The difference between a bad consultant and a stupid consultant can be small to none sometimes. Insufficiant knowledge can have the same effect as malicious exploitation. In other professions, change is slow enough that standards about training can be made in a rational manner. There is no such luxury of time in computers.
This, along with a relatively low understanding of computers in the general populace, makes people think that it's a good idea to hire 16 year old neighbor kid to design their network based on the fact that he/she is a "whiz"(knows slightly more that you).
Not only are there no standards for education but even among knowledgeable people there is disagreement over many things. What do you do with a proprietaty system that works for the client? What if the company that supports the system is having financial trouble? At what point do you transfer the client to a new system? What if the choice you have between different systems is a bad choice or writing your own? Is it wrong to move a client to a system that only you know about?
The same as you don't expect contractors to build your house OK without any supervision someone hiring a consultant should not blindly expect that everything will be done perfectly without any of your own interference. Get the consultant to make promisies on paper and give them deadlines. This way you can take legal action if they prove to be incompetent or devious.
It's not them, error correction and ability to tell which direction is being read is built into the barcode pattern. Any reader of barcodes must necesicarily be able to read in all sorts of funky directions.
I believe "lewd" speech is as much protected as prayer is.
</blockquote>
Depends on what you are praying for really...
In the US anyway, "lewd" speech usually isn't protected. "Offensive" speech is. The Supreme Court has found that there is a difference between yelling "F*ck!" and yelling "F*ck the government!".
Become a "private ISP" of sorts. Charge a nominal, required fee for use of the e-mail system. That way you could use some of the legal prtections ISP's have.
I do some grading for my school's intro and 2nd level programming classes. We're using Java as the language of choice, so we don't have the platform issues that this person has. The lab machines are NT 4 running Codewarrior but all the grading is done on my or my professor's Debian boxes.
The text the professor settled on is another by Savitch; i forget the title. But I do know that Savitch did include a wrapper around System.in and out in Java so perhaps he has included something similar in his C++ book. In any case, unless you are doing GUI work, you shouldn't have that much trouble making things portable. Just don't use any "special features".
I have a problem with comparing the number of bugs in a Linux distribution and MS WinWhatever. The two things are not the same beast. A Linux distribution typically includes a huge mass of various programs like TeX, AbiWord, gnumeric, all of KDE, Netscape, Apache, INN, a ftp server, proxy software, games, etc. Large numbers of smaller programs fill distributions as well. Windows though, includes IE, a media player, and that "Personal Webserver" thingy. NT's IIS adds in a ftp server. It seems to me that to sompare the two fairly, you must necessarily add a large chunk of MS Office and other programs to Windows. Somehow I doubt that MS's bug numbers would compare favoribly after those additions. Anyway, most of the stuff on BugTraq is fixed bugs, a signal that more work is getting done on linux than other platforms.
Re:The reasons why - please read, Jon.
on
Frankenstein Time
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· Score: 3
I'd like to point out to everyone here that _assuming_ that selection of individual genes someday becomes possible and more importantly legal, we still will not be able to create "perfect" children. Most of the common imperfections that you see in people are in fact not strictly imperfections but more like "qualified advantageous mutations".
For example, a common blood disorder in Africans, sickle-cell anaemia, in only problematic when you have a pair of genes for that trait. When you only have one gene it provides immunity against malaria. Also, Schizophrenia and certain other mental disorders have been shown to have strong links to creativity and intelligence. Genetically enhancing breast size by increasing the amount of estrogen produced would have side effects of enhanced risk of cancer. Significant height enhancements would bring about increased risks of heart failure.
What I'm saying here is that many, if not most, of the changes a parent might want to make to their child are not without tradeoffs. There is no prefect child.
As for more innocuous changes, I also find it hard to believe that suddenly everyone would choose to be blonde hair and blue eyes. Most parents want their children to look like them.
The problem that I see is not a new one. Insurance companies look at your parent's and grand-parent's health histories _right_now_. While people are usually not refused coverage based upon their histories, they do have to pay higher premiums. A child born with the genes for MS would find it very hard to get insurance if genetic testing was common.
