Assuming that just because humans are doing things implies that the results of those things are the primary cause of climate change is alarmist thinking. We are here, therefore we are the cause is sloppy thinking. It comes from humans arrogantly assuming that they are the center of the universe and therefore are the cause of everything.
Similarly, the thinking behind Kyoto appears to be:
the climate is changing;
we must do something;
Kyoto is something;
therefore we must "do" Kyoto!
Where is the proof?
Now, I am not advocating open season on resource consuption -- minimizing our impact on the environment is just good thinking (and therefore will never happen in north america), while minimizing our polution levels reduces ugly things like smog.
But claiming that rising sea levels are a cause for alarm ignores the fact that sea levels are already three hundred feet above where they were fifteen thousand years ago. I bet if some of these nuts were around then, they would be running around claiming that maybe this "fire" thing was having a greater impact on the environment than could be controlled!
The greatest lie of our market-based system is that time equals money, in all circumstances.
At one point Joel points out that just because there isn't money involved does not mean that there are no costs. Chosing one thing always costs you the "opportunity cost" of potentially making a different choice. For example, if you are chosing to spend (note the word spend) time writing some piece of software, it costs you the opportunity to do something else with your time (like beg someone for sex).
Where I started, we had five main types of unix running (SunOS, HP-UX, OSF/1, AIX, and Linux) and multiple revs of all of them. It was trying at times, sure, but if the admin team is able and willing to think about things and isn't afraid to make mistakes, they will get the job done.
Easilly the number one cost is admin time to learn all the tricks necessary to get the job done.
Katz, your beef is not with Lucas raking the cash from the merchandizing efforts -- it is with the american society which greedilly sucks this tripe up voluntarilly. Lucas is merely a successfull capitalist.
The fact that a viable business has been made from a particular activity in no way places a burden on society or government to protect or preserve the viability of such a business.
No no, my point being that all this paranoia and money could have been spent on lowering the number of people killed in traffic "accidents".
Really, why are we getting our collective panties in a bunch over five dead people, when many more die on the roads? What is so special about those five people that the others don't have?(I mean, besides the fact that those threatened by this have more power to spend public money than the average poor dead statistic.)
Tech savvy employers can search through Google's usenet archives with a few last names or old email addresses of potential employees, read all their unconvertible straight-edge/goth/wiccan/vegan/leftist/whatever from the 'good old days' of the internet combined with a more naive posting ethic... and avoid hiring the ones that don't fit the good ol boys profile.
Boy, some of you guys are going to look like monkeys on crack when they start searching through old slashdot stories.
So don't read the fucking article. Contrary to popular opinion, not every single byte on Slashdot is required reading. Vote with your eyeballs and read something else if that's at all possible.
[...] winner of the [entirely fictitious and just-invented] Most Unintuitive Interface In The Entire Fscking World Award.
Y'know, you might be interested to know that for those of us who have used olvwm for the last five years, KDE & gnome & E & all those other nasty windowmanagers out there are just as "intuitive" to us as olvwm is to you. Most of the details for these new window managers baffle me. The only thing I've kept is the konsole application, now that KDE has finally fixed the titlebar bug...
There's no such thing as "intuitive". There's only things which are "consistant with previous experience."
Hooray! I like olvwm so much, I installed it on my Mandrake 8.1 install -- and then fixed the scripting setup so that it would actually work!
I briefly dabbled with KDE, but my inability to create a working Autostart folder (wonderful setup, Mandrake, almost matching the wonderful documentation job done by the KDE team) when I wanted to install Xscreensaver (because it, with xv, has way more flexibility than does kslideshow.kss) finally buried it. I went hawling back to momma!
As has been written in a couple of posts already, AIX is designed to run on enterprise-level hardware. The bonus is that since the OS and hardware all come from IBM, there is a single point of contact for those problems. There are some really cool things that separate AIX from other UNIX's:
Most of the advantages of "single source" can be realized by IBM maintaining their own "distribution" of linux which is optimised for use on their hardware. This will probably continue right down to them maintaining their own kernel patches and combinations, similar to the way that distributions like Red Hat add their own combination of patches to kernels they ship.
Most of the critical OS functions can be controlled via the SMIT interface.
