I've been looking at using dvdisaster for a similar reason. It was mentioned recently on one of the local sage lists I'm on, and unfortunately was too late for the asker (whose media was already corrupt).
I don't understand it either. It sounds from TFA as though he wrote these programs in the normal course of his employment, clearly making the software the property of the company. That he "placed locks on the code and stipulated that Titleserv could run--but not alter--the programs" sounds as though he was attempting to hold the company hostage. Even with some additional information in one of the comments on TFA, it sounds like it was a co-ownership situation, where the company had every right in the world to make modifications as it needed them.
You've got a couple choices if you want a token-based dual factor authentication scheme. Of course, there's RSA's SecurID that you already know about. There's also CryptoCard, which IIRC can emulate some of the RSA tokens, and has its own scheme.
Now, what's nice about SecurID is AFAIR it's the only token that does *time*-based auth (ie, the displayed number sequences change constantly as a function of elapsed time). However, there's a really ugly problem with their auth servers that we accidentally discovered trying to set up a replicated server for failover purposes. To wit: the servers only sync based on a timed (as opposed to event-based) schedule. So, in the normal course of events, you can sometimes reuse the same token (# stream on the hardware device) even though they supposed to be single use. This happens when you attempt to have both servers service requests, and login 1 uses server A to authenticate against, and login 2 ends up using server B to authenticate in a very short period of elapsed time. Server A hasn't had a chance to tell server B yet that it's already seen that particular number sequence, so B happily accepts it.
Now, the devious-minded can see a problem here... You can be sniffing a network connection, get the token, pin, and password from the network ("hey, we have these hardware tokens, why should we ssh/ssl/vpn?" or what annoyed me, "we can't use ssh key authentication, we *must* use password auth with this"), then DoS one of the auth servers, and attempt a login with the same credentials, hoping to get an alternate, not-yet-synced auth server. Bang, you're in (eventually). So much for the whole non-replayable 2-factor authentication thing.
I don't think this problem was ever solved satisfactorially (I've since moved off that contract), but you can "solve" it by only having a single auth server...
Unfortunately, I know a lot less about CryptoCard, since we went with SecurID ourselves and didn't find the warts until later.
Oh, yeah, good thing this is just windowss, as linux was ok, but Digital Unix and Irix were a bitch to get working with SecurID.
Not really feasible. I have to disable tor in order to post comments, for the same reasons. Again, great karma, I don't troll, been registered forever, and yet all the software cares to think about is the IP or subnet, not bothering to even take into account the account itself.
IMHO, disallowing *anonymous* comment posting from certain IPs or subnets makes sense, as non-anon, you can lock the individual accounts. But so much software seems to think an IP address is a good identifier and people are so lazy, I doubt anything will change soon.
When I went to update the BIOS in my Toshiba Satellite, which doesn't even come with a floppy drive, I discovered that since sometime in 2002, Toshiba started supplying bootable.iso images with BIOS updates. So, a quick CD-RW burn later (with the Satellite's DVD/CD-RW drive), I was booting off the CD, and updating BIOS and the CPU's microcode...
I've yet to try it with my desktop system, but that's a 1999-vintage Tyan.
(OT: for the love of christ, WTF can't logged-in users post through tor?!)
No. Sorry. It's not your information. It doesn't belong to anyone. Those that chose to display information a certain way are in their right to do such and lame excuses to justify the bastardization of their attempts to come off a certain way are the rant of the uninformed zealot with a "screw you all" mentality....
It's not something everyone has to get all up in arms about. It's a presentation of information. If you don't like it, go somewhere else! If he chooses to display it and prevent this extension from running on his site, so be it! He's well within his rights to do such.
I suppose from the above statements that you're opposed to the level of control most browsers ALREADY give over the display of content? To wit, in Firefox I can go to Edit->Preferences->General, and in there override fonts and colors so that the page's fonts, font sizes, and colors aren't used. I can choose to force links to be displayed with underlines. Under Edit->Preferences->Web Features, I can override popups, javascript, image loading, etc, as well as provide exceptions to most of those... Under Edit->Preferences->Advanced, I can control the resizing of images, force links to open in new tabs, etc. Additionally, if I set up proxies, I can force all my connections to go through privoxy, blocking ads and the like. I can also choose to not install flash, making websites that use it extensively stand out pretty sorely.
