Uhhhhh... on the page linked to in the/. article, there is no "rc" on the end. The link there for "2.4.17-1" goes to the same place (kernel.org) as your link.
Re:FOREVER WAR vs. STARSHIP TROOPERS
on
The Forever War
·
· Score: 2
They had very different views of war.
Not only that, but I believe that Haldeman was writing somewhat in response to Heinlein's romanticized, glorified view of combat. (You're right, Heinlein never did see combat I think, yet the dedication on the inside cover of Starship Trooeprs is to all the sargeants who are still "turning boys into men".)
Haldeman's response is a most excellent, "it's nothing to do with glory and honor, it's all about incredibly stupid mistakes, one after the other, and a lot of smart people (the Forever War main character is a physics professor) getting needlessly killed."
If the cost of bandwidth is the main problem, is anybody anywhere trying to do anything about it?
If I said, "Use less bandwidth," would you call me an asshole?
How about, "design ads that don't suck up the bandwidth that you're using the ads to pay for" instead?
The early AdCritic site was simple and straightforward. One banner ad, medium graphics. The usual "best viewed with" collection of tiny icons. It loaded fast and quickly.
A month ago I went there for the first time in a long time, trying to find the Clinton "Last Days" movie. I was on a friend's computer, with no filters and all the graphics turned on. Five minutes later it was still retrieving streaming animated banner ads for all over the page, X10 popup and popunder ads were having their gory way with my eyeballs, and the actual text of the page wasn't done loading yet because all the high-bandwidth advertisments hadn't finished hoarding the network yet.
I gave up and got my Clinton video somewhere else.
Yeah, I remembered the "Rear" as I pressed "Submit," but I wasn't certain how much of a difference that makes to the official rank. I guess it's just like the subdivisions in a general's rank. (I haven't done as much work with the Navy as with the other branches.)
She also won a Turing Award, didn't she? In '74 or '78?
No, it's a question of perceived status. At that time, being a computer -- recall that 'computer' was the title of the person doing the math, not the noisy room-sized thing you did the math on -- was considered something of a drudge job. The men discovered the algorithms, the women did the computing.
Later, as the idea of working with a (machine) computer as a career became more fashionable, more and more men moved into the field, as it was no longer considered "merely" women's work.
Remember Lady Ada Lovelace, the first programmer? Babbage couldn't be bothered to do the menial work of actually designing algorithms. Then the act of designing algorithms lost some of its stigma, and men took over. Finally the act of actually coding the algorithms has lost its stigma, and so I (a male) can sit here making a fabulous living as a coder, while my equally-talented coder girlfriend doesn't make as much money.
The glass ceiling is still there. It just shifts up and down to include/exclude different professions as culture changes.:-(
Alan Turing home page
on
Looking At Turing
·
· Score: 3, Informative
... is
here. I can't get to the site referenced in the article, so maybe they already mention it or link to it.
Re:So, the new inscription goes like this...
on
The Hype of the Rings
·
· Score: 5, Funny
I forgot to mention that I had a dream the other day, where I walked into a Burger King after the release date of the movie. All the workers had nametags (like they do now), but their names were written in the Tengwar of Feanor.
I think I woke up shaking at that point; I'm not certain.
So, the new inscription goes like this...
on
The Hype of the Rings
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Three drinks for the Burger Kings under the sky,
Seven burgers for the Dwarves who are stoned,
Ninety million consumers doomed to buy,
One cut for the Dark Lord, the franchise he owns.
In the land of Mordor where the Whoppers lie.
Onion ring to rule them all, onion ring to dine them,
Onion ring to bring them all and in the deep-fryer bind them
In the land of Mordor where the Whoppers lie.
I would give an attribution if I had seen one. Probably it's evolved from several sources.
Personally, I always liked the "drill" approach. The IT guys occasionally create a Hotmail account or some such, and mail something cool-looking to a few random accounts at the company. If you run the attachment, it pops up a simple message on your screen informing you that if this had been real,[...]
Unfortunately, that assumes your IT dept actually has the power to do something about stupid lusers.
I work on a U.S. military base, and while some of these viruses are caught by the filters on the Exchange server[*], they pose enough of a risk that once, the base IT folks sent out a "drill" email. This one sent the user to an internal webpage which threw out some technical-sounding gibberish -- NOBODY in the whole damn WORLD is as good as the U.S. military at generating technical-sounding gibberish -- and asked the user for their username/password.
Which they've been told repeatedly not to do. Those who entered it got a huge flashing warning sign, their username was recorded in a "morons" list, and an announcement went out the next week saying that the morons in question would have to submit a 100-word essay on why they should be allowed to continue to have access to the computer network, given that they're (apparently) willing to hand out access to any random webpage.
