I second the medium-sized-business-using-Samba bit. I have 250 or so users hitting a Samba box, actually running on the Mac OS. What this setup gave us was flexibility-- we are able to share out AFP in addition to SMB and not worry about file-locking (Netatalk uses POSIX locks and Samba has its own locking mechanism, so you can't just throw them together) and HFS+ metadata. The very, very nice thing is that we were able to make the switch and keep the whole thing completely quiet from the corporate overlords (we have the blessings of the prez of our company to do this kind of stuff); they never noticed the difference.
The one downside is that, at least with Apple's implementation, we've found that there are (or were) some reliability issues with the AD-OpenDirectory plugin that Apple supplies. It had trouble scaling past 25 users. They may have fixed that particular problem, but since our current setup is working, I'm not terribly eager to go back and try it again.
Samba is very responsive, even for very large shares, and I basically don't worry about it. It's a nice change from the Windows box that it replaced. Oh, and the fact that I can also SSH/SCP into this box is a nice bonus.
No shit. I've put in about 70 hours this week. The Exchange DST tool is the most hacked together piece of shit software I've seen in a long time. I fear what other software is out there that I missed. What little things will break because timestamps are different on the endpoints-- like DNS's rndc and VPN traffic. Too many things to think about.
Congress can kiss my ass after this worthless piece of legislation, which further reinforces my impression that having people who write laws full time and get paid for it is a bad idea. Did they even think about how many devices keep time? We're talking millions, at least! We should be moving away from regional differences in time, not toward it. Pass a fucking law that says you can come into work an hour later. That I'm OK with. I wish we would just all switch to UTC and be done with this piece of make-work. Time is complicated enough without some brainless fool in Washington making things worse.
Fortunately, I have a vacation planned starting Monday. See ya, suckers! If the company is still standing when I come back, super.
As for being developer friendly...When I can install windows and have it come with compilers and libraries for half a dozen different programming languages, then we'll talk about "developer friendliness". Fedora recently started bundling Tomcat with their distros as an installable option...Anyone who has ever installed Tomcat knows how valuable that is. Not to mention that when a simple program breaks in some mysterious way, on Windows, I can't even look at the fucking libraries that come with the compiler that I paid for, because they're binaries! We just have to take their word that their documentation is correct. Why obfuscate it? It's a fucking C library! Obviously, thanks to GCC, this particular difficulty does not exist on any of the Free operating systems I develop for.
No, we can't agree, because there's no way to know how a lack of a WWII would have changed things. Perhaps, without a WWII, Nazi Germany would have eliminated all non-Aryans from the planet. You suggest a contrapositive here; a logical fallacy. !(WWII) != !(medical advances)
The hate comes from the fact that snake-oil peddlers and bullshit artists are preying on and benefitting from people's ignorance and desperation. If there are any things that are truly deserving of hatred, that, my friend, is one of them.
I'd buy your argument but for the fact that the Ten Commandments, Old Testment, New Testament, etc, clearly enumerate some of what we call "evil". Clearly there are areas where both athiests and Judeo-Christians can agree, i.e., "Thou shalt not murder." Since these commandments are said to be handed down by God, we have to assume, at least, that God himself believes them to clearly state the difference between good and evil.
If we can't agree that World War II contained many acts of "evil", we can't agree on anything. By your same reasoning, God might consider mulching abandoned babies to feed pigs to feed the population as "not evil", since it benefits the greater good. I'm pretty sure baby-mulching machines are evil. Are you saying that you can't think of an evil act that has no positive benefit? Surely we can agree that both the suffering of innocents is "evil".
Either way, if any of the two conditions above are true, then even if the existence of God is not logically inconsistent, it is an absurdity. So as an atheist, my "unfounded belief" that God does not exist may not be logical, but at least it's not insane.
How do you know that there isn't less evil in the world? What's your baseline?
The baseline is the current world. The current world contains evil. I don't think anyone disputes this. The thing is, we can imagine a better, and still possible world. Since we can imagine a better world, one in which there is less evil and yet still enough evil to make Free Will possible, why did God make this world? Isn't it contradictory for a God, who really does wish for the well-being of his universe (i.e., omnibenevolent), to make a universe that is more evil than it needs to be?
