shouldn't that be "17 MiB files"? kinda like "17 FBI files"? seriously tho, you may want to not advertise the fact that you know about the MiB. let alone the MiB files. you may get someone show up at your door with the "flashy thingy".
haven't tried it myself but sometime back, i had read somewhere about 'kill -9 1' in a firewall so that, since the kernel/network/firewall is already up and running, no process would be able to do anything to the system unless it was physically rebooted. assuming there are no exploit vectors in the kernel, that may be a nice setup for a dedicated firewall.
As opposed to the Linux PC that has a standard configuration? The only stickers I see are "Vista Capable". Never knew there was a "Linux Capable" stickers going around.
> The modem is rented from a cable service.
I didn't know there was any other way to get a different modem for Linux.
> The video card purchased from the bargain bin at Tiger Direct.
That sounds more like the linux boxes. Windows mostly comes pre-packaged from BestBuy/CircuitCity/Dell. With the "certified" parts.
> The RAM from eBay.
Are you sure you're not confusing Windows with Linux? Windows is the OS that comes from OEMs with everything bundled together with "certified" parts. Linux is the one you have to install on hardware that probably was "designed" for another OS.
I'd never thought I'd see the day when people defended windows for having to deal with random components. Shoe on other foot?
and I can tell you that in the post-windows days... well, people have this concept of rebooting when things don't work. "it will auto-magically fix itself" (tm). cell-phones, managed switches, home routers... you name it, the first thing tech-support will do is ask you to "turn it off and on again". so much so that that is a standard gag in "the IT crowd".
i had this incident in our data center where this nincompoop kept futzing around with a managed switch. he hosed the config, caused some ripple effect on the servers and then panicked and wanted to reboot everything - including the servers. didn't know what the problem was but as he is indoctrinated to the ethos of rebooting to automagically fix problems, just wanted to reboot everything.
i had to step in, restart a few services and things were back to normal. no reboot required. a reboot would have taken us out for a good 15-20 minutes. restarting services, 10 seconds.
it's almost like people don't take pride in uptimes. who cares if it's down for 30 minutes... thanks largely to the microsoft OS culture. unix was bad enough - compared to mainframes and VMS - or so i'm told.
so, yeah, it's gone downhill. MS didn't help. telephones might have had outages but i sure don't recall having to reboot the big black rotery dial phones..
Well, here's an easy win for ya. I pledge to sing praises of MS *if* MS works with the mod_ssl people to fix the force-response-1.0 issue with apache+mod_ssl and IE. And no it's not just for 4.0x versions of IE. The way I see it, the problem may be in mod_ssl (or it may be in IE) but the mod_ssl people have no way of figuring that out since IE is closed. MS, on the other hand, has access to both IE and mod_ssl. Now, wouldn't it be wonderful if MS took those small, yet practical steps in making things interoperable?
Until that happens, I couldn't care less about the time MS spends in the mountains of documentation and years of man-hour spent in making said mountain, or the revenue lost in doing so. I'm sorry, but don't expect me to sympathize about lost revenue with a company that makes millions in the amount of time it takes me to stick that bit of configuration into one of my servers to make it work with the said corp's products in a hobbled and barely functioning way.
I just spent two months of going back and fourth with a client why despite the forced downgrade, we had enough hardware to handle the load. MS could have helped me out. It chooses not to. I could sing praises of MS. I choose not to.
while it is true that most of the time, the primary and secondary name servers are the only ones doing zone transfers, i have a setup with AT&T where i get to host my own forward and reverse DNS for a CIDR netblock by doing a notify/transfer with the mother-ship. so, in north dakota, this would be illegal?
> But show me the OSS software out there that screams, "Wow! That's unbelievably clever!"
The reason those don't exist (supposedly), I think, has to do with the fact that OSS was born *because* "Closed Source" market mechanics makes damn sure that the market *belongs* to the incumbent and any new innovative ideas never take hold. So the first goal, in my mind, for OSS has been to take away the hold that Closed Source has on the marketplace. Once that is achieved - I don't mean total domination, just enough market share so that it takes away the monopolistic nature of Closed Source - then, I think, we'll start seeing some radical ideas.
Case in point, BeOS. At some levels, it was amazing! Same desktop, file-system paradigms, sure. But with efficiency that makes you wonder just what the hell the other OSs are doing that requires so much compute power just to stay on. You have to see it to believe it. That, to me, was quite clever. But did they make it? Nope. And I suspect that the "Closed Source" incumbents played a role in making sure that BeOS never got to the marketplace.
So, while one may start to make an argument that Open Source hasn't produced anything clever, Closed Source has made damn sure that even if anything clever did appear, it wouldn't see the light of day. Which is what made Open Source necessary in the first place - to reverse the damages of Closed Source on innovation.
