You yourself can go to nearly any university, and if you're willing to fatten up an endowment or two and fund the construction of a building, you too can have your name put on that building.
Sure it's an honor to name the building after Gates, but it's really an empty honor. At least they didn't give him a PhD for ponying up the money.
If one of these breaks (hardware or software), you have two people not working instead of just one. And maybe 2 people's documents lost, rather than just one.
And Windows XP is just not that well designed for multi-user multitasking. Suppose my coworker hits ctrl-alt-delete. Now the machine is stalled, waiting for him to do whatever he was going to do. Oops, he just opened a message in outlook with a virus, and now I have it too.
So with this, the stupid user doesn't just take themselves out (I think some stupid users aren't THAT stupid - they break thier machines on purpose so they don't have to work), but they take their co-worker out too.
I've seen what people do to their windows boxes and I hate having to use their computer. I'd really hate it if I was in a permanent state of sharing it with them. Hmmm... no thanks.
Suppose the CD is scratched. Sure, there's a low probability that an error would still result in a valid executable. Maybe there's a flaw elsewhere in the program that might lead to a buffer overflow and this destructive code being executed on a valid user. Or maybe a virus infects the executable...
I guess I'm saying it's pretty short-sighted for this guy to put destructive code in there that might cause damage to someone who doesn't deserve it. Having that code in there is just asking for trouble because the potential to cause unintended harm is just so much greater.
All home routers I've seen (dlink, linksys, smc, belkin) do route, but only between the outside and the inside.
That's why I have my wireless router connected to my DSL modem, and behind that is another router that my wired computers connec to.
Sure, there is some overhead from the extra NAT going on, but it keeps the wired computers safe from anyone who might connect to the wireless router, trying to get in.
And what happens when a bit error causes a JNE (Jump Not Equal) to become a JE (Jump Equal), and the correct information leads to your data being erased? All these checks are great, but it all really comes down to:
if status=valid,
run normally else
delete all files end if
If the stupid program can tell when a fake number is entered, it should simply refuse to run.
I can't think of any one of them that I would consider other than a negative predictor.
Think about it, though. Nobody really cares for a story that is all "happy ending". Happy stories only get a blip on the news. It's the tragedies and horror stories that get all the coverage. For whatever reason, it's what people like.
So, an SF writer that writes about utopian worlds that have no problems or strife is not likely to be very popular because the story will probably be very boring.
You can even look at the Bible ("the most popular book in history"). Only a few sentences refer to the "1000 years of peace" that Jesus is supposed to preside over. All the other hundreds of pages are about mostly unhappy things, or peopel struggling against unhappy things.
My guess is that ever since we decended from the trees, we've been paronoid and afraid that the lions, tigers, and bears will eat us, that a story only really resonates when there is peril and struggle.
That's interesting. I'm an American and I recently visited a friend in Germany. I brought chocolate chips with the goal of making chocolate chip cookies. I have the Tollhouse recipe memorized.
But, I forgot to bring measuring cups and teaspoons. I asked her if she had metric ones, but she only did for liquids. For solids, like flour and sugar, she did, indeed, use a container sitting on top of a dietary scale. So, 100g flour in a German recipe really means 100g, and there is not a cup that measure that exactly.
Considering that cooking is very chemistry based, it makes sense that quantities for solids (that can have different densities) should be measured by mass rather than volume.
It will be foolish to think that you can take one course or one training program and be just as proficient in Linux as you are in Windows. Make sure your bosses realize this. (I've been in places where they send you for a week of training, then say, "Here you go, you're an expert now. You take care of it."
There are lots of good suggestions so far. I personally recommend multiple-approach solution:
1) find a local Linux Users Group and get involved 2) seek out the certification you think is best, such as the Red Hat. Has SAGE ever finished their certification program? Sure, a cert is worth the paper it's printed on, but if you're serious about learning (rather than just getting by), it will provide you with a solid foundation. 3) set up a small network at home. Get a domain, and set up servers for mail, web, etc. See how quickly you get hacked, and learn how to prevent it. Get internal services like print servers, samba, file services, authentication, etc working. Will you be doing a mixed environment at work? Make sure your linux network can serve to your windows boxes 4) someone suggested a "city" at work. this is like your home network, but maybe can mirror better the work environment 5) see if your local community college or university has a unix course. It can be a great way to learn some basics about how a unix system is laid out and give you an intro to scripting.
