I'm not a Mac user, so maybe I'm mistaken on this, but isn't OS X (and Apple in general) rather infamous for not letting users configure things very much?
A typical user, yeah - the options are plentiful, but not all-encompassing.
However, if you have admin rights on the box, changing any aspect of OSX' behavior is just a text editor and the right.plist file away.
the Registry is a database. This means it's more likely to be resilient to data entry errors.
...no it doesn't. ID10T errors are no different no matter where the keystrokes go. It also doesn't prevent the registry itself from corrupting, which Windows is rather legendary at doing.
With text files, a syntax error usually invalidates the entire file...
...assuming you mean 'a bad configuration entry breaks the application', yes. It means you only have the application/service that relies on it going south. Just like borking a registry entry will bork the application/service that relies on the now-broken registry entry. Not seeing much difference there, unless you're referring to the registry's backup copy (which amazingly enough, you yourself can do before you edit a config file in *nix.)
Now if you meant that the file is completely useless from that point onwards, then you'd be wrong; the typoed/mistyped portion of said file can be edited back to normal and everything is hunky-dory again. By comparison, sometimes you cannot do that with a broken registry (that is, if you broke it badly enough and was dumb enough to reboot in-between... a not too outlandish scenario).
Finally, a config file can do something that a registry entry cannot: properly carry its own documentation within the file itself.
Actually, no... Microsoft didn't come close to 'perfecting' anything. Now if you had instead mentioned the OEMs, specifically who sold systems with Windows pre-loaded with drivers that the OEM provided? Different story entirely.
Therein lies the hand-tied-behind=back problem Linux faces. You see, distros don't have major OEMs going out of their way to make solid consumer computers with working drivers that are 1) supported, and b) tuned to the product for stability and performance. Now I'm not saying that the OEMs get it perfect, but consider this: When you buy a Dell or HP with Windows pre-loaded on it, you buy it knowing that all of the drivers are going to be installed and reasonably solid, at least for typical consumer uses. You get no such thing with Linux boxes from OEMs, unless you settle for a business model, which is definitely not a perfect match for consumer use cases (read: games).
Most of us schlubs on/. build our own machinery for the most part, so we don't see this problem. The vast majority of users, who buy it all pre-loaded and ready-to-rock? They see it.
1) It's not Oracle's fault that the previous owner (e.g. landlord) was/is a dick. Yes, Oracle could do some feel-good PR with it, but it won't make a difference long-term, and the folks involved end up getting their pain prolonged in most cases.
2) How the fuck does this even make it to closing with tenants still on the books? Unless Oracle specifically agrees (agreed?) to take on the role of landlord, the place should have been emptied by the day the title transfer papers get signed.
3) Legally (barring some clause or two that nobody read in their leases), the property seller may be on the hook for paying up any leases that are still live when the property sold (unless, again, Oracle agreed to become a landlord at closing). But, I can only guess at that because I don't know the city/county/state laws that apply.
4) A question - is there any sort of state of federal grant money action or program occurring here? I'm assuming not, else the residents would have gotten at least a year or more of advanced warning, relocation assistance, rental vouchers to help them pay rent elsewhere, etc etc.
Dude, Oracle botched the State of Oregon's healthcare website (Cover Oregon, and to the tune of $300m)... no idea if they did anything on the federal one.
Certainly you could muffle the engine on that robot... with about 100 extra pounds of muffling gear that by the way will add to the size of the thing. Oh, and it has to be serviceable/repairable in the field.
As sibling said, it's also about the size of the thing, not to mention that a human can more easily move without being seen than a large and mechanized thing the approximate size of a horse (minus a head).
3) You discover that the folks you handed this pile over to are far too prone to prioritize 'ooh shiny!' over things like system stability, capacity vs. budgeting, security, and more than a few other aspects to keeping the system up and running .
See also the headlong chase to make everything that's not welded to the floor into {insert some-widget-barely-out-of-beta here}... even when it makes zero sense to do so. Yeah, devs love the hell out that shit (because it makes constructing their test envs drop-easy)... but adding unnecessary overhead and complexity in the name of the almighty Buzzword is just as bad as having PHBs do it (or worse, you get Architect and PHBs alike saying ZOMG let's turn our Oracle RAC cluster into Docker containers running teh MongoDBz!!!11!!...with zero thought beforehand as to whether or not that's actually doable, let alone necessary. )
Mind you, I do the DevOps thing for a living, and quite well, judging by the amount of crap I have turned into automated goodness thus far. However, turning devs into ops people w/o any sense of training or experience is fucking moronic - most of them lack the perspective, skill and foresight to run a home router, let alone a production-critical system.