Cool, huh? 'Cept that some of the N-star generals with more stars than neurons were on that moron list, and of course they have way too much pride to be explaining to anybody why they should be permitted to do whatever they want. So a few days after the first announcement, another announcement went out, "Never mind."
And the morons continue to wreak havoc on the network.
[*] Those filters are fucking stupid, I might add. Frex, the word "funny" in the subject line triggers them. We found out about this one the hard way when a user mailed us with, "The secondary RAID is acting funny."
Why not just save everyone the time and effort, and call themselves VA*?
How many people outside of programming understand wildcard characters?
When was the last time Joe Q. Windows User needed to know what a wildcard was, what it looked like, or what it meant?
Nobody will save time and effort this way, because nobody outside of programming is intelligent enough to use this "abbreviation".:-)
Re:Never EVER override the browser colors!
on
Homepage Usability
·
· Score: 2
in Mozilla:
You know that, and I know that (ever since it was introduced in Netscape), but the average user doesn't know that.
Never EVER override the browser colors!
on
Homepage Usability
·
· Score: 2
PLEASE use different colors for visited and unvisited links.
If I go to a website that tries to override my browser's colors, I leave. Fuck them and whatever product they were trying to sell me.
Why? Because people who have any variation of color blindness will set their browser to use colors which they, the users, can distinguish. Most web sites never even consider this fact, and suddenly the users are faced with links, text, images, etc, which all look the same. (Consider a user with red-green color blindness going to a website that tries to "get in the Christmas spirit" by making the links red and green.)
Those websites need to die. I will not support them, visit them, nor refer them to others. I encourage everyone reading to do the same. The inconsiderate I-will-decide-what-you-display designers of those websites also need to die. I will torture them on sight with big flashing migraine-inducing strobe lights, and I encourage everyone reading to do the same.
The whole freaking point of HTML was to allow the end user to specify layout and appearance. The website designer specifies content, nothing else.
The maintainers of the autotools (autoconf, automake, libtool)
wrote a book to help explain the approach used by the tools. (Yes, it's called the goat book. Read the page to find out why.)
I've seen an amazing amount of crap posted in these comments; the parent article by jvl001 is one of the few good exceptions. NO tool can get it all; the autotools get you about 90%, and you have to help it the rest of the way. There are solution for just about all of the problems and red-herrings I've seen posted here, but you need to look a little farther than/. to find them.
The unix system doesn't really dump all the files in/usr/bin. These are, almost without exception, executable files.
Well, duh. He wasn't suggesting that his password file is now/bin/passwd and his data sink is/bin/null and his POP3 spool was/bin/INBOX.
Yes, everything in/usr/bin is an executable. (Hence the bin, because they're all binaries.) That's true on every Unix.
And on most Unixes,/usr/bin is for core applications, graphical binaries go in (say)/usr/X11/bin, statically-linked binaries go in/usr/sbin or/sbin, etc. There is some breakdown based on the purpose of the executable.
But under Linux -- and I think this is what the complaint revolved around -- all of the X11 and other graphical things get dumped in/usr/bin under most distros. Including the "helper apps" that no user runs directly. It's a mess, it's a pain, and it slows down PATH hashing.
They seem to be forgetting what GNU's "libexec" directory is for, among other things.
* Ability to bring up my $EDITOR when typing in a textarea
Go figure. Who would have thought that Mozilla users would be asking for a feature that Lynx has had for years.:-)
This is one of many reasons why I keep Lynx around: when I'm using a web interface to a bug-tracking system, and I want to, say, paste some code in to the "explanation" textarea before I close the report, I can just pop into my $EDITOR.
I don't know of any other *nix browser which lets me do this (but I haven't looked very hard).
No wonder America is viewed as corrupt
on
Message from Kabul
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
So the top three TV shows mentioned in the story ("acutely missed" is the phrase connected to one of them) are Baywatch, Survivor, and Temptation Island?
Three shows based on the concept of manly men frolicking with scantily-clad women, and in the latter two, premised on the assumption that all humans are conniving backstabbers, and that relationships cannot last in the face of lust, respectively.
And we're trying to convince the Middle East that America is a just and moral nation? Ya ha ha, whatever.
This idea of "simply don't reveal your address" would kill the spirit of open collaboration. A user goes to report a bug or ask a question, and then changes his mind because "then the spammers would get me... maybe I can just live with the bug instead." The cure would be worse than the disease.
Some OSS lists have already gone down that route. The KDE lists are blocked from open posting, and subscribing takes way too many hoops to jump through. It's a shame.
My aplogies for not making my position clearer in my previous posting.
