...are not at all like the folks you're talking about. I have no special love for Wikipedia, and I've explicitly and repeatedly stated that it can't be used as a primary reference. However, given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. As a trend, I believe that Wikipedia is moving toward being more accurate, and reading an article will generally lead to you being more informed on its subject than less informed.
Not that any of this has to do with my original point that Wikipedia, even when sometimes inaccurate, is at least unlikely to be biased against one side of a non-publicized trial.
First, The writers and editors do not have to be people trained in the field and this is acknowledge by Wikipedia in its disclaimer. Second, anyone can change almost any Wikipedia article to support a position, then site that version of the article.
Didja notice the second part of my post where I said not to cite Wikipedia directly for that reason?
To suggest otherwise would be to say that one is better off relying on Wikipedia articles to make medical diagnoses over one's doctor.
No. It says that Wikipedia may be more reliable than a paid witness in a country that is... how to say this delicately?... not known for its impeccable legal ethics. As far as I know, no one has paid my doctor to diagnose me in a way that would be to someone else's advantage, and I consider him to be an reliable observer with my best interests in mind. I would not grant that same level of trust to a doctor hired to testify against me.
Because it is reasonable to assume an article written by amateurs is much more reliable than an expert witness, a practicing psychologist, who actually interviewed the people in question.
Yes, it is. First, the "amateurs" who wrote the Wikipedia article are almost certainly people trained in its field, in the same way that the physics and computer articles are generally edited by physicists and computer people. Second, the Wikipedia editors have not been paid to testify on behalf of either party and are completely unbiased authorities with respect to this particular case.
That said, the prosecutor is still a jackass. Wrong way: cite Wikipedia in court. Right way: use Wikipedia to bone up on the subject at hand, then cherry pick evidence from the articles it references that support your position and cite those articles directly.
Try to add a new device to one of the pools on a system. Intend to write:
# zpool add mediapool/dev/newdisk
...but accidentally pull this up from your shell history:
# zpool add bigassraid/dev/newdisk
Panic when you realize that you just told the system to load-balance operations between that 64-drive RAID and a 160GB PATA drive you were screwing around with, and that you can't remove the new drive without backing up and restoring the whole RAID.
I love ZFS, but I despise the fact that you can't undo operations that seem like they should be very undoable.
If FreeBSD ever gets a good ZFS implementation expect lawsuits to commence.
None have been filed since it was production-ready last year. Besides, what would they sue over? The FreeBSD team using code that Sun deliberately and explicitly licensed for such things?
Their solution is wrong. The easiest way to solve it would be to pass a law which requires Copyleft to be stated, in writing in a copyright office application.
Easiest for that government, perhaps, but quite frankly I don't give a rat's ass. The Berne Convention says that everything I write, including this post, is copyright to me - automatically. I can't imagine a single legitimate reason why I should have to specifically register my writings in order to distribute them with a Copyleft license, when I have to do no such thing to distribute them with a proprietary license.
Your suggested handling of proprietary licences: "Hey, MikeRT! I wrote this. Want to read it? Here you go! Just don't give it to anyone else, OK?"
Your suggested handling of Copyleft licenses: "Hey, MikeRT! I wrote this. Want to read it? I have to wait for the Copyright Office to return my paperwork before I'm legally allowed to hand it to you."
Same here. I built a standing desk at work and I've been upright for over a year now. As you said, I acclimated pretty quickly so that standing is no less comfortable than sitting.
Oh, and I lost 30 pounds last year. Granted, the standing desk was only part of a health regimen I started, but I believe it helped. That alone has to have dropped my early death likelihood by quite a lot.
Seriously, that's aggravating as hell. I just kind of assumed that GNU would have released all of their flagship software under the L?GPL and had no idea that they were distributing non-Free software. They were the one distributor I figured I'd never have to audit the licenses from. Are there any other hidden gems? Is there some shareware in Emacs? Maybe a bit of Shared Source in binutils?
People have laughed at the BSDs for replacing a lot of common software with locally-developed, BSD-licensed equivalents. That's starting to seem like a much saner alternative.
