why would you install the new version, instead of just keeping your working version patched?
I have two main reasons:
The new versions do new, cool stuff. That's why they released a new version, after all. For example, pf.conf is more pleasant to work with each time, to the point that it's been worth the 10 minutes of downtime to upgrade just for that one improvement.
I had to upgrade a firewall so that I could install a sufficiently recent version of the Amanda backup client on it. The version that came with that OpenBSD release didn't actually work and it wouldn't build cleanly from ports. Given the option of sitting on an old OpenBSD with a non-working backup and putting in a huge effort to backport Amanda or just upgrading the whole thing to a newer, fixed version, I took the easy way out.
I did my research, found the person I liked and I voted for them even though they are likely to win. Waste of time? I think not. Every time I vote that's one more little bit of the percentage of being recognized.
I did much the same, except that I don't care whether my candidates get recognition or not. I mean, of course I hope they win! But even if they don't and no one but me ever bothers to learn about them, I still get to go to bed tonight knowing that I cast a ballot for someone that I genuinely liked.
Thankfully, by voting libertarian you are just throwing your vote away, the majority of Americans can see through the scam and would never vote diametrically opposite their true interests.
Then the majority of Americans suck. I vote Libertarian because there are a lot of things I don't personally like - gay marriage, legal pot, etc. - that I think the government has absolutely no business restricting. I want a small federal government, and the state governments can do whatever damn fool thing they want for all I care, so long as I'm free to move to a different one if I don't like the way mine is being run.
So where else do I look for candidates who support small federal governments and personal freedoms? Both parties are in a footrace to invent new megabureacracies that no one really seems to want, so I can't really vote for either based on economic reasons. Likewise, both parties are decidedly against personal freedom although their sets of specific unwanted liberties don't perfectly overlap (Dems want to regulate guns, Reps want to regulate the bedroom, and both will drop everything at "think of the children!"). The Libertarian party, as a whole, comes a lot closer to representing my political beliefs than any other group, so why shouldn't I support them regardless of their particular major backers? It's not as though eI like the Reps or Dems major supporters any more than I like the Koch brothers.
That's actually a great reason to use it on laptops (even if the pull of Ubuntu was too strong for me). A laptop without the password to the encrypted boot system and without any way to get it out of sleeping without knowing the login password might as well have a formatted drive for all the use it is to a thief.
Yes, you can get most of that with a properly set up Linux system. That's what I'm banking on with my own laptop here. Still, should it get stolen, I'd feel a lot better if my personal data was locked up in OpenBSD.
So what does someone do? Just ask you not to steal it if you aren't a customer.
That's not at all what she's asking. She's publishing all her content, for free, with no login or payment or account required to see it. Then she's threatening to sue everyone who actually dares access that publicly-available content. That is contrary to the behavior of any other website on the planet. Name one other site - any site - which lets you view the whole thing for free without restrictions and then attempts to bill you retroactively.
"Look, that woman says a lot of things, yeah she's a real talker, but it comes down to a lonely old lady with something screwy upstairs sitting in front of a computer, with few friends, making enemies."
Dear God, someone get that woman a Slashdot account.
I fully expect that at an upcoming awards show we will see some digital holdout musician like Paul McCartney touting a new pay service calling itself Limewire attempting to live off past name recognition despite a poor business model.
That's the bottom line. No matter how skilled and well meaning you are, what you do with your iProduct affects how that product is perceived in the marketplace. Right now iProducts are known as being a comfortable padded room that locks from the outside; that appeals to a large consumer base.
That's just stupid. A Honda Civic is still a fine car, even if kids like to put wings and can mufflers on them to look cool to their peer group. Nowhere outside the confines of personal electronics would anyone dare make the statement that hackish 3rd-party modifications reflect on the original product.
If I know voting makes no difference whatsoever, then I know not voting makes absolutely no difference whatsoever.
That's cowardly, lazy justification. Do you really want to screw with some political types? Get a thousand people like yourself to show up and turn in blank ballots. Vote "none of the above". It'll never happen, but can you imagine what would happen if 80% of voters said that everyone running sucks and that none of them deserve support?
If that doesn't sway you, consider that you're fulfilling your own prophecy of third-party irrelevance by not voting for them. If everyone who was eligible to vote but didn't like either major party showed up and picked a third-party candidate at random, I guarantee you that the next election cycle would look a lot different.
