You are spot on about flaming (and your tagline is brilliant), but you were not responding to a flame. It was actually a pretty reasonable post.
Perhaps, rather than calling Windows apologists "stupid," he should have pointed out that none of them demonstrate any capacity for critical thought. Bigger words, same meaning.
Use a real name next time, and maybe you'll get a real answer.
I think his failure to obtain a real answer is due in large part by his failure to address a real person. Instead, he engaged a paranoid, bitter and infantile egomaniac. Results were as one would expect.
As a service to the Slashdot community, the red pen is providing this capsule summary of Tom Christiansen's comment, lest anyone spend more that a few valuable seconds spotting it for the drivel it is.
I am King of the Hill. That Hill is the Perl Hill, the Computer Science Hill or the Blustery Intellectual Hill, depending on which slightly different Hill makes it clearer that I'm King of It. In short, I am King of the Hill by definition, so don't bother attempting to dispute it.
Now, some people have suggested that there might be other hills to be King of. To be King of these Hills, you must read the sports page, have an MBA, be interested in commerce or, in some other way embrace a world view that deviates from mine. Don't fall for it! Their hills are not The Hill (of which only I am King). In order to show that their hills are of no value, I shall mock them and call them clever names. Seriously, we all know that "secretaries, librarians, or data entry clerks" aren't fully qualified human beings. Give me a break.
Do I mention I'm King of the Hill? Oh look! My masturbatory post has been moderated way up. It's good to be the King.
Senators in safe seats have soooo much more free time than VP's running for President.
Good point -- but it was a pretty short, fluffy article that re-hashed things he'd already said. He might've had a chance to write it, and he's more likely to have than many other politicians.
You're definitely right that people should be aware of how little is personally written by these people.
Years ago, a friend of mine had to write some sort of Technology and Policy document for some Senate subcommitee that Senator Al Gore chaired. Gore was only responsible for endorsing it by writing a foreward.
Ordinarily, a Senator will assign some (hopefully) bright staffer to write the foreward and then signs his or her name (Kay Bailey Hutchison probably needs help with that, too). To my friend's surprise, Senator Gore made time to meet with him and discuss the paper. Gore asked a series of increasingly deep technical questions and when he felt he understood the contents of the paper, he wrote the foreward himself. In addition, it was insightful.
My friend has been a staunch Gore supporter since.
You may now continue with your regularly-scheduled episode of "Slashdot posters bash Gore."
Yes but when was the last time the White house was called in to moderate an Anti Trust settlement.
Ooo! Case in point!
Ummm... has the White House been called in to moderate an Anti-Trust settlement? What, exactly, did Gore say? What did he mean? Do you know? Did you read the original article? Care to cite a fact?
You may not be a stupid person, but you are an ignorant person.
According to this report, Gore tried to say as little as possible about the anti-trust suit. The C|Net article also stresses this, but throws an aside that "[Gore] expected that the White House would get involved..." Note, it doesn't include a quote or any analysis of what this involvement would be.
For some strange reason, Slashdot fixated on this aside and there have erupted a torrent of ignorant flames about it. Sheesh... if I want this level of distortion and disinformation, I can listen to Rush Limbaugh. Maybe people all these people who are clearly too lazy to read the original story will listen to the NPR version.
Shiner Boch is the National beer of Texas. I've managed to find it outside the Republic, but it's difficult. One bar in Florida listed it as an import. I guess travelling from Heaven to Earth is an importing process.
I spent most of yesterday trying to get a Slowlaris machine to run with two NIC cards. (OK, full disclosure: I had one of my staff doing it while I surfed Slashdot and offered helpful manager-type suggestions like "Did you try adding a route?").
It was a pain. In the end, I don't even know why we got it to work -- it was one of those "fiddle with it until something works" kind of things. There were no GUI tools and the help was lousy. Sometimes, when we did a netstat -r, it would hang for 5-10 minutes. WHY?!
If you showed a novice the trials we went through compared to the ease with which you can accomplish the same thing using a simple Linux GUI (or even CLI tools that worked), they'd guess that Linux was the expensive commercial operating system.
We would have been better off installing Sparc Linux over Slowlaris and gotten some real work done. I'm totally serious.
I have an equally low opinion of HPUX. Nowadays, when I'm faced with the prospect of using a commecial OS (and not just NT), I cringe.
D'ya think we hurt his feelings, jd? Maybe we should send him a fruit basket.
Seriously, the guy's a jerk. It would be one thing if there was ever any difference between the way his critics depict him and the way he actually behaves, but there is. Never. He's consistant.
Forum's like this grant him an un-earned opportunity to appear reasonable. Thank god that's out of his capability.
Slashdot's descision to interview this twit was disappointing and still is. The proof positive that it was a waste of bandwidth and brainpower can be found somewhat above this very post.
