Don't forget "Experts Exchange". My last company paid for a subscription to that and most of the answers are either "RTFM" or just pulled straight from the newsgroup posting that is right under the 7 experts exchange hits on google. (Or, even more commonly, an RTFM pulled straight from the newsgroup...)
I'd also like a separate search space for web-ified mailing lists. I don't like the first 20 hits for any technical question I ask being somebody (occasionally even me) asking the same question on a mailing list and getting no responses. As a final annoyance, when the question is about pipermail, every single mailman list hits because "pipermail" is in the URL...
When you have 4 minutes, and the topic is BT encryption, you don't go off on a tangent about whether or not the authorities are doing what they're say they're doing for the reasons they're specifying.
And that, coupled with the fact that all news pieces are 4 minutes long now, is why we're in Iraq...
...and a cell phone. Take tickets by phone only so you can ask them right then and there "what do you expect to happen when you click there and what actually happens?" "what does the error message say?" "is the little green light in your ethernet card lit?". Write down the info you get from the phone call on a post-it note. Stick it on the side of your monitor. When the issue is resolved, put the note in a file or in the wastebasket, depending on how much archiving you want to do.
Gentoo lets stupid people compile their own kernels. Stupid people ask us questions on IRC. We forget that we were stupid once too so Gentoo is stupid.
Smarter people use Debian. RMS is really really smart. Proof? He uses Debian. QED.
Gentoo lets you set compiler optimizations. Compiler optimizations won't make things 5x as fast. So they are stupid.
Gentoo has USE flags. USE flags are for packages that can't even decide what parts they should have. Forget them.
Gentoo's default editor is nano. Nano is for pussies. Proof? My college roommate used nano and he was a pussy.
Gentoo makes you compile stuff. Who's got time for that? There's no way to get binary packages from portage so it sucks.
Gentoo's mascot is a cow. Cows are herbivores. Herbivores are stupid. Proof? Pamela Anderson is a herbivore.
Penguins and gnus can beat up cows. So can whatever mascot slackware has.
Gentoo doesn't use xinetd. Xinetd is the only way to let your serverz connect to the interweb. I need my servers to connect to the interweb so I don't want Gentoo.
Let's compare apples to apples here. Windows isn't easy either. Its installer is actually much harder than most Linux installers. Its driver management is much more difficult and spread out among a million vendors rather than just distributed with the kernel like it is in Linux.
It's like a company I as consulting with earlier that was mulling switching to Linux for their desktops and the chief worry was that their employees "didn't know Linux". It took about 1 day of usability studies to convince them that their employees "didn't know Windows" either so it was a crapshoot. Rote is rote. You can mechanically learn tasks in about a day, whatever system you're on.
I call bullshit. If you installed the OEM disk made for your computer, maybe. But retail XP's included drivers are PITIFUL, especially for any hardware older than 2 years or so.
I didn't mean that as an attack on Microsoft; I for one don't see the distorted market as Microsoft's fault. They're playing (largely) within rules that were not of their making and I can't fault them for that.
Again, the DRM is proprietary, but all DRM essentially is.
Why? There's no need for DRM to be proprietary. Frankly given the generally better quality of open-source encryption technology, I'd imagine you could write a more effective DRM suite with open-source tools than with proprietary tools. Sure, it would not be impossible to crack but no DRM is. DRM only needs to make the cost of bypassing it enough to deter a large portion of copyright infringement. The security of any cryptographic system (including DRM) is and must be in the keys, not in public ignorance of the encryption scheme.
Microsoft spends money to develop Vista. In a free market, Microsoft could then sell Vista at a market-set price, generally close to the marginal cost of production.
Microsoft then spends more money making crippled versions of Vista. IE, "Home" and "Starter" cost them more to produce than "Business" did (if we assume "Business" is the full operating system without the Enterpirse add-ons, which seems likely given 2000 and XP).
Despite costing Microsoft more money to produce, they sell it for less. This is an inefficient market. They pay more to cripple their own product, and then sell it for less.
Sigh. Well, at least maybe for once I'll be able to install Windows on a machine without having to download a million drivers (something I've never had to do with Linux). Here's hoping.
It depends on the time period. Mozart had patrons but Beethoven made money on ticket sales from concerts and purchases of authorized sheet music (anybody could "pirate" sheet music at that point, but only editions authorized by the composer could call themselves authorized).
In all periods the most secure form of income for composers seems to have been teaching.
Did those two years have value? That's a question for a philosopher or theologian. As to the more concrete question of whether the guy got any money from it, if he's like my friend he did because people heard his music and came to see his gigs. He could never get a recording contract with any promotion but when he uploaded his music with ID3 tags going to his website he started getting hits and fans.
