I don't think "contrarians" are the problem; I think the problem is that the people who become journalists do so via a college program in which they don't actually learn ANYTHING except how to write cleverly (and supply the correct APA-format references).
Think about how college courses are structured. Journalism majors have a few dozen required credits in "How to write using third-person while supplying a reference for every thought they express", the implication being that no one ever has an original thought -- everything must be attributed. If you've ever heard a journalism flack say "who said that" after you've said something witty, and felt the raw, unquenchable desire to grab that person by their lower jaw and start yanking it in different directions to see how much "play" there is in the joints, you know what I mean.
In the U.S. at least, journalism majors also have to select a minor, i.e. a couple of dozen credits in some specific knowledge area, to broaden their intellect. It doesn't work; they select whatever they think they can get good grades in without having to work too hard, something that looks vaguely interesting. It'll be something like art history, or art, or philosophy... I'm not saying these studies are easy, just that their MINORS are because you never get up to the upper level classes in a minor -- you just do the freshman and sophomore stuff, usually.
Finally, they have to select a few dozen credits worth of liberal arts classes, so they don't get too specialized (read: knowledeable). So they pick up a survey course here, an entry-level course there, all stuff that doesn't bend their brains too much.
The result of all this is a person who doesn't actually KNOW much of anything, but who believes he can write about anything provided he has access to a public library and the internet. He thinks that as long as his citations are in the correct format, everyone will agree that his research is good. And, he thinks that he's actually qualified to determine whether one side or another in a technical debate is "right" (or, if he, with his years of survey course wisdom, can't determine which one is right, that it's "up for grabs", so he gives both sides equal time).
It's the American system that is the problem. It sets up an environment in which the people writing about a thing are usually the least qualified to write about it.
The only way to fix the system would be for a newspaper (magazine, etc) to keep a well-educated technical staff on board for research purposes. But that'll never happen -- fact-checkers were journalism majors too. Such irony, there.
FWIW: I majored in computer science, minoring in mathematics. We in the techie subculture generally thought the journalism majors were a bunch of dumb drunks. But, to each, his own!;)
I see what you mean, but I can't help think this is going to turn into a cold-war style escalation which will lead us to the point where all resumes are considered fiction and no one is ever believed about anything they say.
The results of that, are anybody's guess. Maybe someone will come up with an on-the-spot skills test?
Taking Java as the example, I'd agree with you to a degree. The base language didn't change much, and many of the libraries were the same. However, the GUI development setup changed completely, so a large chunk of knowledge basically went out the window. While it's true you can still do AWT programming, a modern boss would probably require you to code in Swing, which has a big learning curve (the books are all huge, big old boat anchors).
Then, you've got to learn a new IDE, generally, which is a pain.
And if you've been doing, say,.Net for two years, your head will be cluttered with competing ways of doing things, which are similar but oh-so-slightly different, and it'll take some time to get back in the swing of doing things the Java way (pardon the pun).
The real problem with your "it's possible" theorem is this: it takes three to five years of working experience for, say, a recruiter to consider you a seasoned professional in ANY technology. If you're working with more than one technology at a time, your attention is diluted between the two. If we're talking about three, five, seven, etc, then the situation becomes more and more unrealistic.
Another factor is, let's say that you work in Java for three years, then.Net for two more. If you now want to do Java, there will have been some language releases since you last touched it. Instead of AWT, you'll be looking at Swing or SWT. Your experience will no longer be relevant anyway, and just like that, you're a rookie again.
Given five years of experience, it's very unlikely that a person will be able to really master and stay current in more than one or two. And given longer experience, older subjects will likely be obsolete.
No disrespect, but I find your claim a bit hard to swallow, too. You're only going to be current in the stuff you've been doing this year; think about it. Everything changes too fast for your experience to have such a long shelf life.
It's awful, isn't it? The worst thing is, if you've got a good resume, people assume you're lying, even though you're not. Makes you want to throw the whole thing in the river and become a mugger, specializing in HR flacks...;)
True; I'm a better programmer than wordsmith. Actually, I was thinking of the kind of person who claims to be an expert COM+/ASP, J2EE,.Net, AND mainframe developer, with about four years experience. WTF???
If you've got four or five years, I might buy that you're exceptional at one, maybe two of the technologies, but ALL of them? How the hell would anyone keep all that crap in their head at the same time? It's bizarre that someone would even pretend to be able to do this.
I think maybe people mean "I've done a little bit of work in X technology, and I know how to use Google, so I'm an expert".
I've given up on programming for a private company. There are plenty of jobs in civil service, academia, large public institutions... Many of those won't be programming jobs in the future, but at least they pay the bills.
The real last straw for me was the start of the recession, right around 2000, when I started seeing job offers that required several years experience in twenty technologies, some of which were mutually exclusive.
Let alone the fact (the FACT) that no one is capable of getting five years meaningful experience in all those technologies at a single company.
No, what really bothered me was this: Companies inflate their requirements for two primary reasons:
1. They want to make sure that NOBODY will qualify for the job so they can justify hiring an H1-B to fill it, instead of an American, or a Brit, or whatever.
