Yet another reason the DHS should be disbanded. You know, beside the half-billion other reasons. The RIAA treats their customers this way, and it got them everylasting scorn and loss of a non-trivial amount of their customer base. The government treats their customers this way (let's face it, we're no longer citizens, we're customers), and there is absolutely nothing we can do. If we speak out, we're labelled as "unamerican", and subject to a host of more intrusive measures, from which we also have no recourse. Habeas corpus be damned! Fourth amendment be damned!
I refuse to get on a plane in the US until they're gone... so that means I'm probably not going to fly again in my lifetime.
You've hit it spot-on. The rich aren't going to be getting richer quite as fast as they used to, and they're upset about it. And of course you know the golden rule, "he who has the gold, makes the rules."
I kind of fell into doing IT, because I couldn't think of anything else to do. I had been programming since age 10, and had fun doing my little projects, and thought, "oh sure, I suppose I could do that for work."
When I had originally gone to college, it was to a photography program (pre-digital, all wet process). I burned out on that, and went to a different school, and decided that since I have always loved cars, I wanted to work with designing and building them. The engineering program where I was quickly quashed any such notion. So I just kind of fell back to what I knew best. I got into the CS program, coasted through it, and here I am, <mumble> years later, in a job about which I couldn't care less.
I'm at a salary level which I couldn't hope to match with any other profession, especially considering that I'm unexperienced in any other field. I think that I would just have to swallow the pay cut, and make a clean break, because IT just doesn't do a thing for me any longer.
So now I just have to figure out what I want to do when I grow up. Most of my hobbies involve some sort of hand craftsmanship - cooking, baking, woodworking, photography, even sewing. I'm sure doing something similar would be awesome.
My brain more-or-less ignores the lazy eye, so instead of giving me headaches, it just fails, and causes the film to look crappy. I hope they make a 2D version, and have the 3D one as a special IMAX showing or something like that.
You've hit the nail squarely on the head. It's just another piece of our culture of fear. I, for one, do NOT welcome our "ZOMG, you might die!!!" overlords.
My home network is all named for the outer planes in D&D. The firewall is nirvana, the general-purpose mail/web/ldap server is limbo, one of the normal hosts is paradise. The non-host devices are named after the elemental planes - the printer is earth. There are a whole ton of names left, including lots of sub-planes. There are 7 sub-planes of the Seven Heavens, f'rinstance: lunia, mercuria, venya, solania, mertion, jovar, and chronias, in addition to heaven. I've got 90 hostnames in my zonefile, only a few of which are being used right now.
A couple of jobs ago, we had a set of machines which ran an Oracle stack. fred and barney were the DB nodes; pebbles, bambam, and dino were the app layer; and wilma and betty were the web heads. It was easy to talk about the Flintstones gang, when referring to the whole stack.
That Quill mouse, on the ergonomic page, just looks cool. Seems like it would be very restful to use - you just hold your hand in it, and don't have to grab anything.
Pricy, but seems awfully neat.
Uh, why would any self-respecting admin use either one, for any reason? Can we just get back to our vi vs. emacs flamewars now?
Ob-fun-trick: in bash, !$ is the last arg from the previous command.
# mkdir reallyreallyreallylongdirname
# cd !$
cd reallyreallyreallylongdirname
# pwd /reallyreallyreallylongdirname
Similarly, !^ is the first arg, and !* is all the args. ^word^otherword does a straight text substitution of "otherword" for the first instance of "word" on the previous command. Anything to save typing is Good.
How does this violate the first amendment? The first guarantees freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of religion, and the right to petition the government. Not seeing where a term limitation would violate that.
The Constitution would have to be amended, as the legislative terms are laid out in Article One, but without any explicit rules regarding limits on number of terms one may serve.
Just wait until the government figures out that terrorists use the US Mail for their terrorist activities. Whatever will we do then? Won't somebody please think of the children?
If there is a method of communication, the probability of these ubiquitous "terrorists" using it for communication are pretty close to 1. File this story under "duh".
The thing is, these companies don't seem to ever get it their heads to, you know, ask. They don't check gaming forums and read all the "ZOMG DRM SuXx0R5!!one" posts. They don't put together focus groups of, say, their actual customers, and learn about the way reality actually works. They just make (erroneous) assumptions, and things get worse, instead of better.
