data. It's fairly easy to get it
working in an active/passive setup. But to get
both nodes actively accessing the same SCSI
devices requires a little more care. DG (now EMC)
CLARiiONs were great at this, even if they were
somewhat pricey...
Anyway, if you claim Java's performance is abysmal (in any area except 3D graphics) you just haven't looked at the damn thing in a few years.
Wrong. I deploy Java code in the form of servlets
and JSPs on a Solaris/Apache web farm, and
I claim its performance is
abysmal. I'm sure in certain circumstances, it's
fine, but for what we're doing, it's painfully slow
at times. Oh, and the requirement to include a
compiler on a public facing production system
really, really sucks.
So you use cron to schedule you PHP scripts not PHP.
And you have issue with using the standard Unix
scheduling tool that the rest of the world's been
using for the last 30 years? I'm failing to see
the problem. Instead you seem to be advocating that
PHP reinvent the wheel to acquire some inherent
scheduling system. Bizarre. Oh I get it. You
want the world to make the same NIH mistakes that
java did...
PHP runs in a Apache process.
Nope. PHP can run as an
Apache module, but it doesn't have to. You can
run it as a standalone process via cron, for
example, as the original poster does.
Threads can be created that run long past the connection closes. In PHP you do not have access to Threads.
I can't think of a single occasion where this
would be desirable. Far better would be to write
the relevant information to a database while the
connection is open, and process it offline via
batch jobs run from cron, for example.
On the footer of *every single page* at linuxguru.net, we specifically request that slashdot not link our stories because we can't handle the load.
I now have two dead machines because they linked us anyways.
I'd have thought a "Linux Guru" would know how to
block traffic referred from Slashdot, preferably
at the firewall (if you have content based
filtering), or at the webserver if not. In
addition, it's not that hard to throttle traffic
back to a level your servers can handle. Again,
something a guru should know. Aaah, yes... the
penny drops. You're the same James Blackwell
that's been flaming Larry McVoy on LKML. It all
makes sense now...
Or he could have been on a terminal server session, and the server administrator sent the popup message to his session.
I guess that may have been what happened, then,
because I didn't send it to myself. In fact, I
didn't know until this thread that it was a
human generated error...
Slashdot Mirror
But that's the point. In a case of perfect timing, I've just got back to the office having come from seeing "Die another day", and here I find a Slashdot article about it. My biggest complaint about the film is that the gadgets (and the stunts) are just *too* unrealistic, and yes, that does spoil the entertainment factor of the whole film. Sure, I enjoyed it, but I would have enjoyed it more if I hadn't been sitting there imagining some clueless creative type saying "it would be really cool if Bond did this, or had that gadget". I can suspend belief for a film as much as anyone, but they're just pushing it too far nowadays. Oh, and the theme tune was a big let down, too. Definitely not in the same category as Bond films of yesteryear. Don't get me wrong, it's a decent film, and worth seeing, but I just think it could have been much better with a little more attention to detail, and a little less sensationalism.
The point you're missing is that I wouldn't want this removed. People have different points of view about what's offensive, and what's not. For example, I fail to see how the post was any of the things you listed, apart from perhaps revolting, but even that's completely subjective. So why should your wishes override mine? The only solution to this problem is to let the community decide what's suitable, and the mechanism for that is moderation. Sure, it was offtopic. But moderation had already taken care of it by the time I got to it.
I can't agree with this strongly enough. Anyone can become a competent coder with relative ease. But unless you can write assembly, you'll never become a truly great coder. I'm not claiming you'll need to actually write any assembly -- I haven't had to for probably 10 years or so. But the very fact that you can means that you'll have a better understanding of what's happening underneath your high level abstractions, which will in turn make you a better coder. In 20 years or writing code, I haven't yet seen any exceptions to this...
I'm surprised no one's mentioned tesco.com yet. It's the world's largest online grocery delivery service, with revenues of over $560m last year, and it's running an operating profit. They've just started expanding out of the UK and have launched in the US in a partnership with Safeway. The unique thing about them is that rather than have a huge distribution centre somewhere, they make use of their existing bricks and mortar infrastructure. When you place an order, it gets sent through to your nearest store where a member of staff goes and picks it off the shelf for you, and it's delivered the next day (within a 2 hour timeslot you request, too). I've been using them for a while now, and have few complaints (other than a few IE-isms on the web site).
Yes. And you have to be getting really quite old before you hit a browser that doesn't support PNG in *some* fashion. If you avoid PNG's alpha channel, then virtually all browsers will support it, and you're no worse off than you were with GIFs. In time, enough browsers will properly support transparent PNGs that it'll be sensible to use them (IMHO, that cutoff time is almost here anyway).
Not quite... it's been 15 years since X moved from X10 to X11. That's a testament to the strength of the design -- that the protocol hasn't needed to change despite all the changes that have happened since 1987. It was designed to be extensible, so that now all the new goodies are available via extensions without breaking backwards compatibility. I only wish all software was as well designed as X.
Yes. Interesting naming they've chosen there. It's closed source, and hence not even remotely supportable by the community. What they're trying to say is "unsupported by Real Networks". There really isn't anything the community can do. It either works or it doesn't in the form they supply it.
