4. Some people noticed that Kerry's lead over Dean was highly correlated with how the votes were counted:
Your own link gives alternate explanations as to why Kerry might win in the areas that used the electronic voting machines. I'll give you some more. The bulk of the population in NH lives along the southern border, near MA. That region gets lots of transplants from MA, and recieve a lot of the Boston TV channels. They know who John Kerry is, and have been being exposed to him for the past 20 years that he's been in politics. I know all this because I used to live in NH, specifically in that Southern part of NH. We all knew who John Kerry was long before the rest of the nation did. But even though he was governor of the state to the west, I'd never heard of Howard Dean until he ran for President. I can easily believe that the people in that region would prefer Kerry to Dean. Where's the stats that matches the exit polls specifically from those areas with the actual results of those areas? I'd be interested to see those.
5. # When the dust settled Kerry won by (IIRC) 1.5%--close to the exit poll's "dead heat", but by then he'd been spiked by a microphone and no one cared.
Again your own link betrays you. Kerry won NH by 13% over Dean. 39% to 26%. Where do you get the 1.5%? Is that throwing out all the votes from the EVAL MACHINES? Again, show me the numbers that correlate the exit polls and actual results specifically from those regions. If those don't match either, then maybe you're on to something. If they do match, then I still say, take off the tinfoil hat.
Man, take the tinfoil hat off. Exit polls have NOT historically been fairly reliable, especially in tight elections.
In the Democratic Primary in NH, early exit polls showed Howard Dean and John Kerry in a dead heat. Yet when the votes were actually counted, Kerry won by a wide margin.
Exit polls were off EVERYWHERE this year, not just in areas using Diebold machines or other forms of electronic voting. The simple fact is, PEOPLE ENJOY LYING TO POLLSTERS. My mother makes it a habit to lie to exit pollsters whenever she's asked who she voted for. I don't think this is an uncommon habit. Plus, exit polling is an inexact science at best. The margin of error on even the most scientific exit polls is large. When the election is going to be decided by five percentage points or less, and the margin of error on your poll is five percentage points plus or minus, you have to expect crap like this.
So take off the hat, man. This happens a lot. Exit polls are not infallible, and they're not even historically that good at calling tight races.
Yeah, back in the day when proprietary UNIX OSes running on proprietary hardware ruled the data center, Windows really *was* the low-cost solution--it ran on commodity hardware, and its licencing was often less onerous and expensive than their competitors.
Now that they're no longer really competeing with proprietary UNIX in the data center (they've pretty much taken all they're going to get in that market) along comes a new OS that also runs on commodity hardware, but has the added benefit of being (mostly) free as well.
Once upon a time, they really could argue that they were cheaper than the "big boys". Now, in the portion of the data center market they control, that's not true anymore.
I know that feeling. Unfortunately, that's what it's like being in the service industry. Very few people really notice "good" service at a restaurant--they just notice when the waiter fucks up. Likewise, you can have year-long uptimes on your servers, but the first time one crashes during a critical build or during a high volume sales day, it's your ass, and that year of uptime means nothing. It's expected that the systems will be up and will work all the time. Nobody sees the work that goes into that.
I often think about getting another job. However, I have no other skills. I'm a UNIX guy and can do Windows in a pinch, and that's all I know. So, I'll tough it out for now.
I think I made it pretty clear I'm not a slavish policy nazi. If you have a legitmate business need for something, you should get it. We have a "no downloads" policy where I work too, but if you have a business need for some downloadable piece of software we're happy to download it for you and/or give you temporary access to download it yourself. If your boss can't make the sysadmin folks see the need to bend policy once in awhile, then that's either your bosses fault or you have an *actual* policy nazi in charge of the sysadmin team. I'll be the first to admit those people not only exist but seem to get promoted way beyond their competancy because they say what the higher-ups want to hear.
That all being said, too often I see people making up completely ridiculous business cases just because they're pissed and don't think they should have to be confined by rules. Hey, guess what? I respect that you're an individual and all, and I respect that good programmers are generally creative free-thinking types. Still, I have a business to protect here. There's a reason policies exist, and it's not just to piss you off, believe me. Policies exist because without them I can't do my job. If I don't have control over what goes on a server, I can't admin it properly. If any old user can come along and install whatever, I can't guarantee the service levels my SLA requires. If an app you install crashes the server, that's my head. And saying "I didn't do it, Mr. Programmer did it!" doesn't help at all, because then I'll just get beat with the company policy that says I shouldn't have ever given you access to do that in the first place.
