Yeah, as a Brit I'm somewhat confused by this article; is Linus being hauled over the coals for telling people off for making mistakes? Or for using "cuss" words? Or just both at the same time?
In the type of circles I move in, I really only think I've witnessed the following three attitudes when it comes to dealing with/confronting failure: People who'll call you a fucking idiot People who'll call you a pusillanimous carbuncle with the intellectual capacity of a particularly forlorn used condom People who won't really tell you whether you've fucked up or not, but will often go away thinking you've failed, and acting upon it, without giving you the chance to learn from your mistake or even show you you made one, all under the guise of "politeness" or "professionalism"
Assuming of course they're correctly identifying faults, of the three types, IMHO the first two are capable of forging a good working relationships whereas the third passively destroys relationships by having no feedback system. Sure, there's a difference in the degree of skin thickness required between types 1 and 2 but if you're the sort of person that can accept constructive criticism in the first place you're already doing better than most.
There are various degrees of the above of course, depending on the magnitude of the mistake, but when I fuck up, I'd prefer someone to tell me I've fucked up. Disguise the swearing with some floridity if you really feel you want or need to, but the intent is still the same and it's the intent that's all important IMHO.
Linus' job is more than just that of a manager, he's also a mentor and a teacher as well. Occasionally this means hauling out a particularly daft member of the school for everyone else to see and making an example of them. If Linus doesn't tell people off when they start going wrong sooner or later someone pushes there luck and eventually you get 20MB patches dumped in rc8 to break the last 10MB patch that went in in rc7.
I don't know if it's a cultural taboo about the word fuck and friends (it seems that way on slashdot sometimes with lots of people self-editing themselves with pithless hackronyms like "BS") but I've not met anyone in/from europe (including Finns) or any commonwealth country that doesn't make liberal use of swearing, just adjusting the level of it for the audience. "I've fucked up the teas" has the same literal meaning as "Bloody hell, I've put too much milk in" or "I'm sorry ma'am, but the head footman appears to have upended the teapot", merely adjusted for either politeness or expediency. Fuck is a highly expedient word. Linus isn't polite (he's spent 20yrs herding cats and to be honest given the intractably varied milleu he inhabits I would consider politeness an actual hundrance) and is expedient and to be honest I think he uses much less profanity than I'd expect for a person in his position. Every time I've seen a/. headline about Linus going off on one, the ticking off he's given always seems to have been warranted for technical reasons, I've never seen him threaten someone. As far as most technical people go, I'd go so far as to cal him highly eloquent, and I don't see what's ineloquent about the occasional "fuck". He didn't even use that this time, he was merely telling people in his own sardonic way that they need to rattle sabres once in a while, and his response to Sarah's email was spot-on, deadpan, and attempting to defuse the situation:
That's the spirit.
Greg has taught you well. You have controlled your fear. Now, release your anger. Only your hatred can destroy me.
Come to the dark side, Sarah. We have cookies.
Linus
Storm in a bloody teacup.
More directed to the OP, for what it's worth, I don't think there's anything inherently superior about british/english swearing, I just think it's sometimes seen as supe
Was about to say the same thing here as well; we had some of the G1 LeftHand units foisted upon us as a "cheap" SAN solution about three years ago, very soon after the HP buyout you mentioned.
It was probably more likely due to the fact that the salesman over-promised, the company under-spent (seriously, they expected 1Gb NICs to be fast enough to feed over 300 VMs) and the HP techs set them up wrongly (the same RAID50 setup you describe), but we had endless problems with them - performance was predictably rubbish but a single disc failure kept causing the node to reboot. Anyway, because of the continual problems with the LH, we basically had an HP tech dialling into the nodes at least once a week to firefight the issue du jour, simply because certain node failures could only be remedied this way for some inexplicable reason. HP refused to let us know the backdoor, so one of the network team installed a keylogger on the box they dialled into via WebEx to activate the backdoor which captured teh badgers as it went in. So eventually we were able to fix our nodes much quicker, but it was annoying as hell and a cynical person might say the "backdoor admin" mode was only there to justify support contracts. If I was the kind of person to work in LH's marketing department I would have spun this backdoor as a "Cloud-based administrative control and recovery system" because it was slow, overpriced and unreliable.
Eventually we got a new head of ops who wasn't as much of a yes-man to the director (who by this point was being hauled over the coals for the shitty performance and reliability of his much-vaunted SAN solution) and HP recanted and bought back the LH and sold us a 3par instead (of which performance, support and reliability have been exemplary), and the fact that HP had basically bullied us into a position of "we're going to backdoor you literally and figuratively" was a big factor in negotiating ourselves a good price.
Based on my experience, I'd avoid anything to do with the LeftHand forever more, the whole support infrastructure was just the putrid icing on top of a very shitty cake.
Well, it's horses for courses innit:) If there's any point to this whole argument it's that I don't believe there's such a thing as a One Size Fits All Interface, there's just interfaces that to one degree or another give enough adaptability to please most people. So hope you don't see the following as me saying "you're wrong!", just a "you're different!".
