No, I disagree. The irony was in his saying that the GPP was "towing the line". I now have this image of someone in a big greene & yellow tractor, with a rope attached to the hitch, and nothing attached to the other end of the rope.
I'll second everything you've said, but I can still see this resource as being an excellent place to get a new author's name known before moving on to better houses with better licensing terms.
There aren't that many short-fiction magazines on the market today, so each additional one to be brought forth is worth celebrating.
Not that OSC would read slashdot (that would require an ability to listen to viewpoints other than your own), but as an open comment to him anyway: I, for one, welcome our new... oh wait, wrong comment. I, for one, want to offer you my best wishes in this endeavour. Regardless of your personal stake in it, or your own failure or success concerning it, may it give birth to many fine writing careers.
And may these new authors please please please be able to create characters I can care about? I'm 3/4 the way through Alastair Reynold's Revelation Space and I still don't care what's going to happen to anyone!
Re:Why are we hiding from the police, daddy?
on
Vim 6.4 Released
·
· Score: 1
I have the best solution for this one, but YMMV: really big hands.
In all seriousness, being able to stretch 12 white keys on a full-size piano keyboard does in come in useful sometimes...
When consumer access to the internet first started succeeding in the US, there were several protocols. Novell had IPX/SPX, Microsoft had Netbeui (sp?), you already mentioned Apple's Appletalk, Unix had what became the standard, TCP/IP, although there were already drivers for TCP/IP under Windows & I have no idea what else. I don't know what else was out there as I'm not & have never been a network guru.
To make matters more interesting, Token Ring was still a viable & fast network topology (esp if used in a star configuration rather than a physical ring), although it was much more expensive than the 10mb ethernet of the time. By 1994, 10/100mb switchable ethernet cards were out, with an average throughput capable of competing with Token Ring but at a much better price.
This is pedantic, but your chronology of the names is off. When President Reagan first announced that it would be built, it was called Space Station Freedom. The word 'Freedom' obviously wan't going to sell to well to the Soviet government when they were brought on board, so after some haggling it was changed to the International Space Station. The first time it was called Space Station Alpha was by the first crew on board, during their first radio conversation with mission control.
Sure, but why bother trying to hit the satellites at all when simply lobbing a few nukes into the ionosphere does the job just as well? (Granted, you destroy your own communications abilities at the same time, but hey, it's not like they'll outlast an all-out nuclear war anyway...)
All of you forgot the dreaded Jewish Mother Clippy: "Oh, so you finally decide to write! What took you so long? It's not like your father and I have years left with you, you know! And when am are you gonna get married and give us some grandkids?!"
I say that only because that's what WAU does these days, though I forget for how long it has been doing the binary diffs.
Sure, with the proviso that after every time WUA tweaks your computer by as much as a single bit (or so it seems), it automatically reboots your computer. At least the Firefox updater is polite enough to wait for you to restart the browser yourself.
Although come to think of it, for most Windows users out there, perhaps it's a good thing that WUA automatically reboots them, to ensure that their fix goes live instead of waiting a month for a reboot, during which time they become zombified.
Why not build an operating system that only needs rebooted if the kernel itself is updated? Oh wait...
I lived in Fairfax County when it was under the sway of Media General, then moved away for a few years, then moved back (at this point it was under Cox, which from what I've heard has the same reputation that MG had), then moved away again.
Since you're more familiar with the area than I am (making an assumption, possibly a wrong one, here), you might be able to answer this. Did MG simply go through a name change to become Cox, was their license revoked by the county, or did they simply merge/get bought by Cox? For all the crap they fed us for years when I lived there, I honestly hope it was the second. It always amazed me that one of the richest counties in the US had the shittiest cable system in the country (among counties that actually have cable systems, anyway.)
Yikes, and on a different but somewhat amusing note... I hit the preview button there, then went to check my email while I waited for the page to refresh... the first new message in my inbox is from someone whose last name is Cox!
It's true that Penzias & Wilson discovered the CBE while at Bell Labs, but-- that was by accident, and they didn't at first realize what they'd found. All they were trying to do was eliminate what they at the time believed to be a mechanical or electrical glitch that was causing a low-level hum in their radio telescope dishes.