Oh gawd, I can't believe I just advocated the use of focus groups. I need to increase my coffee intake or something.
There are no terrorists from whom we need protection. The odds against being killed by a terrorist are staggering; you're more likely to fall off a ladder and break your neck while changing that darn lightbulb in the bathroom that keeps going out.
All this "protection" is a big myth. We've had endless shouting here on slash about all the stupid security theatre that the TSA does at our airports, and I'm pretty sure we've all concluded that it's 100% BS. Moreover, that's a form of terror, and it's being inflicted on us by our leaders. The only terror group from whom we legitimately need protection, is those governmental thugs who think they can do whatever they please, for any or no reason at all, constitution be damned.
However, 99.99999% of the time, this isn't what they're used for. I continually hear arguments of how "I need an SUV because of the weather in my area," and it just doesn't hold water.
This one always makes me laugh too. I live in Houston, and it rains here, hard, quite often; flash flooding is very common. I drive a BMW 3-series, which has quite a low ground clearance. During a flash flood, when the water is above the bottom of my car, I'm routinely trying to go faster than most of the soccer moms in their Suburbans, and suburban cowboys in their lifted crew cab extended bed F350s. And that makes it more dicey for me, since I'll then be at more of a risk of messing up my car due to the water.
I hold that most people in cars - big or small - don't actually have any idea what they're doing. They get out there, turn the car on, and turn their brain off. Those who can't handle, say, a little water on the road, when their vehicles are more than capable of it, are a prime example of who I'm talking about.
Yes, you certainly can; it's just the card-edge connector which has been on floppy cables for time immemorial (though probably not so much anymore). I've got one in my 3.0GHz P4 machine, just for the halibut. Works great! I installed some of my old DOS games, and run them in dosbox, and it's all sorts of fun.
I've got another drive, just in case this one breaks.:)
I remapped the Windows to "super" and the menu to "hyper" in X. I needed more modifier keys for emacs key combos, darnit!
I'd love to try one of those space-cadet keyboards. Modifier keys abound! Front, top, meta, shift, control, super, hyper - you could probably type all of Unicode on one.
Software engineering is not just about writing a class / implementing a functionality. Its about a process and is lesser to do with what programming language you have been taught. Mostly it is to do with the Object oriented paradigm (C++, Java for example). OO has a lot of proven advantages.
So OO is the only paradigm that solves every problem? Quite the opposite. There are different programming paradigms (functional, OO, imperative, etc. - see Programming paradigms for a good list) which are used for different purposes. TFA's argument is that since there are multiple valid approaches to writing software, there should not be just one approach which is taught, but multiple approaches. And multiple approaches necessarily require multiple languages.
The old quote about everything looking like a nail, to someone who only has a hammer, applies here.
Languages like assembly and machine code don't require learning one just needs a manual while programming.
It's fairly obvious, then, that you've never used one.
Chief executives think that it enhances flexibility for everybody. In my experience, those executives spend more time not in the office than basically everybody else - they're the king, and they can do whatever strikes their fancy. They give presentations to big clients, or go to see about buying other companies, or even just go golfing. Sure, it enhances their flexibility; they can still get their mails when they're (inevitably) elsewhere. For the rest of the suckers, they've gotta be in the office 8 hours a day anyway. So how does that enhance flexibility, when the people are already there?
Second, on a more personal note, when I'm out of the office, I'm not working. Period. I'm not being paid hourly, and I don't feel the need to give away freebies. I don't have to go on-call at my current job, and unless I get scheduled for a downtime window, my work will still be there the next morning when I get back to the office. A few years ago, I realized that work is not everything. The paycheck is important, but there's much more to life than doing work. I have a lot of hobbies which I like doing infinitely more than working, and they occupy my time and interest just fine, thanks. I like visiting friends and traveling to new places, and I don't want to be interrupted while I'm doing either. If my boss and/or company require the level of fealty that a lot of companies seem to require these days, I'm working at the wrong place.
Back when I was going on-call, I would do my on-call duties when it was my turn, and when it wasn't, I was not very nice about calls I received. I never slept well when I was on-call. I had my Christmas morning of opening gifts with my family interrupted by the on-call phone ringing one year. I used to carry a blackberry, and never read emails on it. The volume of what I got was so high, it quickly (like over the course of the first day or two I had it) turned into the boy-who-cried-wolf device; 99.9%+ of the mails didn't need a response, and the rest could have simply been replaced by an SMS or a phone call of "hey, we need help".