When I worked there, the hard drives for non-sensitive machines were removed and locked in a safe overnight. They were in what they called 4-hour storage cupboards -- fireproof, and rated to take at least 4 hours to break in without damaging the contents. I remember when the keys were lost for one of them. It took many, many hours to drill out the lock to gain access. The sensitive machines were already effectively in a safe anyway. Physical access to the main server rooms was nigh on impossible in the first place.
When I worked for the British Ministry of Defense, yes, every machine on sensitive networks had physical access restrictions, none of them came with any form of removable media, and there was an air gap between them and the rest of the world.
Sigh. No. There's nothing about X11 that dictates that. In fact, in many respects, X11 is far more advanced than Windows. It's down to the authors of the application as to whether they want to copy or to innovate. Sadly with Evolution, they seem to mostly be going for the former, but that's their choice. If Ximian were targeting Windows instead of X11, I'm sure they'd still be bringing out essentially the same product.
I'm not too bothered about the whole LSB issue. But I'd love it if Solaris at least adopted the Linux FHS. This is one of the best thought out and best documented standards I've seen in a long time. Everything has its place, and everything is given a rationale to explain why it's there. Solaris has inherited too many things from Unix that were poorly thought through at the time, but have stuck due to inertia.
Now call me old fashioned, but just because your car now comes with a remote, there's no reason to actually use it. Why not just continue using the key as normal? That way you're not exposed. Of course, that won't work with cars like the new Renault Laguna that are only accessible with the remote. But the vast majority (at least here in Europe) still have a key. Use it. The remote is a useless gimmick anyway.
A nautical mile is one minute of arc of the Earth's circumference at the equator. That works out at approximately 1.15 miles. 1 knot is 1 nautical mile per hour.
Huh? Who on earth has a day to day production system that isn't headless? And one that requires accelerated OpenGL? I guess you could say that if you're talking about workstations for 3D modelling, perhaps. But who uses FreeBSD for that? The applications just aren't there. Don't get me wrong, the drivers are a step in the right direction, and without them, the applications will never follow. But the warning about not using it for production use is a little premature methinks...
I'm still stunned that someone was brainless enough to name this Chimera. Surely even the most basic of Google checks would have found that there's already another web browser called Chimera. I used to use it many years ago on machines for which Netscape was too bloated.
No, it genuinely is millions. The last published figures were for 2000, in which Nokia sold 128 million handsets (out of a global market of 405 million). The 160 million was an estimate from a friend who works in the business. Staggering, isn't it?
Given that Nokia sell some 160,000,000 mobile phones a year, I'd say they've probably got it about right...
Because Oracle, in their infinite wisdom, no longer support a text-mode install. Yes, you can use a response file, but it's a pain in the ass, and I don't think you can do the same for patches. Thus, none of my servers have X installed with the exception of the database machines (no, moving away from Oracle isn't a viable option at this point -- too many PL/SQL stored procedures, and not enough development resources to port them to anything else). I despise Oracle for this. It's a server for $deity's sake. It doesn't need X.
While I'm sure you already know this, there's a big difference between having a "working" multi-initiator setup, and having one that doesn't corrupt your data. It's fairly easy to get it working in an active/passive setup. But to get both nodes actively accessing the same SCSI devices requires a little more care. DG (now EMC) CLARiiONs were great at this, even if they were somewhat pricey...
Wrong. I deploy Java code in the form of servlets and JSPs on a Solaris/Apache web farm, and I claim its performance is abysmal. I'm sure in certain circumstances, it's fine, but for what we're doing, it's painfully slow at times. Oh, and the requirement to include a compiler on a public facing production system really, really sucks.
So you use cron to schedule you PHP scripts not PHP.
And you have issue with using the standard Unix scheduling tool that the rest of the world's been using for the last 30 years? I'm failing to see the problem. Instead you seem to be advocating that PHP reinvent the wheel to acquire some inherent scheduling system. Bizarre. Oh I get it. You want the world to make the same NIH mistakes that java did...
PHP runs in a Apache process.
Nope. PHP can run as an Apache module, but it doesn't have to. You can run it as a standalone process via cron, for example, as the original poster does.
Threads can be created that run long past the connection closes. In PHP you do not have access to Threads.
I can't think of a single occasion where this would be desirable. Far better would be to write the relevant information to a database while the connection is open, and process it offline via batch jobs run from cron, for example.
Wise of them to use PPC chips, which run rather cool.
Of course, Power 4 != PPC...
I'd have thought a "Linux Guru" would know how to block traffic referred from Slashdot, preferably at the firewall (if you have content based filtering), or at the webserver if not. In addition, it's not that hard to throttle traffic back to a level your servers can handle. Again, something a guru should know. Aaah, yes... the penny drops. You're the same James Blackwell that's been flaming Larry McVoy on LKML. It all makes sense now...
I guess that may have been what happened, then, because I didn't send it to myself. In fact, I didn't know until this thread that it was a human generated error...
Actually, since in this case, "Linux" is referring to just the kernel, even RMS doesn't think it should have the "GNU/" prefix...