although I might make a decent amount of money on stock options
Ha ha ha ha ha! That's a good one. Best laugh I've had all day, that:) Stock options... heh
And once the IPO goes through, suddenly it's no longer about employees and customers but aout shareholders and reports and juggling meaningless numbers
You've got that right. IPO is the worst thing to happen to a company from an employees point of view. Suddenly job satisfaction is out the window and you are kept tagging along with carrots on sticks ("Ooh, more options that won't vest for 2 years! Thank you!")
Last company I worked for that went through IPO lost almost all of its IT department who were suddenly faced with an extra 6 hours work per day in exchange for not being fired.
Hate to be a pain, but didn't he say not to say dia? I don't know. I know nothing about diagramming in linux. Just thought I'de be annoying and point that out.
There's always one:)
The problem with dia is a) the hideous symbol sets, and b) the completely unintuitive interface. Open up Dia and, within 10 minutes, figure out how to add or remove points from connecting lines without googling it...
Other than Kivio (which is non-free unless you get the rather cripple-icious Koffice version) the only OTHER one I can think of it TCM, which is even less intuitive than Dia. It still holds a place in my heart, though. Right in that blood-clot...
Instead of blaming me for blaming the GGP poster for not knowing something, why don't you point us in the direction of some (good, not Dia - if they can't cope with OOo they don't have a hope with that) Visio like programs? I can't think of any, so I had none to contribute. I did not know of any alternatives, but it was obvious that the power of OOo Draw was being hidden behind a misrepresentation. I just wanted to fix that.
I have indeed thought that most users don't care what a piece of software is supposed to do and try and make it work instead. That's why I have seen requirements documents done in PowerPoint, database systems done in complex Excel spreadsheets with many cross-links and lookups, and websites created in Word. Just because a user wants a tool to do something doesn't make it a good idea...
Every single person who has asked me that question, I have showed them Ubuntu, and every single one has been impressed, up to the point when you show them that OpenOffice.org doesn't do drawing diagrams correctly...
OT, but define 'correctly'... it does vector drawing, and it does dynamic link lines. Sure, it's no Visio, but it's not intended to be. It's drawing tool (hence the name), not a diagramming tool, and what it does, it does correctly.
There are two things that I immediately see could come from this.
1) Avalanche is launched and is a success
Coupled with the 'marketting' force of MS, distributors will start using Avalanche over BitTorrent because it's less likely to get them sued. BitTorrent will be viewed as the 'evil pirate upstart' version of MS's newest 'invention'.
2) Avalanche is canned
MS will put enough marketting spin on it to say that they have discovered this method of delivery unable to support 'secure, legal distribution' and the rest of the world will have to agree, or be sued. BitTorrent will be viewed as the 'evil pirate upstart' that can only be used for evil because MS have 'proved' it.
Either way, given MS's trustworthiness record, it's not looking good:(
Supply or intent to supply? If you go into a video shop and they have knock of copies on the shelves with pricing on, you can safely assume that they intend to sell them to the public. The intent was there. Sure, it may well be a 'lesser' issue, but the fact is that copies were made and offered for distribution.
If you get to the point of arguing the semantics of the letter of the law, you've already lost.
Now one feature that DOES annoy me is Google's click-tracking. If I search something using google, check the top three results and figure out that my search terms are wrong.
So I use some other terms and notice that the three results are the same that I got from the last query after clicking them, because the urls are not he same in google because they track clicks.
From what I can see, it's only the sponsored links that are tracked (by mediafarm?). If they are sponsored links, then surely you want to track how much that sponsorship is worth?
(who it sounds like you have had the pleasure of dealing with)
Worse, they were contracted in from Liverpool (I'm in Sheffield) because of a lack of engineers in Sheffield, so they didn't even want to be down here in the first place. Those were the ones who tried to sign the job off without doing anything.
