Which is why twenty five years after I learned - including reading everything on structured programming, structured system design, i.e., all the how-to-program-the-RIGHT-way stuff I could find - most of the apps I use were designed by idiots and crash most of the time.
The RIGHT way to learn programming is to first read a book that explains the RIGHT way to program.
I have yet in twenty five years seen code written by, met, read of, or even heard of a competent programmer. I assume they exist somewhere, but you can't prove it by the stuff on the market OR in open source.
According to Boing Boing, if you download RealPlayer One through the BBC, you get sent to a Real referrer page that downloads a version without the spyware, nagware, etc. Supposedly this is because the BBC has a significant public remit and is not allowed to foist spyware and payware on their listeners.
I downloaded it today but haven't tested it to see if it's true.
You can also get the free Linux version via the BBC download page.
You DO have to provide a name and email link but of course that's what spamtraps are for.
Go to Boing Boing for the link - I'm too lazy to put it here.
I'm impressed by the technical achievement here (once they actually get everything working, anyway).
These guys are running a daemon in ring 0 along with Windows, and playing nice with the hardware (letting Windows handle it) and emulating a few things so they can boot a Linux distro on top of a running Windows! This is fucking amazing (to a non-OS-system-programmer like me, anyway)! I thought User Linux was a cool - if not terribly useful except for security and kernel development - hack. This beats that all to hell.
because a week or so ago I had a long argument with someone on one of the Linux newsgroups about backing up to CD and whether CD media was reliable.
I advocated backup to spare hard disk and pointed out that some sysadmins were starting to rsync to offsite hard drives as a primary backup method. Benefits were cost vrs tape, speed vrs tape, accessibility vrs tape, and reliability vrs tape, etc.
The other fellow argued that for home use CDs were much better because HE never had a CD read or write error in six years. I on the other hand have had write errors on my drive when burning faster than 4X (it's a 16x12x40 and I use media rated up to 52X). I granted him that there might be a problem with my drive. But I still don't trust CDs for critical data backups - I make multiple copies of that data, single copies of data that isn't critical (babe pictures from the Net, e.g.).
This article reinforces my view. CDs and DVDs are good for backup, but for critical data and for long-term archival storage, they are NOT as good as a hard disk which is used only for backup and is protected from abuse. You might have the odd stiction problem with a hard drive that's been stored a long time, but the data itself is likely to be recoverable on the platter AFAIK.
I'm not that concerned with long-term archival storage anyway (although the Fred Langa article that suggested two years was "long-term" is unnerving).
For home use, the cost per gig of hard drives today, while still more than CD's (but not by much since you need two CD's to backup a gig - compression increases the risk of unreadable data if you want to advocate it - unless you compress each individual file first, of course), is still a very cheap way to backup data at $1 or less per gig. Especially for data which changes over time and doesn't need to be archivally stored - just replaced whenever it changes. Offsite storage can either be done by CD/DVD or by a third disk or by mirroring offsite (some companies offer this service).
I'm not against CDs or DVDs for backup but the risks and benefits vrs dedicated backup hard drives needs to be considered carefully. A good backup strategy for home use will use both CDs/DVDs and/or tape AND hard disks. For business purposes, a good strategy will use both tapes and rysnced backup hard drives.
They can send hardware millions of miles, but can't keep a radio battery working.
Or maybe it sank in the "mud" they think it landed on.
Maybe Richard Hoagland is right - Bush is an ex-Nazi who thinks we all came from Mars and intends to pollute the world out of existence and then abandon everybody else and go live on Mars. (Saw the same scenario suggested in the Doom 2099 Marvel comic back in the early '90's.) So he's got CIA agents up there picking up all the robots so people at home don't find out we've already got pleasure domes up there waiting for Bush and his Halliburton cronies after they bleed Iraq - and the US - dry.
"Rob Lord, who had joined Nullsoft's team, even tipped off the RIAA to Napster."
We have a word for that in the joint: rat-fink.
Another word we use is "shanked".
Justin himself seems a little schizo over the issue. On the one hand, Napster using their servers to promote file sharing is "wrong". On the other, Gnutella is "right". Make up your mind, Justin.
As as anarchist, personally I don't care, but as long as we're passing antispam laws and the like, I'd say that someone developing tech to bypass a consumer's blocking software is encroaching on that consumer in a way which consitutes coercion. If you know the user has blocking software, evading it is a coercive act. Even developing tech to evade it without knowing if the user actually has it is a coercive act.
