Sure the risk of dying is 20 times higher in an accident. But the risk of getting into an accident in the first place isn't much higher than a car. If you take a class (MSF in Cal.), and know what you're doing, you greatly reduce your chance of being involved in an accident. I've got 14,000 miles on my bike (in about 1 year), commute every day, no problems.
Don't think you're so safe in a car. You can die just as easily. When I ride around and see idiot drivers, with their false sense of security indicated by the half-asleep look on their face (and don't get me started on cellphones), I realize that I'm probably safer, because I'm so alert.
Even though my risk is higher, the reward is great enough. If you haven't toured the country on a bike, you haven't lived.
(sorry about the repost, I didn't like where the other ended up)
Sure the risk of dying is 20 times higher in an accident. But the risk of getting into an accident in the first place isn't much higher than a car. If you take a class (MSF in Cal.), and know what you're doing, you greatly reduce your chance of being involved in an accident. I've got 14,000 miles on my bike (in about 1 year), commute every day, no problems.
Don't think you're so safe in a car. You can die just as easily. When I ride around and see idiot drivers, with their false sense of security indicated by the half-asleep look on their face (and don't get me started on cellphones), I realize that I'm probably safer, because I'm so alert.
Even though my risk is higher, the reward is great enough. If you haven't toured the country on a bike, you haven't lived.
Buy a motorcycle. Excellent on gas, better than 90% of cars out there. You get to experience the road in a way cars cannot show you. You're not trapped in a box, observing the world through glass. On a bike, you're part of the road, the scenery, nature.
If you buy a jap cruiser, you can spend as little as $5,000, up to $30,000+ for high-end bikes or Harleys. I own and highly recommend the Suzuki VL800 Volusia. A phat 800cc cruiser for around $6500.
I fill my tank for $7 (~3.8 gallons) and go 175 miles.
The Logitech Dual Optical Mouseman is the finest mouse ever made. I'm a hardcore gamer and perfect CS response has always been a pipedream. I used MS Optical mice, and if you moved them too fast, the cursor (or crosshair) would move around randomly.
The Logitech Dual Mouseman has two sensors that cooperate so it never gets lost or confused. It is very high res, very very smooth, and you can move it very fast without it losing tracking.
I see your point. I just disagree because, I like what I do (IT & Programming). A lot. Someone could be standing over my shoulder and it wouldn't affect my work habits one bit.
Oh wait, I'm posting to/. at work. But cmon - isn't active participation in the technical internet community vital to being a productive member of the IT and programming industry?:)
I think one of the most significant statements Darl made was how the copyright could not be transferred without written consent of all parties, and thus Caldera's release of such code under the GPL is null and void.
Isn't this the same as saying that electronic licenses mean nothing? If so, he's threatening to disrupt a very massive foundation of law that companies rely on - electronic agreements.
While some click-through licenses have had their legality questioned, if I recall, the most recent case found in favor of the license/company and not the user.
IANAL, but legal precedent appears to demonstrate that a document that clearly states "By using this you agree to..." is valid, assuming all of the points in the document are fundamentally legal. One cannot sign away basic human rights, for example.
So, does the GPL usurp copyright law? His statement that "all parties" must be involved in the signing of a copyright transfer document, of some sort, is invalid when making the decision to release your code as open source, because "all parties" includes "every open source user alive."
So, it's up to a judge to test the GPL. I think this would make a good jury trial: A jury would likely have little sentiment, and regular joes are sick of signing away (what they believe to be, and in many cases is) their fair use rights to things they buy, and would likely rule that a statement made by SCO (even in a "shaky" form such as the GPL) is legal and binding.
The Hawthorne effect clearly only applies to those who wouldn't be working anyway.
People will work if they like the WORK they are doing. The conditions of the workplace are irrelevant. Look at people who work on oil rigs or fish for Alaskan king crab in deadly waters - and wouldn't dream of anything else. It doesn't matter what you do to the working conditions - they must merely meet the expectations of the worker given the task.
Sure, if the conditions are below the standard, people will leave. If they're above standard, the happy workers will just be a little happier, but nothing will change for them as far as productivity or output. It only will reduce their chances of leaving for better conditions.
