yeah, the mention of using BSD is definitely gonna get you a kneecapping. It clearly states on Page 17 of the Slashbot guide, "*BSD is to be respectfully honored as a vanquished predecessor or the quiet underpinnings of MacOS X, not used in real life."
I'm sorry, you've just posted an observation that implies Macintoshes are slower or somehow less desirable than X86 systems. Your Slashdot Karma is being deducted now, please don't let it happen again.
Seriously though, try the two browsers on the same platform before making decisions, Konqueror or Safari is measurably slower than Firefox on my Linux system and my Mac. At any rate, speed isn't the only reason to use a browser... if it was, we'd all be using links. Opera for instance is quite fast, but a PITA to use for many people and terribly non-compliant IME.
I'm sorry, I've just posted an observation that implies Opera is slower or somehow less desirable than other browsers. My Slashdot Karma is being deducted now, please don't let it happen again.
"Since the cost of making the site correctly in the first place is very low, likely the same price as doing it incorrectly..."
unfortunately, for the type of site you seem to be describing this doesn't play out. I'm assuming you mean the typical sell something site that has been built in FrontPage...the people paying the cost rarely know that the site won't work in non-IE browsers, because they don't know that non-IE browsers exist. They pay the developer for a site and the developer makes the decisions, and their input is limited to colors and page content. They have no more opinion on browser compatibility than they do on roofing material or what type of plumbing pipe to use.
The other kind of MSIE-only site is the doing-something site, which is designed to use an ActiveX plugin. This kind of site is not going to switch over readily, becuase they rely on the bad design that motivates switching in the first place.
I agree with all the people posting that outsourcing doesn't work well and that programming will, by necessity, continue to be viable in the US. However, I think it's missing the point that what outsourcing is sensible exerts a downward pressure on programmer's salaries in the US.
I know that I don't work as a programmer anymore, even though I enjoyed the work greatly, because I was unable to feed my family and pay the mortgage on what I was making. Maybe I'm just a lousy coder, but I make twice as much as a presales engineer and get a lot more freedom with my time, to boot.
My own personal example left out of the equation (not everyone has what it takes to survive in sales), does anyone else see the salaries for programming jobs dropping into the toilet?
I have a Timbuk2 bag as well -- the largest courier bag. At first I was going to return it, largest is really large. Get the smaller size if you're under six feet tall. They have a great configger on their website, which is worth checking out.
It holds a ton of gear and a week's worth of clothes. It can be jammed into the space under an airplane seat, would be practically impossible to remove from my person in a quick mugging scenario, and doesn't scream "geek with electronics!" Though I suppose the BlackBerry and iRiver sticking out of my pockets do that... My bag has also had plenty of beverages spilled on it without harm to anything inside.
Re:I got an idea for a hack....
on
A Hack A Day
·
· Score: 1
Oh, I won't drive with mine in the car any more. She's got so many opinions, let her act on them.
Drive the speed limit on an American highway and you'll be given a ticket for obstructing traffic:) Seriously, the right-hand slow lane is usually a few mph above the posted limit, and the great mass of traffic is going 10-15 mph above. It's the cowboys blasting along at 20 mph above and greater who tend to get busted, particularly if they're weaving through the lanes, as it is not very practical to give everyone on the highway a ticket.
spybot search and destroy is also an invaluable tool. Realize that resource utilization will let you know that you're an active spam zombie, but it won't let you know that you've got a keylogger unless you're extremely paranoid... the resource usage is too low to register above normal OS components chatting. Trojaned utilities and browser exploits will of course also fail to register with your methodology.
My Palm V was a genuinely useful device. I kept my address book and calendar in it, took notes, and carried a little bit of documentation (very little:-). It was my alarm clock on the road. Its battery life was decent, with the hard case I could drop it or sit on it and it would be okay.
I replaced it when the battery failed with a Sony Clie 610 which was prettier, faster, bigger, more fragile, and had poorer battery life. After a few months, I quit using it, mainly because of the bigger and more fragile problems -- it wasn't safe to carry in a pocket, and getting it out of my bag to take a note got to be more trouble than it was worth.