So how about this? Pass a law that says Web sites must notify the consumer if the site uses or connects to services which use popup/under ads in any way. This notification must be made on ANY page of the site which is the first page the user's browser hits - in fact this notification could even be a popup (but should preferably be simply a frame or window).
The user can then opt out of visiting that site OR the user can then respond telling the site to disable the popup/unders for his session. The Web site would be required by law to comply with the latter request.
Unenforceable, most likely, like anti-spam laws, but it might help.
In a real anarchist society, spammers and other such nuisances would be ostracized and perhaps beaten to a pulp. In any event, they would certainly be put under much more pressure to quit than they are now by unenforceable regulations.
" is it he's just doing something really strange that he's not even aware of? People do really strange things, and they think they're normal people, but they're not! (Laughs)."
People need to quote this to newbies on the newsgroups who complain when something weird happens that no one - even the gurus - can solve!
Look, if problems crop up with Red Hat 7.x or 8.0, the community is going to notice and post it somewhere. Then the community will fix it. And post the fixes somewhere.
So you have to be a little more alert, and not just depend on up2date to solve all problems.
Doesn't mean you have to throw away your distro and switch and spend another six months re-ironing the kinks between the way you had your system before and the way you have to do it with another distro.
Let's stop the panic before it starts, alright?
If you're a naive user who only uses the GUI, maybe you should switch. But if you have any knowledge of the innards of Linux (i.e., config files, the overall structure, etc.) and can handle the command line, I don't see why end-of-life is a nightmare.
Linux is meant to be continuously upgraded forever. This is not Windows where you have to throw everything out every two (or ten, depending on how delayed the next release is) years.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, right.
Which is why twenty five years after I learned - including reading everything on structured programming, structured system design, i.e., all the how-to-program-the-RIGHT-way stuff I could find - most of the apps I use were designed by idiots and crash most of the time.
The RIGHT way to learn programming is to first read a book that explains the RIGHT way to program.
I have yet in twenty five years seen code written by, met, read of, or even heard of a competent programmer. I assume they exist somewhere, but you can't prove it by the stuff on the market OR in open source.
What's this? The
Porn the NEXT coming craze? Is this a joke that was not modded properly?
In ten years feature films will include porn?
Where has this guy been for the last twenty years - under a rock?
He probably has five
Good move - that probably got him another two years.
You wait until you're OFF parole, THEN do something.
According to Boing Boing, if you download RealPlayer One through the BBC, you get sent to a Real referrer page that downloads a version without the spyware, nagware, etc. Supposedly this is because the BBC has a significant public remit and is not allowed to foist spyware and payware on their listeners.
I downloaded it today but haven't tested it to see if it's true.
You can also get the free Linux version via the BBC download page.
You DO have to provide a name and email link but of course that's what spamtraps are for.
Go to Boing Boing for the link - I'm too lazy to put it here.
Stop buying the shit.
What does it run? Crayon?
I'm impressed by the technical achievement here (once they actually get everything working, anyway).
These guys are running a daemon in ring 0 along with Windows, and playing nice with the hardware (letting Windows handle it) and emulating a few things so they can boot a Linux distro on top of a running Windows! This is fucking amazing (to a non-OS-system-programmer like me, anyway)! I thought User Linux was a cool - if not terribly useful except for security and kernel development - hack. This beats that all to hell.
because a week or so ago I had a long argument with someone on one of the Linux newsgroups about backing up to CD and whether CD media was reliable.
I advocated backup to spare hard disk and pointed out that some sysadmins were starting to rsync to offsite hard drives as a primary backup method. Benefits were cost vrs tape, speed vrs tape, accessibility vrs tape, and reliability vrs tape, etc.
The other fellow argued that for home use CDs were much better because HE never had a CD read or write error in six years. I on the other hand have had write errors on my drive when burning faster than 4X (it's a 16x12x40 and I use media rated up to 52X). I granted him that there might be a problem with my drive. But I still don't trust CDs for critical data backups - I make multiple copies of that data, single copies of data that isn't critical (babe pictures from the Net, e.g.).
This article reinforces my view. CDs and DVDs are good for backup, but for critical data and for long-term archival storage, they are NOT as good as a hard disk which is used only for backup and is protected from abuse. You might have the odd stiction problem with a hard drive that's been stored a long time, but the data itself is likely to be recoverable on the platter AFAIK.
I'm not that concerned with long-term archival storage anyway (although the Fred Langa article that suggested two years was "long-term" is unnerving).