This idea of making money by holding a monopoly on reproducing certain sound recordings is a fad. It won't last. Musicians did just fine without it for millenia (and frankly they did a little better than most of them are now).
Certains works have proven timeless (Mozart) whereas much of what we create today gets swallowed whole in a generation or two.
But most of what was created in Mozart's time was swallowed whole in a generation or two. First off, we don't still listen to 1780's popular music. More than that, we don't even listen to most of the art music from that time (would we really remember Salieri's name if it hadn't been for "Amadeus"?). As with all ages, the best of our art music will survive -- Babbit, Cage, Crumb... stuff like that. It's apples to oranges comparing Mozart to popular musicians.
We force them to become computer-like generalists who process info from multiple sources simultaneously. Back in the day it was plausible that you could start learning the piano at 12 and do little else for 20 years
That's odd because I see things the opposite way: people (educated people, at least) were expected to be generalists 200 years ago in a way we are not now. Composers could write somewhat more complex music because the majority of the audience was expected to know at least the fundamentals of harmony (along with rhetoric, logic, basics of law, math up to the calculus, etc.). Today the mark of education is specializing in as narrow a field as possible. It's rare for a specialist to engage in research -- let alone significant publication -- in another field. I think Feynman was the last "great" to do it, and he was already an oddity back then.
In a grander sense, many conjecture that we're no longer producing works of genius with the same frequency as was the case pre-Internet / telephone for the very reason that the finite capacity of our brains is now being pulled in ever more directions.
Oh that's crap. For as long as people have had records of the accomplishments of people before them, people have been saying "we don't produce works of genius like we used to". It was never true before and it's not true now. The problem is that whatever age you live in, you see the 95% of its products that are crap. The 95% of stuff that was crap from 200 years ago didn't survive, so all we see are the works of genius. In 200 years, people will point to several geniuses we're largely ignoring now and say, "wow, we don't produce works of genius like that anymore".
Hmm... that's interesting. One thing I've noticed is a difference between the right and the left on what the "nightmare" scenario on election day is. You've just described the right's nightmare: the wrong person casts a vote. The left's nightmare is that someone shows up who should be able to vote and is not allowed to. I've just always found that interesting -- people on the right are often willing to accept valid voters being denied to prevent unauthorized votes; people on the left are often willing to accept unauthorized votes to prevent a valid voter being denied. I've just found that character difference runs very deep.
I've got firewall logs that are a couple hours off due to a problem - does that mean I'm rigging the logging so I can download porn without getting caught?
Umm... not necessarily, but you should fix that because clock skews in audit logs are a security hole because they allow (or at least facilitate) certain kinds of attacks. And that's the point here.
I think the main reason Lisp isn't popular is it isn't perfectly standardized
Good point; unfortunately at this point the Lisp community has almost a half-century of legacy code committed to some form of Lisp or another, so standardization will not be coming any time soon. However, read-time conditionals and other read-macros go a long way towards solving this.
If someone would just fix up the foreign function interface
UFFI is pretty darn good. It just talks a little better than it listens.
and add a bad-ass selection of packages
CCLAN is not as comprehensive as CPAN, I'll grant you, but I'd put it up against gems or python's packages for most areas.
This seems to be the opposite of what other people say, but as a sysadmin who has a sysadmin I can say I like mine because I never have to apply my sysadmin-ing to our internal computers. I don't expect to be given Special Powers just because I've got root somewhere else, but I expect the same quality of service I deliver to our external clients (well, OK, I expect better than that).
I'm not root on our local Linux boxes; I'm not a domain admin on our local Windows domain (though I think I'm a schema admin for some reason) -- I don't want to be. I want the local resources I need to connect out and do my work, and I don't want to have to think about them.
As a recruiter I'm surprised that people are so negative against us.
How would you feel if 90% of the resumes you found on these sites were not people actually looking for specific jobs but just people who wanted to know what jobs were available in case they suddenly wanted a new place to work? That's how we feel when 90% of the "jobs" listed on a jobs site are not jobs at all, but just people looking to collect resumes in case a job appears. For God's sake, PLEASE stay off the real jobs boards and make your own frigging sites, OK?
If we were going to see some bad side effects they would have appeared by now.
CAVEAT: I don't believe these guys. But, I disagree with your argument. What makes you so sure we aren't seeing bad effects? Skyrocketing cancer and obesity rates, low fertility, autoimmune disorders unknown 50 years ago... there's absolutely no evidence linking any of these to EM but there are plenty of symptoms out there looking for a cause and just blithely saying "oh we would have seen bad stuff by now" ignores that. Hell, some people blame these problems on the fact that we've been pasteurizing milk for 80 years now.