2. They want to make sure that anyone they DO hire MUST have lied on the resume, so they can fire him whenever they want without paying unemployment benefits.
This wasn't what was going on where I used to work; that manager just didn't care, and didn't want to listen to my complaints. But you can be pretty sure that a lot of companies work this way.
Be careful with those resume fictions; they could bite you in the ass later, when you try to vest stock options or otherwise stand up for yourself.
Yeah, my old boss used to give me resumes to vet. I used to see stuff like "ten years.Net experience!" At first I was shocked, but then I got out my red pen and started annotating. I'd use very descriptive terms: "Bullshit", "He's lying, it hasn't existed that long", "Does this company even exist?" and so forth. Nobody cared. They ignored my comments, hired the low bid, and never asked me to look at resumes again.
Since then I've realized that at some companies, resumes really ARE expected to be fiction, and they select the fiction they enjoy the most.
YES, but if they cared at all about security, they wouldn't have mentioned that this even exists. They would have simply used it, and the country affected would just experience mysterious satellite outages. Then, they could have played dumb and carried out whatever plan they were working on.
Now that they've said that they have this, and admitted that it exists, they've shot themselves in the foot.
First of all, announcing the idea gives everyone else the idea. Everyone who has the know-how to build something like this and the money to buy parts now at least has the subconscious thought, "Hey, that's pretty neat. I wonder if I can take out DirecTV with this?" If you've ever hung around physics majors when they're bored, you know I'm not exactly reaching here. And it only takes a couple of cases of beer to get a techie to decide to start a project up.:)
Second, and more worrying, now every time a satellite fails in a country we're not buddy-buddy with, they're going to be wondering if we're involved. Let's say we're negotiating with a country, and we haven't committed troops yet because things are still at the bargaining stage. Suddenly Nastistan's satellite fails -- maybe some space junk hits a solar panel, or a micrometeorite smacks into it. The ruler, who's probably flaky anyway, freaks out: "The Americans are going to blow us up! Everybody in the bunker!" Then all hell breaks loose. Now the damn ambassador has to coax them back out:
"Um... Mr. Nastistan President? Can you hear me in there?"
"GO AWAY. WE DON'T LIKE YOU ANYMORE."
"Come on, you know we wouldn't kill your satellite. We're friends, we were talking. Come out and have a beer."
"NO. You just want to kill me. We're not friends anymore. And we're keeping our oil too."
"Ok, hang on there, let's not get rash, if you come out, I'll give you a snickers."
"What? Are you nuts? I've got twenty pounds of Halvah in here. Kiss my ass."
"What about a nice, shiny new Palm Pilot? I know you've been admiring mine... If you come out and resume talks, you can have it. I promise not to blow anything up."
"I'm not coming out. That crazy Cheney person is probably out there with a bazooka."
"There are NO BAZOOKAS out here. I promise. Honest. Come on, won't you come out for a few minutes? Just a few?"
And so it goes. All because the air force can't keep its mouth shut. Sigh...
You've got three posts, and up to 64 disks, with the largest disk slid down to the bottom of the first post and the smallest disk at the top, and the diameters of the disks tapering.
You have to move all the disks from the first post to the third post in such a way that no disk is ever placed on a smaller disk, and only one disk is moved at a time, one post at a time. It's harder than it looks.
Your goal: model the three posts and the 64 disks. Write a program that moves the disks from the first post to the third via the middle one, without ever violating the rules. Record the sequence, and let it run, finding the shortest sequence that works.
I don't think it's another topic; if you're talking about running a minimal set of services, then security has to rear its head because it's one of the best reasons to do that (besides performance, that is). It's a dual-whammy; you get a performance and a security boost.
But don't think this only matters in firewalls. Desktop computers without security built-in (whether they're behind a firewall or not) are incomplete.
Well, Red Hat's a primarily North American distro, all their defaults target the U.S. That probably explains why you ended up with a set of settings that were a pain. SuSE or Mandrake would probably have been a little more "open minded" if you know what I mean.
Sorry about implying that non-English languages were obscure. What I was trying ham-handedly to get at was, most of the distros I know are North American (Red Hat, Slackware, Debian I think) so they generally default to English, with a lot of users going for the default. Considering that market, an accent character would be a little obscure, a non-ordinary thing to use. Hope this pulls my foot out of my mouth... ?
There's another reason you want to turn off ALL unessential services: security.
I run Slackware at my apartment, and when I installed it, the first thing I did was make sure that the only services I installed in the first place were the ones I was going to be using daily. Since I'm using the laptop as a workstation, that means I installed almost nothing except CUPS and the client for DHCP so I could hit the web from KDE.
You might also want to go into/etc/rc.d and comment out all the lines that start services you're not running, "just in case". You can always uncomment them if you change your mind later.