PS: I do realize that BeOS wasn't open source. That was chosen as an example of what happens to innovation in a "Closed Source" marketplace.
> On the other hand, completely ignoring Microsoft formats isn't essentially suicide, it is suicide. Microsoft exists, and dominates the office application market, pretending it doesn't exist and that you can 'do your own thing' without taking it into account is utterly stupid.
Quick, somebody tell Linus and RMS that MS dominates the OS market as well and they really shouldn't try to roll their own.
That aside, I do understand where you're coming from. We do *lots* of document generation. I mean 100,000+ in a given week. We use XML/XSLT to target PDF, ODF, OOXML and what have you. OOXML is a *major* pain compared to ODF. While we did implement the necessary software to support OOXML due to market situation, I do hope that ODF displaces OOXML. If ODF attains more 'compatibility' with OOXML, what's the point? We have OOXML now. We don't need ODF to become OOXML. We need it to replace it. If ODF becomes the defacto standard by *becoming* OOXML, that'll be a sad day for us.
just how do you record 'instantaneous' speed? btw, the only difference between speed and velocity is that velocity has a direction component. or, velocity is speed combined with the direction. and neither one is instantaneous. it's *always* an average of the distance traveled over the time taken to travel it.
if you get pedantic about it, and i'm hoping other with more physics-fu can enlighten me here, how exactly does one measure the precise position of a moving object relative to time? (you'd obviously need two of these measurements to calculate speed or velocity). because, as i've been thinking about it, by the time you've observed the position of the object it's already moved.. and aren't you making an assumption that the path didn't change in the minuscule time period?
i realize that for things like speed on the highway, this is far too pedantic...
it might surprise you that when you're using C# for creating these interactive web pages, that it's just acting as a javascript 'translator' in the sense that you do end up creating and sending javascript to the the client browser. before you dismiss javascript as bloated and insecure, and attribute all the supha cool interactivity to.NET, you may want to check the color of the cool aid.
and never, ever, suggest JSP or C# as a replacement for javascript when talking about client (browser) programmability. might help in getting people to take you seriously.
> Geez...get any 10 lawyers together, one will be a real decent person, the other nine will be total asshats.
almost. get any 10 lawyers together, one will be a real decent person, the other *eight* will be total asshats, the last one will be a total ass. as demonstrated by the article.
... Business spend 20% of their IT budgets - but only after spending 80% of the budget on MS software.
I can't believe business (we currently do) have "hiring/bonus/travel" freeze but don't think twice about spending money on MS Software specifically. I guess better to pay MS employees than your own.
personally, i think, that the height of computing was 'cron'. you needed a report every morning, put it in cron. you needed to analyze data every week, put it in cron.
computing was supposed to automate. supposed to make everyones lives easier by helping the person. now look at it. walk into any corporate office and you'll see countless people (myself included) clicking on this and that to satisfy what the computer wants out of you. it feels like you are there to help the computer achieve uptimes, or defragged disks, getting rid of viruses, blocking ports, unblocking ports...
am i there to help the computer do it's job? or is the computer there to help me do mine?
why does the computer occupy the center of my desk? why isn't it tucked away in the utility closet?
but that's a more philosophical discussion to be had - under the influence;) i mean, heavily under the influence.
> Anyone who speaks English but honestly thinks that words or phrases can only have one meaning is either 1) in denial or 2) doesn't really speak English.
or 3) understands English all too well and therefore has a whole different interpretation of 'honestly'.
> Linus Torvalds sits in the middle and does what he feels is right and it appears quite a large segment of the planet agrees with his take.
But if RMS wasn't on the other extreme that you claim he is in, would the middle exist for Linus to sit in? For exercise, draw a line, mark the middle, erase everything left of the middle, notice where the middle is now. Let that one soak for a while.
> Assuming copyright was abolished, this would effectively kill off the entire software industry
I often wonder about this. If we were to put aside the differences in 'Patents' and 'Copyrights' for the sake of the argument and just consider both as a means to 'protect the inventor' in one fashion or another. Then consider the fact that the single greatest invention of humankind, ever -- the wheel -- came about without patent protection...
Slashdot Mirror
lala-land?
one of the best posts i've read in a long time. very eloquent and well put.
> you get a 17 MiB file
shouldn't that be "17 MiB files"? kinda like "17 FBI files"? seriously tho, you may want to not advertise the fact that you know about the MiB. let alone the MiB files. you may get someone show up at your door with the "flashy thingy".
haven't tried it myself but sometime back, i had read somewhere about 'kill -9 1' in a firewall so that, since the kernel/network/firewall is already up and running, no process would be able to do anything to the system unless it was physically rebooted. assuming there are no exploit vectors in the kernel, that may be a nice setup for a dedicated firewall.
