I just tried updating my TiBook and towards the end software update crashed, then the whole system seemed to lock up, until I had to force reboot. Of course, upon rebooting it now won't get past the blue screen where I can move the mouse cursor, but that's it. Nothing changed the next time either.
Anyone else having this issue?
Couldn't find shit on the support site, and I can't even figure out how to post a question. I'm not a newbie Mac user, I'm a software developer for God's sake, so it shouldn't be this hard... I thought Mac was supposed to be easy...
I wonder if these gloves would help my in playing guitar too. It says they're specifically made for keyboards, but going from one to the other throughout the day (I work at home, so I play guitar more often now), really strains my wrists fast. I'm careful about wrist positions on the keyboard and the guitar neck, but that doesn't help much. Neither does stretching and exercise.
I'd be interested in something that was supportive in a range of activities (keyboarding, guitar, piano, jerking over pr0n -- I mean... ah shit;)).
Re:Interesting OT: Segway is not IT
on
Lego Segway
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· Score: 1
Any guesses as to what it could be then?
Re:To the /. editors
on
Lego Segway
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Could we instead check for the existence of a Google cached copy and link to that? Then there's no permission issue with the mirroring, at least with us because we're not doing the mirroring.:)
Girlfriend: I swear, on my grandmother's grave, she went to Utah last month and came back with 20 liters of beer. We drank it with friends last weekend along with pizza, and the next day saw Red Dragon (her suggestion). Tonight we're supposed to see From Dusk Til Dawn (she wanted to see Dawn of the Dead).
Hang on to that one! Them kinda girls were much more plentiful when I was young; growing up around my family and their area, beer was a very inherent part of social gatherings, but now it's all vegans and ravers around here (twenty-something-ers trying to regain their teenage years).
Great perspective on your previous post too! You can't always have everything, but when the glass is pretty close to full, why must people insist on feeling ripped off about that one extra sip?
Applying purchasing patterns of average citizens (the only thing I can think of that a corporation would want to do with this idea) would reveal nothing new. For example, meet Joe.
Joe is a 35 year old male with a wife and a 3 year old son. Once or twice a week, Joe goes out to a restaurant near his work for lunch with a couple work acquaintances. Joe has been tasked with the weekly job (done on Thursdays) of doing the family grocery shopping. Joe pays their bills on the 27th of every month. He fills up with gas and buys a pack of smokes X times throughout the week on his way to or from work. Occasionally, maybe twice a month, Joe also stops to pick up a case of beer. At the same time (roughtly) every year, he goes out and buys another present for his wife because it's her birthday. He does the same for his son. He does this again predictably (which would only have been discovered through the use of patented software) the week before Christmas, at the reminder of his wife. Joe and his family go on vacation every year to the same place, because Joe's wife has family there. All of this, except the vacation, happens within a 1km radius from either Joe's home or his work.
"No alarms and no suprises..." (Radiohead for the uninformed)
Joe's probably not that far from 95% of people either. There's no holy grail of purchasing patterns to be discovered that would increase Walmart's revenues by another 100%. The funny part is that Walmart and all the boys will still try to license this technology to have this fact pointed out to them once again, and just for the fun of it since they can.
This doesn't scare me much at all. I'm a law-bidding citizen on one hand with nothing to fear, and I'm also a privacy/indie/free speech zealot as well, but I don't think this is quite the technology that will put automatic identity checks in the doorways of retail stores, or that will improperly accuse me of some heinous crime. Now required ID cards and all this DMCA garbage, that's another story.
An example of a low-cost CMS ($800 US per site, unlimited users, with a stripped down version for $200 US) that offers a nice URL scheme (every page is/index/PAGENAME, the printable version of that page would be/index/PAGENAME/printable, and any other variables can also be passed in the same manner, ie./index/news/story.544 translates to/index?page=news&mode=html&story=544 in traditional URL speak), and also offers a lot of features found in the higher-end apps (not quite Vignette-sized) like locking/versioning and has a really solid *Object-Oriented* PHP application framework underneath it, can be found by following the link in my.sig (it's called Sitellite).
Sorry for the/vertisement, couldn't help it. We're releasing version 3.0 on Halloween and always looking for good beta testers!