As for distros, I would advise using a common one that you can easily find help for. Fedora Core, Mandrake, Suse, Slackware, to name a few. Has your work settled on the one they'll use? Start with that one.
Watch websites like rootprompt, and subscribe to magazines like linux journal, etc.
I've just moved back to "The City" (which for me, is Portland, OR) from the coast.
I was actually surprised at the wide selection of movies available on the "Coastal Resource Sharing Network". Of course, there were things I couldn't find, but they were even willing to do interlibrary loans to get the less common stuff. Except for the very newest stuff, I'd say their range of materials is more expansive than any Blockbuster I've been too. But then again, like I said in my last, you may end up waiting a couple weeks. It was best to keep the system seeded with lots of requests - that way I was sure to have something to watch.
As you said, though, a lot depends on the librarians.
Try checking the local library. There's a good chance they're linked with other libraries and can offer quite a large selection of movies for free.
I was recently living in a rural coastal region and through my local library, I had access to the dvd/video selection of about 12 other libraries. I saved a fortune in rental fees and my non-subscription to cable.
The only real downside was waiting for particular movies. I couldn't plan to watch a certain movie at a certain time because the only copy might be checked out. But I found that if I kept the system filled with requests that usually something interesting would be ready for me.
I'm not necessarily lazy, but I have to say, I'd prefer to use 85,840,734,641,021 over 5840734641021. Especially if I have to quickly add 1000000 to it or transcribe it by hand to some other medium.
Of course, I tend to prefer using tools that help keep me from making mistakes.
I've worked on documents where people have written things like "4,24,120 incidents". It was a great flag to me that something was wrong and I was able to check it with them. If they had simply written 424120, I would never have spotted the error.
Commas might be deprecated and spaces prefered in the world community, but in either case, I think they're helpful in reducing errors.
If the military can commit people to things like the Air Force Band, sending people to the olympics, and things like the Golden Knights, then they can commit a crew or two to this project. If one or two helecopter crews are going to make the difference in winning a war then we have an even bigger problem.
Would it be so hard to get one more helecopter and train one more crew over what we already have?
I'm not sure what processor was in the printer because it was before my time when he was doing it out of necessity. It was probably a tek phaser, though. I saw him run some of these "for fun" on an HP Laserjet 4M.
As for getting the data, it came out as a printout. The "program" would print out a map of the vector field using colored/shaded polygons and would have variables and data printed at the bottom of the page.
I think that's why he sent the jobs to the printer to be processed. He wrote the "program" in postscript, and the printer, with its specialized processor did all the work of generating the graphics and calculating the force and motion vectors. Postscript is great for doing math on vectors and it can output vectors to be drawn, or just output their parameters as text values. He could get the printer to process a simulation in 30 minutes that would take a day running on his local box.
The printers had the best processors available for his work. Of course, he was the first of our profs to have a linux box on his desktop, and the first to do parallel processing on the several sun sparc 2 workstations we had.
He was always pretty clever at using the computing resources at hand!
And the idea of using a specialized processor for a different purpose is not new.
Back in 386 days, one of our professors was working on liquifaction (the ground sometimes behaves like a liquid during earthquakes). The models were very trig-intensive and took forever on a desktop. So, he wrote the simulations in Postscript and sent them to the printer where its processor could do the work much faster.
I know there were Jews living there for a long time, and they got along pretty well with their Arab neighbors.
Looking back from today, I think many Palestinians would have chosen the UN Partition plan. But I still think most people, looking from the point of view of the Arabs living in Palestine, would feel they should not have to share the land with immigrant Jews and would have rejected the partition plan. They believed they were entitled to the land especially since the British had secretly promised it to them (of course, they also secretly promised it to the Jews).