#9 - always present in game tutorials - god i hate these
It all depends on the kind of game you're playing. I play a lot of sports games, and sometimes an in-game tutorial is awesomely helpful. F'rinstance, the latest Madden game has a skills practice mode, which is fantastic - it lets you see the exact effect the various combos and moves actually do, and actually lets you practice a little, with increasing levels of difficulty, without having to do jump into a full length game and do trial and error. The latest FIFA game has no such skills practice mode, and as a result I don't have a whole lot of enthusiasm to play the game, since it's very hard to do anything. Reading about button combos in the manual, and being able to practice them, are two very different things. And as much complaints as Gran Turismo's license tests get, they're valuable to get the feel of how the controls work, basic car handling, etc. Experienced players can breeze through the easier tests.
On something like Starcraft, the tutorial scenarios are nice, but perhaps they could be streamlined a bit. From what I recall (it's been quite a while), they're set up so that each scenario is the tutorial for using one type of unit. Even though, IIRC, those scenarios are fairly short, it would still be not difficult to combine a couple units' scenarios.
As with the cutscene stuff, the tutorials should always be optional. That's one of the big complaints about the Gran Turismo license tests - they're mandatory to be able to enter all but a few of the most simple races.
I never understood why computing throws away wisdom so easily, instead using green-horns who will work their brains fried just to impress the boss man. It may work in the near term, but long term it's detrimental.
It's probably because that greenhorn who really is willing to destroy himself to impress the boss, will work stupid hours, and he's a whole lot cheaper to pay than the older, wiser programmer. The standard management mindset seems to be that IT workers are cogs, simply to be replaced when they break. And due to the treatment they get, they will break. That certainly does nothing to alleviate the stress level.
I got the hell out of programming about as fast as I could, and went into sysadmin, which isn't a whole lot better. Now I'm looking for a way to get out of IT altogether, but I've been doing it so long, I'm not sure what else to do.
Slashdot Mirror
Yet another reason the DHS should be disbanded. You know, beside the half-billion other reasons. The RIAA treats their customers this way, and it got them everylasting scorn and loss of a non-trivial amount of their customer base. The government treats their customers this way (let's face it, we're no longer citizens, we're customers), and there is absolutely nothing we can do. If we speak out, we're labelled as "unamerican", and subject to a host of more intrusive measures, from which we also have no recourse. Habeas corpus be damned! Fourth amendment be damned!
I refuse to get on a plane in the US until they're gone... so that means I'm probably not going to fly again in my lifetime.
Well said, sir! +1, Eloquent pwnage
+1 Insightful.
You've hit it spot-on. The rich aren't going to be getting richer quite as fast as they used to, and they're upset about it. And of course you know the golden rule, "he who has the gold, makes the rules."
I kind of fell into doing IT, because I couldn't think of anything else to do. I had been programming since age 10, and had fun doing my little projects, and thought, "oh sure, I suppose I could do that for work."
When I had originally gone to college, it was to a photography program (pre-digital, all wet process). I burned out on that, and went to a different school, and decided that since I have always loved cars, I wanted to work with designing and building them. The engineering program where I was quickly quashed any such notion. So I just kind of fell back to what I knew best. I got into the CS program, coasted through it, and here I am, <mumble> years later, in a job about which I couldn't care less.
I'm at a salary level which I couldn't hope to match with any other profession, especially considering that I'm unexperienced in any other field. I think that I would just have to swallow the pay cut, and make a clean break, because IT just doesn't do a thing for me any longer.
So now I just have to figure out what I want to do when I grow up. Most of my hobbies involve some sort of hand craftsmanship - cooking, baking, woodworking, photography, even sewing. I'm sure doing something similar would be awesome.
<aol>Me too!</aol>
My brain more-or-less ignores the lazy eye, so instead of giving me headaches, it just fails, and causes the film to look crappy. I hope they make a 2D version, and have the 3D one as a special IMAX showing or something like that.
You've hit the nail squarely on the head. It's just another piece of our culture of fear. I, for one, do NOT welcome our "ZOMG, you might die!!!" overlords.
