I had this same exact thing happen. Let me tell you, you dont even want to be the IT manager on a *temporary* basis, because once youre there, they are going to take their *sweeeet* time in finding your replacement. If they do find a replacement, that person will most likely be clueless and youll find your own job becoming 10 times more difficult due to his/her incompetence. For them to fire you seems like it is likely a bluff, also. Why would they fire someone who is the best qualified for the job they are trying to fill? The only way out of this, and i think its better sooner rather than later, is just get into the escape pod, Luke.
whats the matter with you people?
on
Perl and .NET
·
· Score: 1
Are perl programmers so fiercely anti-java that they will rally around and support A MICROSOFT AGENDA in order to make it go away? This is a dangerous set of priorities for one to have. Theres lots of other ways to send procedure calls via XML, including the competing, Sun-supported ebxml standard. And no reason why there cant be perl modules for that also. If youd prefer have everything be controlled by Microsoft and be rebooting Windows servers all day, rather than having to write some occasional Java code along with your Perl, then you're sick in the head.
he makes this point that GUI's dumb down the user by removing the usage of language. he says that people should want to operate their computers through language, not infantile pictures. Im not sure how he can *not* see that users would *definitely* prefer to use language over pictures, except that that language must be their own native speaking tongue.
Popular culture from the 1950's right through 2001: A Space Odyssey and ST:TNG portray the most powerful computers as being operated strictly through human-spoken English dialogue. It is obvious to everyone that human-spoken languages are the most intuitive interfaces of all. However, since the native lanaguages of operating computers are things like Bash, DOS, C, whatever, end-users feel like learning these other languages just as much as they would feel like learning Japanese in order to operate their computers. Computer enthusiasts like us and Moglen do not see command-line systems as anywhere nearly as complex as learning Japanese, but I bet to the majority of end-users it appears as a similar amount of effort.
So if we presented Moglen with a computer that had only an interface in Japanese, he wouldnt have any issue with that, right?
I was replying to the original post. "i agree" meant "i agree with AKAImBatman", the original "anonymous coward" was the dumdum. Oh well i suppose this makes me a dumdum too.
and in fact the opposite is true in every point you made. Please tell us what company you are an overpaid dumdum manager in so we can all blacklist it from ever interviewing there. And what are you doing on slashdot anyway, shouldnt you be reading Business 2.0 and looking up all the big words?
anyone who has dealt with IBM knows they have defined the term "the right hand knows not what the left is doing". They are a huge, sprawling, mammoth bureaucratic nightmare where super smart techs are in some corners and people who dont know what HTML is are in others. Between the IBM things we have read about them "getting" open source and this thinkpad support page are a thousand levels of indirection separating them.
Very convinced that the people who do know enough about genetics to know what is safe and what is not, really don't know enough.
Can we really trust that corporations will only proceed with what they know "is safe", and not perhaps something that "is not" (while downplaying or concealing known risks), in the name of profits? Oh, we can? Like the tobacco industry?
Perhaps we should feel lucky that RJ Reynolds never genetically engineered a tobacco plant that was 10000 times more addictive than regular plants. If strong restrictions arent placed on GMO immediately, surely similar forms of abuse in food products can and will happen, i.e. products that are more saleable while known risks are concealed from the public.
the basic.conf file is usually a series of key/value pairs. Meaning, option "a" is set to "foo", option "b" is set to "bar", etc. When an app needs to have configuration that is more complicated than this, say option "a" is a list of items, or option "a" is a list of items each of which having sub-options "b", "c", and "d", all the apps start improvising their own methods.
File formats that have confounded me include the.procmailrc format (which attempts to use "english"-type expressions), the sudoers file (which is sort of BNF-ish) format, and forget about sendmail.cf (i have no idea about that one). With XML, there would be no more special pseudo-languages and sub-syntaxes to learn. To represent named value trees of arbitrary depth or lists is inherent in the XML format, and all of these formats could be converted into simply a particular tag relationship. When given a DTD, can be immediately displayed in any number of ways by tons of different tools and understood by all with only minimal man page overhead.
