I have an inherited Cabriolet with a single EV4/275MHz CPU and 256MB of memory. It's not a screamer when compared to the various soulless Athlons and Pentiums around here, but FreeBSD and three NICs turned it into an outstanding router / firewall / traffic shaper / IPv6 gateway / intrusion detector.
The biggest advantage is that the odds of the latest 1337 h4xx0r scripting their way into a BSD OS on a non-Intel architecture is roughly zero. I still keep current on the latest security patches, of course, but the relative obscurity is a nice extra layer of defense.
Best of all, though, is seeing kernel messages like "Preloaded elf kernel "kernel" at 0xfffffc00006bc000.". All of those 'f's in front are a sure sign that we're not in IA32 anymore.
You mean, AMD64 is just like IA32, with the exception of different operators, wider paths, different supporting chipsets, different interconnects, and a metric buttload of registers (but other than that they're identical)?
No, I wouldn't say that AMD is an "Intel architecture", although they make a line of chips that implement an Intel ISA. Their new stuff is markedly different.
However, I admit that there are better examples of non-Intel architectures, such as those made by the small upstarts IBM and Motorola.
That statement, right there, is why the two groups can't get along. To Conservatives, "liberal and fair" is an oxymoron, but to Liberals, it makes perfect sense. It's like arguing about whether the GPL or BSD license is "more free". Stating one position as unarguable fact only marks you as a partisan, and not insightful.
That's so typical of extremist left-wing groups who insist that everyone is entitled to free speech - as long as it meets their approval.
I'd better hear the same hue and cry in here as if a group of right-wing extremists were gleefully planning to shut down the DNC, or Nader, or any other such group.
That's just plain wrong. If you don't like someone, then debate them - don't try to shut them up.
People used to do without ALL technology, you can learn to do so again, but nobody ever claimed it was easy, and I'm not going to claim I would be willing to do it.
I don't know if that's true anymore. Unless you're willing to hand-grow subsistence levels of grain on your own land, you essentially have to rely on technology. A few days ago I saw a news story about an office building that had lost its air conditioner, and interviews with unsympathetic observers who noted that A/C is a fairly recent invention and we lived without it just fine. However, they neglected the rather strong point that today's buildings are designed around the idea of having functional air conditioning (and electricity and plumbing and elevators, for that matter). Without those technologies, a modern office complex would basically be uninhabitable.
I mention this as an example of my believe that there are certain technologies that have fundamentally changed the way we live to the point that our society wouldn't function properly without them. Air travel is one. Cars are another. The Internet is quickly becoming one. Simply boycotting them ceases to be a workable option after a while, and whether that's good or moral becomes irrelevant.
P.S. I live within a day's drive of my family - those were pure examples.
I live in the US mainland, and my family lives in Hawaii. What's the departure time on the Los Angeles - Honolulu Greyhound?
Alternatively, my mom's dying and I'm on the other side of the country. I have 8 hours to make it to her bedside to say goodbye. How fast do I have to drive to cross 3,000 miles with time to spare?
If someone boycotts the RIAA and you catch them buying a CD, then by all means heckle away. However, there are plenty of situations where it's just not possible to avoid the only means of high-speed long-distance transportation available in this country.
No kidding? Where did you get that RAID that can support 455MB per second of writes sustained for 30 minutes, which is what it would take to do a bare-metal recovery of 800GB in 1800 seconds?
Go back to playing with Access and dreaming big while the rest of us get work done, would you?
"in-" is a Latin prefix with a few meanings, two of them being "not" and "without". Examples: indestructible means "not destructible", inanimate means not animate, and incorrect means not correct. It's hardly a stretch to use insecure to mean "not secure", especially since that definition is in pretty much every dictionary you'll ever find.
I almost NEVER proper-case microsoft (lower-casing/deprecation intentional).
Why don't you just write "M$" and be done with it? You don't have to condone their business practices to admit that "Microsoft" is the proper spelling of their name, and more than my writing "David Syes" would mean that I think you have any valid points.