Your case sounds like you've either got some real policy nazis or you haven't done sufficent job convincing the people in charge that you really need this to do your job. Make sure it keeps getting kicked up the chain. Big companies especially have ridiculously slow bueracracies. If that doesn't work, try just talking to the sysadmin team directly. Find the real geek and explain to him/her why you actually need this to do your job. We SAs hear that excuse all the time, BTW, and it's a lie as often as not. But since you're actually not lying, you've got nothing to lose by taking your case over to the sysadmin team. At least you'll find out if there are any real techies there or if they're all just pretenders.
I empathize with those "fascist policy-drones", because they are as anal as they are for good reason. Who gets blamed if a system crashes? Not the programmer who wrote a bad application that systematically allocated every available byte of RAM. Not the dumb-ass manager who opened an email attachment and unleashed a virus on the company. The sysadmin gets blamed.
Programmers as a general rule think they're the shit, even when they're not. Just like in my world of system administration there are five "paper" MCSEs and CCNAs for every one real system or network admin, there's five dumbshit programmers who only got into the field for the money for every true geek programmer. And these dumbshits think that since they spent three or four years in some school learning how to program, they're naturally qualified to do *my* job as well.
The fact that you find it strange that you didn't have access to your own C: drive is a typical reaction, but there's a good reason for it. That's not your C: drive. That's my C: drive. Who has to rebuild it if you fuck it up? Who has to troubleshoot it when your shit stops working on you and you call for support? Who gets blamed for you not being able to meet your deadline because your computer mysteriously crashed? Me. The sysadmin. I do. I'll get blamed even if I can prove you intentionally deleted the kernel just to keep from having to work towards your own unreasonable deadline, because they'll blame me for giving you improper access against company policy, even though I did it to you as a favor because you claimed you needed that access in order to meet your important deadline.
As a general rule, most sysadmins will give you only the bare minimum level of access you need to do your job. And if it's at all possible to get away with giving you less than that, we'll do it. We don't do it because we're facist rules nazis. We do it because too often it's our own ass if we don't. The last virus our company got was brought in by the development team, because we trusted them to know how to install virus detection software on their systems and know how to update the.dat files regularly, and it turned out that trust was severely misplaced. Who got blamed? We did. Not the ignorant programmers. We got the blame for not taking care of the systems we were told we could trust them to maintain.
So, yeah, if you don't have access to your C: drive, it's because the sysadmin doesn't trust you. But don't take it personally. He/she doesn't trust anybody. There may yet be hope. If you can prove your geekdom sufficiently to your local SA, you can usually earn some trust that way. We may be a totally paranoid lot, but we know true brothers and sisters when we meet them. If you can earn our trust we can usually see our way clear to bending the rules for you a few times. But don't cross us. The first time you make your SA work all weekend to fix up a mess you made of a server due to your code running at some level of access you shouldn't have been able to run it at in the first place, you'll get shitlisted, and good luck getting back in his/her good graces after that.
Then again, maybe your entire systems admin staff are a bunch of paper admins and aren't true geeks at all. If so, I'm sorry. There's not much you can do.
Hold 'Em (also known as Texas Hold 'Em) is a variation of stud poker that uses community cards on the board to complete the hands of the people playing.
In the first round, everyone is dealt two cards, face down. These are known as your hole cards. The first round of betting takes place after the hole cards are dealt, with the person left of the "dealer" (in casinos, this is represented by a button placed in front of the player which rotates clockwise around the table with each hand) going first. In the first round, nobody knows what anybody else has, obviously, but watching the patterns of checks, raises, and calls can give you a good idea of how much the person likes the two cards given them.
After the first round of betting, the dealer turns up three cards face up in the middle of the table. This is known as "the flop", and these are community cards. You get to play these cards in combination with the two you hold in your hand to make the best five-card poker hand possible.
After the second round of betting, a fourth card is added to the board, known alternately as "the turn" or "fourth street". Another round of betting takes place, then the fifth and final community card is revealed, called either "the river" or "fifth street".
