If the dude works at a research institute of minor size and up, they should have IT staff who can do that initial setup for him.
I'm not quite sure why your post is rated as funny; scientists are not necessarily the best people to be left in charge of setting up databases. I've seen all sorts of atrocities constructed in the name of science, from vast flat files to cross-linked ISAM/VSAM files, and I remember many late nights (with complaints from wife) spent sorting them out when a subscript went out of range.
These days where you need 4 tapes to backup a single drive no one appends.
These days with LTO-4, my biggest problem is having enough time to guarantee a daily backup.
Then you are fortunate to have such leeway. I won't preface this with a "get off my lawn" or anything uttered in a Yorkshire accent, but for the first 15 years of my work with computers, backups occupied hundreds of tapes (and lots of time) every single day.
while the second story was procedural user error (do the backup every day, no matter what) being blamed on a technical problem (the backup system).
Back in the late '80s when I was working on Prime "mini-computers" (as such machines were then known), I would receive periodic calls from Prime's tech support to alert me to (yet) another bug found in their BRMS (Backup/Restore Management System), and would I pretty-please stop using it. As it happened, I was using their less sophisticated but otherwise bombproof dump/restore utilities, so this was never an issue for me, but it was still pretty funny...
Good judgement comes from experience. And most experience comes as a result of bad judgement.
Just about anyone who has been in the line of fire as sysadmin for long enough will recall some ill-concieved notion that caused untold trouble. Since my earliest experience with commercial computers was in a batch-processing environment, my initial mishaps rarely inconvenienced anybody other than myself. But I still recall an incident much later (early '90s) when I inadvertently managed to delete the ":per" directory on a Data General mainframe (more or less equivalent to/dev on a *nix box), then having to watch for about 45 minutes while my users' PIDs disappeared. I'll never forget that red-faced moment of knocking on my boss's door and letting him know he might want to leave his phone off the hook for the next hour...
It's simple in my case: I'll maintain my post-mortem cool, because I don't have a facebook account. I don't care what happens to this Slashdot account either, since it's not my first (long ago I had a 3 or 4-digit UID, but lost the password). If someone wants to hack it and burn my maxed-out karma, it won't make any more difference to me after death than before.
Why deny the providers of a service - that you openly admit to liking - revenue for providing you that service? I just don't understand this selfish attitude.
Bullshit. I pay Skype for phone calls and text messages I make to POTS or mobile phones. The cost of these is slightly over the odds compared to a number of SIP offerings, but it's worth it to me to have a convenient softphone that does IM as well.
There's nothing selfish about wanting the product to stay that way, rather than inflicting advertising on us as well.
part of Skype's strategy will be to:...Develop new monetization models, including advertising."
That doesn't sound good. Skype is quite useful to me at the moment (for both VOIP and IM), but if advertising gets in the way, I won't be very happy.
But on the other hand, I guess I use a combination of hosts-file blocking and adblock/flashblock with my browser, so Skype's intrusions will just get added to the counter-measures I take.
If history has shown us anything, it's that these things usually sort themselves out.
You obviously haven't read much history. History mostly tells us that no-one will ever learn from someone else's mistakes. Which, I guess is probably why history keeps repeating itself.
I like our odds (which are probably pretty low no matter what we do) better if we spread out.
Who, ultimately, cares one way or another whether our species survives or expires? My money's on the latter, but I don't count on being around to collect.
...we may actually, as a species, live considerably longer, and be around for a significant amount of universe time.
To do what? Fuck over those nice people on Eroticon VI? Our species doesn't have a good record, and if there's any evidence at all for an Intelligent Designer(TM), it's that Theory of Special Relativity:
Thou shalt not exceed the speed of light, so thou art forced to live in the mess created by thyself. Tough love, I guess, but it makes sense.
Right now, the problem in the USA seems to be the president and Congress.
Hmmm. OK, I'm not a US citizen, but think about this:
Why should a president/congress/whatever fritter away millions or billions of dollars on a project with (at best) a small likelihood of useful returns when that money could be better spent on public health or on wars in foreign countries?
On the plus side, while such a mentality will make getting off this rock pretty much impossible...
No, what's making it impossible is that tedious Theory of Special Relativity. Unless you can disprove that (better minds than mine or yours have failed to do so for 105 years), then you're going to have to come up with something more tenable.
I think human longevity advances are the only way to "cure" this.
Are you serious?
Our species already breeds like flies on a dungheap. If you suddenly increased its lifespan, "civilisation" (such as it is) will collapse in short order as a result of famine, dearth of other resources or disease.
Any free Unices that were capable of running on early PCs would have been about as stable as DOS was in those days
I never got to use it at the time (and of course it certainly wasn't free), but SCO ported Microsoft's Xenix to the 8086/8088 architecture. IIRC there were a few takers for it, so I guess it can't have been entirely unstable.
When shit breaks and it isn't my job to fix it, I'm now very likely to hand the problem off to whomever does have the job of fixing it.
Same here. Easy case for a car analogy. [*Ducks*]
Back when I was in my 20s it was normal for people to fix their own cars. Nowadays, there's so much wiring and proprietary software (not to mention all those damn hoses) hanging around the machines, it's more common to just leave it alone and let someone else handle it.
