I was hired by a shipping services company to convert the company website from.asp to something more maintainable.
Get this: my new boss actually made me decide what hardware, OS, and development environment I'd be using (Xeon, FreeBSD, and Zope respectively).
Then, after spending three months turning ASP into happy code, I had to take a break to write image processing code of the sort that I was good at and actually enjoyed during my undergrad days.
On our company Christmas party, when we all climbed into the rented Greyhound bus for an all-expense paid trip to a nearby city for dinner at a nice restaurant and a play, he only packed three kinds of beer and 2 kinds of wine coolers.
Our office building's free hot chocolate and cappucino machine sometimes goes empty, and we have to actually refill the thing ourself from the large supply provided to us.
The 15'x20' office that I have to myself has only one 4-foot-wide, floor-to-ceiling window.
When I was issued a brand new computer with pre-installed XP, I had to wipe the harddrive and install Debian by myself.
OK, you caught me. My job is awesome and I love everything about it. There's a lot to be said for working outside of traditionally high-tech industries.
Differen't strokes for different folks but I think you're just falling back on some romantic notion.
[sarcasm]
Such as, say, that the younger generation has developed a new and better way of doing something, and if older people don't like it, it's because they're afraid of the new system that they can't understand?
[/sarcasm]
I'm only 32, so it's not like I belong to the "get those kids off my yard!" crowd just yet. Although I've played with a few social networks just to see what the buzz is about, I'm just not that impressed. It's not because I'm less tech-savvy than a random 19 year old (think you're into tech now? Wait until you have the money to buy all the toys you've been wanting to play with!). Rather, I like the "old-fashioned" idea of going out and meeting new people.
Even then, you're paying for the "slap" step. Who decides what packages get included by default? What version of Debian? KDE or Gnome? Which default web browser? Which default mail program? Does the shipped kernel provide full support for every bit of hardware on the system?
Then, you have to pay someone to regression-test new packages and security updates to be reasonably sure that pushing a bugfix to your customers won't result in tens of thousands of disabled machines.
I assume you've heard the phrase "Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing", and in the corporate environment, this is very true: payroll time is, in fact, not very cheap at all. The question is whether Wal-Mart could get the per-unit costs of a home-rolled distribution to be lower than what Sun can offer, and as Wal-Mart isn't in the business of producing software for external clients, that very well may not be the case.
And a decent Linux hacker can roll a simple distro fairly quick 'n' cheap, by basing it off of another distro.
That hacker is wonderful and cost effective if he happens to be you, or if he works for your company and you can have him fix problems on-site as they occur. That same hacker is not useful in the situation where he's building a release that will run on (hopefully) millions of customers' desktops. In that case, you want an engineering team to design a system, then hand it of to a QA team that does their best to break it.
It's not gratis at all for corporate use. You have to pay someone to make a distribution for you, whether by paying Red Hat a lot of money, or by paying your IT staff a lot of money. Even if Wal-Mart decided to undercut Sun by making their own "Sam's Choice Linux", they'd have to hire a department of technicians to build it, test it, and get it ready for release.
As long as Sun can do that cheaper than Wal-Mart can do it for themselves, they'll get the business. That is how you undercut "free".
Now, I have that exact keychain drive and it actually appears as a 64MB partition. Out of that box of floppies, I'd be surprised if more than 80% work for more than one day. Also, given that every computer I've seen in recent memory has a USB port, and very few have floppy drives, it's more likely that you can use that keychain drive without purchasing additional hardware.
More expensive? Nah. They've been cheaper for a while now.
Does this mean that Lindows and Mandrake, sold on other WalMart cheap-PC's isn't a viable alternative?
Said alternative is Linux, not Sun's distribution. Read that way, Sun is delivering the first viable alternative to Windows, just as Red Hat, Mandrake, and Debian are also delivering it.
I think that Apple has stronger grounds to be annoyed at that statement, but Sun and Wal-Mart could make the case that Mac OS doesn't run on x86 machines, so it's not a drop-in replacement for Windows.
I'm 19 however, and people of my age are significantly more tech savy. Perhaps as you get into older people technophobia creeps in.
