11. Revoke the drivers licenses for anyone with 3 serious tickets in the last 5 years.
Come live in Sydney, NSW, Australia.
They've just changed the demerit scheme so that you lose 3 points off your license for speeding if you're even going 1km over the limit - and public holiday weekends are double demerit.
On a full license (not learner or provisional) you get 12 points on your license, and points that come off stay off for 3 years.
That's right on a long weekend you could do 61km/hr in a 60 zone twice and that's your license gone!
All they've done is make it so hard that people are even less bothered to obey speed limits. That's until they come up to a known speed camera and do 10km/hr under the limit. Oh and if you do try to stay under the limit when everyone else isn't it gets very dangerous very quickly (not to mention the abuse).
Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.
The Windows key is NOT just for getting the start menu to display. There are all sorts of short cuts like minimize all WindowsKey-M to minimize all windows etc.
You're obviously not a frequent Windows user. Either that or you should know better.
That's right! Why waste time trademarking whole common words.
I'm going to trademark every letter of the alphabet indvidually, as well as every number. Nah stuff it, I'm going to go trademark every standard ASCII character for about 10 industries.
Then I'll charge people in those industries for naming anything, and in fact for speaking English.
Now, please think about this (and keep in mind I'm talking Australian dollars). It only costs you under $100 a year for dialup access if you know what you're doing. Okay another $100 for phone possibly...and every few years you probably need to spend $700-1000 on computer equipment. Yes if you're starving that's a barrier, but if you have any disposable income at all that's no problem. If you're a student you just about need that computer these days, and there are other ways of getting access (friends, net cafes etc).
Now say you like to participate on 5 message boards that each charge $30/year. Well that's $150/year right there.
Nope, definitely not a good precedent to set - paying for the right to comment. It's not too different from paid BBS's of the 80s and 90s, but they at least provided a service (now usurped by ISPs).
No need to break up a community just because you don't want to pay. You say you're close to these people. Assuming you're close enough to have contact details, you can always get together without Atomic's help. If you organised you could start your own board or join an existing free board and continue to communicate. I've lived through the rise and fall of a few online communities and if friends are important to you, you stay in touch.
I personally would never pay to make a comment on a board. If you don't like what the magazine is doing it's time to move on.
There is an advantage to restricting posting on certain boards, because you can cut out idiots and trolls if you do this carefully. There is no advantage to restricting commenting based on who has more money. It's called trying to make a quick buck. People forget that commercial magazines are about making money and not about giving people a warm fuzzy feeling.
In the end this will likely damage the quality of the magazine, because sensible people without a large disposable income are not going to waste money making comments somewhere for a price, when you could make them elsewhere for free and enjoy other areas of the hobby.
Still they're free to run their business how they like. Vote with your feet. It's the Aussie way!
How about saying that pi is exactly "1.000" in "base pi"?
Except that usually you use integers as number bases...and for good reason. I can't show you what 1 apple in base PI looks like without fractions. I'd hate to have 1 Pi fingers to count on etc. It gets tough when you count with fractions.
You didn't offend me in the least. It just sounds like you're capable and that if you're getting frustrated and lashing out that might be holding you back.
I'd suggest you consider the consequences of not hand holding. Instead next time someone takes on work they're not capable of point them to the right resources to get the job done instead of doing it for them. If you're in a position to do this without risking your own position within the company, you need to change your reputation from being someone who'll bail their workmate out by doing their work for them, to someone who'll bail someone out by showing their workmate how to do the task.
You're about 15 years behind the times. Integration is now an EXPECTATION. Leave it out and people will walk away - from personal home users to decision makers at large firms.
A couple of years ago, my (17yo, non-tech) daughter and a ( 50+ yo, non-tech) woman friend jointly installed Gentoo without my help.
It's just a matter of "follow the directions" and you get a working system. Anyone who can't install Gentoo must be afraid to RTFM.
2 non-tech users you know managed to follow the instructions and get the install to work on their particular hardware.
Fantastic! But you really can draw no generalization from this.
Telling people to RTFM does not cut it. "It worked for me so if you can't get it to work you must be stupid" does not cut it. *sigh* If we keep going like this, we'll be able to sit around in our old age and tell stories of a magical free OS that once was when we were young.
I keep trying to tell people the same thing but I keep getting modded down as a troll (as if I care except I wish more people had a chance to read what I was saying). Do as you will.
Check your attitude there. Regardless of how silly people are, its a silly mistake to think you're doing yourself anything but a disservice going around and thinking of everyone at work as an "idiot-user" or "simpleton".