Is it just me, or has GMail strayed pretty far from its original purpose.
Yes. It was created to be a web interface to a standard SMTP-based email account and should never be altered or updated to take advantage of shifting trends in communication.
This is why there is a change control process, and a testing environment.
Which does nothing to help with production problems that never came up in testing because it never occurred to anyone to test for them yet. In practice, that's just not always possible.
My company has a very old, very complex legacy system that runs everything. We're actively developing its replacement, but the new version isn't live yet. I'm in charge of the external website that customers use to interact with that internal application, and sometimes I get urgent bugs like "customer can't see any of their invoices and we're losing a few thousand dollars a minute, please fix ASAP." Most of the time, the fix is as easy as adding a new condition to some report or another, and our standard practice is to make the fix, then immediately document and commit it back to version control so that it's now part of the main codebase.
No, it's not "pure". Yes, it gets our system back up and working so that it can resume making money for us. The replacement system is on track to clean up the process a lot, but right now, today, we just don't have the luxury of sending all changes through formal code review, testing, and staging.
I bet you'd find a majority of shops have at least a couple of legacy systems that are handled this way until they can be phased out. Everyone knows that's not the "right" way to do things, but if it makes the customers (and the boss and my paycheck) happy, then it's hard to say that it's completely wrong.
The answer can be found in the Wikipedia article on leap seconds - the need for leap seconds isn't constant and predictable.
That doesn't really address his question, though. His proposition is a different way to implement leap seconds, not a way to determine if they're needed. I don't like his idea either, but for different reasons.
There is a good reason to avoid embryonic stem cell altogether. The biggest reason is because we have no good ways to control its potential to form teratoma, which is basically cancerous mass of tissues of all types.
I disagree. That's an excellent reason to get better at ESC technology. All medicines have adverse reactions, and I bet plenty of people would be willing to risk cancer if the process cured an even worse (in their opinion) condition.
A blanket $300 tax on any blog that makes money, for example, is not well thought out -- a better strategy would be a tax on blogs that turn more than, say, $1000/yr. in revenue, or perhaps a tax that cannot exceed the amount of money a blog made.
Sounds good! And since I self-host my blog on my home Internet connection, of course I'll be allowed to claim the cost of my Internet access, pro-rated electricity bill for the server, pro-rated amount of square footage of my house that it occupies, and hardware depreciation, right? I mean, if it's a business then treat it like a business. I pay a lot more to host my blog than I'll ever make from it, so I could get behind that.
Concern for the "rights" of ones mortal enemies is a bit misplaced, however delicious sweet martyrdom over abstract ideals may seem.
Don't in any way construe my question as concern for Iran's rights. By analogy, when Timothy McVeigh was on trial, I was utterly unsympathetic to the killer. However, I'd still wonder what exact charges we were trying to convict him of.
I grew up during the Cold War; I know what having "The Bomb" actually translates to. And to reiterate, I really don't want Iran to have it! But what gives us the right to tell them that they can't, any more than they have the right to tell us they can't?
To clarify, I'm not trying to argue on their behalf. I'm genuinely curious here: I'd like to know what doctrine we're operating under that authorizes us to stop them.
First, I wish no one had the bomb, and the idea of a squirrelly state like Iran - or God forbid, North Korea - having one is enough to make me lose sleep. That said, under what moral or legal right do we get to say that they can't have one, other than that we don't like them? Is it our official policy that only our allies get nukes, and if so, do Russia and China have the same official policy with non-overlapping sets of allies?
Again, I don't want Iran to have the bomb. I'm just curious about what doctrine or treaty gives us a say in the matter of whether a sovereign country gets to use a technology that we already have.
FCC job is to regulate ISPs such that they cannot to QoS on SIP vs. HTTP
You couldn't have picked a shittier example. Given a lack of infinite bandwidth, I want an ISP to prioritize SIP - all SIP, regardless of endpoint addresses - over bulk transfers. That way I can make VOIP calls while you're downloading a Windows update, and you can do the same even when I'm serving web pages. That's perfectly neutral; the ISP isn't prioritizing my packets over yours or vice versa. It's prioritizing latency-sensitive protocols over bulk protocols without regard to who is using them.