Do you have children? If I turn on my TV and tell my two-year-old not to watch it, he might have a choice about whether he'll watch it or not, but I'm reasonably certain that he will, despite what I say. Just because I knew what was going to happen, it doesn't mean that it still wasn't his choice to watch TV. In other words, omnipotence and free will aren't mutually exclusive.
Shit! I didn't know that you were God! You seem to be misunderstanding the meaning of omnipotent/omniscient/omnibenevolent. You are not a good substitute for God, because you don't really know what your child will do. God does. God not only knows what your child will do, he set the universe in motion (therefore, he created your child), and he knows exactly how it will play out. So if God tells your child not to do something, and your child does anyway, God would have known this at the moment he set the universe in motion. Therefore, whatever your child does, it is really God's fault. If you're saying, no, God wouldn't have known because of Free Will, then you're saying that God is not omniscient. If we don't have the three-O's God, then we're not talking about the Judeo-Christian God.
I'm still waiting for someone to justify God's existence based on Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. That one would win brownie points in my book!
Yes, you are absolutely right. The PoE is not as simple as I make it out to be. I spent a year studying PoE, though from a philosophical standpoint rather than from the theological one (I have a BA in philosophy). But I only meant to illustrate the point that there are things we can do, i.e., logical deduction, to show that an athiest need not resort to a "belief in no God", but can actually say "there is no God" and prove it. I'd say that a full enumeration of the arguments and counterarguments of the PoE is beyond the scope of this discussion, but, hey, this is Slashdot, right? Anyhow, at this point in my life, I prefer to leave those notes in the box in my closet!
As a busy sysadmin, I know that I will be spending my time benchmarking sound cards on all my servers! Perhaps I should hire an imaginative CS grad student or armchair slashdotter to do this, no?
The proof is easy. In short, a being that is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent cannot exist in a universe that contains evil. Evil exists. Therefore, God does not exist. QED. No need to make any circuitious arguments about the existence or nonexistence of God, and you can now feel good about being an athiest. God is a logical fallacy.
Sure, you can give up any one of the three O's and my argument falls apart, but then, that's not the same God {Christians, Jews, Muslims} are talking about, is it?
I don't recall exactly which kit I had, but I loved it when I was a kid. I think I was 11 when I got my first kit, which was a crystal radio set. The second kit was one of the 100-in-1 kits, and included a simple digital readout and some relays among the standard parts. The thing is-- you weren't really limited to 100 projects, because once you started to understand some of the patterns, and once you learned some of the basic concepts (Ohm's Law, and so on), you could come up with your own designs. I used my kit as a starting point for my high school science fair project (a science fair that I won); later in the project I moved to experimenter sockets and then breadboard. Once I found out that I could build my own guitar effects pedals based on designs found on the internet (this is c. 1995), I was hooked! The nice thing about these kits (or mine, at least), is that the contacts we're all spring-loaded, and the wire ends were already silvered, so it made playing with the stuff really easy. Highly, highly recommended.
You're obviously just trolling here. Since I, too, am a network engineer, I can say that there is a growing demand for people talented in networking. Communications technology is complicated and growing in complexity all the time. A person who can steer an organization in ways to avoid the pitfalls of the Internet is a hot commodity, and I don't see that going away anytime soon.
My advice to the OP is to keep your skill set broad. A CS degree is not a panacea, but it helps in this regard.
That would be better, but again, this goes to personal autonomy in making medical decisions, a point which you and I appear to disagree on. You always have to balance personal vs. societal benefits and risks, but I'm sorry, neither HPV (nor Influenza) rise to the level of benefit to society to mandate them.
Right, because people always do what they should do. Maybe we should stop selling condoms because people really should be careful about having sex. Your argument about influenza is preposterous. Here's a disease that kills hundreds of thousands to millions of people each year, and gee, if people had only washed their hands this wouldn't be a problem. Their fault. La-dee-da.