It seems to vary wildly, though. For instance, my parent's BT line has been off for 3 weeks now (only for voice, DSL still works!?!). The problem is related to some recent work carried out under the road. On no less than 5 occassions a BT engineer has arrived, run the SAME SET of tests and 'discovered' the problem (my dad tells them what it is every time, they believe him when the leave). Two of them tried to sign the job off as done, despite only having diagnosed, not fixed, the problem.
After 2 weeks and 3 visits, my dad phoned BT. They told him that they had no record of the problem and that it must be the first time he was reporting it, therefore they could not help him. Two phone calls later, one member of the call centre actually bothered to run a search instead of just reading the first screen that appeared. Found the problem, confirmed that it was not fixed. Did nothing else.
It's still not fixed. They're sending an engineer round to 'try and find the fault' (again). My dad has refused to pay for the past quarter's line rental and has queried Citizen's Advice for possible solutions.
Re:DLL encryption will render this ineffective
on
The Open-Source Detector
·
· Score: 3, Informative
It's not as hard as you make out to use GPL code by accident, especially library code. Consider the plight of a poor developer, forced with unmeetable deadlines and a fire-breathing boss with a P45 waiting (I've been there, it happens).
He needs to implement a specific piece of functionality and fast. He searches the web and finds some 'sample' code and thinks "just the job".
Copy.. paste..
You now have GPL code in your application, copied and pasted direct. Why? Malicious and callous hatred of free software? No, an accident. Carelessness. A quick fix in a tight spot.
I'd have swapped that for keeping the description of how Arthur found the bypass plans in the basement - which is ESSENTIAL for the story since it's a nice counterpoint to the Vogon's claim that humanity didn't try to find the plans for the hyperspatial bypass.
I thought it was an excellent counterpoint to surrealism of the underlying metaphor...
He was a Jatravartid. The narrator pretty much read the first chapter of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe including the whole "in the beginning the Universe was created" bit.
I know _WHO_ he was supposed to be. a) It was not funny. b) It did not fit into the plot of the first book. c) It was a fucking brief and off handed reference even when it did come in to play in Restaurant.
Hehe, I love reading these anti-reviews. I thought the movie was great. I have no idea why ANYONE thought it was remotely faithful to the books. Earth blows up; check. Arthur saved by Ford; check. Babelfish, Vogons, other periphery; check. The entire rest of the storyline... um, no. Not in any version of the book, tv series, radio show, game or towel that I've ever known.
Anyway, onto my point and what I found amusing in your rants about Humma Kavula:
"John Malkovich's character, a religious leader, was created especially for the movie by Douglas Adams."
All this agro over a bit that DNA actually wrote! In fact, if you look deeper, Douglas wrote pretty much all of it. All that was left to do was the screenplay.
I dunno. Maybe you were expecting a glorious deep story. Maybe you were expecting a visual representation of the books, verbatim, like even LOTR failed to do. Whatever, you were never gonna get it. What we did get was an amusing, madcap comedy in the Hitchhikers universe, and a load of nay-sayers who would never have been happy unless they had made it themselves. Seeing as none of you would, the point really is moot.
You really should have run the tests a number of times each and averaged them. That would have satisfactorily ruled out any glitches or anomalies in the output.
Also, why link an sxw with a graph? Why not link the sxc with all the actual figures?
Is that its installation speed, which is notoriously slow, or the speed at which it runs? Any system that takes a weekend to install just HAS to be faster, right?
I think it's more "I had to work so damned hard to get this thing up and running, there must be a good payoff. Right? Right?"
No... You don't need those requirements... Distcc helps nicely and can cut the compile time for a base system
You don't need a 4GHz computer, you just need 3 or 4 relatively high spec ones. I'm afraid that still lands Gentoo in the same camp as the 'single fast machine' lot. People who have more computing power than sense;)
I ran Gentoo for a reasonable length of time at home and at work. A network of 40 Gentoo boxes and distcc made the whole thing move along nicely, but for my home machine I had to switch so that I could spend less time compiling and more time actually, you know, getting some work done.
I didn't call you a liar, I said I didn't believe you. Figure out the philosophical conotations for yourself.