By the way, now that I think about it, #2 (that you presented) is pretty big, and I've seen it first-hand. The result is usually sad unless you get management's buy-in to enforce it (...the typical answer: Marketing is too busy breathing down their neck to add new features, and the codebase really needs a good refactoring before it explodes, and now you want the devs to do sysadmin shit too!? Are you high!?)
Who knows - GP may be in a unique and incredibly lucky situation (e.g. a smallish company still relying on something like AWS/EC2 for their heavy-lifting). I'm betting that it damned sure ain't typical no matter the case.
Perhaps, but the 'learned that the same site's database got completely raped, and its member lists got published in the open' might put a bit of a crimp into things...
I mean seriously, there's a lot of idiots on this planet, but 4 million of them in a couple of months? I'm not seeing it, even as misanthropic as I am.
The second is the money you get if you win. The payoff is much much larger than you can get any other way - you cannot make that much money by investing $5200. Even Madoff didn't promise that large a return. So the usual rules of ROI don't apply here.
Dunno... I spent something like that amount on a few classes back in the early 90's to get more acquainted with the whole sysadmin thing, and 20+ years later, I'm making a far more comfortable salary than I would have made than if I had stuck with being an EE - I'm guessing at least twice the income.
Actually, it's a tax on people who cannot do math.
I see a lot of people (like you) who suck at math make that claim. Your odds of winning with no ticket are exactly zero. Your odds with 1 ticket are greater than zero.
You forget ROI, which is why your assertion fails. No tickets and no winnings costs me $0.00 One ticket and no winnings costs me $2, with no ROI. Multiple tickets with no winnings is $2 * n, again with no ROI. Powerball's absolute best odds are at 1:55.41 , which means that one would need to purchase at least $112 in tickets to even halfway hope for (but obviously not guarantee) a return of any kind, and that's just for a $4.00 ROI at minimum - if you're sufficiently lucky.
Of course, you could defy all odds and win $$millions on just one $2 ticket, but the odds are stacked way too far against that happening on anything approaching a predictable basis.
Certainly there's entertainment value in it (one can always dream), but that's nothing to do with mathematics: the odds are still stacked against you, and the only consistent winner of the game is the government, hence a 'tax'.
Meanwhile, here's something else to consider: the typical ticket buyer is usually well below what one would call 'middle class' in income, which means that each dollar spent means a lot more to that person, and that income can ill-afford to be wasted on such an endeavor. As a younger man, I've lived under the poverty line, and I can attest to the fact that $2 (or back then, $1) was often the difference between, say, paying rent on time or not. Would that $1 have made me a multi-millionaire? Most likely not, so why the hell would I risk homelessness on such long-assed odds? Given the results of my frugality back then, I'm doing a whole hell of a lot better now when it comes to income - enough that my wife no longer has to work, we live comfortably, and my daughter currently goes to college w/o her or myself having to take on any debt in order to make that happen. This makes me a hell of a lot happier than any desperate dreaming of some Robin Leach inspired lifestyle ever could.
Actually, it's a tax on people who cannot do math.
I say this because, even though poor folk have more impending reasons to cast their dreams (and money) in that direction, we both know there are well-off people who buy tickets whenever the jackpot goes over a certain amount.
Before parent post gets modded to oblivion, it should be noted that the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (home of the 'Doomsday Clock' if I'm not mistaken), does tend to run a bit activist in its public statements. Now as to whether or not the science they print is sound/skewed/whatever, I'll leave to the reader.
In a way, but c'mon, that's splitting hairs. When I used the term 'harm', I mean actual abuse of an individual or group thereof, not political contrivance.
What makes a reason obvious and what makes it arbitrary?
Good point... It's hard to find the right words sometimes, but let's say that the former code would be for things that cause harm (and are therefore against the law), whereas the latter is the shutting down of a contrary opinion.
