Why is the happening to one person news or even, dare I say it, "Stuff that matters?"
I think what happened is this: the Gretchen Ledgard post mentioned in the article set off a string of responses and counter-responses in the MSDNosphere. At some point during that, this Sorkin guy came out of the woodwork to announce that Microsoft had insulted him and that working there was beneath him, and that's news for the next few days.
To me, the only interesting thing in the whole mess was Ledgard's site, which actually has a lot of interesting material for both job seekers and interviewers anywhere.
Fifield said he would use biblical stories as a framework. "The story of Moses has multiple decade long breaks in the text," he said. "Fill in those blanks and detail his rise to prominence in the Egyptian military, his wanderings and encounters in the wilderness and end the game with God's Judgment of Egypt and deliverance of the Hebrews through the Red Sea."
From a gameplay point of view, this one strikes me as the most promising of the ideas. I don't recall Moses' "prominence in the Egyptian military" in the original text, exactly, (although he obviously was a pretty badass guy) but the overall plan seems sound.
Since neither of us is on trial here, I'll make one last comment and leave it at that:
The nerds built the Internet, and if the rest of the world wants to go and try to administer it while disregarding the logic of the nerds, they just won't have an Internet left. And that's that.
I've never met the guys who built the Internet. But, in general, the people who make the biggest contributions to technology operate with common sense, not the silly analogies, far-fetched edge cases, arguing for the sake of arguing and the overwhelming sense of entitlement that characterize shrieking nerd debate.
I don't think that I'm any less productive a researcher because I understand that just because I have read access to my coworkers Unix accounts, that's not an invitation to browse through all their files. On the contrary -- that I'm capable of behaving like an adult is why they let me have the opportunity to do big things.
What you're saying is that I should make illogical decisions in order to stay out of jail, because a jury of "normal people" is unable to follow a simple argument.
I'd be more sympathetic if nerd logic were actually logic, and not just excessively clever stupidity.
The AC who has already replied to you says it about as well as I could: the nerd logic is the logic that matters when we're talking about networking policy.
As stories here (including this one) demonstrate every day, nerd logic is _not_ the logic that matters for anything besides scoring points in arguing. (It's also just plain stupid, but that's another issue.)
I _understand_ nerd logic (and your web server analogy and obliviousness to my point make for a perfect example thereof) but to normal people, a web server that had to be actively configured and made available and a access point that was not actively secured are not remotely comparable situations. At some level, even nerds grasp this, which is why the arrested individual probably doesn't hide from server admins the way he does from an irritated hotpsot owner.
Nerds can take or ignore my advice, but a "jury of one's peers" doesn't guarantee a panel of Slashbot dweebs who'll respond to your nerdly analogies. Telling yourself how much smarterer you are than them isn't going to make your jail time pass _that_ much quicker.
First of all, this is nerd logic that's unlikely to hold up in court. If networks had to be actively configured to be publically available, you'd have a point, but failing to actively secure it is not (to normal people) comparable to your notion of advertising a keg party.
Second, in this case, the homeowner confronted the l33ch twice, and the latter clearly realized that he wasn't welcome on the network.
DNA has already been isolated (and the mitochondrial genome sequenced) from Neanderthal fossils. I would imagine that it's taken a few years to reliably amplify those small quantities of DNA to sequence the genome, but that's just a guess...
I applaud the submitter's enthusiasm, as well as his not putting in the usual stupid, inflammatory question at the end. ("Could epigenetics mean the end of Microsoft?")
In fact, he comes off even better now that we've gotten "Could this be the start of a Pleistocene park?" a few stories later...
I'd wonder snidely if "celibrate" is a Freudian slip, but then I'm the dweeb who not only read the product of your bong session but is complaining that the probability of "isHelium a gas?" is <1.00.
1) The issue here is methylation and demethylation of DNA sequences, not the submitter's "genetic sequences that activate or suppress other genes".
2) Methylation patterns are heritable through mitosis, so he's not necessarily wrong to say that genes are being "changed".
3) I forget the details of methylation in embryos, but most of it is wiped out between generations. In any case, sperm and egg cells are segregated very early on, so the environment should have minimal effect on changes that get passed along to offspring. The article doesn't address the issue at all.
I applaud the submitter's enthusiasm, as well as his not putting in the usual stupid, inflammatory question at the end. ("Could epigenetics mean the end of Microsoft?") But he could have cut back on the speculation a bit...
This is an impressive bit of reporting, if true. But I've got to wonder:
1) Just how much of a travel budget does 1up.com have?
2) Why would the "sweatshop" owners allow them to take pictures?
Or did they send pictures to the reporter? Two of them? The whole thing strikes me as implausible. In any case, I certainly wouldn't take these guys' claims of enormous profits any more seriously than when we heard similar stories from spammers, day traders and porn aggregators a few years ago. They're not public corporations so they don't have to back up their yapping with real numbers.
The fact that the only major* Linux desktop deployment anyone ever talks about is Largo's migration five years ago is the primary reason I'm skeptical about the rest of those stories.