The unhappy workers, on the other hand, would view the above-standard working conditions a few ways (all negative): The company is overcompensating for crappy salaries. The company is trying to hide other unscrupulous practices. The company is trying to keep us happy while assigning us more work. They will always find problems with everything.
Maintain a standard in your office that matches similar business and meets your employees' expectations. Observe who actually cares about their work and keep them.
To increase actual output, the only way is to understand your business, thus understanding what your workers need to do their jobs quickly, effectively, and cheaply, and supply them with it.
Explain to me then why a Default install of Exchange 2003 (RC2) on Windows 2003 resulted in a completely open relay, against which several thousand spams were sent before I realized what was happening. The authentication systems in 2003 are widly complicated compared to before. It used to be things were restricted by IP or Domain Username.
Now, it's like you can do this operation if you've inhereted the rights from a parent process which was launched by some other process that was launched under the system user, and you have a groups policy entry that dicates that rights are allowed to be inhereted by tokens of your mom and this and that, and only if the Active Directory account is in a group that is part of a membership that is part of a brotherhood that lives in the right forest that has been granted the authoritah to log on under the alternate credentials under which your SMTP process is running. Or something like that. Trying to figure out "who can send mail" is utterly absurd.
I used to do DOOM I and II technical support. id outsourced it to a Colorado company called StarPak. For the first few days, I was doing the support practically alone, along with hundreds of other products with different companies. I'm proud to have recieved the first phone calls.
id provided an excellent knowledge base, and we were able to solve 90% of the problems people called in with. I felt really good enabling thousands of people to play this game - back then, everybody wanted to play it due to it's explosion of popularity and controversy, and people knew little about computers, just like today, with the difference that they were dealing with DOS and Win31, which was even harder for them.
I'll never forget the many times I heard kids scream "hooray!" in the background after I spent an hour on the phone with a very tired mother or father trying to make it work.
I believe that I received the first phone call ever of someone reporting motion sickness as a result of playing a video game due to the realism of 3D movement, since DOOM was the first game that had "bobbing". id thankfully had the insight to provide a switch to turn that off.
Another interesting call I recieved was from a guy who claimed to have produced (or maybe directed?) My Cousin Vinny, and said he wanted to make a movie out of DOOM. I put him in touch with id, and I'm glad nothing ever came from it. It would have made a crappy movie - the plot was a razor thin excuse to provide a setting for thousands of monsters to attack you relentlessly.
I also simultaneously operated on the 900 Hint Line. People would call up and ask the location of a particular key on a particular map. If you recall, the location of secrets was different between single player and multiplayer. We were encouraged to play the game while we worked (research! bwhaha!) and we always played multiplayer of course.
People thought it was amazing that me and my colleagues could rattle off the location of a secret on a map in single player mode while simultaneously playing multiplayer on a totally different map, all without checking the book.
I feel there's only one possible author of this antiworm: Microsoft.
Think about it. No average sysadmin would do it to clean up his systems - there's too much liability under DMCA. Idiot home users don't care. Non-Microsoft people are glad that they were to be attacked on Saturday. Who's left? The punk kids who write all the viruses? Why would they care about this? The only other possiblity would be some security company like eEye trying to gain reputation - but again, the DMCA issues would prevent them from disclosing that they ever wrote it.
Hm... whoever wrote it cares a lot about Microsoft and isn't worried about the DMCA. Microsoft is the only possibility!
Well, even so: Why do you block the ads yet still read the site? If you're reading it, it must provide some value to you - even if that value is just something to anger you and fill a void in your life whereby you need something to complain about every day - so you should be supporting their revenue model instead of stealing their content.
The reason Fox News' website wasn't reporting on the outage is (most likely) the fact (possibility) that thier website operations are based in NY. This was noticed by someone on Fark.
However, power has obviously been restored - check foxnews.com for a the biggest GIF with the word "BLACKOUT" on it you have ever seen.
If I can quit my job, work on free software, and go down to the local welfare office and fill out "free software developer" and get a fat check, then our society will have made some progress.
Seriously though, such a program would require a careful balance between funding OSS and not killing our technology economy. We live in a capitalist society, and if our government takes action that hurts businesses that are considered to be doing an "OK" job (MS) then it seems a little contradictory to capitalism.
