The egos in the comics industry are brutal, and they have been for decades. Breathed, Watterson and Trudeau all do great artwork, but they're all assholes in print. I think the difficulty of investing yourself into something while simultaneously preparing for the fact that no one will take it seriously forces them into eternal-defensiveness and insecurity.
I bet you could find a lot of american animators who have the same trait.
The DC controller sucks, and I had no problem playing Gran Turismo with Sony's dual shock controller.
I know it's not a popular opinion, but I'm siding with Sony on the anti-aliasing issue. Coders will find ways around it. Sega especially because they take the time to make their games right.
And online play sucks. You want Counterstrike? buy a PC.
Sorry, but this thing is just a stock play by Sega while they reorganize for pure game dev. It's really a non-factor in their (and our) future. What's more interesting is that Sega's going to be making games for other platforms: Good games AND a decent controller. Yay!
The conversation between you two was fascinating, and you don't see much of that sort of thing around here anymore. It's nice to see a good news story will still bring out the nerds, was it were.
Their order page uses javascript legitimately. So I have to turn js on just to go there. For the rest of the web I just leave it shut off, I figure if they wanted me to see it they'd put it in html.
We just filled 3 Application Programmer positions, so we won't be hiring for a bit. We're a UNIX shop as far as development, so if you want to work for us (or a place like us, they're all over Boston) in the future, learn some shell tricks, some PERL (perl and some jscript run the new web frontends we're painting on our old apps), and lots of C and SQL(ingres). Brush up on yer emacs, too. Since we do statistical analysis, and we can't pay anywhere near market for SAS Dev (one of the best things to know these days, private companies and government agencies alike will cheerfully kill for good SAS gurus), if you really wanted to work here, that'd be your best bet.
It's got nothing to do with FUD, kiddo. I used to teach both programs to schizophrenics, marines, biotech workers and other morons: Word is easier to learn, and most of our new hires walk through the door already knowing how to use it, so it's a waste to retrain them on WP. The other problem is we standardized on WP9 (WP OFFICE 2K), and it uses 50MB of RAM just to get off the ground. My poor P133s! We're getting an office app server, and given MS' new "charity" pricing ($30 per), I'm going to push to install Word and Excel on it.
Of course, if I had my way, I'd let them all use StarOffice off one of the SPARCs, but that's not my call. I pretty much have to choose between WP and MSO, and since they need MSO just to read attachments with any accuracy, I'm going with the smaller migrane, thanks.
You make a bunch of money at computer companies, but what are you really doing? Most of that stuff's useless toys or the same thing the other guy's making. Most government jobs actually do (in my case indirectly, since we only TEST cancer, AIDS and MS treatments for FDA approval) support and benefit the population, and of more than just this country at that. Trace the history of what you do back fifty or a hundred years, at critical points you'll probably find the US government helped it along with a grant or some related research in another area. You provide the economy, but I'm telling you some public expenditure is necessary to keep things stable, and to catch you when you fall. It's the height of fucking hubris to assume you, your company, your schools, or your field of study and work haven't benefitted from the government at all.
Postal workers start with more than a month of vacation, and when your company told you they gave you "100% medical," they meant "with an HMO that's only 50% as good as Blue Cross." Also, your job's safe with them, and even if it goes away, you get plenty of warning and severance and stuff.
No ping-pong tables, though. Can't have it all, I guess.
It'll probably be factored into future contracts. When they set up grants and stuff, they actually plan every position with an estimated salary, so now the standard salary for tech positions (like mine) will be expected to go up by a third, though that's not going to be enough here in Boston, or in SF, New York, etc./jpowers/
"Hey, look, extra money laying around! Yay! We made it! We're not going to sink along with the dot coms! Quick, pay people more before they disappear."
You better bet I'm worth it, too.
My job's federally funded. I'm a "Network Coordinator" for an NIH-funded research nonprofit in Boston. Started two years ago at pretty low salary, but not bad for an English major. This year a.startup offered me $60K plus stocks plus guaranteed $10K raise for five years.
