Yep, bunch of nonsense, really. All the alleged "reasons" why you don't reboot Unix servers come down to oh no, woe, worry, scare tactics.... The article should be more properly titled "Why you shouldn't reboot Unix servers without knowing why you're rebooting them". It's actually kind of insulting - the author is coming close to inferring that Unix administrators are just as bad as the stereotypical Windows administrators in that they're prone to rebooting without understanding the problem.
By the way, I've had several Windows servers which went years without a reboot and were quite happily humming along. I can remember one which had been up for a couple of years and I finally had to reboot because it was going flaky and showing disk errors so I scheduled a disk check. Guess what, the RAID card had lost its configuration and the server wouldn't start up after the shut down. That is the kind of thing that you may want to have happen at off-peak hours.
Screw you. If you don't like Facebook, don't use it. This is nothing more than antagonistic, hypocritical, petty vengeance befitting an angst-ridden prepubescent teenager.
Paragraphs 1 & 2 - interesting. Paragraphs 3 & 4 - eh... Paragraph 5 - err, as you say, just, you know, don't buy a product that's aimed at a target market that clearly doesn't include you. Same as you don't have to buy a Lady Gaga album if you don't like it. (Or Metallica, or Mozart...).
And from the tenor of your post I think it's a fair assumption that you don't have a Facebook account. So...strike two, surely?
I really do like the points you raise in the first half of your post. I just don't like the whining that is so prevalent on/. these days.
Out of interest, have you read Bowlby? As for Hazen and Shaver, they could be anybody, but a search of Hazen Shaver turns up the people I'm talking about in the very first links. I do not consider that I'm twisting either set of research, frankly. I believe the implications are fairly clear, although I'll grant you it's not the primary topic. I assume you're also familiar with Hall's "Storm and Stress", and how Lerner and Anna Freud reacted to that?
If you're genuinely interested in the research, look at:
Pyne, K. B. (2006). "Good teachers" require "better students": Identity crisis in the search for empowering pedagogy.
Kohnke, J. F. (2005). Fatherlessness: An adolescent's point of view.
At the risk of you thinking I'm twisting something to my own ends, I'll also suggest Austin and Kortum (2004).
Obviously I'm professionally interested in this area and like discussing it. If, on the other hand, you just want to debate or make a point, have fun, but I'm out.
So, now let's consider a school age child. This is the most fragile time in a person's life, pschologically.
Really?
Err..yes, actually, really. I think Bowlby made that pretty clear - not that he was the only one, but I do like his work. Also Hazen and Shaver. There is a ton of excellent work out there, and it's pretty consistent.
I think the rest of your post is a bit of a question-begging assumption, to be honest.
What do you think about Bradley Manning - is he being tortured because he's being kept in solitary confinement? Plenty of people here have stated, with some degree of passion and assurance, that this is torture because it has long term effects on the psyche.
So, now let's consider a school age child. This is the most fragile time in a person's life, pschologically. They may already be dealing with severely stressful situations outside of school, such as parents getting divorced, parents out of work, a close family member dying from cancer, the death of a pet, moving away from all their friends, and any of a number of other issues which are recognized as the most stressful situations possible in an adult's life, never mind a child. They may be getting bullied at school. They may be struggling with poor grades thanks to any number of mitigating circumstances. They may be sick themselves, with a severe illness.
And then they learn that a person who is in a position of authority and has a high degree of control over their life has blasted allegations in a forum that is publicly accessible to their peers as well as thousands or even millions of strangers.
But of course. Slashdot summaries are typically as shrill and outrageous as the very worst of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Osama Bin Laden, and Sarah Palin combined. And on steroids. With a bad headache to make them grumpier and more shrill. And without the self-restraint typically exhibited by those individuals. And a bad dose of PMS. And deploring the overly-rigorous editorial standards of Fox News.