Or perhaps as you "get into older people", you find a population who actually had to get out and meet people and got pretty good at it. Tell me, why would your average person in their 40s want to join an Internet social network other than for geekiness? At that point in life, either they already have a pretty wide friend network of their own, or they're not going to.
Don't think that older people stay away from Friendster, et al because of a supposed gerontotechnophobia. They stay away because they probably have all the friends they want, or know where to look for more.
You're assuming the person is guilty because they were arrested. This is how false accusations ruin people's lives especially related to sexual misconduct (rape accusations/kiddie porn/etc.).
No. I'm calculating that there's a higher probability that they committed the particular crime than some other random person. That's all, and nothing more.
Granted you add the s/he may eventually be found innocent but you then state that until then you're assuming the person is guilty which goes contrary to our justice system.
I assume that they're neither guilty nor not guilty until a court decides. Until then, it's in my best interest not to put myself in a position where they could have an opportunity to commit a crime like the one they were accused of.
FWIW, I've followed several high-profile local trials where the prosecution did a wonderful job of proving that the person was scummy, but a terrible job of proving that they were guilty. After those trials, I would be perfectly willing to consider those people innocent of the crimes of which they were accused. Just because I advocate caution doesn't mean that I'm unwilling to listen to the evidence.
Hoping that someone who saw something suspicious recognizes the behavior as suspicious and reads the police blotter and connects the blotter entry with the suspicious behavior and has genuinely useful information is wishful thinking.
How so? "America's Most Wanted" is basically a made-for-TV blotter sheet, but with a much stronger assertion of guilt, right? Yet people have seen suspects from that show in real life and called the police to report them - several hundred times, in fact. For that matter, all of those picture in the post office are basically detailed blotter sheets that list fugitives, aren't they?
On the other hand, what if you read about someone that was arrested for a crime that occurred at a certain time, and you happened to see them far from the crime scene at that moment? Evidence works both ways, you know.
The idea of voluntary public participation seems to be very deeply ingrained in our justice system.
Sheeesh, it's always about the children, isn't it.
Not at all, but sometimes it is. The arrest records in the newspaper are full of information of vital interest to a community. Would you like to know that the guy your daughter hangs around with just got arrested for providing alcohol to a minor? Or that your son's new friend got busted with coke?
I am not one of those "think of the children!" people, but as a parent, I do have a newfound interest in the the things happening around me. This is a good information source, and I'm glad that we have it.
Is it just me or should this type of information be private until you are actually convicted of something?
There are compelling reasons for publishing that information - it's a good way to get witnesses to volunteer information. Imagine that you read that J. Random Thug was arrested for burglary. He is a neighbor of yours, and you've seen him unloading TVs, stereos, and other expensive goods from the back of his van. Now, although you might've assumed that JRT had just been on another shopping spree (he's had a lot of them since the neighborhood crack dealer started hanging out at his house), you realize that you have some information that the police might find interesting.
Sure, that's contrived. However, I'm we've all seen things that looked perfectly innocent that turned out not to be, and it was only after we found out the truth that it seemed so obvious.
Alternatively, if someone on my street were arrested for possessing child pornography, I darn well want to know about it. S?he may eventually be found innocent, but in the mean time, I don't want my kids playing near their house.
When the charges are subsequently dropped or dismissed chances are they won't pick up on it unless you call them and tell them. Even then they will carry it in the smallest possible font nowhere near the normal police blotter.
Our newspaper carries a comprehensive listing of all court cases, including those dismissed, acquittals, and convictions (and associated penalties). If J. Random Thug from my example above turns out to be innocent, they'll print that alongside the list of arrests and convictions. I guess things are different where you are.
It depends on their total numbers to see what kind of a percentage basis this is, but it seems disturbingly high in absolute number terms.
Those two clauses are completely contradictory. If EV1 has a huge number of customers, then losing 1,800 is a drop in the bucket. If they have a small number, then 1,800 may be overwhelmingly important. Either way, only the relative numbers matter - the absolutely numbers are utterly meaningless without context.
I refuse to even consider ANY language that is whitespace sensitive
It's never cool to brag about an unwillingness to learn something new. No matter what other good things you might have heard about Python, you refuse to even try to get past the formatting? That's really sad.
Question to mods: what part of that comment justified "informative"?