However, in agreement with the gist of your argument: Bell Labs was running the radio dishes with their own funding for pure research. They had no plans at the time for commercial enterprises based on this work. As it turns out, the research did pay off in noise reduction technology, but that wasn't the aim.
IANANG (I Am Not A Network Guru), but I noticed something wrong about that episode too, and I -love- the show in general.
How come as soon as the cables between the computers were disconnected, the viral attack was stopped in its tracks? I just have this image of a bunch of semi-intelligent software agents suddenly saying "oh no! we can't talk to the computer over there anymore! oh well, I guess we lost."
Just the same, I allow the writers some literary license, and recognize that the point of their show is the drama of the situation, not the accuracy.
The biggest problem with being a sci-fan fan is that sometimes the technical errors in a plot are so obvious that the willing suspension of disbelief simply vanishes.
I don't think so. Those search engine guys are mean mother fuckers - thousands and thousands of full-time engineers working on solely one task - imporoving their search products/services.
<snip>
Google's engineers will be on collective vacation, taking it easy while allowing this open source search engine to get its shit together.
Make up your mind. Are they on vacation or are they working solely on improving their search engine? (leaving out any comments about your use of such colorful language)
ask any of them and they will disagree with you, unless they are the only one's using the systems, at which point they do become the victim and aren't reponsible anymore.
I'm confused. Why the distinction between systems where the end user is synonymous with the sysadmin, and those where they are not the same? I believe you're trying to draw a difference between a private home owner and a corporate machine; but then what is the smallest size corporation at which the end user is not responsible? Five people? One-hundred people and a three-member IT department?
As other posters in this thread have said, let's not blame the victim. Yes, companies pay sysadmins good money to protect their systems as best they can afford. Yes, a lot of sysadmins have jobs because of crackers and infectors (my new shorthand for those people who get off by writing worms/virii/etc) (note to/. crowd: it's not just the security firms that benefit. How many of your own company's sysadmins would be redundant if it weren't for threat management?) None of this belies the fact that all those hours spent on rebuilding infected systems, the money used to purchase A-V software subscriptions, etc, etc, etc is (and this is the important part): wasted. If it weren't for crackers and infectors, none of this would be necessary. So yes, the sysadmins are just as much victims as the end-users, although at least the sysadmins get to laugh all the way to the bank...
And while we're at it, perhaps you like to explain how the crime rate has continued it's downward trend while firearm and ammunition purchases have nearly doubled in the past 10 years?
Don't confuse coincidence with causality. Sociologists have proposed plenty of ideas for the drop in crime rate, for instance the following:
A smaller population of adolescents as a portion of the total population
Increased religious observance
Having more criminals behind bars for longer terms.
I don't necessarily buy any one, or the entire collection, of these arguments. I just put forth some arguments I've read.
Having more or fewer guns on the street may or may not have any relation to the crime rate. Not having a test case for the experiment, it's difficult to say either way.
Note: I've carefully tried to avoid taking either side in this post. If you see your ideas being attacked, take that as a sign of the weakness of your beliefs.
Re:I'm all for science/technology/astronomy but...
on
Back to Moon in 2015?
·
· Score: 1
Um, Mars has an atmosphere. This is why NASA & the ESA can use parachutes to deploy landers to the surface. Granted, there's been better luck with airbags, but you get the idea...
What is smart about pushing your customers to anything?
It works for drug dealers....
Re:I'm all for science/technology/astronomy but...
on
Back to Moon in 2015?
·
· Score: 1
I'm all for giving NASA credit, and I do agree that there is value in returning to the moon (it'll make for a great way-station some day, for instance). I have to disagree, however, that practice landings on the moon will be worthwhile in training for landing on other planets, or at least those with atmosphere. Landing a craft in an airless environment such as the moon is mostly a math game, as is landing one on a body with air, such as Mars or Earth; but the difference in control responses due to air flow (or lack thereof) is enough to make each of those three unique to the others.
IANAAE (I am Not An Aeronautics Engineer), so I won't try to go too far into detail here. Perhaps someone with the education in avionics can provide that.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. The kid fresh from high school knows PHP. Those who make a living off of it grok PHP.
No, I disagree. The irony was in his saying that the GPP was "towing the line". I now have this image of someone in a big greene & yellow tractor, with a rope attached to the hitch, and nothing attached to the other end of the rope.