Why can't laptop makers build a tiny firewalling router into one of those and mount it on the motherboard?
How would you configure it? If the laptop's OS can send change requests to the firewall, then it's effectively identical to the firewall running on the OS itself, but with more complexity. Note: that's why I always disable UPnP on hardware firewalls. A security system that allows infected clients to open random ports isn't significantly better than no security system at all.
The biggest problem with IP address availability is web sites that use SSL annoyingly needing a single IP address per site.
There are currently about 120,000,000 domains in the most popular non-geographic TLDs. If every single one of those has an HTTPS server, then that consumes about 3% of the IPv4 address space.
Jesus Christ, why would you do exactly the wrong thing?
Because I'm a jackass, obviously, and in my post I enumerated every single approach we took and I didn't skip past a single detail of what we did and didn't try in order to get to the point I was trying to make.
He was diagnosed by a pediatric neurologist based on his medical and social history and his demonstrated symptoms. If you are not his pediatric neurologist, I cheerfully invite you to take your ignorance elsewhere.
Yeah, you might. I'm not a doctor or other expert in the area, but what you described sounds an awful lot like what I've heard other diagnosed ADD people say. Schedule a physical with your doctor (which is a good thing to do yearly anyway) and ask him/her about it while you're there. Maybe he'll refer you for testing, or maybe he'll tell you you're a lazy ass. You never know.:-)
Heh! I heard that one plenty of times, and I've probably said it a few times myself. But it became clear that no amount of begging, encouragement, threatening, or punishment was going to help him. Oh, and the "one time" clause didn't mean that it was only a problem once. More like, after months of going through a nightly ordeal, he came to me and asked me for help. That was what escalated the situation from "we might consider asking the pediatrician about it" to "OK, we better get this checked out."
Slashdot Mirror
Folks like you
...are not at all like the folks you're talking about. I have no special love for Wikipedia, and I've explicitly and repeatedly stated that it can't be used as a primary reference. However, given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. As a trend, I believe that Wikipedia is moving toward being more accurate, and reading an article will generally lead to you being more informed on its subject than less informed.
Not that any of this has to do with my original point that Wikipedia, even when sometimes inaccurate, is at least unlikely to be biased against one side of a non-publicized trial.
First, The writers and editors do not have to be people trained in the field and this is acknowledge by Wikipedia in its disclaimer. Second, anyone can change almost any Wikipedia article to support a position, then site that version of the article.
Didja notice the second part of my post where I said not to cite Wikipedia directly for that reason?
To suggest otherwise would be to say that one is better off relying on Wikipedia articles to make medical diagnoses over one's doctor.
No. It says that Wikipedia may be more reliable than a paid witness in a country that is... how to say this delicately?... not known for its impeccable legal ethics. As far as I know, no one has paid my doctor to diagnose me in a way that would be to someone else's advantage, and I consider him to be an reliable observer with my best interests in mind. I would not grant that same level of trust to a doctor hired to testify against me.
Because it is reasonable to assume an article written by amateurs is much more reliable than an expert witness, a practicing psychologist, who actually interviewed the people in question.
Yes, it is. First, the "amateurs" who wrote the Wikipedia article are almost certainly people trained in its field, in the same way that the physics and computer articles are generally edited by physicists and computer people. Second, the Wikipedia editors have not been paid to testify on behalf of either party and are completely unbiased authorities with respect to this particular case.
That said, the prosecutor is still a jackass. Wrong way: cite Wikipedia in court. Right way: use Wikipedia to bone up on the subject at hand, then cherry pick evidence from the articles it references that support your position and cite those articles directly.
.... you rarely have to make a volume smaller.
Try to add a new device to one of the pools on a system. Intend to write:
# zpool add mediapool /dev/newdisk
...but accidentally pull this up from your shell history:
# zpool add bigassraid /dev/newdisk
Panic when you realize that you just told the system to load-balance operations between that 64-drive RAID and a 160GB PATA drive you were screwing around with, and that you can't remove the new drive without backing up and restoring the whole RAID.