The files would become much bigger and spread out, which I can certainly see goes against the grain of a lot of UNIX culture, i.e. the culture of representthemostcomplexamountoflogicinthemosttextu allyshortstringpossible, but personally ive never found that particular quirk of the culture to be so productive.
Ive worked at two companies that moved to Exchange. In both cases they never could stop using the Unix-based services altogether. Keep running your listservs and server-intensive processes on unix, and use Exchange for all the individual end users in the company, so you can still have the neato ("bells and whistles" yes, but actually they are extremely handy if everyone knows how to use them) features it provides, like its remote-access model (ala IMAP), meeting requests, web access, contacts/smart address books, etc. Theres lots of different ways you can have one email system proxying to the other (or in both directions if needed). Tell the MS pinheads at your company that youve moved everything to Exchange, i guarantee you they will *never* know the difference since they obviously dont have a concept of the more sophisticated things you are doing anyway.
After reading here how much better mozilla is these days I decided to try it yet again (my previous experiences with it have all been negative, as far as it being a usable product and not just "lots of 'cool' shit"), and i got these identical results on RH6.2. Wont even run. Tried two different installers. Tried every binary, all the shell scripts, run as root, etc., depending on what i do, i either get core dump, segmentation fault, or a bunch of debug messages and it just returns to the prompt. NS6.0 on the other hand ran perfectly well immediately, java applets and all, and i ran it for several hours with no crashes. I even could switch the theme to the classic netscape theme and not that awful "Love Boat" theme they have now. So they must have changed *something*.
In the next 6 months my bets would be with AOL/Netscape as far as a usable product since they will be mostly concerned with end-user satisfaction (i.e., it works, reads all the crappy geocities pages without crashing, reads all the stupid DHTML garbage without showing a blank screen, etc) rather than putting an unstable and complicated version of every kitchen sink the W3 comes up with in it. And who cares about how either of these run on Windows anyway, use IE on windows until AOL gets everyone to use Linux-based appliances.
According to this article, 25% of citizens 18-24 cannot name both major party presidential candidates...
I never believe these kinds of numbers. This is 25% of the people 18-24 who are silly enough to actually bother and waste 20 minutes with these survey people that yank you off the street or call you.
this is the same as saying "R Rated Movies Banned in the US" , since access to an R-rated movie is prohibited to those 17 and under unless accompanied by an adult.
another typical slashdot headline that continues the trend of slashdot being emotional and inflammatory at the expense of accuracy, and not to be taken seriously by the outside community.
seriously, Nader (Nader being the alternative candidate any sane person would favor, though im sure Harry Browne is a nice guy...erm...) has a lot of the right ideas, but he will never win in this country. It sucks, but theres too much at stake right now, with DMCA, several supreme court positions coming up, we cant afford to ahve a psycho like Bush in there. Of course this kind of statement would be made in every election and the "democrats" keep moving farther and farther right, thereby reframing national debate...I dont see any solution to this except to wait it out, wait for the national state-of-mind to swing back again, its all just a pendulum kind of motion anyway.
if someone like Nader were president, he also would have very decreased power due to his unwillingness to bend to pressure from Congress. The country would then get fed up and elect an arch-conservative in retailiation at the next elections. This is my take on why Carter lost to Reagan, and the US citizenry then severly punished Mondale and Dukakis as well for them daring to be limp wristed tree huggers, leading us into 12 years of dark ages, including creating a dangerously conservative supreme court. Another situation like this would be disastrous, which is why i think the sour taste of the Clinton-esque "triangulation" is unfortunately necessary.
members of congress approve new legislation for two reasons:
1. The legislation is very favorable to the monetary/political interests of very large businesses and/or powerful lobbying groups
2. The legislation will correct an issue over which there is a large public outrage, the details of which must have been supplied to the public via the mainstream media.
If these two criterion are not satisfied, a member of congress will not approve the bill; for him/her, there is simply nothing to gain and everything to risk by doing so.
