>> 1. Remember your password
>> 2. Fix your printer yourself.
>> 3. If you get the message "Critical System Updates Available", don't ignore it. Take the updates.
>> 4. Don't get your laptop stolen.
>> 5. Use sudo, not root.
>> 6. If it was working yesterday, something changed. Fess up.
>> 7. Check to make sure its plugged in.
>> 8. RTFM
>> 9. Don't open that.exe your nice new stranger friend sent you.
>> 10. If its 4:55 pm, let it go. It can wait until Monday.
You know, when NeXT was building their first computer, they thought that students would need an advanced computer to do all the work they needed to do and so they came up with this $10,000 thing for students that could do everything but oral sex and sold, like, six of them to students. I was a college student at the time, and my comment was "$10,000 for a computer? For students? My car didn't cost $10,000! Most students I know are poor, and won't even consider such things." The NeXT fans assured me that their parents would be happy to pick up the check. They were wrong.
To me, it appears that WalMart understands the student market vastly better than Steve Jobs did. The price is what's important to the college student market. Capability comes in no higher than a distant second.
If you know someone who runs Linux, who does approximately what you want to do with it, and is reasonably happy with it, you should install what they suggest. If you know more than one person that satisfies all three of the conditions, then pick one and do what they say. That way, you have someone who can help you over the rough spots (answering all of the "how do I do" questions you're going to have. If you know several people to ask, you can ask them all for advice, but if they give conflicting advice you need to pick one expert and forget the rest.
If none of the people that you know satisfy all three of those conditions, then pick one of the consumer-oriented distributions and go for it. This is not a choice that is appropriate to agonize over because you won't know what characteristics are important for your happiness until you've tried something. From your perspective, all of the major distributions are the same, so choice is something that is burdensome rather than liberating. That's the vagueness you talk about. Beginners don't need choices that they just find bewildering. Instead, they need to latch on to an expert (often called a "mentor") who will make choices for them until they understand what those choices mean.
Is everyone talking about it really a good reason to pick an OS? It depends upon your goals. The usual compelling reason to install an OS is because the application you want to run is available only for that OS. That doesn't appear to be the case, here. So, you have to examine your motives. Why do you want to do this? It looks to me like you're trying to see what everybody is talking about. In that case, then maximum buzz factor is the best reason for picking an OS. After all, it's not like you're going to spend hundreds of dollars just trying the thing out. If you don't like it, wipe it off your hard drive and go on with your life until you know someone who satisfies all three of the conditions in the first paragraph.
If all you're doing is stuffing fixed-size records into a single table, why not just use a flat file and not screw around with all the SQL parsing crap that just slows you down? If you need to process it with SQL tools, later, you can always import it into an actual database for report generation and such.
I don't buy it. Not for a second. Oh, I'm sure that the computers people are using are more complicated than their bank accounts, I just don't buy that the problems can all be laid at the feet of that complexity.
Instead, I think that the problem lies in the attitude of the people who provide the tech support. When tech support is viewed as a "cost center" to be minimized rather than an opportunity to gather data about the products that you provide, everybody loses. Outsourcing is always a bad idea because the goal of whoever you outsource to is never going to be your goal. They're trying to maximize their profits by gaming their compensation. You (assuming you have a clue, for mutual benefit is the essence of trade) are trying to maximize your profits by maximizing the value of your products. The easiest way of gaming the system is not going to be actually solving problems. That doesn't add any value to your products.
As a matter of fact, Joel Spolky has an article on providing customer service and while I disagree with one of the points (I think that vendors should be judged based on how often problems happen in addition to how well they resolve the problem--if it always takes six tries for an organization to get something right, I don't care all that much if they admit it's their problem and fix it for free, I'm still not going to think they're doing a good job) I think his direction is right. The feedback you get through your customer service folks gives you a direct window into what's happening with them and an opportunity to improve everybody's experience. It's just that nobody seems to realize the value of that information.
Adding a three hour astronomy course (which I did because I could when I was an undergrad) adds exactly 0 to your tuition and fees if you're already a full time student and the textbooks for 100-level courses are vastly cheaper than those for the 300 and 400 level courses toward your major and can usually be sold back without trouble, if you've a mind to. So, you're talking about $50 at most additional expense. I don't think that you can even buy the right to sit in a Ferrari for $50. And try finding a similar course once you're out in the workplace.
Personally, I wish I had taken the Arthurian Legends in Film course that I heard of when I was in grad school (the viewing list included everything from "Excalibur" to "Monty Python and the Holy Grail") or the "Love in the Western Tradition" course many of my running buddies took when I was an undergrad. I've been out of school for almost 20 years, and that's where my regrets are.