Funding and providing Fire Departments is different because not only are these Public Good, they determined that they are necessary for healthy living (not dying.) Software is nowhere near this level of importance to most people. The government has no motivation to stop software businesses from doing what they do. If the government needs something (like TCP/IP) then they commission it and it gets made.
I think the books vs no-books is based in part on age, but only because age relates to school, which is book oriented. Those who have been out of school a while, or never went to college, may find through experience that skipping books and going straight for built-in docs (or trial and error) works for them.
Younger folks tend to prefer books especially if they just finished, or are still in, college, for obvious reasons.
I see the Youthful Bravado angle, and that's certainly present, but I think it's much more common in older folks. All the interns at my company that we snatch from the nearby college always have a pile of programming books. All the older folk have bookshelves with 20 year old C books that they claim are all they need, and are covered in dust.
Forget the pros and cons, that's trollbait. I think what you're really wondering is why people switch off books, or are turned off by books in the first place, as a tool for learning new things. I think the same people who skip tech books as a learning tool also don't read much other stuff (examining myself.) They just don't like books.
I also believe that the smarter and more experienced you get, the more of an obstacle books are for learning something new, quickly. When any of us learn something new, we pick up a certain amount through intuition, experience, and at some point hit a wall and have to get help. If you're the type that hits the wall much later, you're less likely to hit a book since it wants you to start at the beginning. Documentation (especially online) tends to be better organized so you can find your own entry point into the docs and continue where you feel you left off.
However, I think once you've gotten really good at something, you should pick up a book. Start at the beginning, but you can go fast through the parts you know. You'll pick up all kinds of stuff you may have never otherwise seen.
I used Perl for about 2 years before I wrote a single regular expression. I saw some intriguing stuff in a book, but hated the book, so I fired up perlre and it changed my world.
Some people need books, others don't. Personally I find the ActivePerl documentation to be excellent.
The idea that you can do a PPM search for a module via CPAN based on your need, download it, and have it's docs integrated into the centralized documentation is great. perlfunc, perlre, perlobj, etc are a bit arcane but with a little elbow grease and a good editor (SlickEdit!), you figure things out pretty quick.
I have painstakenly researched each of the viruses mentioned on their site, and written a rebuttal on my site. There is a weak connection at best between P2P software and these viruses. It's almost laughable that they even chose some of them for the list at all.
I love how they mention Nimda, even though it spread by infecting systems by directly injecting into the system over IIS with a malformed URL. What does this have to do with eDonkey, Kazaa?
Though I suppose it's just mentioned as a "Common Virus", not something actually spready by P2P software.
Oh, and 40+ WPM typing speed doesn't make up for the fact that the method names are simply too long. When you can do 40+ WPM, you can do an INSANE amount of coding in a short time when most things you type are only a few characters long.
When dealing with builtin methods and operators on most average languages, there just aren't that many. You have to memorize them all anyway. Why not make them short?
-d $dir_name returns true if a dir exists.
Not only does it take fewer keystrokes to type, it even takes less time to READ so you learn faster!:)
As usual I chime in 7 days after the article is posted with my irrelevant thoughts that nobody will read. Oh well.
The people who "just hit delete" are probably the most efficient, as far as cost per spam, than any of us.
Once you start hating it, and get sucked into the life of filtering, you waste a lot of time. "My filter handles it fine" is BS - what about all those work hours you've spent finding them, trying them, writing them, tweaking them? Or, have you been using the same spam filter since 1992 and it works for everything? If so, you better sell it.
Being interested in anti-spam even leads you to post messages on Slashdot about what you do about spam. Probably during work.
Also, the time that IT spends investigating anti-spam solutions at the server level and dissecting emails to find out why a deluge of messages just got past the filters costs money.
The collective aggravation level of everyone in the company is the determining factor for the IT Dept. to choose how much time and people to put into the anti-spam effort. The worse spam gets, the more people are annoyed, and the more it costs since it becomes a higher priority issue with the IT Dept.
Slashdot Mirror
Cowards, all of you.
Sure the risk of dying is 20 times higher in an accident. But the risk of getting into an accident in the first place isn't much higher than a car. If you take a class (MSF in Cal.), and know what you're doing, you greatly reduce your chance of being involved in an accident. I've got 14,000 miles on my bike (in about 1 year), commute every day, no problems.