In the case of patents, every kind of patent, even these ridculous ones, benefit monied interests greatly; amazon is doing great, apple is paying them, and lawyers galore for both amazon and B&N are doing gangbusters. Whats more, the chances of any new competition from below coming onto the scene is greatly reduced since smaller companies and individuals are immobilized by every possible tool already being someone's IP, which can then be denied to them, as they are potential competitors.
As far as the public, nobody really knows or cares about this issue. Most people I talk to are completely unaware, and when I explain it to them (including my fellow technology coworkers), they say, "whats wrong with Amazon patenting something they invented? You're getting upset over nothing". Theres certainly almost no media coverage of the issue outside of trade publications, and the trade publications are mostly catering to large, monied interests anyway.
Sounds like he wants to keep the details of the movie extrmely secret to prevent artistic/creative dilution of the work. I think its very typical for an artist to keep his work very concealed until its ready to be presented for this reason. Revealing the work-in-progress just takes away from the impact of the final work.
Sony can already make a site and give all their music away for free on it, or any site that is authorized by Sony for such an operation. They dont need a law. They *are* using the existing law to crush their competition, though, so yeah that is sort of slimy, its like stealing your girlfriend and punching you in the stomach too.
"...provided that the transmission is received
only by a recipient who has provided to the transmitting organization proof that the recipient lawfully possesses
a phonorecord of such sound recording..."
Proof? Like a digital signature? Lets use the CueCat encryption for this!
Here is the slight flaw in your otherwise seemingly snappy (*cough*karma-whore*CHOKE*) metaphor: if sales tax is really "robbery", then the solution to the problem is to repeal it altogether, which would be for everyone, internet/non-internet, big and small. So, the metaphoric equivalent of "make sure everyone gets robbed", which really means "distribute the policy equitably", while not a "solution", is an interim step to insure that the "immoral" policy at least is not unfairly benefitting large corporations over smaller establishments.
what if youre poor but you pay your own way? then it becomes, people get taxed at the end of the year based on how much utilization of government services. the government then becomes a business and since its customers are poor, it goes out of business. youll have to pay to have your local streets paved next year and everytime you call 911.
Slashdot Mirror
I had this same exact thing happen. Let me tell you, you dont even want to be the IT manager on a *temporary* basis, because once youre there, they are going to take their *sweeeet* time in finding your replacement. If they do find a replacement, that person will most likely be clueless and youll find your own job becoming 10 times more difficult due to his/her incompetence. For them to fire you seems like it is likely a bluff, also. Why would they fire someone who is the best qualified for the job they are trying to fill? The only way out of this, and i think its better sooner rather than later, is just get into the escape pod, Luke.
Are perl programmers so fiercely anti-java that they will rally around and support A MICROSOFT AGENDA in order to make it go away? This is a dangerous set of priorities for one to have. Theres lots of other ways to send procedure calls via XML, including the competing, Sun-supported ebxml standard. And no reason why there cant be perl modules for that also. If youd prefer have everything be controlled by Microsoft and be rebooting Windows servers all day, rather than having to write some occasional Java code along with your Perl, then you're sick in the head.
he makes this point that GUI's dumb down the user by removing the usage of language. he says that people should want to operate their computers through language, not infantile pictures. Im not sure how he can *not* see that users would *definitely* prefer to use language over pictures, except that that language must be their own native speaking tongue.
Popular culture from the 1950's right through 2001: A Space Odyssey and ST:TNG portray the most powerful computers as being operated strictly through human-spoken English dialogue. It is obvious to everyone that human-spoken languages are the most intuitive interfaces of all. However, since the native lanaguages of operating computers are things like Bash, DOS, C, whatever, end-users feel like learning these other languages just as much as they would feel like learning Japanese in order to operate their computers. Computer enthusiasts like us and Moglen do not see command-line systems as anywhere nearly as complex as learning Japanese, but I bet to the majority of end-users it appears as a similar amount of effort.
So if we presented Moglen with a computer that had only an interface in Japanese, he wouldnt have any issue with that, right?