(To the degree that a small city that will probably be subsumed by the Church of Scientology in the next few decades qualifies as "major"...)
What were the major obstacles and how were they overcome?
My impression is that in most of those heavily-hyped cases, nothing ever wound up happening at all.
Rather than short term focus I'd love to see the shows check in a year later to see how things look. That's more indicative of true success and failure.
I believe Joe Millionaire wound up ditching the shy kindergarten teacher for the bondage video model he had previously relegated to second place, if that's any help.
I've been planning a switch from Gentoo anyway (Portage has just gotten too big to use over dialup and I can't get a 2.6 kernel to power off correctly) and yesterday a bunch of people informed me that Linux Is, In Fact, Ready For The Desktop if I'd just switch distros yet again.
I'd like to go back to a Red Hat variant, but am confused by the various clone options -- Fedora, CentOS, White Box, etc. Can anyone sugggest why one of those might be preferable to the others? (Hint: one thing I've learned from Gentoo is that the packaging system is only as good as the repository behind it.)
I cant see how providing patches faster would increase infection rate.
I assumed that was a typo, and he meant "decrease". "[A]nd hell didn't free over" is probably a typo, as well, although I'm sure Richard Stallman is still typing a furious GNU/missive to Cliff right now...
Not to mention that Linux filled a real need. There were tons of Unix people who wanted to run something familiar on their PC.
Exactly. The article makes the same mistake that so many Linux zealots do -- they think that people can be persuaded to switch to a new operating system that (supposedly) isn't worse than they one they already have. People will switch to something _better_, not to something that isn't worse.
Linux caught on because it was _better_ for a large number of users, who no longer had to Kermit or ZTerm or whatever it was to a minicomputer from their PC. A brand-new consumer desktop OS wouldn't have done nearly as well.
Yeah, there's a bunch of people telling me that this has now been addressed and Linux Is Finally Ready For The Desktop! and it's all my fault for not changing distros before adding new hardware.
Good! As someone else said in his reply, I'd love to see Linux succeed. And I have to do something with that PC, and hopefully the next distro I try will work better. But I've been on the "Oh, that's been fixed but you have to change distros!" treadmill for nine years now, and I've hit the point where my primary computer needs to just work.
1) I recently decided to get with 2002 and buy a USB memory stick. Trying it out on the three platforms I use:
MacOS X -- Plug it in, and it works.
Windows XP -- Plug it in, and it works.
Linux -- Plug it in, grep dmesg for information, create a mount point, guess exactly which partition to mount, and it works. And then I edited/etc/fstab in vi so it'll be even easier next time!
The crazy thing is that that actually was a huge win for Linux! Dealing with USB devices didn't used to be nearly that easy! But it still is a long way from being usable for any normal person.
2) My Linux Waterloo, though, is updates. I have two Linux systems: a TiBook with Yellow Dog, that has an irretrievably corupted RPM database, and a Gentoo whitebox that I can't push through to Xorg and 2.6. (The latter was switched to Gentoo after Mandrake package management imploded.)
It's been a fun ride, but I've spent enough time on treating my computer as a hobby. OS X has pretty much taken over for all my actual computer use outside of work.
What you need to do is get another machine (it doesn't have to be top-of-the-line) solely to experiment on. This machine is called in CompSci circles a "testbed". When testing is done and you are sure everything works (and are confident that it will stay that way) then, and only then, install that program on the computers in use.
First, you're feeding a troll.
Second, that's not exactly the most convincing bit of Linux advocacy I've ever heard...
Slashdot Mirror
I think what happened is this: the Gretchen Ledgard post mentioned in the article set off a string of responses and counter-responses in the MSDNosphere. At some point during that, this Sorkin guy came out of the woodwork to announce that Microsoft had insulted him and that working there was beneath him, and that's news for the next few days.
To me, the only interesting thing in the whole mess was Ledgard's site, which actually has a lot of interesting material for both job seekers and interviewers anywhere.
From a gameplay point of view, this one strikes me as the most promising of the ideas. I don't recall Moses' "prominence in the Egyptian military" in the original text, exactly, (although he obviously was a pretty badass guy) but the overall plan seems sound.
So much for 2005 being The Year Of AIX On The Desktop!
The nerds built the Internet, and if the rest of the world wants to go and try to administer it while disregarding the logic of the nerds, they just won't have an Internet left. And that's that.
I've never met the guys who built the Internet. But, in general, the people who make the biggest contributions to technology operate with common sense, not the silly analogies, far-fetched edge cases, arguing for the sake of arguing and the overwhelming sense of entitlement that characterize shrieking nerd debate.
I don't think that I'm any less productive a researcher because I understand that just because I have read access to my coworkers Unix accounts, that's not an invitation to browse through all their files. On the contrary -- that I'm capable of behaving like an adult is why they let me have the opportunity to do big things.
I'd be more sympathetic if nerd logic were actually logic, and not just excessively clever stupidity.
