Just a minor nitpick to #1. Felons did commit a crime. Not being able to own a firearm is a part of the punishment. You may have a point about non-violent felons not being able to own firearms, but their status felons definitely puts them lower on my trust scale.
First they give the award to a troll, and now to a hooligan. What's up?
In all seriousness, though, I just set up a diskless router based on OpenBSD that saves its state to flash using rsync. So these awards are spot-on, at least as far as I am concerned. And on the heels of Samba 4, too. Great work, tridge!
Maybe. More guns means more guns. I am not convinced that fewer guns mean fewer crimes, or even just gun crimes, since criminals won't let what's illegal stop them from doing that which is illegal. However, it doesn't make sense to me that guns should be easy to get, either. If guns are inconvenient to acquire for law-abiders, then they should also be difficult to acquire for criminals who have to either 1) go through the inconvenient process of registering, waiting, and then buying, or 2) acquire them illegally. The difficulty of acquiring them illegally probably depends on where you live.
I'm in favor of making getting guns inconvenient, but LESS inconvenient than acquiring them illegally. People with a legitmate purpose can put up with the process-- assuming that you grant that the state is just enough to have a monopoly on force, then you can also grant that they have a legitimate interest in regulating firearms. Sometimes I feel like the NRA likes to gloss over the fact that for some kinds of weapon, YES, they are only designed to KILL PEOPLE.
Your little snipe about being a Democrat undermines your argument, rhetorically speaking. Didn't you RTFA?
I am one of those people. No cable TV. I watch Lost (the greatest show, ever) through iTMS. There would be no other way for me to see it. On top of that, now that I don't have to worry about tuning in every Wednesday night at 8PM, I never miss a single episode.
Exactly. Education is the key. I think now about "abstinence education" and I shudder. Hello! We TRIED that for, what, millenia?! I had sex in high school. I could have gotten myself in a fair amount of trouble, but I was fortunate enough to have sex ed classes and parents who, because of their own experiences, decided that knowing about safe sex was very important. Yeah, I hated it at the time, but it has served me quite well.
Out of all my friends and all of the girls I've dated, I'm the only one I know of whose parents took an interest in teaching them about sex. Fortunately, for my friends, they had sex ed in school. This is, increasingly, no longer the case.
People need to realize-- teenagers will have sex whether you like it or not. Do you bury your head in the sand, or do you teach them the one thing that we know will make a difference? If anything, sex ed decreases promiscuity because girls are informed of the consequences. I just can't believe the kind of cultural 180 that has happened in this country in the last few years.
Sometimes there are good reasons to circumvent state purchasing requirements. I used to work with an FM broadcast engineer who had specific requirements for most of his gear. Now, this particular state institution had a rule: you can only buy from vendors with a contract. Those two vendors were Dell and Apple. Not only did Apple and Dell sell machines that were not suited for his purposes, they were overpriced, as the state-negotiated contract ADDED 15% to the cost of the machine.
So we used to buy 'parts for maintenance' and build the machines ourselves. Sure, our machines weren't in inventory, but we all know how well that works... the time the auditors came around when I was there, we got in trouble because our Macintosh SE was missing. This was in, like, 1998. WTF?
Use PEX tubing for plumbing and fiber optics for data. Copper isn't exactly the only conductive metal, either. I'm sure that once it's scarce other materials will look pretty good for power transmission.
I consider this an engineering problem. Take a car, for instance. People don't need to know how they work. They just need to know how to operate the standard controls.
Computers should be the same, IMHO. Sure, something is lost when you design the interface for the lowest common denominator. But you get a huge gain-- people can DO something with their computer! If a problem comes up, bring it to a technician. If you're a power user, don't mourn the loss of flexibility in the OS-- use a more powerful OS. I really learned what I was missing when I was introduced to UNIX in college. Is UNIX for everybody? Definitely not.
Computer makers/software designers have a long way to go to be on par with automobile designers. Computers are vastly more complex, so I don't blame them for taking so long to get there. But we need SIMPLE and RELIABLE. That's it. At work the four main applications are 1) email, 2) word processing, 3) spreadsheets, and 4) the web. Users at home need essentially the same thing. With the exception of the web, have our needs changed that much in the last 20 years? We need a toasterized version of the PC that can do these things. Gaming consoles are a great example of this principle in action: a specialized computer for games.
