i'm not sure i agree. i've never worked for a university so feel free to dismiss this as the musings of an idle mind, but it seems to me that once you factor in students the depth of the heirarchy at the average university and average corporation would probably fall into roughly equal ranges. After all, the bofh didn't have to change his tactics that much when he got a "real" job;)
Anyhow - even if there are more people who can tell you to go piss up a rope when you come by with your anti-virus ("but it makes my machine so slow!"), you should just look at that as an incentive to hone your communications skills, since "I AM THE LAW" doesn't cut it in those cases. Most people are (mostly) rational - even those who don't understand computers with the fluency of the average basement dwelling IT staffer. They don't want viruses or spy ware on their computer, they don't want some kid going through their email or using their credit card to order pornography on the net. It's your job to stop these things happening to them, but you need their help to do that. Some people might not be that rational - they turn everything into a pissing match and figure that they actually make more points by demonstrating that the rules don't apply to them. Don't worry too much - but do make sure to get it in writing. If something happens these same people might well go after you since your "incompetence" caused them all these problems, but hopefully you have enough of a reputation for friendly service by now that the rest of the reasonable people will see your side of the story. On the other hand if you spent your time acting like a two bit tyrant nobody will step up for you when (and that's a "when") something does get through and questions get asked.
(Long winded) moral of this story: you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.
I don't think this is any different in the corporate world - explaining to a senior manager that he doesn't have access to that system isn't any easier. The key is in how you communicate it. Telling people that that's the way it is and "they have to live with it" is basically rude, and rudeness begets rudeness. The difference is, unlike the intern down the hall or the members of the freshman class, the senior manager / important tenured professor really doesn't have to take any stick from some gnome in IT services. I think the key is to explain to them why you are imposing these restrictions (try to accentuate the good you are doing for them without being patronizing. Don't use the phrase "i could explain but your head would explode". Surprisingly few people outside IT find that very funny.)
It is inevitable that you will occasionally run into people who will not listen to reason, and who are highly enough placed that they don't have to. That's fine, stay calm, just make sure that you get any deviation from the security baseline in writing so you are covered in case something goes wrong (at this point you want to avoid the phrase "i told you so").
I wasn't talking about Mr. McDonald - I was talking about you specifically. Your original observation about the quality of the debate on slashdot is actually right on target: the signal to noise ratio is terrible, and only the most immature "slashbot" would ever argue otherwise.
My observation, on the other hand, is that outbursts such as yours are most certainly part of the noise. If you don't like it here, leave. If you decide to stay, why not demonstrate your maturity and intelligence by trying to promote some intelligent material to the signal side of the equation?
You are given some content that includes ads. Do you feel it is right to remove those ads from the content before viewing? Why?
I use Adblock. I can't say i think too much about whether it's right or wrong - i do it because it's possible, it enhances my surfing experience, and it protects me from privacy violations committed by advertisers. There are plenty of situations where you can exploit loopholes (tax law being the biggest example) in order to decrease the burden on yourself without it being illegal or immoral - how is this different?
Actually this is on xp pro at work. We don't have desktop internet access (i know, so 90's) so i use a thumbdrive to move files back and forth. What gave me way more headaches was telling the damn thing to do nothing when i connected the drive (kept on asking me "what should i do when you connect this drive?" and then forgetting my previous answer of "shut up and take it!")
Granted, and that's certainly a superior way to handle the issue than the situation i described above under Windows XP. The author's "problem", however, seems to be with the fact that the system warns you when the drive is unplugged, not when you next need to access it (load/save/whatever). After all, maybe you wanted to remove the drive even though you knew there was a file open - also knowing that you could plug it back in next time you wanted to save or whatever...
The open file thing is inconsistent between applications (which, i guess, is bad). Ultraedit tells me the file no longer exists, click Ok to close or Cancel to keep window open. Some other apps will complain until i tell them to "Save as" in another location, after which that's "the" file. Most other apps keep popping up error messages until you close the window (although in some cases you have to force quit the program to stop the nags).