It's a problem when something apparently simple goes wrong when you're in the middle of nowhere, and you find yourself wishing you had your old VW Beetle and a handful of spanners...
Just because someone knows how to use something doesn't mean they understand
that something.
True, but there are things most people no longer really need to understand. For instance, when was a kid, our analogue phone system was easily understood by most (or many) people. Nowadays, comparatively few people have any real idea how a modern digtal phone system works.
But no-one really needs to know this, unless they are employed in that capacity. As Einstein once explained:
"The wireless telegraph is not difficult to understand. The ordinary telegraph is like a very long cat. You pull the tail in New York, and it meows in Los Angeles. The wireless is exactly the same, only without the cat."
Back when DOS was first released (I never got to use QDOS), I found it incredibly clunky and limited. Actually, that perception didn't change much in version 6.22. Those of us who had spent our lives working with mainframes took a long time to take PCs seriously as a result. To us, they were toys.
If any of the free Unices had been carried over to the x86 world a decade earlier (there were a couple of proprietary ones, but that doesn't count), I suspect Microsoft would barely have got off the ground.
THEN we could start it up on the CRT tube and play with light guns. now get off my lawn.
Oh dear, I can feel a Yorkshire accent coming on. Back in my day, we didn't have CRTs, we had punch-card readers for input and barrel-printers for output. (I'm actually not lying - the machine was a Burroughs B3700 running MCP IV.)
We never had to have an 'andful of cold gravel for breakfast, because we could leave it sitting on top of the ALU for a few minutes, and it would be nice and toasty warm.
...getting back to the topic, I wonder about the claim that Linux users are a rounding error. That sounds very much as if someone's sample is non-randomly selected. I would intuitively expect to see that sort profile among arts students, but as soon as you introduce students from more "techie" disciplines to your sample, I would expect to see a larger proportion of users of Linux and/or multiple OSs.
Having said that, I consider myself primarily as a Linux user, but in actuality, I probably spend more of my time using this second-hand MacBook that I inherited from my wife when she upgraded to a more recent model.
Slashdot Mirror
If the dude works at a research institute of minor size and up, they should have IT staff who can do that initial setup for him.
I'm not quite sure why your post is rated as funny; scientists are not necessarily the best people to be left in charge of setting up databases. I've seen all sorts of atrocities constructed in the name of science, from vast flat files to cross-linked ISAM/VSAM files, and I remember many late nights (with complaints from wife) spent sorting them out when a subscript went out of range.
These days where you need 4 tapes to backup a single drive no one appends. These days with LTO-4, my biggest problem is having enough time to guarantee a daily backup.
Then you are fortunate to have such leeway. I won't preface this with a "get off my lawn" or anything uttered in a Yorkshire accent, but for the first 15 years of my work with computers, backups occupied hundreds of tapes (and lots of time) every single day.
while the second story was procedural user error (do the backup every day, no matter what) being blamed on a technical problem (the backup system).
Back in the late '80s when I was working on Prime "mini-computers" (as such machines were then known), I would receive periodic calls from Prime's tech support to alert me to (yet) another bug found in their BRMS (Backup/Restore Management System), and would I pretty-please stop using it. As it happened, I was using their less sophisticated but otherwise bombproof dump/restore utilities, so this was never an issue for me, but it was still pretty funny...
Good judgement comes from experience. And most experience comes as a result of bad judgement.
/dev on a *nix box), then having to watch for about 45 minutes while my users' PIDs disappeared. I'll never forget that red-faced moment of knocking on my boss's door and letting him know he might want to leave his phone off the hook for the next hour...
Just about anyone who has been in the line of fire as sysadmin for long enough will recall some ill-concieved notion that caused untold trouble. Since my earliest experience with commercial computers was in a batch-processing environment, my initial mishaps rarely inconvenienced anybody other than myself. But I still recall an incident much later (early '90s) when I inadvertently managed to delete the ":per" directory on a Data General mainframe (more or less equivalent to
Recover your password.
What for? My point was that none of these accounts are so important to me that I can't start again. Except when I'm dead, of course...
It's simple in my case: I'll maintain my post-mortem cool, because I don't have a facebook account. I don't care what happens to this Slashdot account either, since it's not my first (long ago I had a 3 or 4-digit UID, but lost the password). If someone wants to hack it and burn my maxed-out karma, it won't make any more difference to me after death than before.
I could care less about Slashdot's rules.
Do you actually mean that Slashdot's rules are fine? If so, your post is redundant. Or maybe you meant to say you couldn't care less...
You should have used the word lose instead of loose.
...and it should be "should have", not "should of".
If you're not doing anything wrong you have nothing to worry about.
You mean, like online banking, or any other purpose where there are legitimate reasons for not wanting to leave history or cookies behind?
Alternatively, he could adopt a Slashdot approach:
Create a "bounce" message saying "Your email has been intercepted by a lameness filter..."
Why deny the providers of a service - that you openly admit to liking - revenue for providing you that service? I just don't understand this selfish attitude.