Perhaps he meant "toeing the line"?
I'll second everything you've said, but I can still see this resource as being an excellent place to get a new author's name known before moving on to better houses with better licensing terms.
There aren't that many short-fiction magazines on the market today, so each additional one to be brought forth is worth celebrating.
Not that OSC would read slashdot (that would require an ability to listen to viewpoints other than your own), but as an open comment to him anyway: I, for one, welcome our new... oh wait, wrong comment. I, for one, want to offer you my best wishes in this endeavour. Regardless of your personal stake in it, or your own failure or success concerning it, may it give birth to many fine writing careers.
And may these new authors please please please be able to create characters I can care about? I'm 3/4 the way through Alastair Reynold's Revelation Space and I still don't care what's going to happen to anyone!
I have the best solution for this one, but YMMV: really big hands.
In all seriousness, being able to stretch 12 white keys on a full-size piano keyboard does in come in useful sometimes...
When consumer access to the internet first started succeeding in the US, there were several protocols. Novell had IPX/SPX, Microsoft had Netbeui (sp?), you already mentioned Apple's Appletalk, Unix had what became the standard, TCP/IP, although there were already drivers for TCP/IP under Windows & I have no idea what else. I don't know what else was out there as I'm not & have never been a network guru.
To make matters more interesting, Token Ring was still a viable & fast network topology (esp if used in a star configuration rather than a physical ring), although it was much more expensive than the 10mb ethernet of the time. By 1994, 10/100mb switchable ethernet cards were out, with an average throughput capable of competing with Token Ring but at a much better price.
This is pedantic, but your chronology of the names is off. When President Reagan first announced that it would be built, it was called Space Station Freedom. The word 'Freedom' obviously wan't going to sell to well to the Soviet government when they were brought on board, so after some haggling it was changed to the International Space Station. The first time it was called Space Station Alpha was by the first crew on board, during their first radio conversation with mission control.
That said, Whedon has to be one of the most overrated writers, ever. IMO, YMMV, etc.
Sure, but Kaylee & River are both hot!
Sure, but why bother trying to hit the satellites at all when simply lobbing a few nukes into the ionosphere does the job just as well? (Granted, you destroy your own communications abilities at the same time, but hey, it's not like they'll outlast an all-out nuclear war anyway...)
(had to go for the classic)
Now imagine a beowulf cluster of those!
All of you forgot the dreaded Jewish Mother Clippy: "Oh, so you finally decide to write! What took you so long? It's not like your father and I have years left with you, you know! And when am are you gonna get married and give us some grandkids?!"
I say that only because that's what WAU does these days, though I forget for how long it has been doing the binary diffs.
Sure, with the proviso that after every time WUA tweaks your computer by as much as a single bit (or so it seems), it automatically reboots your computer. At least the Firefox updater is polite enough to wait for you to restart the browser yourself.
Although come to think of it, for most Windows users out there, perhaps it's a good thing that WUA automatically reboots them, to ensure that their fix goes live instead of waiting a month for a reboot, during which time they become zombified.
Why not build an operating system that only needs rebooted if the kernel itself is updated? Oh wait...
I lived in Fairfax County when it was under the sway of Media General, then moved away for a few years, then moved back (at this point it was under Cox, which from what I've heard has the same reputation that MG had), then moved away again.
Since you're more familiar with the area than I am (making an assumption, possibly a wrong one, here), you might be able to answer this. Did MG simply go through a name change to become Cox, was their license revoked by the county, or did they simply merge/get bought by Cox? For all the crap they fed us for years when I lived there, I honestly hope it was the second. It always amazed me that one of the richest counties in the US had the shittiest cable system in the country (among counties that actually have cable systems, anyway.)
Yikes, and on a different but somewhat amusing note... I hit the preview button there, then went to check my email while I waited for the page to refresh... the first new message in my inbox is from someone whose last name is Cox!
It's true that Penzias & Wilson discovered the CBE while at Bell Labs, but-- that was by accident, and they didn't at first realize what they'd found. All they were trying to do was eliminate what they at the time believed to be a mechanical or electrical glitch that was causing a low-level hum in their radio telescope dishes.