When someone wants to look under the hood, then they can go for a general-purpose PC with a flexible OS. I would hate to see the general-purpose PC go away, but unfortunately, it's too complex for the vast majority of people out there.
As for the book, forget it. People who care enough to learn about how a computer works, will. There are lots of great resources out there for beginners already.
I agree with you, although I think a hard-core libertarian would argue that public school systems wouldn't exist in a truely free market. So although typical public school systems have problems educating the "alternative learners" (the corner cases... ok, it's a big corner), in the libertarian ideal, the market would respond to those kinds of people better than the current one.
But, of course, what we don't know, because we've never had such a system, is whether the population would be generally better-educated, or if a few privileged folks would be better-educated, and the rest of us worse-off. I really have no idea.
Maybe you see this phenomena (assuming there really is one) because the iPod's audience is different from that of other players. I can think of two reasons for this: you have non-technical users buying iPods, because they are 1) trendy, and 2) easy to use.
My impression, having come to know a fair number of tech-savvy users, is that they know where to find things and tend to have fewer problems with exploring the bounds of law. My personal feeling is that what I do online is nodbody's fscking business, and I'm guessing that many other technical users feel this way, too. I am often asked "isn't that illegal?" by non-technical folks (like my girlfriend's family) even though I understand those activities to be completely legal (ssh sessions, for instance, because it "looks like hacking"). So I think that non-technical users probably shy away from activities that "seem illegal".
Of course, in this case, we can actually tickle the specific vulnerability mentioned and see what happens. What conclusion you draw beyond that is entirely up to you. So the next question is, has anyone else confirmed this behavior?
I'm not familiar with Microsoft's coding practices, but maybe this is a debugging feature that somebody forgot to remove-- or accidentally wrote in such a way so that it is defined whether or not debugging output is desired. That might make sense with both the idea of "falling through" in certain cases and the "special trigger", although it still seems really stupid to me to provide a way to execute any old user-defined callback function.
I am an enterprise admin, and I want patches out NOW. I'll make the call as to whether I will wait to see if the patch itself has flaws.
I'll give you an example: when the last zlib overflow patch came out, I patched it immediately. If it breaks, big deal-- I lose the ability to scan inside zip archives on my mail gateways. But if I wait for it to be "fully tested", whatever that means, then I might get hit with a worm that compromises my mail gateways, or worse. I think I'll take the chance.
I'm going to reiterate my statement about modularization, too-- if the programmer is writing clean code, i.e., functions/methods that only do ONE thing (and further, having only ONE function to do that ONE thing), then that mitigates the impact of a flaw in the patch. It also makes patching much easier because you know what your program is doing.
This is probably referring to a continuously variable transmission, which is a very cool device. If I'm not mistaken, the Prius has a CVT, which should allow for better fuel mileage for the gasoline engine.
But what happens when your educational system is barely able to keep up with the current demand for educated workers?
Re:but wait did the MS apologist not say
on
Two New WMF Bugs Found
·
· Score: 2, Informative
So Microsoft doesn't have programmers that work full-time as code auditors? It's not like they don't have the resources. I know that reading someone else's code can be difficult, but if you're documenting your code and modularizing it properly, which Microsoft should be doing anyway, it shouldn't be like pulling teeth.
What it really boils down to is that Microsoft isn't in the business of writing quality code. Their goal is to pump out code that is good enough to maximize profits. This is why Free Software is important.
I totally agree. But what to do when your boss doesn't get it? We've got the most hodgepodge assortment of machines that all pretty much do the same thing. I keep telling him that we should either standardize on one model (and stock spare parts) or else build our own machines (and stock spare parts). Service nowadays is hardly fast, even with a Dell contract, so why bother paying? It's not like servers are exotic enough that my regular maintenance knowledge doesn't transfer over. But whatever, this is a guy who somehow gets away with "secretly" smoking a joint in the server room every day.
I suppose I need to sit down and "run the numbers" and show them how it works, brute-force like.