For home use, the cost per gig of hard drives today, while still more than CD's (but not by much since you need two CD's to backup a gig - compression increases the risk of unreadable data if you want to advocate it - unless you compress each individual file first, of course), is still a very cheap way to backup data at $1 or less per gig. Especially for data which changes over time and doesn't need to be archivally stored - just replaced whenever it changes. Offsite storage can either be done by CD/DVD or by a third disk or by mirroring offsite (some companies offer this service).
I'm not against CDs or DVDs for backup but the risks and benefits vrs dedicated backup hard drives needs to be considered carefully. A good backup strategy for home use will use both CDs/DVDs and/or tape AND hard disks. For business purposes, a good strategy will use both tapes and rysnced backup hard drives.
You mean virtually every other nation on Earth?
only outlaws will have software!
Bring it on!
1) Outlaw software!
2) ???
3) Profit!!
They can send hardware millions of miles, but can't keep a radio battery working.
Or maybe it sank in the "mud" they think it landed on.
Maybe Richard Hoagland is right - Bush is an ex-Nazi who thinks we all came from Mars and intends to pollute the world out of existence and then abandon everybody else and go live on Mars. (Saw the same scenario suggested in the Doom 2099 Marvel comic back in the early '90's.) So he's got CIA agents up there picking up all the robots so people at home don't find out we've already got pleasure domes up there waiting for Bush and his Halliburton cronies after they bleed Iraq - and the US - dry.
Sheesh...
how fast SCO is going out of business?
Or how fast Microsoft is going to follow?
a couple hundred miles.
Sure it does.
One word: Halliburton.
Second word: Cheney.
Third word: war profiteer. (Okay, two words...)
"Rob Lord, who had joined Nullsoft's team, even tipped off the RIAA to Napster."
We have a word for that in the joint: rat-fink.
Another word we use is "shanked".
Justin himself seems a little schizo over the issue. On the one hand, Napster using their servers to promote file sharing is "wrong". On the other, Gnutella is "right". Make up your mind, Justin.
Vietnam.
Second word (later): Federal prison.
Don't go to any site that uses this technology.
It's coercive to run an ad deliberately intended to evade consumer ad-blocking software.
Show your displeasure - do not go to these sites, send email to these sites telling them so, and send email to the ADVERTISERS telling them so.
Enough people revolt, the companies paying for this crap will stop paying for it - simple business decision.
These people need to be told that the Net is NOT one-way broadcasting.
As as anarchist, personally I don't care, but as long as we're passing antispam laws and the like, I'd say that someone developing tech to bypass a consumer's blocking software is encroaching on that consumer in a way which consitutes coercion. If you know the user has blocking software, evading it is a coercive act. Even developing tech to evade it without knowing if the user actually has it is a coercive act.
So how about this? Pass a law that says Web sites must notify the consumer if the site uses or connects to services which use popup/under ads in any way. This notification must be made on ANY page of the site which is the first page the user's browser hits - in fact this notification could even be a popup (but should preferably be simply a frame or window).
The user can then opt out of visiting that site OR the user can then respond telling the site to disable the popup/unders for his session. The Web site would be required by law to comply with the latter request.
Unenforceable, most likely, like anti-spam laws, but it might help.
In a real anarchist society, spammers and other such nuisances would be ostracized and perhaps beaten to a pulp. In any event, they would certainly be put under much more pressure to quit than they are now by unenforceable regulations.
" is it he's just doing something really strange that he's not even aware of? People do really strange things, and they think they're normal people, but they're not! (Laughs)."
People need to quote this to newbies on the newsgroups who complain when something weird happens that no one - even the gurus - can solve!
They're older and smarter than us.
After all, they don't live here, do they?
Look, if problems crop up with Red Hat 7.x or 8.0, the community is going to notice and post it somewhere. Then the community will fix it. And post the fixes somewhere.
So you have to be a little more alert, and not just depend on up2date to solve all problems.
Doesn't mean you have to throw away your distro and switch and spend another six months re-ironing the kinks between the way you had your system before and the way you have to do it with another distro.
Let's stop the panic before it starts, alright?
If you're a naive user who only uses the GUI, maybe you should switch. But if you have any knowledge of the innards of Linux (i.e., config files, the overall structure, etc.) and can handle the command line, I don't see why end-of-life is a nightmare.
Linux is meant to be continuously upgraded forever. This is not Windows where you have to throw everything out every two (or ten, depending on how delayed the next release is) years.
I thought it meant Shit For UNIX...
Given Microsoft's attitude, and all.
Having done that and done eight years in the joint, I know this to be true.
Like IBM is gonna drive SCO into bankruptcy and THEN let Microsoft buy the UNIX IP?
I don't think so, relative amounts of cash in MS bank account vrs IBM notwithstanding.