If you're using indentation for structure, then it's horribly confusing to allow both tabs and spaces. How many spaces is a tab worth? You could add a "tabsize=" variable to the core language, but you have to be able to parse a file before you can start evaluating it, so that would necessarily have to be an ugly hack.
An (old) Python topic-of-heated-discussion was the relative merit of tabs vs. spaces. Setting one as the standard avoids the whole issue and lets everyone get back to work.
My only gripe is that out of the two choices, they picked the wrong one <ducks>.
You're wrong on both counts. Apple no longer ships computers that can boot OS 9 (at least without massive trickery and warranty invalidation, if at all), but they do ship OS 9 (aka "Classic Mode") with OS X.
That's all well and good, but completely wrong. Reality check: new Macs won't boot OS9 natively anymore, and a common complaint is that FrameMaker under Classic crashes far too often.
Ergo, if a shop wants to keep using FrameMaker efficiently on MacOS, they are no longer able to purchase new machines. If one dies, then they have to hunt on eBay to find its replacement.
What if this were an application that ran under Windows 98 but crashed badly under XP, and new PCs all start including hardware that won't allow them to boot Win98 and older? Would you still be arguing that the software is still usable?
If this isn't an argument against close source, then what is? Face it: if your business relies on FrameMaker and you use Macs, then you're either switching applications or switching your hardware platform. In what way is this as good as Open Source?
FreeBSD, on the other hand, explicitly recommends having at least twice as much swap as real memory. From tuning(7):
The kernel's VM paging algorithms are tuned to perform best when there is at least 2x swap versus main memory. Configuring too little swap can lead to inefficiencies in the VM page scanning code as well as create issues later on if you add more memory to your machine.
Do you give your phone number to a store when they ask for it when closing a sale? Bye bye privacy.
I always give them my number, for some definition of "me" that doesn't include myself. My friend two states away probably wonders why he gets coupons for stores he's never heard of.
Don't get "zero percent financing for 2 years" because you'll end up having those purchases tracked by who knows how many marketing firms.
Basically, you have to assign a dollar amount to your privacy. I seem to have chosen a lower number than you did, because I'm happy to buy large purchases on free financing. It increases my cash flow, and when you account for inflation, lets me buy stuff at an additional discount over the negotiated price.
Frankly, I'm OK with a marketer knowing that I just bought a water softener from Sears. I value my privacy in general, but there are certain aspects of it that just aren't that important to me.
Thanks for the honest appraisal. It's nice to get feedback instead of flaming.
You bet. I disagree with your idea, but that's not a person indictment.:)
Hell, Joe Schmoe could be the root authority.
The problem is, what happens when Joe Schmoe becomes glacially unresponsive or starts making heinous new policies to abuse his position of power? Once the system is entrenched, it may not be easy to simply switch the root to a new entity. For example, I don't know of anyone who doesn't dislike Verisign, but we still accept their authority because the cost of switching is more than we want to pay, or than we can expect others to pay.
Have you looked at the SPF anti-forgery protocol? Basically, it's a way to reject all mail that can't be proven to originate from the claimed sender. I am a big fan of this approach since it forcers spammers to use their own domain names for sending, and even though they're able to buy new ones at will, suddenly they're forced to eat operating expenses that they didn't have before SPF (assuming it catches on). It's not perfect, but it's certainly a start.
You know, your proposal is similar to a DNS blackhole list in reverse, where known-good domains are whitelisted instead of having known-bad domains blacklisted. You could implement such a system today, if you wanted, where you would register "good" mailservers and return "spam positive" answers for all queries for servers not listed in your database. Make your clients use SPF so that spammers can't forge email as coming from one of your whitelist entries and voila!, your own personal web of trust with you as the root.
If they spam, their cert gets revoked and my cert takes a "reputation hit".
I understand what you're saying, but unless you've designed a PKI before, you can't imagine how much unintentional hand-waving that statement carries. There are basically two ways to manage revocation lists: a central server pushes the information to clients, or clients poll the master servers. There are some very significant drawbacks to either approach, and are beyond what I care to go into in a Slashdot post.
And there doesn't have to be necessarily one cert authority. Just an angreement on who constitutes root authority.
That's exactly the situation we're in now with current SSL certs. Basically, how do we get together and decide which giant entity is going to be the One True Root? It's sort of a Douglas Adams paradox: I wouldn't trust any organization that wants to be the central registrar.