The company I work for offered me near $50K to stay and I took it, since the startup had some inconsistencies in their job description. There are some benfits that startups (I got lots of offers) couldn't compete with: 4 weeks vacation, 4 weeks sick (which I can actually use), a week of personal time, 0 interest loans for a new computer, no dress code (I mean some of the coders show up in their pajamas), set your own hours, no deadlines, full medical, dental, and I'm insured and invested every way you can imagine. Plus everybody goes way out of their way to get along, there's very little politics, and most importantly: if your new.economy tanks, I've still got a job. Here in Boston folks are still skittish from 7-10 years ago, so that's a big deal. Right now jobs are so easy to come by, you think you can just lose one and pick up another, but when there are less jobs than people...
I learned everything I know about linux and unix and perl and c and java and NeXT and BeOS and even a little win2k registry stuff just during the slow periods (read: when I have everything running efficiently and no one breaks anything). We're slightly understaffed for some stuff and there's a lot of non-IT people here who don't have it as easy as I do, plus some of the larger IT decisions are made by folks a little behind (everyone is still using Word Perfect), but overall, I've had a bunch of tech jobs (state gov, fed gov, private sector, nonprofit) and this sort of pseudo-fed job's the best, the pay being the only issue (and one I can live with).
if somebody puts a label on something saying "It's a draft, don't quote it", it's accepted without question.
That's because it's academic work and the final point of it is to be shared. It's a tradition older than patents and copyrights. The sharing of academic work for the benefit of all has existed in some form or another in recorded history longer than irony, and if we measure by your use of that, it's a healthier tradition as well. Why don't you leave deconstruction to the professionals and get to work on something useful?
Why should you? Because some moron^H^H^H^H^H nerd think that reading this book will reveal everything about "the realities of the world under Big Brother". Now THAT'S pathetic!
"The enemy" don't fucking care about you. I advise you to quit playing games on your peecee. Go outside, meet people, get a life!
He was talking about the character. In the book, the fictional character Goldstein writes a manifesto against the fictional government. It's all fiction, and nowhere does he suggest it's fact. I suggest the book be read just because so many are aware of it, it's part of the cultural conversation right now, and because so many idiots cite it in situations where it has no relevance. 1984 should be read so he can become more involved in the cultural conversation. You, on the other hand, are welcome to fuck off.
The part not described by the word. The part where you throw Symantec an extra $300 so you can do exactly what he was hinting at. The part where you start thinking complete thoughts, and then following through with meaningful comments longer than seven words. I didn't like restating the whole question in 3rd grade reading comprehension quizzes, either, but it helps you learn to communicate without leaving your actual ideas in the [understood] part of your statements.
That's just like handing out condoms in high schools. It doesn't make the problem any better.
I think you may be confusing what's moral with what's theologically popular. Teenage sex isn't a problem. It's a reality. Disease and teen pregnancy are health problems, which condom use could go a long way towards solving.
So how does your analogy fit with what he said? I mean, unless you think both Napster and condoms keep kids from using the black tar heroin or smoking the crack or something. Then I guess you have a point. Sort of. Or not.
When was there honesty, again? I keep looking for it in theology and history books and I'm coming up empty...
These other guys missed the real question: what makes Moore's Law a Law instead of a Theory or Hypothesis or whatever. Answer: nothing. Computers have had such an immediate and close relationship with our culture and society that linguistic rigor fell victim to slang and momentum. More specifically, the process seems to have been: Murphy's "Law" seems to work, so everything that seems to work will now be a Law.
Moore's is a Hypothesis in the classical sense. Seems to work right out of the gate, but who knows for how long? Not as long as Gravitation has held up, certainly. Evolution and Relativity are still theories, and Moore's Hypothesis is written on a Bazooka Joe wrapper compared to those.
OT- For all those people who complain that anime posts are not "news for nerds," this article is as close as/.'s gotten in a while. Count the posts and tell me why...
No, instead, he uses Red Hat, with a spiffy GUI tool, and has no clue what on earth is going on his system.
Sure... if Joe User is installing it for a desktop. I've only been running RedHat and SuSE servers for about three years now, and I've yet to see one work right off the CD. I always need to configure something. The packages set up a default configuration-but that doesn't make the app work. You still need to edit, say, httpd.conf to get apache to run as a webserver.
Eh, it's more that you need to understand inetd, inetd.conf and whatever way your OS/distribution runs the bootscripts to turn the services off. (Not that that is enough to close all the ports). That is, if you can figure out which services you really need.
