Prof too lazy to write his own tests (and don't give me any shit about how this is how they all do it; the prof is responsible for the test content, including the security of it, period)? Check.
Prof too morally lazy and incompetent to stand up to cheaters by identifying them and getting them kicked out? Check
Prof too stupid to realize that relying on the security of a "test bank" (or anything like it) is foolhardy beyond belief? Check.
Prof too ethically incompetent to realize that punishing the ones who did right along with the guilty is an act more despicable than the original cheating? Check.
Prof too full of himself to realize that his emotional reaction is entirely innapropriate? Check.
Prof too incomeptent to realize that changing the rules midstream is an unforgivable breaking of a contract, something no one in a business school should countenance when there are already established procedures for dealing with cheaters? Check.
I'm not even going to try to list all the WTF moments in that vid. If somebody wants to go to the trouble, there are at least a half-dozen quotes that are absolute howlers.
What's really going on here? Off the top of my head, I can come up with two theories. Maybe the prof was pressured not to turn them all over for discipline because the uni higher-ups didn't want all the hassles and potential litigation. Or maybe he's bluffing and doesn't really have a perfect idea of who did and didn't cheat.
Either way, if I was in his class, didn't cheat, and was forced to come back to do the re-test, the physical violence I'd direct toward this idiot would track with whatever I had to give up. If he made me miss the birth of my son or the funeral of my mother, I'd beat the bastard to death. If he made me miss a date with some chick I didn't really care about, perhaps a stern email would suffice.
This situation is screwed up no matter how you look at it. I hope a whole bunch of students are demanding their money back from that institution. And I hope this idiot either decides to start educating, i.e. working directly with students, writing their tests, etc., or, better yet, gets the hell out of the business.
One "inB4" for the people who will be anxious to point out that I obviously went to university far too long ago to understand the modern, high-volume business of churning out sheepskins for job-seekers - You're absolutely right. My ignorance, however, still doesn't excuse the idiocy of this prof's actions.
I know someone who did similar work in the early/mid 1990s. He wasn't as good as the guy in the article purports to be; he seemed to mostly wind up doing glorified book reports for first-year English coeds.
He took his payment in phone sex, earning as much as a half-dozen sessions for one fairly short paper.
If about 15 years ago you entered a certain small, prestigious, east coast university where your first English comp paper was to be inspired by "Everything That Rises Must Converge" and you got some old guy off over the phone in exchange for the paper, then thanks for the memories and thanks for passing my email address around to your friends.:-)
You bring up good points. The inability to fire dead weight really bugs me, too. However, in practical terms it's necessary.
We've seen what happens when government entities can fire people at will. A spoils system comes into being and the turnover defeats the ability of the government to steadily provide services. Look, for example, at the way lots of big-city machines worked 100 years ago. As soon as one guy got elected, he fired everybody that supported the other guy and handed out those jobs as rewards to the people who put him in power. The steady delivery of services, something that governments must provide above all else, is compromised. The same thing happens at every level of government if firing is too easy.
So we have the current system. Yes, dead weight gets to hang around. But it's more important that the bureaucracy continue to function and provide services (even if inefficiently) than to take a chance on the types of mis-steps that interrupt government services. When private industry concerns decide to run lean and efficient, they weigh risks and rewards. If they mis-judge, they go out of business. The formula for government services is weighted differently. When governments misjudge and can't provide vital services, they don't go out of business; some of their customers die.
So government is different. There's a much higher but absolutely necessary tolerance for inefficiency in the name of uninterrupted delivery. So we make firing hard. Nobody really likes it but, then again, nobody has come up with anything better where vital services are involved.
Now, the argument that government these days does lots of things that aren't vital is a completely different kettle of fish and you'll get not much static from me on that one.
As for the opposition of unions to merit pay, I'm with you in concept. In practice, I've seen "pay banding" and other salary schemes actually implemented and they tend to be a mess. I doubt a union would object too strongly if someone in management proposed a merit pay system that actually made sense instead of being just a buzzword-compliant, poorly disguised attempt to cut base pay and then set an impossible standard for getting any sort of bonus/merit/whatever compensation. I've never seen such a proposal.
In the U.S., to actually have all that stuff within a framework of written rules and procedures that are actually adhered to by all in your workplace, you must have some sort of contract. So I expect a few people will poke their heads in here and say that they have all that stuff because it's all in the contract they negotiated before they took their job. Bully for them. For most middle-and-below-class workers, negotiating a contract is something they don't get to do. If they don't like the deal, they can get out.