I love ZFS, but I despise the fact that you can't undo operations that seem like they should be very undoable.
Raises a hand, waving.
If FreeBSD ever gets a good ZFS implementation expect lawsuits to commence.
None have been filed since it was production-ready last year. Besides, what would they sue over? The FreeBSD team using code that Sun deliberately and explicitly licensed for such things?
Their solution is wrong. The easiest way to solve it would be to pass a law which requires Copyleft to be stated, in writing in a copyright office application.
Easiest for that government, perhaps, but quite frankly I don't give a rat's ass. The Berne Convention says that everything I write, including this post, is copyright to me - automatically. I can't imagine a single legitimate reason why I should have to specifically register my writings in order to distribute them with a Copyleft license, when I have to do no such thing to distribute them with a proprietary license.
Your suggested handling of proprietary licences: "Hey, MikeRT! I wrote this. Want to read it? Here you go! Just don't give it to anyone else, OK?"
Your suggested handling of Copyleft licenses: "Hey, MikeRT! I wrote this. Want to read it? I have to wait for the Copyright Office to return my paperwork before I'm legally allowed to hand it to you."
Ixnay on the idea.
Same here. I built a standing desk at work and I've been upright for over a year now. As you said, I acclimated pretty quickly so that standing is no less comfortable than sitting.
Oh, and I lost 30 pounds last year. Granted, the standing desk was only part of a health regimen I started, but I believe it helped. That alone has to have dropped my early death likelihood by quite a lot.
Seriously, that's aggravating as hell. I just kind of assumed that GNU would have released all of their flagship software under the L?GPL and had no idea that they were distributing non-Free software. They were the one distributor I figured I'd never have to audit the licenses from. Are there any other hidden gems? Is there some shareware in Emacs? Maybe a bit of Shared Source in binutils?
People have laughed at the BSDs for replacing a lot of common software with locally-developed, BSD-licensed equivalents. That's starting to seem like a much saner alternative.
Is it just me, or has GMail strayed pretty far from its original purpose.
Yes. It was created to be a web interface to a standard SMTP-based email account and should never be altered or updated to take advantage of shifting trends in communication.
This is why there is a change control process, and a testing environment.
Which does nothing to help with production problems that never came up in testing because it never occurred to anyone to test for them yet. In practice, that's just not always possible.
My company has a very old, very complex legacy system that runs everything. We're actively developing its replacement, but the new version isn't live yet. I'm in charge of the external website that customers use to interact with that internal application, and sometimes I get urgent bugs like "customer can't see any of their invoices and we're losing a few thousand dollars a minute, please fix ASAP." Most of the time, the fix is as easy as adding a new condition to some report or another, and our standard practice is to make the fix, then immediately document and commit it back to version control so that it's now part of the main codebase.
No, it's not "pure". Yes, it gets our system back up and working so that it can resume making money for us. The replacement system is on track to clean up the process a lot, but right now, today, we just don't have the luxury of sending all changes through formal code review, testing, and staging.
I bet you'd find a majority of shops have at least a couple of legacy systems that are handled this way until they can be phased out. Everyone knows that's not the "right" way to do things, but if it makes the customers (and the boss and my paycheck) happy, then it's hard to say that it's completely wrong.
The answer can be found in the Wikipedia article on leap seconds - the need for leap seconds isn't constant and predictable.
That doesn't really address his question, though. His proposition is a different way to implement leap seconds, not a way to determine if they're needed. I don't like his idea either, but for different reasons.
There is a good reason to avoid embryonic stem cell altogether. The biggest reason is because we have no good ways to control its potential to form teratoma, which is basically cancerous mass of tissues of all types.
I disagree. That's an excellent reason to get better at ESC technology. All medicines have adverse reactions, and I bet plenty of people would be willing to risk cancer if the process cured an even worse (in their opinion) condition.
A blanket $300 tax on any blog that makes money, for example, is not well thought out -- a better strategy would be a tax on blogs that turn more than, say, $1000/yr. in revenue, or perhaps a tax that cannot exceed the amount of money a blog made.