At this point, everyone still in the pot has seven cards to work with to make a five-card poker hand. After the final round of betting, all remaining players show their hands, and the best hand wins.
The reason this variation of poker has so much more strategy involved in it is directly related to the community cards. You can tell, at each step of the game, what the best possible hand (called "the nut") is for that set of cards. Say the flop is Ac Ks 5d. The best possible hand so far, including the players two hole cards, is three aces. But, if nobody bet before the flop, then it's a fairly good bet that nobody has three aces, because anyone with bullets in the hole before the flop would probably bet/raise before the flop. With this same flop, say the turn hits Js. NOW the nut hand is a straight, ace high, but that assumes somebody stayed in the pot on 10 Q, which, depending on the betting pattern and the reletive skill of the players, may or may not be likely. Then, say the river turns up As. Again the absolute nut hand is four aces. But by this time, you can probably tell if anyone has that or not by the pattern of their betting.
If you have two spades in the hole, you have a flush now. It may or may not have been a good idea to have stayed in the whole way with your two spades, but at this time you think you're looking good, right?
Well, you may have missed that someone with A K, A J, or A 5 has a full house now. Again, you're in a good position to judge at this point whether someone has A K in the hole by the pattern of their betting. A K, especially of same suit, is a strong hole hand, so that person probably would have bet it before the flop, and after catching two pair on the flop, may have felt good about continuing to bet, depending on the pattern of other bets.
So, instead of just betting on the reletive strength of your hand, you have to take into account what you know and what you can divine of the other player's hands. Hold 'Em is much more strategy oriented than draw or straight stud poker.
Just don't try typing "boot net -install" or you'll bet a non-intuitive error message that'll leave you wondering why what looks like a perfectly formatted command fails.
This was done by placing the keys in such a configuration, such that no two successive keys were right beside eachother.
Do you not think that would reduce typing speed?
No. Actually, I think alternating most keystrokes between hands makes it faster and the strain less. Your argument would hold if you type with only one or two fingers, though. But if you touch-type, it's better to seperate commonly used keys between hands.
-- Dave
Did you even read the question? The guy was happy with the stuff that ran on the old 386s only using 10MB of disk space back in the day. Many PDAs today can handle that.
Probably because they didn't want ugly blue cables stapled to their fence and nasty-ass holes punched in their exterior walls. Those pictures are insane, dude. For a couple of geeks wiring their houses together and not caring too much about anything else (property value, longevity of the connection) this is probably a fine solution. For an entire neighborhood with subscribers many miles apart, I think I'd go with the DSL solution.
Why is this modded up to 5? These are the most retarded suggestions I've ever seen. Yeah, what a great idea, let's insert 20-something Natalie Portman into the end of Jedi and have her talk to her 20-something son and daughter and lead them on another fun adventure for three more movies.
And I'm not even going to touch that Jar-Jar comment. Yeesh.
Yeah, it really sucks having to pay for convenience, doesn't it? Everything should be free (beer) and handy and no company should ever prevent you from misusing a service they offer just because they have a right to.
Personally, I subscribe to Safari, and I think it's great. I recognize that the 5 (maybe when you subscribed it was only 3, but now the bottom subscription level is 5) book limit and the "you can only change books once a month" provision and the anti-spidering technology was all to protect O'Reilly's considerable investment in their books and yet still allow me the convenience of reading and searching a selection of their books online.
But yeah, it really sucks when a company tries hard to both cater to internet geeks *and* protect their investments. They should just post all their books online for free and allow me to write everything to my hard drive so I don't have to pay anymore.
Solaris packages are just a collection of files and a few config files that tell the system where to put the files. If you want to do anything more complex than "Put file X in/bin" you have to write start and finish scripts for the package.
Because people who know anything know that looking at a MHz to MHz comparison across different architectures is meaningless? Hasn't your AMD bias tought you anything?
Clock for clock, the UltraSparc architecture blows away anything in the x86 world.
He's an old hippy. He clings to the outmoded hippy ideals of 30+ years ago. We laugh at old hippies today. Why do people still take this one seriously?
Uh. For the past fifteen YEARS, at all times, there has been someone in orbit. Usually three someones. They were called cosmonauts, and they were on Mir or the Salyut stations that preceeded it. The only time in the last fifteen years in which there might NOT have been anyone in orbit was the period of time between the last Mir crew and the first ISS crew.