No, the only really large groups of secretaries, clerks, IT wonks, odd-job specialists and other mid-to-low end salary earners who get all those things in the U.S. are the folks who belong to unions or work in shops where unions stuck up for them sometime in the past.
Cue the irrational slashdot union-haters. But I contend that for all their mis-steps (e.g. public unions at the *state* level who have gotten excessive retirement benefits, autoworker unions who pushed for too much in general, etc.), labor unions do more good than harm.
Good examples? The biggest federal govt worker unions have managed to get good pay and benefits for the folks at the bottom of the jobs ladder without too much disruption (mostly because they're ultimately neutered by being unable to strike) to the work processes involved.
Now cue the irrational slashdot government-worker-haters.
He wasn't shallow or a dick, really. But he was (past tense; he died about a decade ago) inflicted with a ridiculous sex drive. As long as he was getting laid regularly, he was a wonderful guy. His first wife knew what drove him and used that weakness (if that's the right word) to entrap him.
Wife #2 was cut from the same cloth as him and it was a match made in Heaven. They joined a "social club" that held frequent meetings where a few dozen to a hundred people wound up packed in a house sans clothing and sans inhibitions. The two of them spent the rest of their lives banging each other and anything that came within grabbing distance. They got along great and appeared to the casual observer to be simply two cute little old people enjoying the sunset of their lives together. That's exactly what they were, despite the fact that right up to the end of their lives they spent at least a couple of nights a week diving into various masses of writhing, sweaty humanity.
GP makes valid points but in this case, you're right. I knew the man and his 2nd wife for a long time. Both of them and the ex-wife were all together in a very successful business before he started an affair with the woman who would eventually become wife #2 and it all fell apart. I heard enough, consistently enough, over the years to understand that the first wife was definitely a classic gold-digger. She worked hard at the business but there was just nothing there emotionally.
I've often thought there was a book in there, somewhere: the sex-addicted tent revival preacher who builds a massive production company through inspired preaching and the hard work and overwhelming business acumen of his gold-digging shrew of a wife, risking it all to escape the emotional desert of his loveless marriage by bedding groupies in every town, then throwing it all away when he finds true love with his lead soprano.
I had a good friend who explained why he divorced his first wife thusly:
When we were dating, she'd do any thing, any time. BJs while driving, stand-ups in her parents back yard, you name it. Constantly. All the time, any time I wanted it, and more. We got married. Lovely ceremony. Driving away in the limo, I leaned over to give her a kiss and grab a little something. After all, we'd never sat in the back seat of any vehicle when she wasn't instantly wriggling out of her clothes or diving for my crotch. So I reached over and leaned over and you know what she did? She pushed me back and, in a tone of complete disgust, said "You'll mess up my hair." I didn't get a single bj after that. She barely gave me an opportunity to get her pregnant. I went elsewhere for what I needed and the marriage went straight to hell.
I'll never forget that story. There are some good lessons in there.
The problem with obscenity prosecutions, from the defendants view, isn't that they're trying to prove they didn't commit the particular crime at issue. The defense, rather, has to prove that no crime existed. At all. That's a much tougher bar to get over.
When you're charged with obscenity, the prosecution tells the court "Defendant sold obscene item X. Selling obscene things is illegal. Find him guilty."
The defense counters with "Yes, we sold item X. But item X is not obscene. Thus, no crime ever took place. Find him not guilty."
IOW, the big question before the court isn't whether the defendant is guilty of a crime but whether a crime even took place. Once item X is found obscene, conviction becomes a fait accompli.
So pornographers simply don't know and can't reasonably be expected to know at the time of production if their latest video masterpiece is going to be prosecuted or not. It used to be that you could make a fair guess, depending on whether or not certain acts were included in the film. Chldren having sex, fisting, graphic bestiality, and penetrative sex during bondage were pretty much a sure bet to get you prosecuted. Nowadays, though, fisting is pretty much mainstream and easily available. Penetrative sex during bondage is a bit further behind, being a tad more rare. Bestiality is in the same boat. All are easily available in markets outside the U.S. and online. Kid stuff, on the other hand, has gone in the other direction. Merely shoot a 12-year-old in a bikini and market the photos for purposes of sexual stimulation and you get slapped down by the authorities.