The fact is, people don't always do what's best for them, and people rarely do what is best for their neighbors. When the cost is extremely low, and, seriously-- the argument about having a personal choice in vaccination is largely pedantic (or libertarian)-- I say, yeah, mandate vaccination. You're right, we don't agree at all on this.
You're content knowing that a simple shot, that would have saved a woman the agony of going through cervical cancer, not be administered, because we want to make sure people are 'free'? The fact is, this shot does not require herd immunity to work! That individual is now immune to the strains that cause HPV! But they're free! They can choose whether or not to get chemo now! Yay for freedom!
You have patients? So you're a doctor? If you're so worried about personal autonomy, how do you feel about euthenasia? What about doctor-assisted suicide? I believe your Hippocratic Oath may be in contradiction with your half-baked theory of medical autonomy.
I suspect that this has more to do with the free flow of information than 'addiction'. Since when has China been so worried about the welfare of its citizens? That prison cell sounds really conducive to mental health.
OK, so why doesn't vaccination against these four strains of HPV provide herd immunity against those four strains of HPV? Should I just accept your blanket statement that it doesn't? I looked it up. As far as I can tell, and HPV vaccine fits this idea perfectly. And why shouldn't we mandate influenza vaccination? Does that not also provide herd immunity to influenza?
I think pathology is sufficiently outside of the understanding of the general public, and certain diseases are of sufficient risk, that people should not be trusted to make their own decisions here. The point being that their decisions in this area affect the health of other individuals. I disagree with your opinion that American medicine is based on the idea of personal autonomy-- surely this does not hold when illness is contagious?
But that's all beside the point. Herd immunity is not necessary for this vaccine to begin to offer protection against HPV. It works, for those four strains, in individuals who are exposed to those four strains. Why not mandate it? Do you disagree that there is a benefit to vaccinating an entire population?
Unlike many other issues which are unimportant but are trumpeted as essential for the safety of the public, mandatory vaccination is not one of them. Even when there are side-effects, e.g., the smallpox vaccine (whose side effects include death), the amount of suffering and death that a vaccination campaign can prevent makes it worth the cost. Civil rights do not apply here. If my white neighbor marries a black person, and I don't like it, while I may have the right to hold that [retarded] opinion, the matter doesn't really affect me, and I can piss off anyway. That is the purpose of civil rights. But if my neighbor contracts smallpox because he refused to accept vaccination, that *is* a problem for me. That is a matter of public health.
When a half-dozen legitimately evil people use our aviation infrastructure as a weapon, people go completely ape-shit and will accept any draconian measure put against them. But when we have a drug that has 8 1/2 years of safety trials behind it, that can prevent CANCER, people are opposed to "mandatory" vaccination that you can OPT-OUT of! Let me ask you-- which does more harm: subjecting everybody who passes through an airport, bus terminal, and even some schools to X-ray screening, or a vaccination that prevents cancer? Have you done the epidemiology? This isn't some purported threat that your power-hungry congressperson thought up-- we have data that shows this will improve the quality of people's lives.
I feel the need to point out that the state legislator representing my hometown made pin-on buttons "professionally" before he was elected. Specifically, on the couch, in his underwear. He's a guy who could never hold down a job-- had his house reposessed through a number of extremely poor decisions (e.g., you probably shouldn't purchase a widescreen TV on your funny-buttons-for-your-local-convenience-store budget). He would often share such wisdom as "the little bastard probably deserved it" (in reference to a teenage friend of mine whose stepfather popped him in the mouth, thus necessitating 30 stitches). I know all this because he was the father of a friend of mine. Apparently, he found his calling in the state legislature. WTF?!
So anyway, I've developed the opinion that state legislatures are a void created by smart people doing something else.
Did I mention that he had an in-counter frialator? Seriously.
This is all speculation, but my impression is that he really wanted to make a point about "the system". He has footage of policae abusing their powers and so on. Video is powerful stuff.
But I think he realized that video cuts both ways-- he may also have footage of protesters violating the law (note that he really downplays the vandalism stuff). Were he to release the tape, and it does contain footage of protesters assaulting police officers and damaging property, it would put his original edited story (I think the word he used was "newsworthy") in a completely different context. Police may have abused their powers, but it may have been motivated by extenuating circumstances.
