Just because the dot-com boom was the first time that geeks started noticing talk about IPOs, the concept of companies going public and selling stock with Initial Public Offerings wasn't exactly new, not even to the general public. "IPO" was already part of the standard jargon of Wall Street and the countless people who invested in the stock market... more than "a few".
Yeah, never mind whether a "shelf" is a clever invention: How is this useful? You can't easily type on it unless you stand up and lean forward, and then what's the point of having it at a desk? (Put it on your dresser or some other chest-height piece of furniture.) But hey, you could add an external keyboard... with a footprint the size of the laptop, thereby losing the desk space just recovered.
Do not - no matter how much your wife/Felix/boyfriend/whatever nags you about the clutter - zip-tie, twist-tie, or otherwise tightly bundle your cables together to make them more tidy and less unsightly.
Yes, they will look better with a "cable management system" of that sort in place... until one of the cables goes bad, or you need to plug one of the devices into a different power outlet, etc. At that point you will curse - using words your grandfather never even heard during his time in the Navy - the day that your wife/Felix/boyfriend/whatever was born, and the day you met said individual, and your stupidity for listening to them.
Seriously, the key to keeping a web of cables "manageable" is to keep the individual strands apart. Put as much daylight between them as you can, and as much slack in them as geometry allows. It may not be as pretty as a bundle of cables wrapped by a tight plastic helix or hidden away in an enclosed track, but neither is a domestic murder-suicide incited by frustration over constrictive cable management. (Or so I've heard.)
At least one of the examples on his web site consists of the insufficiently metaphoric submitter not understanding what the term means. A "killer applicataion" is not "a winning application that will supposedly kill the opposition", but an application that is so great (slang "killer") that it makes the platform it runs on successful. e.g. Lotus 123 (for the IBM PC), PageMaker (for the Mac, Windows).
They suggest that such projects only be taken on as public-private partnerships.
A well-managed public service will always be more cost-effective than the same service provided by a well-managed private operation, because there's no profits being taken out before the bottom line. That's basic math.
The trick of course is getting the public service to be well-managed, but that's mostly just a matter of political will. The local Chamber of Commerce will of course pooh-pooh the very notion and sometimes even stand in the way of it, because their interest is in creating niches for private businesses to exploit instead. And of course employees (especially if organized) will try to get as much out of it as possible as well. The government just needs to show some backbone and do it right, regardless.
The only reason a private entity truly needs to be involved is if investors are needed for the capital, and the government doesn't have the means to raise it through bonds or taxes. Otherwise, let the public sector hire the same people to do the same job at the same salary/wages the private company would have hired them at. If the argument is ideological (that government shouldn't do this sort of thing) that's another matter, but if it's a question of accounting, the advantage is to the fully-public approach.
System administration without DameWare would be a real drag.
With a name like "DameWare" ("DameWear"?) I'd think it was for doing drag! [rimshot] Thank you, dahlings, you've been loverly! I'm Angie O'Plasty and I'll be here all week! [cue exit music]
I has a run-in with Deep Freeze once in my last job. The IT dept there doesn't use it, and I was unaware the product even existed. But someone in the library had installed it on one of their computers, and neglected to tell IT that they'd done so. After a while, the anti-virus software started complaining about the virus defs being out of date - and promptly shutting the system down, according to college policy - so I was sent to fix it. I hacked on that thing for two hours* before I figured out why no repairs I did had any lasting effect. I can attest to its effectiveness, but I shudder whenever I hear its name.
*It had some bar-code-reading and other specialised software I couldn't easily reinstall, so I was trying to avoid a wipe-and-reload.
Seriously. You are the sysadmin, not a digital janitor.
Spare me. You are the sysadmin, not the Prince Consort. The job description for such positions (especially in small shops) probably does include "click OK buttons as needed". I've got the proverbial brain the size of a planet, but I'm not above cleaning mice balls or other menial tasks if they need to be done. In a small shop the sysadmin's job is "make it go" and this is all just part of that.
Hiring an additional primate (of whatever species and pay rate) sounds like overkill. More than 1.0 FTE to admin a 15-node workgroup? I don't think so. (And where did the comparison of an ongoing payroll expense to a one-time cost of switching to a different platform - as if they were considering that, or even should - come from? That makes no sense.)