...or you can shut them all off at install and turn them on later very easily (with YaST). RedHat takes more work, but it's work you have to do anyway just to get the fscking thing installed.
How is "that's the way MS shipped it to us" different from "that's the way Red Hat shipped it to us" or "that's the way Sun Microsystems shipped it to us"?
Thanks for completely ignoring half of what I said. The answer is the expectation of ease. RedHat has none. M$ does. M$ writes its software for ease if install, and the install gui presents the end SA with the illusion that everything is taken care of for him. You should see the fscking mess we found on the NT box, and that was with someone we PAID to make it secure. I sat right there and watched the guy install it (never seen it before, you see) and talked to him about how it worked, etc. I've put it on a few other machines to see how it worked, it was like installing a game.
With the SuSE server, I had installed it as a desktop (by choosing single user, so no security) for someone to use and then had to switch it over to use as a server when one crashed, so it was wide open, and that was my fault.
The other linux box I set up with the server choice to begin with. I had to tweak a few apps to get them to work, and as I read the manuals(apache, etc), I watched for "if you want to be secure, do this" notes and followed them. That box passed. It's still probably an easy target for someone who knows what they're doing, but at least the hobbyists will have a hard time getting in.
So I reiterate what I said in my first post: The difference between linux and NT is that linux SAs are expected to do some work to get their server up and running, at the same time they should be making it relatively secure, which is not that much more time consuming. NT SAs are expected to slap the CD in, install IIS or whatever, and get back to their jobs as (in my mother's case) Tax Accountant.
I can't speak to your point about buffer overflows. If you're suggesting that NT is more secure for protecting against it, more power to you (and M$). Doesn't do much good once the end user installs Outlook, does it? Oh wait, that's in there by default.
While none of us really need to get in another fight over which OS is better, I have to ask you to give your own post a second look and consider that your view of this situation may be too simple to be accurate: configuring and operating a linux server is different than doing the same with an NT box. For most NT servers, NT installs right off the CD, you fill out the networking info, and start making user logins. All services are either switched on from the control panel or by installing it off another CD with "autorun".
Linux is a different animal. It takes some work to configure one of these things. SendMail, Apache, Samba, X, whatever you need, you configure, and unlike NT, everything is "off" until you turn it "on", and not only by running YaST, but by endlessly tweaking relevant app.conf files. You basically need to know the inner workings of the programs just to get them to run. Of course, you get some pretty exact control in return, but it really does take a degree of effort just to think the program's configuration through. Not that you couldn't put the same time and effort into tweaking an NT box, but the distribution and marketing of NT don't encourage it. It doesn't make NT admins' sloth any less wrong than *nix admins', but the truth is that the culture and attitude that has developed around the two (NT is great because I slap a M$-approved CD in the drive, then sit in my big comfy chair all day and wait for it to crash v. Linux is great because I tweak the hell out of Apache to get it compatible with my perlcgi style then set hosts.allow to all:all because I'm too lazy to map my fscking users) forces the *nix admins to take all the responsibility for their systems while NT can just say "that's the way MS shipped it to us".
Sysadmins of all stripes deserve SOME of the flak for the spread of viruses and the DDOS attacks from their exploited servers, but M$, by taking some of the control over the system away from NT SAs, also must take a proportional share of the responsibility. Consequently, the security audit my single-purpose linux ftp server failed last Thursday is my fault, but the NT guy gets to blame the MS-approved consultant who installed his fileserver.
It's a shame this one got modded down as a troll, since it's actually the most relevant first post I've seen in a long time. The South Park phenomenon has some interesting parallels to the principles behind annoy.com. Just like Marilyn Manson and Eminem, back to Alice Cooper and Ozzy: say anything, insult everyone, see who responds in anger, set yourself up as a martyr. That's how the game's played.
Doesn't work all that well if you post AC, though.
Slashdot Mirror
The egos in the comics industry are brutal, and they have been for decades. Breathed, Watterson and Trudeau all do great artwork, but they're all assholes in print. I think the difficulty of investing yourself into something while simultaneously preparing for the fact that no one will take it seriously forces them into eternal-defensiveness and insecurity.
I bet you could find a lot of american animators who have the same trait.