I think the best would be if the computer told you the drive/disk/whatever with the file was no longer connected and let you re-connect it and then continue with what you were doing.
The only thing Windows handles being removed "gracefully" is a floppy...To insinuate that Windows gracefully handles the unexpected removal of USB and/or FireWire external volumes is crap.
Actually Windows (XP) doesn't nag if i just yank my USB thumb drive out without doing the "Safely remove hardware" thing.
At the time, it was free (as in beer) for personal and educational use.
Off topic, i know, but why do people always talk about "free as in beer"? Where is this free beer? Beer isn't free - that's pretty much why we all go to work every day (to earn money to buy beer), not to mention: how confident would you be of code quality if beer really was free? Many drunk eyeballs might not be the optimal bug hunting technique.
Sounds like a classic case of tier leakage, esp. the bits about "changes in data necessitate changes in code". It is completely possible to seperate content generation and presentation in LAMP apps, just as it is possible to tie everything into a massive ugly knot with JSPs: just because one's a p-language and the other's java does *not* mean that's one's bound to fail and the other is idiot proof. And as for your comments regarding statelessness: HTTP is itself a stateless protocol, so a web application written in php or perl faces the same constraints and solutions as a J2EE web app. If we were discussing thick client apps then sure, but we're not: it's web app vs web app.
What this sounds like to me is that you took the lessons learned in language/platform A and applied them in language/platform B, but then attributed your success to language B as if it were somehow "better".
try maintaining a large commercial website in something non-structured such as Perl/PHP. Yick! (Been there, have the T-shirt and a really bad taste...)
Oh come on! Some of the most heavily trafficed sites in the world - commerical and otherwise - are built on perl/php and seem to do just fine. Why do these discussions ALWAYS degenerate into "technology Y is better than technology X"? The fact of the matter is that, within a pretty broad spectrum of reason, what technology you use is not the deciding factor of how successful and maintainable your app is going to be. The day someone does come out with a miracle technology that REALLY improves a project's chances of success, we'll all know about it pretty darn quick because everybody will flock to it overnight - and i mean actual people, not magazine articles or Oreilly books. Given that we're all still having "my language can beat up your language" discussions on Slashdot, it's pretty safe to say that we're not at that point yet.
If you had a bad experience with a Perl/PHP based site before, the chances are pretty high that the fault is more with the designers (or lack of) and builders than the languages used. No sweat, this job is a learning experience and the first couple of apps will always be dogfood. A very good book once described mastery (in the development business) as the stage where you don't want to rip up all the code you've done in the last six months and start over.
Whoa there... Java Apps (by which I presume you actually meant "Java applets", or you were trolling) have nothing to do with Tomcat, unless Tomcat itself were serving said applets.
Well, Tomcat itself is an application... written in Java... often abbreviated as a "Java App". Deploy a couple of webapps in tomcat and then check out the memory footprint of Java.exe and you'll see what he means. I've never used tomcat for production use although i do have 5.0.28 running on my workstation to test stuff, and i've found the solution to any perceived performance problems (esp. in single user mode as i do) to be RAM, RAM, and more RAM. At today's prices, why quibble: throw a gig at the problem - even if your problem isn't memory bound you'll *still* have a gig of ram! You can cackle like a maniac every time you think about it!
"astroturfing" is when companies plant fake messages which make it look like their product/service/whatever enjoys massive grass roots support (hence the name). When a company releases a press release, that's not astroturfing since a) you know the statement is being made by the company and not some "man on the street" and b) you (hopefully) know enough to take anything a company says with a grain of salt (including official financial statements).
As for IP issues being "manufactured"... that's debateable. We don't need to get into a long debate about the merits of a certain Utah based firm's claims, but people at all levels of open source development are certainly more aware that there are more questions than "does it compile?" when receiving a patch.
Other than that: yeah, it's just more Microsoft marketing mumbo-jumbo, designed to furthur the "nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft" line. In a way it's kind of flattering that this 300 billion USD gorilla seems so threatened by linux. On the other hand... marketing is what commercial companies do.