I manage about 300 college classroom/lab computers, but I don't really have much "maintenance" for them. Of course shortly before each semester begins, I go around and wipe every hard drive down to the boot sector, and reload pre-configured software images. But not much in between. I do have work-study student employees for "monkey clicks OK" type stuff, but since they rarely actually do what I ask them to do, so that doesn't really count.
Most of my efforts are preventative, putting a lot of thought and fine-tuning into the base software images, to harden them against user abuse and malware, and to automate security patches and definition updates as much as possible. For the Windows machines that's Symantec Anti-Virus with daily updates, Spybot S&D with full Immunization, and MS's auto-critical-updates.
I've found Apple Remote Desktop to be very handy for occasional maintenance on the Macs, such as OS updates and security patches.
For the Windows machines, I usually wait for users to complain about spyware before I wipe them and reload a clean image, rather than doing it on a regular basis during the semester. Mostly that's because the profs don't teach their students good backup habits, and I'm not BOFH enough to go around teaching them painful lessons about not keeping the only copies of their work on the hard drive. Yet. I'm still new on staff, so I'm building up my goodwill reserve before I start doing that.
Where did you get the idea that dark matter is not oberservable?
Various places, but mostly from the fact that it has yet to be directly observed. Its existence has been inferred indirectly, but to my knowledge no one has ever detected it experimentally.
To simplify the computations, they considered only dark matter which composes most of the universe.
In other words, they left out the entire observable universe. Not only does that simplify the calculations, it makes it a little difficult to truly authenticate the results.:)
I humbly suggest that one should be surprised to find themselves assaulted by a police officer and arrested for expressing - however rudely - a negative opinion of him. A right that is only protected "after the fact" (e.g. by suing the "pig" who knocked your teeth out) isn't really being protected... you're just being paid compensation for it being taken away.
I also think that mockery and vandalism are more than just "slightly" separated. One's an intangible, subjective harm; the other is objective and verifiable.
Way back when I was getting my degree in CS, I opined that it wasn't really a "science" degree, because there was obviously (to me, at least) a lot of creativity involved in the field. Not just in terms of interface design and making pretty widgets (which weren't really taught in those pre-MS-Windows, Mac 128K days), but even something as mundane as code formatting had an aesthetic aspect to it. (I thought the way one of profs formatted his code was ugly; I insisted on defying his example.) And although sorting algorithms and such could be ranked mathematically, many of the choices of how approach a problem seemed creative to me.
Several years later, I went back to college, this time studying graphic design and illustration, with a foundation of ye olde fine arts thrown in. I was only mildly surprised to have an instructor start talking about the Fibonacci numbers and the Golden Section. It learned that there are even objective and verifiable standards for what humans usually perceive as "balanced", "unsettling", and even "beautiful". This doesn't mean that art can be verified quantifiably, but it does mean it isn't 100% subjective, either. (Rob Liefeld is a bad artist. Full stop.)
"What is art?" is a subject that will get even art students into heated debate with each other. But if you include architecture and poetry (and I think most people would), then programming has to be at least within the grey fringe.
Personally, I don't care much for attempts to distinguish between (for example) fine art, commercial art, design, craft, etc. Part of that's because I took classes that arguably included each of these, and what I was doing in one or another them wasn't fundamentally different. My art school has majors in Furniture Design, Sculpture, Illustration, Photography, Painting, Interior Design, Graphic Design, etc. and hardly anyone around here tries to separate them into categories of craft/art/design etc.
There's art in science; there's science in art. That's certainly the way Leondardo approached his life's work, and it's how I try to approach mine.
Which is more likely? Someone is going to force religion on you today or someone is going to try to enforce no religion at all
In this dimension? The former. There are certainly counterexamples (the state atheism of the USSR and China), but the forcing of religion (or a different religion) upon the unwilling has been a recurring theme for most of recorded history, and judging by the sample of people knocking on my front door, it remains dominant over the promotion of atheism.
On the other hand, you realize that a Linux fish is essentially a mobile insult against their religious expression which is their right to express (as is your mockery).