All of these settings can be viewed as a bastardization of designers' attempts to display information in a certain way. And most of these settings have been around since the early 1.x days of Netscape Navigator. GreaseMonkey appears to be the logical extension of these settings to the CSS world.
All the HTML markup in the world serves a single purpose---to suggest how a browser should display something to approximate what the originator had in mind. Nothing has ever said that HTML is an imperative command to display something ONLY one way.
It's funny how we spend so much time on alleviating traffic concerns, when it would be simpler to just abandon the car. It's to the point where it's often twice as fast and cheap to use public transport.
Unfortunately for me, it's 4x as slow, and only cheaper if my time is worthless. Living in a DC suburb, and absolutely LOATHING traffic, I looked into taking the metro system around here to get to my job. Over two hours of travel time, not including first getting to the metro station, then walking from the closest bus stop to the main gate of the place I work. This is opposed to a 30 minute drive these days, by shifting my schedule around.
As for getting work done while on the metro, yeah, right. Every time I've ridden it during normal working hours, it's standing room only, both ways. Makes it real difficult to pull out any paperwork I'm likely to have, which would likely be marked as controlled information ANYWAY, let alone use a laptop.
I'm a firm believer in not only asking experts, but also not providing (or listening to) wholly generic advice, especially when the advice given SHOULD depend on the specific situation. In your case, I highly recommend looking at a site like kenrockwell.com or other sites maintained by professional photographers. In particular, his how-to section is full of invaluable opinions by someone who takes photographs for a living. He tries to avoid saying "this is the camera everyone needs for everything", and instead gives opinions mostly based on his experience with the particular models out there, for particular situations.
For example, while he raves about the Nikon D70, probably at least in part because he's a big Nikon fan in general, he points out that the Canon Digital Rebel is still a good dSLR, especially if you have an investment in Canon lenses already. For point-and-shoot, he's currently wild about the Canon Powershot Axx series for what he's been using them for.
There are whole pages on How to Choose and Buy a Digital Camera, Should you buy a Digital Camera?, etc. While in the former link he does say just buy a Canon Powershot if you're too lazy to read the rest of the page, he also recommends actually playing with the cameras in a store to find out how easy they are for you to work.
As a side note, as a techie I find some of his more computer-oriented comments...amusing. But a lot of what he says about photography ("your equipment doesn't matter, your skill does", etc) seems spot-on. Just as you wouldn't ask your butcher for medical advice, or your doctor for computer advice, asking a techie for camera advice is probably a bad idea.
Either I'm being dumb, but I can't find the list of minimum specs for the game anywhere on the website. The most obvious place, the "technical" FAQ, sure doesn't have it, and if the download for the free trial does, it's after the registration form that I can't be bothered to fill in until I know if it's even worth my time to do so.
Having read through part 8 or 9 of the backstory last night, it looks fairly interesting...
Even if you don't overlook a spec or two, wait a year, and you'll be disappointed. The difference between PCs and consoles/iMacs (at least in this case), is the difference between a diverse group of vendors constantly developing new technologies (revolutionary or evolutionary) vs single vendors who have a complete lock on the platform, keeping it static for years at a time.
So what happens is, developers keep taking advantage of the latest and greatest video/sound/whatever in the PC world, where your equipment quickly becomes obsolete and the PC you got last Christmas has trouble running the games released this week, while developers for console systems and the like have a strictly-defined set of unchanging hardware (until the next replacement comes out), and so of COURSE everything for console Y or an iMac that you grab off the shelf is guaranteed to run....it's all for (arguably) obsolete hardware...
Pass a law declaring Bic pens to be "burglary tools", which can only be carried by "licensed professionals", and arrest anyone found in possession of one without a license. It works so well for lock pick kits...