As stories here (including this one) demonstrate every day, nerd logic is _not_ the logic that matters for anything besides scoring points in arguing. (It's also just plain stupid, but that's another issue.)
Nerds can take or ignore my advice, but a "jury of one's peers" doesn't guarantee a panel of Slashbot dweebs who'll respond to your nerdly analogies. Telling yourself how much smarterer you are than them isn't going to make your jail time pass _that_ much quicker.
Second, in this case, the homeowner confronted the l33ch twice, and the latter clearly realized that he wasn't welcome on the network.
0.27
Here's the second case -- IIRC the first paper was in Cell, but I can't find it.
How do they know it's neanderthol and not from something else?
I'm no anthropologist but I think that Neanderthal skeletons are pretty unmistakeable to the trained eye.
DNA has already been isolated (and the mitochondrial genome sequenced) from Neanderthal fossils. I would imagine that it's taken a few years to reliably amplify those small quantities of DNA to sequence the genome, but that's just a guess...
In fact, he comes off even better now that we've gotten "Could this be the start of a Pleistocene park?" a few stories later...
I'd wonder snidely if "celibrate" is a Freudian slip, but then I'm the dweeb who not only read the product of your bong session but is complaining that the probability of "isHelium a gas?" is <1.00.
A few points:
1) The issue here is methylation and demethylation of DNA sequences, not the submitter's "genetic sequences that activate or suppress other genes".
2) Methylation patterns are heritable through mitosis, so he's not necessarily wrong to say that genes are being "changed".
3) I forget the details of methylation in embryos, but most of it is wiped out between generations. In any case, sperm and egg cells are segregated very early on, so the environment should have minimal effect on changes that get passed along to offspring. The article doesn't address the issue at all.
I applaud the submitter's enthusiasm, as well as his not putting in the usual stupid, inflammatory question at the end. ("Could epigenetics mean the end of Microsoft?") But he could have cut back on the speculation a bit...
This is an impressive bit of reporting, if true. But I've got to wonder:
1) Just how much of a travel budget does 1up.com have?
2) Why would the "sweatshop" owners allow them to take pictures?
Or did they send pictures to the reporter? Two of them? The whole thing strikes me as implausible. In any case, I certainly wouldn't take these guys' claims of enormous profits any more seriously than when we heard similar stories from spammers, day traders and porn aggregators a few years ago. They're not public corporations so they don't have to back up their yapping with real numbers.
(To the degree that a small city that will probably be subsumed by the Church of Scientology in the next few decades qualifies as "major"...)
My impression is that in most of those heavily-hyped cases, nothing ever wound up happening at all.
Rather than short term focus I'd love to see the shows check in a year later to see how things look. That's more indicative of true success and failure.
I believe Joe Millionaire wound up ditching the shy kindergarten teacher for the bondage video model he had previously relegated to second place, if that's any help.
I'd like to go back to a Red Hat variant, but am confused by the various clone options -- Fedora, CentOS, White Box, etc. Can anyone sugggest why one of those might be preferable to the others? (Hint: one thing I've learned from Gentoo is that the packaging system is only as good as the repository behind it.)
I assumed that was a typo, and he meant "decrease". "[A]nd hell didn't free over" is probably a typo, as well, although I'm sure Richard Stallman is still typing a furious GNU/missive to Cliff right now...
Exactly. The article makes the same mistake that so many Linux zealots do -- they think that people can be persuaded to switch to a new operating system that (supposedly) isn't worse than they one they already have. People will switch to something _better_, not to something that isn't worse.
Linux caught on because it was _better_ for a large number of users, who no longer had to Kermit or ZTerm or whatever it was to a minicomputer from their PC. A brand-new consumer desktop OS wouldn't have done nearly as well.
Nonsense! Linux will be ready for the desktop in 2006 *AND* 2007!
Good! As someone else said in his reply, I'd love to see Linux succeed. And I have to do something with that PC, and hopefully the next distro I try will work better. But I've been on the "Oh, that's been fixed but you have to change distros!" treadmill for nine years now, and I've hit the point where my primary computer needs to just work.
The crazy thing is that that actually was a huge win for Linux! Dealing with USB devices didn't used to be nearly that easy! But it still is a long way from being usable for any normal person.
2) My Linux Waterloo, though, is updates. I have two Linux systems: a TiBook with Yellow Dog, that has an irretrievably corupted RPM database, and a Gentoo whitebox that I can't push through to Xorg and 2.6. (The latter was switched to Gentoo after Mandrake package management imploded.)
It's been a fun ride, but I've spent enough time on treating my computer as a hobby. OS X has pretty much taken over for all my actual computer use outside of work.
Somehow, I'm thinking Stallman has just found something new to be furious about...! Ingrid, better check your email!
By the way, did the article leave out thefirst name of "Wookey, a Debian developer", did I somehow miss it or is that ZD's idea of a source?
First, you're feeding a troll.
Second, that's not exactly the most convincing bit of Linux advocacy I've ever heard...