How about instead of a special code to indicate when a page has been censored, we just, you know, refuse to censor it in the first place?
Agreed - though I think this proposal is part of doing just this, at least as a form of protest.
After all, maybe your government clamps down and demands you shut down a page -or else. So, to keep your employees out of prison, you slap on a code 451 (love the number, BTW), and then perhaps you try and get sneaky and stick a link underneath it that says "please refer to your search engine for alternate locations of {content title/keywords, etc}" (or similar - enough to give the content away, but just on this side of keeping the government from arresting you).
I believe GP was wanting to differentiate between stuff that's banned by law for obvious reasons (child pr0n, malware, etc), and stuff that's banned by a legal body due to purely political/speech reasons (e.g. calling one's national governmental leader a poop-eating doody-head).
Dude - they've likely sunk that and more on the XBox franchise... they were an estimated $7bn in the hole when they began working on the XBOne, and Heaven only knows what they sunk into the R&D/marketing on that....and they still lose money with each console sold.
Long story short, it's not like Microsoft is new at this losing money thing. If it weren't for the Windows/Office/Exchange/SQL licensing revenues, they'd have been in bankruptcy almost a decade ago.
...so why in the everliving hell didn't *either* campaign just keep the gathered data in servers (and behind firewalls) that they would exclusively control and maintain?
It took them more than three months and required essentially a "research project" on the part of the customer combined with contact and assistance from a tech publication site...
(emphasis mine)
I think at that point I would have sent Comcast an invoice for my time.
Didn't early versions of OS X allow running OS 9.x applications?
Yes. It was called "Classic" mode; the only caveat was that you had to have MacOS9 install media. Otherwise, it ran practically any MacOS 9.x compatible application without a hitch.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not a Mac user, so maybe I'm mistaken on this, but isn't OS X (and Apple in general) rather infamous for not letting users configure things very much?
A typical user, yeah - the options are plentiful, but not all-encompassing.
However, if you have admin rights on the box, changing any aspect of OSX' behavior is just a text editor and the right .plist file away.
the Registry is a database. This means it's more likely to be resilient to data entry errors.
...no it doesn't. ID10T errors are no different no matter where the keystrokes go. It also doesn't prevent the registry itself from corrupting, which Windows is rather legendary at doing.
With text files, a syntax error usually invalidates the entire file...
...assuming you mean 'a bad configuration entry breaks the application', yes. It means you only have the application/service that relies on it going south. Just like borking a registry entry will bork the application/service that relies on the now-broken registry entry. Not seeing much difference there, unless you're referring to the registry's backup copy (which amazingly enough, you yourself can do before you edit a config file in *nix.)
Now if you meant that the file is completely useless from that point onwards, then you'd be wrong; the typoed/mistyped portion of said file can be edited back to normal and everything is hunky-dory again. By comparison, sometimes you cannot do that with a broken registry (that is, if you broke it badly enough and was dumb enough to reboot in-between... a not too outlandish scenario).
Finally, a config file can do something that a registry entry cannot: properly carry its own documentation within the file itself.
Actually, no... Microsoft didn't come close to 'perfecting' anything. Now if you had instead mentioned the OEMs, specifically who sold systems with Windows pre-loaded with drivers that the OEM provided? Different story entirely.
Therein lies the hand-tied-behind=back problem Linux faces. You see, distros don't have major OEMs going out of their way to make solid consumer computers with working drivers that are 1) supported, and b) tuned to the product for stability and performance. Now I'm not saying that the OEMs get it perfect, but consider this: When you buy a Dell or HP with Windows pre-loaded on it, you buy it knowing that all of the drivers are going to be installed and reasonably solid, at least for typical consumer uses. You get no such thing with Linux boxes from OEMs, unless you settle for a business model, which is definitely not a perfect match for consumer use cases (read: games).
Most of us schlubs on /. build our own machinery for the most part, so we don't see this problem. The vast majority of users, who buy it all pre-loaded and ready-to-rock? They see it.
Let's be honest here:
1) It's not Oracle's fault that the previous owner (e.g. landlord) was/is a dick. Yes, Oracle could do some feel-good PR with it, but it won't make a difference long-term, and the folks involved end up getting their pain prolonged in most cases.