There are lots of Israelis and Palestinians now that want peace and would be satisfied with two countries with pre-67 borders. Unfortunately, the pro-war people on both sides are dominating the exchange. For example, a seperation wall might be just the thing that's needed, but it's short-sighted and inflamatory to build it by cutting even farther into "Palestinian land".
Everybody seems to be giving this guy a hard time because he did his research for reading only English. My guess is that the guy reads/speaks English and has ready access to people who do the same. This research is a good start and seems to have valuable results.
Now someone else can work on a PhD Thesis by taking his work and seeing if it applies in other languages.
Isn't this how science works? You do research, try to make some conclusions, and publish the results. If you wait to publish until you've found the Grand Unified Theory of Everything, then nobody publishes anything and science doesn't advance at all.
I'm not sure that he missed anything. He has started with what he knows and has resources to study.
Suppose you live in a big house. It's lease-to-own, and the owner says he'll make it yours. You live in all but one room, and someone else lives in that room. Now, that guy starts having all his relatives move in, and they start taking up other rooms in your house. You start getting nasty with each other and the landlord throws up his hands and leaves. The Mayor then comes in says, "let's split the house in half, one half for you, and one half for the other guy".
You feel you were entitled to have the whole house, or at least all but that one room. Wouldn't you accept what the Mayor offered?
Looking back, it was a poor choice, but I think it's the choice most people would make in that situation.
There are two basic facts that causes most of the trouble.
1) The Israeli government is oppressing the Palestinians that live there. It uses more violence because the Palestinians fight back. 2) Some Palestinians use terrorism against the Israelis. They use more terrorism because the Israeli government is oppressing them.
On face value these things are equal. Israel gets more blame because theirs is a recognized sovereign government that is doing the oppression. There is no recognized sovereign Palestinian government, so you're stuck with only being able to blame the individual Palestinian groups and Palestinians involved in the terrorism.
From the Palestinian point of view, they are an occupied people and have the right to resist. That only allows for fighting against the Israeli military, and not civilians.
It's easy to blame sides and take greivances back to biblical times. But that doesn't solve today's problem - which bleeds over and affects a lot of the world.
Most people who have problems with Israel would be satisified if the Israeli government would stop oppressing the Palestinians. Face it, Israel goes out of its way to make their lives fucking unbearable. This is what pisses off so many Muslims and Arabs.
Give back the West Bank & the Gaza Strip at 67 borders, remove the settlements, and allow the Palestinian state to be a sovereign country, and a vast majority of the people who hate Israel will be content. Sure there will still be a minority that hate Jews, but when the situation is solved, they'll no longer have the audience of the people who hate was Israel does.
In 1900, there were a lot of Arabs living in that area, and a much smaller minority of Jews. They even lived together pretty peacefully. Then up to 1948, there was a huge influx of Jews that came there to reestablish "Israel". Can you blame the Arabs that were there before for not wanting to give up their land and the country they were promised as the Ottoman empire fell?
Now the Arabs there are being terribly oppressed by the Israeli government, and they do it with arms and money supplied by the US. The US nearly always backs Israel in the UN and blocks votes that call for any kind of action by the international community to try and remedy the situation. THIS is why those Arabs and Muslims who hate Israel also hate the US.
You really only have 4 viable final solutions: 1) The Israelis are "driven into the sea" as you say, leaving an Arab state 2) The Palestinians are neutralized, leaving only Jews living in the Israeli state 3) The land is split into two soveriegn countries - one for the Israelis and one for the Palestinians. 4) The two groups live as equals in one country.
Which solution do you advocate? Which one is the US advocating?
Slashdot Mirror
That's just the way it works.
You yourself can go to nearly any university, and if you're willing to fatten up an endowment or two and fund the construction of a building, you too can have your name put on that building.
Sure it's an honor to name the building after Gates, but it's really an empty honor. At least they didn't give him a PhD for ponying up the money.
Don't worry... their IT people will find Slashdot, and their productivity will drop like ours!
I really don't think you save that much.