I don't think that vandalizing someone else's property is generally considered to be a Constitutionally (or morally) defended form of expression.
You could use a fountain pen (feedback) and a scanner (computer input); they're both pretty affordable and many people already have one or the other.
A direct-to-digital emulation of this would have some distinct advantages, however. Not the least of which is an "undo" capability. I'm a clumsy inker, which means I have to do a lot of digital removal of my mistakes after scanning (at least it's better than white-out) and more than occasionally have to throw an illustration out and start over.
If you want to bait this guy, and also set up a site arguing against the sort of thing he's trying to do, I humbly suggest registering StealThisPublicDomain.com (aka StealthIsPublicDomain.com).
That's the stupidest thing I've heard all day... and I've been watching daytime television. Seriously. Infomercials and sportscasters are thoughtful than this.
I guess we're going to have to start nullifying the legal relationships of couples who fail to produce offspring, and deny licenses to post-menopausal women.
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno... they sound like a good reason to blink, if you ask me.
Ellison is known to be willing to share his strongly-held opinions about many other topics.
The idea being that they may pose a level of security risk that might not be acceptable in their situation.
Just because the dot-com boom was the first time that geeks started noticing talk about IPOs, the concept of companies going public and selling stock with Initial Public Offerings wasn't exactly new, not even to the general public. "IPO" was already part of the standard jargon of Wall Street and the countless people who invested in the stock market... more than "a few".
No.
Yeah, never mind whether a "shelf" is a clever invention: How is this useful? You can't easily type on it unless you stand up and lean forward, and then what's the point of having it at a desk? (Put it on your dresser or some other chest-height piece of furniture.) But hey, you could add an external keyboard... with a footprint the size of the laptop, thereby losing the desk space just recovered.
Yes, they will look better with a "cable management system" of that sort in place... until one of the cables goes bad, or you need to plug one of the devices into a different power outlet, etc. At that point you will curse - using words your grandfather never even heard during his time in the Navy - the day that your wife/Felix/boyfriend/whatever was born, and the day you met said individual, and your stupidity for listening to them.
Seriously, the key to keeping a web of cables "manageable" is to keep the individual strands apart. Put as much daylight between them as you can, and as much slack in them as geometry allows. It may not be as pretty as a bundle of cables wrapped by a tight plastic helix or hidden away in an enclosed track, but neither is a domestic murder-suicide incited by frustration over constrictive cable management. (Or so I've heard.)
At least one of the examples on his web site consists of the insufficiently metaphoric submitter not understanding what the term means. A "killer applicataion" is not "a winning application that will supposedly kill the opposition", but an application that is so great (slang "killer") that it makes the platform it runs on successful. e.g. Lotus 123 (for the IBM PC), PageMaker (for the Mac, Windows).
A well-managed public service will always be more cost-effective than the same service provided by a well-managed private operation, because there's no profits being taken out before the bottom line. That's basic math.
The trick of course is getting the public service to be well-managed, but that's mostly just a matter of political will. The local Chamber of Commerce will of course pooh-pooh the very notion and sometimes even stand in the way of it, because their interest is in creating niches for private businesses to exploit instead. And of course employees (especially if organized) will try to get as much out of it as possible as well. The government just needs to show some backbone and do it right, regardless.
The only reason a private entity truly needs to be involved is if investors are needed for the capital, and the government doesn't have the means to raise it through bonds or taxes. Otherwise, let the public sector hire the same people to do the same job at the same salary/wages the private company would have hired them at. If the argument is ideological (that government shouldn't do this sort of thing) that's another matter, but if it's a question of accounting, the advantage is to the fully-public approach.
With a name like "DameWare" ("DameWear"?) I'd think it was for doing drag! [rimshot] Thank you, dahlings, you've been loverly! I'm Angie O'Plasty and I'll be here all week! [cue exit music]
*It had some bar-code-reading and other specialised software I couldn't easily reinstall, so I was trying to avoid a wipe-and-reload.