I'm not saying that this is an inherently bad idea, but there are some very real technical and social obstacles that I believe you're glossing over.
And then only accept certificates that are signed either by a central authority...
Because I can't think of one single entity that I'd trust to manage such a thing at a global level. Verisign? ICANN? Hah!
...or by people whose certificates are signed by those people.
Verisign signs J. Random Spamfriend's certificate. JRS signs a spammer's certificate. See the problem? Maintaining a global PKI with near-real-time revocation is a non-trivial problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Get this: my new boss actually made me decide what hardware, OS, and development environment I'd be using (Xeon, FreeBSD, and Zope respectively).
Then, after spending three months turning ASP into happy code, I had to take a break to write image processing code of the sort that I was good at and actually enjoyed during my undergrad days.
On our company Christmas party, when we all climbed into the rented Greyhound bus for an all-expense paid trip to a nearby city for dinner at a nice restaurant and a play, he only packed three kinds of beer and 2 kinds of wine coolers.
Our office building's free hot chocolate and cappucino machine sometimes goes empty, and we have to actually refill the thing ourself from the large supply provided to us.
The 15'x20' office that I have to myself has only one 4-foot-wide, floor-to-ceiling window.
When I was issued a brand new computer with pre-installed XP, I had to wipe the harddrive and install Debian by myself.
OK, you caught me. My job is awesome and I love everything about it. There's a lot to be said for working outside of traditionally high-tech industries.
[sarcasm]
Such as, say, that the younger generation has developed a new and better way of doing something, and if older people don't like it, it's because they're afraid of the new system that they can't understand?
[/sarcasm]
I'm only 32, so it's not like I belong to the "get those kids off my yard!" crowd just yet. Although I've played with a few social networks just to see what the buzz is about, I'm just not that impressed. It's not because I'm less tech-savvy than a random 19 year old (think you're into tech now? Wait until you have the money to buy all the toys you've been wanting to play with!). Rather, I like the "old-fashioned" idea of going out and meeting new people.
Even then, you're paying for the "slap" step. Who decides what packages get included by default? What version of Debian? KDE or Gnome? Which default web browser? Which default mail program? Does the shipped kernel provide full support for every bit of hardware on the system?
Then, you have to pay someone to regression-test new packages and security updates to be reasonably sure that pushing a bugfix to your customers won't result in tens of thousands of disabled machines.
I assume you've heard the phrase "Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing", and in the corporate environment, this is very true: payroll time is, in fact, not very cheap at all. The question is whether Wal-Mart could get the per-unit costs of a home-rolled distribution to be lower than what Sun can offer, and as Wal-Mart isn't in the business of producing software for external clients, that very well may not be the case.
And a decent Linux hacker can roll a simple distro fairly quick 'n' cheap, by basing it off of another distro.
That hacker is wonderful and cost effective if he happens to be you, or if he works for your company and you can have him fix problems on-site as they occur. That same hacker is not useful in the situation where he's building a release that will run on (hopefully) millions of customers' desktops. In that case, you want an engineering team to design a system, then hand it of to a QA team that does their best to break it.
Juk was playing his remake of Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt" when I read that line. You owe me a package of monitor cleaning wipes.
It's not gratis at all for corporate use. You have to pay someone to make a distribution for you, whether by paying Red Hat a lot of money, or by paying your IT staff a lot of money. Even if Wal-Mart decided to undercut Sun by making their own "Sam's Choice Linux", they'd have to hire a department of technicians to build it, test it, and get it ready for release.
As long as Sun can do that cheaper than Wal-Mart can do it for themselves, they'll get the business. That is how you undercut "free".
Now, I have that exact keychain drive and it actually appears as a 64MB partition. Out of that box of floppies, I'd be surprised if more than 80% work for more than one day. Also, given that every computer I've seen in recent memory has a USB port, and very few have floppy drives, it's more likely that you can use that keychain drive without purchasing additional hardware.
More expensive? Nah. They've been cheaper for a while now.
Said alternative is Linux, not Sun's distribution. Read that way, Sun is delivering the first viable alternative to Windows, just as Red Hat, Mandrake, and Debian are also delivering it.