I don't know where you work but most places people aren't very good with Excel its because they don't need it day to day, and they're not interested - it just isn't their main purpose in life to learn Excel. In any case if you're this public about your attitude chances are no one around you likes you much and no one would put you either in a customer facing position or in a people management position. That might be fine by you, but it's also probably why you're bored and jaded with working in a "cube farm".
..., No one else, not even my wife, knows my network password....,... is about the only part of his screed that could make sense to me.
If your partner wants to hurt you badly enough, your password isn't going to stop her/him. Most partners know enough about the other person that they could have them arrested. Good thing is it works both ways.
1-4 is fine, provided that the programmer is given the time to do the job right. It isn't always that the programmer is lazy - it's that they're given 5 minutes to change the code when the manager/user/customer changes their mind about what they wanted at the 11th hour. I think it's more often a case of time pressure than programmer laziness.
5. is a sign of immaturity. I've seen "business logic" code that would print out conversations between spock and kirk on a random day if a given function is called, other code that prints "global world domination has failed" if a failure condition occurs, and plenty of code with stupid variable names/puzzles, bits of not so funny nerd humour strewn in. Like a naughty child this programmer needs to be corrected if he refuses to grow up when he's caught out.
Start by documenting all the code he's done this with, and having a chat with his manager. You need to get that manager on side and have him sat down and told he'll need to fix it and/or never do it again on pain of being fired. If his manager doesn't listen and you can afford to do it, I'd definitely go up the chain until someone has him fix his ways.
/***
This program is intended to be the world's first fully functional artificially intelligent life form.
When marking my assignment please realize that comments are more important than code.
***/
/***
main - Standard C main program entry point
int argc - Standard C argument count
char** argv - Standard C command line arguments
***/
void main(int argc, char **argv) { /* TODO: Actually write the thing. Unfortunately I don't know how to do that, or I'd have my nobel prize. */
return;
}
I hope they start with something more resonable than this. A big project will get bloated and is less likely to happen. Instead of going to Jupiter, how about getting to Mars with a little more reliability, with people?
You think manned space flight to Mars is more reasonable and less bloated? It ain't a 3 day trip like it was to the moon.
This would be true if every piece of software that worked on RH5 also worked on RH6 and 7. I definitely found that this was not the case.
In any case do you want brownie points for guessing that I was using the most used distro of the time?
even I would roll my eyes if I saw somebody recompiling a kernel just to get their printer working. It's not 1993 anymore.
Okay obviously you don't understand why I was compiling the kernel, and instead of trying to get your head around it you've decided to be an arrogant git. Let me spell it out for you:
1) I recompiled the kernel, in a rush to get support for other hardware (ie. not the printer).
2) I did this in a rush. I just wanted the OS to work. I wasn't trying to experiment with Linux. I was trying to use it to run particular software for a uni class
3) When picking options in menuconfig I left out LPT support by mistake.
4) I discovered my mistake only when I tried to use the printer. This happened when time was scarce as I had groupwork to do on the uni assignment, and getting the group members to meet was difficult.
5) I ended up wasting half an hour to recompile LPT support. If I'd been a little bit more sophisisticated at the time I could probably have just recompiled JUST the lpt support as a module but I wasn't sure this would work, without further experimentation. my best option was a kernel recompile.
My complaint was that this is not how it should have been. How long does it take to add a printer driver in windows? 30 seconds maybe? Most of the time you don't need to even reboot. You have to go to great lengths to disable an LPT port in windows. It's not something you do accidentally. I found it very easy to accidentally leave off an option in menuconfig.
Now if you don't understand that more detailed account of the story I can't help you, so kindly go away.
Hey, it's not my fault that your apps are crappy. What I'm saying is that you can't fault linux for something that hasn't been true about it for 10 years
This is the exact attitude that open source developers take all the time when confronted with a user complaint:
"Works for me. Not my fault it doesn't work for you".
I am not you. I'm not running the same software for the same purposes with the same agenda. There are other people in the world using Linux for things other than those things you do. Take stock of how you treat others using a system if you're advocating they use it.
Now it is true that you can't take a Linux application built for one version of even the same distro and run it on another. This is true today even MORE so than 10 years ago. It's not the app's fault. It doesn't make the app a crappy one. It speaks of incompatibility: a lack of cross compatiblity between distros and a lack of backward compatibility between versions. You can call the apps crappy all you like but it doesn't change the fact that this is not how things should be.
Do you always choose to stick your head in the sand, or is this just true of OSS?
You may not want to learn how to fix the car, but it's good to know that any mechanic who puts in the time to learn can do so.
You're missing my point entirely.