X isn't running on that particular system. Existing ssh sessions freeze. New ssh sessions can't be initiated. FWIU, no new TCP sessions can be initiated. No clue if it's framebuffer or VGA console, but apparently C-A-# works to switch consoles, though the rest of the keyboard doesn't respond at all. So like I said, it sounds like some sort of bad hardware, or ghosts. I should also mention this only started happening with 2.6. Under 2.4 it was rock solid.
3. Ok, seemingly hard lockups are out - but these are more and more uncommon with 2.6 - but nearly everything else is dumpable, unless it screws with the NIC driver itself?
Well, a friend of mine using 2.6 is experiencing random lockups (we suspect either hardware problems, or ghosts), with nothing ever logged. However, he can still ping the machine even after it's locked up, but the console also doesn't respond. I've pointed him at this article, and he's going to try enabling netconsole to see if anything from the kernel is getting lost. Hopefully it'll help figure out what the problem is.
3 days is more than reasonable IMHO. If people can't wait that long, they've got some serious instant gratification issues to deal with. If you're unsure about what you want, then go visit a brick and morter store to find what you want - then go order it over the Internet...or at least price compare. If you can find it $50 or $100 cheaper off the Internet, then it'd be very stupid to buy it from Best Buy...3 days waiting is well worth both the savings and the satisfaction of not buying anything from Best Buy.
Except sometimes the immediacy is definitely a more pressing need than getting the absolute cheapest price. Two cases in point:
1) my power supply went tits up one evening. At first I thought it was the mobo that had died (i'd been doing some upgrades, and nothing powered back on). Luckily, I had a "spare" system that, while the power supply was woefully underpowered for the amount of hardware in the machine in question, at least allowed me to to verify that I could power up the motherboard, CPU fans, and case fans. A quick trip to BB, and I had a new PS. Sure, I grumbled about it, but I was back online *that* *night*, without having to deal with the pain of being offline for 3+ days. Sure, I could have gotten a much better deal online, but, well, I didn't have a computer capable of GETTING online. And I had someone @ home breathing down my neck because online projects were going to be due in a day or two. So immediacy won out.
2) due to a series of near-comical errors and overreaction at work, our entire network was taken down, from the pipe to the interet, inward. We're talking 2 machines in separate offices weren't able to communicate, because the decision had been made to disable all network ports until things could be rebuilt. However, we still needed to move files (custom kernels and configs) about in the early bootstrap stages of rebuilding the network from the ground up. A few of us had personal USB keychain drives. They proved so useful (and such a bottleneck, due to demand) that we went out and purchased another half dozen, in order to speed up transferring data around. And a 120G USB harddrive. And a USB CD/DVD burner. Yeah, we could have waited, if someone went home and ordered several hundred to a couple thousand dollars worth of equipment online, and saved some money. But when you have that many people sitting around idle or limping along, "time == money" rings true. It was cheaper to pay the premium for the immediacy aspects than to "save" a few bucks.
In both instances, there were overriding factors involved, some arguably more justifable than others. But in both, a time vs value judgement was made, and both technically being "emergencies", it made sense to hit up BB. Granted, if it's something I don't absolutely *need* *today*, then there's no contest, I'll buy online in a heartbeat.
That "Dell tech" in your apartment was more than likely an employee of some small-time computer repair shop that Dell has outsourced their on-site repair business to in your area. I got to know the techs in the Irvine, CA, area pretty well from all the problems our corporate laptops had...
What happens with them is, Dell overnights replacement parts to them, and ONLY those replacement parts, as determined by their crack team of phone technical support reps. They have zero latitude in what they can and can't do while on-site, and don't have any spare ANYTHING to work with. This includes stuff like case screws, which, if you've had your laptop long enough, you've probably lost (or found on the desk/floor/case) some of them. The enterprising repair techs will, when replacing something with screws, accidentally "lose" the old ones, so they at least have a supply of them when it turns out they need to be replaced in the field.
That just means the phone monkey you spoke to yesterday is the manager you're speaking to today... It's a common enough practice in support circles...
And yes, I hate Dell too, using a work-issued laptop. I swear, by the time I was done getting it fixed, there were enough replaced parts to build three new systems.