Regarding your other points; I find most animations incredibly irritating, especially when they happen on an object *after* I've done an action on that object; I don't want my eye still being drawn to something after I'm done interacting with it. There's the occasional useful one but for the most part I find them far too flashy. The whole search to launch thing - never really understood it, but then I'm more a spatial viewer/thinker; I'll make extensive use of launchers/quicklaunch/shortcuts/all sorts of other gubbins, doubly so if the work I'm doing at the time means I already have one hand on the mouse. For what it's worth, the only window manager I've ever really loved was Sawfish - made managing two-dozen windows a doddle. Never been a fan of OSX, and never really liked or even grokked gestures either (unless they're mouse gestures - love those) since I don't really like touch devices very much; give me a mouse or trackpad (real buttons only, sadly - finding usable laptops is getting increasingly impossible despite the fact that those buttonless trackpads don't work reliably in windows either) I can chord any day (I grew up on RiscOS which made very heavy use of three-button mice). Never found a way to get focus-follows-mouse working on OSX either - something I'm so used to now that I find it practically impossible to do any Real Work on a computer without it. I can remember the registry hacks to turn this on in windows off by heart:)
Odd that you mention reading documentation and working - that's about 80% of my professional workload.
Not flaming, but I found unity unusable. To start with, it took me about 15 minutes of looking to launch a damned terminal (it doesn't show up in the menus, apparently you have to search for something before it will become visible in the GUI, a concept I find preposterous) and I couldn't run more than one at once. No visible way to turn off the annoying animations. After that I got so frustrated with the crummy window management I gave up.
Unity might be fine for running a couple of fullscreen applications I guess, but I didn't find it conducive to a workstation environment at all.
"...and then they came for *my* bootloader, and there were no more vendors to speak out for me."
With apologies to Niemoller. We've already seen a whole class of devices introduced with the inability to boot anything other than their proscribed OS, we've seen the WindowsRT "our bootloader only", and we've not got "UEFI secure boot must be available, but have an off switch for people willing to go into their BIOS". Given MS and their apparently rabid desire to turn windows from a workstation platform into a glorified app store and it doesn't take too hefty a dose of cynicism/paranoia to think MS might strongarm the OEMs into forcing MS-only bootloaders on consumer tech, relegating "custom bootloaders" to much higher-priced hardware.
One of the main reasons Shakespeare is considered so important is the way he seemed to coin or at least popularise dozens of turns of phrases that are still used today, as well as more than a few words.
Wasn't the StrongARM (IIRC Intel's only dabble in the ARM world, which begat XScale, which was then sold to Marvell) originally a DEC creation? DEC was one of the earliest partners for ARM not long after Apple came out with the Newton.
100 metres as the crow files, maybe... but within 100m of cabling, which often doesn't follow the most efficient path? Heck, my house is 10m from a VDSL-enabled telecoms cabinet but I happen to know that my house is actually connected to one that's 80m away (as the crow flies) and that there's about 150m of cable between it and my phone socket.
Basically no-one would get to see that 1Gb since, as TFA states, they managed to get 800Mb/s over 100m over a single brand-new cable and got 500Mb/s over an older single cable. No word on how nicely it plays with cables longer than 100m, so I'm suspecting not terribly well.
Might be better and scale better than VDSL but this still smacks of bloating the numbers so as to splash an "up to 1Gb/s!!!!!!" banner all over the advertising.
It's a distinct possibility IMHO. Consider the following:
MS seems to be hell-bent on following the Apple path of computers as applications rather than general purpose tools open to all. The advantage of this is that you can curate the experience, and hence take a cut from any software, and eventually data, going in or out of this ecosystem.
MS is also heavily pushing their cloud solutions, and is already heavily involved in massaging regulations to make large-scale cloud deployments feasible from a legal standpoint. People's whose data is already held hostage in one of the many enterprise MS technologies will be prime targets for the MS sales reps to nudge them towards one of the various cloud offerings, either when the prices for the "buy once, use for a decade" locally installable software go through the roof or when MS chooses to simply stop making the software at all. A pessimistic, cynical, dare I say paranoid person might even think that with all the clout they have in manipulating the laws regarding cloud computing, they might even mandate a new raft of security ratings that for some inexplicable reason vastly favour the MS ecosystem for, say, the military, government and financial markets. Anyone wanting to integrate with any of those businesses would of course also need the same secure certification on the same secure network.
Both the "appification" of PCs and the push for the cloud are clear pointers towards rent-seeking behaviour in the medium-to-long-term. I'm not saying this is going to happen, but it certainly wouldn't be the first time that the whole hardware/software stack was owned by someone else and rented out to you for use on a terminal that you rented from them as well.
One of the things I've loved about Opera is the per-domain preferences. You can set things like JS and animated GIFs and plugins to be off by default, and then enable them for sites you trust (or via versa, leave them on and just disable them for sites you don't like). Less fine-grained than NoScript but more accessible and less fiddly IMHO.
Sadly that's something that seems to be going away with Opera's shift to WebKit so I'm hoping someone will think about adding the feature to firefox.
It comes up every time in this situation, but it bears repeating. Living hand-to-mouth costs a bloody fortune.
=======
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socio-economic unfairness.
Thanks for the explanation - makes it all much clearer. I think it seems like your "checking account" is analogous to what we call a "current account" - i.e. money used day to day complete with debit card/cash. This may or may not come with a chequebook/cheque guarantee but I'm not aware of any that charge a monthly fee. Savings accounts are basically the same thing as current accounts but with a higher interest rate and some compromises (depends on the account - some savings accounts don't have the ability to withdraw cash, some are internet-only, some have a 30 or 60 day withdrawal notice period).