My current employer has a side product that manages Pocket PCs, so I was recently sent an IPaq something or other... gotta take the battery out to find the product number, that's really brilliant. Anyway, I used it a few times to test our product, and I carry it in my demo bag so I can show it to anyone who wants to see the product, but it pretty much stinks. I haven't tried it for the address book and calendar functions because I now have those in my phone and my web server... but trying to get the thing onto a wireless network and use the web with it is pointlessly awful. I did try to use it for a solid day at Intel Developer Forum, but I wasn't able to get it to stay on a single AP for more than ten minutes at a time, and the fully charged battery died after about three hours, so that was that.
I so don't miss our lawn, ripped it out ASAP. Front yard is all native plants and herbs, backyard is vines and flowers. The kiddies have what's left of the flagstone patio that the previous owners put in... what's left is not a lot as my son likes to pry up the flagstones looking for bugs.
A previous poster mentioned subsurface drip... there were sprinklers in place for the lawn, so I replaced all their heads with four-way splitters feeding lengths of thin drip hose with little half-circle sprayers on the end for plants that need more water. The hoses are all under dirt and cedar chip, it uses much less water, and hardly any of the water is evaporating away before the plants get it. Cheap, easily adjustable, highly recommended. Won't work for a grass lawn though.
I used to work for the folks who run this site; good times were had by all, and they are indeed not evil. Unfortunately I don't like much of the music enough to pay for it.
I do have an emusic account and have gotten a lot of good stuff from them. I'm liking the look of the relaunch, hopefully I can edit my stash again:)
IE only, others need not apply. WebEx and iLinc both give a tiny bit of lip service to alternatives, but stop short of a product that will work if you don't have Win32 and iexplore.exe.
This stuff is way beyond VNC and keeps my travel schedule down at 50% instead of 90%. Worth keeping a Windows VM around for.
You're misunderstanding the question of "scale of the mission."
Obviously some missions are more important than others. If the mission is to send people to the moon and bring them back alive, the bar is set really high. If the mission is to keep the rope from breaking in your example, the bar is lower. Maybe a lot lower if you're kind of annoying to the people running the software, heh.
Now, if the company's mission is to sell cat food on the Internet, their mission critical components are the whole LAMP stack and their ISP/hosting joint. Any of that stuff quits working, they quit selling cat food. Is that important? To the people selling cat food, yeah. It's not worth anyone's life, but it is important to the folks running the cat food operation.
Your attitude toward this basic issue can be interpreted in a few ways. One is that you lack the empathy and emotional maturity to understand someone else's viewpoint. Anothre is that you have those qualities, but don't chose to exercise them on a mere customer; in other words, you probably work in some form of tech support:)
The next step in marketing or sales is to go to the cat food vendor and press that mission-critical pain and fear button until the thought of their site going down makes them want to cry, then demonstrate how your product or service is going to make it better. They'll probably buy it, then they'll be handed over to tech support when it doesn't work....
We pay through the nose to live in the city, but we get what we pay for. Sure it would cost less to live in the sprawl a few miles from here, and it would cost even less to live in the sprawl a few hours from here. I could have a mansion in some flyover state, and I could probably buy a small island off the coast of Greenland. None of those options would give the same quality of life.
Especially when raising kids, you have to look at the life you're giving to them now, not the money you might or might not leave for them. If you don't want to raise them in the sprawl, rethink what you can and can't afford. If you do want to raise them there, you'll probably need to accept what you've chosen.
there's also the issue of waste storage, which is a big deal for the public. We can argue back and forth about whether a site like Yucca Mountain would really be safe, but the trucks between Burns Energy and Yucca Mountain are another matter.
Bull. Regurgitating general aphorisms blocks true understanding.
This aphorism came about because it is undesirable to have one service hacked leading to access to all the other services and firewall configuration. Okay, this is an understandable situation and goal. Taken to its logical end, it clearly leads to one service per box, which is a good design model for a corporate enterprise with uptime and security as primary design goals.