But Jane's problem is that she knows about as much about her computer's operating system as she knows about the automatic transmission in her car.
Fair enough. <sarcasm>And we all know that cars require no maintenance, and that dealers will fix the "little" problems after the warranty has expired because they owe it to you, and that the neighbor kid can make your car 20% faster by removing the rev limiter with no ill effects whatsoever.</sarcasm>
However, replace "car" with "computer" and "removing the rev limiter" with "overclocking" and people will think that you've made a perfectly reasonably statement.
As far as having to replace or upgrade add-on software, consider that my current car has an excellent Bose audio system. If I buy another car, I'll have to get used to a different stereo. Now, I can move my CDs (analogy: Word files, pictures of the kids, Quicken accounts) to the new car, but I won't be able to keep my current stereo. But I paid for it - shouldn't I be allowed to use it forever? Of course! But I can't expect the manufacturer of either car to help me get my old stereo working in my new car, and I'll probably break a lot of things along the way.
People understand this about their vehicles and it never occurs to them to question it (beyond griping that they wish their new car had a certain feature that they really liked in their old one) because that's just the way things are. Involve a computer, though, and those same people will scream to high heaven that the family tree maker they bought in the discount bin at Sam's Club in 1993 should still work ("it ran right on my old computer, so what's wrong with this new one?!?") no matter how infeasible that may be, or how many bugs their vendor would have to support to make that happen.
Trust me, I wish everybody looked at their computer just like their car. Noone gripes when their 1992 econobox doesn't perform like an '05 fuel-injected, lightweight two-door.
If some of the development community's best and brightest think this language is superior, why not drive an effort to help it put food on the table
You've honestly never heard of Zope, the web application server written in Python? My company isn't selling copies of our site that I developed on Zope, but it sure is turning a tidy profit on the people accessing it.
Many of us are feeding our families by programming in Python. It just may not be in the most visible places.
Spoken like someone who's never had to maintain legacy code. When I sit down to a 20KLOC codebase that I've never seen before, I want to be able to look at a page of code and be able to figure out what it does without having to hit CTAGS twice on each line.
As far as "sub" being obvious, would that refer to subtraction, or substitution, or substring count, or subscribe to dates within the specified range? The point is, there's no great reason to have to figure out the meaning of a common three-letter prefix when the easy solution of just spelling it out is conveniently sitting there.
It is like a person who brushes his teath to avoid the pain of cavities. VS. a person who brushes their teeth because the like the clean taist in their mouth. Who will have better oral health, the later because brushing teeth is a joy for him while the first guy will just do it enough.
To hear a dentist tell it: the guy who does just enough to get by. Most toothpastes ("Most teethpaste"?) contain abrasives that will eventually destroy your enamel if you use too much force or brush too long.
Yeah, I know what you were trying to say, but your example fails in non-obvious ways.
Do you have one of those narrow screens talked about in a previous Slashdot story? I used to laugh at people who wrote out subtractDate() - until I had to revisit my own code after not seeing it for months and figure out that procntr() meant "process the entry".
You have a lot of keys on your keyboard; might as well use 'em.
I'm not exactly the scrawny geek type, but in high school I had gym class with a mouth-breathing freak to stupid and mean to know when to quit hitting people. Anyway, after being terrorized by the loser for a couple of months, I made sure to be the last one out of the locker room at the beginning of class. Long story short, it's amazing how well a jar (not tube - jar) of Super Glue can weld a lock, the locker it's attached to, and all of the contents of said locker into one pungent mess.
I was young and stupid at the time, but I never could find it in myself to be remorseful about the act. When he realized that noone cared, including the teachers, and that noone was going to bother investigating it because everyone figured he had it coming, he pretty much calmed down and left everyone alone for the rest of the year.
Here's to you, Tommy, whatever prison you may be in.
The judge said it was "nearly identical" to the registered trademark "Jerry Falwell" name and was likely to be confusing to Web surfers. Considering Falwell's audience, the judge was probably right.