Re:Scientifically inaccurate, but still entertaini
on
Review: 'Titan A.E.'
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· Score: 2
You know one of the things i just don't get about sci-fi and lasers is that noone ever thinks to wear a shiny suit or carry a big mirror. You would think that someone would have thought of that at some point.
Here's the thing though, if one person said all of these things they may be contradicting themselves. However Slashdot is not a single person, while the population is homogenous in many respects, there are differences in opinion within.
I personally never said anything bad either way about Bill Gates giving/not giving to charity. That's his personal choice, if he wonts to spend it on midget prostitutes that's just fine. (Not to say that I wouldn't rather him give to charity.)
Also, the phrases "MS adds features" and "MS doesn't add features" are deceptive. If you are calling a bug fix a feature then perhaps you don't fully understand what each is. As for the bloatware thing I don't think MS Operating systems are bloated in the way of features at all.(Word is a different product alltogether) In fact, I find MS Operating Systems almost completely devoid of usable programs and accessories. Debian on the other hand comes with all of TeX installed by default.
On competition and monopoly, if you ignore the financial impact on comsumers aspect of monopolism then the major issue is that the Monopolist can restrict the competitive ability of equal or better products. In many ways, Linux is better but MS can destroy it's competitive ability. Look to Apple for a perfect example.
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates, The Road Ahead, Viking Penguin (1995)
That is the funniest sig I have seen in a long time!
Almost all archaeology is done in land fills of a sort. What people throw out is often the only indication of how people lived and what they used. The odd thing about the guy who excavated this landfill is that he chose something so recent.
IANAL, but I believe that they do. One thing you have to watch out for though is that trademarks are often also "ficticious names" and as such certain kinds of parody could be libel.
Err, Debian does use glibc2. You can also go to the unstable tree to get kernel 2.2.12 if you want. Perhaps you are thinking of Slackware, I think they are still using libc5 but have also moved to a 2.2 kernel.
I worked for my college's computer services this summer; my job mainly consisted of applying patches to NT for 3 months. Admittedly, we have many more computers than you (I'd estimate 800+ or so in public labs and administrative offices, we are extremely wired for 1500 students) but with 5 other students and the college's professional staff we were unable to apply service packs to all of them. Why? because when installing that "one big easy install" not only do you have to kick the user of the machine off (they really don't like that) but you actually have to be there the whole time to click on those "friendly" buttons. NT's profiles (they are like home directories except they suck) aren't always updated correctly by the upgrade so the users have to fix and reinstall their programs. Computers that were running NT SP3 w/o IE4 a little bit slow now are completely unusable with all of the "improvements" that were "necessary". Not to mention differing support of hardware between the different service packs; SP4 broke some computer I worked on because of incompatibilities with the BIOS on some Compaqs which had no problems at all with earlier versions.
In contrast, if we had been using Linux, even if I hadn't created a script, I could have opened up a sh*tload of telnet sessions from the cold room and, without the user knowing or caring, updated each and every machine at the same time with only the packages necessary.
So you would have us go back to...shudder... COBOL? Excuse me while I go into spasms.
Seriously though, OOP doesn't mysteriously generate bugs. It's poor programming practice that does it. Go take a look at Eiffel, a OOPL that forces you to program well. It even has a GNU compiler.
By Sunday, after nonstop work, he'd discovered scores of bugs. One was particularly nasty: The key sequence 'control-alt-delete,' a move that gamers employ to shut down a program if it accidentally freezes, would instead shut down the whole computer.
Forgive me my ignorance, but isn't that what CTRL-ALT-DEL is supposed to do? Who uses that to exit a program?
The policy of Mutually Assured Destruction worked for so long because the countries involved were both stable, rational countries. The problem that these anti-missle weapons fix is that of the rouge state headed by a fanatic or of a large scale terrorist organization. From what the articles say this isn't capable of or designed to prevent large scale attacks from a determined, well armed country.
Err, I just downloaded Slashdot's source. Haven't put up a site quite yet but I will soon. It's not GPL, more of a BSDish licence but who cares as long as you have the source.