My home network is all named for the outer planes in D&D. The firewall is nirvana, the general-purpose mail/web/ldap server is limbo, one of the normal hosts is paradise. The non-host devices are named after the elemental planes - the printer is earth. There are a whole ton of names left, including lots of sub-planes. There are 7 sub-planes of the Seven Heavens, f'rinstance: lunia, mercuria, venya, solania, mertion, jovar, and chronias, in addition to heaven. I've got 90 hostnames in my zonefile, only a few of which are being used right now.
A couple of jobs ago, we had a set of machines which ran an Oracle stack. fred and barney were the DB nodes; pebbles, bambam, and dino were the app layer; and wilma and betty were the web heads. It was easy to talk about the Flintstones gang, when referring to the whole stack.
And also because they bought Veritas a few years back.
That Quill mouse, on the ergonomic page, just looks cool. Seems like it would be very restful to use - you just hold your hand in it, and don't have to grab anything. Pricy, but seems awfully neat.
nano is the new pico
Uh, why would any self-respecting admin use either one, for any reason? Can we just get back to our vi vs. emacs flamewars now?
Ob-fun-trick: in bash, !$ is the last arg from the previous command.
# mkdir reallyreallyreallylongdirname
/reallyreallyreallylongdirname
# cd !$
cd reallyreallyreallylongdirname
# pwd
Similarly, !^ is the first arg, and !* is all the args. ^word^otherword does a straight text substitution of "otherword" for the first instance of "word" on the previous command. Anything to save typing is Good.
How does this violate the first amendment? The first guarantees freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of religion, and the right to petition the government. Not seeing where a term limitation would violate that.
The Constitution would have to be amended, as the legislative terms are laid out in Article One, but without any explicit rules regarding limits on number of terms one may serve.
Just wait until the government figures out that terrorists use the US Mail for their terrorist activities. Whatever will we do then? Won't somebody please think of the children?
If there is a method of communication, the probability of these ubiquitous "terrorists" using it for communication are pretty close to 1. File this story under "duh".
FP?
Bill? Bill Shatner? Is that really you?
The thing is, these companies don't seem to ever get it their heads to, you know, ask. They don't check gaming forums and read all the "ZOMG DRM SuXx0R5!!one" posts. They don't put together focus groups of, say, their actual customers, and learn about the way reality actually works. They just make (erroneous) assumptions, and things get worse, instead of better.
Oh gawd, I can't believe I just advocated the use of focus groups. I need to increase my coffee intake or something.
sqrt(2), maybe?
The HTML entity is √, for another method.
Protection from what, though?
There are no terrorists from whom we need protection. The odds against being killed by a terrorist are staggering; you're more likely to fall off a ladder and break your neck while changing that darn lightbulb in the bathroom that keeps going out.
All this "protection" is a big myth. We've had endless shouting here on slash about all the stupid security theatre that the TSA does at our airports, and I'm pretty sure we've all concluded that it's 100% BS. Moreover, that's a form of terror, and it's being inflicted on us by our leaders. The only terror group from whom we legitimately need protection, is those governmental thugs who think they can do whatever they please, for any or no reason at all, constitution be damned.
This one always makes me laugh too. I live in Houston, and it rains here, hard, quite often; flash flooding is very common. I drive a BMW 3-series, which has quite a low ground clearance. During a flash flood, when the water is above the bottom of my car, I'm routinely trying to go faster than most of the soccer moms in their Suburbans, and suburban cowboys in their lifted crew cab extended bed F350s. And that makes it more dicey for me, since I'll then be at more of a risk of messing up my car due to the water.
I hold that most people in cars - big or small - don't actually have any idea what they're doing. They get out there, turn the car on, and turn their brain off. Those who can't handle, say, a little water on the road, when their vehicles are more than capable of it, are a prime example of who I'm talking about.
Yes, you certainly can; it's just the card-edge connector which has been on floppy cables for time immemorial (though probably not so much anymore). I've got one in my 3.0GHz P4 machine, just for the halibut. Works great! I installed some of my old DOS games, and run them in dosbox, and it's all sorts of fun.
:)
I've got another drive, just in case this one breaks.
I remapped the Windows to "super" and the menu to "hyper" in X. I needed more modifier keys for emacs key combos, darnit!
I'd love to try one of those space-cadet keyboards. Modifier keys abound! Front, top, meta, shift, control, super, hyper - you could probably type all of Unicode on one.