Bullshit. I pay Skype for phone calls and text messages I make to POTS or mobile phones. The cost of these is slightly over the odds compared to a number of SIP offerings, but it's worth it to me to have a convenient softphone that does IM as well.
There's nothing selfish about wanting the product to stay that way, rather than inflicting advertising on us as well.
An even simpler fix:
Don't bother going to Digg if you're a human beign with an IQ > 1.
...at the end of the article:
part of Skype's strategy will be to:...Develop new monetization models, including advertising."
That doesn't sound good. Skype is quite useful to me at the moment (for both VOIP and IM), but if advertising gets in the way, I won't be very happy.
But on the other hand, I guess I use a combination of hosts-file blocking and adblock/flashblock with my browser, so Skype's intrusions will just get added to the counter-measures I take.
If history has shown us anything, it's that these things usually sort themselves out.
You obviously haven't read much history. History mostly tells us that no-one will ever learn from someone else's mistakes. Which, I guess is probably why history keeps repeating itself.
I like our odds (which are probably pretty low no matter what we do) better if we spread out.
Who, ultimately, cares one way or another whether our species survives or expires? My money's on the latter, but I don't count on being around to collect.
...we may actually, as a species, live considerably longer, and be around for a significant amount of universe time.
To do what? Fuck over those nice people on Eroticon VI? Our species doesn't have a good record, and if there's any evidence at all for an Intelligent Designer(TM), it's that Theory of Special Relativity:
Thou shalt not exceed the speed of light, so thou art forced to live in the mess created by thyself. Tough love, I guess, but it makes sense.
Right now, the problem in the USA seems to be the president and Congress.
Hmmm. OK, I'm not a US citizen, but think about this:
Why should a president/congress/whatever fritter away millions or billions of dollars on a project with (at best) a small likelihood of useful returns when that money could be better spent on public health or on wars in foreign countries?
Looks like a no-brainer to me.
On the plus side, while such a mentality will make getting off this rock pretty much impossible...
No, what's making it impossible is that tedious Theory of Special Relativity. Unless you can disprove that (better minds than mine or yours have failed to do so for 105 years), then you're going to have to come up with something more tenable.
I think human longevity advances are the only way to "cure" this.
Are you serious?
Our species already breeds like flies on a dungheap. If you suddenly increased its lifespan, "civilisation" (such as it is) will collapse in short order as a result of famine, dearth of other resources or disease.
Any free Unices that were capable of running on early PCs would have been about as stable as DOS was in those days
I never got to use it at the time (and of course it certainly wasn't free), but SCO ported Microsoft's Xenix to the 8086/8088 architecture. IIRC there were a few takers for it, so I guess it can't have been entirely unstable.
When shit breaks and it isn't my job to fix it, I'm now very likely to hand the problem off to whomever does have the job of fixing it.
Same here. Easy case for a car analogy. [*Ducks*]
Back when I was in my 20s it was normal for people to fix their own cars. Nowadays, there's so much wiring and proprietary software (not to mention all those damn hoses) hanging around the machines, it's more common to just leave it alone and let someone else handle it.
It's a problem when something apparently simple goes wrong when you're in the middle of nowhere, and you find yourself wishing you had your old VW Beetle and a handful of spanners...
Just because someone knows how to use something doesn't mean they understand that something.
True, but there are things most people no longer really need to understand. For instance, when was a kid, our analogue phone system was easily understood by most (or many) people. Nowadays, comparatively few people have any real idea how a modern digtal phone system works.
But no-one really needs to know this, unless they are employed in that capacity. As Einstein once explained:
"The wireless telegraph is not difficult to understand. The ordinary telegraph is like a very long cat. You pull the tail in New York, and it meows in Los Angeles. The wireless is exactly the same, only without the cat."
Back when DOS was first released (I never got to use QDOS), I found it incredibly clunky and limited. Actually, that perception didn't change much in version 6.22. Those of us who had spent our lives working with mainframes took a long time to take PCs seriously as a result. To us, they were toys.
If any of the free Unices had been carried over to the x86 world a decade earlier (there were a couple of proprietary ones, but that doesn't count), I suspect Microsoft would barely have got off the ground.
THEN we could start it up on the CRT tube and play with light guns. now get off my lawn.
Oh dear, I can feel a Yorkshire accent coming on. Back in my day, we didn't have CRTs, we had punch-card readers for input and barrel-printers for output. (I'm actually not lying - the machine was a Burroughs B3700 running MCP IV.)
We never had to have an 'andful of cold gravel for breakfast, because we could leave it sitting on top of the ALU for a few minutes, and it would be nice and toasty warm.
...getting back to the topic, I wonder about the claim that Linux users are a rounding error. That sounds very much as if someone's sample is non-randomly selected. I would intuitively expect to see that sort profile among arts students, but as soon as you introduce students from more "techie" disciplines to your sample, I would expect to see a larger proportion of users of Linux and/or multiple OSs.
Having said that, I consider myself primarily as a Linux user, but in actuality, I probably spend more of my time using this second-hand MacBook that I inherited from my wife when she upgraded to a more recent model.