Their servers though, if you're on the right contract, rock mightily. You pay through the nose, but...
...is that, for a change, *you* are the "annoying foreign grad student" who has a funny accent, eats funny food, and doesn't quite fit into the culture. Unless that's just a feature of schools in the US.
The packages will still exist; they'll just be in the "non-free" section
Ok, and so what happens if, the next (or next next, or next next next, or whatever) time there's a big push to "get rid of non-free", as seems to happen regularly with Debian, and it finally goes through? That would be my big concern here. Moving a bunch of hardware support to non-free has the potential of abandoning a large amount of hardware in the future, should the camp that wants to eliminate non-free ever manage to actually get the momentum they need.
It especially doesn't seem right when you go to Loki's old site and read:
01.30.02 We'd like to update our customers on a few items as we prepare to close down.
...
Many of you have asked about support and maintenance for Loki products. We have taken the following steps:
...
all source code has been returned to the respective licensors. Although we cannot guarantee that each licensor will continue to support the Linux versions of their titles, we have made certain that they have all the necessary tools to do so. Don't be shy about letting them know your thoughts on the matter.
...
Seems to me that it's more an issue of "*we* never supported linux, and don't want to start now, so we'll make a claim that we *can't* do it, and that'll shut them up", or at least, an employee who doesn't know what's really going on.
Oh well, off to tuxgames.com to go buy something that really is going to work on Linux natively.
Realize there are others around you
on
Cubicle Etiquette?
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· Score: 2, Funny
Pet peeve of mine at my last job:
A coworker had this habit of brining in noisy toys, like the talking Sponge Bob Square Pants, dancing hamsters, etc. He'd routinely set them all off in succession several times a day. It didn't help that he himself had 2 voice levels, loud and bleeding eardrums. Nothing spoils your concentration like having to listen to a hamster sing "Kung Fu Fighting" followed by Sponge Bob's laugh, followed boing various "Boing!" "Crash!" etc sounds.
Others insisted on routinely using speakerphones for conference calls, even when several people in the same area were on the phone. Still others didn't understand the concept of "headphones".
There was also the guy who, when lobbing nerf darts and hitting someone, would scream out "OOOOHHHHHH!!!!" regularly. He'd also try to sing and play a guitar.
Now, if there were a normal office, it might possibly be semi-excusable (assuming you don't mind this stuff, or have a good set of earplugs--I recommend ones with the highest rating you can find, usually they're in the shooting supplies subsection of the sports equipment section of your local Mega-Lo-Mart), but this was a support center, where several people would routinely be on the phone with customers. The last thing THEY want to hear are all those sounds that drove me up a wall.
Seriously, I'm sure a LOT of confusion could be avoided by using C++200x. "0x" is overloaded as it is, not to mention sorting order problems, rollover issues ("was C++99 ratified in 1999 or 2099?"), etc. Add in the introduction of C#, and one can easily see how people might think it was literally referring to "C plus plus zero x".
Ah well, it wouldn't be a standard if there wasn't widespread confusion on its correct interpretation...
Looking through the linked PDF, it wasn't until slide #6 that it hit me what "C++0x" was, when I saw a reference to "C++98". "x" looks like it's a placeholder, but jeez, you'd think we'd have learned by now about using only 2 digits to denote a year!
I'll go off on a different track than the other responses I've seen...
Wouldn't python suffer from roughly the same problem as Java with the JRE? I mean, unless it's compiled (and I'll admit right now, I don't follow python closely enough to know if it has a "compiler" yet), users are going to need to find and download a Python runtime environment of some sort. The latest I've found at python's web site is around 9M. While that's still about 1/3 what a JRE is, it's still either going to be a separate install, or a lot of additional weight to package up with whatever you're distributing.
It would seem that anything interpretted is going to suffer the "separate download" problem... Ease of learning would also be debatable for probably every language out there. I know folks who are wizards with C/C++/Java/perl/$language1 who could couldn't get a working "Hello, world." out of $language2, while at the same time I know others with the skills in $language2 who couldn't do anything in $language1.
