The former Conservative government decided that for the second largest country by area, it would be a good idea to centralize all Information Technology services, and called it Shared Services Canada (SSC). This is wrong in so many ways...first of all, having all IT services centralized means that you have a single point of failure. Add to that, SSC may have their own priorities that may leave you sitting for weeks and months waiting for installation, configuration and implementation all sorts of IT technologies. It used to be that each department of the Government of Canada could set up their internal services, as long as they conformed to a set of guidelines, and the equipment was bought from government approved vendors who had standing offers with the government.
Now, SSC has become one of the worst BOFH, and everyone suffers.
Minix is microkernel based, and still in constant development. It would also be pretty much free of Linux code. Although, I admit, I haven't played with it since the early days of Linux....
It was running Fido, and was part of Fidonet, 163/5, before there were zone numbers! I named it after one of my favourite songs, Solsbury Hill by Peter Gabriel. Our hub for Ottawa was run by a guy named, I kid you not, Al Hacker! He had to pull out his wallet and show us his driver's license at the first Sysop gathering we had! l I started carrying "Echos", which were sort of like Newsgroups on Usenet, and I remember when the nodelist of Fidonet BBSs broke 1,000!
I also met some truly wonderful people, and a few cranks...but it was a formative experience, and later lead to a career doing Unix and Linux.
If the "Sick Puppies" were any more predictable, their last name would be Trump! What makes them even more funny is that they really have no idea about how the Hugo Awards or the WSFS works.
ttyl
Farrell
p.s. And their names also makes them open to ad homonym attacks!
I got my real start in Computers and Programming due to Logo. I was lucky enough to get a high school co-op placement at Ottawa's Carleton Board of Education's Computer Pilot Project, the Computer P.L.A.C.E. where I got to play with a Terrapin floor turtle, and ended up having to hack it's code fix it's programming to make it draw square "squares". I taught computer programming using LOGO, both Terrapin and Apple versions, to some of the very same high school teachers who had told me that I couldn't do programming because my math wasn't good enough. It also enabled me to get a summer job teaching at a computer day camp, and thus my career in computers was launched!
This Samhain, Seymour Papert, you will remembered among the honoured ancestors of my craft! Hail and Farewell!
You mean like the Anonymous Coward who says "graphical utilities don't update the kernel"
This person should simply click the Mint update manager on their bar which brings up the graphical Update Manager Window. Then you click "View", and from that drop-down menu select "Linux Kernels". From there you can choose from all of the available kernels for Linux Mint.
I don't know about you, but that is certainly looks fairly graphical to me!
You can get a great deal of information from the "service tag" on your Dell equipment. Every piece of Dell equipment has one, and you can get the entire service history through the Dell website. This is very useful for service types, both inside and outside Dell. But it sounds like some people are abusing that, and I fear that will cause Dell to shut down or limit access to that service.:-(
It's an interesting article...but the video linked to it is by someone who is fairly clueless about Linux. As it's well know that Red Star OS is Linux, the video's creator should have at least taken the time to learn more about Linux so that he could comment competently on Red Star. Disappointing.
If anyone can do a good translation to the small screne, it would be JMS. He knows what is good science fiction, and what is good TV. If it fails, it won't be because of his writing. I think I need to dig out my copies and re-red the series again.
It's amazing how Brad R. Torgersen came up with an acronym to perfectly describe the various Sick Puppies, and that acronym is CHORF. I couldn't think of a better way to describe them, as it stands for "Cliquish, Holier-than-thou, Obnoxious, Reactionary, Fanatics". That perfectly describes a bunch older white males who pine for the Golden Age when they thought they ruled the world, when women stayed at home and had babies rather than winning Hugos - bunch of white male elitists had a bad case of homophobia.
As for the numbers, well they really do have something to say about how a bunch of whiny old 5th tier male writers tried to influence an popularity contest by insulting and trying to bully the very people they needed to vote for them. And, not so amazingly, they created an EPIC FAIL.
The AC who submitted this is of obviously from the "Sick Puppies" camp. Anyone who has a clue to how the Hugo system works could have predicted, and many did, that this would be a sweep for "no award" in the categories that were influenced by the actions of the "Sick Puppies".
And really, it was all about numbers. The Puppies are a small minority and were thus clobbered by the greater SF Community. To them, it's a well known "fact" that a Hugo win can boost the sales of books and collections, and that is what the Puppies were looking for. Unfortunately, they have confused cause and effect. Books don't suddenly become popular when they win the Hugo....it is because a book is already popular that it goes on to win the Hugo. So no matter how hard you campaign, or rile at the community, to try to win a Hugo, if the work isn't already popular, you only get a pyrrhic victory by getting it nominated.