So OO is the only paradigm that solves every problem? Quite the opposite. There are different programming paradigms (functional, OO, imperative, etc. - see Programming paradigms for a good list) which are used for different purposes. TFA's argument is that since there are multiple valid approaches to writing software, there should not be just one approach which is taught, but multiple approaches. And multiple approaches necessarily require multiple languages.
The old quote about everything looking like a nail, to someone who only has a hammer, applies here.
Languages like assembly and machine code don't require learning one just needs a manual while programming.It's fairly obvious, then, that you've never used one.
Chief executives think that it enhances flexibility for everybody. In my experience, those executives spend more time not in the office than basically everybody else - they're the king, and they can do whatever strikes their fancy. They give presentations to big clients, or go to see about buying other companies, or even just go golfing. Sure, it enhances their flexibility; they can still get their mails when they're (inevitably) elsewhere. For the rest of the suckers, they've gotta be in the office 8 hours a day anyway. So how does that enhance flexibility, when the people are already there?
Second, on a more personal note, when I'm out of the office, I'm not working. Period. I'm not being paid hourly, and I don't feel the need to give away freebies. I don't have to go on-call at my current job, and unless I get scheduled for a downtime window, my work will still be there the next morning when I get back to the office. A few years ago, I realized that work is not everything. The paycheck is important, but there's much more to life than doing work. I have a lot of hobbies which I like doing infinitely more than working, and they occupy my time and interest just fine, thanks. I like visiting friends and traveling to new places, and I don't want to be interrupted while I'm doing either. If my boss and/or company require the level of fealty that a lot of companies seem to require these days, I'm working at the wrong place.
Back when I was going on-call, I would do my on-call duties when it was my turn, and when it wasn't, I was not very nice about calls I received. I never slept well when I was on-call. I had my Christmas morning of opening gifts with my family interrupted by the on-call phone ringing one year. I used to carry a blackberry, and never read emails on it. The volume of what I got was so high, it quickly (like over the course of the first day or two I had it) turned into the boy-who-cried-wolf device; 99.9%+ of the mails didn't need a response, and the rest could have simply been replaced by an SMS or a phone call of "hey, we need help".
Well said. Often it's hard to see the progress that's happening all around us, simply because we're stuck in the middle of it.
#9 - always present in game tutorials - god i hate these
It all depends on the kind of game you're playing. I play a lot of sports games, and sometimes an in-game tutorial is awesomely helpful. F'rinstance, the latest Madden game has a skills practice mode, which is fantastic - it lets you see the exact effect the various combos and moves actually do, and actually lets you practice a little, with increasing levels of difficulty, without having to do jump into a full length game and do trial and error. The latest FIFA game has no such skills practice mode, and as a result I don't have a whole lot of enthusiasm to play the game, since it's very hard to do anything. Reading about button combos in the manual, and being able to practice them, are two very different things. And as much complaints as Gran Turismo's license tests get, they're valuable to get the feel of how the controls work, basic car handling, etc. Experienced players can breeze through the easier tests.
On something like Starcraft, the tutorial scenarios are nice, but perhaps they could be streamlined a bit. From what I recall (it's been quite a while), they're set up so that each scenario is the tutorial for using one type of unit. Even though, IIRC, those scenarios are fairly short, it would still be not difficult to combine a couple units' scenarios.
As with the cutscene stuff, the tutorials should always be optional. That's one of the big complaints about the Gran Turismo license tests - they're mandatory to be able to enter all but a few of the most simple races.
"Space Monkey Invented for Space Tourists"
Space Monkey? Uh, what?
It's been a long week.
I never understood why computing throws away wisdom so easily, instead using green-horns who will work their brains fried just to impress the boss man. It may work in the near term, but long term it's detrimental.
It's probably because that greenhorn who really is willing to destroy himself to impress the boss, will work stupid hours, and he's a whole lot cheaper to pay than the older, wiser programmer. The standard management mindset seems to be that IT workers are cogs, simply to be replaced when they break. And due to the treatment they get, they will break. That certainly does nothing to alleviate the stress level.
I got the hell out of programming about as fast as I could, and went into sysadmin, which isn't a whole lot better. Now I'm looking for a way to get out of IT altogether, but I've been doing it so long, I'm not sure what else to do.