However, in a home network where service consolidation and low power utilization are the primary design goals, this additional layer of safety bears too high of a cost. Even if the servers are $50 laptops, six or seven of them stacked up are going to be noisy, heat-generating, continually failing little problems. That's probably okay if the goal is to learn how to manage a corporate enterprise, but now we're changing design goals midstream, never a good idea.
With tools like chroot and automatically-handled patch management (urpmi, apt-get, &c), the risk of getting the whole server compromised by one service is reduced, down to what is an acceptable level for many. Once that's understood, we can evaluate the choice of firewall/router packages, and once we're doing that the power and flexibility of netfilter or pf blow any SOHO appliance out of the water. Proper logging, a good set of utilities... appliances are fine for use in networks where no one cares, I suppose, but I don't see why you would want one when a Linux or BSD box could be used instead.
It's not about the article, and there is no spoon:)
Does Stephenson write dystopias? I don't think so. His worlds are certainly dirty, venal, and insane, but so is our current one. His worlds are still able to support relationships and dissent though... Winston wouldn't be caught and destroyed if he lived in _Diamond Age_ or _Snow Crash_. Of course, he'd probably be a 7/11 clerk or something, but he'd probably have a wife and kids.
You're 100% right -- Robocop is another example of a movie set thoroughly in its own dystopia. I can understand someone hating either movie, but I find both to be brilliant. http://imdb.com/title/tt0120201/ http ://imdb.com/title/tt0093870/
Funny, same director:) http://imdb.com/name/nm0000682/
Tangential, but I just saw Minority Report and though it was terrible. False ending after false ending after false ending, but what can one expect from a short story turned into a full length movie... what was that thing, two or three hours?
I do want one of those computers though, that was a cool bit of technology.
Slashdot Mirror
you mean like rpm or deb do?
Anyway, signatures don't solve the problem if the build system is hacked, because it's the trojaned code that gets signed.
yeah, the mention of using BSD is definitely gonna get you a kneecapping. It clearly states on Page 17 of the Slashbot guide, "*BSD is to be respectfully honored as a vanquished predecessor or the quiet underpinnings of MacOS X, not used in real life."
I'm sorry, you've just posted an observation that implies Macintoshes are slower or somehow less desirable than X86 systems. Your Slashdot Karma is being deducted now, please don't let it happen again.
Seriously though, try the two browsers on the same platform before making decisions, Konqueror or Safari is measurably slower than Firefox on my Linux system and my Mac. At any rate, speed isn't the only reason to use a browser... if it was, we'd all be using links. Opera for instance is quite fast, but a PITA to use for many people and terribly non-compliant IME.
I'm sorry, I've just posted an observation that implies Opera is slower or somehow less desirable than other browsers. My Slashdot Karma is being deducted now, please don't let it happen again.
"Since the cost of making the site correctly in the first place is very low, likely the same price as doing it incorrectly..."
unfortunately, for the type of site you seem to be describing this doesn't play out. I'm assuming you mean the typical sell something site that has been built in FrontPage...the people paying the cost rarely know that the site won't work in non-IE browsers, because they don't know that non-IE browsers exist. They pay the developer for a site and the developer makes the decisions, and their input is limited to colors and page content. They have no more opinion on browser compatibility than they do on roofing material or what type of plumbing pipe to use.
The other kind of MSIE-only site is the doing-something site, which is designed to use an ActiveX plugin. This kind of site is not going to switch over readily, becuase they rely on the bad design that motivates switching in the first place.
wake me up when there's a Klein bottle mac: http://www.kleinbottle.com/
I agree with all the people posting that outsourcing doesn't work well and that programming will, by necessity, continue to be viable in the US. However, I think it's missing the point that what outsourcing is sensible exerts a downward pressure on programmer's salaries in the US.
I know that I don't work as a programmer anymore, even though I enjoyed the work greatly, because I was unable to feed my family and pay the mortgage on what I was making. Maybe I'm just a lousy coder, but I make twice as much as a presales engineer and get a lot more freedom with my time, to boot.