It's a shame the linked article's author didn't address what WOULD be an ideal language to use, and enumerate why, but it's probably because any language he did pick would end up sharing criteria with his "these make C/C++/Java bad" statements.:-/
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I've been looking at using dvdisaster for a similar reason. It was mentioned recently on one of the local sage lists I'm on, and unfortunately was too late for the asker (whose media was already corrupt).
I don't understand it either. It sounds from TFA as though he wrote these programs in the normal course of his employment, clearly making the software the property of the company. That he "placed locks on the code and stipulated that Titleserv could run--but not alter--the programs" sounds as though he was attempting to hold the company hostage. Even with some additional information in one of the comments on TFA, it sounds like it was a co-ownership situation, where the company had every right in the world to make modifications as it needed them.
You've got a couple choices if you want a token-based dual factor authentication scheme. Of course, there's RSA's SecurID that you already know about. There's also CryptoCard, which IIRC can emulate some of the RSA tokens, and has its own scheme.
Now, what's nice about SecurID is AFAIR it's the only token that does *time*-based auth (ie, the displayed number sequences change constantly as a function of elapsed time). However, there's a really ugly problem with their auth servers that we accidentally discovered trying to set up a replicated server for failover purposes. To wit: the servers only sync based on a timed (as opposed to event-based) schedule. So, in the normal course of events, you can sometimes reuse the same token (# stream on the hardware device) even though they supposed to be single use. This happens when you attempt to have both servers service requests, and login 1 uses server A to authenticate against, and login 2 ends up using server B to authenticate in a very short period of elapsed time. Server A hasn't had a chance to tell server B yet that it's already seen that particular number sequence, so B happily accepts it.
Now, the devious-minded can see a problem here... You can be sniffing a network connection, get the token, pin, and password from the network ("hey, we have these hardware tokens, why should we ssh/ssl/vpn?" or what annoyed me, "we can't use ssh key authentication, we *must* use password auth with this"), then DoS one of the auth servers, and attempt a login with the same credentials, hoping to get an alternate, not-yet-synced auth server. Bang, you're in (eventually). So much for the whole non-replayable 2-factor authentication thing.
I don't think this problem was ever solved satisfactorially (I've since moved off that contract), but you can "solve" it by only having a single auth server...
Unfortunately, I know a lot less about CryptoCard, since we went with SecurID ourselves and didn't find the warts until later.
Oh, yeah, good thing this is just windowss, as linux was ok, but Digital Unix and Irix were a bitch to get working with SecurID.
Not really feasible. I have to disable tor in order to post comments, for the same reasons. Again, great karma, I don't troll, been registered forever, and yet all the software cares to think about is the IP or subnet, not bothering to even take into account the account itself.
IMHO, disallowing *anonymous* comment posting from certain IPs or subnets makes sense, as non-anon, you can lock the individual accounts. But so much software seems to think an IP address is a good identifier and people are so lazy, I doubt anything will change soon.
When I went to update the BIOS in my Toshiba Satellite, which doesn't even come with a floppy drive, I discovered that since sometime in 2002, Toshiba started supplying bootable .iso images with BIOS updates. So, a quick CD-RW burn later (with the Satellite's DVD/CD-RW drive), I was booting off the CD, and updating BIOS and the CPU's microcode...
I've yet to try it with my desktop system, but that's a 1999-vintage Tyan.
(OT: for the love of christ, WTF can't logged-in users post through tor?!)
No. Sorry. It's not your information. It doesn't belong to anyone. Those that chose to display information a certain way are in their right to do such and lame excuses to justify the bastardization of their attempts to come off a certain way are the rant of the uninformed zealot with a "screw you all" mentality. ...
It's not something everyone has to get all up in arms about. It's a presentation of information. If you don't like it, go somewhere else! If he chooses to display it and prevent this extension from running on his site, so be it! He's well within his rights to do such.
