I did my part to bring the averages down and broaden the standard deviations, by including my mid-sized city, midwestern, academic compensation in the dataset. The compensation results in these surveys are so alien to the job market in which I work that I don't know whether to laugh at them or just cry.
Awaiting supervisor input for something that occurs regularly
What part of "ranging from ___ to ____" did you find unclear? I wasn't talking about requiring supervisor approval for pressing Ctrl-S to save your work every ten minutes. If someone "regularly" buys a quarter billion dollars worth of stock, then the system should be coded accordingly. But if that's something the employee would almost never do, that's an entirely different scenario.
is a bad idea from a business perspective.
Yeah, designing your system to let someone accidentally spend a quarter billion dollars is a much better idea from a business perspective. {roll eyes}
A developer who blindly builds an app to the suits' specs, without himself throwing up red flags at their lack of request for sanity-checking, is (IMHO) irresponsible. Application specifications are like any other form of input: they require sanity-checking.
Ultimately it's the stock-holders who are responsible (as they hired the board who hired the president who....) but that doesn't mean that everyone who doesn't a "the buck stops here" sign on their desk is devoid of responsibility.
The primary fault lies with the developer who failed to adeqautely validate input. Data validation means more than just making sure you don't have an alpha character in a numeric field; it includes sanity checking to make sure data are within reasonable ranges, and requiring additional confirmation (ranging from "Whoa, dude! That much?" to supervisor approval) when input is outside that.
If people don't read much, they will write very poorly and spell almost randomly. If they read crappy writing (i.e. much of what is now published unedited on the net) they will learn to write and spell the same way. It's not specifically a hacker thing, but since folks online get exposed to a lot more no-standards reading material, it's probably a bit worse in that population than among, say, regular newspaper or book readers.
I seem to recall that once upon a time they passed laws that made it illegal to sell something below cost to steal market share from competitors. It was called "predatory pricing". While Sony's probably staying within the loophole of the law, the principle's the same. And of course the US DoJ doesn't even enforce the law when it's blatantly predatory (e.g. IE taking over the browser market).
I wasn't using "ignore" in the same sense as "ignorance". But in your case "ignorance" is the right word. You say that basic cable is only $7-8/month, but it's twice that around here. (It was all I could afford in my budget, and had to cancel it a while back when some unplanned expenses came along.) And one doesn't have to be in poverty for a $100 expense to be a burden: If you're living paycheck to paycheck (as I was doing recently, although I have a better-paying job now), it is.
If you don't think it's worth it, that's a valid opinion. Just do some actual research and try to learn something about what you're talking about before pretending to be an informed authority.
If the poor can't afford to replace their analog sets with digital, then let them watch cable!
Yeah, there's a real myopia among the "industry leaders" and tech geeks who are salivating over this, ignoring the fact that those who most use broadcast TV are doing so because they can't afford the alternatives, and also can't convert.
I do wonder, though, if this might be a blessing in disguise. Speaking as someone who gets all his TV programming via rabbit ears, maybe shutting down those transmitters is just what I need to finally wean myself from the boob tube. Shutting off that source of brain-numbing stimulation could single-handedly do more for the academic performance of the underclass than a dozen No Child Left Behind acts. Or maybe they'll just use other drugs more. {shrug}
Case in point: How many people can remember all the secret doors on the umpteenth map in Quake 2, vs how many people can remember to get the Babel Fish in Infocom's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? And when all is said and done, which was more satisfying to beat?
The echoes of my triumphant "YES!!!" upon first solving the Babelfish puzzle still resound through the structure of my parents' house, lo these decades later.
I just built a Myth box from scratch and it cost about $600 all told.
OK, but that's still enough to pay for a TiVo and lifetime service plus enough pizza and beer to last all weekend. I love a DiY project, but I had almost as much fun hacking my TiVo when I got it 4 or 5 years ago, and it didn't cost as much.
I'd lay even odds that young Wesley probably ended up spending time in whatever passes for gay bars in the 24th century.
That'd be Ten-Forward.
(Though I'm afraid you lost me with this point. Are you equating "not sexy" with "gay"? With all due respect, all that does is support my assertion that straight men don't get what makes a man "sexy"; gay men (stereo)typically have it in spades. {smile})
Straight guys are incredibly clueless when it comes to sex appeal of the male variety. They recognize a couple forms of it (as in "I want to look like that"), but can't grasp how, e.g. Patrick Stewart is sexy.