So obscenity is a very different animal from most types of crime. It involves speech issues, community standards, and basic disagreements over even the existence of criminality. It can be very difficult to parse out.
I said all that to say this: People who illustrate their non-nuanced stance on the value of free speech with examples of obscentiy are treading on thin ice. Obscenity is just...well...different enough that it's often apropos of nothing and not a useful example to illustrate anything.
I got modded down as redundant, apparently because I did a "MOD PARENT UP" post and the mod saw that the parent was at 5. However, at the time I posted, it was at 2.
Mods who can't appreciate posting times and what they reveal about relative posting order; or who don't understand how quickly things change on slashdot are unqualified to get mod points. I sure hope a meta-mod gets a crack at the parent to this post.
I can imagine being forced to pay attention to a video under court order. If you've ever had the unpleasant experience of taking one of those safe driving courses offered on DVD in lieu of classroom training in the aftermath of a traffic ticket, you know what I mean. One of the questions on the test will likely be something like "What was the breed of dog that appeared with the woman in the blue car?".
So, yeah, if a judge orders me to pay attention to a video, I will, however supremely irrititating it may be.
But forcing me to pay attention to an advertisement? That is NOT going to happen as long as I can click away.
4. Free software to do everything I want. 5. Usable documentation.
Ubuntu wins on 1, 2 and 4. To achieve those goals with Windows, I have to buy an encryption product (e.g. PGP's whole-disk product); install a firewall and virus protection; and be ready to open my wallet for lots of odd software packages. With Ubuntu or Fedora, I just check an option at installation to get the encryption, forget about the security problems, and click a simple download menu to get software.
Windows wins, hands-down, on 3. I've installed Ubuntu and Fedora a couple of dozen times (at least) in the last few months on 5 different computers and in every case getting decent Flash performance, getting AVI files to play, just getting the desktop to display at the native resolution of the panel is a royal pain, often requiring lots of arcane command-line work and the sacrifice of a couple of small animals.
What's broken it for me, though, is my latest build, a machine that highlights the fact that Linux miserably fails on 5. I got tired of slow video performance so I built a nice, fast machine. It doesn't have crazy gamer graphics or a dozen sticks of RAM, but it's got $1200 worth of quality parts, all of them using chipsets listed as supported by Linux and Ubuntu. I get random freezes that stop everything but the mouse pointer. This should be simple, right? Go to the Ubuntu forums and you'll find the mother of all irritating support threads, over a thousand (iirc) posts of people with the same problem with no answers, no decent input from developers, and not even any standard diagnostic flow. There's a bug reporting system that, for this bug, is deliberately set up to require more information than can be gleaned from any frozen machine. The same bug is present in Fedora.
This kind of really shitty attention to show-stopping bugs is enough to make me switch to Windows. I'm actually going to go to the store and buy a copy of Windows 7, download Avira and whatever is the currently best free firewall, and give my credit card number to PGP for another copy of their whole disk encryption. Then I'll have to toss out a few bucks here and there for an up-to-snuff NNTP client and a few other pieces of software.
I've been using and sticking up for Ubuntu for the better part of a decade, but if all this works like it should, I may go back to Windows. (I NEVER thought I'd say that.) I'm such a Linux fanboi that I may also just build yet another machine and try again.
But however this situation turns out, I'm really peeved with Linux right now and I'm not talking it up like I used to.
Where's the software suite that lets me set up P2P software, a giant list of usenet down- or uploads, or any task for later execution, then constantly searches for open wi-fi, connects, and does the task(s)? Surely someone has written something simple to set up that works automatically.
It sure would be nice if EvilMe (tm) had a VM on my laptop that was constantly doing all my EvilDeeds (tm) in the background.
According to the article, linked memo, and linked data center tier definition, the meanest little closet holding a box with blinking lights is a "data center". The survey referenced does limit them to over 500 square feet but even that number can be kinda meaningless.
At this moment, I'm sitting on the other side of the wall from a "data center" for a major TLA. It was once a monstrosity with dozens of Pyramids the size of refrigerators, racks of Windows-based servers for files and email, and a few dozen Unix servers that I administered.