That's a great idea. I wish I had the power to do something like this./dev/null-ing Kazaa & gang even in a small region could upset a large enough group of users that they would get some serious backlash, users that don't understand much about it other than that it stopped working. Even better would be a way to report back a server error like '404 Did you know Kazaa is spying on you right now? Why don't you try gnucleus.com for downloading mp3's and show Kazaa where they can shove it?!' but I'm sure that they wouldn't let that happen too easily.
Either way, I'm uninstalling Limewire. What a bunch of low-lives. When I hear shit like this, I am again astounded at the depths people will sink for the holy dollar bill.
Not that I'm not a thief in my own right, but this just blows my mind.
It's inherently insecure. Just don't do it, or make them perfectly aware of the risks and let them do the risk/worth analysis. That's why you'll never see an online banking service offer this type of thing, but you will see it all over forums and news/discussion type sites where the cost of leaking data is very low (or null).
The display looks to be the biggest power-hog which current technology has no really good solution for. It may be possible the electronic paper displays will use less power than a current TFT display (which needs a strong backlight to go through 3 layers of LCD display).
Slightly off-topic, but what ever happened to OLED displays? Aren't these supposed to be thinner, cheaper to manufacture, clearer/brighter, and less power hungry?
This sounds a lot like what I went through a few months ago. I now happily run my own software company, which this situation enabled me go forward and accomplish, but during the lay-off process I got the runaround hardcore.
Technically (and IANAL, but this is quoting almost exactly what the unemployment offices told me), severance doesn't exist. Notice is required in most cases when either party leaves, and that notice period is equivalent to one pay period. So if you're paid weekly, it's a week's notice. Every two weeks, two week's notice. Severance is just money to compensate for the fact that a company sees it as a risk to let you carry out your final week or two with them (for fear of sabotage), and so they give you no notice and a week or two of pay.
Decent companies will offer you additional "severance" for each year you've been there (some 1 week per year, some 1 month per year), but I'm not familiar with this "common law" thing. Neither was the local unemployment office (I'm in Manitoba, FYI).
My story was our division of the company got bought out by a company in BC and they wanted to keep three of us on. I was one of these three. The rest of our team was laid off immediately, and given 2 weeks severance plus the vacation pay they had earned. I was our one programmer, and the other two being kept filled sales-y roles. The company was cool with keeping the other two guys here in Winnipeg, but since their programmer team was in BC I was given the ultimatum to move or find new work. They then informed me that since I had been on vacation (earned vacation time) during the time of the company purchase, no employment agreement had been reached with me, and I was currently employed by no one (I found out I was laid off from the original company upon return from vacation). Of course, I had already worked for a week for the new company, having been told it was all good by my direct higher-up.
It ended up that I declined the offer to move which would have been at a decrease in pay (due to living expenses increasing) and almost no help with moving, and so I was entitled to no severance at all. I had to fight and fight for pay for that last week of work even, and they still owe me $180 for a hotel expense I covered on my visa and filed an expense report for. The catch is that the old company says they let me go with the expectation that the new company was to immediately re-employ me, and the new company says nothing was ever worked out. So it's a situation where each company is able to point the finger at the other, and it would be too expensive for me to pursue compensation from either, standing a 50/50 chance of losing anyway due to this finger pointing.
I think I will talk to my lawyer on Monday however about this common law thing you mentioned, since I have some other things to go over with him anyway. At worst, he asks around his firm for free advice, and at best I'm entitled to another 2 or 3 months compensation for the lack of notice and my "hardships".:)
My advince to the original questioner, stick up for yourself and don't take shit, but be reasonable and know how to choose your battles wisely.
HTML brought online document authoring to masses of people who don't really care about computers, but love the fact they can now build an online community of lacrosse players or some such. I beleive HTML became popular in part because it was actually simple enough that it was _easier_ to write HTML than learn to use a new type of wysiwig editor. These days, new editions of HTML books have big scary warnings about not forgetting to close your tags, to remember to close them in the right order, remember to put in / in singleton tags like br, why you should separate content and presentation, etc. None of which the average joe _wants_ to care about. And a bunch of geeks telling him to will just annoy him.