Other than that, at all times during the last fifteen years, we Americans could sleep peacefully knowing that three cosmonauts orbited above our heads.
Slashdot Mirror
Your own link gives alternate explanations as to why Kerry might win in the areas that used the electronic voting machines. I'll give you some more. The bulk of the population in NH lives along the southern border, near MA. That region gets lots of transplants from MA, and recieve a lot of the Boston TV channels. They know who John Kerry is, and have been being exposed to him for the past 20 years that he's been in politics. I know all this because I used to live in NH, specifically in that Southern part of NH. We all knew who John Kerry was long before the rest of the nation did. But even though he was governor of the state to the west, I'd never heard of Howard Dean until he ran for President. I can easily believe that the people in that region would prefer Kerry to Dean. Where's the stats that matches the exit polls specifically from those areas with the actual results of those areas? I'd be interested to see those.
5. # When the dust settled Kerry won by (IIRC) 1.5%--close to the exit poll's "dead heat", but by then he'd been spiked by a microphone and no one cared.
Again your own link betrays you. Kerry won NH by 13% over Dean. 39% to 26%. Where do you get the 1.5%? Is that throwing out all the votes from the EVAL MACHINES? Again, show me the numbers that correlate the exit polls and actual results specifically from those regions. If those don't match either, then maybe you're on to something. If they do match, then I still say, take off the tinfoil hat.
-- Dave
Man, take the tinfoil hat off. Exit polls have NOT historically been fairly reliable, especially in tight elections.
In the Democratic Primary in NH, early exit polls showed Howard Dean and John Kerry in a dead heat. Yet when the votes were actually counted, Kerry won by a wide margin.
Exit polls were off EVERYWHERE this year, not just in areas using Diebold machines or other forms of electronic voting. The simple fact is, PEOPLE ENJOY LYING TO POLLSTERS. My mother makes it a habit to lie to exit pollsters whenever she's asked who she voted for. I don't think this is an uncommon habit. Plus, exit polling is an inexact science at best. The margin of error on even the most scientific exit polls is large. When the election is going to be decided by five percentage points or less, and the margin of error on your poll is five percentage points plus or minus, you have to expect crap like this.
So take off the hat, man. This happens a lot. Exit polls are not infallible, and they're not even historically that good at calling tight races.
-- Dave
Yeah, back in the day when proprietary UNIX OSes running on proprietary hardware ruled the data center, Windows really *was* the low-cost solution--it ran on commodity hardware, and its licencing was often less onerous and expensive than their competitors.
Now that they're no longer really competeing with proprietary UNIX in the data center (they've pretty much taken all they're going to get in that market) along comes a new OS that also runs on commodity hardware, but has the added benefit of being (mostly) free as well.
Once upon a time, they really could argue that they were cheaper than the "big boys". Now, in the portion of the data center market they control, that's not true anymore.
-- Dave
George W. Bush is not a "Jr". His father's name is George Herbert Walker Bush. His name is George Walker Bush. There's no Jr. or Sr.
-- Dave
I often think about getting another job. However, I have no other skills. I'm a UNIX guy and can do Windows in a pinch, and that's all I know. So, I'll tough it out for now.
-- Dave
That all being said, too often I see people making up completely ridiculous business cases just because they're pissed and don't think they should have to be confined by rules. Hey, guess what? I respect that you're an individual and all, and I respect that good programmers are generally creative free-thinking types. Still, I have a business to protect here. There's a reason policies exist, and it's not just to piss you off, believe me. Policies exist because without them I can't do my job. If I don't have control over what goes on a server, I can't admin it properly. If any old user can come along and install whatever, I can't guarantee the service levels my SLA requires. If an app you install crashes the server, that's my head. And saying "I didn't do it, Mr. Programmer did it!" doesn't help at all, because then I'll just get beat with the company policy that says I shouldn't have ever given you access to do that in the first place.
Your case sounds like you've either got some real policy nazis or you haven't done sufficent job convincing the people in charge that you really need this to do your job. Make sure it keeps getting kicked up the chain. Big companies especially have ridiculously slow bueracracies. If that doesn't work, try just talking to the sysadmin team directly. Find the real geek and explain to him/her why you actually need this to do your job. We SAs hear that excuse all the time, BTW, and it's a lie as often as not. But since you're actually not lying, you've got nothing to lose by taking your case over to the sysadmin team. At least you'll find out if there are any real techies there or if they're all just pretenders.