Or, look at it another way. While you're in college, you don't have to account for your time. You can do stuff and check things out and you won't have to explain to some HR person ten years later how you could be a worthwhile employee even though you chose to spend a year unemployed. It's not as good as hitchhiking around Europe, but it's a lot easier to explain.
You need to read this comment and stop complaining that college is trying to educate you instead of training you. Increasing your general knowledge level is most emphatically not a waste of your time and money. What's a waste is having an opportunity to access all kinds of knowledge (most especially knowledge that doesn't have anything to do with your major--you'll find that employers encourage gaining knowledge in your field, but won't let you study interesting but unrelated stuff) and not taking advantage of it to learn all kinds of cool stuff. What's wrong with you?
I think you're wrong. I once heard a joke to the effect that 90% of politicians give the rest of them a bad reputation. I believe that there are politicians with integrety, I just don't know who they are. I also don't believe that having multiple distinct parties makes the process less screwed up.
On a more serious note, I once read that the constituents have a strange attitude: They like their congresscritter, but they (largely) don't like Congress I think that this is due to a variation on the "tragedy of the commons" where that district gets "pork" while this district gets projects that "create badly needed jobs". My own personal belief is that job creation in and of itself is not a function of any government that doesn't have you swearing fealty to your liege lord.
How much a politician lies depends strongly on whether or not the one doing the measuring agrees with the politician. In a similar fashion how much "extreme ignorance" a politician has depends strongly on whether or not the one doing the measuring agrees with the politician. In other words, lies (and "extreme ignorance") are largely in the eye of the beholder. This lack of objectivity is a large part of why the politicial process is (and, as near as I can tell, always has been) screwed up the way that it is.
What you're supposed to get in college is education, not training. The difference being that an education is not directed toward a specific purpose, while training is all about learning a particular set of skills. Education is supposed to increase your broad knowledge level while training is supposed to make you able to do some specific thing. My opinion is that education is important, but most training is pretty useless for me. Although other people find formal training to be quite useful, the utility I get from it lies mostly in the training materials, which I can refer to when I actually get to the point of doing real work.
The benefits? None that I can think of at the moment. In fact, while my initial connection was a pretty stable one to the 6bone through Sprint, the current connection is flaky as hell and it's a minor pain to keep checking it to make sure I can ping the other end of the tunnel. One of these days, I'll automate the testing and reconnection of it, but it'll have to wait until it's a whole lot more important to me. Mostly I just ignore it and test it when I think about it. The only thing that it hurts when it's done is if the place I'm getting to has an AAAA record, the attempted connection to the IPv6 address has to time out before it retries the IPv4 address, so a very few sites are slower.
The original reason I got an IPv6 connection was to see what it took to set up an IPv6 network, and I had this T1 to Sprint and Sprint offered free tunnels to the 6bone so, I figured, why not? I mean, IPv6 was the next big thing (or so they told me) in the late 90's, so I was trying to be ahead of the curve. Eventually, I set up tunnels between my ISP and what was then my day job and my house and I (briefly) enjoyed the benefits of being able to SSH directly from one workstation behind a NAT connection to another workstation behind a different NAT connection. Yahoo.
When my ISP went under, and the 6bone went away, I got a connection to one of the public tunnel brokers, and it worked for a while. Then I changed my feed to Time Warner and the first cablemodem filtered protocol 41, so the tunnel wouldn't work no matter what I did. After replacing the cablemodem for other reasons, (and waiting long enough for me to wonder if it would work with the new equipment) I was able to get a tunnel to a tunnel broker and I've had a block of addresses ever since. (2001:5c0:8305::/48, in case you're wondering.) Some people have a garden. I have a home network and I enjoy puttering about with it from time to time. (The rest of the time it's a freakin' nuisance.)
I've been using IPv6 for nearly a decade, but most of the IPv6 traffic on my LAN is local to the LAN. There are very few interesting places on the Internet that have IPv6 addresses and fewer end users coming from IPv6 capable nodes.
With most engineering specialties, the demand is pretty steady, but the aerospace business is cyclic with about a 20 year cycle. The bottom of the money spent on aerospace stuff dropped out the bottom in the late 60's/early 70's after a peak in the mid-60's, and the pattern repeated itself in the late 80's/early 90's (when I was trying to find a job with my engineering degree, just out of grad school) and it appears to be holding true now. At least this programming gig turned out to be something I could do in the long term.
However, one of these days I have a dream of someday actually doing some of the engineering that I spent six years learning about.
