I fully admit to bashing Vista, even viciously, before I had even actually got a copy to live with for a while. I repent.
I fully admit to bashing Vista too, and I continue to do so. It was pushed out the door unfinished and with poor driver support (thanks to Microsoft changing video architecture too late in the dev cycle, not due to any 3rd party failings) and while the driver issues have been resolved I still find Vista feels unfinished. But leaving Windows 7 off the good OS list is just wrong. Windows 7 is a well designed and executed OS, and Microsoft deserves credit for it. And I say that as a dyed in the wool UNIX / Mac OS X fan and frequent Microsoft critic. (Did I mention how bad I think Vista is?)
I'm in the same camp. I have to manage version control with some less than sophisticated Windows-based web guys, and TortiseSVN works well for that purpose.
Personally, I come from a CVS on UNIX background so the smooth repository transition and similar commands and usage style were handy. All I needed out of a "better CVS" was the ability to version file name changes. If you aren't coming from CVS, I think SVN loses much of its charm.
I'd be all over Git if I thought distributed repositories would be helpful for my projects, and I'm thinking of tooling around a little with it on the side just to keep up on all this new fangled stuff you kids are using these days.
Rails, not so much. It looks nice, but it tickles my "get off my lawn" reflex.
Even in the link you post, the notion that octothorpe is a spoof is disputed. I've linked in a previous discussion to a different source who suggests that it is a cartographical term, although they don't back it up other than to say they've seen maps using the octothorpe symbol.
Have you ever stared at a word until you start to doubt that you've spelled it right? I'm starting to get a similar feeling about the octothorpe now. I mean, does it even exist on my keyboard?
Umm... he is citing a source, even if only indirectly. I found it faster to google "oecd country population dispersion" and I got this PDF as my first result. Figure 1.8 on page 31 shows Canada, the US and Japan closely clustered for population dispersion & broadband penetration, with Canada both most dispersed and most... penetrated.
I still wonder how meaningful the chosen metric is. You're talking percentage of land mass vs. percentage of population, which is an odd way to compare Japan and Canada. I mean, the dispersion rate may be similar, but the difference in distances involved is still huge. Not that this weakens the GP's point.
This looks like an odd choice, but we got a bunch of these (the short-back version) for our boardroom:
Steelcase Uno
We can't keep them in the boardroom, because everyone keeps stealing them for their own desks. They're much more space efficient than other office chairs, and they pivot oddly when you lean back on them. I guess the pivot point is roughly in the middle of the arm rest.
As for kneeling chairs and exercise balls, we've had a bunch of them in the office and some people swear by them - for about a week. Nobody is still using them, except for a rare change of pace.
I don't know about the Herman Miller chairs, they must be good from what people are saying. We have had a few expensive 'ergonomic' chairs in the office, and people view them as some sort of punishment.
OK, I just spent an educational 20 minutes reading the Professional Engineers Ontario site, and it looks like We Engineers can be a touchy lot in Canada. (Look under Enforcement -> Use of the term "Engineer")
Seems stupid to me, and I still wouldn't worry about it myself, but I guess I should be more careful in my recommendations of what job titles people should use.
I am Canadian, and I am an engineer. As in, I have an engineering degree from a Canadian university, but no 'Professional Engineering' credentials; like most engineering graduates, I didn't bother. If you aren't building bridges or something, you don't need them. By not becoming a P.Eng, I avoid paying annual association dues, and I don't have to sign passport applications for half the people I know. That is the sum of all differences between me with a P.Eng. and me without.
Getting to the point, there is *nothing* wrong with calling yourself an engineer in Canada. OK, maybe you should be ready to clarify that you aren't a P.Eng. in the odd circumstance that someone would ask. Nobody has ever asked me in all the untold years since I graduated. Software engineer, application engineer, network engineer, whatever. Maybe big companies distinguish somehow - I've always worked in smaller shops. But the only time I've ever heard any serious outcry is when some union of garbage men announced that they wanted to call themselves 'sanitary engineers'.
So I would recommend calling yourself whatever you feel is most descriptive of your job skills, and if you do run afoul of some P.Eng. pedant, consider yourself lucky to not work for them.