However, I'm pretty surprised to see you mention "people who cannot get a bank account"; last time I looked I wasn't aware of anyone who's not allowed a bank account. From my POV, it looks like this problem where (poor) people were reamed by dodgy cheque-cashiers was purely due to them not having a bank account, so it looks like a self-fuelling problem where the poorer you are, the more expensive it is to be able to earn money. Strikes me as a bit odd. Even homeless people with no fixed address are able to get a bank account if they go through one of the homeless support groups. Even people, as far as I'm aware, with fraud convictions can't be turned away from a bank application, so essentially it's de rigeur for anyone in employment to have BACS pay straight into their account ("direct deposit" in your parlance I take it?), and I don't see why a credit score makes any difference as to whether you get a bank account or not; here people who the banks don't think can pay back money don't get credit cards or overdrafts to begin with (I was in this situation myself as a student).
The huge gripe is that not everyone uses the start menu in the same way as everyone else. Personally, I hate the "search to launch something" functionality; I only search for things when I don't know where they are. This is handy to have in the start menu when I know what something is called but don't know where it is... but my memory is primarily spatial and I have a terrible memory for names, so I remember things by placement and the shape of what the icons/words look like rather than by remembering the letters per se. For when I do know the name of the command, nine times out of ten it's already in $PATH (or %PATH% depending on your poison) and I can launch it from a command line with tab-completion anyway.
Microsoft's problem here is that take people like you into account, for whom search is a perfectly good way of launching stuff, but remove, or at least impede, any alternative for people like me you find it clunky. Lots of people appreciate having both available but in my opinion MS appear to have gone headfirst down the "tyranny of choice" route.
As an aside, it always infuriated me that the XP/7 start menu "learnt" the priority of your programs so that a) their relative position was always changing and b) the more frequently you used them, the further away they moved from the start button. This is mostly why I'm still hooked on quicklaunch and other folders full of shortcuts I can turn into a toolbar.
Can someone in the US explain what is happening here? Does "checking account" mean that users are typically paid in cheques, and if so why isn't this feasible for low-wage workers? And that you have to pay the banks to *deposit* your money?!
I'm based in the UK, where almost everyone is paid via BACS or occasionally CHAPS straight into their bank account, from friends in the rest of europe it's exactly the same there, is this not done in the US?
I did a study in my history class about John "Iron Mad" Wilkinson who was a huge proponent of company shops and worker tokens, the concept filled me with horror even as a child.
This might all sound exaggerated to you now, but the fact is that these companies plan far more ahead than some people might think.
When certain geeks saw the long-term implications for Microsoft's "Palladium" technology ten years ago, they were often laughed at for being overly paranoid and assured that such a thing could never and would never happen. There's no way to lock down a computer like that since we'll always be able to remove the TPM or bypass the BIOS, and not even Microsoft would be stupid enough to produce an operating system that would only boot on "authorised" hardware! Right?
The concept is alive and well and if people think that MS won't tighten the thumbscrews if margins get squeezed then I've got a rose-tinted bridge to sell them.
/From my parent's home in Wyoming, I stab at thee!
Given that a butterfly flapping its wings in the right or wrong way can cause a hurricane on the other side of the planet, logic dictates that a model plane loaded with 250g of gunpowder (having hundreds of times more kinetic and potential energy than a butterfly) would cause repercussions on the scale of a global thermonuclear war if handled incorrectly.
So the authorities shouldn't just be cracking down on RC planes loaded with what some so-called experts call "small" amounts of explosive, they should also be monitoring illicit butterfly keepers as well. We can't allow a caterpillar gap.
Joke I know, but couldn't resist a geek nitpick: weren't the supercomputers in Jurassic Park Thinking Machines what with all their awesomely photogenic blinkenlights?
IIRC they used a Cray (XMP? YMP?) in Sneakers. I remember Ben Kingsley making a big deal of sitting on a red one, so I think it's a YMP. Still one of my favourite "Hollywood Hacking" movies as it bears a passing resemblance to reality.
It probably won't, no... but what it will do is massively increase exposure to programming. Not everyone's cut out to be a Ritchie or a Picasso or a da Vinci but we still think it's important to get kids exposed to art and science at an early age to give peoples talents the best chance of development, yet here at least there was an active shift away from programming.
When I was at school in the UK in the 80's, we were actively encouraged to tinker with things in our spare time with our dreaded IT teacher (she was actually very nice but had a rep as being very strict). One member of my class wrote his own top-down racing game in assembly on the BBC micros; looked very simple but had self-generating tracks and (mind-blowingly for us at the time) 16 computer multiplayer (I think?) off the back of the econet. I never really had much of a head for programming but still.
When my sister went to the same school a few years later, it was nothing but microsoft this and microsoft that; "today we're going to look at how to change fonts, sizes and text styles in Word, children!", "Here's how to make a pie-chart look 3D!". As a family of geeky tinkerers she found it infuriating that the entire curriculum centred on the concept of the computer being an important and yet inscrutable tool that mere mortals would have no hope of understanding - as kids we'd had craptons of fun making lego robots and this taught us both that learning how to break complex problems into small ones was the important part, and once you'd done that you could do almost anything. My first GF had the same experience when she was at school - "you only need a computer in order to learn how to use this software packages". If kids haven't been exposed to the guts of computers at home, and they got nothing but this dross from school, then any latent talent they may have is going to go unrecognised.