2) How the fuck does this even make it to closing with tenants still on the books? Unless Oracle specifically agrees (agreed?) to take on the role of landlord, the place should have been emptied by the day the title transfer papers get signed.
3) Legally (barring some clause or two that nobody read in their leases), the property seller may be on the hook for paying up any leases that are still live when the property sold (unless, again, Oracle agreed to become a landlord at closing). But, I can only guess at that because I don't know the city/county/state laws that apply.
4) A question - is there any sort of state of federal grant money action or program occurring here? I'm assuming not, else the residents would have gotten at least a year or more of advanced warning, relocation assistance, rental vouchers to help them pay rent elsewhere, etc etc.
Dude, Oracle botched the State of Oregon's healthcare website (Cover Oregon, and to the tune of $300m)... no idea if they did anything on the federal one.
Certainly you could muffle the engine on that robot... with about 100 extra pounds of muffling gear that by the way will add to the size of the thing. Oh, and it has to be serviceable/repairable in the field.
As sibling said, it's also about the size of the thing, not to mention that a human can more easily move without being seen than a large and mechanized thing the approximate size of a horse (minus a head).
I'd like to add a more important one:
3) You discover that the folks you handed this pile over to are far too prone to prioritize 'ooh shiny!' over things like system stability, capacity vs. budgeting, security, and more than a few other aspects to keeping the system up and running .
See also the headlong chase to make everything that's not welded to the floor into {insert some-widget-barely-out-of-beta here}... even when it makes zero sense to do so. Yeah, devs love the hell out that shit (because it makes constructing their test envs drop-easy)... but adding unnecessary overhead and complexity in the name of the almighty Buzzword is just as bad as having PHBs do it (or worse, you get Architect and PHBs alike saying ZOMG let's turn our Oracle RAC cluster into Docker containers running teh MongoDBz!!!11!! ...with zero thought beforehand as to whether or not that's actually doable, let alone necessary. )
Mind you, I do the DevOps thing for a living, and quite well, judging by the amount of crap I have turned into automated goodness thus far. However, turning devs into ops people w/o any sense of training or experience is fucking moronic - most of them lack the perspective, skill and foresight to run a home router, let alone a production-critical system.
By the way, now that I think about it, #2 (that you presented) is pretty big, and I've seen it first-hand. The result is usually sad unless you get management's buy-in to enforce it (...the typical answer: Marketing is too busy breathing down their neck to add new features, and the codebase really needs a good refactoring before it explodes, and now you want the devs to do sysadmin shit too!? Are you high!?)
Who knows - GP may be in a unique and incredibly lucky situation (e.g. a smallish company still relying on something like AWS/EC2 for their heavy-lifting). I'm betting that it damned sure ain't typical no matter the case.
What MS needs to do is to design a media update to W10, XBOne, and Surface to auto-discover and cloud all devices in a house.
...as long as it ain't my house, go for it. ;)
The kind of thing that would really piss off the Slashdotters that don't want their devices to do things before they tell them to.
...there's a rather logical explanation for that.
Perhaps, but the 'learned that the same site's database got completely raped, and its member lists got published in the open' might put a bit of a crimp into things...
I mean seriously, there's a lot of idiots on this planet, but 4 million of them in a couple of months? I'm not seeing it, even as misanthropic as I am.
The second is the money you get if you win. The payoff is much much larger than you can get any other way - you cannot make that much money by investing $5200. Even Madoff didn't promise that large a return. So the usual rules of ROI don't apply here.
Dunno... I spent something like that amount on a few classes back in the early 90's to get more acquainted with the whole sysadmin thing, and 20+ years later, I'm making a far more comfortable salary than I would have made than if I had stuck with being an EE - I'm guessing at least twice the income.
Actually, it's a tax on people who cannot do math.
I see a lot of people (like you) who suck at math make that claim. Your odds of winning with no ticket are exactly zero. Your odds with 1 ticket are greater than zero.
You forget ROI, which is why your assertion fails. No tickets and no winnings costs me $0.00 One ticket and no winnings costs me $2, with no ROI. Multiple tickets with no winnings is $2 * n, again with no ROI. Powerball's absolute best odds are at 1:55.41 , which means that one would need to purchase at least $112 in tickets to even halfway hope for (but obviously not guarantee) a return of any kind, and that's just for a $4.00 ROI at minimum - if you're sufficiently lucky.