I'm not saying it's radio waves, or pasteurized milk, or unpasteurized milk, or red meat, or soy, or canola, or asbestos, or DDT, or anything. I'm just saying there are some serious health problems today that seem to have environmental causes, and we shouldn't rule out anything in our research on this.
Look at the "solutions" to deceptive advertisement regulators have come up with, though. Now every time I connect my DS to a hotspot to play MarioKart, I get a little flash message saying "Warning: Game experience may change during online play"... I'd certainly $*%&ing hope so! Why else would I bother going online?
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Don't forget "Experts Exchange". My last company paid for a subscription to that and most of the answers are either "RTFM" or just pulled straight from the newsgroup posting that is right under the 7 experts exchange hits on google. (Or, even more commonly, an RTFM pulled straight from the newsgroup...)
I'd also like a separate search space for web-ified mailing lists. I don't like the first 20 hits for any technical question I ask being somebody (occasionally even me) asking the same question on a mailing list and getting no responses. As a final annoyance, when the question is about pipermail, every single mailman list hits because "pipermail" is in the URL...
And that, coupled with the fact that all news pieces are 4 minutes long now, is why we're in Iraq...
Is it good or is it wack?
...and a cell phone. Take tickets by phone only so you can ask them right then and there "what do you expect to happen when you click there and what actually happens?" "what does the error message say?" "is the little green light in your ethernet card lit?". Write down the info you get from the phone call on a post-it note. Stick it on the side of your monitor. When the issue is resolved, put the note in a file or in the wastebasket, depending on how much archiving you want to do.
Just to beat the h8ers to the punch:
Let's compare apples to apples here. Windows isn't easy either. Its installer is actually much harder than most Linux installers. Its driver management is much more difficult and spread out among a million vendors rather than just distributed with the kernel like it is in Linux.
It's like a company I as consulting with earlier that was mulling switching to Linux for their desktops and the chief worry was that their employees "didn't know Linux". It took about 1 day of usability studies to convince them that their employees "didn't know Windows" either so it was a crapshoot. Rote is rote. You can mechanically learn tasks in about a day, whatever system you're on.
Then by that logic you should use Net- or OpenBSD. They have drivers for everything.
I call bullshit. If you installed the OEM disk made for your computer, maybe. But retail XP's included drivers are PITIFUL, especially for any hardware older than 2 years or so.
I have never, and I mean never, had a sound card that didn't just work on Linux.
I have never, and I mean never, had a sound card that just worked out of the box on Windows XP. And it sounds like you just didn't either.
I didn't mean that as an attack on Microsoft; I for one don't see the distorted market as Microsoft's fault. They're playing (largely) within rules that were not of their making and I can't fault them for that.
Why? There's no need for DRM to be proprietary. Frankly given the generally better quality of open-source encryption technology, I'd imagine you could write a more effective DRM suite with open-source tools than with proprietary tools. Sure, it would not be impossible to crack but no DRM is. DRM only needs to make the cost of bypassing it enough to deter a large portion of copyright infringement. The security of any cryptographic system (including DRM) is and must be in the keys, not in public ignorance of the encryption scheme.
Microsoft spends money to develop Vista. In a free market, Microsoft could then sell Vista at a market-set price, generally close to the marginal cost of production.
Microsoft then spends more money making crippled versions of Vista. IE, "Home" and "Starter" cost them more to produce than "Business" did (if we assume "Business" is the full operating system without the Enterpirse add-ons, which seems likely given 2000 and XP).
Despite costing Microsoft more money to produce, they sell it for less. This is an inefficient market. They pay more to cripple their own product, and then sell it for less.
Sigh. Well, at least maybe for once I'll be able to install Windows on a machine without having to download a million drivers (something I've never had to do with Linux). Here's hoping.
It depends on the time period. Mozart had patrons but Beethoven made money on ticket sales from concerts and purchases of authorized sheet music (anybody could "pirate" sheet music at that point, but only editions authorized by the composer could call themselves authorized). In all periods the most secure form of income for composers seems to have been teaching.
Did those two years have value? That's a question for a philosopher or theologian. As to the more concrete question of whether the guy got any money from it, if he's like my friend he did because people heard his music and came to see his gigs. He could never get a recording contract with any promotion but when he uploaded his music with ID3 tags going to his website he started getting hits and fans.