Without a doubt, video games and "edutainment" played a role in my enthusiasm for technology, science, and math. My parents bought a TI-994A when I was a kid, and man! What great games! You can't tell me that games where I need to take notes and use deduction to win (Hunt the Wumpus), solve puzzles (any of Scott Adams' text-based adventures; Zork; Myst when I was in high school), develop and refine strategies for each stage (Parsec), use trigonometry to program combat robots (BotWars), etc, etc, etc, don't contribute to a kid's development. And this stuff was fun! My experience playing games was what motivated me to learn how to program in the first place (TI Extended BASIC).
Shit, just put a kid in front of a computer! The things they'll do will astonish you. I must have spent hours making banners on the old PDP-11 and the DECWriter in my dad's lab. With technology being generally pervasive nowadays, the possibilities are endless. My opinion is this: kids love computers; they just gravitate toward them. A good teacher can use that to her advantage.
There's plenty of software that both fails to captivate and fails to educate. But there's also lots of software that just so happens to educate along the way. Should we stop teaching english literature just because every teacher I ever had bored me to tears?
And I forgot to add: to try a Linux/BSD out, all you need is an old machine. OpenBSD will run happily on a 486 with 24 MB of RAM as long as you're just learning. I'm sure you can find at least a Pentium hanging around somewhere. My router at home, which has been running nonstop for about 3 years, is an AMD K6-2, and it runs OpenBSD.
Slashdot Mirror
Just a minor nitpick to #1. Felons did commit a crime. Not being able to own a firearm is a part of the punishment. You may have a point about non-violent felons not being able to own firearms, but their status felons definitely puts them lower on my trust scale.
In all seriousness, though, I just set up a diskless router based on OpenBSD that saves its state to flash using rsync. So these awards are spot-on, at least as far as I am concerned. And on the heels of Samba 4, too. Great work, tridge!
I'm in favor of making getting guns inconvenient, but LESS inconvenient than acquiring them illegally. People with a legitmate purpose can put up with the process-- assuming that you grant that the state is just enough to have a monopoly on force, then you can also grant that they have a legitimate interest in regulating firearms. Sometimes I feel like the NRA likes to gloss over the fact that for some kinds of weapon, YES, they are only designed to KILL PEOPLE.
Your little snipe about being a Democrat undermines your argument, rhetorically speaking. Didn't you RTFA?
It's about time we finally penetrated the government. They've been fucking us for years.
I am one of those people. No cable TV. I watch Lost (the greatest show, ever) through iTMS. There would be no other way for me to see it. On top of that, now that I don't have to worry about tuning in every Wednesday night at 8PM, I never miss a single episode.
Out of all my friends and all of the girls I've dated, I'm the only one I know of whose parents took an interest in teaching them about sex. Fortunately, for my friends, they had sex ed in school. This is, increasingly, no longer the case.
People need to realize-- teenagers will have sex whether you like it or not. Do you bury your head in the sand, or do you teach them the one thing that we know will make a difference? If anything, sex ed decreases promiscuity because girls are informed of the consequences. I just can't believe the kind of cultural 180 that has happened in this country in the last few years.
So we used to buy 'parts for maintenance' and build the machines ourselves. Sure, our machines weren't in inventory, but we all know how well that works... the time the auditors came around when I was there, we got in trouble because our Macintosh SE was missing. This was in, like, 1998. WTF?
Use PEX tubing for plumbing and fiber optics for data. Copper isn't exactly the only conductive metal, either. I'm sure that once it's scarce other materials will look pretty good for power transmission.
Kyle: Because it's your dog.
Rubin: Jesus Christ!
Kyle: You know, because it's YOUR dog, get it?
Rubin: Yeah, we've got it.
Computers should be the same, IMHO. Sure, something is lost when you design the interface for the lowest common denominator. But you get a huge gain-- people can DO something with their computer! If a problem comes up, bring it to a technician. If you're a power user, don't mourn the loss of flexibility in the OS-- use a more powerful OS. I really learned what I was missing when I was introduced to UNIX in college. Is UNIX for everybody? Definitely not.
