McCain was born on a naval base which is considered soverign US soil for the purposes of birth, and has been since the 1790s by an act of Congress. (It's true the wording isn't as clear as it could be, but it's clear what the intent is of the bill.)
(This thread is decidedly OT from e-voting.)
As I understand it, the topic of "natural born" is untested, and is certainly not clear here. However, no one is likely to contest John McCain in his candidacy based on his birth, so this is probably moot.
The Fourteenth Amendment provides that, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." This gives rise to the notion that there are two kinds of citizens: born and naturalized. So, the question becomes, was John McCain effectively born in the U.S., or did some law make him a citizen, rendering him naturalized?
The reason this is important is that John McCain was born on U.S. military base Coco Solo in the Panama Canal Zone to U.S. parents. Does that make him a "natural born Citizen?"
First, it is important to note that John McCain is definitely a "Citizen" of the United States. [...]
Proponents of McCain's eligibility argue that McCain must be a natural born citizen because he was born a citizen by virtue of his parents being citizens and the birth occurring on a military base. [...] Opponents of McCain's eligibility would point to the dichotomy between being born a citizen, and being declared a citizen. If, under the language of the Fourteenth Amendment and Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952, a person is "declared" to be a citizen, then the person was not a citizen at the moment of birth. The law "declared" him to be a citizen, and so the person was naturalized, not naturally born. [...] Last, current State Department policy reads: "Despite widespread popular belief, U.S. military installations abroad and U.S. diplomatic or consular facilities are not part of the United States within the meaning of the 14th Amendment. [...]
In the end, a group challenging McCain on this ground might face a backlash. McCain was a prisoner of war, and was born outside the physical boundaries of the U.S. only because the government ordered his parents there. He does not seem to be the problem that the original framers envisioned: a foreigner without current allegiance to the newly-founded United States. McCain, a longtime senator, does not seem to really fit this problem.
As many others have pointed out, you can write bad code in any language. Perl makes it very easy to write terrible code [...]
I'll start this out with a disclaimer: I write and maintain some perl code, but not as part of my work.
One thing that really annoys me about perl is that there are so many different ways to do the same thing. It makes code unnecessarily difficult to read. I believe the following statements are all the same in perl: (Assume $debug is expected to hold a value of 0 or 1.)
if ($debug == 1) { print "foo\n"; }
unless ($debug == 0 ) { print "foo\n"; }
print "foo\n" if $debug == 1;
print "foo\n" unless $debug == 0;
($debug == 1) && print "foo\n";
The whole point with unless is that it is the same as writing a negated if statement. I think I'd rather have the negated if. But my real bane is the tail-if and tail-unless. I guess I'm old and stodgy (at age 36) but to me, a programming language is much better when the rules are more strictly enforced. Pick one of the 5 methods, not all of them. Although I guess I'm ok with #5 since it is mimicking sh scripting behavior.
In some places this is against the law. I know where I live you are not allowed to put out your garbage until after 4pm the night before pick-up. Obviously enforcement of this is not consistent. I've seen people randomly get notices on their doors about this, and then there's other neighborhoods where the cans basically sit out all week long instead of being carted back and forth from house to curb.
That's interesting. Where I live (St Paul, MN) we got a flier from the city when we moved to our house, giving tips on how to be part of the community. One of the tips specifically talked about leaving unwanted items on your green space (between the sidewalk and the street) with a "FREE" sign so that others can take them if needed. They gave the same advice as the GP: if it doesn't go away in a few days, then bring it to county recycling center (electronics, hazardous waste) or put it in the trash.
I've gotten rid of a TV, a microwave oven, an office chair and a rolling computer desk this way. Works great on weekends... there's a church down the street from me. Some other items didn't go, so I picked them apart after a few days and tossed them out. Electronics got recycled.
I got my degree in Physics, but my career path after that was in IT. My first job (January, 1995) was working as a UNIX systems administrator at a small geographics company. What helped me land the job despite having a different educational background was first-hand "experience" with Linux (SLS and Slackware.) I was the first at my university to try Linux (1993) so I became a sort of go-to guy for Linux questions when the CompSci students started to install it, and the university IT staff put it up on a few systems to try it out. "Something break? Happened to me too once, let me help you fix it."