And if the "Sick Puppies" really had a clue about how the Hugos work and it's history, they would have known they were going to fail, because a certain organization whose name begins with "S", which is fabulously rich and was founded by a science fiction writer once tried a campaign get a book "written" by him to win the Hugo, and *they* failed.
Given how wide Slashdot's readers are, I suspect the reason why people are picky is because there's the expectation that a lot of people reading will be not native speakers--and having been a regular of IRC chatrooms where we were chatting in English purely because it was the sole language everybody knew, it was hard to miss sometimes that while people fluent in a language certainly can 'fix' missing words...this required fluency.
Frankly, this is the first time I have had this problem. I've been posting on BBSs, IRC, Usenet, Compuserv and usually, the only thing I used to get dinged for is spelling. As spell checking has gotten better, I have been able to "see" the way the word written correctly looks like, and more often than not, notice that it is "wrong", but usually can't tell you why it is wrong.
How well do modern STT options work? I was a selective mute because it took years to get it to where my speech could be understood--it was simply less frustrating to not even try to talk--so I'm very wary of attempting to get a computer to understand my speech.
I haven't used computer based STT, but I am having good success with Android's version on both phones and tablets. I am going to have to see soon about getting some sort of STT running on Linux to see how good it is...I hope that I won't be forced to shift to Windows to get decent software....although in theory, the stuff Google is doing should be portable to Linux since, at it's base, Android is running on top of Linux. Android apps are really just like Java apps, as they run their own bytecode in a sandbox on top of something else, like the Linux kernel.
As for keyboards, I've found that HP, ASUS, and Lenovo's laptop keyboards work well for me, enough so that I've actually worn out a couple laptop keyboards. I also keep a cheap USB old-style keyboard in my Bin O' Cables. (I am not going out to buy a new keyboard in the middle of the night, thank you.)
I used to use a Happy Hacking keyboard, but I switched to using a KVM between two machines, and thus needed to switch to a USB keyboard. I am currently using logitech wireless keyboard & mouse combo as I was forced for a while to work in a very limited space, but I now have enough space to maybe move back to the HH keyboard, or buy a new mechanical one, and switch back to using a trackball.
Incidentally: Choose a craft or musical instrument you enjoy that requires deft hands, the skills do transfer! This is a way to try to force your brain to expand the region associated with your hands, as well as increase manual dexterity, and the skills will transfer. (It won't help your handwriting, though; my handwriting is and remains dismal in English. I have reason to suspect that'd require having to relearn it entirely but have seen no sign that anybody's done the research here...yet.)
I actually play guitar, and have played for about 20+ years. I'm no Jimmy Page, Jeff Martin or Alex Lifeson but with practice I can play along with some of the songs they wrote.:-) I also play synthesizer, which is a bit different from just playing keyboards...playing a synth involves knowing more than just what keys are what notes, but understanding things like waveforms, envelopes, LFOs and all sorts of esoteric "analog programming" to produce unique and intersting sounds.
This might also help you when your eyesight gets worse, since being able to work by touch is amazingly useful when you're working in the dark or in conditions where you can't see (well). Personally, I think it's a useful skill for anybody to have; if nothing else, being able to change a lightbulb in the dark has its obvious applications.
As it is, when I turn off the light when I go to bed, I don't turn it on again if I need to hit the restroom, and thus navigate in the dark. It's not much, but it gives me a feeling for moving around wi
I read up on Dysgraphia, and that does seem to describe some of my problems. I have a very hard time writing things out in longhand, and although I can express my self well writing on a computer, with decent editing, such that I have actually sold articles and been Editor-in-Chief of an academic magazine, writing on forums like Slashdot is where I run into "Language Nazis", and get flamed. I am seeing my doctor in a couple of weeks for a regular checkup, I will ask him about testing.
In reference to typing, I can type usually in the 60 wpm and in bursts up to a hundred...but I still have problems getting my ideas out, and a good keyboard helps...most new laptop keyboards suck galactic muffins. That is why I have and older IBM/Lenovo laptop. And on devices like phones, I do tend to use the STT options, I started that since I was diagnosed with Macular Degeneration, and I am slowly going blind...so I have go get used to doing things with limited sight. I also need to start learning to use a screen reader on the computer....
I have a great deal of respect for the English language, but as I suffer from both Dyslexia, and ADHD, it is amazing I can express myself at all in the written word. I can't write as fast as I think, so I accidentally drop words from sentences. If it wasn't for spell check, I would be functionally illiterate.