My own personal example left out of the equation (not everyone has what it takes to survive in sales), does anyone else see the salaries for programming jobs dropping into the toilet?
I have a Timbuk2 bag as well -- the largest courier bag. At first I was going to return it, largest is really large. Get the smaller size if you're under six feet tall. They have a great configger on their website, which is worth checking out.
It holds a ton of gear and a week's worth of clothes. It can be jammed into the space under an airplane seat, would be practically impossible to remove from my person in a quick mugging scenario, and doesn't scream "geek with electronics!" Though I suppose the BlackBerry and iRiver sticking out of my pockets do that... My bag has also had plenty of beverages spilled on it without harm to anything inside.
Oh, I won't drive with mine in the car any more. She's got so many opinions, let her act on them.
in Wyoming, it is feasible to give everyone on the road a speeding ticket.
1 /i-880_sb_exit_031_01.jpg
Different matter here: http://www.westcoastroads.com/california/images80
Drive the speed limit on an American highway and you'll be given a ticket for obstructing traffic :) Seriously, the right-hand slow lane is usually a few mph above the posted limit, and the great mass of traffic is going 10-15 mph above. It's the cowboys blasting along at 20 mph above and greater who tend to get busted, particularly if they're weaving through the lanes, as it is not very practical to give everyone on the highway a ticket.
spybot search and destroy is also an invaluable tool. Realize that resource utilization will let you know that you're an active spam zombie, but it won't let you know that you've got a keylogger unless you're extremely paranoid... the resource usage is too low to register above normal OS components chatting. Trojaned utilities and browser exploits will of course also fail to register with your methodology.
My Palm V was a genuinely useful device. I kept my address book and calendar in it, took notes, and carried a little bit of documentation (very little :-). It was my alarm clock on the road. Its battery life was decent, with the hard case I could drop it or sit on it and it would be okay.
I replaced it when the battery failed with a Sony Clie 610 which was prettier, faster, bigger, more fragile, and had poorer battery life. After a few months, I quit using it, mainly because of the bigger and more fragile problems -- it wasn't safe to carry in a pocket, and getting it out of my bag to take a note got to be more trouble than it was worth.
My current employer has a side product that manages Pocket PCs, so I was recently sent an IPaq something or other... gotta take the battery out to find the product number, that's really brilliant. Anyway, I used it a few times to test our product, and I carry it in my demo bag so I can show it to anyone who wants to see the product, but it pretty much stinks. I haven't tried it for the address book and calendar functions because I now have those in my phone and my web server... but trying to get the thing onto a wireless network and use the web with it is pointlessly awful. I did try to use it for a solid day at Intel Developer Forum, but I wasn't able to get it to stay on a single AP for more than ten minutes at a time, and the fully charged battery died after about three hours, so that was that.
I so don't miss our lawn, ripped it out ASAP. Front yard is all native plants and herbs, backyard is vines and flowers. The kiddies have what's left of the flagstone patio that the previous owners put in... what's left is not a lot as my son likes to pry up the flagstones looking for bugs.
A previous poster mentioned subsurface drip... there were sprinklers in place for the lawn, so I replaced all their heads with four-way splitters feeding lengths of thin drip hose with little half-circle sprayers on the end for plants that need more water. The hoses are all under dirt and cedar chip, it uses much less water, and hardly any of the water is evaporating away before the plants get it. Cheap, easily adjustable, highly recommended. Won't work for a grass lawn though.
I used to work for the folks who run this site; good times were had by all, and they are indeed not evil. Unfortunately I don't like much of the music enough to pay for it.
:)
I do have an emusic account and have gotten a lot of good stuff from them. I'm liking the look of the relaunch, hopefully I can edit my stash again
I guess you don't use web conferencing tools then.
IE only, others need not apply. WebEx and iLinc both give a tiny bit of lip service to alternatives, but stop short of a product that will work if you don't have Win32 and iexplore.exe.
This stuff is way beyond VNC and keeps my travel schedule down at 50% instead of 90%. Worth keeping a Windows VM around for.
Sometimes I kind of like that, and other times I think I'm already there.