I should clarify my comment. I wasn't intending to imply that I think highly of the bill or that the people here who have a deep suspicion of the patent system would lose that suspicion upon reading the bill. Instead, I was trying to give some general advice. What people say that a document says and what it actually says are often two different things. One should debate the contents of a bill rather than what pcworld says about it.
I agree that, solely from the list of the organizations that are in favor of the bill, it would seem unlikely that your typical Slashdot denizen will be in favor of it even after they read it.
Prior art determines patentability, not the determination of who the inventor is. Look, patents are issued to inventors. In order for that to happen, the inventor must be determined. Right now, the standard in the US is "first to invent", which means that the patent office has to examine the evidence and determine who invented the invention first. Now, since they obviously can't trust anyone's word on the subject, they have to examine evidence which is usually (always? IANAL) in the form of notebooks that have to be properly kept. In the absence of other evidence, the first person to file is declared the inventor.
Now, this is not to say that the bill would not break the US patent system any more than it already is, but one really can't tell that just from reading a summary. You should read the actual bill before concluding that it makes any problems worse.
A while ago, I was in the local big-box retailer and they had an HD TV and an SD TV set up next to each other playing the same content (a football game, as it happens) and the difference in the picture was noticeable.
However, even on the SD TV, you could still tell it was a football game on and you could read all the numbers on all the jerseys and you could follow all the plays. In short, even though the HD TV had a noticeably improved picture, it did not change my viewing experience in the slightest. So, perhaps the people who you're complaining about weren't blind and perhaps they were watching a TV that was set up correctly and perhaps they were watching the correct content. Perhaps they (quite rightly, in my opinion) concluded that no matter how pretty the picture, it's still just television.
Hey! It looks like you've got a Freenet6 tunnel, just like me! I hope you've figured out a better way to keep an eye on it than I have. Every time I try to ping the far end of my tunnel, it seems, the tunnel is down but tspc is still running. Unfortunately, I just checked and I think you're tunnel appears to be down right now. It's a good thing you also have an IPv4 address.
Sarbanes-Oxley? I suppose that a law could mandate that I have the capability to jump to the moon, too. However, I don't think Sarbanes-Oxley says what you think it says, at least about the general retention of general. I've skimmed over it and if there was anything in there that talked about anything other than the handling of financial data, I didn't see it. Perhaps you could point it out to me.
As for your point that the company has a right to control the use to which company resources are put, well, there's an old saying to the effect that just because you have a right to do something, that doesn't make it right for you to do it. Many companies (most companies? certainly all the companies I've ever worked for or owned) cannot function unless their employees do things that aren't strictly part of that worker's job description. Things like engineers working occasional (or even not-so-occasional) evenings and weekends. It is generally best for morale if those companies don't try to be strict with their resources. After all, if the people are giving up their time and resources on behalf of the company, the company should reciprocate. To do otherwise fosters a "workers vs owners" mentality when what is best is for everyone to be on the same page and working for the common good.
No, it doesn't mean that I have to have physical address to the local Ethernet segment, only that I need to have network access to a single machine on that Ethernet segment. Say one that got compromised because someone clicked on an attachment they shouldn't have, and I disagree with jandrese that this is a much harder job than simply scanning a network. How do you scan a network behind a NAT gateway (or stateful packet filter, like I use on my IPv6 gateway, whichever)? At worst, it's the same job.
My real problem with the assertion that the large address space of IPv6 enhances the security of the network is that it looks at the issue from the point of view of the proud designer who's sure that his new invention much more secure than the old way of doing things rather than the point of view of the malware creator who is looking for ways of accomplishing some task. Those points of view couldn't be more different. That's why those who design security protocols need to have devious-minded people review those protocols before putting them into widespread use.
So scanning networks for machines doesn't work any more. So what? In the time it took me to write the post to which you replied, I came up with a half-dozen different methods of propagating malware that don't depend on scanning. I'm sure there are others. You'll still need to be diligent with your security patches in a world where IPv6 is in common use.
No, it doesn't have to scan the entire local network to find your IPv6 addresses. You can send an ethernet broadcast packet (or look them up in the ARP table) and, since IPv6 workstations derive their addresses from the MAC address, you can simply calculate the IPv6 addresses from the replies. I think the whole "the IPv6 address space is so large worms can't possibly propagate" meme needs to be buried in the same grave as "NAT is a firewall".
Slashdot Mirror
>> 2. Fix your printer yourself.
>> 3. If you get the message "Critical System Updates Available", don't ignore it. Take the updates.
>> 4. Don't get your laptop stolen.
>> 5. Use sudo, not root.
>> 6. If it was working yesterday, something changed. Fess up.
>> 7. Check to make sure its plugged in.