Of course young Wil had sex appeal: he was nice-looking, smart, had a cute smile, etc. To a certain demographic, he was a definite hottie. (And for the record, he still looks quite nice. But he's hitched, so I'll just leave it at that. {sigh})
Self-serving semantics. Just because you think that the word "stealing" shouldn't be applied to unauthorized copying doesn't mean that it's the "wrong word". If that's the word he used, that's what he considers it: stealing.
writer's are just as ham-strung as actors in the visual media circus.
Unless you include the pictures-on-paper variety. Comics is one of the few entertainment media (along with prose, and I suppose poetry if you consider that entertainment {wicked grin}) where a single auteur can realize a creative vision without interference from producers/actors/editors/etc. who want to impose their own ideas on it. Wil's obviously familiar with the medium; if he can draw at all that might be an avenue that would appeal to him. Even if he can't draw, collaborating with an illustrator is easier than collaborating with a bunch of actors, cinematographers, costumers, etc. For one thing, we illustrators aren't all clinically insane. {beatific smile}
says things like he doesn't want to come off "like a total douche"
He says that because he used to do that a lot. He was a first-class adolescent wanker when he was on Star Trek. Granted, most of the people who hated him did so because they hated his character, but many of us who saw beyond the character (or even liked it) hated him because he was a jerk. Fortunately he's grown up a bit since then, to the point that he readily admits to his past jerkishness. And apparently tries to avoid it now.:)
Creating a secure and maintainable firewall is hard. For someone not very skilled in the low level commands a GUI would be very useful.
Since you're replying (indirectly) to a comment about Coyote Linux, I'd like to point out that it has one. It includes an internally-accessible web interface using thttpd.
Since you put it that way: I'd turn it over to no one but myself. Every time I've tried "outsourcing" some component of my online presence (web hosting, DNS, e-mail account), I've come to regret it. I'd rather pull what's left of my hair out fixing something myself than put up with someone else's incompetence. Your Mileage May Vary, but I've found the minuses outweigh the plusses.
"You can't solve this problem with technology; here's how you have to do it," is a perfectly valid and helpful answer to, "What technology can I use to solve this problem?"
any default install, especially linux, will have all kinds of other things installed.
One exception to this is Coyote Linux. Not only does it not have the usual services enabled by default, nearly all of them have been stripped out. It includes just the components (such as iptables) that serve the central function of safely connecting a LAN to the Internet. And because it's so minimal, it fits on a floppy and runs on a 386 with 12MB RAM. It's no substitute for a full-featured Cisco Pix (for that you'd have to look at Coyote's big brother Wolverine), but it's worked great for me for years, both at home and in a couple offices I've worked at.
Slashdot Mirror
I did my part to bring the averages down and broaden the standard deviations, by including my mid-sized city, midwestern, academic compensation in the dataset. The compensation results in these surveys are so alien to the job market in which I work that I don't know whether to laugh at them or just cry.
And a rich executive blames his employees.
Maybe they should. Sounds like the whole system's in need of a sanity check.
What part of "ranging from ___ to ____" did you find unclear? I wasn't talking about requiring supervisor approval for pressing Ctrl-S to save your work every ten minutes. If someone "regularly" buys a quarter billion dollars worth of stock, then the system should be coded accordingly. But if that's something the employee would almost never do, that's an entirely different scenario.
is a bad idea from a business perspective.
Yeah, designing your system to let someone accidentally spend a quarter billion dollars is a much better idea from a business perspective. {roll eyes}
Ultimately it's the stock-holders who are responsible (as they hired the board who hired the president who....) but that doesn't mean that everyone who doesn't a "the buck stops here" sign on their desk is devoid of responsibility.
Kind of like the U.S. Dept. of Defense using access to kids' high school records for recruitment purposes?
Hell, that argument's so persuasive that it gets used for things that have nothing to do with children, like same-gender marriage.
The primary fault lies with the developer who failed to adeqautely validate input. Data validation means more than just making sure you don't have an alpha character in a numeric field; it includes sanity checking to make sure data are within reasonable ranges, and requiring additional confirmation (ranging from "Whoa, dude! That much?" to supervisor approval) when input is outside that.