Slashdot Mirror
The difference between a bad consultant and a stupid consultant can be small to none sometimes. Insufficiant knowledge can have the same effect as malicious exploitation. In other professions, change is slow enough that standards about training can be made in a rational manner. There is no such luxury of time in computers.
This, along with a relatively low understanding of computers in the general populace, makes people think that it's a good idea to hire 16 year old neighbor kid to design their network based on the fact that he/she is a "whiz"(knows slightly more that you).
Not only are there no standards for education but even among knowledgeable people there is disagreement over many things. What do you do with a proprietaty system that works for the client? What if the company that supports the system is having financial trouble? At what point do you transfer the client to a new system? What if the choice you have between different systems is a bad choice or writing your own? Is it wrong to move a client to a system that only you know about?
The same as you don't expect contractors to build your house OK without any supervision someone hiring a consultant should not blindly expect that everything will be done perfectly without any of your own interference. Get the consultant to make promisies on paper and give them deadlines. This way you can take legal action if they prove to be incompetent or devious.
You do realize that Puerto Rico is not a seperate country but part of the USA, right?
It's not them, error correction and ability to tell which direction is being read is built into the barcode pattern. Any reader of barcodes must necesicarily be able to read in all sorts of funky directions.
I'm no lawyer but AFAIK this idea would work:
Become a "private ISP" of sorts. Charge a nominal, required fee for use of the e-mail system. That way you could use some of the legal prtections ISP's have.
I do some grading for my school's intro and 2nd level programming classes. We're using Java as the language of choice, so we don't have the platform issues that this person has. The lab machines are NT 4 running Codewarrior but all the grading is done on my or my professor's Debian boxes.
The text the professor settled on is another by Savitch; i forget the title. But I do know that Savitch did include a wrapper around System.in and out in Java so perhaps he has included something similar in his C++ book. In any case, unless you are doing GUI work, you shouldn't have that much trouble making things portable. Just don't use any "special features".
prices will go down for the fibre it self but you'll still have right-of-way issues to deal with using any kind of land-line.
hmm letting tons of nitrogren slip into the atmosphere... isn't the atmosphere around 3/4's nitrogen? somehow I don't see leakage as a problem
I have a problem with comparing the number of bugs in a Linux distribution and MS WinWhatever. The two things are not the same beast. A Linux distribution typically includes a huge mass of various programs like TeX, AbiWord, gnumeric, all of KDE, Netscape, Apache, INN, a ftp server, proxy software, games, etc. Large numbers of smaller programs fill distributions as well. Windows though, includes IE, a media player, and that "Personal Webserver" thingy. NT's IIS adds in a ftp server. It seems to me that to sompare the two fairly, you must necessarily add a large chunk of MS Office and other programs to Windows. Somehow I doubt that MS's bug numbers would compare favoribly after those additions. Anyway, most of the stuff on BugTraq is fixed bugs, a signal that more work is getting done on linux than other platforms.
I'd like to point out to everyone here that _assuming_ that selection of individual genes someday becomes possible and more importantly legal, we still will not be able to create "perfect" children. Most of the common imperfections that you see in people are in fact not strictly imperfections but more like "qualified advantageous mutations".
For example, a common blood disorder in Africans, sickle-cell anaemia, in only problematic when you have a pair of genes for that trait. When you only have one gene it provides immunity against malaria. Also, Schizophrenia and certain other mental disorders have been shown to have strong links to creativity and intelligence. Genetically enhancing breast size by increasing the amount of estrogen produced would have side effects of enhanced risk of cancer. Significant height enhancements would bring about increased risks of heart failure.
What I'm saying here is that many, if not most, of the changes a parent might want to make to their child are not without tradeoffs. There is no prefect child.
As for more innocuous changes, I also find it hard to believe that suddenly everyone would choose to be blonde hair and blue eyes. Most parents want their children to look like them.
The problem that I see is not a new one. Insurance companies look at your parent's and grand-parent's health histories _right_now_. While people are usually not refused coverage based upon their histories, they do have to pay higher premiums. A child born with the genes for MS would find it very hard to get insurance if genetic testing was common.