>> 8. RTFM
>> 9. Don't open that
>> 10. If its 4:55 pm, let it go. It can wait until Monday.
>11. Down, not across.
12. All software sucks.
To me, it appears that WalMart understands the student market vastly better than Steve Jobs did. The price is what's important to the college student market. Capability comes in no higher than a distant second.
If none of the people that you know satisfy all three of those conditions, then pick one of the consumer-oriented distributions and go for it. This is not a choice that is appropriate to agonize over because you won't know what characteristics are important for your happiness until you've tried something. From your perspective, all of the major distributions are the same, so choice is something that is burdensome rather than liberating. That's the vagueness you talk about. Beginners don't need choices that they just find bewildering. Instead, they need to latch on to an expert (often called a "mentor") who will make choices for them until they understand what those choices mean.
Is everyone talking about it really a good reason to pick an OS? It depends upon your goals. The usual compelling reason to install an OS is because the application you want to run is available only for that OS. That doesn't appear to be the case, here. So, you have to examine your motives. Why do you want to do this? It looks to me like you're trying to see what everybody is talking about. In that case, then maximum buzz factor is the best reason for picking an OS. After all, it's not like you're going to spend hundreds of dollars just trying the thing out. If you don't like it, wipe it off your hard drive and go on with your life until you know someone who satisfies all three of the conditions in the first paragraph.
If all you're doing is stuffing fixed-size records into a single table, why not just use a flat file and not screw around with all the SQL parsing crap that just slows you down? If you need to process it with SQL tools, later, you can always import it into an actual database for report generation and such.
Out of curiousity, how do you prove that the source code that was provided matches the binaries that were provided?
Instead, I think that the problem lies in the attitude of the people who provide the tech support. When tech support is viewed as a "cost center" to be minimized rather than an opportunity to gather data about the products that you provide, everybody loses. Outsourcing is always a bad idea because the goal of whoever you outsource to is never going to be your goal. They're trying to maximize their profits by gaming their compensation. You (assuming you have a clue, for mutual benefit is the essence of trade) are trying to maximize your profits by maximizing the value of your products. The easiest way of gaming the system is not going to be actually solving problems. That doesn't add any value to your products.
As a matter of fact, Joel Spolky has an article on providing customer service and while I disagree with one of the points (I think that vendors should be judged based on how often problems happen in addition to how well they resolve the problem--if it always takes six tries for an organization to get something right, I don't care all that much if they admit it's their problem and fix it for free, I'm still not going to think they're doing a good job) I think his direction is right. The feedback you get through your customer service folks gives you a direct window into what's happening with them and an opportunity to improve everybody's experience. It's just that nobody seems to realize the value of that information.
Personally, I wish I had taken the Arthurian Legends in Film course that I heard of when I was in grad school (the viewing list included everything from "Excalibur" to "Monty Python and the Holy Grail") or the "Love in the Western Tradition" course many of my running buddies took when I was an undergrad. I've been out of school for almost 20 years, and that's where my regrets are.
Or, look at it another way. While you're in college, you don't have to account for your time. You can do stuff and check things out and you won't have to explain to some HR person ten years later how you could be a worthwhile employee even though you chose to spend a year unemployed. It's not as good as hitchhiking around Europe, but it's a lot easier to explain.
You need to read this comment and stop complaining that college is trying to educate you instead of training you. Increasing your general knowledge level is most emphatically not a waste of your time and money. What's a waste is having an opportunity to access all kinds of knowledge (most especially knowledge that doesn't have anything to do with your major--you'll find that employers encourage gaining knowledge in your field, but won't let you study interesting but unrelated stuff) and not taking advantage of it to learn all kinds of cool stuff. What's wrong with you?
What do you think MIT would do if China offered them a billion dollars for their /8?
On a more serious note, I once read that the constituents have a strange attitude: They like their congresscritter, but they (largely) don't like Congress I think that this is due to a variation on the "tragedy of the commons" where that district gets "pork" while this district gets projects that "create badly needed jobs". My own personal belief is that job creation in and of itself is not a function of any government that doesn't have you swearing fealty to your liege lord.
But that's just me.
How much a politician lies depends strongly on whether or not the one doing the measuring agrees with the politician. In a similar fashion how much "extreme ignorance" a politician has depends strongly on whether or not the one doing the measuring agrees with the politician. In other words, lies (and "extreme ignorance") are largely in the eye of the beholder. This lack of objectivity is a large part of why the politicial process is (and, as near as I can tell, always has been) screwed up the way that it is.