Fine. We'll just take our toys and go home. I home you won't miss Stevie Ray Vaughn, Edie Brickell, Tex-Mex cuisine, films like Rushmore, Lonestar, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Sports fans will undoubtedly miss the Dallas Stars, the Dallas Burn and the Dallas Cowboys (defense lawyers will also miss the Dallas Cowboys).
Becuase "possession is nine-tenths of the law," we also lay claim to Bob Mould, Ministry, and Sandra Bullock.
Finally, Walker: Texas Ranger may be a lame TV show, but do you think anyone would watch Walker: Wisconsin Ranger?! Not likely.
Now, I know what you're going to say, but we can make our own damn cheese.
Remember Micrografx Designer? For years, it was the #1 illustration program for Windows. Corel Draw nipped at it's heals, but Micrografx had a firm lead.
Then, after the 3.0 release, the hack C coders who created it decided to rewrite the whole thing in C++. This was going to take "6 months." None of them had any OO development background, BTW.
Two years later, the company was bleeding money badly and laying off developers. Designer 4.0 still hadn't shipped. Meanwhile, Corel Draw had gone through two major revisions.
Lessons learned:
Never be arrogant about market lead. That can be lost in a single release cycle.
Don't release buggy crap.
In a closed-source, commercial project, these two bullets compete fiercely. Open source means never having to say, "Release it or we'll lose revenue!"
Back "in the day" when high-end IBM PC's featured the awesome 8086, Tandy (Radio Shack) build a PC called the Tandy 2000.
The Tandy 2000 featured an 80186, which is an 8086 with built in UART and DMA controller. The Tandy 2000 also featured a 640x480 color display at a time when the CGA was standard. All in all, it was about 4 years ahead of its time.
I remember a strange thing about the announcement: it was "85% IBM compatable." Huh? Who would make a "sorta compatible PC"? What software would it run reliably?
Well, it would run all this great new software for a new environment called "Windows." The slight differences in hardware would be hidden by "drivers." Cool, huh?
Except Microsoft didn't ship Windows 1.0 in time. When it did, it sucked. Worse yet, Microsoft decided to put Windows on the backburner in order to produce a new operating system with IBM called "OS/2."
The net result is that Tandy ended up with a warehouse full of Tandy 2000's they couldn't sell. It put them out of the computer business pretty much permanently.
The power, flexibility, and support of Linux is unmatched, from clusters of multi-processor scientific behemoths, to the young school girl's modest hand-me-down 386.
Well, actually the power of Linux is pretty well matched on both ends by OS/2, which has always had the fastest context switching. It even runs on a 286 (Linux won't).
The government built the roads, so they make the rules. And if you wanna drive on them, you've got to let anyone who wants to park in your garage and sleep in your house. That's about what your "logic" boils to.
Isn't it a little early in the day to start smoking crack?
The government did build the roads and they do make the rules. Try running stop signs and speeding in front of our friendly law enforcement officials and see how they respond.
I don't think that driving on the roads obligates me to open my garage or house in any way -- the laws governing use of the roads do not require this. Perhaps, if you should have your representative propose such a law just to teach liberals like me a lesson. Unfortunately, my representatives (and everyone else's probably) will vote against it and it will not pass. Good thing because it would be a voilation of the 4th Amendment barring "unreasonable seizure" of my property. Oh damn, that's another one of those damn laws you hate so much. Why oh why can't people be free to unreasonably seize things?!! It's so Stalinist!!!!
That's representative democracy. Read up on it when the drugs wear off.
The Heath Information Porability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 mandates controls over the release of "patient-specific" medical information. As another poster pointed out, this may require a PKI.
Or not. Because, in this case, the communication is between doctor and patient, they may only need to track the doctor's access to the records. Because (theoretically) the doctor is communicating directly with you, there may not be as stringent controls on that transmission. (IANAL.)
Why don't banks (and this medical site) use X.509 certs? Because they are a pain in the ass. Sure, they work great, but the general public has enough trouble just using a browser, much less dealing with a cert (I know, the cert is easy to use, but so is the browser!).
Right this very minute, I'm trying to set up a mini-PKI to demo to an oil company and it's a royal hassle. PKI products don't talk to your Enterprise apps... they don't follow published standards... or they implement different options of those standard and can't talk. That's if you get them to run in the first place (grrrr... I've been here 3 hours trying to get Netscape's LDAP to run on Slowlaris). These are just the server-side hassles.
Now add in the clueless clients. Not only do they have to follow the procedure to download a cert (good luck making it simple enough), but they have to password protect it (oh no, another password!). If they use Internet Exploder, they have several options: no password (what's the point?) or increasing levels of annoying password re-prompting. It sucks.
The only companies I've been able to get to adopt X.509 certs are those who are really paranoid, technically enlightened, or those who we can threaten with IT audit "findings" if they don't (those finding may be reported to the SEC if there is some kind of stock-affecting trouble).