And as for the few other posters saying that immigrants have a hard time finding work in Canada, I can only say two things. Firstly, jobs are not always easy to come by here, even for Canadians. Networks matter, though, which works against immigrants. Can that be so different in other countries?
And secondly, language skills are often a major hiring impediment. I've personally seen decent CVs (yes, we do know what that word means up among the snow drifts and sled dogs) from people who couldn't make it through the most basic of phone interviews. English must be much easier to read and write than to speak, given my current company's experience. We try to hire based on skill, but around me I see four people born in Canada, one visa holder from each of England, Ireland and the US, and one naturalized Canadian of Hong Kong Chinese origin. Not exactly Vancouver in a box, but not quite the sort of discrimination Canadians seem to stand accused of at a few points in this thread.
Don't know about any of this HIPPA stuff, but Bellovin mentions snipping the TX line on a network cable (presumably ethernet) in his 1992 paper about attacks on att.com entitled, "There Be Dragons." You can find a PDF off of this page: http://www.deter.com/unix/. Top of page 6. Presumably ethernet would get you a little more bandwidth than serial.
I also remember reading about some NSA (or similar) machine that someone had to feed data to. It did reply when data was sent, but the only reply it ever gave was some sort of OK packet. Maybe someone else has more details.
If I had to do some legally mandated logging, I would definitely use something certified for the job. But for just hacking around, there are some interesting ideas out there.
At the risk of repeating myself: I'm convinced the biggest difference between Tron and Star Wars is John Williams. Go ahead, hum the Tron theme. I'll wait while you try to remember it...
Music isn't the only difference, I'll grant. But I believe it is the biggest.
Speaking of Tron and ET... John Williams was the composer for ET, Star Wars, Jaws, Indiana Jones, and just about every other movie I can remember the theme song to. I've often wondered how things would have turned out if he composed the theme for Tron and someone else did Star Wars. Seriously, check out his movie credits:
I appreciate the correction. It's been a couple of years since I last bought a desktop Mac, and I may have to try out that chording option.
I don't appreciate your tone, though. Why is it that almost any Apple discussion on Slashdot has to turn into an endless stream of curses and insults? I made a mistake, I didn't insult you personally.
Back on topic, I still think this is an issue of consistency in Apple's mind, but I wish they would switch to allowing individual labels to chose to use DRM or give it a pass. (My understanding is that Apple exclusively deals with labels, not artists directly, but please don't swear at me if I'm wrong.) That would end the debate about Apple's intensions, and it would take political heat off of Apple and put it more squarely on the major labels.
And after twenty-some years, Apple is still selling computers with single-button mice. Even its high-end professional laptops. Face it; for better or worse, when Apple decides some part of the 'user experience' needs to be consistent, they become fanatical about consistency. I would argue for worse in many cases, but I do admire their resolve.
I'm using some of those expensive camera rechargable AAs - probably NiMH, I forget. They outlasted the camera I bought them for, so I'm glad to have a use for them.
Anyway, I swapped them once or twice so far when the console started to report them being in the red, i.e. low on power. It seemed a little too quick to me, though, so at the moment I'm running a pair of them until they stop working. They have been running at 'low power' for quite a while now, probably longer than they were above low power. Determining battery charge must be a black art, and it looks to me as if Nintendo is being conservative in their power estimates.
I leave plugins disabled on Safari except when I come across a page with some flash feature I want to see, which is pretty rare. On my PC at work I uninstalled flash entirely because I couldn't find a way to enable it selectively. There must be a Firefox plugin, but I haven't been bothered enough to look.
Oh, and I have doubleclick.net and a couple other sites in my hosts file at 127.0.0.1, from way back.
Most non-flash ads just don't bother me that much.
Red Had and SUSE are working on the *same OS* as the open source community, so of course it is easier to work together more closely. There is no technical reason why they can't be working from the same CVS archive.
Safari uses khtml code, but there are still large differences between WebKit and khtml. So yes they should work together as much as they can and perhaps provide smaller patches with more documentation, but the code bases are never going to be fully compatible.
I thought there was some legal decision in the '60s or '70s where a judge accepted an argument from one of the lawyers that software licenses were valid because the act of executing a program involved copying the software from the supplied disk (or other media) into the CPU for execution. Without this decision, you would still have copyright on software you write, but licenses would not apply in the same way they don't apply to books. I.e. once you buy a book, you can't copy it, but you can otherwise do what you want with that physical copy.