So if this initiative can help get the UK curriculum steered off the educational cul-de-sac it's been in, then great, but I think we're still a long way away from the large culture shift needed. Proper education is just too expensive and most of the geeks I'm seeing come to the fore these days only became like that because one of their parents is a geek and made sure they had Tinker Time or Take Things To Bits And Then Put Them Back Together Again Day as a child.
Just an observation from someone who doesn't have kids, hopefully some fellow UK-er can make me feel better with a "it's not all that bad really!"...
They've breezed through the whole debacle with the air of a waiter who still expects a full tip just because he stopped pissing in your soup at the table.
The fact that this was even on the cards to begin with shows that MS weren't listening to their customers and just forging ahead with whatever boondoggles they could think of that might help them squeeze out a fatter profit margin. Big emphasis on streaming TV services that'll only be remotely viable in the USA? Always-on internet connection even for single-player? Pay-to-play even for P2P multiplayer? They're just going to start pissing in your soup in the kitchen instead of at your table and eventually start selling you better qualities of urine...
I'm not a console gamer and don't have a hand in either camp and I've been actively boycotting Sony for 10 years; I fully expect them to be watching what MS can get away with with great interest, but they've won a resounding PR battle over the last two weeks and will likely have a significant advantage in this generation.
What's lacking here is branding awareness and a lack of a clear plan of execution. Watching this unfold in the media is torture. We need a catchy new name to get the public behind this fast-track form of getting the obviously guilty terrorists brought before the law.
Bad form to reply again, sorry; I have no idea what happened to my post above, half of it went missing. Thanks heavens for browser cache, here it is again:
As a UK citizen, I wouldn't exactly call our internet access options stellar; although there are a great many ISPs, the vast majority of them all use the old BT network for both last mile and backbone routing. These are built out by BT OpenReach that then sells them on to resellers. Good news is that the wholesale price is set low (and with a lot of government oversight) so that OpenReach can't sell to BT's ISP businesses at a different cost than they sell to everyone else. However, the bad news is that the OpenReach infrastructure is quite outdated in a lot of ways (e.g. the new "21st Century Network" dubbed 21CN doesn't even have a provision for IPv6) and much of the copper is old and crappy; many places outside of major metropolitan centres are so far from their exchange/DSLAM that they're basically limited by the laws of physics to ADSL at less than 5Mb. Co-ax/fibre from Virgin (previously NTL/TeleWest/BlueYonder) has mitigated this but again it's not available in all areas.
Cue FTTH and FTTC which are finally seeing some limited rollouts, although because the only two major players in this regard are BT and Virgin, adoption has been slow... and slowed further by BT starting out only lighting up streets that were already lit up by Virgin (I've had a number of friends who were literally 20yards from a fibre cabinet whom were told FTTC/VDSL wasn't an option).
In both cases, bandwidth caps, throttling and "fair usage" policies are the rule rather than the exception, and it's not unusual for youtube/iPlayer to be restricted to "crap" during peak times. Bandwidth caps don't tend to be high either, last time I looked the BT FTTC 40Mb/s service had a cap of 40GB/mo. If you're not on FTTC or FTTH then "up to" 24Mb/s is typically the highest you'll see.
However, the best service by far tends to be on the little providers that provide some or all of their own equipment. For years I've been using LLU ISPs; LLU means Local Loop Unbundling and typically means the ISP has hired some space in a (BT) exchange and hooks the subscriber up over the (BT) copper, but it meant you usually get a better backbone and don't have to pay BT for copper rental. BeThere, one of the first large-scale LLU providers, have had ADSL2 running for donkeys years, way in advance of BT... but have just been bought by Sky, another ISP that is mostly just a BT reseller.
There are a fair few "niche" ISPs like this that provide a very good range of services - you can see from this page that this provider has a nice up-front approach to all the different options you can get:
http://www.xilo.net/adsl_broadband/#pro...but even here you're still restricted to mostly the BT and a couple of other networks. My favourite ISP, Zen, for example only have an LLU network available in Rochdale.
I don't even follow the ISP game that closely, just closely enough to get good-enough internet without having to give BT any money. It's possible I might just be moaning about first-world problems, blah blah. The US might look at some european ISPs with envy (your prices *do* seem high and I'll never understand the preponderance of cable internet bundled with TV, but then I'm Onion guy who doesn't watch TV), but then everyone else I know just looks at places like Stockholm with eyes greener than that grass on the other side of the fence:)
Anyone from Sweden or similar Awesomepipesville care to comment? Is your telecoms infrastructure still mostly built/owned by a (state-overseen?) incumbent and rented out to your different ISPs as per the UK or do the different ISP lay all their own stuff?
Slashdot Mirror
That's because sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Don't be ridiculous! My chocolate ration just went up from 20 to 25 grams so it's clear that they don't want to take things away from us.
What, no mention of Marmite? Yahoo even have their own "answers" page about it, containing only slightly less information than this fluff piece.
http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20061113101418AAETa3c
The obvious downside is that you need to eat Marmite, and about half of the population would rather catch malaria.