> The Windows PC has no standard configuration.
As opposed to the Linux PC that has a standard configuration? The only stickers I see are "Vista Capable". Never knew there was a "Linux Capable" stickers going around.
> The modem is rented from a cable service.
I didn't know there was any other way to get a different modem for Linux.
> The video card purchased from the bargain bin at Tiger Direct.
That sounds more like the linux boxes. Windows mostly comes pre-packaged from BestBuy/CircuitCity/Dell. With the "certified" parts.
> The RAM from eBay.
Are you sure you're not confusing Windows with Linux? Windows is the OS that comes from OEMs with everything bundled together with "certified" parts. Linux is the one you have to install on hardware that probably was "designed" for another OS.
I'd never thought I'd see the day when people defended windows for having to deal with random components. Shoe on other foot?
no one will be able to play games on the handhelds (with the handheld held slightly below the table level) during meetings!
> I can tell you that in the pre-Windows days...
and I can tell you that in the post-windows days... well, people have this concept of rebooting when things don't work. "it will auto-magically fix itself" (tm). cell-phones, managed switches, home routers... you name it, the first thing tech-support will do is ask you to "turn it off and on again". so much so that that is a standard gag in "the IT crowd".
i had this incident in our data center where this nincompoop kept futzing around with a managed switch. he hosed the config, caused some ripple effect on the servers and then panicked and wanted to reboot everything - including the servers. didn't know what the problem was but as he is indoctrinated to the ethos of rebooting to automagically fix problems, just wanted to reboot everything.
i had to step in, restart a few services and things were back to normal. no reboot required. a reboot would have taken us out for a good 15-20 minutes. restarting services, 10 seconds.
it's almost like people don't take pride in uptimes. who cares if it's down for 30 minutes... thanks largely to the microsoft OS culture. unix was bad enough - compared to mainframes and VMS - or so i'm told.
so, yeah, it's gone downhill. MS didn't help. telephones might have had outages but i sure don't recall having to reboot the big black rotery dial phones..
> giant vacuum (for disembarking) combined with a giant cannon (for boarding)
everyone knows you don't need both. all you need is the giant vacuum and the schwartz ring. and lonestar to operate it.
We leave linux bashing to Forbes, The Yankee Group, Mr Enderle etc. They are much better at it. :)
> Now, sure, we still post profits thanks to asia and america,
So you admit those in Asia and America are being charged extra to cover the expenses of the consequences of unethical business practices elsewhere?
Well, here's an easy win for ya. I pledge to sing praises of MS *if* MS works with the mod_ssl people to fix the force-response-1.0 issue with apache+mod_ssl and IE. And no it's not just for 4.0x versions of IE. The way I see it, the problem may be in mod_ssl (or it may be in IE) but the mod_ssl people have no way of figuring that out since IE is closed. MS, on the other hand, has access to both IE and mod_ssl. Now, wouldn't it be wonderful if MS took those small, yet practical steps in making things interoperable?
Until that happens, I couldn't care less about the time MS spends in the mountains of documentation and years of man-hour spent in making said mountain, or the revenue lost in doing so. I'm sorry, but don't expect me to sympathize about lost revenue with a company that makes millions in the amount of time it takes me to stick that bit of configuration into one of my servers to make it work with the said corp's products in a hobbled and barely functioning way.
I just spent two months of going back and fourth with a client why despite the forced downgrade, we had enough hardware to handle the load. MS could have helped me out. It chooses not to. I could sing praises of MS. I choose not to.
um, not quite.
while it is true that most of the time, the primary and secondary name servers are the only ones doing zone transfers, i have a setup with AT&T where i get to host my own forward and reverse DNS for a CIDR netblock by doing a notify/transfer with the mother-ship. so, in north dakota, this would be illegal?
> Pregnancy? God did it.
Nope. I did it. Or at least, that's what the wife is telling me.
> Given that adults do not believe in the Tooth Fairy or Santa, yet adults come to believe in God, even if they had no exposure to him in childhood
rAmen! I, too, came to believe in something i had no exposure to in my childhood. therefore it must be real! PBUH my friend.
> But show me the OSS software out there that screams, "Wow! That's unbelievably clever!"
The reason those don't exist (supposedly), I think, has to do with the fact that OSS was born *because* "Closed Source" market mechanics makes damn sure that the market *belongs* to the incumbent and any new innovative ideas never take hold. So the first goal, in my mind, for OSS has been to take away the hold that Closed Source has on the marketplace. Once that is achieved - I don't mean total domination, just enough market share so that it takes away the monopolistic nature of Closed Source - then, I think, we'll start seeing some radical ideas.