The language is either not Turing complete and then mostly useless for practical general computing, or it is Turing complete and then it provides no real security.
It doesn't have to be all-or-nothing, though. You could make a similar argument about the usefulness of ACLs or Unix permissions or virtual memory: "these won't fix everything!" And yet all of those do make our systems more secure, and we certainly wouldn't want to get rid of them just because they're not perfect.
Speaking of ACLs - you could bolt something like that onto an existing language pretty easily. Imagine a "hardened Python" (that's what she said!) that runs in a Java-like sandbox with no access to the outside world by default, and where you had to decorate functions with the list of permissions they need:
Obviously that wouldn't solve every security problem, because you'll inevitably get idiot savant programmers who figure out how to allow web clients to pass SQL strings and then execute them. It'd go a long way toward eradicating a lot of more common coding-with-insufficient-coffee errors, though, and I think that would be pretty valuable even if it's not perfect.
Perhaps we should institute a system of tests, in which low-UID users are periodically challenged on their knowledge, and demoted if they fail - and other users are given an opportunity to filter up the ranks via the same system?
We already have one. I started out in the high 800,000s.
Gotcha. I think it's a great idea, but thought I'd mention that stuff just in case. I'm sure you're all too aware of how nitpicky HIPAA gets about stuff. For a while, the local gov't liaison person wanted my wife to have a "take the next number" machine in her lobby and call patients back by number. I'm not sure if they ever understood why my wife flatly refused to have any part of that idea.
May I suggest that you run this setup through your legal department? That sounds utterly HIPAA-noncompliant: "Hello, this is the office of Dr. Obstetrician calling for Teenage Daughter to confirm her appointment for tomorrow at 9:00AM. Have a nice day!"
Chances are that's not a huge deal for you. For example, my wife's a podiatrist, and few people are going to be mortally embarrassed to have an appointment for her to see their ingrown toenail. Still, it's something you might want to think about. Maybe consider having a line on your patient questionnaire like "I agree to have Dr. Obstetrician's automated phone system call my house to remind me of my appointment: YES___ NO___" with a place for their initials.
This is right on the mark. As an employee, you're ethically obligated to help the company make the best decision for the company. It's not your place to decide to promote open source for the sake of open source.
There are a lot - a lot - of people who feel that Free Software is inherently superior to its proprietary cousins, and those people believe they're helping their company by advocating it.
Whether you agree with them is a different issue, of course. That doesn't change the fact that they're acting in their employer's best interests from their perspective.
Personally, after spending the last several years trying to help my company pry itself loose from the proprietary EOLed products it depends on, I'm very sympathetic to the idea that Free Software is inherently better. Unless a proprietary product is clearly, unarguably better suited to our needs, I'll support the Free alternative every time. From experience, I know which one will be easier to support (or migrate cleanly away from) 5 years down the road.
Stallman is the Michael Savage of software. He seems reasonable until you hear him speak or read his writings.
Stallman is utterly unreasonable. He's also correct pretty much every time he predicts something. I wish the world had a few more unreasonable visionaries who were unwilling to compromise on their goals to make this a better place.
What I would really like to hear is equivalent quotes of companies who successfully migrated from MS Office to OO.o. Is there any? (no, not/. pseudonym-"in my office"-anecdotes, but real company names)
You get the pseudopseudonymous version anyway, but: in my 50-person company, everyone gets OO.o. A few employees, such as the owner and bookkeeper, get MS Office, but those are generally accepted as "legacy" installations for people who have very specific backward compatibility needs. We were always saving docs in MS Office format for the sake of trading documents with our customers until we found out that quite a few of those customers were also using OO.o, so for them (and general internal use now), we save in native OO.o format.
Personally, if nature wants to find a way to use my body after I'm dead, I'm happy.
I'm not particularly Buddhist, but I kind of hate the idea of my mortal remains locked up in an airtight box 'til the end of time, cut off from the rest of the world and the abundant life around me. I'd much rather think of earthworms returning me to the soil so that I can keep being part of the "circle of life" and all that.
I'm not quite that restrictive. If a friend says something particularly interesting, I'll sometimes retweet that on the chance that some of my followers might also like it. After all, that sort of thing is how I found most of the people I follow on Twitter.
Slashdot Mirror
why would you install the new version, instead of just keeping your working version patched?