Don't think you're so safe in a car. You can die just as easily. When I ride around and see idiot drivers, with their false sense of security indicated by the half-asleep look on their face (and don't get me started on cellphones), I realize that I'm probably safer, because I'm so alert.
Even though my risk is higher, the reward is great enough. If you haven't toured the country on a bike, you haven't lived.
(sorry about the repost, I didn't like where the other ended up)
# Erik.LA
Cowards, all of you.
Sure the risk of dying is 20 times higher in an accident. But the risk of getting into an accident in the first place isn't much higher than a car. If you take a class (MSF in Cal.), and know what you're doing, you greatly reduce your chance of being involved in an accident. I've got 14,000 miles on my bike (in about 1 year), commute every day, no problems.
Don't think you're so safe in a car. You can die just as easily. When I ride around and see idiot drivers, with their false sense of security indicated by the half-asleep look on their face (and don't get me started on cellphones), I realize that I'm probably safer, because I'm so alert.
Even though my risk is higher, the reward is great enough. If you haven't toured the country on a bike, you haven't lived.
Buy a motorcycle. Excellent on gas, better than 90% of cars out there. You get to experience the road in a way cars cannot show you. You're not trapped in a box, observing the world through glass. On a bike, you're part of the road, the scenery, nature.
If you buy a jap cruiser, you can spend as little as $5,000, up to $30,000+ for high-end bikes or Harleys. I own and highly recommend the Suzuki VL800 Volusia. A phat 800cc cruiser for around $6500.
I fill my tank for $7 (~3.8 gallons) and go 175 miles.
The Logitech Dual Optical Mouseman is the finest mouse ever made. I'm a hardcore gamer and perfect CS response has always been a pipedream. I used MS Optical mice, and if you moved them too fast, the cursor (or crosshair) would move around randomly.
The Logitech Dual Mouseman has two sensors that cooperate so it never gets lost or confused. It is very high res, very very smooth, and you can move it very fast without it losing tracking.
Does this mean I have to turn off my Windows 2003 Server AD logon hour restrictions?
Will anyone attempt to actually answer that, or will everyone start immediately making linux jokes and insulting me because I use Windows?
I see your point. I just disagree because, I like what I do (IT & Programming). A lot. Someone could be standing over my shoulder and it wouldn't affect my work habits one bit.
/. at work. But cmon - isn't active participation in the technical internet community vital to being a productive member of the IT and programming industry? :)
Oh wait, I'm posting to
I think one of the most significant statements Darl made was how the copyright could not be transferred without written consent of all parties, and thus Caldera's release of such code under the GPL is null and void.
Isn't this the same as saying that electronic licenses mean nothing? If so, he's threatening to disrupt a very massive foundation of law that companies rely on - electronic agreements.
While some click-through licenses have had their legality questioned, if I recall, the most recent case found in favor of the license/company and not the user.
IANAL, but legal precedent appears to demonstrate that a document that clearly states "By using this you agree to..." is valid, assuming all of the points in the document are fundamentally legal. One cannot sign away basic human rights, for example.
So, does the GPL usurp copyright law? His statement that "all parties" must be involved in the signing of a copyright transfer document, of some sort, is invalid when making the decision to release your code as open source, because "all parties" includes "every open source user alive."
So, it's up to a judge to test the GPL. I think this would make a good jury trial: A jury would likely have little sentiment, and regular joes are sick of signing away (what they believe to be, and in many cases is) their fair use rights to things they buy, and would likely rule that a statement made by SCO (even in a "shaky" form such as the GPL) is legal and binding.
The Hawthorne effect clearly only applies to those who wouldn't be working anyway.
People will work if they like the WORK they are doing. The conditions of the workplace are irrelevant. Look at people who work on oil rigs or fish for Alaskan king crab in deadly waters - and wouldn't dream of anything else. It doesn't matter what you do to the working conditions - they must merely meet the expectations of the worker given the task.
Sure, if the conditions are below the standard, people will leave. If they're above standard, the happy workers will just be a little happier, but nothing will change for them as far as productivity or output. It only will reduce their chances of leaving for better conditions.
The unhappy workers, on the other hand, would view the above-standard working conditions a few ways (all negative): The company is overcompensating for crappy salaries. The company is trying to hide other unscrupulous practices. The company is trying to keep us happy while assigning us more work. They will always find problems with everything.