The smit could be ported to Linux, or replaced by something else. Once you get the hang of smit, it's great -- but it seems to necessitate cramping your brain into a certain way that means that if smit makes sense, nothing else does.
* Unlike other flavours of UNIX, AIX does not use flat files to define parameters for daemons. AIX has all the relevant information stored in an internal database (The ODM).
Uh huh. The registry concept works oh so well for Microsoft. What I hate is that the appropriate config files are maintained by smit as a 'convenience' for other programs which may have to read configuration data out of them, but if the conf files differ from the ODM, the ODM is authoritative. As you say yourself, if the ODM gets hosed, you can be in deep deep trouble; while if a single conf file gets hosed, usually you can fix just that conf file.
* AIX ships with a journaled file system and file systems can be grown on the fly.
Again, I'm sure that IBM can guide the kernel development in the right directions, and add the right file system bits later either as GPL extensions or as proprietary 'value add'.
* AIX gives way more control over disk management than other flavours of UNIX. It is easy to implement the various type sof RAID. AIX also lets you control where certain files can be physically located on your disk, and during off-peak hours the system can move files around to re-organize the disks.
let's see how many people will still
have the latest Windows and Office on all their machines
If many (or most) Windows installations are 'pirated', and Microsoft can coerce people into paying for more of the installations they make, then their revenues go up. Since most of their money will come from the coroporations which are tied to Microsoft through complex site licenses, revenues are almost guaranteed to go up.
Similarly, if people can't 'pirate' their Windows or Office, and those people (who wouldn't pay anyways) migrate to Free alternatives, Microsoft can point to the growth in the Free userbase as proof as a vibrant and growing competition.
Maybe I'm blind, but I don't see the short-term or mid-term downside for Microsoft in this scenario.
I also don't see the downside for the Free community -- with our growth in users, we will gain more developers (since a percentage of the transitioning users will also be developers), leading to an increase in the availability of Free software.
Long term scenarios don't apply to either party, since we have repeatedly seen that there is no such thing as a long term scenario in Internet Time. Something always comes along to upset the status quo.
If Microsoft wants to grow the Free community as a side effect of growing their own revenues, I say let 'em. --
Firstly, I was talking about religion in general, not christianity in particular.
Secondly, that is how it was explained to me -- don't sin or go to hell. The arguments about whether or not my sins are already paid for (ie in advance -- if so, then who cares what I do? it's paid for! AK47s for everyone!) stray too far into the particulars of any given religion for my tastes.
Finally, having not seen the inside of a school for ten years, I really can't tell you what the kids are reading today. I can tell you that Nietzsche sure wasn't on my reading list -- unless it was in one of the 68000 appendicies I skipped. --
PARENTS need to teach children moral value, and that value should be reinforced by SCHOOL.
There are a few problems with this idea. The first problem is that there is a difference between moral teachings and religious teachings. I will give you the benefit of the doubt here and assume that what you want to do is use the latter as a vehicle for the former; a laudable and acceptable goal, if that is as far as you go. Any further, and you start trampling on other people's spiritual beliefs, which gets you in trouble, even in America.
The main problem as I see it is that religion is the ultimate cop-out as an argument favoring moral behaviour. A moral guideline would be one like "don't kill people". The thing is, the innocent (ie children) and the selfish (ie everyone else) immediately question that guideline with a "why? what gives that guideline the strength to limit my actions?" And let's face it, the answer if you kill people you will go to hell (ie because god says so) is a lot simpler, straightforward, and defensible than any non-secular argument. It means that we stop reasoning with our peers (for that is what our spiritual leaders used to be, and should be) and start threatening their perceptions of their immortality and spiritual future.
Religion probably originated at least partially in response to this need -- the enlightened saw that we needed to be nice to each other and help each other (ie, not killing each other and having sex with other people's spouses), and attributing these commandments to the powerful beings (gods) that had already been invented to deal with the messy question of "where did we all come from and why are we here?" was a useful way to bring those less able to have a reasoned argument in line.
We definitely need some way of teaching moral behavior. If religion can be curbed from the borg-like assimilative behaviour which many religions indulge in, it might be an acceptable way. But I am definitely not holding my breath. --
OK, I work with in a CM/Build team for a... uh... company of some non-deterministic size. We build large software products. We use various CM tools, some Open Source, some Free, some neither.