-jpowers
The DC controller sucks, and I had no problem playing Gran Turismo with Sony's dual shock controller. I know it's not a popular opinion, but I'm siding with Sony on the anti-aliasing issue. Coders will find ways around it. Sega especially because they take the time to make their games right. And online play sucks. You want Counterstrike? buy a PC.
-jpowers
Sorry, but this thing is just a stock play by Sega while they reorganize for pure game dev. It's really a non-factor in their (and our) future. What's more interesting is that Sega's going to be making games for other platforms: Good games AND a decent controller. Yay!
-jpowers
The conversation between you two was fascinating, and you don't see much of that sort of thing around here anymore. It's nice to see a good news story will still bring out the nerds, was it were.
-jpowers
Their order page uses javascript legitimately. So I have to turn js on just to go there. For the rest of the web I just leave it shut off, I figure if they wanted me to see it they'd put it in html.
-jpowers
-1, nested, always.
-jpowers
...Napster to that list. I, for one, have been carefully backing it up for about a year now...
-jpowers
We just filled 3 Application Programmer positions, so we won't be hiring for a bit. We're a UNIX shop as far as development, so if you want to work for us (or a place like us, they're all over Boston) in the future, learn some shell tricks, some PERL (perl and some jscript run the new web frontends we're painting on our old apps), and lots of C and SQL(ingres). Brush up on yer emacs, too. Since we do statistical analysis, and we can't pay anywhere near market for SAS Dev (one of the best things to know these days, private companies and government agencies alike will cheerfully kill for good SAS gurus), if you really wanted to work here, that'd be your best bet.
-jpowers
It's got nothing to do with FUD, kiddo. I used to teach both programs to schizophrenics, marines, biotech workers and other morons: Word is easier to learn, and most of our new hires walk through the door already knowing how to use it, so it's a waste to retrain them on WP. The other problem is we standardized on WP9 (WP OFFICE 2K), and it uses 50MB of RAM just to get off the ground. My poor P133s! We're getting an office app server, and given MS' new "charity" pricing ($30 per), I'm going to push to install Word and Excel on it.
Of course, if I had my way, I'd let them all use StarOffice off one of the SPARCs, but that's not my call. I pretty much have to choose between WP and MSO, and since they need MSO just to read attachments with any accuracy, I'm going with the smaller migrane, thanks.
I, on the other hand, will continue to use SuSE.
-jpowers
I've been granting trolls serious replies since before you knew what a troll was, son.
-jpowers
You make a bunch of money at computer companies, but what are you really doing? Most of that stuff's useless toys or the same thing the other guy's making. Most government jobs actually do (in my case indirectly, since we only TEST cancer, AIDS and MS treatments for FDA approval) support and benefit the population, and of more than just this country at that. Trace the history of what you do back fifty or a hundred years, at critical points you'll probably find the US government helped it along with a grant or some related research in another area. You provide the economy, but I'm telling you some public expenditure is necessary to keep things stable, and to catch you when you fall. It's the height of fucking hubris to assume you, your company, your schools, or your field of study and work haven't benefitted from the government at all.
-jpowers
Postal workers start with more than a month of vacation, and when your company told you they gave you "100% medical," they meant "with an HMO that's only 50% as good as Blue Cross." Also, your job's safe with them, and even if it goes away, you get plenty of warning and severance and stuff.
No ping-pong tables, though. Can't have it all, I guess.
-jpowers
It'll probably be factored into future contracts. When they set up grants and stuff, they actually plan every position with an estimated salary, so now the standard salary for tech positions (like mine) will be expected to go up by a third, though that's not going to be enough here in Boston, or in SF, New York, etc. /jpowers/
-jpowers
"Hey, look, extra money laying around! Yay! We made it! We're not going to sink along with the dot coms! Quick, pay people more before they disappear."
.startup offered me $60K plus stocks plus guaranteed $10K raise for five years.
.economy tanks, I've still got a job. Here in Boston folks are still skittish from 7-10 years ago, so that's a big deal. Right now jobs are so easy to come by, you think you can just lose one and pick up another, but when there are less jobs than people...