Of course, you could defy all odds and win $$millions on just one $2 ticket, but the odds are stacked way too far against that happening on anything approaching a predictable basis.
Certainly there's entertainment value in it (one can always dream), but that's nothing to do with mathematics: the odds are still stacked against you, and the only consistent winner of the game is the government, hence a 'tax'.
Meanwhile, here's something else to consider: the typical ticket buyer is usually well below what one would call 'middle class' in income, which means that each dollar spent means a lot more to that person, and that income can ill-afford to be wasted on such an endeavor. As a younger man, I've lived under the poverty line, and I can attest to the fact that $2 (or back then, $1) was often the difference between, say, paying rent on time or not. Would that $1 have made me a multi-millionaire? Most likely not, so why the hell would I risk homelessness on such long-assed odds? Given the results of my frugality back then, I'm doing a whole hell of a lot better now when it comes to income - enough that my wife no longer has to work, we live comfortably, and my daughter currently goes to college w/o her or myself having to take on any debt in order to make that happen. This makes me a hell of a lot happier than any desperate dreaming of some Robin Leach inspired lifestyle ever could.
Actually, it's a tax on people who cannot do math.
I say this because, even though poor folk have more impending reasons to cast their dreams (and money) in that direction, we both know there are well-off people who buy tickets whenever the jackpot goes over a certain amount.
Before parent post gets modded to oblivion, it should be noted that the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (home of the 'Doomsday Clock' if I'm not mistaken), does tend to run a bit activist in its public statements. Now as to whether or not the science they print is sound/skewed/whatever, I'll leave to the reader.
In a way, but c'mon, that's splitting hairs. When I used the term 'harm', I mean actual abuse of an individual or group thereof, not political contrivance.
What makes a reason obvious and what makes it arbitrary?
Good point... It's hard to find the right words sometimes, but let's say that the former code would be for things that cause harm (and are therefore against the law), whereas the latter is the shutting down of a contrary opinion.
How about instead of a special code to indicate when a page has been censored, we just, you know, refuse to censor it in the first place?
Agreed - though I think this proposal is part of doing just this, at least as a form of protest.
After all, maybe your government clamps down and demands you shut down a page -or else. So, to keep your employees out of prison, you slap on a code 451 (love the number, BTW), and then perhaps you try and get sneaky and stick a link underneath it that says "please refer to your search engine for alternate locations of {content title/keywords, etc}" (or similar - enough to give the content away, but just on this side of keeping the government from arresting you).
Law is political
I believe GP was wanting to differentiate between stuff that's banned by law for obvious reasons (child pr0n, malware, etc), and stuff that's banned by a legal body due to purely political/speech reasons (e.g. calling one's national governmental leader a poop-eating doody-head).
Dude - they've likely sunk that and more on the XBox franchise... they were an estimated $7bn in the hole when they began working on the XBOne, and Heaven only knows what they sunk into the R&D/marketing on that. ...and they still lose money with each console sold.
Long story short, it's not like Microsoft is new at this losing money thing. If it weren't for the Windows/Office/Exchange/SQL licensing revenues, they'd have been in bankruptcy almost a decade ago.
...so why in the everliving hell didn't *either* campaign just keep the gathered data in servers (and behind firewalls) that they would exclusively control and maintain?
The sad part is, most of them will never have heard of this, and the very few who have won't pay enough attention that it will spur them to action.
Consumer ignorance is the greatest force in modern economics, I fear.
It took them more than three months and required essentially a "research project" on the part of the customer combined with contact and assistance from a tech publication site...
(emphasis mine)
I think at that point I would have sent Comcast an invoice for my time.
There is a big difference between criticism and hatespeech.
...it all depends on who gets to define what "hate speech" is. Therein lies the problem.
...using a credit card you bought with cash under your target's name at some convenience store?
Didn't early versions of OS X allow running OS 9.x applications?
Yes. It was called "Classic" mode; the only caveat was that you had to have MacOS9 install media. Otherwise, it ran practically any MacOS 9.x compatible application without a hitch.
Parent needs modded up. Now.
("...Fellow", my ass.)
The only other valid nickname I can think it had was "Aluminum Overcast"