When I graduated, and it was time to look for a job, a friend recommended me for the UNIX sysadmin job at her company. The fact that I'd had two years experience working with Linux, helping others to install it and get it working for them, really gave me a boost during the interview. I got the job.
Yes, this could have turned out the same if I'd just been helping at the computer labs (which I didn't, but others might have.) I think what gave me the extra edge was spending so much time with it at home, so when the technical interview questions came up, I was able to answer them very well. Nothing beats spending that extra time on your own desktop system, when you'll eventually mess something up and have to learn stuffon your ownto get it working again and know how not break it a second time. That kind of "experience" says a lot to a hiring manager.
He has a permit to carry concealed weapons and is so used to doing so that he simply didn't notice.
Neither did the TSA. There's one data point for your experiment.
Thanks for the trailer. You know, watching the trailer, some of the graphics and fill-in music reminded me of War Planets (aka "Shadow Raiders"). Suddenly I wonder how cool it would be for someone to take that license and run with it. Would make a kick-ass space flight combat sim. Lots of opportunities to fly craft from the different planets, against Beast ships, eventually taking on the Beast planet itself. Awesome!
They can do a bit better by having the person to pay for the lost laptop. All of a sudden, everyone would be extra careful as it would come out of their pay cheques.
And what do you do if someone's laptop was taken from them at gunpoint, like in a mugging? (Yes, it happens.) Was it that person's fault the laptop was taken? (Hint: it's not.) Should that person pay for the laptop out of their paycheck?
Or what if the laptop was stolen from their home during the night, like in a robbery? (Yup, that happens too.) Should that person pay for the laptop out of their paycheck? It's certainly not their fault. They likely lost a bunch of personal possessions, and you want them to take an additional $3000 hit to their paycheck?
Life is a bit more complicated than the simplified world you think it is. Remind me never to work for you.
Google needs to release its web office applications as a server that can be installed in a corporate datacenter. That would allow corporations to maintain full and auditable control over their data, while leaving the high cost of MS Office behind.
We made the same request to Google for their GMail services, about a year ago. We'd love to have all our staff using GMail - email is a commodity, why run your own? But for legal / audit control reasons, we cannot have Google run all our staff email.
Google responded that GMail just isn't designed / set up that way. They can't sell a Google Mail Appliance, let us plug it into our own SAN. Doesn't work that way. They'd prefer everyone run off gmail.com servers.:-(
I remember reading in a blog (I think Elyse Sewell's blog but I can't find the reference there at the moment) that shops in China don't really care if the English translation is correct or incorrect. What matters to them is that English is on the sign/menu. Having Chinese and a European language on your stuff makes you seem "international" or something.
The English text might say "Translation server error" or something else clearly wrong. But like 90% of your local clientele won't know the English anyway. To them, they just care that there's also English on the sign, so you must be an important place and they should go there.
I think it works the same way here in the States. Answer this honestly: let's say you're on a business trip in a strange city, and you want some Chinese food. You have two Chinese restaurants to pick from: one simply says "Chan's Chinese restaurant", the other says "Yan's Chinese restaurant" and has a bunch of Chinese characters on the sign, as well. Which do you go to? I'll bet you pick the second one, even though you have no idea what the Chinese characters mean - they could say "Stupid Americans eat here."
I had to do this too once upon a time (do presentations without a laptop.) Here's how I solved it:
Get a USB memory stick
Save your presentation as a PDF
Bring it with you.
Seriously, there will be a PC plugged into the presentation device at the other end. For conferences and such, there's a little box on the speaker information form you fill out before you go where you can indicate you'll need a PC or laptop. They'll accommodate you. If presenting at a business partner or customer site, they'll also have a PC or laptop to use.
You don't need a smartphone to do this. As much as your boss probably wants the excuse to have one.:-)
If you RTFA, Red Hat is planning on getting it's revenue from selling support. I'm not sure I see this happening. If you're running a cloud service, you're going to have a LOT of machines and you're going to need enough custom support and custom software that you're probably going to have in-house support. If you have in-house support, you're probably not paying for the Red Hat support, so how do the expect to make revenue?