Anyway, pure speculation. I may be reading more into this than there really is. I'm sure the big bad police just wanted to stomp on some protesters, right Josh?
Not only that, Eckel also wrote two volumes of Thinking in C++, which in my humble opinion is far, far more readable than the Intro CS standby by Deitel & Deitel. He also gives this book away for free! Check it out. So in my mind, Eckel, being very familiar with Java and the alternatives to Java, is supremely qualified to comment on Java's good and bad points.
Slashdot Mirror
I second the medium-sized-business-using-Samba bit. I have 250 or so users hitting a Samba box, actually running on the Mac OS. What this setup gave us was flexibility-- we are able to share out AFP in addition to SMB and not worry about file-locking (Netatalk uses POSIX locks and Samba has its own locking mechanism, so you can't just throw them together) and HFS+ metadata. The very, very nice thing is that we were able to make the switch and keep the whole thing completely quiet from the corporate overlords (we have the blessings of the prez of our company to do this kind of stuff); they never noticed the difference.
The one downside is that, at least with Apple's implementation, we've found that there are (or were) some reliability issues with the AD-OpenDirectory plugin that Apple supplies. It had trouble scaling past 25 users. They may have fixed that particular problem, but since our current setup is working, I'm not terribly eager to go back and try it again.
Samba is very responsive, even for very large shares, and I basically don't worry about it. It's a nice change from the Windows box that it replaced. Oh, and the fact that I can also SSH/SCP into this box is a nice bonus.
No shit. I've put in about 70 hours this week. The Exchange DST tool is the most hacked together piece of shit software I've seen in a long time. I fear what other software is out there that I missed. What little things will break because timestamps are different on the endpoints-- like DNS's rndc and VPN traffic. Too many things to think about.
Congress can kiss my ass after this worthless piece of legislation, which further reinforces my impression that having people who write laws full time and get paid for it is a bad idea. Did they even think about how many devices keep time? We're talking millions, at least! We should be moving away from regional differences in time, not toward it. Pass a fucking law that says you can come into work an hour later. That I'm OK with. I wish we would just all switch to UTC and be done with this piece of make-work. Time is complicated enough without some brainless fool in Washington making things worse.
Fortunately, I have a vacation planned starting Monday. See ya, suckers! If the company is still standing when I come back, super.
Thanks for the info. This is very useful.
No, we can't agree, because there's no way to know how a lack of a WWII would have changed things. Perhaps, without a WWII, Nazi Germany would have eliminated all non-Aryans from the planet. You suggest a contrapositive here; a logical fallacy. !(WWII) != !(medical advances)
The hate comes from the fact that snake-oil peddlers and bullshit artists are preying on and benefitting from people's ignorance and desperation. If there are any things that are truly deserving of hatred, that, my friend, is one of them.
Either way, if any of the two conditions above are true, then even if the existence of God is not logically inconsistent, it is an absurdity. So as an atheist, my "unfounded belief" that God does not exist may not be logical, but at least it's not insane.
The baseline is the current world. The current world contains evil. I don't think anyone disputes this. The thing is, we can imagine a better, and still possible world. Since we can imagine a better world, one in which there is less evil and yet still enough evil to make Free Will possible, why did God make this world? Isn't it contradictory for a God, who really does wish for the well-being of his universe (i.e., omnibenevolent), to make a universe that is more evil than it needs to be?
Do you have children? If I turn on my TV and tell my two-year-old not to watch it, he might have a choice about whether he'll watch it or not, but I'm reasonably certain that he will, despite what I say. Just because I knew what was going to happen, it doesn't mean that it still wasn't his choice to watch TV. In other words, omnipotence and free will aren't mutually exclusive.Shit! I didn't know that you were God! You seem to be misunderstanding the meaning of omnipotent/omniscient/omnibenevolent. You are not a good substitute for God, because you don't really know what your child will do. God does. God not only knows what your child will do, he set the universe in motion (therefore, he created your child), and he knows exactly how it will play out. So if God tells your child not to do something, and your child does anyway, God would have known this at the moment he set the universe in motion. Therefore, whatever your child does, it is really God's fault. If you're saying, no, God wouldn't have known because of Free Will, then you're saying that God is not omniscient. If we don't have the three-O's God, then we're not talking about the Judeo-Christian God.