And that's what the comments have to go on, because god forbid anyone should read the article.*
* If we are so lucky as to have an actual legitimate article to read rather than a Photoshopped screenshot of a Twitter feed from someone who thought they read a blog somewhere by ImTheRealBillGatesHonest that's been printed out, scanned in at 50 DPI and then run through a prehistoric OCR reader.
Yeah, I'm done too. Here's the thing - you are posting all kinds of vague allegations ("it's not just solitary confinement, we're doing other things to him too") and then can't back them up. The least that is deserved here is to be honest. If the facts and truth don't bolster your argument, then re-evaluate your argument. And I have seen nothing to suggest that anything other than solitary confinement is happening. That waking him every five minutes? The post you give is not specific, but it doesn't explicitly state he is being woken up at night. From another web site (my emphasis added):
Guards check Private Manning every five minutes but allow him to sleep without interruption from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m., when only dim night lights are on, unless they need to wake him to be certain he is breathing.
Who's making up the stories here?
To be clear on my position, solitary confinement is not exactly what I'd consider fun, but from all accounts (including the ones you've posted and linked to) he's not in some dirty squalid rat hole, he's being kept clean, he gets a 15 minute shower each day, he can read (he gets one book at a time), he's not being starved or denied water.
To make up vague stories implying, however loosely, that he is suffering much worse, ultimately cheapens and harms whatever end you're trying to achieve.
Sleep deprivation. It can actually kill you if it goes on long enough, and it can drive you absolutely schizophrenic. Being constantly woken up does not allow REM sleep, and that will eventually drive anyone bonkers.
From the Salon link you posted:
Like most individuals held in severe isolation, Manning sleeps much of the day
The normally sober and sometimes accurate Wall Street Journal...
I don't think you fully appreciate the amazing levels of hypocrisy and outright lack of awareness involved in posting that on a site like Slashdot. This is, after all, the site where it's entirely possible to have 100 comments on a story before anyone posts a rebuttal/explanation that total invalidates all prior comments with two sentences that come straight from reading the article.
That is not the only thing we are doing to him, but yes, being held in solitary for long enough is definitely considered torture as it can lead to lasting psychological damage.
And again - what other things? I read every one of those links, and followed several of the links in those stories.
Several of them have big chunks of text which are identical, and specifically the chunks referring to the torture.
Not one of those stories refers to anything other than solitary confinement and deprivation of pillows and sheets.
In fact, several of those stories state:
No one's alleging Manning is being subjected to electrodes on his genitals or needles under his nails
All I can see that comes under the category of "other things" is the deprivation of pillows and sheets. Which sucks, and I don't think it's fair, but it's one heck of a far cry from what you're implying.
You know, this is one of the most insightful posts I've read on/. in a long, LONG time.
As for TFA, just let them fricking die already.
Exactly. Throughout the years, people have posted long, time-consuming (both to write and to read) rants about SCO and how they keep hanging on and never going away, etc. Half the reason they stayed alive so long was they became almost a cause celebre thanks to the disproportionate attention lavished on them by the Linux/FOSS crowd and Groklaw. Hardly anyone outside these groups knew anything about SCO; nor would they have cared had they known.
So, your morality adjusts according to your personal needs ?
Yes, actually, for most people living in the real world, it does. I have actually been in the position faced by the person the article discusses, TWICE - once before I was married, and once after I was married and had a daughter. And I will tell you straight up that it makes an enormous difference to one's thinking process to sit down and look at your daughter and know she is dependent on the choices you make. For better or worse, how I act at work and how I manage my career determines how good a life she has, and I choose to take responsibility for making the decision, along with my wife, to have a child.
In this specific case, it's actually not a question of right or wrong. It's what we adults like to call a "grey area". If it really were that black and white, we wouldn't be having this lengthy discussion, now, would we?
You may think it makes me a bad person, and quite honestly I made a different decision when I was single. And had I made that decision several years later, and had it played out the same way, my family would be destitute. This isn't some theory - I know what happened the first time I went through this. Having a family, and having people who depend on you, DIRECTLY, for their daily meal, tends to change things. I feel terrible about bad things that happen to other people, whether they be job losses or cancer or floods. I do what I can to help out by donating to charities, for instance. But my daughter won't get charity from you, will she? So I will look out for her first. Then the rest. If that sounds harsh, well, I think you had better take a very hard look at how you view the concept of "family".