(As for the laws-against-certain-people... that only holds as long as they meant the definitions of "people." I have nothing against Communists, and some of my best friends are Muslims, and unfortunately we have to allow the KKK freakos their opinions, but spammers add nothing to the quality of life anywhere on the planet, and do a lot to detract from it. They are nothing but a plague.)
then I can't collaborate, contribute, or even ask a freaking question in public.
I will not be chased off of developer email lists just because some poodlefucker harvests the addresses of the list traffic.
(And yes, I do support the death penalty for spammers. They cause far more loss in time and revenue than their lives could possible be worth. Yes, I really am that cold. *grin*)
Slashdot Mirror
Uhhhhh... on the page linked to in the
Not only that, but I believe that Haldeman was writing somewhat in response to Heinlein's romanticized, glorified view of combat. (You're right, Heinlein never did see combat I think, yet the dedication on the inside cover of Starship Trooeprs is to all the sargeants who are still "turning boys into men".)
Haldeman's response is a most excellent, "it's nothing to do with glory and honor, it's all about incredibly stupid mistakes, one after the other, and a lot of smart people (the Forever War main character is a physics professor) getting needlessly killed."
Never before has anyone dared to speak that tongue in the house of
Say what you like about Roger Ebert, this is a very nice writeup: http://www.suntimes.com/output/ebert1/cst-ftr-lor
If I said, "Use less bandwidth," would you call me an asshole?
How about, "design ads that don't suck up the bandwidth that you're using the ads to pay for" instead?
The early AdCritic site was simple and straightforward. One banner ad, medium graphics. The usual "best viewed with" collection of tiny icons. It loaded fast and quickly.
A month ago I went there for the first time in a long time, trying to find the Clinton "Last Days" movie. I was on a friend's computer, with no filters and all the graphics turned on. Five minutes later it was still retrieving streaming animated banner ads for all over the page, X10 popup and popunder ads were having their gory way with my eyeballs, and the actual text of the page wasn't done loading yet because all the high-bandwidth advertisments hadn't finished hoarding the network yet.
I gave up and got my Clinton video somewhere else.
Yeah, I remembered the "Rear" as I pressed "Submit," but I wasn't certain how much of a difference that makes to the official rank. I guess it's just like the subdivisions in a general's rank. (I haven't done as much work with the Navy as with the other branches.)
She also won a Turing Award, didn't she? In '74 or '78?
No, it's a question of perceived status. At that time, being a computer -- recall that 'computer' was the title of the person doing the math, not the noisy room-sized thing you did the math on -- was considered something of a drudge job. The men discovered the algorithms, the women did the computing.
Later, as the idea of working with a (machine) computer as a career became more fashionable, more and more men moved into the field, as it was no longer considered "merely" women's work.
Remember Lady Ada Lovelace, the first programmer? Babbage couldn't be bothered to do the menial work of actually designing algorithms. Then the act of designing algorithms lost some of its stigma, and men took over. Finally the act of actually coding the algorithms has lost its stigma, and so I (a male) can sit here making a fabulous living as a coder, while my equally-talented coder girlfriend doesn't make as much money.
The glass ceiling is still there. It just shifts up and down to include/exclude different professions as culture changes. :-(
(Somebody wanna help me with who said that?)
Admiral Grace Hopper to you.
... is here. I can't get to the site referenced in the article, so maybe they already mention it or link to it.
I forgot to mention that I had a dream the other day, where I walked into a Burger King after the release date of the movie. All the workers had nametags (like they do now), but their names were written in the Tengwar of Feanor.
I think I woke up shaking at that point; I'm not certain.
I would give an attribution if I had seen one. Probably it's evolved from several sources.
Unfortunately, that assumes your IT dept actually has the power to do something about stupid lusers.
I work on a U.S. military base, and while some of these viruses are caught by the filters on the Exchange server[*], they pose enough of a risk that once, the base IT folks sent out a "drill" email. This one sent the user to an internal webpage which threw out some technical-sounding gibberish -- NOBODY in the whole damn WORLD is as good as the U.S. military at generating technical-sounding gibberish -- and asked the user for their username/password.
Which they've been told repeatedly not to do. Those who entered it got a huge flashing warning sign, their username was recorded in a "morons" list, and an announcement went out the next week saying that the morons in question would have to submit a 100-word essay on why they should be allowed to continue to have access to the computer network, given that they're (apparently) willing to hand out access to any random webpage.
Cool, huh? 'Cept that some of the N-star generals with more stars than neurons were on that moron list, and of course they have way too much pride to be explaining to anybody why they should be permitted to do whatever they want. So a few days after the first announcement, another announcement went out, "Never mind."
And the morons continue to wreak havoc on the network.
[*] Those filters are fucking stupid, I might add. Frex, the word "funny" in the subject line triggers them. We found out about this one the hard way when a user mailed us with, "The secondary RAID is acting funny."