I'm still waiting for someone to justify God's existence based on Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. That one would win brownie points in my book!
Yes, you are absolutely right. The PoE is not as simple as I make it out to be. I spent a year studying PoE, though from a philosophical standpoint rather than from the theological one (I have a BA in philosophy). But I only meant to illustrate the point that there are things we can do, i.e., logical deduction, to show that an athiest need not resort to a "belief in no God", but can actually say "there is no God" and prove it. I'd say that a full enumeration of the arguments and counterarguments of the PoE is beyond the scope of this discussion, but, hey, this is Slashdot, right? Anyhow, at this point in my life, I prefer to leave those notes in the box in my closet!
As a busy sysadmin, I know that I will be spending my time benchmarking sound cards on all my servers! Perhaps I should hire an imaginative CS grad student or armchair slashdotter to do this, no?
The proof is easy. In short, a being that is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent cannot exist in a universe that contains evil. Evil exists. Therefore, God does not exist. QED. No need to make any circuitious arguments about the existence or nonexistence of God, and you can now feel good about being an athiest. God is a logical fallacy.
Sure, you can give up any one of the three O's and my argument falls apart, but then, that's not the same God {Christians, Jews, Muslims} are talking about, is it?
I don't recall exactly which kit I had, but I loved it when I was a kid. I think I was 11 when I got my first kit, which was a crystal radio set. The second kit was one of the 100-in-1 kits, and included a simple digital readout and some relays among the standard parts. The thing is-- you weren't really limited to 100 projects, because once you started to understand some of the patterns, and once you learned some of the basic concepts (Ohm's Law, and so on), you could come up with your own designs. I used my kit as a starting point for my high school science fair project (a science fair that I won); later in the project I moved to experimenter sockets and then breadboard. Once I found out that I could build my own guitar effects pedals based on designs found on the internet (this is c. 1995), I was hooked! The nice thing about these kits (or mine, at least), is that the contacts we're all spring-loaded, and the wire ends were already silvered, so it made playing with the stuff really easy. Highly, highly recommended.
You a headhunter or something?
You're obviously just trolling here. Since I, too, am a network engineer, I can say that there is a growing demand for people talented in networking. Communications technology is complicated and growing in complexity all the time. A person who can steer an organization in ways to avoid the pitfalls of the Internet is a hot commodity, and I don't see that going away anytime soon.
My advice to the OP is to keep your skill set broad. A CS degree is not a panacea, but it helps in this regard.
That's funny. I always assumed that we put the words "In God We Trust" on our banknotes because we didn't have enough gold to put our trust in.
That would be better, but again, this goes to personal autonomy in making medical decisions, a point which you and I appear to disagree on. You always have to balance personal vs. societal benefits and risks, but I'm sorry, neither HPV (nor Influenza) rise to the level of benefit to society to mandate them.
Right, because people always do what they should do. Maybe we should stop selling condoms because people really should be careful about having sex. Your argument about influenza is preposterous. Here's a disease that kills hundreds of thousands to millions of people each year, and gee, if people had only washed their hands this wouldn't be a problem. Their fault. La-dee-da.
The fact is, people don't always do what's best for them, and people rarely do what is best for their neighbors. When the cost is extremely low, and, seriously-- the argument about having a personal choice in vaccination is largely pedantic (or libertarian)-- I say, yeah, mandate vaccination. You're right, we don't agree at all on this.
You're content knowing that a simple shot, that would have saved a woman the agony of going through cervical cancer, not be administered, because we want to make sure people are 'free'? The fact is, this shot does not require herd immunity to work! That individual is now immune to the strains that cause HPV! But they're free! They can choose whether or not to get chemo now! Yay for freedom!
You have patients? So you're a doctor? If you're so worried about personal autonomy, how do you feel about euthenasia? What about doctor-assisted suicide? I believe your Hippocratic Oath may be in contradiction with your half-baked theory of medical autonomy.