You're misunderstanding the question of "scale of the mission."
:)
Obviously some missions are more important than others. If the mission is to send people to the moon and bring them back alive, the bar is set really high. If the mission is to keep the rope from breaking in your example, the bar is lower. Maybe a lot lower if you're kind of annoying to the people running the software, heh.
Now, if the company's mission is to sell cat food on the Internet, their mission critical components are the whole LAMP stack and their ISP/hosting joint. Any of that stuff quits working, they quit selling cat food. Is that important? To the people selling cat food, yeah. It's not worth anyone's life, but it is important to the folks running the cat food operation.
Your attitude toward this basic issue can be interpreted in a few ways. One is that you lack the empathy and emotional maturity to understand someone else's viewpoint. Anothre is that you have those qualities, but don't chose to exercise them on a mere customer; in other words, you probably work in some form of tech support
The next step in marketing or sales is to go to the cat food vendor and press that mission-critical pain and fear button until the thought of their site going down makes them want to cry, then demonstrate how your product or service is going to make it better. They'll probably buy it, then they'll be handed over to tech support when it doesn't work....
We pay through the nose to live in the city, but we get what we pay for. Sure it would cost less to live in the sprawl a few miles from here, and it would cost even less to live in the sprawl a few hours from here. I could have a mansion in some flyover state, and I could probably buy a small island off the coast of Greenland. None of those options would give the same quality of life.
Especially when raising kids, you have to look at the life you're giving to them now, not the money you might or might not leave for them. If you don't want to raise them in the sprawl, rethink what you can and can't afford. If you do want to raise them there, you'll probably need to accept what you've chosen.
there's also the issue of waste storage, which is a big deal for the public. We can argue back and forth about whether a site like Yucca Mountain would really be safe, but the trucks between Burns Energy and Yucca Mountain are another matter.
Bull. Regurgitating general aphorisms blocks true understanding.
This aphorism came about because it is undesirable to have one service hacked leading to access to all the other services and firewall configuration. Okay, this is an understandable situation and goal. Taken to its logical end, it clearly leads to one service per box, which is a good design model for a corporate enterprise with uptime and security as primary design goals.
However, in a home network where service consolidation and low power utilization are the primary design goals, this additional layer of safety bears too high of a cost. Even if the servers are $50 laptops, six or seven of them stacked up are going to be noisy, heat-generating, continually failing little problems. That's probably okay if the goal is to learn how to manage a corporate enterprise, but now we're changing design goals midstream, never a good idea.
With tools like chroot and automatically-handled patch management (urpmi, apt-get, &c), the risk of getting the whole server compromised by one service is reduced, down to what is an acceptable level for many. Once that's understood, we can evaluate the choice of firewall/router packages, and once we're doing that the power and flexibility of netfilter or pf blow any SOHO appliance out of the water. Proper logging, a good set of utilities... appliances are fine for use in networks where no one cares, I suppose, but I don't see why you would want one when a Linux or BSD box could be used instead.
I think Mojo Nation / HiveCache is the earliest, fielded in 2000. Seems dead in the water now, though.
It's not about the article, and there is no spoon :)
Does Stephenson write dystopias? I don't think so. His worlds are certainly dirty, venal, and insane, but so is our current one. His worlds are still able to support relationships and dissent though... Winston wouldn't be caught and destroyed if he lived in _Diamond Age_ or _Snow Crash_. Of course, he'd probably be a 7/11 clerk or something, but he'd probably have a wife and kids.
You're 100% right -- Robocop is another example of a movie set thoroughly in its own dystopia. I can understand someone hating either movie, but I find both to be brilliant.p ://imdb.com/title/tt0093870/
:)
http://imdb.com/title/tt0120201/
htt
Funny, same director
http://imdb.com/name/nm0000682/
Just you wait til that tailor finishes my purple suit, buddy boy, just you wait.
Tangential, but I just saw Minority Report and though it was terrible. False ending after false ending after false ending, but what can one expect from a short story turned into a full length movie... what was that thing, two or three hours?
I do want one of those computers though, that was a cool bit of technology.