Aaah, soddit. If you're still trolling after this long you must be serious. Fine... Linux sucks because you had to compile a kernel once five years ago. Leave it, man, it's just not funny any more.
Hoorah! Personal insults! Nice one, really assisted your point.
From what I can tell, you built a custom kernel (something I have not _had_ to do since 2.0.35, but have occassionally done by choice) and forgot something, then blamed the OS that you had to go and put it back.
It sounds like this was quite a long time ago, and if you got YOUR head out of the sand, you would see that this kind of thing just doesn't happen anymore. It's like saying it's difficult to get CD-ROM drives working in Windows XP because, in DOS, you had to edit config.sys and autoexec.bat.
If you feel the need to recompile your kernel for whatever reason (masochism, Gentoo, you know the score) then you should accept responsibility if you screw it up. Generally, it's enough to just modprobe what's missing from the stock kernel provided by the distro.
I've had comp sci students roll their eyes at me when I had to recompile my kernel to add support for a printer so we could print data off in Linux. I've also had Astronomy Masters students feel overwhelmed with Linux - avoiding it or dumping it out of frustration early.
Quite frankly, I don't believe you. The only printer related things in the kernel are the USB and parallel port support; everything else is in userspace. If you didn't have usb or lp support, you could just modprobe them?!? If you're going to bash somethings failings, at least pick a failing that's real.
Sadly, I've heard many developers come out with the line "Ah well, memory is cheap". Swift smack upside the head needed to make then realise that, yeah, memory is cheap. Just imagine the cool stuff you could be using it for if it wasn't full of crap!
Slashdot Mirror
although I might make a decent amount of money on stock options
:) Stock options ... heh
Ha ha ha ha ha! That's a good one. Best laugh I've had all day, that
And once the IPO goes through, suddenly it's no longer about employees and customers but aout shareholders and reports and juggling meaningless numbers
You've got that right. IPO is the worst thing to happen to a company from an employees point of view. Suddenly job satisfaction is out the window and you are kept tagging along with carrots on sticks ("Ooh, more options that won't vest for 2 years! Thank you!")
Last company I worked for that went through IPO lost almost all of its IT department who were suddenly faced with an extra 6 hours work per day in exchange for not being fired.
I thought this. I basically equate Dali programmers with Kai Krause
Running Windows is like having sex - without protection, there's a 50% chance you get infected in 12 minutes...
And 12 minutes is a MASSIVE improvement on previous statistics!
Humans 'similar to other biological organisms'
More on this shocking new theory at 8
Open up Dia and, within 10 minutes, figure out how to add or remove points from connecting lines without googling it...
:)
OK, scratch that, it's been put in the context menu since I last used it
Now it's just as unusable as Visio, so recommend away!
Hate to be a pain, but didn't he say not to say dia? I don't know. I know nothing about diagramming in linux. Just thought I'de be annoying and point that out.
:)
...
There's always one
The problem with dia is a) the hideous symbol sets, and b) the completely unintuitive interface. Open up Dia and, within 10 minutes, figure out how to add or remove points from connecting lines without googling it...
Other than Kivio (which is non-free unless you get the rather cripple-icious Koffice version) the only OTHER one I can think of it TCM, which is even less intuitive than Dia. It still holds a place in my heart, though. Right in that blood-clot
Instead of blaming me for blaming the GGP poster for not knowing something, why don't you point us in the direction of some (good, not Dia - if they can't cope with OOo they don't have a hope with that) Visio like programs? I can't think of any, so I had none to contribute. I did not know of any alternatives, but it was obvious that the power of OOo Draw was being hidden behind a misrepresentation. I just wanted to fix that.
I have indeed thought that most users don't care what a piece of software is supposed to do and try and make it work instead. That's why I have seen requirements documents done in PowerPoint, database systems done in complex Excel spreadsheets with many cross-links and lookups, and websites created in Word. Just because a user wants a tool to do something doesn't make it a good idea...