I suppose from the above statements that you're opposed to the level of control most browsers ALREADY give over the display of content? To wit, in Firefox I can go to Edit->Preferences->General, and in there override fonts and colors so that the page's fonts, font sizes, and colors aren't used. I can choose to force links to be displayed with underlines. Under Edit->Preferences->Web Features, I can override popups, javascript, image loading, etc, as well as provide exceptions to most of those... Under Edit->Preferences->Advanced, I can control the resizing of images, force links to open in new tabs, etc. Additionally, if I set up proxies, I can force all my connections to go through privoxy, blocking ads and the like. I can also choose to not install flash, making websites that use it extensively stand out pretty sorely.
All of these settings can be viewed as a bastardization of designers' attempts to display information in a certain way. And most of these settings have been around since the early 1.x days of Netscape Navigator. GreaseMonkey appears to be the logical extension of these settings to the CSS world.
All the HTML markup in the world serves a single purpose---to suggest how a browser should display something to approximate what the originator had in mind. Nothing has ever said that HTML is an imperative command to display something ONLY one way.
It's funny how we spend so much time on alleviating traffic concerns, when it would be simpler to just abandon the car. It's to the point where it's often twice as fast and cheap to use public transport.
Unfortunately for me, it's 4x as slow, and only cheaper if my time is worthless. Living in a DC suburb, and absolutely LOATHING traffic, I looked into taking the metro system around here to get to my job. Over two hours of travel time, not including first getting to the metro station, then walking from the closest bus stop to the main gate of the place I work. This is opposed to a 30 minute drive these days, by shifting my schedule around.
As for getting work done while on the metro, yeah, right. Every time I've ridden it during normal working hours, it's standing room only, both ways. Makes it real difficult to pull out any paperwork I'm likely to have, which would likely be marked as controlled information ANYWAY, let alone use a laptop.
This isn't an orgy, we're the infrastructure for a beowulf cluster...
HAN synced first?
I'm a firm believer in not only asking experts, but also not providing (or listening to) wholly generic advice, especially when the advice given SHOULD depend on the specific situation. In your case, I highly recommend looking at a site like kenrockwell.com or other sites maintained by professional photographers. In particular, his how-to section is full of invaluable opinions by someone who takes photographs for a living. He tries to avoid saying "this is the camera everyone needs for everything", and instead gives opinions mostly based on his experience with the particular models out there, for particular situations.
For example, while he raves about the Nikon D70, probably at least in part because he's a big Nikon fan in general, he points out that the Canon Digital Rebel is still a good dSLR, especially if you have an investment in Canon lenses already. For point-and-shoot, he's currently wild about the Canon Powershot Axx series for what he's been using them for.
There are whole pages on How to Choose and Buy a Digital Camera, Should you buy a Digital Camera?, etc. While in the former link he does say just buy a Canon Powershot if you're too lazy to read the rest of the page, he also recommends actually playing with the cameras in a store to find out how easy they are for you to work.
As a side note, as a techie I find some of his more computer-oriented comments...amusing. But a lot of what he says about photography ("your equipment doesn't matter, your skill does", etc) seems spot-on. Just as you wouldn't ask your butcher for medical advice, or your doctor for computer advice, asking a techie for camera advice is probably a bad idea.
Either I'm being dumb, but I can't find the list of minimum specs for the game anywhere on the website. The most obvious place, the "technical" FAQ, sure doesn't have it, and if the download for the free trial does, it's after the registration form that I can't be bothered to fill in until I know if it's even worth my time to do so.
Having read through part 8 or 9 of the backstory last night, it looks fairly interesting...
Even if you don't overlook a spec or two, wait a year, and you'll be disappointed. The difference between PCs and consoles/iMacs (at least in this case), is the difference between a diverse group of vendors constantly developing new technologies (revolutionary or evolutionary) vs single vendors who have a complete lock on the platform, keeping it static for years at a time.
So what happens is, developers keep taking advantage of the latest and greatest video/sound/whatever in the PC world, where your equipment quickly becomes obsolete and the PC you got last Christmas has trouble running the games released this week, while developers for console systems and the like have a strictly-defined set of unchanging hardware (until the next replacement comes out), and so of COURSE everything for console Y or an iMac that you grab off the shelf is guaranteed to run....it's all for (arguably) obsolete hardware...