Exactly! Not that I'm against XML, I use it everyday. And having a standard document format for everything and a standard API for accessing that data is wonderful. But I agree that HTML made page authoring easy enough for non-techies to be able to create sites about their cats, their little clubs, their personal lives and ideas, and that made the web really interesting in its day (something it has lacked in recent years).
It's great and all that we now have sophisticated document management system (one of which I'm guilty of having created, see.sig for details:)), but the fact of the matter is that all of this "easy" content management has only really created a new barrier to entry for the average joe wanting to publish his/her thoughts. It also helps further the rift between corporations/multinational conglomerates who are able to publish using these high-end systems and the average joes that made up the original commercial-free population of the net. While standards help the big guys do what big guys do, they also inhibit competition and are exclusive in this fundamental way.
So while we can have discussions about interoperability between CMS systems and at the same time talk about the refinement of HTML into a "proper British grammar" of itself, it's important that we recognize a few applications that have grown out of the need for "the rest of us" to express ourselves as well (specifically, blogging). And anyways, it should be the responsibility of the software makers to worry about standards compliance. For far too long now software like dreamweaver/frontpage/homesite/et al have been excused for their poor output quality, but it looks like things have improved at least somewhat on that front in recent years.
Now it's time to kick the leading browser out on its ass and get on with the web as it should be. Free for all, and accessible by all.
P.S. If you hate XML so much for structuring documents, you may appreciate YAML, SLiP, and the like. Search for them on Google.
This is so true. Even teachers at pseudo-university-level programs around here don't seem to understand the meaning of the ML in HTML/XHTML/XML/etc. This is why a new generation of unqualified "web designers" and "web developers" are coming into the job market and aren't worth the minimum wage jobs they'll be fighting tooth and nail over (sorry, sad but true newbies). I don't mean to flame anyone here, so I apologize for being so harsh.
One teacher I had before I quit was trying to teach the class about XHTML (I'll leave the program nameless). He told us all that XHTML wasn't supported in NS4 because tags like <br/> don't work in it. I tried to point out Appendix C in the XHTML specification that discusses compatibility with existing browsers, and how all you had to do was put a space before the slash (ie. <br/>) and it would be fine, but when I pointed this out he made like the standard had changed and that's why he didn't know about it.
He also tried to tell us that the <tr> and <td> tags all had to go on a single line (of course they do), but I'll stop before I get nasty...
At least in our case (being uncensored), our main form of censorship is self-censorship. This is a choice. It's a choice people are all too willing to make these days, but at least the few of us willing to excercise our rights and our brains to form our own opinions (amidst the constant bombardment of media pressure) have the right to do so.
You raise an interesting point though. +5 from me.
not to be an idealist, but i think that commercial attempts to control the internet will largely fail because we're faced with smart terminals that allow us, the internet populace, to do what we want and go where we want. it's not like someone can force me to stop using Mozilla and start accepting their over-commericalized (and popup driven) vision of the internet without a fight. and no attempts at fighting your customers are going to result in happy or loyal customers. it's the same reason the music industry is in for it, because they are trying to control the listeners and we don't like it, and we know we don't have to put up with it.
anyway, i should go read the article now that i've gone and run my mouth off!:)
Hey, this guy sounds like just the guy I've been looking for. I've been trying to find somebody to make a few small changes to some old Perl scripts I have...;)
Wasn't DeMuDi (http://www.demudi.org/) supposed to be a Debian-based multimedia distribution? Red Hat could at least try to come up with a more original name than ReHMuDi, honestly!
It's not always a good idea to write down every thought you have. With a piece of paper, you're forced to use your head. A good programmer should be able to work things out without the aid or reliance on tools.
Try it sometime. You'll hate it at first, but then you'll start to understand what you're doing much more thoroughly, and you'll come about better solutions as a result. I spend maybe 25% of my "coding time" with a computer. Another benefit is that I don't kill my eyes and wrists so much.
Now I do a large portion of my work on paper. I've never gone to college (aside from a brief stint at one of those crappy "learn to code in 12 months" courses, which I quit right away), but I had been coding recreationally for years, and my high school had a 3 year comp sci course where the teacher forced us to do 75% of our work on the chalk board and on paper. I f***ing hated it! Tests were almost all done on paper too, especially the exams.