There are two kinds of support here:
Phone/web/email support, for problems and other issues. This is the traditional "help desk" or "support center" that you are probably thinking of.
Updates and system patches to keep your servers up-to-date with the latest software.
I work with lots of systems (over 1,100 servers... about half of which run RHEL) and we need to run with both kinds of support. Sure, we probably have called Red Hat about half a dozen times in the last 5 years. But we need to have it there, should something go wrong. Am I wasting my money for that? No, because the times that we've needed to call support, we really needed it. You don't pay for support because you know you'll need it - you pay for support because you'll probably need it.
Yes, we have our own system support people, and most are RHCE. They can figure out most problems - but we still need to have RHEL there as a safety net.
I haven't RTFA'd, but I suspect Red Hat will offer some kind of volume discount if you have enough systems. Otherwise, it will likely be too expensive for some folks.
(Disclaimer: I work at a Big Ten university, and we don't actually run with "help desk" support on everything. Red Hat offers an "Academic" subscription to RHEL, so you still get patches and updates, but don't get phone support. We run with phone support where we need it - like to run third-party software, or in production - but for "dev" instances for our own development staff, we may choose to run "Academic" without phone support, at a much lower price per system. It works well for us.)
Hey Ramji, after all your employer has done to promote Open Source like backing SCO and buying off ISO, why don't you just crawl under a rock someplace and quit wasting our air. Just go cash that big check and live in some kind of peace and harmony with your bought-off ass.
I don't entirely agree with this sentiment. I'd much prefer that Ramji try very hard to get Microsoft to change their ways. He's in about the only position inside Microsoft to lobby for more open, less anti-competitive behaviour.
Actions speak louder than words - if Microsoft is serious about being more "open" to Open Source / Free Software, they need to do something with it. For example, I'd like to see Ramji convince someone on the Microsoft Office team to release a version of Office for Linux. There's a version of Office for Mac, so clearly it's not entirely locked to Windows (yes, I know there's a special team at Microsoft working on the Mac.) Let me see a working, compatible version of MS Office that I can install on my Linux laptop (Fedora 9) and I'll listen.
Transition plan needed
on
Apple After Jobs
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
One thing we in IT are typically very bad at is transition planning. I was discussing this with friends over the weekend - what Microsoft had going for it was a good transition plan after Bill Gates. While Ballmer isn't the best CEO for the company, at least the transition was long enough with Steve at the helm that Bill's departure this summer became a non-event for the company. Lots of interviews and "remember when" videos to be sure, but no one on Wall Street or in the press was left wondering who would lead Microsoft in a post-Gates world.
On the other hand, Apple has worked themselves into a corner. Effectively, Steve Jobs is Apple. Take away Jobs, and Apple suffers. I wasn't aware of Steve's health problems this week, but when I was discussing Apple this weekend I postulated that if Jobs were suddenly to become sick, or for some other reason suddenly be absent from the company for an extended time, Apple's stock price would drop dramatically. And now, catching up on the news I see that's exactly what happened.
Apple needs to create a transition plan, and make it clear to the community - investors and users alike. It doesn't matter if Steve plans to remove himself from Apple in a year or 10 years, there needs to be a clear #2 with the chops to effectively manage Apple in Steve's absence. Steve needs to project that person into the public consciousness by having the person back him up in presentations and public appearances, even to the point of introducing new products at MacWorld and CES, etc instead of Steve.
Apple is an innovative company, and Jobs is seen to lead that innovation, so this #2 person needs to be "leaderful" and innovative as well. That's a tough pair of requirements to meet, but if Apple is to survive Steve's eventual departure, he/she must be seen as Steve's spiritual equal among Mac geeks.
Here is an idea don't throttle P2P connections also, don't block websites, don't keep logs, and stand up for fair use and anonymity on the internet. Do that and you might be more liked. But keep throttling P2P connections and acting as a puppet of congress/MPAA/RIAA and people will hate you for it.