Every single person who has asked me that question, I have showed them Ubuntu, and every single one has been impressed, up to the point when you show them that OpenOffice.org doesn't do drawing diagrams correctly...
OT, but define 'correctly'... it does vector drawing, and it does dynamic link lines. Sure, it's no Visio, but it's not intended to be. It's drawing tool (hence the name), not a diagramming tool, and what it does, it does correctly.
There are two things that I immediately see could come from this.
:(
1) Avalanche is launched and is a success
Coupled with the 'marketting' force of MS, distributors will start using Avalanche over BitTorrent because it's less likely to get them sued. BitTorrent will be viewed as the 'evil pirate upstart' version of MS's newest 'invention'.
2) Avalanche is canned
MS will put enough marketting spin on it to say that they have discovered this method of delivery unable to support 'secure, legal distribution' and the rest of the world will have to agree, or be sued. BitTorrent will be viewed as the 'evil pirate upstart' that can only be used for evil because MS have 'proved' it.
Either way, given MS's trustworthiness record, it's not looking good
Supply or intent to supply? If you go into a video shop and they have knock of copies on the shelves with pricing on, you can safely assume that they intend to sell them to the public. The intent was there. Sure, it may well be a 'lesser' issue, but the fact is that copies were made and offered for distribution.
If you get to the point of arguing the semantics of the letter of the law, you've already lost.
"If Time wants to get exposure to the geek community, let 'em buy an ad."
One word: Adblock
Remodel your entire home with alien technology using Time-Life's Unexplained Home Repair.
I'd buy that. I have an unexplained home that is in desperate need of sorting out.
Now one feature that DOES annoy me is Google's click-tracking. If I search something using google, check the top three results and figure out that my search terms are wrong.
So I use some other terms and notice that the three results are the same that I got from the last query after clicking them, because the urls are not he same in google because they track clicks.
From what I can see, it's only the sponsored links that are tracked (by mediafarm?). If they are sponsored links, then surely you want to track how much that sponsorship is worth?
Your normal search results seem unaffected.
(who it sounds like you have had the pleasure of dealing with)
Worse, they were contracted in from Liverpool (I'm in Sheffield) because of a lack of engineers in Sheffield, so they didn't even want to be down here in the first place. Those were the ones who tried to sign the job off without doing anything.
It seems to vary wildly, though. For instance, my parent's BT line has been off for 3 weeks now (only for voice, DSL still works!?!). The problem is related to some recent work carried out under the road. On no less than 5 occassions a BT engineer has arrived, run the SAME SET of tests and 'discovered' the problem (my dad tells them what it is every time, they believe him when the leave). Two of them tried to sign the job off as done, despite only having diagnosed, not fixed, the problem.
After 2 weeks and 3 visits, my dad phoned BT. They told him that they had no record of the problem and that it must be the first time he was reporting it, therefore they could not help him. Two phone calls later, one member of the call centre actually bothered to run a search instead of just reading the first screen that appeared. Found the problem, confirmed that it was not fixed. Did nothing else.
It's still not fixed. They're sending an engineer round to 'try and find the fault' (again). My dad has refused to pay for the past quarter's line rental and has queried Citizen's Advice for possible solutions.
It's not as hard as you make out to use GPL code by accident, especially library code. Consider the plight of a poor developer, forced with unmeetable deadlines and a fire-breathing boss with a P45 waiting (I've been there, it happens).
He needs to implement a specific piece of functionality and fast. He searches the web and finds some 'sample' code and thinks "just the job".
Copy.. paste..
You now have GPL code in your application, copied and pasted direct. Why? Malicious and callous hatred of free software? No, an accident. Carelessness. A quick fix in a tight spot.
It happens. I've seen it.
I'd have swapped that for keeping the description of how Arthur found the bypass plans in the basement - which is ESSENTIAL for the story since it's a nice counterpoint to the Vogon's claim that humanity didn't try to find the plans for the hyperspatial bypass.
I thought it was an excellent counterpoint to surrealism of the underlying metaphor...