The one lesson which has been hammered home again and again and again is that a tool is just that, a tool. It can not, and will not, substitute for good programming practices and procedures which control who does what and where. It cannot be used to enforce policy; all it can do in the best of circumstances is assist a policy. Any time that a tool or process is bypassed in some way it is an indication of a problem -- either with the process, or with the business environment surrounding the process.
These are lessons many of us know, but few have learned, and fewer still apply. I know that we try, but we do not always succeed. --
The reason why they want you is because you know how things work in your team, the responsibilities, how it relates to the rest of the company, and what it actually has to do.
Too often, companies have to look outside of themselves to find "management", which is then slagged off by the rest of the team as disconnected, uninformed, useless. By promoting you, they get someone who knows the team and the job.
A similar thing happened to me. A year ago my company tried to promote me to a management position, and I said no. My feeling was that at this point in my career, abandoning a technical job for a management job would be a one-way trap door -- it would be very hard to go back to a technical job in the future after being "management" for any non-trivial period of time. When they leaned on me, I said that I was happy with my current set of responsibilities, and would sooner leave than take on something I was not comfortable with. I guess they valued my work, since they backed right off and hired someone else to do the job (someone else from within the team, and he does a much better job at it than I would have.) --
The question should be "what is the return for such an expedition?" If 2004 is the last possible time to get a gravity assist, and the current technology available will only let us get some grainy pictures of a couple of dark blobs in space as our probe goes whistling by them, then perhaps we should wait until the next time around when we can do it properly.
JPL's track record right now on robotic encounters is a little shaky, and I am not sure we have an acceptable chance of success of a robot managing this encounter on its own. I read somewhere that the encounter is going to be a flyby, not an orbital insertion, and the entire thing will take place over the space of about twenty minutes. Considering that the MCO hit the broad side of a barn (metaphorically speaking), will the PKE even be in the right part of space at the right time? Seems like a lot of money and a long way to go for a small chance at a lottery win.
If we wait, we could put permanent probes in orbit proper around pluto with better imaging sensors and study it properly.
Besides, if we wait another 250 years, Captain Kirk can just stop to check on Pluto with his tricorder before going on to blow up the Klingons. --
You know, once upon a time the point of all this open source stuff was to ensure that people had a choice. They could pick and choose the pieces that they wanted/needed to do their work or their play. If you wanted vi, you could use vi. If you wanted emacs, you could use emacs. There was little of the "you should use only this or die" attitude that seems so previlent through today's user community.
I like openlook. It has everything I want in a window manager (clean, simple, a configurable menu for launching programs, and a Front key) and does not impose on me anything that I don't want (icons, buttons, an icon panel, sounds, flaming widgets/applets/epplets or any of that other eye-candy crap). It is a perfect display mechanism for the xterms that make up my day. The best part about it is that it runs identically on both my Sun at the office and my Linux system at home -- I don't have to think about how to do something, I just do it.
Unfortunately for me, Sun appears to be abandoning the olwm world -- when you log into a Solaris 8 system, it warns you: OpenLook may not be shipped in future versions, do you want to change to CDE? CDE?! Ick. I'd sooner use KDE. But I don't want to use either.
Slashdot Mirror
COINCIDENCE DOES NOT IMPLY CAUSALITY
Assuming that just because humans are doing things implies that the results of those things are the primary cause of climate change is alarmist thinking. We are here, therefore we are the cause is sloppy thinking. It comes from humans arrogantly assuming that they are the center of the universe and therefore are the cause of everything.
Similarly, the thinking behind Kyoto appears to be:
Where is the proof?
Now, I am not advocating open season on resource consuption -- minimizing our impact on the environment is just good thinking (and therefore will never happen in north america), while minimizing our polution levels reduces ugly things like smog.
But claiming that rising sea levels are a cause for alarm ignores the fact that sea levels are already three hundred feet above where they were fifteen thousand years ago. I bet if some of these nuts were around then, they would be running around claiming that maybe this "fire" thing was having a greater impact on the environment than could be controlled!
At one point Joel points out that just because there isn't money involved does not mean that there are no costs. Chosing one thing always costs you the "opportunity cost" of potentially making a different choice. For example, if you are chosing to spend (note the word spend) time writing some piece of software, it costs you the opportunity to do something else with your time (like beg someone for sex).