I really don't mind that Comcast throttles P2P... what annoys me is that they are so dishonest about it. (Disclaimer: I don't use P2P.) They try to hide that they throttle P2P - just admit that you do it, and set some simple ground rules. Like, "We throttle P2P traffic between 6:00a.m. and 10:00p.m. (your local time) Monday - Friday, to preserve network bandwidth for our other customers."
Blocking web sites is dangerous territory, though. They may think this is a good thing, doing their bit to prevent piracy or child porn, or other illegal activity. But by blocking one web site, you imply the not-blocked sites are ok. And woe is the day when you block the wrong web site because you listened blindly to a corporate partner.
Ah, that would explain how I lost funding for my digital TV relay space-station project: the Digitally Enhanced Array, Troop Habitation, Satellite Transmitter And Receiver. Too bad.
At my first industry job (internship) I quickly realized their coding standards were very different from mine. So I spent the first 2 hours after lunch on day 1 with GNU Indent, working up a script that would convert my code into the company's coding standard for indentation.
Let the tools do the work for you. Just don't forget to run 'indent' before you check in your code.
I have a WRT54GS (Firmware Version: 1.52.4) and it has very long uptimes - forced reboot every 3 months, maybe. And seems like the only times I need to boot it are right after a major storm comes through my area, so I've always assumed it had more to do with the cable modem getting into a funny state, but I bounce both anyway.
Maybe I'm lucky, but I had the same experience with my WRT54G that I had before my GS, right down to the "reboot it after major storms" thing.
Also, your window manager or OS probably has a quick zoom?
In compiz, for example, can hold super down while using mouse wheel for a quick look at part of the screen.
Handy for those horrible flash videos.
Why haven't I tried this before!?? I knew about compiz's alt-scroll (transparency) but hadn't tried using Super.
Slashdot Mirror
McCain was born on a naval base which is considered soverign US soil for the purposes of birth, and has been since the 1790s by an act of Congress. (It's true the wording isn't as clear as it could be, but it's clear what the intent is of the bill.)
(This thread is decidedly OT from e-voting.)
As I understand it, the topic of "natural born" is untested, and is certainly not clear here. However, no one is likely to contest John McCain in his candidacy based on his birth, so this is probably moot.
The topic of "natural born" was a topic on the Legal Lad podcast back in March. The key points:
The Fourteenth Amendment provides that, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." This gives rise to the notion that there are two kinds of citizens: born and naturalized. So, the question becomes, was John McCain effectively born in the U.S., or did some law make him a citizen, rendering him naturalized?
The reason this is important is that John McCain was born on U.S. military base Coco Solo in the Panama Canal Zone to U.S. parents. Does that make him a "natural born Citizen?"
First, it is important to note that John McCain is definitely a "Citizen" of the United States. [...]
Proponents of McCain's eligibility argue that McCain must be a natural born citizen because he was born a citizen by virtue of his parents being citizens and the birth occurring on a military base. [...] Opponents of McCain's eligibility would point to the dichotomy between being born a citizen, and being declared a citizen. If, under the language of the Fourteenth Amendment and Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952, a person is "declared" to be a citizen, then the person was not a citizen at the moment of birth. The law "declared" him to be a citizen, and so the person was naturalized, not naturally born. [...] Last, current State Department policy reads: "Despite widespread popular belief, U.S. military installations abroad and U.S. diplomatic or consular facilities are not part of the United States within the meaning of the 14th Amendment. [...]
In the end, a group challenging McCain on this ground might face a backlash. McCain was a prisoner of war, and was born outside the physical boundaries of the U.S. only because the government ordered his parents there. He does not seem to be the problem that the original framers envisioned: a foreigner without current allegiance to the newly-founded United States. McCain, a longtime senator, does not seem to really fit this problem.
Just be happy they didn't also make you wear a yellow star on your sleeve.
Godwin's law has been invoked. This discussion thread is now dead. Anonymous Coward loses.
BTW, my preference is #1
if ($debug == 1) { print "foo\n"; }
As many others have pointed out, you can write bad code in any language. Perl makes it very easy to write terrible code [...]