I think that Apple has stronger grounds to be annoyed at that statement, but Sun and Wal-Mart could make the case that Mac OS doesn't run on x86 machines, so it's not a drop-in replacement for Windows.
Or perhaps as you "get into older people", you find a population who actually had to get out and meet people and got pretty good at it. Tell me, why would your average person in their 40s want to join an Internet social network other than for geekiness? At that point in life, either they already have a pretty wide friend network of their own, or they're not going to.
Don't think that older people stay away from Friendster, et al because of a supposed gerontotechnophobia. They stay away because they probably have all the friends they want, or know where to look for more.
No. I'm calculating that there's a higher probability that they committed the particular crime than some other random person. That's all, and nothing more.
Granted you add the s/he may eventually be found innocent but you then state that until then you're assuming the person is guilty which goes contrary to our justice system.
I assume that they're neither guilty nor not guilty until a court decides. Until then, it's in my best interest not to put myself in a position where they could have an opportunity to commit a crime like the one they were accused of.
FWIW, I've followed several high-profile local trials where the prosecution did a wonderful job of proving that the person was scummy, but a terrible job of proving that they were guilty. After those trials, I would be perfectly willing to consider those people innocent of the crimes of which they were accused. Just because I advocate caution doesn't mean that I'm unwilling to listen to the evidence.
How so? "America's Most Wanted" is basically a made-for-TV blotter sheet, but with a much stronger assertion of guilt, right? Yet people have seen suspects from that show in real life and called the police to report them - several hundred times, in fact. For that matter, all of those picture in the post office are basically detailed blotter sheets that list fugitives, aren't they?
On the other hand, what if you read about someone that was arrested for a crime that occurred at a certain time, and you happened to see them far from the crime scene at that moment? Evidence works both ways, you know.
The idea of voluntary public participation seems to be very deeply ingrained in our justice system.
Sheeesh, it's always about the children, isn't it.
Not at all, but sometimes it is. The arrest records in the newspaper are full of information of vital interest to a community. Would you like to know that the guy your daughter hangs around with just got arrested for providing alcohol to a minor? Or that your son's new friend got busted with coke?
I am not one of those "think of the children!" people, but as a parent, I do have a newfound interest in the the things happening around me. This is a good information source, and I'm glad that we have it.
That would never happen. We'd surely never have corporations that specialize in design, building and management of prisons, jails and detention facilities and providing inmate residential and prisoner transportation services in partnership with government. Oh, wait...
Great books, but I wouldn't want to live there.
You already do.
There are compelling reasons for publishing that information - it's a good way to get witnesses to volunteer information. Imagine that you read that J. Random Thug was arrested for burglary. He is a neighbor of yours, and you've seen him unloading TVs, stereos, and other expensive goods from the back of his van. Now, although you might've assumed that JRT had just been on another shopping spree (he's had a lot of them since the neighborhood crack dealer started hanging out at his house), you realize that you have some information that the police might find interesting.
Sure, that's contrived. However, I'm we've all seen things that looked perfectly innocent that turned out not to be, and it was only after we found out the truth that it seemed so obvious.
Alternatively, if someone on my street were arrested for possessing child pornography, I darn well want to know about it. S?he may eventually be found innocent, but in the mean time, I don't want my kids playing near their house.
When the charges are subsequently dropped or dismissed chances are they won't pick up on it unless you call them and tell them. Even then they will carry it in the smallest possible font nowhere near the normal police blotter.
Our newspaper carries a comprehensive listing of all court cases, including those dismissed, acquittals, and convictions (and associated penalties). If J. Random Thug from my example above turns out to be innocent, they'll print that alongside the list of arrests and convictions. I guess things are different where you are.
Have you ever met this "girlfriend"? You haven't been asking her for nude pictures or trying to arrange a "meeting", have you?
Thank you! I can't wait to whip out that logic the next time someone objects to the death penalty as "state-sponsored murder".
Those two clauses are completely contradictory. If EV1 has a huge number of customers, then losing 1,800 is a drop in the bucket. If they have a small number, then 1,800 may be overwhelmingly important. Either way, only the relative numbers matter - the absolutely numbers are utterly meaningless without context.