You know one of the things i just don't get about sci-fi and lasers is that noone ever thinks to wear a shiny suit or carry a big mirror. You would think that someone would have thought of that at some point.
Here's the thing though, if one person said all of these things they may be contradicting themselves. However Slashdot is not a single person, while the population is homogenous in many respects, there are differences in opinion within.
I personally never said anything bad either way about Bill Gates giving/not giving to charity. That's his personal choice, if he wonts to spend it on midget prostitutes that's just fine. (Not to say that I wouldn't rather him give to charity.)
Also, the phrases "MS adds features" and "MS doesn't add features" are deceptive. If you are calling a bug fix a feature then perhaps you don't fully understand what each is. As for the bloatware thing I don't think MS Operating systems are bloated in the way of features at all.(Word is a different product alltogether) In fact, I find MS Operating Systems almost completely devoid of usable programs and accessories. Debian on the other hand comes with all of TeX installed by default.
On competition and monopoly, if you ignore the financial impact on comsumers aspect of monopolism then the major issue is that the Monopolist can restrict the competitive ability of equal or better products. In many ways, Linux is better but MS can destroy it's competitive ability. Look to Apple for a perfect example.
That is the funniest sig I have seen in a long time!
Almost all archaeology is done in land fills of a sort. What people throw out is often the only indication of how people lived and what they used. The odd thing about the guy who excavated this landfill is that he chose something so recent.
Mabey that's because voting is much, much, much more important that billions of dollars in financial transactions.
Personally, I'm going to see if I can get a phd so that I can become a professor and stay on fast college networks for the rest of my life.
IANAL, but I believe that they do. One thing you have to watch out for though is that trademarks are often also "ficticious names" and as such certain kinds of parody could be libel.
Yes, Pi kicked ass but it wasn't a hacker/cracker movie.
Err, Debian does use glibc2. You can also go to the unstable tree to get kernel 2.2.12 if you want. Perhaps you are thinking of Slackware, I think they are still using libc5 but have also moved to a 2.2 kernel.
Err, why was that posted as an AC? I am/was logged in.
--Adam Knapp
Well I don't know about enterprise settings but:
I worked for my college's computer services this summer; my job mainly consisted of applying patches to NT for 3 months. Admittedly, we have many more computers than you (I'd estimate 800+ or so in public labs and administrative offices, we are extremely wired for 1500 students) but with 5 other students and the college's professional staff we were unable to apply service packs to all of them. Why? because when installing that "one big easy install" not only do you have to kick the user of the machine off (they really don't like that) but you actually have to be there the whole time to click on those "friendly" buttons. NT's profiles (they are like home directories except they suck) aren't always updated correctly by the upgrade so the users have to fix and reinstall their programs. Computers that were running NT SP3 w/o IE4 a little bit slow now are completely unusable with all of the "improvements" that were "necessary". Not to mention differing support of hardware between the different service packs; SP4 broke some computer I worked on because of incompatibilities with the BIOS on some Compaqs which had no problems at all with earlier versions.
In contrast, if we had been using Linux, even if I hadn't created a script, I could have opened up a sh*tload of telnet sessions from the cold room and, without the user knowing or caring, updated each and every machine at the same time with only the packages necessary.
So you would have us go back to ...shudder... COBOL? Excuse me while I go into spasms.
Seriously though, OOP doesn't mysteriously generate bugs. It's poor programming practice that does it. Go take a look at Eiffel, a OOPL that forces you to program well. It even has a GNU compiler.
Forgive me my ignorance, but isn't that what CTRL-ALT-DEL is supposed to do? Who uses that to exit a program?
The policy of Mutually Assured Destruction worked for so long because the countries involved were both stable, rational countries. The problem that these anti-missle weapons fix is that of the rouge state headed by a fanatic or of a large scale terrorist organization. From what the articles say this isn't capable of or designed to prevent large scale attacks from a determined, well armed country.
Err, I just downloaded Slashdot's source. Haven't put up a site quite yet but I will soon. It's not GPL, more of a BSDish licence but who cares as long as you have the source.