You can have sex with a real live girl in an envelope if you both want to. Back seats are nice, sure, but not mandatory.
Any car on the planet -- even a Citroen 2CV -- can hold more beer than you can.
Where I started, we had five main types of unix running (SunOS, HP-UX, OSF/1, AIX, and Linux) and multiple revs of all of them. It was trying at times, sure, but if the admin team is able and willing to think about things and isn't afraid to make mistakes, they will get the job done.
Easilly the number one cost is admin time to learn all the tricks necessary to get the job done.
I was thinking about buying the book until I saw this...
Katz, your beef is not with Lucas raking the cash from the merchandizing efforts -- it is with the american society which greedilly sucks this tripe up voluntarilly. Lucas is merely a successfull capitalist.
I wish I could remember who.
Really, why are we getting our collective panties in a bunch over five dead people, when many more die on the roads? What is so special about those five people that the others don't have?(I mean, besides the fact that those threatened by this have more power to spend public money than the average poor dead statistic.)
Can anyone find out how many federal workers have been killed in traffic "accidents" since September 11? I bet it's more than five.
Boy, some of you guys are going to look like monkeys on crack when they start searching through old slashdot stories.
This even works if you use a linux system as a dhcp system -- I modified the resolv.conf and then doctored pump to not mess with my modified file.
So don't read the fucking article. Contrary to popular opinion, not every single byte on Slashdot is required reading. Vote with your eyeballs and read something else if that's at all possible.
Y'know, you might be interested to know that for those of us who have used olvwm for the last five years, KDE & gnome & E & all those other nasty windowmanagers out there are just as "intuitive" to us as olvwm is to you. Most of the details for these new window managers baffle me. The only thing I've kept is the konsole application, now that KDE has finally fixed the titlebar bug...
There's no such thing as "intuitive". There's only things which are "consistant with previous experience."
I briefly dabbled with KDE, but my inability to create a working Autostart folder (wonderful setup, Mandrake, almost matching the wonderful documentation job done by the KDE team) when I wanted to install Xscreensaver (because it, with xv, has way more flexibility than does kslideshow.kss) finally buried it. I went hawling back to momma!
Most of the advantages of "single source" can be realized by IBM maintaining their own "distribution" of linux which is optimised for use on their hardware. This will probably continue right down to them maintaining their own kernel patches and combinations, similar to the way that distributions like Red Hat add their own combination of patches to kernels they ship.
The smit could be ported to Linux, or replaced by something else. Once you get the hang of smit, it's great -- but it seems to necessitate cramping your brain into a certain way that means that if smit makes sense, nothing else does.
Uh huh. The registry concept works oh so well for Microsoft. What I hate is that the appropriate config files are maintained by smit as a 'convenience' for other programs which may have to read configuration data out of them, but if the conf files differ from the ODM, the ODM is authoritative. As you say yourself, if the ODM gets hosed, you can be in deep deep trouble; while if a single conf file gets hosed, usually you can fix just that conf file.
Again, I'm sure that IBM can guide the kernel development in the right directions, and add the right file system bits later either as GPL extensions or as proprietary 'value add'.
See previous point.
Hey, if this kill java on the web dead, I'm all for this!
--
If many (or most) Windows installations are 'pirated', and Microsoft can coerce people into paying for more of the installations they make, then their revenues go up. Since most of their money will come from the coroporations which are tied to Microsoft through complex site licenses, revenues are almost guaranteed to go up.
Similarly, if people can't 'pirate' their Windows or Office, and those people (who wouldn't pay anyways) migrate to Free alternatives, Microsoft can point to the growth in the Free userbase as proof as a vibrant and growing competition.
Maybe I'm blind, but I don't see the short-term or mid-term downside for Microsoft in this scenario.
I also don't see the downside for the Free community -- with our growth in users, we will gain more developers (since a percentage of the transitioning users will also be developers), leading to an increase in the availability of Free software.
Long term scenarios don't apply to either party, since we have repeatedly seen that there is no such thing as a long term scenario in Internet Time. Something always comes along to upset the status quo.
If Microsoft wants to grow the Free community as a side effect of growing their own revenues, I say let 'em.