-- Dave
Programmers as a general rule think they're the shit, even when they're not. Just like in my world of system administration there are five "paper" MCSEs and CCNAs for every one real system or network admin, there's five dumbshit programmers who only got into the field for the money for every true geek programmer. And these dumbshits think that since they spent three or four years in some school learning how to program, they're naturally qualified to do *my* job as well.
The fact that you find it strange that you didn't have access to your own C: drive is a typical reaction, but there's a good reason for it. That's not your C: drive. That's my C: drive. Who has to rebuild it if you fuck it up? Who has to troubleshoot it when your shit stops working on you and you call for support? Who gets blamed for you not being able to meet your deadline because your computer mysteriously crashed? Me. The sysadmin. I do. I'll get blamed even if I can prove you intentionally deleted the kernel just to keep from having to work towards your own unreasonable deadline, because they'll blame me for giving you improper access against company policy, even though I did it to you as a favor because you claimed you needed that access in order to meet your important deadline.
As a general rule, most sysadmins will give you only the bare minimum level of access you need to do your job. And if it's at all possible to get away with giving you less than that, we'll do it. We don't do it because we're facist rules nazis. We do it because too often it's our own ass if we don't. The last virus our company got was brought in by the development team, because we trusted them to know how to install virus detection software on their systems and know how to update the .dat files regularly, and it turned out that trust was severely misplaced. Who got blamed? We did. Not the ignorant programmers. We got the blame for not taking care of the systems we were told we could trust them to maintain.
So, yeah, if you don't have access to your C: drive, it's because the sysadmin doesn't trust you. But don't take it personally. He/she doesn't trust anybody. There may yet be hope. If you can prove your geekdom sufficiently to your local SA, you can usually earn some trust that way. We may be a totally paranoid lot, but we know true brothers and sisters when we meet them. If you can earn our trust we can usually see our way clear to bending the rules for you a few times. But don't cross us. The first time you make your SA work all weekend to fix up a mess you made of a server due to your code running at some level of access you shouldn't have been able to run it at in the first place, you'll get shitlisted, and good luck getting back in his/her good graces after that.
Then again, maybe your entire systems admin staff are a bunch of paper admins and aren't true geeks at all. If so, I'm sorry. There's not much you can do.
-- Dave
Well, if he won't, I will.
Hold 'Em (also known as Texas Hold 'Em) is a variation of stud poker that uses community cards on the board to complete the hands of the people playing.
In the first round, everyone is dealt two cards, face down. These are known as your hole cards. The first round of betting takes place after the hole cards are dealt, with the person left of the "dealer" (in casinos, this is represented by a button placed in front of the player which rotates clockwise around the table with each hand) going first. In the first round, nobody knows what anybody else has, obviously, but watching the patterns of checks, raises, and calls can give you a good idea of how much the person likes the two cards given them.
After the first round of betting, the dealer turns up three cards face up in the middle of the table. This is known as "the flop", and these are community cards. You get to play these cards in combination with the two you hold in your hand to make the best five-card poker hand possible.
After the second round of betting, a fourth card is added to the board, known alternately as "the turn" or "fourth street". Another round of betting takes place, then the fifth and final community card is revealed, called either "the river" or "fifth street".
At this point, everyone still in the pot has seven cards to work with to make a five-card poker hand. After the final round of betting, all remaining players show their hands, and the best hand wins.
The reason this variation of poker has so much more strategy involved in it is directly related to the community cards. You can tell, at each step of the game, what the best possible hand (called "the nut") is for that set of cards. Say the flop is Ac Ks 5d. The best possible hand so far, including the players two hole cards, is three aces. But, if nobody bet before the flop, then it's a fairly good bet that nobody has three aces, because anyone with bullets in the hole before the flop would probably bet/raise before the flop. With this same flop, say the turn hits Js. NOW the nut hand is a straight, ace high, but that assumes somebody stayed in the pot on 10 Q, which, depending on the betting pattern and the reletive skill of the players, may or may not be likely. Then, say the river turns up As. Again the absolute nut hand is four aces. But by this time, you can probably tell if anyone has that or not by the pattern of their betting.