Maintain a standard in your office that matches similar business and meets your employees' expectations. Observe who actually cares about their work and keep them.
To increase actual output, the only way is to understand your business, thus understanding what your workers need to do their jobs quickly, effectively, and cheaply, and supply them with it.
Explain to me then why a Default install of Exchange 2003 (RC2) on Windows 2003 resulted in a completely open relay, against which several thousand spams were sent before I realized what was happening. The authentication systems in 2003 are widly complicated compared to before. It used to be things were restricted by IP or Domain Username.
Now, it's like you can do this operation if you've inhereted the rights from a parent process which was launched by some other process that was launched under the system user, and you have a groups policy entry that dicates that rights are allowed to be inhereted by tokens of your mom and this and that, and only if the Active Directory account is in a group that is part of a membership that is part of a brotherhood that lives in the right forest that has been granted the authoritah to log on under the alternate credentials under which your SMTP process is running. Or something like that. Trying to figure out "who can send mail" is utterly absurd.
I used to do DOOM I and II technical support. id outsourced it to a Colorado company called StarPak. For the first few days, I was doing the support practically alone, along with hundreds of other products with different companies. I'm proud to have recieved the first phone calls.
id provided an excellent knowledge base, and we were able to solve 90% of the problems people called in with. I felt really good enabling thousands of people to play this game - back then, everybody wanted to play it due to it's explosion of popularity and controversy, and people knew little about computers, just like today, with the difference that they were dealing with DOS and Win31, which was even harder for them.
I'll never forget the many times I heard kids scream "hooray!" in the background after I spent an hour on the phone with a very tired mother or father trying to make it work.
I believe that I received the first phone call ever of someone reporting motion sickness as a result of playing a video game due to the realism of 3D movement, since DOOM was the first game that had "bobbing". id thankfully had the insight to provide a switch to turn that off.
Another interesting call I recieved was from a guy who claimed to have produced (or maybe directed?) My Cousin Vinny, and said he wanted to make a movie out of DOOM. I put him in touch with id, and I'm glad nothing ever came from it. It would have made a crappy movie - the plot was a razor thin excuse to provide a setting for thousands of monsters to attack you relentlessly.
I also simultaneously operated on the 900 Hint Line. People would call up and ask the location of a particular key on a particular map. If you recall, the location of secrets was different between single player and multiplayer. We were encouraged to play the game while we worked (research! bwhaha!) and we always played multiplayer of course.
People thought it was amazing that me and my colleagues could rattle off the location of a secret on a map in single player mode while simultaneously playing multiplayer on a totally different map, all without checking the book.
Ahh, good times.
Who's to the limit, say me, I'm to the limit, everybody go FHQWGADS
I feel there's only one possible author of this antiworm: Microsoft.
Think about it. No average sysadmin would do it to clean up his systems - there's too much liability under DMCA. Idiot home users don't care. Non-Microsoft people are glad that they were to be attacked on Saturday. Who's left? The punk kids who write all the viruses? Why would they care about this? The only other possiblity would be some security company like eEye trying to gain reputation - but again, the DMCA issues would prevent them from disclosing that they ever wrote it.
Hm... whoever wrote it cares a lot about Microsoft and isn't worried about the DMCA. Microsoft is the only possibility!
Oh, "AD" servers.
Well, even so: Why do you block the ads yet still read the site? If you're reading it, it must provide some value to you - even if that value is just something to anger you and fill a void in your life whereby you need something to complain about every day - so you should be supporting their revenue model instead of stealing their content.
Why isn't your block working now?
The reason Fox News' website wasn't reporting on the outage is (most likely) the fact (possibility) that thier website operations are based in NY. This was noticed by someone on Fark.
However, power has obviously been restored - check foxnews.com for a the biggest GIF with the word "BLACKOUT" on it you have ever seen.
If I can quit my job, work on free software, and go down to the local welfare office and fill out "free software developer" and get a fat check, then our society will have made some progress.
Seriously though, such a program would require a careful balance between funding OSS and not killing our technology economy. We live in a capitalist society, and if our government takes action that hurts businesses that are considered to be doing an "OK" job (MS) then it seems a little contradictory to capitalism.