I submit the world would be better without people like you in it.
Grow up.
And if this pretentious bilge is the best you can manage, please shut up until you've been in this position. I have.
So far it's just a ceremonial handing over of the last blocks, and the recipients are giving brief speeches. The guy from Asia Pacific commented he expected to run through his final allocated addresses in three to six months.
1. It's already out there - see that link in the summary?
2. Doing a search for wikileaks nobel shows the top results as newsfeeds from AP and Reuters on Yahoo, the Reuters feed on Bing, and, err, neither of them on Google, but at least the top results are news articles about it.
So I think the notion that it'll be suppressed is a wee bit silly. Once it's out there, it's out there!
* and apparently the ordered list tag no longer works, or at least not in preview.
Ogg Theora is technically highly inferior to H.264. All it has going for it is religion and ideology.
Way to prove the point, Mr. AC, with your teeny-bopper hasn't-yet-woken-up-to-the-real-world-of-practicality bitter-and-completely-out-of-touch "my way is the only way, forget whether something works, everyone has to support it because it fits in with my religion and ideology" parade.
Nonsense. That's only one step above the "best viewed in 800 x 600". The message is "I can't be bothered to code very well so please adapt your environment to suit my whims or laziness. Oh, and by the way, this code I'm writing...I don't want to think about all the possible error conditions, so if you file a bug report that says it crashes when I enter this value for the abc parameter, don't be surprised if I respond back with so don't enter that value for the abc parameter, then. What do you want, elegant error handling?".
If a similar vein if you don't like people complaining about something, don't read it. Or is taking your own advice, something you're not prepared to do?
You make a good point, honestly. The problem is that there are often snippets of good input buried amongst the trash, so I feel compelled to at least scan through the comments if it's a story I'm interested in. If it's a story about something I don't like or doesn't really impact me, well, I just ignore it. That's what I wish other people would do; it wastes so much time filtering through the anti-Facebook venom, say, on a story which I may want to read.
Same here (IE7 on corporate laptop - and in response to someone who posted a reply to you "why not install Firefox, your laptop probably isn't locked down so hard that it'll prevent it"...well, mine is locked down that hard, so it's not outside the realms of possibility).
The story page, at least, is more or less readable. But the front page was quite literally unusable. The sections on the left look terrible, but were there. Then there's a thin little bar on the right which contains all the front-page posts, overwritten by advertisements. In between - acres of white space. Nothing. If I resize my browser window, the acres of white space expand, and all the content is still squeezed up. I actually couldn't click through to most of the stories until I found the four pixels that were open for the "disable advertising" box. I didn't mind the advertising, but I was forced to hide it this morning. It's the only way I could use the front page.
Why? People make movies, you don't want to see them, don't buy a ticket. You save some ridiculous amount of money and have a few hours extra to indulge in something you will enjoy. Why is that so hard?
I don't get all this scorn and derision. If you don't like something - a movie, a web site, Fox News - ignore it. Change the channel. Isn't that what people always say when fighting for freedom of expression versus censorship? "You don't like it, you don't have to watch it."
Something that is "obvious" is usually only obvious if you consider it in the context of shared social knowledge or prior experience. I remember when I first moved to the U.S. and was buying a car, and the salesman pointed to the bottom of the sheet and (very happy because he'd just sold me a new car and was counting his commission) invited me to "just put your John Hancock right there".