Spare me. You are the sysadmin, not the Prince Consort. The job description for such positions (especially in small shops) probably does include "click OK buttons as needed". I've got the proverbial brain the size of a planet, but I'm not above cleaning mice balls or other menial tasks if they need to be done. In a small shop the sysadmin's job is "make it go" and this is all just part of that.
Hiring an additional primate (of whatever species and pay rate) sounds like overkill. More than 1.0 FTE to admin a 15-node workgroup? I don't think so. (And where did the comparison of an ongoing payroll expense to a one-time cost of switching to a different platform - as if they were considering that, or even should - come from? That makes no sense.)
Most of my efforts are preventative, putting a lot of thought and fine-tuning into the base software images, to harden them against user abuse and malware, and to automate security patches and definition updates as much as possible. For the Windows machines that's Symantec Anti-Virus with daily updates, Spybot S&D with full Immunization, and MS's auto-critical-updates.
I've found Apple Remote Desktop to be very handy for occasional maintenance on the Macs, such as OS updates and security patches.
For the Windows machines, I usually wait for users to complain about spyware before I wipe them and reload a clean image, rather than doing it on a regular basis during the semester. Mostly that's because the profs don't teach their students good backup habits, and I'm not BOFH enough to go around teaching them painful lessons about not keeping the only copies of their work on the hard drive. Yet. I'm still new on staff, so I'm building up my goodwill reserve before I start doing that.
Various places, but mostly from the fact that it has yet to be directly observed. Its existence has been inferred indirectly, but to my knowledge no one has ever detected it experimentally.
In other words, they left out the entire observable universe. Not only does that simplify the calculations, it makes it a little difficult to truly authenticate the results. :)
I also think that mockery and vandalism are more than just "slightly" separated. One's an intangible, subjective harm; the other is objective and verifiable.
Several years later, I went back to college, this time studying graphic design and illustration, with a foundation of ye olde fine arts thrown in. I was only mildly surprised to have an instructor start talking about the Fibonacci numbers and the Golden Section. It learned that there are even objective and verifiable standards for what humans usually perceive as "balanced", "unsettling", and even "beautiful". This doesn't mean that art can be verified quantifiably, but it does mean it isn't 100% subjective, either. (Rob Liefeld is a bad artist. Full stop.)
"What is art?" is a subject that will get even art students into heated debate with each other. But if you include architecture and poetry (and I think most people would), then programming has to be at least within the grey fringe.
Personally, I don't care much for attempts to distinguish between (for example) fine art, commercial art, design, craft, etc. Part of that's because I took classes that arguably included each of these, and what I was doing in one or another them wasn't fundamentally different. My art school has majors in Furniture Design, Sculpture, Illustration, Photography, Painting, Interior Design, Graphic Design, etc. and hardly anyone around here tries to separate them into categories of craft/art/design etc.
There's art in science; there's science in art. That's certainly the way Leondardo approached his life's work, and it's how I try to approach mine.
It's pretty much the same way someone in Nevada can sue a citizen of Wisconsin in the Nevada state courts.
The CPU fan rattles when I do that.
Obviously the death of her rat^H^H^Hdog was too traumatic, and she suppressed the advance-memory of it. Basic (para)psychology.
In this dimension? The former. There are certainly counterexamples (the state atheism of the USSR and China), but the forcing of religion (or a different religion) upon the unwilling has been a recurring theme for most of recorded history, and judging by the sample of people knocking on my front door, it remains dominant over the promotion of atheism.
I don't think that vandalizing someone else's property is generally considered to be a Constitutionally (or morally) defended form of expression.
A direct-to-digital emulation of this would have some distinct advantages, however. Not the least of which is an "undo" capability. I'm a clumsy inker, which means I have to do a lot of digital removal of my mistakes after scanning (at least it's better than white-out) and more than occasionally have to throw an illustration out and start over.
If you want to bait this guy, and also set up a site arguing against the sort of thing he's trying to do, I humbly suggest registering StealThisPublicDomain.com (aka StealthIsPublicDomain.com).
That's the stupidest thing I've heard all day... and I've been watching daytime television. Seriously. Infomercials and sportscasters are thoughtful than this.
I guess we're going to have to start nullifying the legal relationships of couples who fail to produce offspring, and deny licenses to post-menopausal women.