I have two main reasons:
Run yourself. Sure, you may not win, but you're voting for someone you feel isn't corrupt.
I suck. There's no way I would vote for me.
I did my research, found the person I liked and I voted for them even though they are likely to win. Waste of time? I think not. Every time I vote that's one more little bit of the percentage of being recognized.
I did much the same, except that I don't care whether my candidates get recognition or not. I mean, of course I hope they win! But even if they don't and no one but me ever bothers to learn about them, I still get to go to bed tonight knowing that I cast a ballot for someone that I genuinely liked.
Thankfully, by voting libertarian you are just throwing your vote away, the majority of Americans can see through the scam and would never vote diametrically opposite their true interests.
Then the majority of Americans suck. I vote Libertarian because there are a lot of things I don't personally like - gay marriage, legal pot, etc. - that I think the government has absolutely no business restricting. I want a small federal government, and the state governments can do whatever damn fool thing they want for all I care, so long as I'm free to move to a different one if I don't like the way mine is being run.
So where else do I look for candidates who support small federal governments and personal freedoms? Both parties are in a footrace to invent new megabureacracies that no one really seems to want, so I can't really vote for either based on economic reasons. Likewise, both parties are decidedly against personal freedom although their sets of specific unwanted liberties don't perfectly overlap (Dems want to regulate guns, Reps want to regulate the bedroom, and both will drop everything at "think of the children!"). The Libertarian party, as a whole, comes a lot closer to representing my political beliefs than any other group, so why shouldn't I support them regardless of their particular major backers? It's not as though eI like the Reps or Dems major supporters any more than I like the Koch brothers.
That's actually a great reason to use it on laptops (even if the pull of Ubuntu was too strong for me). A laptop without the password to the encrypted boot system and without any way to get it out of sleeping without knowing the login password might as well have a formatted drive for all the use it is to a thief.
Yes, you can get most of that with a properly set up Linux system. That's what I'm banking on with my own laptop here. Still, should it get stolen, I'd feel a lot better if my personal data was locked up in OpenBSD.
Are those decimal (1,000,000) or binary (1,048,576) megabytes?
The real kind that computers use.
Welcome aboard. You're among peers now.
So what does someone do? Just ask you not to steal it if you aren't a customer.
That's not at all what she's asking. She's publishing all her content, for free, with no login or payment or account required to see it. Then she's threatening to sue everyone who actually dares access that publicly-available content. That is contrary to the behavior of any other website on the planet. Name one other site - any site - which lets you view the whole thing for free without restrictions and then attempts to bill you retroactively.
"Look, that woman says a lot of things, yeah she's a real talker, but it comes down to a lonely old lady with something screwy upstairs sitting in front of a computer, with few friends, making enemies."
Dear God, someone get that woman a Slashdot account.
I fully expect that at an upcoming awards show we will see some digital holdout musician like Paul McCartney touting a new pay service calling itself Limewire attempting to live off past name recognition despite a poor business model.
That would be exceedingly appropriate.
That's the bottom line. No matter how skilled and well meaning you are, what you do with your iProduct affects how that product is perceived in the marketplace. Right now iProducts are known as being a comfortable padded room that locks from the outside; that appeals to a large consumer base.
That's just stupid. A Honda Civic is still a fine car, even if kids like to put wings and can mufflers on them to look cool to their peer group. Nowhere outside the confines of personal electronics would anyone dare make the statement that hackish 3rd-party modifications reflect on the original product.
If I know voting makes no difference whatsoever, then I know not voting makes absolutely no difference whatsoever.
That's cowardly, lazy justification. Do you really want to screw with some political types? Get a thousand people like yourself to show up and turn in blank ballots. Vote "none of the above". It'll never happen, but can you imagine what would happen if 80% of voters said that everyone running sucks and that none of them deserve support?
If that doesn't sway you, consider that you're fulfilling your own prophecy of third-party irrelevance by not voting for them. If everyone who was eligible to vote but didn't like either major party showed up and picked a third-party candidate at random, I guarantee you that the next election cycle would look a lot different.
The language is either not Turing complete and then mostly useless for practical general computing, or it is Turing complete and then it provides no real security.
It doesn't have to be all-or-nothing, though. You could make a similar argument about the usefulness of ACLs or Unix permissions or virtual memory: "these won't fix everything!" And yet all of those do make our systems more secure, and we certainly wouldn't want to get rid of them just because they're not perfect.