Computer makers/software designers have a long way to go to be on par with automobile designers. Computers are vastly more complex, so I don't blame them for taking so long to get there. But we need SIMPLE and RELIABLE. That's it. At work the four main applications are 1) email, 2) word processing, 3) spreadsheets, and 4) the web. Users at home need essentially the same thing. With the exception of the web, have our needs changed that much in the last 20 years? We need a toasterized version of the PC that can do these things. Gaming consoles are a great example of this principle in action: a specialized computer for games.
When someone wants to look under the hood, then they can go for a general-purpose PC with a flexible OS. I would hate to see the general-purpose PC go away, but unfortunately, it's too complex for the vast majority of people out there.
As for the book, forget it. People who care enough to learn about how a computer works, will. There are lots of great resources out there for beginners already.
Maybe you should stop reading tabloids.
But, of course, what we don't know, because we've never had such a system, is whether the population would be generally better-educated, or if a few privileged folks would be better-educated, and the rest of us worse-off. I really have no idea.
My impression, having come to know a fair number of tech-savvy users, is that they know where to find things and tend to have fewer problems with exploring the bounds of law. My personal feeling is that what I do online is nodbody's fscking business, and I'm guessing that many other technical users feel this way, too. I am often asked "isn't that illegal?" by non-technical folks (like my girlfriend's family) even though I understand those activities to be completely legal (ssh sessions, for instance, because it "looks like hacking"). So I think that non-technical users probably shy away from activities that "seem illegal".
Of course, in this case, we can actually tickle the specific vulnerability mentioned and see what happens. What conclusion you draw beyond that is entirely up to you. So the next question is, has anyone else confirmed this behavior?
I'm not familiar with Microsoft's coding practices, but maybe this is a debugging feature that somebody forgot to remove-- or accidentally wrote in such a way so that it is defined whether or not debugging output is desired. That might make sense with both the idea of "falling through" in certain cases and the "special trigger", although it still seems really stupid to me to provide a way to execute any old user-defined callback function.
I'll give you an example: when the last zlib overflow patch came out, I patched it immediately. If it breaks, big deal-- I lose the ability to scan inside zip archives on my mail gateways. But if I wait for it to be "fully tested", whatever that means, then I might get hit with a worm that compromises my mail gateways, or worse. I think I'll take the chance.
I'm going to reiterate my statement about modularization, too-- if the programmer is writing clean code, i.e., functions/methods that only do ONE thing (and further, having only ONE function to do that ONE thing), then that mitigates the impact of a flaw in the patch. It also makes patching much easier because you know what your program is doing.
This is probably referring to a continuously variable transmission, which is a very cool device. If I'm not mistaken, the Prius has a CVT, which should allow for better fuel mileage for the gasoline engine.
But what happens when your educational system is barely able to keep up with the current demand for educated workers?
What it really boils down to is that Microsoft isn't in the business of writing quality code. Their goal is to pump out code that is good enough to maximize profits. This is why Free Software is important.
Yeah, just took my contacts out, and, wait... a story about beers flying on Slashdot? Awesome! I didn't even know they could!
I suppose I need to sit down and "run the numbers" and show them how it works, brute-force like.
Oh, AND the optical digital in and out, and the accelerometer ("sudden motion sensor").
Don't forget the illuminated keyboard, the magnetic power cord thingy, and the firewire port.
Shit, just put a kid in front of a computer! The things they'll do will astonish you. I must have spent hours making banners on the old PDP-11 and the DECWriter in my dad's lab. With technology being generally pervasive nowadays, the possibilities are endless. My opinion is this: kids love computers; they just gravitate toward them. A good teacher can use that to her advantage.
There's plenty of software that both fails to captivate and fails to educate. But there's also lots of software that just so happens to educate along the way. Should we stop teaching english literature just because every teacher I ever had bored me to tears?
And I forgot to add: to try a Linux/BSD out, all you need is an old machine. OpenBSD will run happily on a 486 with 24 MB of RAM as long as you're just learning. I'm sure you can find at least a Pentium hanging around somewhere. My router at home, which has been running nonstop for about 3 years, is an AMD K6-2, and it runs OpenBSD.