Then I moved cities and had to get a job, so I got up to speed with Perl, and I've been coding professionally for 3 or 4 years now. The problem was that when I moved, I didn't have a computer for the first year and a half I was here, aside from at work. So I took out a dozen books at a time from the library, got a big notebook, and coded all on paper. It was painful at first, but now I can't do without it. I find it helps to separate myself from the problem at hand, and since I use scripting languages (usually PHP now, with some Perl/Python/Ruby once in a while) I don't have to worry about compiling, and the code is much more like prototyping or pseudocode.
I went back to my high school a few years ago and thanked my teacher for forcing us to code on paper, because now I use it constantly. It forces me to thoroughly understand the problems I'm working with, and to consider my approach more carefully. It also helps because with pseudocode you can make your own functions you don't have to worry about implementing until later.
This also helps me when I do API designs, since I can put short UML diagrams interspersed with my pseudocode all over the page.
Dude, I just bought a new G4 TiBook. The processor is 667mhz, which didn't sound like much when you hear Intel bragging about their 2.0ghz procs. Well, I'm also running an AMD athlon 700mhz at home with Windows ME, and an AMD 1.4ghz athlon with Red Hat 7.1 at work, and I'd have to say there's no real difference between the three. Sure one might be technically faster than the other, but my 2 year old home machine doesn't feel that noticeably slower than my 1.4ghz, and my tibook is definitely not the slowest of the three. The discrepancy is definitely in the software, and that puts the tibook way in the lead. I love linux, don't get me wrong, and I'm goofy excited over Gnome 2 coming out, but the ease-of-use of osx is still worlds beyond gnome. Plus, once jaguar comes out, osx will be light years beyond the others (the thought of quartz extreme has me just as pumped as gnome 2).
The price, on the other hand, is why next month I'm putting a new AMD/Linux workstation into the mix and not a new G4 workstation.
Re:Nobody here is upset at the system crackers?
on
California Hax0red
·
· Score: 1
That's nice, and I sympathize completely with your point of view. However, sysadmins who are responsible for important data can't be naive enough to make assumptions about the security of that data. We live in a world full of crackers, and so it becomes only common sense to set up a proper firewall, perhaps an IDS, and that they have to at least try to turn off unused ports and enforce semi-decent passwords (or at least regular password changes). These things may not be apparent to an MCSE sysadmin, but then again you don't go around calling an MCSE certified person a QUALIFIED sysadmin unless you yourself are clueless (aka. suit).
However, it's truly a shame that the world has to be this way.
Re:One thing I've NEVER seen here....
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 1
Fuck dude, that was a brilliant analogy. +5 in my book!
Slashdot Mirror
I just tried updating my TiBook and towards the end software update crashed, then the whole system seemed to lock up, until I had to force reboot. Of course, upon rebooting it now won't get past the blue screen where I can move the mouse cursor, but that's it. Nothing changed the next time either.
Anyone else having this issue?
Couldn't find shit on the support site, and I can't even figure out how to post a question. I'm not a newbie Mac user, I'm a software developer for God's sake, so it shouldn't be this hard... I thought Mac was supposed to be easy...
I wonder if these gloves would help my in playing guitar too. It says they're specifically made for keyboards, but going from one to the other throughout the day (I work at home, so I play guitar more often now), really strains my wrists fast. I'm careful about wrist positions on the keyboard and the guitar neck, but that doesn't help much. Neither does stretching and exercise.
;)).
I'd be interested in something that was supportive in a range of activities (keyboarding, guitar, piano, jerking over pr0n -- I mean... ah shit
Any guesses as to what it could be then?
Could we instead check for the existence of a Google cached copy and link to that? Then there's no permission issue with the mirroring, at least with us because we're not doing the mirroring. :)
Hang on to that one! Them kinda girls were much more plentiful when I was young; growing up around my family and their area, beer was a very inherent part of social gatherings, but now it's all vegans and ravers around here (twenty-something-ers trying to regain their teenage years).
Great perspective on your previous post too! You can't always have everything, but when the glass is pretty close to full, why must people insist on feeling ripped off about that one extra sip?
Applying purchasing patterns of average citizens (the only thing I can think of that a corporation would want to do with this idea) would reveal nothing new. For example, meet Joe.