You better bet I'm worth it, too. My job's federally funded. I'm a "Network Coordinator" for an NIH-funded research nonprofit in Boston. Started two years ago at pretty low salary, but not bad for an English major. This year a
The company I work for offered me near $50K to stay and I took it, since the startup had some inconsistencies in their job description. There are some benfits that startups (I got lots of offers) couldn't compete with: 4 weeks vacation, 4 weeks sick (which I can actually use), a week of personal time, 0 interest loans for a new computer, no dress code (I mean some of the coders show up in their pajamas), set your own hours, no deadlines, full medical, dental, and I'm insured and invested every way you can imagine. Plus everybody goes way out of their way to get along, there's very little politics, and most importantly: if your new
I learned everything I know about linux and unix and perl and c and java and NeXT and BeOS and even a little win2k registry stuff just during the slow periods (read: when I have everything running efficiently and no one breaks anything). We're slightly understaffed for some stuff and there's a lot of non-IT people here who don't have it as easy as I do, plus some of the larger IT decisions are made by folks a little behind (everyone is still using Word Perfect), but overall, I've had a bunch of tech jobs (state gov, fed gov, private sector, nonprofit) and this sort of pseudo-fed job's the best, the pay being the only issue (and one I can live with).
-jpowers
if somebody puts a label on something saying "It's a draft, don't quote it", it's accepted without question.
That's because it's academic work and the final point of it is to be shared. It's a tradition older than patents and copyrights. The sharing of academic work for the benefit of all has existed in some form or another in recorded history longer than irony, and if we measure by your use of that, it's a healthier tradition as well. Why don't you leave deconstruction to the professionals and get to work on something useful?
-jpowers
Why should you? Because some moron^H^H^H^H^H nerd think that reading this book will reveal everything about "the realities of the world under Big Brother". Now THAT'S pathetic!
"The enemy" don't fucking care about you. I advise you to quit playing games on your peecee. Go outside, meet people, get a life!
He was talking about the character. In the book, the fictional character Goldstein writes a manifesto against the fictional government. It's all fiction, and nowhere does he suggest it's fact. I suggest the book be read just because so many are aware of it, it's part of the cultural conversation right now, and because so many idiots cite it in situations where it has no relevance. 1984 should be read so he can become more involved in the cultural conversation. You, on the other hand, are welcome to fuck off.
-jpowers
The part not described by the word. The part where you throw Symantec an extra $300 so you can do exactly what he was hinting at. The part where you start thinking complete thoughts, and then following through with meaningful comments longer than seven words. I didn't like restating the whole question in 3rd grade reading comprehension quizzes, either, but it helps you learn to communicate without leaving your actual ideas in the [understood] part of your statements.
-jpowers
That's just like handing out condoms in high schools. It doesn't make the problem any better.
I think you may be confusing what's moral with what's theologically popular. Teenage sex isn't a problem. It's a reality. Disease and teen pregnancy are health problems, which condom use could go a long way towards solving.
So how does your analogy fit with what he said? I mean, unless you think both Napster and condoms keep kids from using the black tar heroin or smoking the crack or something. Then I guess you have a point. Sort of. Or not.
When was there honesty, again? I keep looking for it in theology and history books and I'm coming up empty...
-jpowers
The rest of the posts in this thread after the parent and first two replies were clipped on my browser, sorry about that first sentence, y'all.
-jpowers
These other guys missed the real question: what makes Moore's Law a Law instead of a Theory or Hypothesis or whatever. Answer: nothing. Computers have had such an immediate and close relationship with our culture and society that linguistic rigor fell victim to slang and momentum. More specifically, the process seems to have been: Murphy's "Law" seems to work, so everything that seems to work will now be a Law.
/.'s gotten in a while. Count the posts and tell me why...
Moore's is a Hypothesis in the classical sense. Seems to work right out of the gate, but who knows for how long? Not as long as Gravitation has held up, certainly. Evolution and Relativity are still theories, and Moore's Hypothesis is written on a Bazooka Joe wrapper compared to those.
OT- For all those people who complain that anime posts are not "news for nerds," this article is as close as
-jpowers
Here I was thinking it was buggy and slow because I was accessing it with Netscape, but you're saying it was the servers?
Maybe, maybe not. I dropped hotmail and signed up for some other OS' mail... much better.
-jpowers
No, instead, he uses Red Hat, with a spiffy GUI tool, and has no clue what on earth is going on his system.
...or you can shut them all off at install and turn them on later very easily (with YaST). RedHat takes more work, but it's work you have to do anyway just to get the fscking thing installed.