Does anyone know anything about this court case? I can't seem to pull it up in a quick round on Google...
You are right, this movie should probably not be taken at face value. But at the very least Moore probably wasn't "lying and slandering the President" about the approval of bin Laden flights.
The film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year, which means it would have been sometime between May 12 and 23, 2004. The film must have been completed some time before that. The article you link to (your "FBI and Clarke Respond" link) was first published May 26. I found a link for the original article here:
http://www.hillnews.com/news/052604/clarke.aspx
If you read that, you will see that there have been a lot of people trying to find out who authorized the bin Laden flights, and Clarke finally took credit, almost certainly after the movie's Cannes debut. It seems unlikely Moore just didn't ask:
Another Democrat who attended the meeting confirmed Boxer's account and reported that Hamilton said: "We don't know who authorized it. We've asked that question 50 times."
Moore certainly has a history of being selective with his information, but he can't be blamed for this one. He can probably be credited with forcing Clarke to speak out on the issue.
Of course the issue then becomes one of whether Clarke is just taking a fall or not. The timing is certainly suspicious.
It's doing poorly for a movie that opened on Wednesday? It opened at two theatres. As is recorded in your first link. And how does that make $8Mil on Friday at 868 theatres a poor result?
Honestly, I'm curious what the logic is to the parent post. From the two links provided, we can see Fahrenheit did $9447 per theatre on Friday (the first day of wide distribution) where The Return of the King pulled in $9303 per theatre when it opened. I'm sure other films have done better, but Fahrenheit didn't exactly crater.
Slashdot Mirror
I fully admit to bashing Vista, even viciously, before I had even actually got a copy to live with for a while. I repent.
I fully admit to bashing Vista too, and I continue to do so. It was pushed out the door unfinished and with poor driver support (thanks to Microsoft changing video architecture too late in the dev cycle, not due to any 3rd party failings) and while the driver issues have been resolved I still find Vista feels unfinished. But leaving Windows 7 off the good OS list is just wrong. Windows 7 is a well designed and executed OS, and Microsoft deserves credit for it. And I say that as a dyed in the wool UNIX / Mac OS X fan and frequent Microsoft critic. (Did I mention how bad I think Vista is?)
I'm in the same camp. I have to manage version control with some less than sophisticated Windows-based web guys, and TortiseSVN works well for that purpose.
Personally, I come from a CVS on UNIX background so the smooth repository transition and similar commands and usage style were handy. All I needed out of a "better CVS" was the ability to version file name changes. If you aren't coming from CVS, I think SVN loses much of its charm.
I'd be all over Git if I thought distributed repositories would be helpful for my projects, and I'm thinking of tooling around a little with it on the side just to keep up on all this new fangled stuff you kids are using these days.
Rails, not so much. It looks nice, but it tickles my "get off my lawn" reflex.
Even in the link you post, the notion that octothorpe is a spoof is disputed. I've linked in a previous discussion to a different source who suggests that it is a cartographical term, although they don't back it up other than to say they've seen maps using the octothorpe symbol.
Have you ever stared at a word until you start to doubt that you've spelled it right? I'm starting to get a similar feeling about the octothorpe now. I mean, does it even exist on my keyboard?
Umm... he is citing a source, even if only indirectly. I found it faster to google "oecd country population dispersion" and I got this PDF as my first result. Figure 1.8 on page 31 shows Canada, the US and Japan closely clustered for population dispersion & broadband penetration, with Canada both most dispersed and most... penetrated.
I still wonder how meaningful the chosen metric is. You're talking percentage of land mass vs. percentage of population, which is an odd way to compare Japan and Canada. I mean, the dispersion rate may be similar, but the difference in distances involved is still huge. Not that this weakens the GP's point.
http://www.steelcase.com/na/uno_products.aspx?f=12279
This looks like an odd choice, but we got a bunch of these (the short-back version) for our boardroom:
Steelcase Uno
We can't keep them in the boardroom, because everyone keeps stealing them for their own desks. They're much more space efficient than other office chairs, and they pivot oddly when you lean back on them. I guess the pivot point is roughly in the middle of the arm rest.