However, in agreement with the gist of your argument: Bell Labs was running the radio dishes with their own funding for pure research. They had no plans at the time for commercial enterprises based on this work. As it turns out, the research did pay off in noise reduction technology, but that wasn't the aim.
You can have the mouse & glasses, I want the pocket protector & coffee mug.
IANANG (I Am Not A Network Guru), but I noticed something wrong about that episode too, and I -love- the show in general.
How come as soon as the cables between the computers were disconnected, the viral attack was stopped in its tracks? I just have this image of a bunch of semi-intelligent software agents suddenly saying "oh no! we can't talk to the computer over there anymore! oh well, I guess we lost."
Just the same, I allow the writers some literary license, and recognize that the point of their show is the drama of the situation, not the accuracy.
The biggest problem with being a sci-fan fan is that sometimes the technical errors in a plot are so obvious that the willing suspension of disbelief simply vanishes.
Set to peak in 10 years. . .dude.
You have too much THC on board. It only feels like 10 years. It's actually five minutes.
I don't think so. Those search engine guys are mean mother fuckers - thousands and thousands of full-time engineers working on solely one task - imporoving their search products/services.
<snip>
Google's engineers will be on collective vacation, taking it easy while allowing this open source search engine to get its shit together.
Make up your mind. Are they on vacation or are they working solely on improving their search engine? (leaving out any comments about your use of such colorful language)
Did anyone else hear similarities to whalesong?
s/jail time/the electric chair
I kind of like that... 30 to 300 years in the electric chair for him... (with apologies to the writers of Sneakers
you think sysadmins are the end users?
ask any of them and they will disagree with you, unless they are the only one's using the systems, at which point they do become the victim and aren't reponsible anymore.
I'm confused. Why the distinction between systems where the end user is synonymous with the sysadmin, and those where they are not the same? I believe you're trying to draw a difference between a private home owner and a corporate machine; but then what is the smallest size corporation at which the end user is not responsible? Five people? One-hundred people and a three-member IT department?
As other posters in this thread have said, let's not blame the victim. Yes, companies pay sysadmins good money to protect their systems as best they can afford. Yes, a lot of sysadmins have jobs because of crackers and infectors (my new shorthand for those people who get off by writing worms/virii/etc) (note to /. crowd: it's not just the security firms that benefit. How many of your own company's sysadmins would be redundant if it weren't for threat management?) None of this belies the fact that all those hours spent on rebuilding infected systems, the money used to purchase A-V software subscriptions, etc, etc, etc is (and this is the important part): wasted . If it weren't for crackers and infectors, none of this would be necessary. So yes, the sysadmins are just as much victims as the end-users, although at least the sysadmins get to laugh all the way to the bank...
And while we're at it, perhaps you like to explain how the crime rate has continued it's downward trend while firearm and ammunition purchases have nearly doubled in the past 10 years?
Don't confuse coincidence with causality. Sociologists have proposed plenty of ideas for the drop in crime rate, for instance the following:
- A smaller population of adolescents as a portion of the total population
- Increased religious observance
- Having more criminals behind bars for longer terms.
I don't necessarily buy any one, or the entire collection, of these arguments. I just put forth some arguments I've read.Having more or fewer guns on the street may or may not have any relation to the crime rate. Not having a test case for the experiment, it's difficult to say either way.
Note: I've carefully tried to avoid taking either side in this post. If you see your ideas being attacked, take that as a sign of the weakness of your beliefs.
Um, Mars has an atmosphere. This is why NASA & the ESA can use parachutes to deploy landers to the surface. Granted, there's been better luck with airbags, but you get the idea...
What is smart about pushing your customers to anything?
It works for drug dealers....
I'm all for giving NASA credit, and I do agree that there is value in returning to the moon (it'll make for a great way-station some day, for instance). I have to disagree, however, that practice landings on the moon will be worthwhile in training for landing on other planets, or at least those with atmosphere. Landing a craft in an airless environment such as the moon is mostly a math game, as is landing one on a body with air, such as Mars or Earth; but the difference in control responses due to air flow (or lack thereof) is enough to make each of those three unique to the others.
IANAAE (I am Not An Aeronautics Engineer), so I won't try to go too far into detail here. Perhaps someone with the education in avionics can provide that.
Well then I, for one, wish to be the first to welcome our robotic simian overlords....
(Sorry, couldn't resist...)