OMG CHRISIANZ ARE TEH ST00P1D!!! LOL OMG!
Timothy was right to edit your submission, but not because he "clarified" it, but because he removed your bigoted conclusion.
If the domain in question were "muslum.org", would you be joking about how people trying to go to muslim.org are likely to be confused? Considering, you know, that they're poor illiterate Muslims? Or is it only funny because Christians are fair game for ridicule?
The server side way gives you full flexibility, you can use any language/technology to validate, structure your parameters, regenerate the page. The cost is some efficiency (round trips, having to regenerate full pages except if you use lots if (i)frames which can be very hard to handle).
I have to reluctantly agree with you. You still have to validate forms on the server - if you don't, you deserve to be dragged out and flogged. So, now you have a server-side validation system and a parallel client-side system, hopefully with the same logic. Want to update a field's input range? Be sure to touch both pieces of code!
I'm guessing that smarter people than myself have this all figured out, but from what (admittedly little) I know about it, this seems like an easy way to double the amount of work required to process forms.
Thats because you associate coding and programing with learning and new discoveries. Every programming project, every new linux distrubution, every class has been something new and interesting. When you hit the real world, that ends. It becomes the same old shit everyday. Yes, you can learn on your own, but that isn't your job.
If that's your life, then you've carved out a little piece of hell of your own making. The problem is with your decisions and your priorities, not with the world.
Me? I live in a small town (25,000 people in the middle of an agricultural region). I'm in my early 30s and freakin' LOVE my job! I have complete decision making authority over my own projects ("Yeah, I think that Zope+Python on a FreeBSD server would be just the thing - OK if I go ahead and get started?") and am doing new and interesting things almost every day for a company with cool management, good pay, and outstanding benefits.
For example, the job description I applied for never mentioned anything about writing pseudo-AI image processing software to look for barcodes on faxes we receive so that we can import them into the appropriate place in our database, but that was my main project a few months ago. This month, I'm working on profiling and tuning the database connector I wrote to make Zope talk to Foxpro. As a side project, I've been looking at partitioning our webserver into a set of jails with service isolation. Next month, I'll be working on EDI files that we're swapping between the federal government and a large national bank.
If your job is boring, then either get used to it or sit down, decide what's important to you, and make it happen. So far you've settled for drudgery, but you have the choice to change that! There's a very large world out there, and maybe this would be a good time to find a part of it that makes you happier.
True story: I was helping a coworker re-write an ecommerce system that was more congealed than engineered, and his task-du-jour was to unravel a problem where the site would occasionally give completely bogus shipping rates. After about an hour of digging through the Byzantine PHP-in-HTML that was the site, he called me over to join him in a fit of hysterics. The old (and poorly named) code, as written by the guy with the MIS degree:
So saying (eg in an advertisement) that a product has some special property while it hasn't is not protected by free speech. Is it in the US?
Apparently so, as evidenced by the fact that every other advertisement on television is for a "natural" product to help you sleep, make your breath fresh, or give you an erection. Of course, they all carry a standard "These claims have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration..." disclaimer in a 2-point font, so maybe that's what makes it acceptable.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, Mozilla, KAddressBook, and OpenLDAP support LDIF. That seems like a pretty feature-complete standard for sharing directory information.
The biggest advantage is that the odds of the latest 1337 h4xx0r scripting their way into a BSD OS on a non-Intel architecture is roughly zero. I still keep current on the latest security patches, of course, but the relative obscurity is a nice extra layer of defense.
Best of all, though, is seeing kernel messages like "Preloaded elf kernel "kernel" at 0xfffffc00006bc000.". All of those 'f's in front are a sure sign that we're not in IA32 anymore.
No, I wouldn't say that AMD is an "Intel architecture", although they make a line of chips that implement an Intel ISA. Their new stuff is markedly different.
However, I admit that there are better examples of non-Intel architectures, such as those made by the small upstarts IBM and Motorola.