So go ahead and kick the cripple, it's easy and fun.
Back then, there were really a few magazines that the up-and-coming cyberpunk would read. Mondo 2000, Boing Boing, 2600, and later, Wired. Another good one, when you could find it, was TAP.
Ah...back in the days when the gritty future of cyberpunk was shinny and new...
A friend of mine was able to pick up a cheap used PDP-8 in the 1990s with many of the bells and whistles (paper tape reader/writer & teletype, etc), and a full set of software. I remember toggling in the bootstrap loader to start the whole bootstrapping of the operating system. Ah...memories.
That's apart from the over-specified buzzword bingo related to web CMSs and frameworks. For example, someone that's pretty good with Drupal [not me] can probably deal with Joomla after a week or two.
Same for version numbers, too! You have experience with AIX 5.2, Solaris 10, Red Hat Enterprise 5, but the ad asks for AIX 6.0, or Solaris 8 or Red Hat Enterprise 4.5...well chances are, you can handle the job with just a few adjustments, but the HR won't select your resume unless you have those listed as well.
Indeed, it rains in the desert too...a desert is defined by the amount of rain over a year. Wikipedia says:
"Deserts have been defined and classified in a number of ways, generally combining total precipitation, number of days on which this falls, temperature, and humidity, and sometimes additional factors.[8] For example, Phoenix, Arizona receives less than 250 mm (9.8 in) of precipitation per year, and is immediately recognized as being located in a desert because of its aridity-adapted plants. The North Slope of Alaska's Brooks Range also receives less than 250 mm (9.8 in) of precipitation per year and is often classified as a cold desert" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
- 40C? More like -50C, sometimes being below -60C! And dry...the Canadian Arctic is a desert! Most plastics do not survive long in the North, and many other materials behave strangely compared to being in more temperate environments.
Slashdot Mirror
True! I doubt that they have simply gone off-line. They must have found some other system since they know TOR has been compromised.
The former Conservative government decided that for the second largest country by area, it would be a good idea to centralize all Information Technology services, and called it Shared Services Canada (SSC). This is wrong in so many ways...first of all, having all IT services centralized means that you have a single point of failure. Add to that, SSC may have their own priorities that may leave you sitting for weeks and months waiting for installation, configuration and implementation all sorts of IT technologies. It used to be that each department of the Government of Canada could set up their internal services, as long as they conformed to a set of guidelines, and the equipment was bought from government approved vendors who had standing offers with the government.
Now, SSC has become one of the worst BOFH, and everyone suffers.
Remember, "Cloud" simply means "Someone else's computers" that you have very little or no control over...much like Windows. :-)
Minix is microkernel based, and still in constant development. It would also be pretty much free of Linux code. Although, I admit, I haven't played with it since the early days of Linux....
It was running Fido, and was part of Fidonet, 163/5, before there were zone numbers! I named it after one of my favourite songs, Solsbury Hill by Peter Gabriel. Our hub for Ottawa was run by a guy named, I kid you not, Al Hacker! He had to pull out his wallet and show us his driver's license at the first Sysop gathering we had! l I started carrying "Echos", which were sort of like Newsgroups on Usenet, and I remember when the nodelist of Fidonet BBSs broke 1,000!
I also met some truly wonderful people, and a few cranks...but it was a formative experience, and later lead to a career doing Unix and Linux.
Dell Latitude series laptops are fairly good machines, it's the Vostro and Inspirons that tend to be fairly crappy.
If the "Sick Puppies" were any more predictable, their last name would be Trump! What makes them even more funny is that they really have no idea about how the Hugo Awards or the WSFS works.
ttyl
Farrell
p.s. And their names also makes them open to ad homonym attacks!
When will people admit that the GNU operating system is actually EMACS?
Truly a Hero! I owe him a great deal!
I got my real start in Computers and Programming due to Logo. I was lucky enough to get a high school co-op placement at Ottawa's Carleton Board of Education's Computer Pilot Project, the Computer P.L.A.C.E. where I got to play with a Terrapin floor turtle, and ended up having to hack it's code fix it's programming to make it draw square "squares". I taught computer programming using LOGO, both Terrapin and Apple versions, to some of the very same high school teachers who had told me that I couldn't do programming because my math wasn't good enough. It also enabled me to get a summer job teaching at a computer day camp, and thus my career in computers was launched!
This Samhain, Seymour Papert, you will remembered among the honoured ancestors of my craft! Hail and Farewell!