I suspect that this has more to do with the free flow of information than 'addiction'. Since when has China been so worried about the welfare of its citizens? That prison cell sounds really conducive to mental health.
OK, so why doesn't vaccination against these four strains of HPV provide herd immunity against those four strains of HPV? Should I just accept your blanket statement that it doesn't? I looked it up. As far as I can tell, and HPV vaccine fits this idea perfectly. And why shouldn't we mandate influenza vaccination? Does that not also provide herd immunity to influenza?
I think pathology is sufficiently outside of the understanding of the general public, and certain diseases are of sufficient risk, that people should not be trusted to make their own decisions here. The point being that their decisions in this area affect the health of other individuals. I disagree with your opinion that American medicine is based on the idea of personal autonomy-- surely this does not hold when illness is contagious?
But that's all beside the point. Herd immunity is not necessary for this vaccine to begin to offer protection against HPV. It works, for those four strains, in individuals who are exposed to those four strains. Why not mandate it? Do you disagree that there is a benefit to vaccinating an entire population?
Unlike many other issues which are unimportant but are trumpeted as essential for the safety of the public, mandatory vaccination is not one of them. Even when there are side-effects, e.g., the smallpox vaccine (whose side effects include death), the amount of suffering and death that a vaccination campaign can prevent makes it worth the cost. Civil rights do not apply here. If my white neighbor marries a black person, and I don't like it, while I may have the right to hold that [retarded] opinion, the matter doesn't really affect me, and I can piss off anyway. That is the purpose of civil rights. But if my neighbor contracts smallpox because he refused to accept vaccination, that *is* a problem for me. That is a matter of public health.
When a half-dozen legitimately evil people use our aviation infrastructure as a weapon, people go completely ape-shit and will accept any draconian measure put against them. But when we have a drug that has 8 1/2 years of safety trials behind it, that can prevent CANCER, people are opposed to "mandatory" vaccination that you can OPT-OUT of! Let me ask you-- which does more harm: subjecting everybody who passes through an airport, bus terminal, and even some schools to X-ray screening, or a vaccination that prevents cancer? Have you done the epidemiology? This isn't some purported threat that your power-hungry congressperson thought up-- we have data that shows this will improve the quality of people's lives.
Think about environmental conditions. How hot is it where you store your computer? Do you dump water on it yearly?
To lazy, or not too lazy: that is the question.
Don't worry. Boston Harbor is already a cesspool. A few floating politicians can't make it any worse.
I feel the need to point out that the state legislator representing my hometown made pin-on buttons "professionally" before he was elected. Specifically, on the couch, in his underwear. He's a guy who could never hold down a job-- had his house reposessed through a number of extremely poor decisions (e.g., you probably shouldn't purchase a widescreen TV on your funny-buttons-for-your-local-convenience-store budget). He would often share such wisdom as "the little bastard probably deserved it" (in reference to a teenage friend of mine whose stepfather popped him in the mouth, thus necessitating 30 stitches). I know all this because he was the father of a friend of mine. Apparently, he found his calling in the state legislature. WTF?!
So anyway, I've developed the opinion that state legislatures are a void created by smart people doing something else.
Did I mention that he had an in-counter frialator? Seriously.
This is all speculation, but my impression is that he really wanted to make a point about "the system". He has footage of policae abusing their powers and so on. Video is powerful stuff.
But I think he realized that video cuts both ways-- he may also have footage of protesters violating the law (note that he really downplays the vandalism stuff). Were he to release the tape, and it does contain footage of protesters assaulting police officers and damaging property, it would put his original edited story (I think the word he used was "newsworthy") in a completely different context. Police may have abused their powers, but it may have been motivated by extenuating circumstances.
Anyway, pure speculation. I may be reading more into this than there really is. I'm sure the big bad police just wanted to stomp on some protesters, right Josh?
Not only that, Eckel also wrote two volumes of Thinking in C++, which in my humble opinion is far, far more readable than the Intro CS standby by Deitel & Deitel. He also gives this book away for free! Check it out. So in my mind, Eckel, being very familiar with Java and the alternatives to Java, is supremely qualified to comment on Java's good and bad points.