As for kneeling chairs and exercise balls, we've had a bunch of them in the office and some people swear by them - for about a week. Nobody is still using them, except for a rare change of pace.
I don't know about the Herman Miller chairs, they must be good from what people are saying. We have had a few expensive 'ergonomic' chairs in the office, and people view them as some sort of punishment.
I have no idea where people come up with this junk. All of this discussion of theory vs. law vs. fact is depressing on a supposed 'geek' web site.
Here's the best paper I've seen on this collection of words in science: Evolution as Fact, Theory, and Path
I came across it at the ever more sane Ars Technica.
Seems stupid to me, and I still wouldn't worry about it myself, but I guess I should be more careful in my recommendations of what job titles people should use.
I am Canadian, and I am an engineer. As in, I have an engineering degree from a Canadian university, but no 'Professional Engineering' credentials; like most engineering graduates, I didn't bother. If you aren't building bridges or something, you don't need them. By not becoming a P.Eng, I avoid paying annual association dues, and I don't have to sign passport applications for half the people I know. That is the sum of all differences between me with a P.Eng. and me without.
Getting to the point, there is *nothing* wrong with calling yourself an engineer in Canada. OK, maybe you should be ready to clarify that you aren't a P.Eng. in the odd circumstance that someone would ask. Nobody has ever asked me in all the untold years since I graduated. Software engineer, application engineer, network engineer, whatever. Maybe big companies distinguish somehow - I've always worked in smaller shops. But the only time I've ever heard any serious outcry is when some union of garbage men announced that they wanted to call themselves 'sanitary engineers'.
So I would recommend calling yourself whatever you feel is most descriptive of your job skills, and if you do run afoul of some P.Eng. pedant, consider yourself lucky to not work for them.
And as for the few other posters saying that immigrants have a hard time finding work in Canada, I can only say two things. Firstly, jobs are not always easy to come by here, even for Canadians. Networks matter, though, which works against immigrants. Can that be so different in other countries?
And secondly, language skills are often a major hiring impediment. I've personally seen decent CVs (yes, we do know what that word means up among the snow drifts and sled dogs) from people who couldn't make it through the most basic of phone interviews. English must be much easier to read and write than to speak, given my current company's experience. We try to hire based on skill, but around me I see four people born in Canada, one visa holder from each of England, Ireland and the US, and one naturalized Canadian of Hong Kong Chinese origin. Not exactly Vancouver in a box, but not quite the sort of discrimination Canadians seem to stand accused of at a few points in this thread.
Otherwise, why imprison kidnappers but not doctors who treated patients who died?
You know, the preview button gives you a chance to think about the content of your post, not just its formatting.
Don't know about any of this HIPPA stuff, but Bellovin mentions snipping the TX line on a network cable (presumably ethernet) in his 1992 paper about attacks on att.com entitled, "There Be Dragons." You can find a PDF off of this page: http://www.deter.com/unix/. Top of page 6. Presumably ethernet would get you a little more bandwidth than serial.
I also remember reading about some NSA (or similar) machine that someone had to feed data to. It did reply when data was sent, but the only reply it ever gave was some sort of OK packet. Maybe someone else has more details.
If I had to do some legally mandated logging, I would definitely use something certified for the job. But for just hacking around, there are some interesting ideas out there.
At the risk of repeating myself: I'm convinced the biggest difference between Tron and Star Wars is John Williams. Go ahead, hum the Tron theme. I'll wait while you try to remember it...
Music isn't the only difference, I'll grant. But I believe it is the biggest.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
But of course Taco isn't stupid, and even the summary is obviously trolling... thank god Ars hasn't gone off the deep end yet.
Speaking of Tron and ET... John Williams was the composer for ET, Star Wars, Jaws, Indiana Jones, and just about every other movie I can remember the theme song to. I've often wondered how things would have turned out if he composed the theme for Tron and someone else did Star Wars. Seriously, check out his movie credits:
John Williams
Nuts to storytelling. Would it have been so easy to accept that terrible Star Wars dialog without the awesome theme music to carry things along?
I appreciate the correction. It's been a couple of years since I last bought a desktop Mac, and I may have to try out that chording option.
I don't appreciate your tone, though. Why is it that almost any Apple discussion on Slashdot has to turn into an endless stream of curses and insults? I made a mistake, I didn't insult you personally.