Slashdot Mirror
It involves hard work, but it is not at all synonymous with "elbow grease." This is yet another indication that this guy is blowing smoke.
Perhaps, rather than calling Windows apologists "stupid," he should have pointed out that none of them demonstrate any capacity for critical thought. Bigger words, same meaning.
- Use a real name next time, and maybe you'll get a real answer.
I think his failure to obtain a real answer is due in large part by his failure to address a real person. Instead, he engaged a paranoid, bitter and infantile egomaniac. Results were as one would expect.- I am King of the Hill. That Hill is the Perl Hill, the Computer Science Hill or the Blustery Intellectual Hill, depending on which slightly different Hill makes it clearer that I'm King of It. In short, I am King of the Hill by definition, so don't bother attempting to dispute it.
You're welcome.Now, some people have suggested that there might be other hills to be King of. To be King of these Hills, you must read the sports page, have an MBA, be interested in commerce or, in some other way embrace a world view that deviates from mine. Don't fall for it! Their hills are not The Hill (of which only I am King). In order to show that their hills are of no value, I shall mock them and call them clever names. Seriously, we all know that "secretaries, librarians, or data entry clerks" aren't fully qualified human beings. Give me a break.
Do I mention I'm King of the Hill? Oh look! My masturbatory post has been moderated way up. It's good to be the King.
- Senators in safe seats have soooo much more free time than VP's running for President.
Good point -- but it was a pretty short, fluffy article that re-hashed things he'd already said. He might've had a chance to write it, and he's more likely to have than many other politicians.You're definitely right that people should be aware of how little is personally written by these people.
See my anecdote.
Ordinarily, a Senator will assign some (hopefully) bright staffer to write the foreward and then signs his or her name (Kay Bailey Hutchison probably needs help with that, too). To my friend's surprise, Senator Gore made time to meet with him and discuss the paper. Gore asked a series of increasingly deep technical questions and when he felt he understood the contents of the paper, he wrote the foreward himself. In addition, it was insightful.
My friend has been a staunch Gore supporter since.
You may now continue with your regularly-scheduled episode of "Slashdot posters bash Gore."
Here are some links to NPR's (Real Audia) essays on the subject:
- Yes but when was the last time the White house was called in to moderate an Anti Trust settlement.
Ooo! Case in point!Ummm... has the White House been called in to moderate an Anti-Trust settlement? What, exactly, did Gore say? What did he mean? Do you know? Did you read the original article? Care to cite a fact?
You may not be a stupid person, but you are an ignorant person.
According to this report, Gore tried to say as little as possible about the anti-trust suit. The C|Net article also stresses this, but throws an aside that "[Gore] expected that the White House would get involved..." Note, it doesn't include a quote or any analysis of what this involvement would be.
For some strange reason, Slashdot fixated on this aside and there have erupted a torrent of ignorant flames about it. Sheesh... if I want this level of distortion and disinformation, I can listen to Rush Limbaugh. Maybe people all these people who are clearly too lazy to read the original story will listen to the NPR version.
- Clinton's rape of a campaign worker, Juanita Broderick
.... Gates had the story killed.
Or maybe the story wasn't accurate.- Alan Dershowitz, Harvard Law Professor
Shiner Boch is the National beer of Texas. I've managed to find it outside the Republic, but it's difficult. One bar in Florida listed it as an import. I guess travelling from Heaven to Earth is an importing process.
It was a pain. In the end, I don't even know why we got it to work -- it was one of those "fiddle with it until something works" kind of things. There were no GUI tools and the help was lousy. Sometimes, when we did a netstat -r, it would hang for 5-10 minutes. WHY?!
If you showed a novice the trials we went through compared to the ease with which you can accomplish the same thing using a simple Linux GUI (or even CLI tools that worked), they'd guess that Linux was the expensive commercial operating system.
We would have been better off installing Sparc Linux over Slowlaris and gotten some real work done. I'm totally serious.
I have an equally low opinion of HPUX. Nowadays, when I'm faced with the prospect of using a commecial OS (and not just NT), I cringe.
Seriously, the guy's a jerk. It would be one thing if there was ever any difference between the way his critics depict him and the way he actually behaves, but there is. Never. He's consistant.
Forum's like this grant him an un-earned opportunity to appear reasonable. Thank god that's out of his capability.
Slashdot's descision to interview this twit was disappointing and still is. The proof positive that it was a waste of bandwidth and brainpower can be found somewhat above this very post.
- the Texans deserve it, IMHO
Fine. We'll just take our toys and go home. I home you won't miss Stevie Ray Vaughn, Edie Brickell, Tex-Mex cuisine, films like Rushmore, Lonestar, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Sports fans will undoubtedly miss the Dallas Stars, the Dallas Burn and the Dallas Cowboys (defense lawyers will also miss the Dallas Cowboys).Becuase "possession is nine-tenths of the law," we also lay claim to Bob Mould, Ministry, and Sandra Bullock.