That statement, right there, is why the two groups can't get along. To Conservatives, "liberal and fair" is an oxymoron, but to Liberals, it makes perfect sense. It's like arguing about whether the GPL or BSD license is "more free". Stating one position as unarguable fact only marks you as a partisan, and not insightful.
I'd better hear the same hue and cry in here as if a group of right-wing extremists were gleefully planning to shut down the DNC, or Nader, or any other such group.
That's just plain wrong. If you don't like someone, then debate them - don't try to shut them up.
So, you're saying that you can pinch your friends, and you can pinch your LOAF, but you can't pinch your friend's LOAF?
I don't know if that's true anymore. Unless you're willing to hand-grow subsistence levels of grain on your own land, you essentially have to rely on technology. A few days ago I saw a news story about an office building that had lost its air conditioner, and interviews with unsympathetic observers who noted that A/C is a fairly recent invention and we lived without it just fine. However, they neglected the rather strong point that today's buildings are designed around the idea of having functional air conditioning (and electricity and plumbing and elevators, for that matter). Without those technologies, a modern office complex would basically be uninhabitable.
I mention this as an example of my believe that there are certain technologies that have fundamentally changed the way we live to the point that our society wouldn't function properly without them. Air travel is one. Cars are another. The Internet is quickly becoming one. Simply boycotting them ceases to be a workable option after a while, and whether that's good or moral becomes irrelevant.
P.S. I live within a day's drive of my family - those were pure examples.
I live in the US mainland, and my family lives in Hawaii. What's the departure time on the Los Angeles - Honolulu Greyhound?
Alternatively, my mom's dying and I'm on the other side of the country. I have 8 hours to make it to her bedside to say goodbye. How fast do I have to drive to cross 3,000 miles with time to spare?
If someone boycotts the RIAA and you catch them buying a CD, then by all means heckle away. However, there are plenty of situations where it's just not possible to avoid the only means of high-speed long-distance transportation available in this country.
Go back to playing with Access and dreaming big while the rest of us get work done, would you?
"in-" is a Latin prefix with a few meanings, two of them being "not" and "without". Examples: indestructible means "not destructible", inanimate means not animate, and incorrect means not correct. It's hardly a stretch to use insecure to mean "not secure", especially since that definition is in pretty much every dictionary you'll ever find.
I almost NEVER proper-case microsoft (lower-casing/deprecation intentional).
Why don't you just write "M$" and be done with it? You don't have to condone their business practices to admit that "Microsoft" is the proper spelling of their name, and more than my writing "David Syes" would mean that I think you have any valid points.
She willingly paid for it, right? That would be "The Cost of Computer Naivete" that the subject refers to. :)
Fair enough. <sarcasm>And we all know that cars require no maintenance, and that dealers will fix the "little" problems after the warranty has expired because they owe it to you, and that the neighbor kid can make your car 20% faster by removing the rev limiter with no ill effects whatsoever.</sarcasm>
However, replace "car" with "computer" and "removing the rev limiter" with "overclocking" and people will think that you've made a perfectly reasonably statement.
As far as having to replace or upgrade add-on software, consider that my current car has an excellent Bose audio system. If I buy another car, I'll have to get used to a different stereo. Now, I can move my CDs (analogy: Word files, pictures of the kids, Quicken accounts) to the new car, but I won't be able to keep my current stereo. But I paid for it - shouldn't I be allowed to use it forever? Of course! But I can't expect the manufacturer of either car to help me get my old stereo working in my new car, and I'll probably break a lot of things along the way.
People understand this about their vehicles and it never occurs to them to question it (beyond griping that they wish their new car had a certain feature that they really liked in their old one) because that's just the way things are. Involve a computer, though, and those same people will scream to high heaven that the family tree maker they bought in the discount bin at Sam's Club in 1993 should still work ("it ran right on my old computer, so what's wrong with this new one?!?") no matter how infeasible that may be, or how many bugs their vendor would have to support to make that happen.