Something about a shiny black iBook seems cool to me. paint. not just for sniffing anymore.
Re:Hibernate is good, but I am using Prevayler mor
on
Hibernate in Action
·
· Score: 1
Well, I've seen "modern" applications that were a nightmare to modify (chasing changes thru different levels of abstraction) and SQL (read two tier database backed - "classical") apps which were a snap to maintain (add a field to the database, modify the insert and update procs in a package named after the table, done in five minutes). The key factors in whether an application will age well are the quality of the design and devlopment that went in to it, not the technology that it is based on or uses (within reason, of course... but both hibernate and "classic SQL based" are well within that reason). This whole fashion for endless discussions about why a given technology is "better" than another or why using certain techniques will invariably doom your software project to the ninth and deepest circle of hell are a waste of time in an industry that already "enjoys" a spectaculat project failure rate. Good developers and designers produce good applications, bad developers and designers produce a mess. End of.
might have to downgrade them a tad... not for the installation, but because i just found out that it indexes encrypted outlook mails when you open/read them and stores them in plain text, even if you specified the "don't index encrypted web pages" option...
Overall, i'd have to give it a 9 out of a possible 10, and i'm in much the same case as you are (all the good stuff not on C:\, incompatible browser software, etc.). The reason i'm giving it such a high score is that this software targets the "average" user and does a completely brilliant job of it. A 400k download followed by (this is the kicker) a question-free installation and it "just works". Software a son could love, but a mother could install.
The inmates have been evicted, someone else is running this asylum.
Slashdot Mirror
really? will it run linux?
i'm not sure i agree. i've never worked for a university so feel free to dismiss this as the musings of an idle mind, but it seems to me that once you factor in students the depth of the heirarchy at the average university and average corporation would probably fall into roughly equal ranges. After all, the bofh didn't have to change his tactics that much when he got a "real" job ;)
Anyhow - even if there are more people who can tell you to go piss up a rope when you come by with your anti-virus ("but it makes my machine so slow!"), you should just look at that as an incentive to hone your communications skills, since "I AM THE LAW" doesn't cut it in those cases. Most people are (mostly) rational - even those who don't understand computers with the fluency of the average basement dwelling IT staffer. They don't want viruses or spy ware on their computer, they don't want some kid going through their email or using their credit card to order pornography on the net. It's your job to stop these things happening to them, but you need their help to do that. Some people might not be that rational - they turn everything into a pissing match and figure that they actually make more points by demonstrating that the rules don't apply to them. Don't worry too much - but do make sure to get it in writing. If something happens these same people might well go after you since your "incompetence" caused them all these problems, but hopefully you have enough of a reputation for friendly service by now that the rest of the reasonable people will see your side of the story. On the other hand if you spent your time acting like a two bit tyrant nobody will step up for you when (and that's a "when") something does get through and questions get asked.
(Long winded) moral of this story: you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.
I don't think this is any different in the corporate world - explaining to a senior manager that he doesn't have access to that system isn't any easier. The key is in how you communicate it. Telling people that that's the way it is and "they have to live with it" is basically rude, and rudeness begets rudeness. The difference is, unlike the intern down the hall or the members of the freshman class, the senior manager / important tenured professor really doesn't have to take any stick from some gnome in IT services. I think the key is to explain to them why you are imposing these restrictions (try to accentuate the good you are doing for them without being patronizing. Don't use the phrase "i could explain but your head would explode". Surprisingly few people outside IT find that very funny.)
It is inevitable that you will occasionally run into people who will not listen to reason, and who are highly enough placed that they don't have to. That's fine, stay calm, just make sure that you get any deviation from the security baseline in writing so you are covered in case something goes wrong (at this point you want to avoid the phrase "i told you so").
I wasn't talking about Mr. McDonald - I was talking about you specifically. Your original observation about the quality of the debate on slashdot is actually right on target: the signal to noise ratio is terrible, and only the most immature "slashbot" would ever argue otherwise.