Obvious to him what was needed - probably obvious to the majority of adult Americans. I had zero clue what he was talking about. Even when he realized I was stumped, he didn't know what to do to make me understand. That's not some peculiarity of the car business or mechanical talk - it's shared cultural expertise which I didn't know because I'd only been in the country for two weeks.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, bunch of nonsense, really. All the alleged "reasons" why you don't reboot Unix servers come down to oh no, woe, worry, scare tactics.... The article should be more properly titled "Why you shouldn't reboot Unix servers without knowing why you're rebooting them". It's actually kind of insulting - the author is coming close to inferring that Unix administrators are just as bad as the stereotypical Windows administrators in that they're prone to rebooting without understanding the problem.
By the way, I've had several Windows servers which went years without a reboot and were quite happily humming along. I can remember one which had been up for a couple of years and I finally had to reboot because it was going flaky and showing disk errors so I scheduled a disk check. Guess what, the RAID card had lost its configuration and the server wouldn't start up after the shut down. That is the kind of thing that you may want to have happen at off-peak hours.
Screw you. If you don't like Facebook, don't use it. This is nothing more than antagonistic, hypocritical, petty vengeance befitting an angst-ridden prepubescent teenager.
Paragraphs 1 & 2 - interesting.
Paragraphs 3 & 4 - eh...
Paragraph 5 - err, as you say, just, you know, don't buy a product that's aimed at a target market that clearly doesn't include you. Same as you don't have to buy a Lady Gaga album if you don't like it. (Or Metallica, or Mozart...).
And from the tenor of your post I think it's a fair assumption that you don't have a Facebook account. So...strike two, surely?
I really do like the points you raise in the first half of your post. I just don't like the whining that is so prevalent on /. these days.
Out of interest, have you read Bowlby? As for Hazen and Shaver, they could be anybody, but a search of Hazen Shaver turns up the people I'm talking about in the very first links. I do not consider that I'm twisting either set of research, frankly. I believe the implications are fairly clear, although I'll grant you it's not the primary topic. I assume you're also familiar with Hall's "Storm and Stress", and how Lerner and Anna Freud reacted to that?
If you're genuinely interested in the research, look at:
At the risk of you thinking I'm twisting something to my own ends, I'll also suggest Austin and Kortum (2004).
Obviously I'm professionally interested in this area and like discussing it. If, on the other hand, you just want to debate or make a point, have fun, but I'm out.
So, now let's consider a school age child. This is the most fragile time in a person's life, pschologically.
Really?
Err..yes, actually, really. I think Bowlby made that pretty clear - not that he was the only one, but I do like his work. Also Hazen and Shaver. There is a ton of excellent work out there, and it's pretty consistent.
I think the rest of your post is a bit of a question-begging assumption, to be honest.
Sigh. Seriously?
What do you think about Bradley Manning - is he being tortured because he's being kept in solitary confinement? Plenty of people here have stated, with some degree of passion and assurance, that this is torture because it has long term effects on the psyche.
So, now let's consider a school age child. This is the most fragile time in a person's life, pschologically. They may already be dealing with severely stressful situations outside of school, such as parents getting divorced, parents out of work, a close family member dying from cancer, the death of a pet, moving away from all their friends, and any of a number of other issues which are recognized as the most stressful situations possible in an adult's life, never mind a child. They may be getting bullied at school. They may be struggling with poor grades thanks to any number of mitigating circumstances. They may be sick themselves, with a severe illness.
And then they learn that a person who is in a position of authority and has a high degree of control over their life has blasted allegations in a forum that is publicly accessible to their peers as well as thousands or even millions of strangers.
And you think that's okay...
But of course. Slashdot summaries are typically as shrill and outrageous as the very worst of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Osama Bin Laden, and Sarah Palin combined. And on steroids. With a bad headache to make them grumpier and more shrill. And without the self-restraint typically exhibited by those individuals. And a bad dose of PMS. And deploring the overly-rigorous editorial standards of Fox News.
And that's what the comments have to go on, because god forbid anyone should read the article.*
* If we are so lucky as to have an actual legitimate article to read rather than a Photoshopped screenshot of a Twitter feed from someone who thought they read a blog somewhere by ImTheRealBillGatesHonest that's been printed out, scanned in at 50 DPI and then run through a prehistoric OCR reader.