If you have two spades in the hole, you have a flush now. It may or may not have been a good idea to have stayed in the whole way with your two spades, but at this time you think you're looking good, right?
Well, you may have missed that someone with A K, A J, or A 5 has a full house now. Again, you're in a good position to judge at this point whether someone has A K in the hole by the pattern of their betting. A K, especially of same suit, is a strong hole hand, so that person probably would have bet it before the flop, and after catching two pair on the flop, may have felt good about continuing to bet, depending on the pattern of other bets.
So, instead of just betting on the reletive strength of your hand, you have to take into account what you know and what you can divine of the other player's hands. Hold 'Em is much more strategy oriented than draw or straight stud poker.
-- Dave
Just don't try typing "boot net -install" or you'll bet a non-intuitive error message that'll leave you wondering why what looks like a perfectly formatted command fails.
-- Dave
This was done by placing the keys in such a configuration, such that no two successive keys were right beside eachother.
Do you not think that would reduce typing speed?
No. Actually, I think alternating most keystrokes between hands makes it faster and the strain less. Your argument would hold if you type with only one or two fingers, though. But if you touch-type, it's better to seperate commonly used keys between hands.
-- Dave
Who told you life was going to be fair? Whoever that was is the person you need to be complaining to, not Bill Gates for having more money than you.
-- Dave
At least as long as the "ALL YOUR BASE" jokes did, dude.
-- Dave
Did you even read the question? The guy was happy with the stuff that ran on the old 386s only using 10MB of disk space back in the day. Many PDAs today can handle that.
-- Dave
I we sure Steve Ballmer exists? Maybe he's just another one of Microsoft's clip-art fantasies. Have *you* ever seen him in person?
-- Dave
Probably because they didn't want ugly blue cables stapled to their fence and nasty-ass holes punched in their exterior walls. Those pictures are insane, dude. For a couple of geeks wiring their houses together and not caring too much about anything else (property value, longevity of the connection) this is probably a fine solution. For an entire neighborhood with subscribers many miles apart, I think I'd go with the DSL solution.
-- Dave
Why is this modded up to 5? These are the most retarded suggestions I've ever seen. Yeah, what a great idea, let's insert 20-something Natalie Portman into the end of Jedi and have her talk to her 20-something son and daughter and lead them on another fun adventure for three more movies.
And I'm not even going to touch that Jar-Jar comment. Yeesh.
Do any of you actually read the stuff you mod?
Yeah, it really sucks having to pay for convenience, doesn't it? Everything should be free (beer) and handy and no company should ever prevent you from misusing a service they offer just because they have a right to.
Personally, I subscribe to Safari, and I think it's great. I recognize that the 5 (maybe when you subscribed it was only 3, but now the bottom subscription level is 5) book limit and the "you can only change books once a month" provision and the anti-spidering technology was all to protect O'Reilly's considerable investment in their books and yet still allow me the convenience of reading and searching a selection of their books online.
But yeah, it really sucks when a company tries hard to both cater to internet geeks *and* protect their investments. They should just post all their books online for free and allow me to write everything to my hard drive so I don't have to pay anymore.
-- Dave
Try this link if you don't believe me.
-- Dave
Take your finger out of your nose and use it to click the mouse on the link to the article. Then open your eyes and READ it. Thanks.
-- Dave
What made you think they were going to dump HPUX? Seems to me it's the second biggest commercial UNIX out there. It'd be foolish to dump HPUX.
-- Dave
Solaris packages are just a collection of files and a few config files that tell the system where to put the files. If you want to do anything more complex than "Put file X in /bin" you have to write start and finish scripts for the package.
Clock for clock, the UltraSparc architecture blows away anything in the x86 world.
He's an old hippy. He clings to the outmoded hippy ideals of 30+ years ago. We laugh at old hippies today. Why do people still take this one seriously?
Uh. For the past fifteen YEARS, at all times, there has been someone in orbit. Usually three someones. They were called cosmonauts, and they were on Mir or the Salyut stations that preceeded it. The only time in the last fifteen years in which there might NOT have been anyone in orbit was the period of time between the last Mir crew and the first ISS crew. Other than that, at all times during the last fifteen years, we Americans could sleep peacefully knowing that three cosmonauts orbited above our heads.