Pass a law declaring Bic pens to be "burglary tools", which can only be carried by "licensed professionals", and arrest anyone found in possession of one without a license. It works so well for lock pick kits...
X isn't running on that particular system. Existing ssh sessions freeze. New ssh sessions can't be initiated. FWIU, no new TCP sessions can be initiated. No clue if it's framebuffer or VGA console, but apparently C-A-# works to switch consoles, though the rest of the keyboard doesn't respond at all. So like I said, it sounds like some sort of bad hardware, or ghosts. I should also mention this only started happening with 2.6. Under 2.4 it was rock solid.
3. Ok, seemingly hard lockups are out - but these are more and more uncommon with 2.6 - but nearly everything else is dumpable, unless it screws with the NIC driver itself?
Well, a friend of mine using 2.6 is experiencing random lockups (we suspect either hardware problems, or ghosts), with nothing ever logged. However, he can still ping the machine even after it's locked up, but the console also doesn't respond. I've pointed him at this article, and he's going to try enabling netconsole to see if anything from the kernel is getting lost. Hopefully it'll help figure out what the problem is.
3 days is more than reasonable IMHO. If people can't wait that long, they've got some serious instant gratification issues to deal with. If you're unsure about what you want, then go visit a brick and morter store to find what you want - then go order it over the Internet...or at least price compare. If you can find it $50 or $100 cheaper off the Internet, then it'd be very stupid to buy it from Best Buy...3 days waiting is well worth both the savings and the satisfaction of not buying anything from Best Buy.
Except sometimes the immediacy is definitely a more pressing need than getting the absolute cheapest price. Two cases in point:
1) my power supply went tits up one evening. At first I thought it was the mobo that had died (i'd been doing some upgrades, and nothing powered back on). Luckily, I had a "spare" system that, while the power supply was woefully underpowered for the amount of hardware in the machine in question, at least allowed me to to verify that I could power up the motherboard, CPU fans, and case fans. A quick trip to BB, and I had a new PS. Sure, I grumbled about it, but I was back online *that* *night*, without having to deal with the pain of being offline for 3+ days. Sure, I could have gotten a much better deal online, but, well, I didn't have a computer capable of GETTING online. And I had someone @ home breathing down my neck because online projects were going to be due in a day or two. So immediacy won out.
2) due to a series of near-comical errors and overreaction at work, our entire network was taken down, from the pipe to the interet, inward. We're talking 2 machines in separate offices weren't able to communicate, because the decision had been made to disable all network ports until things could be rebuilt. However, we still needed to move files (custom kernels and configs) about in the early bootstrap stages of rebuilding the network from the ground up. A few of us had personal USB keychain drives. They proved so useful (and such a bottleneck, due to demand) that we went out and purchased another half dozen, in order to speed up transferring data around. And a 120G USB harddrive. And a USB CD/DVD burner. Yeah, we could have waited, if someone went home and ordered several hundred to a couple thousand dollars worth of equipment online, and saved some money. But when you have that many people sitting around idle or limping along, "time == money" rings true. It was cheaper to pay the premium for the immediacy aspects than to "save" a few bucks.
In both instances, there were overriding factors involved, some arguably more justifable than others. But in both, a time vs value judgement was made, and both technically being "emergencies", it made sense to hit up BB. Granted, if it's something I don't absolutely *need* *today*, then there's no contest, I'll buy online in a heartbeat.
That "Dell tech" in your apartment was more than likely an employee of some small-time computer repair shop that Dell has outsourced their on-site repair business to in your area. I got to know the techs in the Irvine, CA, area pretty well from all the problems our corporate laptops had...
What happens with them is, Dell overnights replacement parts to them, and ONLY those replacement parts, as determined by their crack team of phone technical support reps. They have zero latitude in what they can and can't do while on-site, and don't have any spare ANYTHING to work with. This includes stuff like case screws, which, if you've had your laptop long enough, you've probably lost (or found on the desk/floor/case) some of them. The enterprising repair techs will, when replacing something with screws, accidentally "lose" the old ones, so they at least have a supply of them when it turns out they need to be replaced in the field.