It's never cool to brag about an unwillingness to learn something new. No matter what other good things you might have heard about Python, you refuse to even try to get past the formatting? That's really sad.
Question to mods: what part of that comment justified "informative"?
- If you're using indentation for structure, then it's horribly confusing to allow both tabs and spaces. How many spaces is a tab worth? You could add a "tabsize=" variable to the core language, but you have to be able to parse a file before you can start evaluating it, so that would necessarily have to be an ugly hack.
- An (old) Python topic-of-heated-discussion was the relative merit of tabs vs. spaces. Setting one as the standard avoids the whole issue and lets everyone get back to work.
My only gripe is that out of the two choices, they picked the wrong one <ducks>.You're wrong on both counts. Apple no longer ships computers that can boot OS 9 (at least without massive trickery and warranty invalidation, if at all), but they do ship OS 9 (aka "Classic Mode") with OS X.
Ergo, if a shop wants to keep using FrameMaker efficiently on MacOS, they are no longer able to purchase new machines. If one dies, then they have to hunt on eBay to find its replacement.
What if this were an application that ran under Windows 98 but crashed badly under XP, and new PCs all start including hardware that won't allow them to boot Win98 and older? Would you still be arguing that the software is still usable?
If this isn't an argument against close source, then what is? Face it: if your business relies on FrameMaker and you use Macs, then you're either switching applications or switching your hardware platform. In what way is this as good as Open Source?
I always give them my number, for some definition of "me" that doesn't include myself. My friend two states away probably wonders why he gets coupons for stores he's never heard of.
Don't get "zero percent financing for 2 years" because you'll end up having those purchases tracked by who knows how many marketing firms.
Basically, you have to assign a dollar amount to your privacy. I seem to have chosen a lower number than you did, because I'm happy to buy large purchases on free financing. It increases my cash flow, and when you account for inflation, lets me buy stuff at an additional discount over the negotiated price.
Frankly, I'm OK with a marketer knowing that I just bought a water softener from Sears. I value my privacy in general, but there are certain aspects of it that just aren't that important to me.
You bet. I disagree with your idea, but that's not a person indictment. :)
Hell, Joe Schmoe could be the root authority.
The problem is, what happens when Joe Schmoe becomes glacially unresponsive or starts making heinous new policies to abuse his position of power? Once the system is entrenched, it may not be easy to simply switch the root to a new entity. For example, I don't know of anyone who doesn't dislike Verisign, but we still accept their authority because the cost of switching is more than we want to pay, or than we can expect others to pay.
Have you looked at the SPF anti-forgery protocol? Basically, it's a way to reject all mail that can't be proven to originate from the claimed sender. I am a big fan of this approach since it forcers spammers to use their own domain names for sending, and even though they're able to buy new ones at will, suddenly they're forced to eat operating expenses that they didn't have before SPF (assuming it catches on). It's not perfect, but it's certainly a start.
You know, your proposal is similar to a DNS blackhole list in reverse, where known-good domains are whitelisted instead of having known-bad domains blacklisted. You could implement such a system today, if you wanted, where you would register "good" mailservers and return "spam positive" answers for all queries for servers not listed in your database. Make your clients use SPF so that spammers can't forge email as coming from one of your whitelist entries and voila!, your own personal web of trust with you as the root.
Hah!
I understand what you're saying, but unless you've designed a PKI before, you can't imagine how much unintentional hand-waving that statement carries. There are basically two ways to manage revocation lists: a central server pushes the information to clients, or clients poll the master servers. There are some very significant drawbacks to either approach, and are beyond what I care to go into in a Slashdot post.
And there doesn't have to be necessarily one cert authority. Just an angreement on who constitutes root authority.
That's exactly the situation we're in now with current SSL certs. Basically, how do we get together and decide which giant entity is going to be the One True Root? It's sort of a Douglas Adams paradox: I wouldn't trust any organization that wants to be the central registrar.
I'm not saying that this is an inherently bad idea, but there are some very real technical and social obstacles that I believe you're glossing over.
Because I can't think of one single entity that I'd trust to manage such a thing at a global level. Verisign? ICANN? Hah!
Verisign signs J. Random Spamfriend's certificate. JRS signs a spammer's certificate. See the problem? Maintaining a global PKI with near-real-time revocation is a non-trivial problem.