Trust me, I wish everybody looked at their computer just like their car. Noone gripes when their 1992 econobox doesn't perform like an '05 fuel-injected, lightweight two-door.
OK, not really. But it made you blink, didn't it? :)
You've honestly never heard of Zope, the web application server written in Python? My company isn't selling copies of our site that I developed on Zope, but it sure is turning a tidy profit on the people accessing it.
Many of us are feeding our families by programming in Python. It just may not be in the most visible places.
I was trying for a "Funny", but got an "Insightful". I didn't mean to sound lecture-y when I wrote that. :)
As far as "sub" being obvious, would that refer to subtraction, or substitution, or substring count, or subscribe to dates within the specified range? The point is, there's no great reason to have to figure out the meaning of a common three-letter prefix when the easy solution of just spelling it out is conveniently sitting there.
To hear a dentist tell it: the guy who does just enough to get by. Most toothpastes ("Most teethpaste"?) contain abrasives that will eventually destroy your enamel if you use too much force or brush too long.
Yeah, I know what you were trying to say, but your example fails in non-obvious ways.
Do you have one of those narrow screens talked about in a previous Slashdot story? I used to laugh at people who wrote out subtractDate() - until I had to revisit my own code after not seeing it for months and figure out that procntr() meant "process the entry".
You have a lot of keys on your keyboard; might as well use 'em.
I was young and stupid at the time, but I never could find it in myself to be remorseful about the act. When he realized that noone cared, including the teachers, and that noone was going to bother investigating it because everyone figured he had it coming, he pretty much calmed down and left everyone alone for the rest of the year.
Here's to you, Tommy, whatever prison you may be in.
OMG CHRISIANZ ARE TEH ST00P1D!!! LOL OMG!
Timothy was right to edit your submission, but not because he "clarified" it, but because he removed your bigoted conclusion.
If the domain in question were "muslum.org", would you be joking about how people trying to go to muslim.org are likely to be confused? Considering, you know, that they're poor illiterate Muslims? Or is it only funny because Christians are fair game for ridicule?
I have to reluctantly agree with you. You still have to validate forms on the server - if you don't, you deserve to be dragged out and flogged. So, now you have a server-side validation system and a parallel client-side system, hopefully with the same logic. Want to update a field's input range? Be sure to touch both pieces of code!
I'm guessing that smarter people than myself have this all figured out, but from what (admittedly little) I know about it, this seems like an easy way to double the amount of work required to process forms.
Don't be. I only have to move them from point A to point B (through point B) - I don't actually have to look at them. :)
If that's your life, then you've carved out a little piece of hell of your own making. The problem is with your decisions and your priorities, not with the world.
Me? I live in a small town (25,000 people in the middle of an agricultural region). I'm in my early 30s and freakin' LOVE my job! I have complete decision making authority over my own projects ("Yeah, I think that Zope+Python on a FreeBSD server would be just the thing - OK if I go ahead and get started?") and am doing new and interesting things almost every day for a company with cool management, good pay, and outstanding benefits.
For example, the job description I applied for never mentioned anything about writing pseudo-AI image processing software to look for barcodes on faxes we receive so that we can import them into the appropriate place in our database, but that was my main project a few months ago. This month, I'm working on profiling and tuning the database connector I wrote to make Zope talk to Foxpro. As a side project, I've been looking at partitioning our webserver into a set of jails with service isolation. Next month, I'll be working on EDI files that we're swapping between the federal government and a large national bank.
If your job is boring, then either get used to it or sit down, decide what's important to you, and make it happen. So far you've settled for drudgery, but you have the choice to change that! There's a very large world out there, and maybe this would be a good time to find a part of it that makes you happier.
Apparently so, as evidenced by the fact that every other advertisement on television is for a "natural" product to help you sleep, make your breath fresh, or give you an erection. Of course, they all carry a standard "These claims have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration..." disclaimer in a 2-point font, so maybe that's what makes it acceptable.