--
Secondly, that is how it was explained to me -- don't sin or go to hell. The arguments about whether or not my sins are already paid for (ie in advance -- if so, then who cares what I do? it's paid for! AK47s for everyone!) stray too far into the particulars of any given religion for my tastes.
Finally, having not seen the inside of a school for ten years, I really can't tell you what the kids are reading today. I can tell you that Nietzsche sure wasn't on my reading list -- unless it was in one of the 68000 appendicies I skipped.
--
There are a few problems with this idea. The first problem is that there is a difference between moral teachings and religious teachings. I will give you the benefit of the doubt here and assume that what you want to do is use the latter as a vehicle for the former; a laudable and acceptable goal, if that is as far as you go. Any further, and you start trampling on other people's spiritual beliefs, which gets you in trouble, even in America.
The main problem as I see it is that religion is the ultimate cop-out as an argument favoring moral behaviour. A moral guideline would be one like "don't kill people". The thing is, the innocent (ie children) and the selfish (ie everyone else) immediately question that guideline with a "why? what gives that guideline the strength to limit my actions?" And let's face it, the answer if you kill people you will go to hell (ie because god says so) is a lot simpler, straightforward, and defensible than any non-secular argument. It means that we stop reasoning with our peers (for that is what our spiritual leaders used to be, and should be) and start threatening their perceptions of their immortality and spiritual future.
Religion probably originated at least partially in response to this need -- the enlightened saw that we needed to be nice to each other and help each other (ie, not killing each other and having sex with other people's spouses), and attributing these commandments to the powerful beings (gods) that had already been invented to deal with the messy question of "where did we all come from and why are we here?" was a useful way to bring those less able to have a reasoned argument in line.
We definitely need some way of teaching moral behavior. If religion can be curbed from the borg-like assimilative behaviour which many religions indulge in, it might be an acceptable way. But I am definitely not holding my breath.
--
The one lesson which has been hammered home again and again and again is that a tool is just that, a tool. It can not, and will not, substitute for good programming practices and procedures which control who does what and where. It cannot be used to enforce policy; all it can do in the best of circumstances is assist a policy. Any time that a tool or process is bypassed in some way it is an indication of a problem -- either with the process, or with the business environment surrounding the process.
These are lessons many of us know, but few have learned, and fewer still apply. I know that we try, but we do not always succeed.
--
Isn't America great!
--
A similar thing happened to me. A year ago my company tried to promote me to a management position, and I said no. My feeling was that at this point in my career, abandoning a technical job for a management job would be a one-way trap door -- it would be very hard to go back to a technical job in the future after being "management" for any non-trivial period of time. When they leaned on me, I said that I was happy with my current set of responsibilities, and would sooner leave than take on something I was not comfortable with. I guess they valued my work, since they backed right off and hired someone else to do the job (someone else from within the team, and he does a much better job at it than I would have.)
--
JPL's track record right now on robotic encounters is a little shaky, and I am not sure we have an acceptable chance of success of a robot managing this encounter on its own. I read somewhere that the encounter is going to be a flyby, not an orbital insertion, and the entire thing will take place over the space of about twenty minutes. Considering that the MCO hit the broad side of a barn (metaphorically speaking), will the PKE even be in the right part of space at the right time? Seems like a lot of money and a long way to go for a small chance at a lottery win.
If we wait, we could put permanent probes in orbit proper around pluto with better imaging sensors and study it properly.
Besides, if we wait another 250 years, Captain Kirk can just stop to check on Pluto with his tricorder before going on to blow up the Klingons.
--
I like openlook. It has everything I want in a window manager (clean, simple, a configurable menu for launching programs, and a Front key) and does not impose on me anything that I don't want (icons, buttons, an icon panel, sounds, flaming widgets/applets/epplets or any of that other eye-candy crap). It is a perfect display mechanism for the xterms that make up my day. The best part about it is that it runs identically on both my Sun at the office and my Linux system at home -- I don't have to think about how to do something, I just do it.
Unfortunately for me, Sun appears to be abandoning the olwm world -- when you log into a Solaris 8 system, it warns you: OpenLook may not be shipped in future versions, do you want to change to CDE? CDE?! Ick. I'd sooner use KDE. But I don't want to use either.
Choice, man -- it should all be about choice.
--