He was a Jatravartid. The narrator pretty much read the first chapter of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe including the whole "in the beginning the Universe was created" bit.
I know _WHO_ he was supposed to be. a) It was not funny. b) It did not fit into the plot of the first book. c) It was a fucking brief and off handed reference even when it did come in to play in Restaurant.
Hehe, I love reading these anti-reviews. I thought the movie was great. I have no idea why ANYONE thought it was remotely faithful to the books. Earth blows up; check. Arthur saved by Ford; check. Babelfish, Vogons, other periphery; check. The entire rest of the storyline... um, no. Not in any version of the book, tv series, radio show, game or towel that I've ever known.
Anyway, onto my point and what I found amusing in your rants about Humma Kavula:
"John Malkovich's character, a religious leader, was created especially for the movie by Douglas Adams."
Source: http://imdb.com/title/tt0371724/trivia
All this agro over a bit that DNA actually wrote! In fact, if you look deeper, Douglas wrote pretty much all of it. All that was left to do was the screenplay.
I dunno. Maybe you were expecting a glorious deep story. Maybe you were expecting a visual representation of the books, verbatim, like even LOTR failed to do. Whatever, you were never gonna get it. What we did get was an amusing, madcap comedy in the Hitchhikers universe, and a load of nay-sayers who would never have been happy unless they had made it themselves. Seeing as none of you would, the point really is moot.
You really should have run the tests a number of times each and averaged them. That would have satisfactorily ruled out any glitches or anomalies in the output.
Also, why link an sxw with a graph? Why not link the sxc with all the actual figures?
Is that its installation speed, which is notoriously slow, or the speed at which it runs? Any system that takes a weekend to install just HAS to be faster, right?
I think it's more "I had to work so damned hard to get this thing up and running, there must be a good payoff. Right? Right?"
The first 3 sentences are already up there, in the --omg-optimized section, 7th quote
No... You don't need those requirements... Distcc helps nicely and can cut the compile time for a base system
;)
You don't need a 4GHz computer, you just need 3 or 4 relatively high spec ones. I'm afraid that still lands Gentoo in the same camp as the 'single fast machine' lot. People who have more computing power than sense
I ran Gentoo for a reasonable length of time at home and at work. A network of 40 Gentoo boxes and distcc made the whole thing move along nicely, but for my home machine I had to switch so that I could spend less time compiling and more time actually, you know, getting some work done.
I didn't call you a liar, I said I didn't believe you. Figure out the philosophical conotations for yourself.
Aaah, soddit. If you're still trolling after this long you must be serious. Fine... Linux sucks because you had to compile a kernel once five years ago. Leave it, man, it's just not funny any more.
Hoorah! Personal insults! Nice one, really assisted your point.
From what I can tell, you built a custom kernel (something I have not _had_ to do since 2.0.35, but have occassionally done by choice) and forgot something, then blamed the OS that you had to go and put it back.
It sounds like this was quite a long time ago, and if you got YOUR head out of the sand, you would see that this kind of thing just doesn't happen anymore. It's like saying it's difficult to get CD-ROM drives working in Windows XP because, in DOS, you had to edit config.sys and autoexec.bat.
If you feel the need to recompile your kernel for whatever reason (masochism, Gentoo, you know the score) then you should accept responsibility if you screw it up. Generally, it's enough to just modprobe what's missing from the stock kernel provided by the distro.
I've had comp sci students roll their eyes at me when I had to recompile my kernel to add support for a printer so we could print data off in Linux. I've also had Astronomy Masters students feel overwhelmed with Linux - avoiding it or dumping it out of frustration early.
Quite frankly, I don't believe you. The only printer related things in the kernel are the USB and parallel port support; everything else is in userspace. If you didn't have usb or lp support, you could just modprobe them?!? If you're going to bash somethings failings, at least pick a failing that's real.
Sadly, I've heard many developers come out with the line "Ah well, memory is cheap". Swift smack upside the head needed to make then realise that, yeah, memory is cheap. Just imagine the cool stuff you could be using it for if it wasn't full of crap!