I'll start this out with a disclaimer: I write and maintain some perl code, but not as part of my work.
One thing that really annoys me about perl is that there are so many different ways to do the same thing. It makes code unnecessarily difficult to read. I believe the following statements are all the same in perl: (Assume $debug is expected to hold a value of 0 or 1.)
The whole point with unless is that it is the same as writing a negated if statement. I think I'd rather have the negated if. But my real bane is the tail-if and tail-unless. I guess I'm old and stodgy (at age 36) but to me, a programming language is much better when the rules are more strictly enforced. Pick one of the 5 methods, not all of them. Although I guess I'm ok with #5 since it is mimicking sh scripting behavior.
In some places this is against the law. I know where I live you are not allowed to put out your garbage until after 4pm the night before pick-up. Obviously enforcement of this is not consistent. I've seen people randomly get notices on their doors about this, and then there's other neighborhoods where the cans basically sit out all week long instead of being carted back and forth from house to curb.
That's interesting. Where I live (St Paul, MN) we got a flier from the city when we moved to our house, giving tips on how to be part of the community. One of the tips specifically talked about leaving unwanted items on your green space (between the sidewalk and the street) with a "FREE" sign so that others can take them if needed. They gave the same advice as the GP: if it doesn't go away in a few days, then bring it to county recycling center (electronics, hazardous waste) or put it in the trash.
I've gotten rid of a TV, a microwave oven, an office chair and a rolling computer desk this way. Works great on weekends ... there's a church down the street from me. Some other items didn't go, so I picked them apart after a few days and tossed them out. Electronics got recycled.
I got my degree in Physics, but my career path after that was in IT. My first job (January, 1995) was working as a UNIX systems administrator at a small geographics company. What helped me land the job despite having a different educational background was first-hand "experience" with Linux (SLS and Slackware.) I was the first at my university to try Linux (1993) so I became a sort of go-to guy for Linux questions when the CompSci students started to install it, and the university IT staff put it up on a few systems to try it out. "Something break? Happened to me too once, let me help you fix it."
When I graduated, and it was time to look for a job, a friend recommended me for the UNIX sysadmin job at her company. The fact that I'd had two years experience working with Linux, helping others to install it and get it working for them, really gave me a boost during the interview. I got the job.
Yes, this could have turned out the same if I'd just been helping at the computer labs (which I didn't, but others might have.) I think what gave me the extra edge was spending so much time with it at home, so when the technical interview questions came up, I was able to answer them very well. Nothing beats spending that extra time on your own desktop system, when you'll eventually mess something up and have to learn stuff on your own to get it working again and know how not break it a second time. That kind of "experience" says a lot to a hiring manager.
Then I have some car insurance to sell you. :-)
He has a permit to carry concealed weapons and is so used to doing so that he simply didn't notice. Neither did the TSA. There's one data point for your experiment.
Here's another one. (No, not the one with the bat ... the other one.) News post is here.
I love anecdoes, don't you? They're so terribly useful ... and scientific.
And here I tossed out my 6502 assembler book, just last week!
:-)
Thanks for the trailer. You know, watching the trailer, some of the graphics and fill-in music reminded me of War Planets (aka "Shadow Raiders"). Suddenly I wonder how cool it would be for someone to take that license and run with it. Would make a kick-ass space flight combat sim. Lots of opportunities to fly craft from the different planets, against Beast ships, eventually taking on the Beast planet itself. Awesome!
(Too bad I don't see this game being made.)
They can do a bit better by having the person to pay for the lost laptop. All of a sudden, everyone would be extra careful as it would come out of their pay cheques.
And what do you do if someone's laptop was taken from them at gunpoint, like in a mugging? (Yes, it happens.) Was it that person's fault the laptop was taken? (Hint: it's not.) Should that person pay for the laptop out of their paycheck?
Or what if the laptop was stolen from their home during the night, like in a robbery? (Yup, that happens too.) Should that person pay for the laptop out of their paycheck? It's certainly not their fault. They likely lost a bunch of personal possessions, and you want them to take an additional $3000 hit to their paycheck?