Funding and providing Fire Departments is different because not only are these Public Good, they determined that they are necessary for healthy living (not dying.) Software is nowhere near this level of importance to most people. The government has no motivation to stop software businesses from doing what they do. If the government needs something (like TCP/IP) then they commission it and it gets made.
Heh, I was kidding on the demote but who cares.
I think the books vs no-books is based in part on age, but only because age relates to school, which is book oriented. Those who have been out of school a while, or never went to college, may find through experience that skipping books and going straight for built-in docs (or trial and error) works for them.
Younger folks tend to prefer books especially if they just finished, or are still in, college, for obvious reasons.
I see the Youthful Bravado angle, and that's certainly present, but I think it's much more common in older folks. All the interns at my company that we snatch from the nearby college always have a pile of programming books. All the older folk have bookshelves with 20 year old C books that they claim are all they need, and are covered in dust.
Forget the pros and cons, that's trollbait. I think what you're really wondering is why people switch off books, or are turned off by books in the first place, as a tool for learning new things. I think the same people who skip tech books as a learning tool also don't read much other stuff (examining myself.) They just don't like books.
I also believe that the smarter and more experienced you get, the more of an obstacle books are for learning something new, quickly. When any of us learn something new, we pick up a certain amount through intuition, experience, and at some point hit a wall and have to get help. If you're the type that hits the wall much later, you're less likely to hit a book since it wants you to start at the beginning. Documentation (especially online) tends to be better organized so you can find your own entry point into the docs and continue where you feel you left off.
However, I think once you've gotten really good at something, you should pick up a book. Start at the beginning, but you can go fast through the parts you know. You'll pick up all kinds of stuff you may have never otherwise seen.
I used Perl for about 2 years before I wrote a single regular expression. I saw some intriguing stuff in a book, but hated the book, so I fired up perlre and it changed my world.
Nice chatting with you pileated.
Cmon, this wasn't interesting. Maybe a 1. I demand that my points be revoked immediately.
Some people need books, others don't. Personally I find the ActivePerl documentation to be excellent.
The idea that you can do a PPM search for a module via CPAN based on your need, download it, and have it's docs integrated into the centralized documentation is great. perlfunc, perlre, perlobj, etc are a bit arcane but with a little elbow grease and a good editor (SlickEdit!), you figure things out pretty quick.
I have painstakenly researched each of the viruses mentioned on their site, and written a rebuttal on my site. There is a weak connection at best between P2P software and these viruses. It's almost laughable that they even chose some of them for the list at all.
Read the Anti-FUD on the front page:
http://erik.la
I love how they mention Nimda, even though it spread by infecting systems by directly injecting into the system over IIS with a malformed URL. What does this have to do with eDonkey, Kazaa?
Though I suppose it's just mentioned as a "Common Virus", not something actually spready by P2P software.
Oh, and 40+ WPM typing speed doesn't make up for the fact that the method names are simply too long. When you can do 40+ WPM, you can do an INSANE amount of coding in a short time when most things you type are only a few characters long.
When dealing with builtin methods and operators on most average languages, there just aren't that many. You have to memorize them all anyway. Why not make them short?
:)
-d $dir_name returns true if a dir exists.
Not only does it take fewer keystrokes to type, it even takes less time to READ so you learn faster!
As usual I chime in 7 days after the article is posted with my irrelevant thoughts that nobody will read. Oh well.
The people who "just hit delete" are probably the most efficient, as far as cost per spam, than any of us.
Once you start hating it, and get sucked into the life of filtering, you waste a lot of time. "My filter handles it fine" is BS - what about all those work hours you've spent finding them, trying them, writing them, tweaking them? Or, have you been using the same spam filter since 1992 and it works for everything? If so, you better sell it.
Being interested in anti-spam even leads you to post messages on Slashdot about what you do about spam. Probably during work.
Also, the time that IT spends investigating anti-spam solutions at the server level and dissecting emails to find out why a deluge of messages just got past the filters costs money.
The collective aggravation level of everyone in the company is the determining factor for the IT Dept. to choose how much time and people to put into the anti-spam effort. The worse spam gets, the more people are annoyed, and the more it costs since it becomes a higher priority issue with the IT Dept.
That perhaps the most accurate description of every Exec to Tech interaction in the history of business. Good one.