Yeah, as a Brit I'm somewhat confused by this article; is Linus being hauled over the coals for telling people off for making mistakes? Or for using "cuss" words? Or just both at the same time?
In the type of circles I move in, I really only think I've witnessed the following three attitudes when it comes to dealing with/confronting failure:
People who'll call you a fucking idiot
People who'll call you a pusillanimous carbuncle with the intellectual capacity of a particularly forlorn used condom
People who won't really tell you whether you've fucked up or not, but will often go away thinking you've failed, and acting upon it, without giving you the chance to learn from your mistake or even show you you made one, all under the guise of "politeness" or "professionalism"
Assuming of course they're correctly identifying faults, of the three types, IMHO the first two are capable of forging a good working relationships whereas the third passively destroys relationships by having no feedback system. Sure, there's a difference in the degree of skin thickness required between types 1 and 2 but if you're the sort of person that can accept constructive criticism in the first place you're already doing better than most.
There are various degrees of the above of course, depending on the magnitude of the mistake, but when I fuck up, I'd prefer someone to tell me I've fucked up. Disguise the swearing with some floridity if you really feel you want or need to, but the intent is still the same and it's the intent that's all important IMHO.
Linus' job is more than just that of a manager, he's also a mentor and a teacher as well. Occasionally this means hauling out a particularly daft member of the school for everyone else to see and making an example of them. If Linus doesn't tell people off when they start going wrong sooner or later someone pushes there luck and eventually you get 20MB patches dumped in rc8 to break the last 10MB patch that went in in rc7.
I don't know if it's a cultural taboo about the word fuck and friends (it seems that way on slashdot sometimes with lots of people self-editing themselves with pithless hackronyms like "BS") but I've not met anyone in/from europe (including Finns) or any commonwealth country that doesn't make liberal use of swearing, just adjusting the level of it for the audience. "I've fucked up the teas" has the same literal meaning as "Bloody hell, I've put too much milk in" or "I'm sorry ma'am, but the head footman appears to have upended the teapot", merely adjusted for either politeness or expediency. Fuck is a highly expedient word. Linus isn't polite (he's spent 20yrs herding cats and to be honest given the intractably varied milleu he inhabits I would consider politeness an actual hundrance) and is expedient and to be honest I think he uses much less profanity than I'd expect for a person in his position. Every time I've seen a /. headline about Linus going off on one, the ticking off he's given always seems to have been warranted for technical reasons, I've never seen him threaten someone. As far as most technical people go, I'd go so far as to cal him highly eloquent, and I don't see what's ineloquent about the occasional "fuck". He didn't even use that this time, he was merely telling people in his own sardonic way that they need to rattle sabres once in a while, and his response to Sarah's email was spot-on, deadpan, and attempting to defuse the situation:
That's the spirit.
Greg has taught you well. You have controlled your fear. Now, release
your anger. Only your hatred can destroy me.
Come to the dark side, Sarah. We have cookies.
Linus
Storm in a bloody teacup.
More directed to the OP, for what it's worth, I don't think there's anything inherently superior about british/english swearing, I just think it's sometimes seen as supe
Was about to say the same thing here as well; we had some of the G1 LeftHand units foisted upon us as a "cheap" SAN solution about three years ago, very soon after the HP buyout you mentioned.
It was probably more likely due to the fact that the salesman over-promised, the company under-spent (seriously, they expected 1Gb NICs to be fast enough to feed over 300 VMs) and the HP techs set them up wrongly (the same RAID50 setup you describe), but we had endless problems with them - performance was predictably rubbish but a single disc failure kept causing the node to reboot. Anyway, because of the continual problems with the LH, we basically had an HP tech dialling into the nodes at least once a week to firefight the issue du jour, simply because certain node failures could only be remedied this way for some inexplicable reason. HP refused to let us know the backdoor, so one of the network team installed a keylogger on the box they dialled into via WebEx to activate the backdoor which captured teh badgers as it went in. So eventually we were able to fix our nodes much quicker, but it was annoying as hell and a cynical person might say the "backdoor admin" mode was only there to justify support contracts. If I was the kind of person to work in LH's marketing department I would have spun this backdoor as a "Cloud-based administrative control and recovery system" because it was slow, overpriced and unreliable.
Eventually we got a new head of ops who wasn't as much of a yes-man to the director (who by this point was being hauled over the coals for the shitty performance and reliability of his much-vaunted SAN solution) and HP recanted and bought back the LH and sold us a 3par instead (of which performance, support and reliability have been exemplary), and the fact that HP had basically bullied us into a position of "we're going to backdoor you literally and figuratively" was a big factor in negotiating ourselves a good price.
Based on my experience, I'd avoid anything to do with the LeftHand forever more, the whole support infrastructure was just the putrid icing on top of a very shitty cake.
Well, it's horses for courses innit :) If there's any point to this whole argument it's that I don't believe there's such a thing as a One Size Fits All Interface, there's just interfaces that to one degree or another give enough adaptability to please most people. So hope you don't see the following as me saying "you're wrong!", just a "you're different!".
Regarding your other points; :)
I find most animations incredibly irritating, especially when they happen on an object *after* I've done an action on that object; I don't want my eye still being drawn to something after I'm done interacting with it. There's the occasional useful one but for the most part I find them far too flashy.