Yeah, I'm done too. Here's the thing - you are posting all kinds of vague allegations ("it's not just solitary confinement, we're doing other things to him too") and then can't back them up. The least that is deserved here is to be honest. If the facts and truth don't bolster your argument, then re-evaluate your argument. And I have seen nothing to suggest that anything other than solitary confinement is happening. That waking him every five minutes? The post you give is not specific, but it doesn't explicitly state he is being woken up at night. From another web site (my emphasis added):
Guards check Private Manning every five minutes but allow him to sleep without interruption from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m., when only dim night lights are on, unless they need to wake him to be certain he is breathing.
Who's making up the stories here?
To be clear on my position, solitary confinement is not exactly what I'd consider fun, but from all accounts (including the ones you've posted and linked to) he's not in some dirty squalid rat hole, he's being kept clean, he gets a 15 minute shower each day, he can read (he gets one book at a time), he's not being starved or denied water.
To make up vague stories implying, however loosely, that he is suffering much worse, ultimately cheapens and harms whatever end you're trying to achieve.
I missed that particular issue. Would you be kind enough to tell me which article documents that?
Sleep deprivation. It can actually kill you if it goes on long enough, and it can drive you absolutely schizophrenic. Being constantly woken up does not allow REM sleep, and that will eventually drive anyone bonkers.
From the Salon link you posted:
Like most individuals held in severe isolation, Manning sleeps much of the day
The normally sober and sometimes accurate Wall Street Journal...
I don't think you fully appreciate the amazing levels of hypocrisy and outright lack of awareness involved in posting that on a site like Slashdot. This is, after all, the site where it's entirely possible to have 100 comments on a story before anyone posts a rebuttal/explanation that total invalidates all prior comments with two sentences that come straight from reading the article.
From your original post:
That is not the only thing we are doing to him, but yes, being held in solitary for long enough is definitely considered torture as it can lead to lasting psychological damage.
And again - what other things? I read every one of those links, and followed several of the links in those stories.
In fact, several of those stories state:
No one's alleging Manning is being subjected to electrodes on his genitals or needles under his nails
All I can see that comes under the category of "other things" is the deprivation of pillows and sheets. Which sucks, and I don't think it's fair, but it's one heck of a far cry from what you're implying.
It's an op-ed by senator Dianne Feinstein in the Wall Street Journal. Please let's keep things intellectually honest.
Again - citation. What are the other things that are being done to him?
You know, this is one of the most insightful posts I've read on /. in a long, LONG time.
As for TFA, just let them fricking die already.
Exactly. Throughout the years, people have posted long, time-consuming (both to write and to read) rants about SCO and how they keep hanging on and never going away, etc. Half the reason they stayed alive so long was they became almost a cause celebre thanks to the disproportionate attention lavished on them by the Linux/FOSS crowd and Groklaw. Hardly anyone outside these groups knew anything about SCO; nor would they have cared had they known.
So, your morality adjusts according to your personal needs ?
Yes, actually, for most people living in the real world, it does. I have actually been in the position faced by the person the article discusses, TWICE - once before I was married, and once after I was married and had a daughter. And I will tell you straight up that it makes an enormous difference to one's thinking process to sit down and look at your daughter and know she is dependent on the choices you make. For better or worse, how I act at work and how I manage my career determines how good a life she has, and I choose to take responsibility for making the decision, along with my wife, to have a child.
In this specific case, it's actually not a question of right or wrong. It's what we adults like to call a "grey area". If it really were that black and white, we wouldn't be having this lengthy discussion, now, would we?
You may think it makes me a bad person, and quite honestly I made a different decision when I was single. And had I made that decision several years later, and had it played out the same way, my family would be destitute. This isn't some theory - I know what happened the first time I went through this. Having a family, and having people who depend on you, DIRECTLY, for their daily meal, tends to change things. I feel terrible about bad things that happen to other people, whether they be job losses or cancer or floods. I do what I can to help out by donating to charities, for instance. But my daughter won't get charity from you, will she? So I will look out for her first. Then the rest. If that sounds harsh, well, I think you had better take a very hard look at how you view the concept of "family".