MOST people won't know much about what's under the hood at all. If they have a problem, they go to the mechanic. They ask what the problem is in very rough layman's terms, what it will cost to fix, and what will happen if they don't fix it. They don't ask if the parts are made by company XYZ and whether or not they're an ethical company.
This is how it should be. A user shouldn't have to be an expert. It's true of cars and its true of computers.
You should always take your RAW images and post process to a different format as soon as convient (ie. same day in most cases). You keep the raw file but you also keep the image in a less flexible but standard format for posterity. You back up both images to hard drive, burn to CD/DVD, or whatever other strategy you use to keep pictures. Worst case if you can't decode the RAW in 10 years time, you'll still have a copy of the picture in some format.
At the time you take the picture, if you don't have any way of converting the RAW file to something standard, you really ought not to be using the camera.
(There's a whole other topic there - keeping data so it doesn't deteriorate through your own lifetime. CD/DVD is not a long term solution as it is proven to deteriorate).
"And I think you've missed the point...most people don't give a shit whether it is free as in anything as long as it does what they need."
Agreed, sadly, that this is typical human nature. It is also the precise mechanism throughout history by means of which freedom gets lost.
At some point you have to treat some things as black boxes? Tell me when the last time was you cared about the details of the design and build of the components an aircraft you flew on. You don't care. You just care that the pilot knows what he's doing, the aircraft works, and you get there safely in reasonable comfort.
That's just one example. In a technological society if you didn't do this with aspects of your life you'd be drowned in complexity. Not everyone's going to care about writing software or building computer hardware. If we build things on a philosophy that requires that, we're doomed to failure and it's not the general public's fault.
Slashdot Mirror
11. Revoke the drivers licenses for anyone with 3 serious tickets in the last 5 years.
i es/demeritpoints/index.html
Come live in Sydney, NSW, Australia.
They've just changed the demerit scheme so that you lose 3 points off your license for speeding if you're even going 1km over the limit - and public holiday weekends are double demerit.
On a full license (not learner or provisional) you get 12 points on your license, and points that come off stay off for 3 years.
That's right on a long weekend you could do 61km/hr in a 60 zone twice and that's your license gone!
Don't believe me? Take a look at:
http://www.rta.nsw.gov.au/rulesregulations/penalt
All they've done is make it so hard that people are even less bothered to obey speed limits. That's until they come up to a known speed camera and do 10km/hr under the limit. Oh and if you do try to stay under the limit when everyone else isn't it gets very dangerous very quickly (not to mention the abuse).
Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.
Have you tried Ctrl+Esc instead?
The Windows key is NOT just for getting the start menu to display. There are all sorts of short cuts like minimize all WindowsKey-M to minimize all windows etc.
You're obviously not a frequent Windows user. Either that or you should know better.
Is it just me, or is Hong Kong the perfect place for the MPAA to start brainwashing the youngest members of our society?
Whaaaat? I thought child abuse was illegal even in Hong Kong!
Trademarking of common words is just... stupid.
That's right! Why waste time trademarking whole common words.
I'm going to trademark every letter of the alphabet indvidually, as well as every number. Nah stuff it, I'm going to go trademark every standard ASCII character for about 10 industries.
Then I'll charge people in those industries for naming anything, and in fact for speaking English.
I'll be rich I tells ya!
!@#$ IP law. It's broken.
Thanks for the feedback.
Now, please think about this (and keep in mind I'm talking Australian dollars). It only costs you under $100 a year for dialup access if you know what you're doing. Okay another $100 for phone possibly...and every few years you probably need to spend $700-1000 on computer equipment. Yes if you're starving that's a barrier, but if you have any disposable income at all that's no problem. If you're a student you just about need that computer these days, and there are other ways of getting access (friends, net cafes etc).
Now say you like to participate on 5 message boards that each charge $30/year. Well that's $150/year right there.
Nope, definitely not a good precedent to set - paying for the right to comment. It's not too different from paid BBS's of the 80s and 90s, but they at least provided a service (now usurped by ISPs).
No need to break up a community just because you don't want to pay. You say you're close to these people. Assuming you're close enough to have contact details, you can always get together without Atomic's help. If you organised you could start your own board or join an existing free board and continue to communicate. I've lived through the rise and fall of a few online communities and if friends are important to you, you stay in touch.
I personally would never pay to make a comment on a board. If you don't like what the magazine is doing it's time to move on.
There is an advantage to restricting posting on certain boards, because you can cut out idiots and trolls if you do this carefully. There is no advantage to restricting commenting based on who has more money. It's called trying to make a quick buck. People forget that commercial magazines are about making money and not about giving people a warm fuzzy feeling.