The whole search to launch thing - never really understood it, but then I'm more a spatial viewer/thinker; I'll make extensive use of launchers/quicklaunch/shortcuts/all sorts of other gubbins, doubly so if the work I'm doing at the time means I already have one hand on the mouse.
For what it's worth, the only window manager I've ever really loved was Sawfish - made managing two-dozen windows a doddle.
Never been a fan of OSX, and never really liked or even grokked gestures either (unless they're mouse gestures - love those) since I don't really like touch devices very much; give me a mouse or trackpad (real buttons only, sadly - finding usable laptops is getting increasingly impossible despite the fact that those buttonless trackpads don't work reliably in windows either) I can chord any day (I grew up on RiscOS which made very heavy use of three-button mice). Never found a way to get focus-follows-mouse working on OSX either - something I'm so used to now that I find it practically impossible to do any Real Work on a computer without it. I can remember the registry hacks to turn this on in windows off by heart
Odd that you mention reading documentation and working - that's about 80% of my professional workload.
Not flaming, but I found unity unusable. To start with, it took me about 15 minutes of looking to launch a damned terminal (it doesn't show up in the menus, apparently you have to search for something before it will become visible in the GUI, a concept I find preposterous) and I couldn't run more than one at once. No visible way to turn off the annoying animations. After that I got so frustrated with the crummy window management I gave up.
Unity might be fine for running a couple of fullscreen applications I guess, but I didn't find it conducive to a workstation environment at all.
"...and then they came for *my* bootloader, and there were no more vendors to speak out for me."
With apologies to Niemoller. We've already seen a whole class of devices introduced with the inability to boot anything other than their proscribed OS, we've seen the WindowsRT "our bootloader only", and we've not got "UEFI secure boot must be available, but have an off switch for people willing to go into their BIOS". Given MS and their apparently rabid desire to turn windows from a workstation platform into a glorified app store and it doesn't take too hefty a dose of cynicism/paranoia to think MS might strongarm the OEMs into forcing MS-only bootloaders on consumer tech, relegating "custom bootloaders" to much higher-priced hardware.
One of the main reasons Shakespeare is considered so important is the way he seemed to coin or at least popularise dozens of turns of phrases that are still used today, as well as more than a few words.
http://www.pathguy.com/shakeswo.htm
The other main reason Shakespeare is considered important is all the smutty jokes ;)
Wasn't the StrongARM (IIRC Intel's only dabble in the ARM world, which begat XScale, which was then sold to Marvell) originally a DEC creation? DEC was one of the earliest partners for ARM not long after Apple came out with the Newton.
100 metres as the crow files, maybe... but within 100m of cabling, which often doesn't follow the most efficient path? Heck, my house is 10m from a VDSL-enabled telecoms cabinet but I happen to know that my house is actually connected to one that's 80m away (as the crow flies) and that there's about 150m of cable between it and my phone socket.
Basically no-one would get to see that 1Gb since, as TFA states, they managed to get 800Mb/s over 100m over a single brand-new cable and got 500Mb/s over an older single cable. No word on how nicely it plays with cables longer than 100m, so I'm suspecting not terribly well.
Might be better and scale better than VDSL but this still smacks of bloating the numbers so as to splash an "up to 1Gb/s!!!!!!" banner all over the advertising.
It's a distinct possibility IMHO. Consider the following:
MS seems to be hell-bent on following the Apple path of computers as applications rather than general purpose tools open to all. The advantage of this is that you can curate the experience, and hence take a cut from any software, and eventually data, going in or out of this ecosystem.
MS is also heavily pushing their cloud solutions, and is already heavily involved in massaging regulations to make large-scale cloud deployments feasible from a legal standpoint. People's whose data is already held hostage in one of the many enterprise MS technologies will be prime targets for the MS sales reps to nudge them towards one of the various cloud offerings, either when the prices for the "buy once, use for a decade" locally installable software go through the roof or when MS chooses to simply stop making the software at all. A pessimistic, cynical, dare I say paranoid person might even think that with all the clout they have in manipulating the laws regarding cloud computing, they might even mandate a new raft of security ratings that for some inexplicable reason vastly favour the MS ecosystem for, say, the military, government and financial markets. Anyone wanting to integrate with any of those businesses would of course also need the same secure certification on the same secure network.
Both the "appification" of PCs and the push for the cloud are clear pointers towards rent-seeking behaviour in the medium-to-long-term. I'm not saying this is going to happen, but it certainly wouldn't be the first time that the whole hardware/software stack was owned by someone else and rented out to you for use on a terminal that you rented from them as well.
One of the things I've loved about Opera is the per-domain preferences. You can set things like JS and animated GIFs and plugins to be off by default, and then enable them for sites you trust (or via versa, leave them on and just disable them for sites you don't like). Less fine-grained than NoScript but more accessible and less fiddly IMHO.
Sadly that's something that seems to be going away with Opera's shift to WebKit so I'm hoping someone will think about adding the feature to firefox.
It comes up every time in this situation, but it bears repeating. Living hand-to-mouth costs a bloody fortune.
=======
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socio-economic unfairness.