Through consolidation and virtualization to larger data centers, it's lost nearly everything. Two file servers sit in a rack in the middle of a gigantic room with a raised floor, cooling, and excellent redundant power. There's also one tower-format file server. Technically, it's a data center. In real life, it's three servers sitting in the middle of thousands of empty square feet. At least it was until a couple of weeks ago; we've chained off the area into separate rooms for other uses and other departments, so the server rack now sits in about 500 square feet.
When the hardware in the rack fails, it won't be replaced; it'll be virtualized elsewhere. At that point, the one server that must remain can be put into a glorified closet with a good lock on the door and we'll no longer have a "data center". All this is a result of consolidation efforts that have been going on for years at my agency.
I wonder how many of the data centers in the fine article are equally as far from what most people think of when you say "data center"?
The problem is...resisting the temptation of all the Lois Lane types throwing their bodies at you. You would have super babies all over the planet.
I would not accept any superpowers that rendered me so stupid as to forget that there are an infinite number of ways to achieve sexual satisfaction without risking pregnancy.
So what, exactly, is the problem here? I don't get it.
...human life. Taking it is something you do when you have absolutely no other option...
Thoughtful carriers of concealed weapons understand that the purpose of shooting someone is never (in a civilian context) to kill them. A shooting is justified only when someone is doing something so terrible that stopping them becomes so important that we're willing to use methods that may endanger life. No one (again, in any justifiable, civilian self-defense scenario) actually desires to cause death; that would be murder. We simply want the person to stop what they're doing. In fact, we've decided that stopping them is so important that risking their life in the process is an acceptable thing.
So, if you decide to start shooting me while you're robbing me and I respond by putting a bullet in your brain, please understand that there's no intent in my heart to cause your death. I simply want so badly for you to immediately stop that I no longer (much) care if you live or die. Taking a life is, most assuredly, not the goal.
...just because somebody does something differently from us where they live, it doesn't mean that it's irrational and driven by fear.
I apologize for being unclear. The irrational fear I identified was on the part of the respondents on that travel forum. Their responses were so over-the-top that I could only attribute them, in light of the fact that they had insufficient information to be so condemning, to irrationality.
Slashdot Mirror
Holy shit.
You don't understand the historical uses of "compleat" and why I'd spell it that way to make a point in this case?
I see it's not just this professor who's a reason for me to weep over the current state of higher education.
Prof too lazy to write his own tests (and don't give me any shit about how this is how they all do it; the prof is responsible for the test content, including the security of it, period)? Check.
Prof too morally lazy and incompetent to stand up to cheaters by identifying them and getting them kicked out? Check
Prof too stupid to realize that relying on the security of a "test bank" (or anything like it) is foolhardy beyond belief? Check.
Prof too ethically incompetent to realize that punishing the ones who did right along with the guilty is an act more despicable than the original cheating? Check.
Prof too full of himself to realize that his emotional reaction is entirely innapropriate? Check.
Prof too incomeptent to realize that changing the rules midstream is an unforgivable breaking of a contract, something no one in a business school should countenance when there are already established procedures for dealing with cheaters? Check.
I'm not even going to try to list all the WTF moments in that vid. If somebody wants to go to the trouble, there are at least a half-dozen quotes that are absolute howlers.
What's really going on here? Off the top of my head, I can come up with two theories. Maybe the prof was pressured not to turn them all over for discipline because the uni higher-ups didn't want all the hassles and potential litigation. Or maybe he's bluffing and doesn't really have a perfect idea of who did and didn't cheat.
Either way, if I was in his class, didn't cheat, and was forced to come back to do the re-test, the physical violence I'd direct toward this idiot would track with whatever I had to give up. If he made me miss the birth of my son or the funeral of my mother, I'd beat the bastard to death. If he made me miss a date with some chick I didn't really care about, perhaps a stern email would suffice.
This situation is screwed up no matter how you look at it. I hope a whole bunch of students are demanding their money back from that institution. And I hope this idiot either decides to start educating, i.e. working directly with students, writing their tests, etc., or, better yet, gets the hell out of the business.
One "inB4" for the people who will be anxious to point out that I obviously went to university far too long ago to understand the modern, high-volume business of churning out sheepskins for job-seekers - You're absolutely right. My ignorance, however, still doesn't excuse the idiocy of this prof's actions.
I don't care how hot they were, I wasn't going to drive 1500 miles for it.
I know someone who did similar work in the early/mid 1990s. He wasn't as good as the guy in the article purports to be; he seemed to mostly wind up doing glorified book reports for first-year English coeds.