Sure... if Joe User is installing it for a desktop. I've only been running RedHat and SuSE servers for about three years now, and I've yet to see one work right off the CD. I always need to configure something. The packages set up a default configuration-but that doesn't make the app work. You still need to edit, say, httpd.conf to get apache to run as a webserver.
Eh, it's more that you need to understand inetd, inetd.conf and whatever way your OS/distribution runs the bootscripts to turn the services off. (Not that that is enough to close all the ports). That is, if you can figure out which services you really need.
How is "that's the way MS shipped it to us" different from "that's the way Red Hat shipped it to us" or "that's the way Sun Microsystems shipped it to us"?
Thanks for completely ignoring half of what I said. The answer is the expectation of ease. RedHat has none. M$ does. M$ writes its software for ease if install, and the install gui presents the end SA with the illusion that everything is taken care of for him. You should see the fscking mess we found on the NT box, and that was with someone we PAID to make it secure. I sat right there and watched the guy install it (never seen it before, you see) and talked to him about how it worked, etc. I've put it on a few other machines to see how it worked, it was like installing a game.
With the SuSE server, I had installed it as a desktop (by choosing single user, so no security) for someone to use and then had to switch it over to use as a server when one crashed, so it was wide open, and that was my fault.
The other linux box I set up with the server choice to begin with. I had to tweak a few apps to get them to work, and as I read the manuals(apache, etc), I watched for "if you want to be secure, do this" notes and followed them. That box passed. It's still probably an easy target for someone who knows what they're doing, but at least the hobbyists will have a hard time getting in.
So I reiterate what I said in my first post: The difference between linux and NT is that linux SAs are expected to do some work to get their server up and running, at the same time they should be making it relatively secure, which is not that much more time consuming. NT SAs are expected to slap the CD in, install IIS or whatever, and get back to their jobs as (in my mother's case) Tax Accountant.
I can't speak to your point about buffer overflows. If you're suggesting that NT is more secure for protecting against it, more power to you (and M$). Doesn't do much good once the end user installs Outlook, does it? Oh wait, that's in there by default.
-jpowers
my personal favorite is Bakkslide Seven
That was beautiful. Thanks.
-jpowers
While none of us really need to get in another fight over which OS is better, I have to ask you to give your own post a second look and consider that your view of this situation may be too simple to be accurate: configuring and operating a linux server is different than doing the same with an NT box. For most NT servers, NT installs right off the CD, you fill out the networking info, and start making user logins. All services are either switched on from the control panel or by installing it off another CD with "autorun".
Linux is a different animal. It takes some work to configure one of these things. SendMail, Apache, Samba, X, whatever you need, you configure, and unlike NT, everything is "off" until you turn it "on", and not only by running YaST, but by endlessly tweaking relevant app.conf files. You basically need to know the inner workings of the programs just to get them to run. Of course, you get some pretty exact control in return, but it really does take a degree of effort just to think the program's configuration through. Not that you couldn't put the same time and effort into tweaking an NT box, but the distribution and marketing of NT don't encourage it. It doesn't make NT admins' sloth any less wrong than *nix admins', but the truth is that the culture and attitude that has developed around the two (NT is great because I slap a M$-approved CD in the drive, then sit in my big comfy chair all day and wait for it to crash v. Linux is great because I tweak the hell out of Apache to get it compatible with my perlcgi style then set hosts.allow to all:all because I'm too lazy to map my fscking users) forces the *nix admins to take all the responsibility for their systems while NT can just say "that's the way MS shipped it to us".
Sysadmins of all stripes deserve SOME of the flak for the spread of viruses and the DDOS attacks from their exploited servers, but M$, by taking some of the control over the system away from NT SAs, also must take a proportional share of the responsibility. Consequently, the security audit my single-purpose linux ftp server failed last Thursday is my fault, but the NT guy gets to blame the MS-approved consultant who installed his fileserver.
-jpowers
It's a shame this one got modded down as a troll, since it's actually the most relevant first post I've seen in a long time. The South Park phenomenon has some interesting parallels to the principles behind annoy.com. Just like Marilyn Manson and Eminem, back to Alice Cooper and Ozzy: say anything, insult everyone, see who responds in anger, set yourself up as a martyr. That's how the game's played.
Doesn't work all that well if you post AC, though.
-jpowers