You mean like the Anonymous Coward who says "graphical utilities don't update the kernel"
This person should simply click the Mint update manager on their bar which brings up the graphical Update Manager Window. Then you click "View", and from that drop-down menu select "Linux Kernels". From there you can choose from all of the available kernels for Linux Mint.
I don't know about you, but that is certainly looks fairly graphical to me!
You can get a great deal of information from the "service tag" on your Dell equipment. Every piece of Dell equipment has one, and you can get the entire service history through the Dell website. This is very useful for service types, both inside and outside Dell. But it sounds like some people are abusing that, and I fear that will cause Dell to shut down or limit access to that service. :-(
It's an interesting article...but the video linked to it is by someone who is fairly clueless about Linux. As it's well know that Red Star OS is Linux, the video's creator should have at least taken the time to learn more about Linux so that he could comment competently on Red Star. Disappointing.
You are right, you can't Terraform Mars, you Areoform it!
If anyone can do a good translation to the small screne, it would be JMS. He knows what is good science fiction, and what is good TV. If it fails, it won't be because of his writing. I think I need to dig out my copies and re-red the series again.
It's amazing how Brad R. Torgersen came up with an acronym to perfectly describe the various Sick Puppies, and that acronym is CHORF. I couldn't think of a better way to describe them, as it stands for "Cliquish, Holier-than-thou, Obnoxious, Reactionary, Fanatics". That perfectly describes a bunch older white males who pine for the Golden Age when they thought they ruled the world, when women stayed at home and had babies rather than winning Hugos - bunch of white male elitists had a bad case of homophobia.
As for the numbers, well they really do have something to say about how a bunch of whiny old 5th tier male writers tried to influence an popularity contest by insulting and trying to bully the very people they needed to vote for them. And, not so amazingly, they created an EPIC FAIL.
The AC who submitted this is of obviously from the "Sick Puppies" camp. Anyone who has a clue to how the Hugo system works could have predicted, and many did, that this would be a sweep for "no award" in the categories that were influenced by the actions of the "Sick Puppies".
And really, it was all about numbers. The Puppies are a small minority and were thus clobbered by the greater SF Community. To them, it's a well known "fact" that a Hugo win can boost the sales of books and collections, and that is what the Puppies were looking for. Unfortunately, they have confused cause and effect. Books don't suddenly become popular when they win the Hugo....it is because a book is already popular that it goes on to win the Hugo. So no matter how hard you campaign, or rile at the community, to try to win a Hugo, if the work isn't already popular, you only get a pyrrhic victory by getting it nominated.
And if the "Sick Puppies" really had a clue about how the Hugos work and it's history, they would have known they were going to fail, because a certain organization whose name begins with "S", which is fabulously rich and was founded by a science fiction writer once tried a campaign get a book "written" by him to win the Hugo, and *they* failed.
So the Puppies had no chance what so ever.
Given how wide Slashdot's readers are, I suspect the reason why people are picky is because there's the expectation that a lot of people reading will be not native speakers--and having been a regular of IRC chatrooms where we were chatting in English purely because it was the sole language everybody knew, it was hard to miss sometimes that while people fluent in a language certainly can 'fix' missing words...this required fluency.
Frankly, this is the first time I have had this problem. I've been posting on BBSs, IRC, Usenet, Compuserv and usually, the only thing I used to get dinged for is spelling. As spell checking has gotten better, I have been able to "see" the way the word written correctly looks like, and more often than not, notice that it is "wrong", but usually can't tell you why it is wrong.
How well do modern STT options work? I was a selective mute because it took years to get it to where my speech could be understood--it was simply less frustrating to not even try to talk--so I'm very wary of attempting to get a computer to understand my speech.
I haven't used computer based STT, but I am having good success with Android's version on both phones and tablets. I am going to have to see soon about getting some sort of STT running on Linux to see how good it is...I hope that I won't be forced to shift to Windows to get decent software....although in theory, the stuff Google is doing should be portable to Linux since, at it's base, Android is running on top of Linux. Android apps are really just like Java apps, as they run their own bytecode in a sandbox on top of something else, like the Linux kernel.
As for keyboards, I've found that HP, ASUS, and Lenovo's laptop keyboards work well for me, enough so that I've actually worn out a couple laptop keyboards. I also keep a cheap USB old-style keyboard in my Bin O' Cables. (I am not going out to buy a new keyboard in the middle of the night, thank you.)