I was replying to the original post. "i agree" meant "i agree with AKAImBatman", the original "anonymous coward" was the dumdum. Oh well i suppose this makes me a dumdum too.
and in fact the opposite is true in every point you made. Please tell us what company you are an overpaid dumdum manager in so we can all blacklist it from ever interviewing there. And what are you doing on slashdot anyway, shouldnt you be reading Business 2.0 and looking up all the big words?
http://www.sdtimes.com/news/015/story1.htm
http://www.essentialaction.org/shell/era/era.html
Yay linux and all, but lets be careful how much we cheer these guys on....
anyone who has dealt with IBM knows they have defined the term "the right hand knows not what the left is doing". They are a huge, sprawling, mammoth bureaucratic nightmare where super smart techs are in some corners and people who dont know what HTML is are in others. Between the IBM things we have read about them "getting" open source and this thinkpad support page are a thousand levels of indirection separating them.
Can we really trust that corporations will only proceed with what they know "is safe", and not perhaps something that "is not" (while downplaying or concealing known risks), in the name of profits? Oh, we can? Like the tobacco industry?
Perhaps we should feel lucky that RJ Reynolds never genetically engineered a tobacco plant that was 10000 times more addictive than regular plants. If strong restrictions arent placed on GMO immediately, surely similar forms of abuse in food products can and will happen, i.e. products that are more saleable while known risks are concealed from the public.
procmailrc is confusing, but i meant the .fetchmailrc format as the one that tries to look like english...
the basic .conf file is usually a series of key/value pairs. Meaning, option "a" is set to "foo", option "b" is set to "bar", etc. When an app needs to have configuration that is more complicated than this, say option "a" is a list of items, or option "a" is a list of items each of which having sub-options "b", "c", and "d", all the apps start improvising their own methods.
File formats that have confounded me include the .procmailrc format (which attempts to use "english"-type expressions), the sudoers file (which is sort of BNF-ish) format, and forget about sendmail.cf (i have no idea about that one). With XML, there would be no more special pseudo-languages and sub-syntaxes to learn. To represent named value trees of arbitrary depth or lists is inherent in the XML format, and all of these formats could be converted into simply a particular tag relationship. When given a DTD, can be immediately displayed in any number of ways by tons of different tools and understood by all with only minimal man page overhead.
The files would become much bigger and spread out, which I can certainly see goes against the grain of a lot of UNIX culture, i.e. the culture of representthemostcomplexamountoflogicinthemosttextu allyshortstringpossible, but personally ive never found that particular quirk of the culture to be so productive.
Ive worked at two companies that moved to Exchange. In both cases they never could stop using the Unix-based services altogether. Keep running your listservs and server-intensive processes on unix, and use Exchange for all the individual end users in the company, so you can still have the neato ("bells and whistles" yes, but actually they are extremely handy if everyone knows how to use them) features it provides, like its remote-access model (ala IMAP), meeting requests, web access, contacts/smart address books, etc. Theres lots of different ways you can have one email system proxying to the other (or in both directions if needed). Tell the MS pinheads at your company that youve moved everything to Exchange, i guarantee you they will *never* know the difference since they obviously dont have a concept of the more sophisticated things you are doing anyway.
After reading here how much better mozilla is these days I decided to try it yet again (my previous experiences with it have all been negative, as far as it being a usable product and not just "lots of 'cool' shit"), and i got these identical results on RH6.2. Wont even run. Tried two different installers. Tried every binary, all the shell scripts, run as root, etc., depending on what i do, i either get core dump, segmentation fault, or a bunch of debug messages and it just returns to the prompt. NS6.0 on the other hand ran perfectly well immediately, java applets and all, and i ran it for several hours with no crashes. I even could switch the theme to the classic netscape theme and not that awful "Love Boat" theme they have now. So they must have changed *something*.