My observation, on the other hand, is that outbursts such as yours are most certainly part of the noise. If you don't like it here, leave. If you decide to stay, why not demonstrate your maturity and intelligence by trying to promote some intelligent material to the signal side of the equation?
...the target is going to be folks who can pay more for a server than the software itself?
As i read the article, the target is people who violate the license agreement they signed, not their customers.
The real smart people don't need to prove it--they live it.
Fill in the blank:
"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the _________"
thank you for playing.
You are given some content that includes ads. Do you feel it is right to remove those ads from the content before viewing? Why?
I use Adblock. I can't say i think too much about whether it's right or wrong - i do it because it's possible, it enhances my surfing experience, and it protects me from privacy violations committed by advertisers. There are plenty of situations where you can exploit loopholes (tax law being the biggest example) in order to decrease the burden on yourself without it being illegal or immoral - how is this different?
roflmao. thank you very much!
Actually this is on xp pro at work. We don't have desktop internet access (i know, so 90's) so i use a thumbdrive to move files back and forth. What gave me way more headaches was telling the damn thing to do nothing when i connected the drive (kept on asking me "what should i do when you connect this drive?" and then forgetting my previous answer of "shut up and take it!")
it is actually strangely compelling...
Granted, and that's certainly a superior way to handle the issue than the situation i described above under Windows XP. The author's "problem", however, seems to be with the fact that the system warns you when the drive is unplugged, not when you next need to access it (load/save/whatever). After all, maybe you wanted to remove the drive even though you knew there was a file open - also knowing that you could plug it back in next time you wanted to save or whatever...
The open file thing is inconsistent between applications (which, i guess, is bad). Ultraedit tells me the file no longer exists, click Ok to close or Cancel to keep window open. Some other apps will complain until i tell them to "Save as" in another location, after which that's "the" file. Most other apps keep popping up error messages until you close the window (although in some cases you have to force quit the program to stop the nags).
I think the best would be if the computer told you the drive/disk/whatever with the file was no longer connected and let you re-connect it and then continue with what you were doing.
The only thing Windows handles being removed "gracefully" is a floppy...To insinuate that Windows gracefully handles the unexpected removal of USB and/or FireWire external volumes is crap.
Actually Windows (XP) doesn't nag if i just yank my USB thumb drive out without doing the "Safely remove hardware" thing.
At the time, it was free (as in beer) for personal and educational use.
Off topic, i know, but why do people always talk about "free as in beer"? Where is this free beer? Beer isn't free - that's pretty much why we all go to work every day (to earn money to buy beer), not to mention: how confident would you be of code quality if beer really was free? Many drunk eyeballs might not be the optimal bug hunting technique.
Sounds like a classic case of tier leakage, esp. the bits about "changes in data necessitate changes in code". It is completely possible to seperate content generation and presentation in LAMP apps, just as it is possible to tie everything into a massive ugly knot with JSPs: just because one's a p-language and the other's java does *not* mean that's one's bound to fail and the other is idiot proof. And as for your comments regarding statelessness: HTTP is itself a stateless protocol, so a web application written in php or perl faces the same constraints and solutions as a J2EE web app. If we were discussing thick client apps then sure, but we're not: it's web app vs web app.
What this sounds like to me is that you took the lessons learned in language/platform A and applied them in language/platform B, but then attributed your success to language B as if it were somehow "better".
try maintaining a large commercial website in something non-structured such as Perl/PHP. Yick! (Been there, have the T-shirt and a really bad taste...)
Oh come on! Some of the most heavily trafficed sites in the world - commerical and otherwise - are built on perl/php and seem to do just fine. Why do these discussions ALWAYS degenerate into "technology Y is better than technology X"? The fact of the matter is that, within a pretty broad spectrum of reason, what technology you use is not the deciding factor of how successful and maintainable your app is going to be. The day someone does come out with a miracle technology that REALLY improves a project's chances of success, we'll all know about it pretty darn quick because everybody will flock to it overnight - and i mean actual people, not magazine articles or Oreilly books. Given that we're all still having "my language can beat up your language" discussions on Slashdot, it's pretty safe to say that we're not at that point yet.