In the end this will likely damage the quality of the magazine, because sensible people without a large disposable income are not going to waste money making comments somewhere for a price, when you could make them elsewhere for free and enjoy other areas of the hobby.
Still they're free to run their business how they like. Vote with your feet. It's the Aussie way!
How about saying that pi is exactly "1.000" in "base pi"?
Except that usually you use integers as number bases...and for good reason. I can't show you what 1 apple in base PI looks like without fractions. I'd hate to have 1 Pi fingers to count on etc. It gets tough when you count with fractions.
Hey maybe we can mash up the Longhorn screens and then we can legally put them up as a paroday.
Let's start by cutting off the "Shut down.." label on the start menu....oh wait...
Hi,
You didn't offend me in the least. It just sounds like you're capable and that if you're getting frustrated and lashing out that might be holding you back.
I'd suggest you consider the consequences of not hand holding. Instead next time someone takes on work they're not capable of point them to the right resources to get the job done instead of doing it for them. If you're in a position to do this without risking your own position within the company, you need to change your reputation from being someone who'll bail their workmate out by doing their work for them, to someone who'll bail someone out by showing their workmate how to do the task.
Integration is today's buzzword and need.
You're about 15 years behind the times. Integration is now an EXPECTATION. Leave it out and people will walk away - from personal home users to decision makers at large firms.
A couple of years ago, my (17yo, non-tech) daughter and a ( 50+ yo, non-tech) woman friend jointly installed Gentoo without my help.
It's just a matter of "follow the directions" and you get a working system. Anyone who can't install Gentoo must be afraid to RTFM.
2 non-tech users you know managed to follow the instructions and get the install to work on their particular hardware.
Fantastic! But you really can draw no generalization from this.
Telling people to RTFM does not cut it. "It worked for me so if you can't get it to work you must be stupid" does not cut it. *sigh* If we keep going like this, we'll be able to sit around in our old age and tell stories of a magical free OS that once was when we were young.
I keep trying to tell people the same thing but I keep getting modded down as a troll (as if I care except I wish more people had a chance to read what I was saying). Do as you will.
Dude,
Check your attitude there. Regardless of how silly people are, its a silly mistake to think you're doing yourself anything but a disservice going around and thinking of everyone at work as an "idiot-user" or "simpleton".
I don't know where you work but most places people aren't very good with Excel its because they don't need it day to day, and they're not interested - it just isn't their main purpose in life to learn Excel. In any case if you're this public about your attitude chances are no one around you likes you much and no one would put you either in a customer facing position or in a people management position. That might be fine by you, but it's also probably why you're bored and jaded with working in a "cube farm".
..., No one else, not even my wife, knows my network password...., ... is about the only part of his screed that could make sense to me.
If your partner wants to hurt you badly enough, your password isn't going to stop her/him. Most partners know enough about the other person that they could have them arrested. Good thing is it works both ways.
1-4 is fine, provided that the programmer is given the time to do the job right. It isn't always that the programmer is lazy - it's that they're given 5 minutes to change the code when the manager/user/customer changes their mind about what they wanted at the 11th hour. I think it's more often a case of time pressure than programmer laziness.
5. is a sign of immaturity. I've seen "business logic" code that would print out conversations between spock and kirk on a random day if a given function is called, other code that prints "global world domination has failed" if a failure condition occurs, and plenty of code with stupid variable names/puzzles, bits of not so funny nerd humour strewn in. Like a naughty child this programmer needs to be corrected if he refuses to grow up when he's caught out.
Start by documenting all the code he's done this with, and having a chat with his manager. You need to get that manager on side and have him sat down and told he'll need to fix it and/or never do it again on pain of being fired. If his manager doesn't listen and you can afford to do it, I'd definitely go up the chain until someone has him fix his ways.
/***
/***
/* TODO: Actually write the thing. Unfortunately I don't know how to do that, or I'd have my nobel prize. */
This program is intended to be the world's first fully functional artificially intelligent life form.
When marking my assignment please realize that comments are more important than code.
***/
main - Standard C main program entry point
int argc - Standard C argument count
char** argv - Standard C command line arguments
***/
void main(int argc, char **argv) {
return;
}
Lucas now struggles with how to reinvent himself
I can cope with that, but if he shows up in a pointy bra with his teeth blacked out, I'm walking out!
Let's celebrate!
There's so much to celebrate.
Laws that allow others to lock their ideas away so no one can use them.
Laws that allow organised price fixing.
Laws that allow people to own ideas that should belong to everyone. Everything down to your own DNA has some form of IP on it.
Rejoice world.
Gimme a break!
I hope they start with something more resonable than this. A big project will get bloated and is less likely to happen. Instead of going to Jupiter, how about getting to Mars with a little more reliability, with people?