What you're supposed to get in college is education, not training. The difference being that an education is not directed toward a specific purpose, while training is all about learning a particular set of skills. Education is supposed to increase your broad knowledge level while training is supposed to make you able to do some specific thing. My opinion is that education is important, but most training is pretty useless for me. Although other people find formal training to be quite useful, the utility I get from it lies mostly in the training materials, which I can refer to when I actually get to the point of doing real work.
Is Microsoft a software company or a jobs program?
The original reason I got an IPv6 connection was to see what it took to set up an IPv6 network, and I had this T1 to Sprint and Sprint offered free tunnels to the 6bone so, I figured, why not? I mean, IPv6 was the next big thing (or so they told me) in the late 90's, so I was trying to be ahead of the curve. Eventually, I set up tunnels between my ISP and what was then my day job and my house and I (briefly) enjoyed the benefits of being able to SSH directly from one workstation behind a NAT connection to another workstation behind a different NAT connection. Yahoo.
When my ISP went under, and the 6bone went away, I got a connection to one of the public tunnel brokers, and it worked for a while. Then I changed my feed to Time Warner and the first cablemodem filtered protocol 41, so the tunnel wouldn't work no matter what I did. After replacing the cablemodem for other reasons, (and waiting long enough for me to wonder if it would work with the new equipment) I was able to get a tunnel to a tunnel broker and I've had a block of addresses ever since. (2001:5c0:8305::/48, in case you're wondering.) Some people have a garden. I have a home network and I enjoy puttering about with it from time to time. (The rest of the time it's a freakin' nuisance.)
I've been using IPv6 for nearly a decade, but most of the IPv6 traffic on my LAN is local to the LAN. There are very few interesting places on the Internet that have IPv6 addresses and fewer end users coming from IPv6 capable nodes.
I just bought a $35 USB GPS (no display, just a receiver on the end of a cable that plugs into a USB port) and it works just fine in the house.
However, one of these days I have a dream of someday actually doing some of the engineering that I spent six years learning about.
I agree that, solely from the list of the organizations that are in favor of the bill, it would seem unlikely that your typical Slashdot denizen will be in favor of it even after they read it.
Now, this is not to say that the bill would not break the US patent system any more than it already is, but one really can't tell that just from reading a summary. You should read the actual bill before concluding that it makes any problems worse.
However, even on the SD TV, you could still tell it was a football game on and you could read all the numbers on all the jerseys and you could follow all the plays. In short, even though the HD TV had a noticeably improved picture, it did not change my viewing experience in the slightest. So, perhaps the people who you're complaining about weren't blind and perhaps they were watching a TV that was set up correctly and perhaps they were watching the correct content. Perhaps they (quite rightly, in my opinion) concluded that no matter how pretty the picture, it's still just television.
Hey! It looks like you've got a Freenet6 tunnel, just like me! I hope you've figured out a better way to keep an eye on it than I have. Every time I try to ping the far end of my tunnel, it seems, the tunnel is down but tspc is still running. Unfortunately, I just checked and I think you're tunnel appears to be down right now. It's a good thing you also have an IPv4 address.
As for your point that the company has a right to control the use to which company resources are put, well, there's an old saying to the effect that just because you have a right to do something, that doesn't make it right for you to do it. Many companies (most companies? certainly all the companies I've ever worked for or owned) cannot function unless their employees do things that aren't strictly part of that worker's job description. Things like engineers working occasional (or even not-so-occasional) evenings and weekends. It is generally best for morale if those companies don't try to be strict with their resources. After all, if the people are giving up their time and resources on behalf of the company, the company should reciprocate. To do otherwise fosters a "workers vs owners" mentality when what is best is for everyone to be on the same page and working for the common good.
My real problem with the assertion that the large address space of IPv6 enhances the security of the network is that it looks at the issue from the point of view of the proud designer who's sure that his new invention much more secure than the old way of doing things rather than the point of view of the malware creator who is looking for ways of accomplishing some task. Those points of view couldn't be more different. That's why those who design security protocols need to have devious-minded people review those protocols before putting them into widespread use.
So scanning networks for machines doesn't work any more. So what? In the time it took me to write the post to which you replied, I came up with a half-dozen different methods of propagating malware that don't depend on scanning. I'm sure there are others. You'll still need to be diligent with your security patches in a world where IPv6 is in common use.
No, it doesn't have to scan the entire local network to find your IPv6 addresses. You can send an ethernet broadcast packet (or look them up in the ARP table) and, since IPv6 workstations derive their addresses from the MAC address, you can simply calculate the IPv6 addresses from the replies. I think the whole "the IPv6 address space is so large worms can't possibly propagate" meme needs to be buried in the same grave as "NAT is a firewall".
No, it's more like "With Folded Hands".