I submit the world would be better without people like you in it.
Grow up.
And if this pretentious bilge is the best you can manage, please shut up until you've been in this position. I have.
So far it's just a ceremonial handing over of the last blocks, and the recipients are giving brief speeches. The guy from Asia Pacific commented he expected to run through his final allocated addresses in three to six months.
This blows my mind for sheer paranoia.
So I think the notion that it'll be suppressed is a wee bit silly. Once it's out there, it's out there!
* and apparently the ordered list tag no longer works, or at least not in preview.
I have to laugh. From the original post:
Ogg Theora is technically highly inferior to H.264. All it has going for it is religion and ideology.
Way to prove the point, Mr. AC, with your teeny-bopper hasn't-yet-woken-up-to-the-real-world-of-practicality bitter-and-completely-out-of-touch "my way is the only way, forget whether something works, everyone has to support it because it fits in with my religion and ideology" parade.
Moron.
You're talking about intangible features - nothing to deprive you of actual material possessions. Therefore, not theft, and not stealing.
Or so goes the argument to explain why pirating music is not theft. (And this one is even more innocuous - it's not even "copyright infringement".)
You can't have it both ways.
Nonsense. That's only one step above the "best viewed in 800 x 600". The message is "I can't be bothered to code very well so please adapt your environment to suit my whims or laziness. Oh, and by the way, this code I'm writing...I don't want to think about all the possible error conditions, so if you file a bug report that says it crashes when I enter this value for the abc parameter, don't be surprised if I respond back with so don't enter that value for the abc parameter, then. What do you want, elegant error handling?".
If a similar vein if you don't like people complaining about something, don't read it. Or is taking your own advice, something you're not prepared to do?
You make a good point, honestly. The problem is that there are often snippets of good input buried amongst the trash, so I feel compelled to at least scan through the comments if it's a story I'm interested in. If it's a story about something I don't like or doesn't really impact me, well, I just ignore it. That's what I wish other people would do; it wastes so much time filtering through the anti-Facebook venom, say, on a story which I may want to read.
Same here (IE7 on corporate laptop - and in response to someone who posted a reply to you "why not install Firefox, your laptop probably isn't locked down so hard that it'll prevent it"...well, mine is locked down that hard, so it's not outside the realms of possibility).
The story page, at least, is more or less readable. But the front page was quite literally unusable. The sections on the left look terrible, but were there. Then there's a thin little bar on the right which contains all the front-page posts, overwritten by advertisements. In between - acres of white space. Nothing. If I resize my browser window, the acres of white space expand, and all the content is still squeezed up. I actually couldn't click through to most of the stories until I found the four pixels that were open for the "disable advertising" box. I didn't mind the advertising, but I was forced to hide it this morning. It's the only way I could use the front page.
?
Why? People make movies, you don't want to see them, don't buy a ticket. You save some ridiculous amount of money and have a few hours extra to indulge in something you will enjoy. Why is that so hard?
I don't get all this scorn and derision. If you don't like something - a movie, a web site, Fox News - ignore it. Change the channel. Isn't that what people always say when fighting for freedom of expression versus censorship? "You don't like it, you don't have to watch it."
Because of prior experience? Culture? Context?
Something that is "obvious" is usually only obvious if you consider it in the context of shared social knowledge or prior experience. I remember when I first moved to the U.S. and was buying a car, and the salesman pointed to the bottom of the sheet and (very happy because he'd just sold me a new car and was counting his commission) invited me to "just put your John Hancock right there".
Obvious to him what was needed - probably obvious to the majority of adult Americans. I had zero clue what he was talking about. Even when he realized I was stumped, he didn't know what to do to make me understand. That's not some peculiarity of the car business or mechanical talk - it's shared cultural expertise which I didn't know because I'd only been in the country for two weeks.