Speaking of ACLs - you could bolt something like that onto an existing language pretty easily. Imagine a "hardened Python" (that's what she said!) that runs in a Java-like sandbox with no access to the outside world by default, and where you had to decorate functions with the list of permissions they need:
or
Obviously that wouldn't solve every security problem, because you'll inevitably get idiot savant programmers who figure out how to allow web clients to pass SQL strings and then execute them. It'd go a long way toward eradicating a lot of more common coding-with-insufficient-coffee errors, though, and I think that would be pretty valuable even if it's not perfect.
Perhaps we should institute a system of tests, in which low-UID users are periodically challenged on their knowledge, and demoted if they fail - and other users are given an opportunity to filter up the ranks via the same system?
We already have one. I started out in the high 800,000s.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of muti-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
You misspelled "multi".
I live off my iPod, with a setup very similar to yours:
Total cost is... I haven't bothered to add it up. The improvement in my productivity and reduction in my stress levels have been worth it.
Gotcha. I think it's a great idea, but thought I'd mention that stuff just in case. I'm sure you're all too aware of how nitpicky HIPAA gets about stuff. For a while, the local gov't liaison person wanted my wife to have a "take the next number" machine in her lobby and call patients back by number. I'm not sure if they ever understood why my wife flatly refused to have any part of that idea.
May I suggest that you run this setup through your legal department? That sounds utterly HIPAA-noncompliant: "Hello, this is the office of Dr. Obstetrician calling for Teenage Daughter to confirm her appointment for tomorrow at 9:00AM. Have a nice day!"
Chances are that's not a huge deal for you. For example, my wife's a podiatrist, and few people are going to be mortally embarrassed to have an appointment for her to see their ingrown toenail. Still, it's something you might want to think about. Maybe consider having a line on your patient questionnaire like "I agree to have Dr. Obstetrician's automated phone system call my house to remind me of my appointment: YES___ NO___" with a place for their initials.
When talking about fuel economy, team Edison2 have proven, light weight and low drag beat hybrids with heavy batteries.
Do you have to choose only one?
No argument there. :-)
This is right on the mark. As an employee, you're ethically obligated to help the company make the best decision for the company. It's not your place to decide to promote open source for the sake of open source.
There are a lot - a lot - of people who feel that Free Software is inherently superior to its proprietary cousins, and those people believe they're helping their company by advocating it.
Whether you agree with them is a different issue, of course. That doesn't change the fact that they're acting in their employer's best interests from their perspective.
Personally, after spending the last several years trying to help my company pry itself loose from the proprietary EOLed products it depends on, I'm very sympathetic to the idea that Free Software is inherently better. Unless a proprietary product is clearly, unarguably better suited to our needs, I'll support the Free alternative every time. From experience, I know which one will be easier to support (or migrate cleanly away from) 5 years down the road.
Stallman is the Michael Savage of software. He seems reasonable until you hear him speak or read his writings.
Stallman is utterly unreasonable. He's also correct pretty much every time he predicts something. I wish the world had a few more unreasonable visionaries who were unwilling to compromise on their goals to make this a better place.
What I would really like to hear is equivalent quotes of companies who successfully migrated from MS Office to OO.o. Is there any? (no, not /. pseudonym-"in my office"-anecdotes, but real company names)
You get the pseudopseudonymous version anyway, but: in my 50-person company, everyone gets OO.o. A few employees, such as the owner and bookkeeper, get MS Office, but those are generally accepted as "legacy" installations for people who have very specific backward compatibility needs. We were always saving docs in MS Office format for the sake of trading documents with our customers until we found out that quite a few of those customers were also using OO.o, so for them (and general internal use now), we save in native OO.o format.
Personally, if nature wants to find a way to use my body after I'm dead, I'm happy.
I'm not particularly Buddhist, but I kind of hate the idea of my mortal remains locked up in an airtight box 'til the end of time, cut off from the rest of the world and the abundant life around me. I'd much rather think of earthworms returning me to the soil so that I can keep being part of the "circle of life" and all that.
I'm not quite that restrictive. If a friend says something particularly interesting, I'll sometimes retweet that on the chance that some of my followers might also like it. After all, that sort of thing is how I found most of the people I follow on Twitter.