Case in point, BeOS. At some levels, it was amazing! Same desktop, file-system paradigms, sure. But with efficiency that makes you wonder just what the hell the other OSs are doing that requires so much compute power just to stay on. You have to see it to believe it. That, to me, was quite clever. But did they make it? Nope. And I suspect that the "Closed Source" incumbents played a role in making sure that BeOS never got to the marketplace.
So, while one may start to make an argument that Open Source hasn't produced anything clever, Closed Source has made damn sure that even if anything clever did appear, it wouldn't see the light of day. Which is what made Open Source necessary in the first place - to reverse the damages of Closed Source on innovation.
PS: I do realize that BeOS wasn't open source. That was chosen as an example of what happens to innovation in a "Closed Source" marketplace.
> but the company must recoup the NRE costs if they are to remain in business
i wonder if MS charges us enough to recoup it's costs?
> On the other hand, completely ignoring Microsoft formats isn't essentially suicide, it is suicide. Microsoft exists, and dominates the office application market, pretending it doesn't exist and that you can 'do your own thing' without taking it into account is utterly stupid.
Quick, somebody tell Linus and RMS that MS dominates the OS market as well and they really shouldn't try to roll their own.
That aside, I do understand where you're coming from. We do *lots* of document generation. I mean 100,000+ in a given week. We use XML/XSLT to target PDF, ODF, OOXML and what have you. OOXML is a *major* pain compared to ODF. While we did implement the necessary software to support OOXML due to market situation, I do hope that ODF displaces OOXML. If ODF attains more 'compatibility' with OOXML, what's the point? We have OOXML now. We don't need ODF to become OOXML. We need it to replace it. If ODF becomes the defacto standard by *becoming* OOXML, that'll be a sad day for us.
just how do you record 'instantaneous' speed? btw, the only difference between speed and velocity is that velocity has a direction component. or, velocity is speed combined with the direction. and neither one is instantaneous. it's *always* an average of the distance traveled over the time taken to travel it.
if you get pedantic about it, and i'm hoping other with more physics-fu can enlighten me here, how exactly does one measure the precise position of a moving object relative to time? (you'd obviously need two of these measurements to calculate speed or velocity). because, as i've been thinking about it, by the time you've observed the position of the object it's already moved.. and aren't you making an assumption that the path didn't change in the minuscule time period?
i realize that for things like speed on the highway, this is far too pedantic...
apples and oranges.
.NET, you may want to check the color of the cool aid.
it might surprise you that when you're using C# for creating these interactive web pages, that it's just acting as a javascript 'translator' in the sense that you do end up creating and sending javascript to the the client browser. before you dismiss javascript as bloated and insecure, and attribute all the supha cool interactivity to
and never, ever, suggest JSP or C# as a replacement for javascript when talking about client (browser) programmability. might help in getting people to take you seriously.
> Geez...get any 10 lawyers together, one will be a real decent person, the other nine will be total asshats.
almost. get any 10 lawyers together, one will be a real decent person, the other *eight* will be total asshats, the last one will be a total ass. as demonstrated by the article.
... Business spend 20% of their IT budgets - but only after spending 80% of the budget on MS software.
I can't believe business (we currently do) have "hiring/bonus/travel" freeze but don't think twice about spending money on MS Software specifically. I guess better to pay MS employees than your own.
personally, i think, that the height of computing was 'cron'. you needed a report every morning, put it in cron. you needed to analyze data every week, put it in cron.
;) i mean, heavily under the influence.
computing was supposed to automate. supposed to make everyones lives easier by helping the person. now look at it. walk into any corporate office and you'll see countless people (myself included) clicking on this and that to satisfy what the computer wants out of you. it feels like you are there to help the computer achieve uptimes, or defragged disks, getting rid of viruses, blocking ports, unblocking ports...
am i there to help the computer do it's job? or is the computer there to help me do mine?
why does the computer occupy the center of my desk? why isn't it tucked away in the utility closet?
but that's a more philosophical discussion to be had - under the influence
> Anyone who speaks English but honestly thinks that words or phrases can only have one meaning is either 1) in denial or 2) doesn't really speak English.
or 3) understands English all too well and therefore has a whole different interpretation of 'honestly'.
> Linus Torvalds sits in the middle and does what he feels is right and it appears quite a large segment of the planet agrees with his take.
But if RMS wasn't on the other extreme that you claim he is in, would the middle exist for Linus to sit in? For exercise, draw a line, mark the middle, erase everything left of the middle, notice where the middle is now. Let that one soak for a while.
> Assuming copyright was abolished, this would effectively kill off the entire software industry
I often wonder about this. If we were to put aside the differences in 'Patents' and 'Copyrights' for the sake of the argument and just consider both as a means to 'protect the inventor' in one fashion or another. Then consider the fact that the single greatest invention of humankind, ever -- the wheel -- came about without patent protection...