Life is a bit more complicated than the simplified world you think it is. Remind me never to work for you.
Google needs to release its web office applications as a server that can be installed in a corporate datacenter. That would allow corporations to maintain full and auditable control over their data, while leaving the high cost of MS Office behind.
We made the same request to Google for their GMail services, about a year ago. We'd love to have all our staff using GMail - email is a commodity, why run your own? But for legal / audit control reasons, we cannot have Google run all our staff email.
Google responded that GMail just isn't designed / set up that way. They can't sell a Google Mail Appliance, let us plug it into our own SAN. Doesn't work that way. They'd prefer everyone run off gmail.com servers. :-(
I remember reading in a blog (I think Elyse Sewell's blog but I can't find the reference there at the moment) that shops in China don't really care if the English translation is correct or incorrect. What matters to them is that English is on the sign/menu. Having Chinese and a European language on your stuff makes you seem "international" or something.
The English text might say "Translation server error" or something else clearly wrong. But like 90% of your local clientele won't know the English anyway. To them, they just care that there's also English on the sign, so you must be an important place and they should go there.
I think it works the same way here in the States. Answer this honestly: let's say you're on a business trip in a strange city, and you want some Chinese food. You have two Chinese restaurants to pick from: one simply says "Chan's Chinese restaurant", the other says "Yan's Chinese restaurant" and has a bunch of Chinese characters on the sign, as well. Which do you go to? I'll bet you pick the second one, even though you have no idea what the Chinese characters mean - they could say "Stupid Americans eat here."
I had to do this too once upon a time (do presentations without a laptop.) Here's how I solved it:
Seriously, there will be a PC plugged into the presentation device at the other end. For conferences and such, there's a little box on the speaker information form you fill out before you go where you can indicate you'll need a PC or laptop. They'll accommodate you. If presenting at a business partner or customer site, they'll also have a PC or laptop to use.
You don't need a smartphone to do this. As much as your boss probably wants the excuse to have one. :-)
If you RTFA, Red Hat is planning on getting it's revenue from selling support. I'm not sure I see this happening. If you're running a cloud service, you're going to have a LOT of machines and you're going to need enough custom support and custom software that you're probably going to have in-house support. If you have in-house support, you're probably not paying for the Red Hat support, so how do the expect to make revenue?
There are two kinds of support here:
Phone/web/email support, for problems and other issues. This is the traditional "help desk" or "support center" that you are probably thinking of.
Updates and system patches to keep your servers up-to-date with the latest software.
I work with lots of systems (over 1,100 servers ... about half of which run RHEL) and we need to run with both kinds of support. Sure, we probably have called Red Hat about half a dozen times in the last 5 years. But we need to have it there, should something go wrong. Am I wasting my money for that? No, because the times that we've needed to call support, we really needed it. You don't pay for support because you know you'll need it - you pay for support because you'll probably need it.
Yes, we have our own system support people, and most are RHCE. They can figure out most problems - but we still need to have RHEL there as a safety net.
I haven't RTFA'd, but I suspect Red Hat will offer some kind of volume discount if you have enough systems. Otherwise, it will likely be too expensive for some folks.
(Disclaimer: I work at a Big Ten university, and we don't actually run with "help desk" support on everything. Red Hat offers an "Academic" subscription to RHEL, so you still get patches and updates, but don't get phone support. We run with phone support where we need it - like to run third-party software, or in production - but for "dev" instances for our own development staff, we may choose to run "Academic" without phone support, at a much lower price per system. It works well for us.)
Hey Ramji, after all your employer has done to promote Open Source like backing SCO and buying off ISO, why don't you just crawl under a rock someplace and quit wasting our air. Just go cash that big check and live in some kind of peace and harmony with your bought-off ass.
I don't entirely agree with this sentiment. I'd much prefer that Ramji try very hard to get Microsoft to change their ways. He's in about the only position inside Microsoft to lobby for more open, less anti-competitive behaviour.