Joe is a 35 year old male with a wife and a 3 year old son. Once or twice a week, Joe goes out to a restaurant near his work for lunch with a couple work acquaintances. Joe has been tasked with the weekly job (done on Thursdays) of doing the family grocery shopping. Joe pays their bills on the 27th of every month. He fills up with gas and buys a pack of smokes X times throughout the week on his way to or from work. Occasionally, maybe twice a month, Joe also stops to pick up a case of beer. At the same time (roughtly) every year, he goes out and buys another present for his wife because it's her birthday. He does the same for his son. He does this again predictably (which would only have been discovered through the use of patented software) the week before Christmas, at the reminder of his wife. Joe and his family go on vacation every year to the same place, because Joe's wife has family there. All of this, except the vacation, happens within a 1km radius from either Joe's home or his work.
"No alarms and no suprises..." (Radiohead for the uninformed)
Joe's probably not that far from 95% of people either. There's no holy grail of purchasing patterns to be discovered that would increase Walmart's revenues by another 100%. The funny part is that Walmart and all the boys will still try to license this technology to have this fact pointed out to them once again, and just for the fun of it since they can.
This doesn't scare me much at all. I'm a law-bidding citizen on one hand with nothing to fear, and I'm also a privacy/indie/free speech zealot as well, but I don't think this is quite the technology that will put automatic identity checks in the doorways of retail stores, or that will improperly accuse me of some heinous crime. Now required ID cards and all this DMCA garbage, that's another story.
An example of a low-cost CMS ($800 US per site, unlimited users, with a stripped down version for $200 US) that offers a nice URL scheme (every page is /index/PAGENAME, the printable version of that page would be /index/PAGENAME/printable, and any other variables can also be passed in the same manner, ie. /index/news/story.544 translates to /index?page=news&mode=html&story=544 in traditional URL speak), and also offers a lot of features found in the higher-end apps (not quite Vignette-sized) like locking/versioning and has a really solid *Object-Oriented* PHP application framework underneath it, can be found by following the link in my .sig (it's called Sitellite).
/vertisement, couldn't help it. We're releasing version 3.0 on Halloween and always looking for good beta testers!
Sorry for the
That's a great idea. I wish I had the power to do something like this. /dev/null-ing Kazaa & gang even in a small region could upset a large enough group of users that they would get some serious backlash, users that don't understand much about it other than that it stopped working. Even better would be a way to report back a server error like '404 Did you know Kazaa is spying on you right now? Why don't you try gnucleus.com for downloading mp3's and show Kazaa where they can shove it?!' but I'm sure that they wouldn't let that happen too easily.
Either way, I'm uninstalling Limewire. What a bunch of low-lives. When I hear shit like this, I am again astounded at the depths people will sink for the holy dollar bill.
Not that I'm not a thief in my own right, but this just blows my mind.
It's inherently insecure. Just don't do it, or make them perfectly aware of the risks and let them do the risk/worth analysis. That's why you'll never see an online banking service offer this type of thing, but you will see it all over forums and news/discussion type sites where the cost of leaking data is very low (or null).
Slightly off-topic, but what ever happened to OLED displays? Aren't these supposed to be thinner, cheaper to manufacture, clearer/brighter, and less power hungry?
This sounds a lot like what I went through a few months ago. I now happily run my own software company, which this situation enabled me go forward and accomplish, but during the lay-off process I got the runaround hardcore.
:)
Technically (and IANAL, but this is quoting almost exactly what the unemployment offices told me), severance doesn't exist. Notice is required in most cases when either party leaves, and that notice period is equivalent to one pay period. So if you're paid weekly, it's a week's notice. Every two weeks, two week's notice. Severance is just money to compensate for the fact that a company sees it as a risk to let you carry out your final week or two with them (for fear of sabotage), and so they give you no notice and a week or two of pay.
Decent companies will offer you additional "severance" for each year you've been there (some 1 week per year, some 1 month per year), but I'm not familiar with this "common law" thing. Neither was the local unemployment office (I'm in Manitoba, FYI).