If people don't read much, they will write very poorly and spell almost randomly. If they read crappy writing (i.e. much of what is now published unedited on the net) they will learn to write and spell the same way. It's not specifically a hacker thing, but since folks online get exposed to a lot more no-standards reading material, it's probably a bit worse in that population than among, say, regular newspaper or book readers.
I'm reposting the above comment, because (despite its down-modding) it's a valid point.
I seem to recall that once upon a time they passed laws that made it illegal to sell something below cost to steal market share from competitors. It was called "predatory pricing". While Sony's probably staying within the loophole of the law, the principle's the same. And of course the US DoJ doesn't even enforce the law when it's blatantly predatory (e.g. IE taking over the browser market).
If you don't think it's worth it, that's a valid opinion. Just do some actual research and try to learn something about what you're talking about before pretending to be an informed authority.
Yeah, there's a real myopia among the "industry leaders" and tech geeks who are salivating over this, ignoring the fact that those who most use broadcast TV are doing so because they can't afford the alternatives, and also can't convert.
I do wonder, though, if this might be a blessing in disguise. Speaking as someone who gets all his TV programming via rabbit ears, maybe shutting down those transmitters is just what I need to finally wean myself from the boob tube. Shutting off that source of brain-numbing stimulation could single-handedly do more for the academic performance of the underclass than a dozen No Child Left Behind acts. Or maybe they'll just use other drugs more. {shrug}
Ah. So you're just not getting why people go to gay bars. {shrug}
The echoes of my triumphant "YES!!!" upon first solving the Babelfish puzzle still resound through the structure of my parents' house, lo these decades later.
OK, but that's still enough to pay for a TiVo and lifetime service plus enough pizza and beer to last all weekend. I love a DiY project, but I had almost as much fun hacking my TiVo when I got it 4 or 5 years ago, and it didn't cost as much.
That'd be Ten-Forward.
(Though I'm afraid you lost me with this point. Are you equating "not sexy" with "gay"? With all due respect, all that does is support my assertion that straight men don't get what makes a man "sexy"; gay men (stereo)typically have it in spades. {smile})
Of course young Wil had sex appeal: he was nice-looking, smart, had a cute smile, etc. To a certain demographic, he was a definite hottie. (And for the record, he still looks quite nice. But he's hitched, so I'll just leave it at that. {sigh})
Self-serving semantics. Just because you think that the word "stealing" shouldn't be applied to unauthorized copying doesn't mean that it's the "wrong word". If that's the word he used, that's what he considers it: stealing.
Unless you include the pictures-on-paper variety. Comics is one of the few entertainment media (along with prose, and I suppose poetry if you consider that entertainment {wicked grin}) where a single auteur can realize a creative vision without interference from producers/actors/editors/etc. who want to impose their own ideas on it. Wil's obviously familiar with the medium; if he can draw at all that might be an avenue that would appeal to him. Even if he can't draw, collaborating with an illustrator is easier than collaborating with a bunch of actors, cinematographers, costumers, etc. For one thing, we illustrators aren't all clinically insane. {beatific smile}
He says that because he used to do that a lot. He was a first-class adolescent wanker when he was on Star Trek. Granted, most of the people who hated him did so because they hated his character, but many of us who saw beyond the character (or even liked it) hated him because he was a jerk. Fortunately he's grown up a bit since then, to the point that he readily admits to his past jerkishness. And apparently tries to avoid it now. :)
Since you're replying (indirectly) to a comment about Coyote Linux, I'd like to point out that it has one. It includes an internally-accessible web interface using thttpd.
Since you put it that way: I'd turn it over to no one but myself. Every time I've tried "outsourcing" some component of my online presence (web hosting, DNS, e-mail account), I've come to regret it. I'd rather pull what's left of my hair out fixing something myself than put up with someone else's incompetence. Your Mileage May Vary, but I've found the minuses outweigh the plusses.
"You can't solve this problem with technology; here's how you have to do it," is a perfectly valid and helpful answer to, "What technology can I use to solve this problem?"
One exception to this is Coyote Linux. Not only does it not have the usual services enabled by default, nearly all of them have been stripped out. It includes just the components (such as iptables) that serve the central function of safely connecting a LAN to the Internet. And because it's so minimal, it fits on a floppy and runs on a 386 with 12MB RAM. It's no substitute for a full-featured Cisco Pix (for that you'd have to look at Coyote's big brother Wolverine), but it's worked great for me for years, both at home and in a couple offices I've worked at.