He took his payment in phone sex, earning as much as a half-dozen sessions for one fairly short paper.
If about 15 years ago you entered a certain small, prestigious, east coast university where your first English comp paper was to be inspired by "Everything That Rises Must Converge" and you got some old guy off over the phone in exchange for the paper, then thanks for the memories and thanks for passing my email address around to your friends. :-)
You bring up good points. The inability to fire dead weight really bugs me, too. However, in practical terms it's necessary.
We've seen what happens when government entities can fire people at will. A spoils system comes into being and the turnover defeats the ability of the government to steadily provide services. Look, for example, at the way lots of big-city machines worked 100 years ago. As soon as one guy got elected, he fired everybody that supported the other guy and handed out those jobs as rewards to the people who put him in power. The steady delivery of services, something that governments must provide above all else, is compromised. The same thing happens at every level of government if firing is too easy.
So we have the current system. Yes, dead weight gets to hang around. But it's more important that the bureaucracy continue to function and provide services (even if inefficiently) than to take a chance on the types of mis-steps that interrupt government services. When private industry concerns decide to run lean and efficient, they weigh risks and rewards. If they mis-judge, they go out of business. The formula for government services is weighted differently. When governments misjudge and can't provide vital services, they don't go out of business; some of their customers die.
So government is different. There's a much higher but absolutely necessary tolerance for inefficiency in the name of uninterrupted delivery. So we make firing hard. Nobody really likes it but, then again, nobody has come up with anything better where vital services are involved.
Now, the argument that government these days does lots of things that aren't vital is a completely different kettle of fish and you'll get not much static from me on that one.
As for the opposition of unions to merit pay, I'm with you in concept. In practice, I've seen "pay banding" and other salary schemes actually implemented and they tend to be a mess. I doubt a union would object too strongly if someone in management proposed a merit pay system that actually made sense instead of being just a buzzword-compliant, poorly disguised attempt to cut base pay and then set an impossible standard for getting any sort of bonus/merit/whatever compensation. I've never seen such a proposal.
In the U.S., to actually have all that stuff within a framework of written rules and procedures that are actually adhered to by all in your workplace, you must have some sort of contract. So I expect a few people will poke their heads in here and say that they have all that stuff because it's all in the contract they negotiated before they took their job. Bully for them. For most middle-and-below-class workers, negotiating a contract is something they don't get to do. If they don't like the deal, they can get out.
No, the only really large groups of secretaries, clerks, IT wonks, odd-job specialists and other mid-to-low end salary earners who get all those things in the U.S. are the folks who belong to unions or work in shops where unions stuck up for them sometime in the past.
Cue the irrational slashdot union-haters. But I contend that for all their mis-steps (e.g. public unions at the *state* level who have gotten excessive retirement benefits, autoworker unions who pushed for too much in general, etc.), labor unions do more good than harm.
Good examples? The biggest federal govt worker unions have managed to get good pay and benefits for the folks at the bottom of the jobs ladder without too much disruption (mostly because they're ultimately neutered by being unable to strike) to the work processes involved.
Now cue the irrational slashdot government-worker-haters.
Matches my experience perfectly.
...so I don't know how it works. But I assume Cook's Source could just nuke their own page?
I hope someone is making copies.
He wasn't shallow or a dick, really. But he was (past tense; he died about a decade ago) inflicted with a ridiculous sex drive. As long as he was getting laid regularly, he was a wonderful guy. His first wife knew what drove him and used that weakness (if that's the right word) to entrap him.
Wife #2 was cut from the same cloth as him and it was a match made in Heaven. They joined a "social club" that held frequent meetings where a few dozen to a hundred people wound up packed in a house sans clothing and sans inhibitions. The two of them spent the rest of their lives banging each other and anything that came within grabbing distance. They got along great and appeared to the casual observer to be simply two cute little old people enjoying the sunset of their lives together. That's exactly what they were, despite the fact that right up to the end of their lives they spent at least a couple of nights a week diving into various masses of writhing, sweaty humanity.
GP makes valid points but in this case, you're right. I knew the man and his 2nd wife for a long time. Both of them and the ex-wife were all together in a very successful business before he started an affair with the woman who would eventually become wife #2 and it all fell apart. I heard enough, consistently enough, over the years to understand that the first wife was definitely a classic gold-digger. She worked hard at the business but there was just nothing there emotionally.