I used to use a Happy Hacking keyboard, but I switched to using a KVM between two machines, and thus needed to switch to a USB keyboard. I am currently using logitech wireless keyboard & mouse combo as I was forced for a while to work in a very limited space, but I now have enough space to maybe move back to the HH keyboard, or buy a new mechanical one, and switch back to using a trackball.
Incidentally: Choose a craft or musical instrument you enjoy that requires deft hands, the skills do transfer! This is a way to try to force your brain to expand the region associated with your hands, as well as increase manual dexterity, and the skills will transfer. (It won't help your handwriting, though; my handwriting is and remains dismal in English. I have reason to suspect that'd require having to relearn it entirely but have seen no sign that anybody's done the research here...yet.)
I actually play guitar, and have played for about 20+ years. I'm no Jimmy Page, Jeff Martin or Alex Lifeson but with practice I can play along with some of the songs they wrote. :-) I also play synthesizer, which is a bit different from just playing keyboards...playing a synth involves knowing more than just what keys are what notes, but understanding things like waveforms, envelopes, LFOs and all sorts of esoteric "analog programming" to produce unique and intersting sounds.
This might also help you when your eyesight gets worse, since being able to work by touch is amazingly useful when you're working in the dark or in conditions where you can't see (well). Personally, I think it's a useful skill for anybody to have; if nothing else, being able to change a lightbulb in the dark has its obvious applications.
As it is, when I turn off the light when I go to bed, I don't turn it on again if I need to hit the restroom, and thus navigate in the dark. It's not much, but it gives me a feeling for moving around wi
Thank you very much for your suggestions!
I read up on Dysgraphia, and that does seem to describe some of my problems. I have a very hard time writing things out in longhand, and although I can express my self well writing on a computer, with decent editing, such that I have actually sold articles and been Editor-in-Chief of an academic magazine, writing on forums like Slashdot is where I run into "Language Nazis", and get flamed. I am seeing my doctor in a couple of weeks for a regular checkup, I will ask him about testing.
In reference to typing, I can type usually in the 60 wpm and in bursts up to a hundred...but I still have problems getting my ideas out, and a good keyboard helps...most new laptop keyboards suck galactic muffins. That is why I have and older IBM/Lenovo laptop. And on devices like phones, I do tend to use the STT options, I started that since I was diagnosed with Macular Degeneration, and I am slowly going blind...so I have go get used to doing things with limited sight. I also need to start learning to use a screen reader on the computer....
Thanks again for your suggestions!!!!
I have a great deal of respect for the English language, but as I suffer from both Dyslexia, and ADHD, it is amazing I can express myself at all in the written word. I can't write as fast as I think, so I accidentally drop words from sentences. If it wasn't for spell check, I would be functionally illiterate.
So go ahead and kick the cripple, it's easy and fun.
Right.
Not all Hackers are cyber criminals. Despite what CSI:Cyber might say.
Back then, there were really a few magazines that the up-and-coming cyberpunk would read. Mondo 2000, Boing Boing, 2600, and later, Wired. Another good one, when you could find it, was TAP.
Ah...back in the days when the gritty future of cyberpunk was shinny and new...
A friend of mine was able to pick up a cheap used PDP-8 in the 1990s with many of the bells and whistles (paper tape reader/writer & teletype, etc), and a full set of software. I remember toggling in the bootstrap loader to start the whole bootstrapping of the operating system. Ah...memories.
That's apart from the over-specified buzzword bingo related to web CMSs and frameworks. For example, someone that's pretty good with Drupal [not me] can probably deal with Joomla after a week or two.
Same for version numbers, too! You have experience with AIX 5.2, Solaris 10, Red Hat Enterprise 5, but the ad asks for AIX 6.0, or Solaris 8 or Red Hat Enterprise 4.5...well chances are, you can handle the job with just a few adjustments, but the HR won't select your resume unless you have those listed as well.
Indeed, it rains in the desert too...a desert is defined by the amount of rain over a year. Wikipedia says:
"Deserts have been defined and classified in a number of ways, generally combining total precipitation, number of days on which this falls, temperature, and humidity, and sometimes additional factors.[8] For example, Phoenix, Arizona receives less than 250 mm (9.8 in) of precipitation per year, and is immediately recognized as being located in a desert because of its aridity-adapted plants. The North Slope of Alaska's Brooks Range also receives less than 250 mm (9.8 in) of precipitation per year and is often classified as a cold desert" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
- 40C? More like -50C, sometimes being below -60C! And dry...the Canadian Arctic is a desert! Most plastics do not survive long in the North, and many other materials behave strangely compared to being in more temperate environments.