My story was our division of the company got bought out by a company in BC and they wanted to keep three of us on. I was one of these three. The rest of our team was laid off immediately, and given 2 weeks severance plus the vacation pay they had earned. I was our one programmer, and the other two being kept filled sales-y roles. The company was cool with keeping the other two guys here in Winnipeg, but since their programmer team was in BC I was given the ultimatum to move or find new work. They then informed me that since I had been on vacation (earned vacation time) during the time of the company purchase, no employment agreement had been reached with me, and I was currently employed by no one (I found out I was laid off from the original company upon return from vacation). Of course, I had already worked for a week for the new company, having been told it was all good by my direct higher-up.
It ended up that I declined the offer to move which would have been at a decrease in pay (due to living expenses increasing) and almost no help with moving, and so I was entitled to no severance at all. I had to fight and fight for pay for that last week of work even, and they still owe me $180 for a hotel expense I covered on my visa and filed an expense report for. The catch is that the old company says they let me go with the expectation that the new company was to immediately re-employ me, and the new company says nothing was ever worked out. So it's a situation where each company is able to point the finger at the other, and it would be too expensive for me to pursue compensation from either, standing a 50/50 chance of losing anyway due to this finger pointing.
I think I will talk to my lawyer on Monday however about this common law thing you mentioned, since I have some other things to go over with him anyway. At worst, he asks around his firm for free advice, and at best I'm entitled to another 2 or 3 months compensation for the lack of notice and my "hardships".
My advince to the original questioner, stick up for yourself and don't take shit, but be reasonable and know how to choose your battles wisely.
Exactly! Not that I'm against XML, I use it everyday. And having a standard document format for everything and a standard API for accessing that data is wonderful. But I agree that HTML made page authoring easy enough for non-techies to be able to create sites about their cats, their little clubs, their personal lives and ideas, and that made the web really interesting in its day (something it has lacked in recent years).
It's great and all that we now have sophisticated document management system (one of which I'm guilty of having created, see .sig for details :)), but the fact of the matter is that all of this "easy" content management has only really created a new barrier to entry for the average joe wanting to publish his/her thoughts. It also helps further the rift between corporations/multinational conglomerates who are able to publish using these high-end systems and the average joes that made up the original commercial-free population of the net. While standards help the big guys do what big guys do, they also inhibit competition and are exclusive in this fundamental way.
So while we can have discussions about interoperability between CMS systems and at the same time talk about the refinement of HTML into a "proper British grammar" of itself, it's important that we recognize a few applications that have grown out of the need for "the rest of us" to express ourselves as well (specifically, blogging). And anyways, it should be the responsibility of the software makers to worry about standards compliance. For far too long now software like dreamweaver/frontpage/homesite/et al have been excused for their poor output quality, but it looks like things have improved at least somewhat on that front in recent years.
Now it's time to kick the leading browser out on its ass and get on with the web as it should be. Free for all, and accessible by all.
P.S. If you hate XML so much for structuring documents, you may appreciate YAML, SLiP, and the like. Search for them on Google.
This is so true. Even teachers at pseudo-university-level programs around here don't seem to understand the meaning of the ML in HTML/XHTML/XML/etc. This is why a new generation of unqualified "web designers" and "web developers" are coming into the job market and aren't worth the minimum wage jobs they'll be fighting tooth and nail over (sorry, sad but true newbies). I don't mean to flame anyone here, so I apologize for being so harsh.
/>) and it would be fine, but when I pointed this out he made like the standard had changed and that's why he didn't know about it.
One teacher I had before I quit was trying to teach the class about XHTML (I'll leave the program nameless). He told us all that XHTML wasn't supported in NS4 because tags like <br/> don't work in it. I tried to point out Appendix C in the XHTML specification that discusses compatibility with existing browsers, and how all you had to do was put a space before the slash (ie. <br
He also tried to tell us that the <tr> and <td> tags all had to go on a single line (of course they do), but I'll stop before I get nasty...
At least in our case (being uncensored), our main form of censorship is self-censorship. This is a choice. It's a choice people are all too willing to make these days, but at least the few of us willing to excercise our rights and our brains to form our own opinions (amidst the constant bombardment of media pressure) have the right to do so.