Actions speak louder than words - if Microsoft is serious about being more "open" to Open Source / Free Software, they need to do something with it. For example, I'd like to see Ramji convince someone on the Microsoft Office team to release a version of Office for Linux. There's a version of Office for Mac, so clearly it's not entirely locked to Windows (yes, I know there's a special team at Microsoft working on the Mac.) Let me see a working, compatible version of MS Office that I can install on my Linux laptop (Fedora 9) and I'll listen.
> Open source is supposed to be cross platform...
Says who? There are a lot of open-source projects that are platform specific. Sometimes that's what you need.
For example, most of the Free / Open Source software that I write these days is for a single platform that isn't Linux. :-)
One thing we in IT are typically very bad at is transition planning. I was discussing this with friends over the weekend - what Microsoft had going for it was a good transition plan after Bill Gates. While Ballmer isn't the best CEO for the company, at least the transition was long enough with Steve at the helm that Bill's departure this summer became a non-event for the company. Lots of interviews and "remember when" videos to be sure, but no one on Wall Street or in the press was left wondering who would lead Microsoft in a post-Gates world.
On the other hand, Apple has worked themselves into a corner. Effectively, Steve Jobs is Apple. Take away Jobs, and Apple suffers. I wasn't aware of Steve's health problems this week, but when I was discussing Apple this weekend I postulated that if Jobs were suddenly to become sick, or for some other reason suddenly be absent from the company for an extended time, Apple's stock price would drop dramatically. And now, catching up on the news I see that's exactly what happened.
Apple needs to create a transition plan, and make it clear to the community - investors and users alike. It doesn't matter if Steve plans to remove himself from Apple in a year or 10 years, there needs to be a clear #2 with the chops to effectively manage Apple in Steve's absence. Steve needs to project that person into the public consciousness by having the person back him up in presentations and public appearances, even to the point of introducing new products at MacWorld and CES, etc instead of Steve.
Apple is an innovative company, and Jobs is seen to lead that innovation, so this #2 person needs to be "leaderful" and innovative as well. That's a tough pair of requirements to meet, but if Apple is to survive Steve's eventual departure, he/she must be seen as Steve's spiritual equal among Mac geeks.
Here is an idea don't throttle P2P connections also, don't block websites, don't keep logs, and stand up for fair use and anonymity on the internet. Do that and you might be more liked. But keep throttling P2P connections and acting as a puppet of congress/MPAA/RIAA and people will hate you for it.
I really don't mind that Comcast throttles P2P ... what annoys me is that they are so dishonest about it. (Disclaimer: I don't use P2P.) They try to hide that they throttle P2P - just admit that you do it, and set some simple ground rules. Like, "We throttle P2P traffic between 6:00a.m. and 10:00p.m. (your local time) Monday - Friday, to preserve network bandwidth for our other customers."
Blocking web sites is dangerous territory, though. They may think this is a good thing, doing their bit to prevent piracy or child porn, or other illegal activity. But by blocking one web site, you imply the not-blocked sites are ok. And woe is the day when you block the wrong web site because you listened blindly to a corporate partner.
Ah, that would explain how I lost funding for my digital TV relay space-station project: the Digitally Enhanced Array, Troop Habitation, Satellite Transmitter And Receiver. Too bad.
At my first industry job (internship) I quickly realized their coding standards were very different from mine. So I spent the first 2 hours after lunch on day 1 with GNU Indent, working up a script that would convert my code into the company's coding standard for indentation.
Let the tools do the work for you. Just don't forget to run 'indent' before you check in your code.
I have a WRT54GS (Firmware Version: 1.52.4) and it has very long uptimes - forced reboot every 3 months, maybe. And seems like the only times I need to boot it are right after a major storm comes through my area, so I've always assumed it had more to do with the cable modem getting into a funny state, but I bounce both anyway.
Maybe I'm lucky, but I had the same experience with my WRT54G that I had before my GS, right down to the "reboot it after major storms" thing.
Why haven't I tried this before!?? I knew about compiz's alt-scroll (transparency) but hadn't tried using Super.
Very cool. Thanks!
(ref) Thanks for the photo. Looks like someone's about to get frozen in carbonite.
You got there first, and with a lower UID. Damn me and my old-person need for sleep at 12:30AM.