That just means the phone monkey you spoke to yesterday is the manager you're speaking to today... It's a common enough practice in support circles...
And yes, I hate Dell too, using a work-issued laptop. I swear, by the time I was done getting it fixed, there were enough replaced parts to build three new systems.
Their servers though, if you're on the right contract, rock mightily. You pay through the nose, but...
...is that, for a change, *you* are the "annoying foreign grad student" who has a funny accent, eats funny food, and doesn't quite fit into the culture. Unless that's just a feature of schools in the US.
The packages will still exist; they'll just be in the "non-free" section
Ok, and so what happens if, the next (or next next, or next next next, or whatever) time there's a big push to "get rid of non-free", as seems to happen regularly with Debian, and it finally goes through? That would be my big concern here. Moving a bunch of hardware support to non-free has the potential of abandoning a large amount of hardware in the future, should the camp that wants to eliminate non-free ever manage to actually get the momentum they need.
Seems to me that it's more an issue of "*we* never supported linux, and don't want to start now, so we'll make a claim that we *can't* do it, and that'll shut them up", or at least, an employee who doesn't know what's really going on.
Oh well, off to tuxgames.com to go buy something that really is going to work on Linux natively.
Pet peeve of mine at my last job:
A coworker had this habit of brining in noisy toys, like the talking Sponge Bob Square Pants, dancing hamsters, etc. He'd routinely set them all off in succession several times a day. It didn't help that he himself had 2 voice levels, loud and bleeding eardrums. Nothing spoils your concentration like having to listen to a hamster sing "Kung Fu Fighting" followed by Sponge Bob's laugh, followed boing various "Boing!" "Crash!" etc sounds.
Others insisted on routinely using speakerphones for conference calls, even when several people in the same area were on the phone. Still others didn't understand the concept of "headphones".
There was also the guy who, when lobbing nerf darts and hitting someone, would scream out "OOOOHHHHHH!!!!" regularly. He'd also try to sing and play a guitar.
Now, if there were a normal office, it might possibly be semi-excusable (assuming you don't mind this stuff, or have a good set of earplugs--I recommend ones with the highest rating you can find, usually they're in the shooting supplies subsection of the sports equipment section of your local Mega-Lo-Mart), but this was a support center, where several people would routinely be on the phone with customers. The last thing THEY want to hear are all those sounds that drove me up a wall.
So 0[0-9] is greater than 98? :-)
Seriously, I'm sure a LOT of confusion could be avoided by using C++200x. "0x" is overloaded as it is, not to mention sorting order problems, rollover issues ("was C++99 ratified in 1999 or 2099?"), etc. Add in the introduction of C#, and one can easily see how people might think it was literally referring to "C plus plus zero x".
Ah well, it wouldn't be a standard if there wasn't widespread confusion on its correct interpretation...
Looking through the linked PDF, it wasn't until slide #6 that it hit me what "C++0x" was, when I saw a reference to "C++98". "x" looks like it's a placeholder, but jeez, you'd think we'd have learned by now about using only 2 digits to denote a year!
I'll go off on a different track than the other responses I've seen...
:-/
Wouldn't python suffer from roughly the same problem as Java with the JRE? I mean, unless it's compiled (and I'll admit right now, I don't follow python closely enough to know if it has a "compiler" yet), users are going to need to find and download a Python runtime environment of some sort. The latest I've found at python's web site is around 9M. While that's still about 1/3 what a JRE is, it's still either going to be a separate install, or a lot of additional weight to package up with whatever you're distributing.
It would seem that anything interpretted is going to suffer the "separate download" problem... Ease of learning would also be debatable for probably every language out there. I know folks who are wizards with C/C++/Java/perl/$language1 who could couldn't get a working "Hello, world." out of $language2, while at the same time I know others with the skills in $language2 who couldn't do anything in $language1.
It's a shame the linked article's author didn't address what WOULD be an ideal language to use, and enumerate why, but it's probably because any language he did pick would end up sharing criteria with his "these make C/C++/Java bad" statements.