Back on topic, I still think this is an issue of consistency in Apple's mind, but I wish they would switch to allowing individual labels to chose to use DRM or give it a pass. (My understanding is that Apple exclusively deals with labels, not artists directly, but please don't swear at me if I'm wrong.) That would end the debate about Apple's intensions, and it would take political heat off of Apple and put it more squarely on the major labels.
And after twenty-some years, Apple is still selling computers with single-button mice. Even its high-end professional laptops. Face it; for better or worse, when Apple decides some part of the 'user experience' needs to be consistent, they become fanatical about consistency. I would argue for worse in many cases, but I do admire their resolve.
I'm using some of those expensive camera rechargable AAs - probably NiMH, I forget. They outlasted the camera I bought them for, so I'm glad to have a use for them.
Anyway, I swapped them once or twice so far when the console started to report them being in the red, i.e. low on power. It seemed a little too quick to me, though, so at the moment I'm running a pair of them until they stop working. They have been running at 'low power' for quite a while now, probably longer than they were above low power. Determining battery charge must be a black art, and it looks to me as if Nintendo is being conservative in their power estimates.
Fellow Canuckleheads, did you have to install anything?
Yeah, I had to install this fancy program called a 'web browser'.
Seriously, I did mine using Safari on OS X, and I surf with plugins disabled. It could still have used Java, but that's it.
I leave plugins disabled on Safari except when I come across a page with some flash feature I want to see, which is pretty rare. On my PC at work I uninstalled flash entirely because I couldn't find a way to enable it selectively. There must be a Firefox plugin, but I haven't been bothered enough to look.
Oh, and I have doubleclick.net and a couple other sites in my hosts file at 127.0.0.1, from way back.
Most non-flash ads just don't bother me that much.
I love the quote at the bottom of the page right now. I wonder if it is intentional:
Red Had and SUSE are working on the *same OS* as the open source community, so of course it is easier to work together more closely. There is no technical reason why they can't be working from the same CVS archive.
Safari uses khtml code, but there are still large differences between WebKit and khtml. So yes they should work together as much as they can and perhaps provide smaller patches with more documentation, but the code bases are never going to be fully compatible.
Have a look at this one too:
Sxip (pronounced "skip")
They are still working on the tech, but it looks pretty cool to me.
I thought there was some legal decision in the '60s or '70s where a judge accepted an argument from one of the lawyers that software licenses were valid because the act of executing a program involved copying the software from the supplied disk (or other media) into the CPU for execution. Without this decision, you would still have copyright on software you write, but licenses would not apply in the same way they don't apply to books. I.e. once you buy a book, you can't copy it, but you can otherwise do what you want with that physical copy.
Does anyone know anything about this court case? I can't seem to pull it up in a quick round on Google...
You are right, this movie should probably not be taken at face value. But at the very least Moore probably wasn't "lying and slandering the President" about the approval of bin Laden flights.
The film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year, which means it would have been sometime between May 12 and 23, 2004. The film must have been completed some time before that. The article you link to (your "FBI and Clarke Respond" link) was first published May 26. I found a link for the original article here:
http://www.hillnews.com/news/052604/clarke.aspx
If you read that, you will see that there have been a lot of people trying to find out who authorized the bin Laden flights, and Clarke finally took credit, almost certainly after the movie's Cannes debut. It seems unlikely Moore just didn't ask:
Another Democrat who attended the meeting confirmed Boxer's account and reported that Hamilton said: "We don't know who authorized it. We've asked that question 50 times."
Moore certainly has a history of being selective with his information, but he can't be blamed for this one. He can probably be credited with forcing Clarke to speak out on the issue.
Of course the issue then becomes one of whether Clarke is just taking a fall or not. The timing is certainly suspicious.
It's doing poorly for a movie that opened on Wednesday? It opened at two theatres. As is recorded in your first link. And how does that make $8Mil on Friday at 868 theatres a poor result?
Honestly, I'm curious what the logic is to the parent post. From the two links provided, we can see Fahrenheit did $9447 per theatre on Friday (the first day of wide distribution) where The Return of the King pulled in $9303 per theatre when it opened. I'm sure other films have done better, but Fahrenheit didn't exactly crater.