If one of these breaks (hardware or software), you have two people not working instead of just one. And maybe 2 people's documents lost, rather than just one.
And Windows XP is just not that well designed for multi-user multitasking. Suppose my coworker hits ctrl-alt-delete. Now the machine is stalled, waiting for him to do whatever he was going to do. Oops, he just opened a message in outlook with a virus, and now I have it too.
So with this, the stupid user doesn't just take themselves out (I think some stupid users aren't THAT stupid - they break thier machines on purpose so they don't have to work), but they take their co-worker out too.
I've seen what people do to their windows boxes and I hate having to use their computer. I'd really hate it if I was in a permanent state of sharing it with them.
Hmmm... no thanks.
Suppose the CD is scratched. Sure, there's a low probability that an error would still result in a valid executable. Maybe there's a flaw elsewhere in the program that might lead to a buffer overflow and this destructive code being executed on a valid user. Or maybe a virus infects the executable...
I guess I'm saying it's pretty short-sighted for this guy to put destructive code in there that might cause damage to someone who doesn't deserve it. Having that code in there is just asking for trouble because the potential to cause unintended harm is just so much greater.
All home routers I've seen (dlink, linksys, smc, belkin) do route, but only between the outside and the inside.
That's why I have my wireless router connected to my DSL modem, and behind that is another router that my wired computers connec to.
Sure, there is some overhead from the extra NAT going on, but it keeps the wired computers safe from anyone who might connect to the wireless router, trying to get in.
And what happens when a bit error causes a JNE (Jump Not Equal) to become a JE (Jump Equal), and the correct information leads to your data being erased? All these checks are great, but it all really comes down to:
if status=valid,
run normally
else
delete all files
end if
If the stupid program can tell when a fake number is entered, it should simply refuse to run.
I can't think of any one of them that I would consider other than a negative predictor.
Think about it, though. Nobody really cares for a story that is all "happy ending". Happy stories only get a blip on the news. It's the tragedies and horror stories that get all the coverage. For whatever reason, it's what people like.
So, an SF writer that writes about utopian worlds that have no problems or strife is not likely to be very popular because the story will probably be very boring.
You can even look at the Bible ("the most popular book in history"). Only a few sentences refer to the "1000 years of peace" that Jesus is supposed to preside over. All the other hundreds of pages are about mostly unhappy things, or peopel struggling against unhappy things.
My guess is that ever since we decended from the trees, we've been paronoid and afraid that the lions, tigers, and bears will eat us, that a story only really resonates when there is peril and struggle.
That's interesting. I'm an American and I recently visited a friend in Germany. I brought chocolate chips with the goal of making chocolate chip cookies. I have the Tollhouse recipe memorized.
But, I forgot to bring measuring cups and teaspoons. I asked her if she had metric ones, but she only did for liquids. For solids, like flour and sugar, she did, indeed, use a container sitting on top of a dietary scale. So, 100g flour in a German recipe really means 100g, and there is not a cup that measure that exactly.
Considering that cooking is very chemistry based, it makes sense that quantities for solids (that can have different densities) should be measured by mass rather than volume.
It will be foolish to think that you can take one course or one training program and be just as proficient in Linux as you are in Windows. Make sure your bosses realize this. (I've been in places where they send you for a week of training, then say, "Here you go, you're an expert now. You take care of it."
There are lots of good suggestions so far. I personally recommend multiple-approach solution:
1) find a local Linux Users Group and get involved
2) seek out the certification you think is best, such as the Red Hat. Has SAGE ever finished their certification program? Sure, a cert is worth the paper it's printed on, but if you're serious about learning (rather than just getting by), it will provide you with a solid foundation.
3) set up a small network at home. Get a domain, and set up servers for mail, web, etc. See how quickly you get hacked, and learn how to prevent it. Get internal services like print servers, samba, file services, authentication, etc working. Will you be doing a mixed environment at work? Make sure your linux network can serve to your windows boxes
4) someone suggested a "city" at work. this is like your home network, but maybe can mirror better the work environment
5) see if your local community college or university has a unix course. It can be a great way to learn some basics about how a unix system is laid out and give you an intro to scripting.