Finally, Walker: Texas Ranger may be a lame TV show, but do you think anyone would watch Walker: Wisconsin Ranger?! Not likely.
Now, I know what you're going to say, but we can make our own damn cheese.
Then, after the 3.0 release, the hack C coders who created it decided to rewrite the whole thing in C++. This was going to take "6 months." None of them had any OO development background, BTW.
Two years later, the company was bleeding money badly and laying off developers. Designer 4.0 still hadn't shipped. Meanwhile, Corel Draw had gone through two major revisions.
Lessons learned:
- Never be arrogant about market lead. That can be lost in a single release cycle.
- Don't release buggy crap.
In a closed-source, commercial project, these two bullets compete fiercely. Open source means never having to say, "Release it or we'll lose revenue!"The Tandy 2000 featured an 80186, which is an 8086 with built in UART and DMA controller. The Tandy 2000 also featured a 640x480 color display at a time when the CGA was standard. All in all, it was about 4 years ahead of its time.
I remember a strange thing about the announcement: it was "85% IBM compatable." Huh? Who would make a "sorta compatible PC"? What software would it run reliably?
Well, it would run all this great new software for a new environment called "Windows." The slight differences in hardware would be hidden by "drivers." Cool, huh?
Except Microsoft didn't ship Windows 1.0 in time. When it did, it sucked. Worse yet, Microsoft decided to put Windows on the backburner in order to produce a new operating system with IBM called "OS/2."
The net result is that Tandy ended up with a warehouse full of Tandy 2000's they couldn't sell. It put them out of the computer business pretty much permanently.
The IBM PC didn't kill the TRS-80, Microsoft did.
- The power, flexibility, and support of Linux is unmatched, from clusters of multi-processor scientific behemoths, to the young school girl's modest hand-me-down 386.
Well, actually the power of Linux is pretty well matched on both ends by OS/2, which has always had the fastest context switching. It even runs on a 286 (Linux won't).It does not run on Amigas.
If I can ever find an Amiga, I'll have to check it out. Until then, I think I'll run my Linux on hardware I can buy.
What gives?
- -Steve Martin, commenting on speaking French badly
If I used one of these, I'd want to know enough of the destination language to "sanity check" its output.- Look, I travel WITHOUT a driver's license...
Yes, there are facts that are unclear to some people here. Guess who those people are? Or person. Sheesh.I have an Internationals Drivers Permit.
You might want to check FACTS...
- The government built the roads, so they make the rules. And if you wanna drive on them, you've got to let anyone who wants to park in your garage and sleep in your house. That's about what your "logic" boils to.
Isn't it a little early in the day to start smoking crack?The government did build the roads and they do make the rules. Try running stop signs and speeding in front of our friendly law enforcement officials and see how they respond.
I don't think that driving on the roads obligates me to open my garage or house in any way -- the laws governing use of the roads do not require this. Perhaps, if you should have your representative propose such a law just to teach liberals like me a lesson. Unfortunately, my representatives (and everyone else's probably) will vote against it and it will not pass. Good thing because it would be a voilation of the 4th Amendment barring "unreasonable seizure" of my property. Oh damn, that's another one of those damn laws you hate so much. Why oh why can't people be free to unreasonably seize things?!! It's so Stalinist!!!!
That's representative democracy. Read up on it when the drugs wear off.
Or not. Because, in this case, the communication is between doctor and patient, they may only need to track the doctor's access to the records. Because (theoretically) the doctor is communicating directly with you, there may not be as stringent controls on that transmission. (IANAL.)
Why don't banks (and this medical site) use X.509 certs? Because they are a pain in the ass. Sure, they work great, but the general public has enough trouble just using a browser, much less dealing with a cert (I know, the cert is easy to use, but so is the browser!).
Right this very minute, I'm trying to set up a mini-PKI to demo to an oil company and it's a royal hassle. PKI products don't talk to your Enterprise apps... they don't follow published standards... or they implement different options of those standard and can't talk. That's if you get them to run in the first place (grrrr... I've been here 3 hours trying to get Netscape's LDAP to run on Slowlaris). These are just the server-side hassles.
Now add in the clueless clients. Not only do they have to follow the procedure to download a cert (good luck making it simple enough), but they have to password protect it (oh no, another password!). If they use Internet Exploder, they have several options: no password (what's the point?) or increasing levels of annoying password re-prompting. It sucks.
The only companies I've been able to get to adopt X.509 certs are those who are really paranoid, technically enlightened, or those who we can threaten with IT audit "findings" if they don't (those finding may be reported to the SEC if there is some kind of stock-affecting trouble).