Thanks for the explanation - makes it all much clearer. I think it seems like your "checking account" is analogous to what we call a "current account" - i.e. money used day to day complete with debit card/cash. This may or may not come with a chequebook/cheque guarantee but I'm not aware of any that charge a monthly fee. Savings accounts are basically the same thing as current accounts but with a higher interest rate and some compromises (depends on the account - some savings accounts don't have the ability to withdraw cash, some are internet-only, some have a 30 or 60 day withdrawal notice period).
However, I'm pretty surprised to see you mention "people who cannot get a bank account"; last time I looked I wasn't aware of anyone who's not allowed a bank account. From my POV, it looks like this problem where (poor) people were reamed by dodgy cheque-cashiers was purely due to them not having a bank account, so it looks like a self-fuelling problem where the poorer you are, the more expensive it is to be able to earn money. Strikes me as a bit odd. Even homeless people with no fixed address are able to get a bank account if they go through one of the homeless support groups. Even people, as far as I'm aware, with fraud convictions can't be turned away from a bank application, so essentially it's de rigeur for anyone in employment to have BACS pay straight into their account ("direct deposit" in your parlance I take it?), and I don't see why a credit score makes any difference as to whether you get a bank account or not; here people who the banks don't think can pay back money don't get credit cards or overdrafts to begin with (I was in this situation myself as a student).
The huge gripe is that not everyone uses the start menu in the same way as everyone else. Personally, I hate the "search to launch something" functionality; I only search for things when I don't know where they are. This is handy to have in the start menu when I know what something is called but don't know where it is... but my memory is primarily spatial and I have a terrible memory for names, so I remember things by placement and the shape of what the icons/words look like rather than by remembering the letters per se. For when I do know the name of the command, nine times out of ten it's already in $PATH (or %PATH% depending on your poison) and I can launch it from a command line with tab-completion anyway.
Microsoft's problem here is that take people like you into account, for whom search is a perfectly good way of launching stuff, but remove, or at least impede, any alternative for people like me you find it clunky. Lots of people appreciate having both available but in my opinion MS appear to have gone headfirst down the "tyranny of choice" route.
As an aside, it always infuriated me that the XP/7 start menu "learnt" the priority of your programs so that a) their relative position was always changing and b) the more frequently you used them, the further away they moved from the start button. This is mostly why I'm still hooked on quicklaunch and other folders full of shortcuts I can turn into a toolbar.
Can someone in the US explain what is happening here? Does "checking account" mean that users are typically paid in cheques, and if so why isn't this feasible for low-wage workers? And that you have to pay the banks to *deposit* your money?!
I'm based in the UK, where almost everyone is paid via BACS or occasionally CHAPS straight into their bank account, from friends in the rest of europe it's exactly the same there, is this not done in the US?
I did a study in my history class about John "Iron Mad" Wilkinson who was a huge proponent of company shops and worker tokens, the concept filled me with horror even as a child.
This might all sound exaggerated to you now, but the fact is that these companies plan far more ahead than some people might think.
When certain geeks saw the long-term implications for Microsoft's "Palladium" technology ten years ago, they were often laughed at for being overly paranoid and assured that such a thing could never and would never happen. There's no way to lock down a computer like that since we'll always be able to remove the TPM or bypass the BIOS, and not even Microsoft would be stupid enough to produce an operating system that would only boot on "authorised" hardware! Right?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next-Generation_Secure_Computing_Base
The concept is alive and well and if people think that MS won't tighten the thumbscrews if margins get squeezed then I've got a rose-tinted bridge to sell them.
Given that a butterfly flapping its wings in the right or wrong way can cause a hurricane on the other side of the planet, logic dictates that a model plane loaded with 250g of gunpowder (having hundreds of times more kinetic and potential energy than a butterfly) would cause repercussions on the scale of a global thermonuclear war if handled incorrectly.
So the authorities shouldn't just be cracking down on RC planes loaded with what some so-called experts call "small" amounts of explosive, they should also be monitoring illicit butterfly keepers as well. We can't allow a caterpillar gap.
Joke I know, but couldn't resist a geek nitpick: weren't the supercomputers in Jurassic Park Thinking Machines what with all their awesomely photogenic blinkenlights?
IIRC they used a Cray (XMP? YMP?) in Sneakers. I remember Ben Kingsley making a big deal of sitting on a red one, so I think it's a YMP. Still one of my favourite "Hollywood Hacking" movies as it bears a passing resemblance to reality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_Y-MP
It probably won't, no... but what it will do is massively increase exposure to programming. Not everyone's cut out to be a Ritchie or a Picasso or a da Vinci but we still think it's important to get kids exposed to art and science at an early age to give peoples talents the best chance of development, yet here at least there was an active shift away from programming.
When I was at school in the UK in the 80's, we were actively encouraged to tinker with things in our spare time with our dreaded IT teacher (she was actually very nice but had a rep as being very strict). One member of my class wrote his own top-down racing game in assembly on the BBC micros; looked very simple but had self-generating tracks and (mind-blowingly for us at the time) 16 computer multiplayer (I think?) off the back of the econet. I never really had much of a head for programming but still.
When my sister went to the same school a few years later, it was nothing but microsoft this and microsoft that; "today we're going to look at how to change fonts, sizes and text styles in Word, children!", "Here's how to make a pie-chart look 3D!". As a family of geeky tinkerers she found it infuriating that the entire curriculum centred on the concept of the computer being an important and yet inscrutable tool that mere mortals would have no hope of understanding - as kids we'd had craptons of fun making lego robots and this taught us both that learning how to break complex problems into small ones was the important part, and once you'd done that you could do almost anything. My first GF had the same experience when she was at school - "you only need a computer in order to learn how to use this software packages". If kids haven't been exposed to the guts of computers at home, and they got nothing but this dross from school, then any latent talent they may have is going to go unrecognised.