As for distros, I would advise using a common one that you can easily find help for. Fedora Core, Mandrake, Suse, Slackware, to name a few. Has your work settled on the one they'll use? Start with that one.
Watch websites like rootprompt, and subscribe to magazines like linux journal, etc.
I used to play a game called "cheerios" with my younger brother. I would sit on his stomach and hold his hands over his head - pinned to the floor.
I would then say, "Do you like cheerios", hitting his sternum with my knuckle on each syllable.
"NO" he might yell
"Why Do You Not Like Cheer-E-Oos"?
and so on, until I got bored with it. I had no idea I could apply this working for AOL!
I thought that was coverage of Clinton's operation!
And I know that Repo Man is just a "for instance", but sure enough:
Of course... it's checked out.
I've just moved back to "The City" (which for me, is Portland, OR) from the coast.
I was actually surprised at the wide selection of movies available on the "Coastal Resource Sharing Network". Of course, there were things I couldn't find, but they were even willing to do interlibrary loans to get the less common stuff. Except for the very newest stuff, I'd say their range of materials is more expansive than any Blockbuster I've been too. But then again, like I said in my last, you may end up waiting a couple weeks. It was best to keep the system seeded with lots of requests - that way I was sure to have something to watch.
As you said, though, a lot depends on the librarians.
Try checking the local library. There's a good chance they're linked with other libraries and can offer quite a large selection of movies for free.
I was recently living in a rural coastal region and through my local library, I had access to the dvd/video selection of about 12 other libraries. I saved a fortune in rental fees and my non-subscription to cable.
The only real downside was waiting for particular movies. I couldn't plan to watch a certain movie at a certain time because the only copy might be checked out. But I found that if I kept the system filled with requests that usually something interesting would be ready for me.
I'm not necessarily lazy, but I have to say, I'd prefer to use 85,840,734,641,021 over 5840734641021. Especially if I have to quickly add 1000000 to it or transcribe it by hand to some other medium.
Of course, I tend to prefer using tools that help keep me from making mistakes.
I've worked on documents where people have written things like "4,24,120 incidents". It was a great flag to me that something was wrong and I was able to check it with them. If they had simply written 424120, I would never have spotted the error.
Commas might be deprecated and spaces prefered in the world community, but in either case, I think they're helpful in reducing errors.
If the military can commit people to things like the Air Force Band, sending people to the olympics, and things like the Golden Knights, then they can commit a crew or two to this project. If one or two helecopter crews are going to make the difference in winning a war then we have an even bigger problem.
Would it be so hard to get one more helecopter and train one more crew over what we already have?
I'm not sure what processor was in the printer because it was before my time when he was doing it out of necessity. It was probably a tek phaser, though. I saw him run some of these "for fun" on an HP Laserjet 4M.
As for getting the data, it came out as a printout. The "program" would print out a map of the vector field using colored/shaded polygons and would have variables and data printed at the bottom of the page.
I think that's why he sent the jobs to the printer to be processed. He wrote the "program" in postscript, and the printer, with its specialized processor did all the work of generating the graphics and calculating the force and motion vectors. Postscript is great for doing math on vectors and it can output vectors to be drawn, or just output their parameters as text values. He could get the printer to process a simulation in 30 minutes that would take a day running on his local box.
The printers had the best processors available for his work. Of course, he was the first of our profs to have a linux box on his desktop, and the first to do parallel processing on the several sun sparc 2 workstations we had.
He was always pretty clever at using the computing resources at hand!
And the idea of using a specialized processor for a different purpose is not new.
Back in 386 days, one of our professors was working on liquifaction (the ground sometimes behaves like a liquid during earthquakes). The models were very trig-intensive and took forever on a desktop. So, he wrote the simulations in Postscript and sent them to the printer where its processor could do the work much faster.
I know there were Jews living there for a long time, and they got along pretty well with their Arab neighbors.