Sounds good! And since I self-host my blog on my home Internet connection, of course I'll be allowed to claim the cost of my Internet access, pro-rated electricity bill for the server, pro-rated amount of square footage of my house that it occupies, and hardware depreciation, right? I mean, if it's a business then treat it like a business. I pay a lot more to host my blog than I'll ever make from it, so I could get behind that.
Concern for the "rights" of ones mortal enemies is a bit misplaced, however delicious sweet martyrdom over abstract ideals may seem.
Don't in any way construe my question as concern for Iran's rights. By analogy, when Timothy McVeigh was on trial, I was utterly unsympathetic to the killer. However, I'd still wonder what exact charges we were trying to convict him of.
Thank you for being the first to actually answer my question. :-)
I grew up during the Cold War; I know what having "The Bomb" actually translates to. And to reiterate, I really don't want Iran to have it! But what gives us the right to tell them that they can't, any more than they have the right to tell us they can't?
To clarify, I'm not trying to argue on their behalf. I'm genuinely curious here: I'd like to know what doctrine we're operating under that authorizes us to stop them.
First, I wish no one had the bomb, and the idea of a squirrelly state like Iran - or God forbid, North Korea - having one is enough to make me lose sleep. That said, under what moral or legal right do we get to say that they can't have one, other than that we don't like them? Is it our official policy that only our allies get nukes, and if so, do Russia and China have the same official policy with non-overlapping sets of allies?
Again, I don't want Iran to have the bomb. I'm just curious about what doctrine or treaty gives us a say in the matter of whether a sovereign country gets to use a technology that we already have.
FCC job is to regulate ISPs such that they cannot to QoS on SIP vs. HTTP
You couldn't have picked a shittier example. Given a lack of infinite bandwidth, I want an ISP to prioritize SIP - all SIP, regardless of endpoint addresses - over bulk transfers. That way I can make VOIP calls while you're downloading a Windows update, and you can do the same even when I'm serving web pages. That's perfectly neutral; the ISP isn't prioritizing my packets over yours or vice versa. It's prioritizing latency-sensitive protocols over bulk protocols without regard to who is using them.
Why can't laptop makers build a tiny firewalling router into one of those and mount it on the motherboard?
How would you configure it? If the laptop's OS can send change requests to the firewall, then it's effectively identical to the firewall running on the OS itself, but with more complexity. Note: that's why I always disable UPnP on hardware firewalls. A security system that allows infected clients to open random ports isn't significantly better than no security system at all.
The biggest problem with IP address availability is web sites that use SSL annoyingly needing a single IP address per site.
There are currently about 120,000,000 domains in the most popular non-geographic TLDs. If every single one of those has an HTTPS server, then that consumes about 3% of the IPv4 address space.
That is, of course, if your LAN is set up to use names. That's not happening here where I work.
Fire your IT guy this morning. He is incompetent and you can pick up a qualified admin on the cheap these days.
Jesus Christ, why would you do exactly the wrong thing?
Because I'm a jackass, obviously, and in my post I enumerated every single approach we took and I didn't skip past a single detail of what we did and didn't try in order to get to the point I was trying to make.
He was diagnosed by a pediatric neurologist based on his medical and social history and his demonstrated symptoms. If you are not his pediatric neurologist, I cheerfully invite you to take your ignorance elsewhere.
Yeah, you might. I'm not a doctor or other expert in the area, but what you described sounds an awful lot like what I've heard other diagnosed ADD people say. Schedule a physical with your doctor (which is a good thing to do yearly anyway) and ask him/her about it while you're there. Maybe he'll refer you for testing, or maybe he'll tell you you're a lazy ass. You never know. :-)
Heh! I heard that one plenty of times, and I've probably said it a few times myself. But it became clear that no amount of begging, encouragement, threatening, or punishment was going to help him. Oh, and the "one time" clause didn't mean that it was only a problem once. More like, after months of going through a nightly ordeal, he came to me and asked me for help. That was what escalated the situation from "we might consider asking the pediatrician about it" to "OK, we better get this checked out."