How many people outside of programming understand wildcard characters?
When was the last time Joe Q. Windows User needed to know what a wildcard was, what it looked like, or what it meant?
Nobody will save time and effort this way, because nobody outside of programming is intelligent enough to use this "abbreviation". :-)
You know that, and I know that (ever since it was introduced in Netscape), but the average user doesn't know that.
If I go to a website that tries to override my browser's colors, I leave. Fuck them and whatever product they were trying to sell me.
Why? Because people who have any variation of color blindness will set their browser to use colors which they, the users, can distinguish. Most web sites never even consider this fact, and suddenly the users are faced with links, text, images, etc, which all look the same. (Consider a user with red-green color blindness going to a website that tries to "get in the Christmas spirit" by making the links red and green.)
Those websites need to die. I will not support them, visit them, nor refer them to others. I encourage everyone reading to do the same. The inconsiderate I-will-decide-what-you-display designers of those websites also need to die. I will torture them on sight with big flashing migraine-inducing strobe lights, and I encourage everyone reading to do the same.
The whole freaking point of HTML was to allow the end user to specify layout and appearance. The website designer specifies content, nothing else.
The maintainers of the autotools (autoconf, automake, libtool) wrote a book to help explain the approach used by the tools. (Yes, it's called the goat book. Read the page to find out why.)
I've seen an amazing amount of crap posted in these comments; the parent article by jvl001 is one of the few good exceptions. NO tool can get it all; the autotools get you about 90%, and you have to help it the rest of the way. There are solution for just about all of the problems and red-herrings I've seen posted here, but you need to look a little farther than /. to find them.
And it runs on beer? You'll also have to build a second detox facility for the workers...
Well, duh. He wasn't suggesting that his password file is now /bin/passwd and his data sink is /bin/null and his POP3 spool was /bin/INBOX.
Yes, everything in /usr/bin is an executable. (Hence the bin, because they're all binaries.) That's true on every Unix.
And on most Unixes, /usr/bin is for core applications, graphical binaries go in (say) /usr/X11/bin, statically-linked binaries go in /usr/sbin or /sbin, etc. There is some breakdown based on the purpose of the executable.
But under Linux -- and I think this is what the complaint revolved around -- all of the X11 and other graphical things get dumped in /usr/bin under most distros. Including the "helper apps" that no user runs directly. It's a mess, it's a pain, and it slows down PATH hashing.
They seem to be forgetting what GNU's "libexec" directory is for, among other things.
Go figure. Who would have thought that Mozilla users would be asking for a feature that Lynx has had for years. :-)
This is one of many reasons why I keep Lynx around: when I'm using a web interface to a bug-tracking system, and I want to, say, paste some code in to the "explanation" textarea before I close the report, I can just pop into my $EDITOR.
I don't know of any other *nix browser which lets me do this (but I haven't looked very hard).
So the top three TV shows mentioned in the story ("acutely missed" is the phrase connected to one of them) are Baywatch, Survivor, and Temptation Island?
Three shows based on the concept of manly men frolicking with scantily-clad women, and in the latter two, premised on the assumption that all humans are conniving backstabbers, and that relationships cannot last in the face of lust, respectively.
And we're trying to convince the Middle East that America is a just and moral nation? Ya ha ha, whatever.
My aplogies for not making my position clearer in my previous posting.
My apologies for not doing a cursory spell check in my previous posting. (Those responsible for the previous apology have been sacked.)
Spam is NOT killing open source.
That wasn't my point. Let me try again.
This idea of "simply don't reveal your address" would kill the spirit of open collaboration. A user goes to report a bug or ask a question, and then changes his mind because "then the spammers would get me... maybe I can just live with the bug instead." The cure would be worse than the disease.
Some OSS lists have already gone down that route. The KDE lists are blocked from open posting, and subscribing takes way too many hoops to jump through. It's a shame.
My aplogies for not making my position clearer in my previous posting.
(As for the laws-against-certain-people... that only holds as long as they meant the definitions of "people." I have nothing against Communists, and some of my best friends are Muslims, and unfortunately we have to allow the KKK freakos their opinions, but spammers add nothing to the quality of life anywhere on the planet, and do a lot to detract from it. They are nothing but a plague.)
then I can't collaborate, contribute, or even ask a freaking question in public.
I will not be chased off of developer email lists just because some poodlefucker harvests the addresses of the list traffic.
(And yes, I do support the death penalty for spammers. They cause far more loss in time and revenue than their lives could possible be worth. Yes, I really am that cold. *grin*)
however, the video card protected the modem and sound-card!
Ouch. Reminds me of that old saying, "The expensive hardware will go up in smoke to protect the more vulnerable {fuses,circuit-breakers}." :-)