Looking back from today, I think many Palestinians would have chosen the UN Partition plan. But I still think most people, looking from the point of view of the Arabs living in Palestine, would feel they should not have to share the land with immigrant Jews and would have rejected the partition plan. They believed they were entitled to the land especially since the British had secretly promised it to them (of course, they also secretly promised it to the Jews).
There are lots of Israelis and Palestinians now that want peace and would be satisfied with two countries with pre-67 borders. Unfortunately, the pro-war people on both sides are dominating the exchange. For example, a seperation wall might be just the thing that's needed, but it's short-sighted and inflamatory to build it by cutting even farther into "Palestinian land".
Everybody seems to be giving this guy a hard time because he did his research for reading only English. My guess is that the guy reads/speaks English and has ready access to people who do the same. This research is a good start and seems to have valuable results.
Now someone else can work on a PhD Thesis by taking his work and seeing if it applies in other languages.
Isn't this how science works? You do research, try to make some conclusions, and publish the results. If you wait to publish until you've found the Grand Unified Theory of Everything, then nobody publishes anything and science doesn't advance at all.
I'm not sure that he missed anything. He has started with what he knows and has resources to study.
You should be able to Edit|Paste Special, and then select "Unformatted Text". This USUALLY pastes in the current style.
Of course, if you don't use it, it may not show up in the menu for a few seconds.
Sure they did. And you probably would have too.
Suppose you live in a big house. It's lease-to-own, and the owner says he'll make it yours. You live in all but one room, and someone else lives in that room. Now, that guy starts having all his relatives move in, and they start taking up other rooms in your house. You start getting nasty with each other and the landlord throws up his hands and leaves. The Mayor then comes in says, "let's split the house in half, one half for you, and one half for the other guy".
You feel you were entitled to have the whole house, or at least all but that one room. Wouldn't you accept what the Mayor offered?
Looking back, it was a poor choice, but I think it's the choice most people would make in that situation.
There are two basic facts that causes most of the trouble.
1) The Israeli government is oppressing the Palestinians that live there. It uses more violence because the Palestinians fight back.
2) Some Palestinians use terrorism against the Israelis. They use more terrorism because the Israeli government is oppressing them.
On face value these things are equal. Israel gets more blame because theirs is a recognized sovereign government that is doing the oppression. There is no recognized sovereign Palestinian government, so you're stuck with only being able to blame the individual Palestinian groups and Palestinians involved in the terrorism.
From the Palestinian point of view, they are an occupied people and have the right to resist. That only allows for fighting against the Israeli military, and not civilians.
It's easy to blame sides and take greivances back to biblical times. But that doesn't solve today's problem - which bleeds over and affects a lot of the world.
Most people who have problems with Israel would be satisified if the Israeli government would stop oppressing the Palestinians. Face it, Israel goes out of its way to make their lives fucking unbearable. This is what pisses off so many Muslims and Arabs.
Give back the West Bank & the Gaza Strip at 67 borders, remove the settlements, and allow the Palestinian state to be a sovereign country, and a vast majority of the people who hate Israel will be content. Sure there will still be a minority that hate Jews, but when the situation is solved, they'll no longer have the audience of the people who hate was Israel does.
In 1900, there were a lot of Arabs living in that area, and a much smaller minority of Jews. They even lived together pretty peacefully. Then up to 1948, there was a huge influx of Jews that came there to reestablish "Israel". Can you blame the Arabs that were there before for not wanting to give up their land and the country they were promised as the Ottoman empire fell?
Now the Arabs there are being terribly oppressed by the Israeli government, and they do it with arms and money supplied by the US. The US nearly always backs Israel in the UN and blocks votes that call for any kind of action by the international community to try and remedy the situation. THIS is why those Arabs and Muslims who hate Israel also hate the US.
You really only have 4 viable final solutions:
1) The Israelis are "driven into the sea" as you say, leaving an Arab state
2) The Palestinians are neutralized, leaving only Jews living in the Israeli state
3) The land is split into two soveriegn countries - one for the Israelis and one for the Palestinians.
4) The two groups live as equals in one country.
Which solution do you advocate? Which one is the US advocating?