You raise an interesting point though. +5 from me.
not to be an idealist, but i think that commercial attempts to control the internet will largely fail because we're faced with smart terminals that allow us, the internet populace, to do what we want and go where we want. it's not like someone can force me to stop using Mozilla and start accepting their over-commericalized (and popup driven) vision of the internet without a fight. and no attempts at fighting your customers are going to result in happy or loyal customers. it's the same reason the music industry is in for it, because they are trying to control the listeners and we don't like it, and we know we don't have to put up with it.
:)
anyway, i should go read the article now that i've gone and run my mouth off!
The fact that we consider ethics when dealing with humans but not when dealing with anything else should raise some questions right there.
Hey, this guy sounds like just the guy I've been looking for. I've been trying to find somebody to make a few small changes to some old Perl scripts I have... ;)
.sig!
Nice
Wasn't DeMuDi (http://www.demudi.org/) supposed to be a Debian-based multimedia distribution? Red Hat could at least try to come up with a more original name than ReHMuDi, honestly!
"It's definitely of the giant squid group..."
Wow, it's a good thing David Pemberton was on the scene.
It's not always a good idea to write down every thought you have. With a piece of paper, you're forced to use your head. A good programmer should be able to work things out without the aid or reliance on tools.
Try it sometime. You'll hate it at first, but then you'll start to understand what you're doing much more thoroughly, and you'll come about better solutions as a result. I spend maybe 25% of my "coding time" with a computer. Another benefit is that I don't kill my eyes and wrists so much.
Now I do a large portion of my work on paper. I've never gone to college (aside from a brief stint at one of those crappy "learn to code in 12 months" courses, which I quit right away), but I had been coding recreationally for years, and my high school had a 3 year comp sci course where the teacher forced us to do 75% of our work on the chalk board and on paper. I f***ing hated it! Tests were almost all done on paper too, especially the exams.
Then I moved cities and had to get a job, so I got up to speed with Perl, and I've been coding professionally for 3 or 4 years now. The problem was that when I moved, I didn't have a computer for the first year and a half I was here, aside from at work. So I took out a dozen books at a time from the library, got a big notebook, and coded all on paper. It was painful at first, but now I can't do without it. I find it helps to separate myself from the problem at hand, and since I use scripting languages (usually PHP now, with some Perl/Python/Ruby once in a while) I don't have to worry about compiling, and the code is much more like prototyping or pseudocode.
I went back to my high school a few years ago and thanked my teacher for forcing us to code on paper, because now I use it constantly. It forces me to thoroughly understand the problems I'm working with, and to consider my approach more carefully. It also helps because with pseudocode you can make your own functions you don't have to worry about implementing until later.
This also helps me when I do API designs, since I can put short UML diagrams interspersed with my pseudocode all over the page.
Dude, I just bought a new G4 TiBook. The processor is 667mhz, which didn't sound like much when you hear Intel bragging about their 2.0ghz procs. Well, I'm also running an AMD athlon 700mhz at home with Windows ME, and an AMD 1.4ghz athlon with Red Hat 7.1 at work, and I'd have to say there's no real difference between the three. Sure one might be technically faster than the other, but my 2 year old home machine doesn't feel that noticeably slower than my 1.4ghz, and my tibook is definitely not the slowest of the three. The discrepancy is definitely in the software, and that puts the tibook way in the lead. I love linux, don't get me wrong, and I'm goofy excited over Gnome 2 coming out, but the ease-of-use of osx is still worlds beyond gnome. Plus, once jaguar comes out, osx will be light years beyond the others (the thought of quartz extreme has me just as pumped as gnome 2).
The price, on the other hand, is why next month I'm putting a new AMD/Linux workstation into the mix and not a new G4 workstation.
That's nice, and I sympathize completely with your point of view. However, sysadmins who are responsible for important data can't be naive enough to make assumptions about the security of that data. We live in a world full of crackers, and so it becomes only common sense to set up a proper firewall, perhaps an IDS, and that they have to at least try to turn off unused ports and enforce semi-decent passwords (or at least regular password changes). These things may not be apparent to an MCSE sysadmin, but then again you don't go around calling an MCSE certified person a QUALIFIED sysadmin unless you yourself are clueless (aka. suit).
However, it's truly a shame that the world has to be this way.
Fuck dude, that was a brilliant analogy. +5 in my book!