So if this initiative can help get the UK curriculum steered off the educational cul-de-sac it's been in, then great, but I think we're still a long way away from the large culture shift needed. Proper education is just too expensive and most of the geeks I'm seeing come to the fore these days only became like that because one of their parents is a geek and made sure they had Tinker Time or Take Things To Bits And Then Put Them Back Together Again Day as a child.
Just an observation from someone who doesn't have kids, hopefully some fellow UK-er can make me feel better with a "it's not all that bad really!"...
They've breezed through the whole debacle with the air of a waiter who still expects a full tip just because he stopped pissing in your soup at the table.
The fact that this was even on the cards to begin with shows that MS weren't listening to their customers and just forging ahead with whatever boondoggles they could think of that might help them squeeze out a fatter profit margin. Big emphasis on streaming TV services that'll only be remotely viable in the USA? Always-on internet connection even for single-player? Pay-to-play even for P2P multiplayer? They're just going to start pissing in your soup in the kitchen instead of at your table and eventually start selling you better qualities of urine...
I'm not a console gamer and don't have a hand in either camp and I've been actively boycotting Sony for 10 years; I fully expect them to be watching what MS can get away with with great interest, but they've won a resounding PR battle over the last two weeks and will likely have a significant advantage in this generation.
£0.02
What's lacking here is branding awareness and a lack of a clear plan of execution. Watching this unfold in the media is torture. We need a catchy new name to get the public behind this fast-track form of getting the obviously guilty terrorists brought before the law.
How about the Stars and Stripes Chamber?
It's been done (albeit by way of Japanese rather than German)! :)
- Know the scan
- English translations
- Google OCR translations
- Germany Google login!
Watermarks, or better yet none of it. Share a confidence.
http://translationparty.com/
Bad form to reply again, sorry; I have no idea what happened to my post above, half of it went missing. Thanks heavens for browser cache, here it is again:
As a UK citizen, I wouldn't exactly call our internet access options stellar; although there are a great many ISPs, the vast majority of them all use the old BT network for both last mile and backbone routing. These are built out by BT OpenReach that then sells them on to resellers. Good news is that the wholesale price is set low (and with a lot of government oversight) so that OpenReach can't sell to BT's ISP businesses at a different cost than they sell to everyone else. However, the bad news is that the OpenReach infrastructure is quite outdated in a lot of ways (e.g. the new "21st Century Network" dubbed 21CN doesn't even have a provision for IPv6) and much of the copper is old and crappy; many places outside of major metropolitan centres are so far from their exchange/DSLAM that they're basically limited by the laws of physics to ADSL at less than 5Mb. Co-ax/fibre from Virgin (previously NTL/TeleWest/BlueYonder) has mitigated this but again it's not available in all areas.
Cue FTTH and FTTC which are finally seeing some limited rollouts, although because the only two major players in this regard are BT and Virgin, adoption has been slow... and slowed further by BT starting out only lighting up streets that were already lit up by Virgin (I've had a number of friends who were literally 20yards from a fibre cabinet whom were told FTTC/VDSL wasn't an option).
In both cases, bandwidth caps, throttling and "fair usage" policies are the rule rather than the exception, and it's not unusual for youtube/iPlayer to be restricted to "crap" during peak times. Bandwidth caps don't tend to be high either, last time I looked the BT FTTC 40Mb/s service had a cap of 40GB/mo. If you're not on FTTC or FTTH then "up to" 24Mb/s is typically the highest you'll see.
However, the best service by far tends to be on the little providers that provide some or all of their own equipment. For years I've been using LLU ISPs; LLU means Local Loop Unbundling and typically means the ISP has hired some space in a (BT) exchange and hooks the subscriber up over the (BT) copper, but it meant you usually get a better backbone and don't have to pay BT for copper rental. BeThere, one of the first large-scale LLU providers, have had ADSL2 running for donkeys years, way in advance of BT... but have just been bought by Sky, another ISP that is mostly just a BT reseller.
There are a fair few "niche" ISPs like this that provide a very good range of services - you can see from this page that this provider has a nice up-front approach to all the different options you can get:
http://www.xilo.net/adsl_broadband/#pro ...but even here you're still restricted to mostly the BT and a couple of other networks. My favourite ISP, Zen, for example only have an LLU network available in Rochdale.
I don't even follow the ISP game that closely, just closely enough to get good-enough internet without having to give BT any money. It's possible I might just be moaning about first-world problems, blah blah. The US might look at some european ISPs with envy (your prices *do* seem high and I'll never understand the preponderance of cable internet bundled with TV, but then I'm Onion guy who doesn't watch TV), but then everyone else I know just looks at places like Stockholm with eyes greener than that grass on the other side of the fence :)
Anyone from Sweden or similar Awesomepipesville care to comment? Is your telecoms infrastructure still mostly built/owned by a (state-overseen?) incumbent and rented out to your different ISPs as per the UK or do the different ISP lay all their own stuff?