In the next 6 months my bets would be with AOL/Netscape as far as a usable product since they will be mostly concerned with end-user satisfaction (i.e., it works, reads all the crappy geocities pages without crashing, reads all the stupid DHTML garbage without showing a blank screen, etc) rather than putting an unstable and complicated version of every kitchen sink the W3 comes up with in it. And who cares about how either of these run on Windows anyway, use IE on windows until AOL gets everyone to use Linux-based appliances.
open source can still be proprietary software. After all the lecturing we get from Richard Stallman we still mix them up??
this is the same as saying "R Rated Movies Banned in the US" , since access to an R-rated movie is prohibited to those 17 and under unless accompanied by an adult.
another typical slashdot headline that continues the trend of slashdot being emotional and inflammatory at the expense of accuracy, and not to be taken seriously by the outside community.
seriously, Nader (Nader being the alternative candidate any sane person would favor, though im sure Harry Browne is a nice guy...erm...) has a lot of the right ideas, but he will never win in this country. It sucks, but theres too much at stake right now, with DMCA, several supreme court positions coming up, we cant afford to ahve a psycho like Bush in there. Of course this kind of statement would be made in every election and the "democrats" keep moving farther and farther right, thereby reframing national debate...I dont see any solution to this except to wait it out, wait for the national state-of-mind to swing back again, its all just a pendulum kind of motion anyway.
if someone like Nader were president, he also would have very decreased power due to his unwillingness to bend to pressure from Congress. The country would then get fed up and elect an arch-conservative in retailiation at the next elections. This is my take on why Carter lost to Reagan, and the US citizenry then severly punished Mondale and Dukakis as well for them daring to be limp wristed tree huggers, leading us into 12 years of dark ages, including creating a dangerously conservative supreme court. Another situation like this would be disastrous, which is why i think the sour taste of the Clinton-esque "triangulation" is unfortunately necessary.
you troll you
members of congress approve new legislation for two reasons:
1. The legislation is very favorable to the monetary/political interests of very large businesses and/or powerful lobbying groups2. The legislation will correct an issue over which there is a large public outrage, the details of which must have been supplied to the public via the mainstream media.
If these two criterion are not satisfied, a member of congress will not approve the bill; for him/her, there is simply nothing to gain and everything to risk by doing so.
In the case of patents, every kind of patent, even these ridculous ones, benefit monied interests greatly; amazon is doing great, apple is paying them, and lawyers galore for both amazon and B&N are doing gangbusters. Whats more, the chances of any new competition from below coming onto the scene is greatly reduced since smaller companies and individuals are immobilized by every possible tool already being someone's IP, which can then be denied to them, as they are potential competitors.
As far as the public, nobody really knows or cares about this issue. Most people I talk to are completely unaware, and when I explain it to them (including my fellow technology coworkers), they say, "whats wrong with Amazon patenting something they invented? You're getting upset over nothing". Theres certainly almost no media coverage of the issue outside of trade publications, and the trade publications are mostly catering to large, monied interests anyway.
Sounds like he wants to keep the details of the movie extrmely secret to prevent artistic/creative dilution of the work. I think its very typical for an artist to keep his work very concealed until its ready to be presented for this reason. Revealing the work-in-progress just takes away from the impact of the final work.
noone has mentioned it yet so its
here. Loads up in under half a second.
Sony can already make a site and give all their music away for free on it, or any site that is authorized by Sony for such an operation. They dont need a law. They *are* using the existing law to crush their competition, though, so yeah that is sort of slimy, its like stealing your girlfriend and punching you in the stomach too.
"...provided that the transmission is received only by a recipient who has provided to the transmitting organization proof that the recipient lawfully possesses a phonorecord of such sound recording..."
Proof? Like a digital signature? Lets use the CueCat encryption for this!
Here is the slight flaw in your otherwise seemingly snappy (*cough*karma-whore*CHOKE*) metaphor: if sales tax is really "robbery", then the solution to the problem is to repeal it altogether, which would be for everyone, internet/non-internet, big and small. So, the metaphoric equivalent of "make sure everyone gets robbed", which really means "distribute the policy equitably", while not a "solution", is an interim step to insure that the "immoral" policy at least is not unfairly benefitting large corporations over smaller establishments.
what if youre poor but you pay your own way? then it becomes, people get taxed at the end of the year based on how much utilization of government services. the government then becomes a business and since its customers are poor, it goes out of business. youll have to pay to have your local streets paved next year and everytime you call 911.