You think manned space flight to Mars is more reasonable and less bloated? It ain't a 3 day trip like it was to the moon.
Then I would call RH5 a pretty darn good guess.
This would be true if every piece of software that worked on RH5 also worked on RH6 and 7. I definitely found that this was not the case.
In any case do you want brownie points for guessing that I was using the most used distro of the time?
even I would roll my eyes if I saw somebody recompiling a kernel just to get their printer working. It's not 1993 anymore.
Okay obviously you don't understand why I was compiling the kernel, and instead of trying to get your head around it you've decided to be an arrogant git. Let me spell it out for you:
1) I recompiled the kernel, in a rush to get support for other hardware (ie. not the printer).
2) I did this in a rush. I just wanted the OS to work. I wasn't trying to experiment with Linux. I was trying to use it to run particular software for a uni class
3) When picking options in menuconfig I left out LPT support by mistake.
4) I discovered my mistake only when I tried to use the printer. This happened when time was scarce as I had groupwork to do on the uni assignment, and getting the group members to meet was difficult.
5) I ended up wasting half an hour to recompile LPT support. If I'd been a little bit more sophisisticated at the time I could probably have just recompiled JUST the lpt support as a module but I wasn't sure this would work, without further experimentation. my best option was a kernel recompile.
My complaint was that this is not how it should have been. How long does it take to add a printer driver in windows? 30 seconds maybe? Most of the time you don't need to even reboot. You have to go to great lengths to disable an LPT port in windows. It's not something you do accidentally. I found it very easy to accidentally leave off an option in menuconfig.
Now if you don't understand that more detailed account of the story I can't help you, so kindly go away.
Hey, it's not my fault that your apps are crappy. What I'm saying is that you can't fault linux for something that hasn't been true about it for 10 years
This is the exact attitude that open source developers take all the time when confronted with a user complaint:
"Works for me. Not my fault it doesn't work for you".
I am not you. I'm not running the same software for the same purposes with the same agenda. There are other people in the world using Linux for things other than those things you do. Take stock of how you treat others using a system if you're advocating they use it.
Now it is true that you can't take a Linux application built for one version of even the same distro and run it on another. This is true today even MORE so than 10 years ago. It's not the app's fault. It doesn't make the app a crappy one. It speaks of incompatibility: a lack of cross compatiblity between distros and a lack of backward compatibility between versions. You can call the apps crappy all you like but it doesn't change the fact that this is not how things should be.
Do you always choose to stick your head in the sand, or is this just true of OSS?
You may not want to learn how to fix the car, but it's good to know that any mechanic who puts in the time to learn can do so.
You're missing my point entirely.
MOST people won't know much about what's under the hood at all. If they have a problem, they go to the mechanic. They ask what the problem is in very rough layman's terms, what it will cost to fix, and what will happen if they don't fix it. They don't ask if the parts are made by company XYZ and whether or not they're an ethical company.
This is how it should be. A user shouldn't have to be an expert. It's true of cars and its true of computers.
You should always take your RAW images and post process to a different format as soon as convient (ie. same day in most cases). You keep the raw file but you also keep the image in a less flexible but standard format for posterity. You back up both images to hard drive, burn to CD/DVD, or whatever other strategy you use to keep pictures. Worst case if you can't decode the RAW in 10 years time, you'll still have a copy of the picture in some format.
At the time you take the picture, if you don't have any way of converting the RAW file to something standard, you really ought not to be using the camera.
(There's a whole other topic there - keeping data so it doesn't deteriorate through your own lifetime. CD/DVD is not a long term solution as it is proven to deteriorate).
"And I think you've missed the point...most people don't give a shit whether it is free as in anything as long as it does what they need."
Agreed, sadly, that this is typical human nature. It is also the precise mechanism throughout history by means of which freedom gets lost.
At some point you have to treat some things as black boxes? Tell me when the last time was you cared about the details of the design and build of the components an aircraft you flew on. You don't care. You just care that the pilot knows what he's doing, the aircraft works, and you get there safely in reasonable comfort.
That's just one example. In a technological society if you didn't do this with aspects of your life you'd be drowned in complexity. Not everyone's going to care about writing software or building computer hardware. If we build things on a philosophy that requires that, we're doomed to failure and it's not the general public's fault.
That gives the shuttle a success rate of 97.7%. That doesn't sound all that dangerous to me...
Would you drive your car if your brakes had a success rate of 97.7%?
Space is dangerous. Period.
You're a Unix guru are you? No, I think you're a troll.
I know how to use vi you halfwit. Do your grandparents know or want to know?