If you had a bad experience with a Perl/PHP based site before, the chances are pretty high that the fault is more with the designers (or lack of) and builders than the languages used. No sweat, this job is a learning experience and the first couple of apps will always be dogfood. A very good book once described mastery (in the development business) as the stage where you don't want to rip up all the code you've done in the last six months and start over.
Yes, I have noticed that the docs are pretty cryptic. Agreed.
Get The Definitive Guide to Plone from Apress (Jun 2004).
Whoa there... Java Apps (by which I presume you actually meant "Java applets", or you were trolling) have nothing to do with Tomcat, unless Tomcat itself were serving said applets.
Well, Tomcat itself is an application... written in Java... often abbreviated as a "Java App". Deploy a couple of webapps in tomcat and then check out the memory footprint of Java.exe and you'll see what he means. I've never used tomcat for production use although i do have 5.0.28 running on my workstation to test stuff, and i've found the solution to any perceived performance problems (esp. in single user mode as i do) to be RAM, RAM, and more RAM. At today's prices, why quibble: throw a gig at the problem - even if your problem isn't memory bound you'll *still* have a gig of ram! You can cackle like a maniac every time you think about it!
"astroturfing" is when companies plant fake messages which make it look like their product/service/whatever enjoys massive grass roots support (hence the name). When a company releases a press release, that's not astroturfing since a) you know the statement is being made by the company and not some "man on the street" and b) you (hopefully) know enough to take anything a company says with a grain of salt (including official financial statements).
As for IP issues being "manufactured"... that's debateable. We don't need to get into a long debate about the merits of a certain Utah based firm's claims, but people at all levels of open source development are certainly more aware that there are more questions than "does it compile?" when receiving a patch.
Other than that: yeah, it's just more Microsoft marketing mumbo-jumbo, designed to furthur the "nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft" line. In a way it's kind of flattering that this 300 billion USD gorilla seems so threatened by linux. On the other hand... marketing is what commercial companies do.
in IE:
Tools -> Internet Options -> Advanced -> (scroll, scroll, scroll) -> Java (Sun) -> uncheck "use Sun JVM 1.4.xxx blahdiblah"
I have the same problem to use Netegrity's Siteminder admin tool. Most annoying.
bicycles
Something about a shiny black iBook seems cool to me.
paint. not just for sniffing anymore.
Well, I've seen "modern" applications that were a nightmare to modify (chasing changes thru different levels of abstraction) and SQL (read two tier database backed - "classical") apps which were a snap to maintain (add a field to the database, modify the insert and update procs in a package named after the table, done in five minutes). The key factors in whether an application will age well are the quality of the design and devlopment that went in to it, not the technology that it is based on or uses (within reason, of course... but both hibernate and "classic SQL based" are well within that reason). This whole fashion for endless discussions about why a given technology is "better" than another or why using certain techniques will invariably doom your software project to the ninth and deepest circle of hell are a waste of time in an industry that already "enjoys" a spectaculat project failure rate. Good developers and designers produce good applications, bad developers and designers produce a mess. End of.
might have to downgrade them a tad... not for the installation, but because i just found out that it indexes encrypted outlook mails when you open/read them and stores them in plain text, even if you specified the "don't index encrypted web pages" option...
security departments are gonna shit themselves.
Overall, i'd have to give it a 9 out of a possible 10, and i'm in much the same case as you are (all the good stuff not on C:\, incompatible browser software, etc.). The reason i'm giving it such a high score is that this software targets the "average" user and does a completely brilliant job of it. A 400k download followed by (this is the kicker) a question-free installation and it "just works". Software a son could love, but a mother could install.
The inmates have been evicted, someone else is running this asylum.