I've often thought there was a book in there, somewhere: the sex-addicted tent revival preacher who builds a massive production company through inspired preaching and the hard work and overwhelming business acumen of his gold-digging shrew of a wife, risking it all to escape the emotional desert of his loveless marriage by bedding groupies in every town, then throwing it all away when he finds true love with his lead soprano.
Nah. Too soap-opera-ish. No one would believe it.
And sometimes people get blindsided.
I had a good friend who explained why he divorced his first wife thusly:
I'll never forget that story. There are some good lessons in there.
Bravo, sir.
The problem with obscenity prosecutions, from the defendants view, isn't that they're trying to prove they didn't commit the particular crime at issue. The defense, rather, has to prove that no crime existed. At all. That's a much tougher bar to get over.
When you're charged with obscenity, the prosecution tells the court "Defendant sold obscene item X. Selling obscene things is illegal. Find him guilty."
The defense counters with "Yes, we sold item X. But item X is not obscene. Thus, no crime ever took place. Find him not guilty."
IOW, the big question before the court isn't whether the defendant is guilty of a crime but whether a crime even took place. Once item X is found obscene, conviction becomes a fait accompli.
So pornographers simply don't know and can't reasonably be expected to know at the time of production if their latest video masterpiece is going to be prosecuted or not. It used to be that you could make a fair guess, depending on whether or not certain acts were included in the film. Chldren having sex, fisting, graphic bestiality, and penetrative sex during bondage were pretty much a sure bet to get you prosecuted. Nowadays, though, fisting is pretty much mainstream and easily available. Penetrative sex during bondage is a bit further behind, being a tad more rare. Bestiality is in the same boat. All are easily available in markets outside the U.S. and online. Kid stuff, on the other hand, has gone in the other direction. Merely shoot a 12-year-old in a bikini and market the photos for purposes of sexual stimulation and you get slapped down by the authorities.
So obscenity is a very different animal from most types of crime. It involves speech issues, community standards, and basic disagreements over even the existence of criminality. It can be very difficult to parse out.
I said all that to say this: People who illustrate their non-nuanced stance on the value of free speech with examples of obscentiy are treading on thin ice. Obscenity is just...well...different enough that it's often apropos of nothing and not a useful example to illustrate anything.
I got modded down as redundant, apparently because I did a "MOD PARENT UP" post and the mod saw that the parent was at 5. However, at the time I posted, it was at 2.
Mods who can't appreciate posting times and what they reveal about relative posting order; or who don't understand how quickly things change on slashdot are unqualified to get mod points. I sure hope a meta-mod gets a crack at the parent to this post.
Parent really calls attention to the elephant in the room when it comes to oil and our dependence on it.
I can imagine being forced to pay attention to a video under court order. If you've ever had the unpleasant experience of taking one of those safe driving courses offered on DVD in lieu of classroom training in the aftermath of a traffic ticket, you know what I mean. One of the questions on the test will likely be something like "What was the breed of dog that appeared with the woman in the blue car?".
So, yeah, if a judge orders me to pay attention to a video, I will, however supremely irrititating it may be.
But forcing me to pay attention to an advertisement? That is NOT going to happen as long as I can click away.
How many '32 Hi-Boys do you see at an average rod run? It seems like lots of guys manage to get their open-wheel cars properly titled.
I'm at a bit of a crossroads with Linux atm. The things I insist on having are:
1. Easy, integrated whole-disk encryption.
2. Resistance to security problems.
3. Excellent multimedia capabilities.
Nice-to-haves include:
4. Free software to do everything I want.
5. Usable documentation.
Ubuntu wins on 1, 2 and 4. To achieve those goals with Windows, I have to buy an encryption product (e.g. PGP's whole-disk product); install a firewall and virus protection; and be ready to open my wallet for lots of odd software packages. With Ubuntu or Fedora, I just check an option at installation to get the encryption, forget about the security problems, and click a simple download menu to get software.
Windows wins, hands-down, on 3. I've installed Ubuntu and Fedora a couple of dozen times (at least) in the last few months on 5 different computers and in every case getting decent Flash performance, getting AVI files to play, just getting the desktop to display at the native resolution of the panel is a royal pain, often requiring lots of arcane command-line work and the sacrifice of a couple of small animals.