This idea of making money by holding a monopoly on reproducing certain sound recordings is a fad. It won't last. Musicians did just fine without it for millenia (and frankly they did a little better than most of them are now).
But most of what was created in Mozart's time was swallowed whole in a generation or two. First off, we don't still listen to 1780's popular music. More than that, we don't even listen to most of the art music from that time (would we really remember Salieri's name if it hadn't been for "Amadeus"?). As with all ages, the best of our art music will survive -- Babbit, Cage, Crumb... stuff like that. It's apples to oranges comparing Mozart to popular musicians.
That's odd because I see things the opposite way: people (educated people, at least) were expected to be generalists 200 years ago in a way we are not now. Composers could write somewhat more complex music because the majority of the audience was expected to know at least the fundamentals of harmony (along with rhetoric, logic, basics of law, math up to the calculus, etc.). Today the mark of education is specializing in as narrow a field as possible. It's rare for a specialist to engage in research -- let alone significant publication -- in another field. I think Feynman was the last "great" to do it, and he was already an oddity back then.
Oh that's crap. For as long as people have had records of the accomplishments of people before them, people have been saying "we don't produce works of genius like we used to". It was never true before and it's not true now. The problem is that whatever age you live in, you see the 95% of its products that are crap. The 95% of stuff that was crap from 200 years ago didn't survive, so all we see are the works of genius. In 200 years, people will point to several geniuses we're largely ignoring now and say, "wow, we don't produce works of genius like that anymore".
Hmm... that's interesting. One thing I've noticed is a difference between the right and the left on what the "nightmare" scenario on election day is. You've just described the right's nightmare: the wrong person casts a vote. The left's nightmare is that someone shows up who should be able to vote and is not allowed to. I've just always found that interesting -- people on the right are often willing to accept valid voters being denied to prevent unauthorized votes; people on the left are often willing to accept unauthorized votes to prevent a valid voter being denied. I've just found that character difference runs very deep.
Umm... not necessarily, but you should fix that because clock skews in audit logs are a security hole because they allow (or at least facilitate) certain kinds of attacks. And that's the point here.
Good point; unfortunately at this point the Lisp community has almost a half-century of legacy code committed to some form of Lisp or another, so standardization will not be coming any time soon. However, read-time conditionals and other read-macros go a long way towards solving this.
UFFI is pretty darn good. It just talks a little better than it listens.
CCLAN is not as comprehensive as CPAN, I'll grant you, but I'd put it up against gems or python's packages for most areas.
*shrug* I use Lisp. Most frameworks take about 4 or 5 macros to emulate. Not really worth the time to download any of them.
Those who don't use Lisp are doomed to reimplement it...
This seems to be the opposite of what other people say, but as a sysadmin who has a sysadmin I can say I like mine because I never have to apply my sysadmin-ing to our internal computers. I don't expect to be given Special Powers just because I've got root somewhere else, but I expect the same quality of service I deliver to our external clients (well, OK, I expect better than that).
I'm not root on our local Linux boxes; I'm not a domain admin on our local Windows domain (though I think I'm a schema admin for some reason) -- I don't want to be. I want the local resources I need to connect out and do my work, and I don't want to have to think about them.
YMMV.
How would you feel if 90% of the resumes you found on these sites were not people actually looking for specific jobs but just people who wanted to know what jobs were available in case they suddenly wanted a new place to work? That's how we feel when 90% of the "jobs" listed on a jobs site are not jobs at all, but just people looking to collect resumes in case a job appears. For God's sake, PLEASE stay off the real jobs boards and make your own frigging sites, OK?
For the record, the claim is that pasteurized milk is bad, not milk in general.
CAVEAT: I don't believe these guys. But, I disagree with your argument. What makes you so sure we aren't seeing bad effects? Skyrocketing cancer and obesity rates, low fertility, autoimmune disorders unknown 50 years ago... there's absolutely no evidence linking any of these to EM but there are plenty of symptoms out there looking for a cause and just blithely saying "oh we would have seen bad stuff by now" ignores that. Hell, some people blame these problems on the fact that we've been pasteurizing milk for 80 years now.
I'm not saying it's radio waves, or pasteurized milk, or unpasteurized milk, or red meat, or soy, or canola, or asbestos, or DDT, or anything. I'm just saying there are some serious health problems today that seem to have environmental causes, and we shouldn't rule out anything in our research on this.
Look at the "solutions" to deceptive advertisement regulators have come up with, though. Now every time I connect my DS to a hotspot to play MarioKart, I get a little flash message saying "Warning: Game experience may change during online play"... I'd certainly $*%&ing hope so! Why else would I bother going online?