What's broken it for me, though, is my latest build, a machine that highlights the fact that Linux miserably fails on 5. I got tired of slow video performance so I built a nice, fast machine. It doesn't have crazy gamer graphics or a dozen sticks of RAM, but it's got $1200 worth of quality parts, all of them using chipsets listed as supported by Linux and Ubuntu. I get random freezes that stop everything but the mouse pointer. This should be simple, right? Go to the Ubuntu forums and you'll find the mother of all irritating support threads, over a thousand (iirc) posts of people with the same problem with no answers, no decent input from developers, and not even any standard diagnostic flow. There's a bug reporting system that, for this bug, is deliberately set up to require more information than can be gleaned from any frozen machine. The same bug is present in Fedora.
This kind of really shitty attention to show-stopping bugs is enough to make me switch to Windows. I'm actually going to go to the store and buy a copy of Windows 7, download Avira and whatever is the currently best free firewall, and give my credit card number to PGP for another copy of their whole disk encryption. Then I'll have to toss out a few bucks here and there for an up-to-snuff NNTP client and a few other pieces of software.
I've been using and sticking up for Ubuntu for the better part of a decade, but if all this works like it should, I may go back to Windows. (I NEVER thought I'd say that.) I'm such a Linux fanboi that I may also just build yet another machine and try again.
But however this situation turns out, I'm really peeved with Linux right now and I'm not talking it up like I used to.
Such a shame.
That's actually a real surname? Raper?
I might be tempted to change my name.
Where's the software suite that lets me set up P2P software, a giant list of usenet down- or uploads, or any task for later execution, then constantly searches for open wi-fi, connects, and does the task(s)? Surely someone has written something simple to set up that works automatically.
It sure would be nice if EvilMe (tm) had a VM on my laptop that was constantly doing all my EvilDeeds (tm) in the background.
Apparently, I can't spell "MOD". Or maybe I've been doing so many drive mappings this morning that I've just got "map" on the mind.
Sheesh...
According to the article, linked memo, and linked data center tier definition, the meanest little closet holding a box with blinking lights is a "data center". The survey referenced does limit them to over 500 square feet but even that number can be kinda meaningless.
At this moment, I'm sitting on the other side of the wall from a "data center" for a major TLA. It was once a monstrosity with dozens of Pyramids the size of refrigerators, racks of Windows-based servers for files and email, and a few dozen Unix servers that I administered.
Through consolidation and virtualization to larger data centers, it's lost nearly everything. Two file servers sit in a rack in the middle of a gigantic room with a raised floor, cooling, and excellent redundant power. There's also one tower-format file server. Technically, it's a data center. In real life, it's three servers sitting in the middle of thousands of empty square feet. At least it was until a couple of weeks ago; we've chained off the area into separate rooms for other uses and other departments, so the server rack now sits in about 500 square feet.
When the hardware in the rack fails, it won't be replaced; it'll be virtualized elsewhere. At that point, the one server that must remain can be put into a glorified closet with a good lock on the door and we'll no longer have a "data center". All this is a result of consolidation efforts that have been going on for years at my agency.
I wonder how many of the data centers in the fine article are equally as far from what most people think of when you say "data center"?
I would not accept any superpowers that rendered me so stupid as to forget that there are an infinite number of ways to achieve sexual satisfaction without risking pregnancy.
So what, exactly, is the problem here? I don't get it.
A thoughtful reply. Thank you very much.
Just one point.
Thoughtful carriers of concealed weapons understand that the purpose of shooting someone is never (in a civilian context) to kill them. A shooting is justified only when someone is doing something so terrible that stopping them becomes so important that we're willing to use methods that may endanger life. No one (again, in any justifiable, civilian self-defense scenario) actually desires to cause death; that would be murder. We simply want the person to stop what they're doing. In fact, we've decided that stopping them is so important that risking their life in the process is an acceptable thing.
So, if you decide to start shooting me while you're robbing me and I respond by putting a bullet in your brain, please understand that there's no intent in my heart to cause your death. I simply want so badly for you to immediately stop that I no longer (much) care if you live or die. Taking a life is, most assuredly, not the goal.
I apologize for being unclear. The irrational fear I identified was on the part of the respondents on that travel forum. Their responses were so over-the-top that I could only attribute them, in light of the fact that they had insufficient information to be so condemning, to irrationality.