But, backup for your point, I have a pretty minimal set of stuff running. And, my Slackware runs like the wind on a Pentium-III, 600Mhz with 384MB Ram. Including, believe it or not, Netbeans IDE, which is a resource hog and a half. Slackware gives it plenty of room, and I didn't even recompile anything (I like kernel modules). Fedora ran like crap, by the way, and wasn't java friendly (it installed a weird C library and I couldn't get the install to work).
You're talking about one relatively obscure thing. At least here in the U.S. no one uses "accent" and the default installs work perfectly well.
The fact that one very specific thing is difficult won't affect the rate at which people who don't use it adopt a tool.
And, anyway, in Europe (I assume this is a European language thing? Like an umlaut or something?) there are plenty of Linux guys -- if this is an issue, someone will fix it. What distro were you using? Maybe you should lean towards a European-origin distro, they probably have this worked out in their default install.
Or maybe you clicked through the localization part of the installation? They ask you which country you're in, which keyboard you're using, and so forth... Maybe you chose the wrong setting for your country/hardware?
Re:and a slightly more cynical view...
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The Cult of Mac
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· Score: 1
"I find Firefox way too slow on OS X -- which is sad, because I like Firefox, but it's just too much of a hog on my Powerbook"
Try Mozilla 1.7.3. I've been using it on my iBook and it seems to run just fine. I tried Firefox and liked Mozilla better.
Re:CULT-ture of Mac
on
The Cult of Mac
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I know what you mean.
Up a couple of years ago, I didn't have much use for macs. I thought they were pretty machines, but they just didn't feel all that useful to me. Since '95, I've generally leant heavily towards Linux systems, built from parts. I bought a blueberry iBook as an experiment, but I didn't think it was suitable for my purposes. I ended up giving it to my parents, who never touched it. I ended up selling it on Ebay.
But when they came out with OS/X, things changed. I got an iBook, and it was perfect for me. I really liked it. I ended up getting my folks an eMac, which solved their virus/trojan problem instantly. And, I found that just about anything I might want to do was there.
OS/X was the turning point for the company, I think. Their older OSes were pretty limited, but this one is great, top notch. And, my iBook rules, I use it as my main computer at home. Nothing else is as smooth to use, as refined. I really dig it.
But like you said, I like it because of what it is NOW. I didn't like their older stuff.
Individual people are starting to get really annoyed about Windows. You hear them kvetching all the time, "My computer screwed up again", "My email's all messed up", "I think I've got a virus or something, my PC's acting funny"... You hear it at work, you hear it on the web. It's a much bigger deal than all these "business pundit" types imagine. People will change the way they do things to avoid aggravation, no matter WHAT they're told to do by Microsoft or the tech pundit of the week.
Prediction Number One:
The people who will adopt Linux first are actually the home users everyone thinks will go last. The reasons are easy enough:
1. It's free. 2. It's easy enough to install and the UI is familiar enough for them to use it comfortably, especially with KDE. Plus, it does everything a home user typically does (word processing, web browsing, email) much better than Windows would. 3. It's free. 4. There is a LOT of info online about how to do Linux-related things, and people are getting used to Googling for information. This is true despite the constant assertion by techno-snobs that Joe Sixpack is too stupid or lazy to do this. Maybe they forgot to tell Joe. 5. It's free. 6. Unlike a business, there's no boss to tell you that you can't switch to Linux. 7. It's free. 8. Home users will feel cool and hackerish using Linux -- they'll feel they're clued in to something, hip and different. People DO care about this. It turns 'em on, and makes them look cool to their friends. Social capital -- don't underestimate it. 9. It's free.
People are going to say this is bullshit. But look how many people are picking up Firefox. It's clear they have the initiative to try new things when they're annoyed enough. And they're definitely annoyed.
Prediction Number Two:
People with enough money to buy a Mac are going to switch to Mac OS/X in larger numbers, faster, than the x86 crowd, because of the "cool" factor. Most artists, writers, etc, already use Macs. They're very trendy computers. And the more rich/popular people use Macs, the more regular people will see changing to something different as an attractive thing. So Mac use will foster eventual Linux use among people who can't afford Macs.
Prediction Number Three:
The holdouts will be organizations which are averse to change, which move glacially. Governments, for example. Individual departments might switch over, but as a whole, it'll be slow going. I know MY shop will be among the last to change over. There's a whole cultural pro-Windows bias there. I see any transition happening on the server-side first, because we're already running some unix boxen and that transition would be the easiest. We're talking far backend, not middleware or frontend, here.
Some private companies might be slow to switch over, too, because of their investment in custom software, and their lack of Linux-related expertise. THIS transition is going to be very painful.
So, here it is in a nutshell:
Rich/affluent people: Mac OS/X on fast machines.
Regular people: Mostly switching to some form of Linux, whichever gets buzz for being easiest to install and manage.
Techies: Linux or OS/X depending on relative wealth. Maybe both in lots of cases.
Small, fast companies: Linux or *BSD.
Large, cautious companies: Windows for many years.
Most (almost all) software development performed for American companies is custom IT work for internal systems. Most of this was traditionally done by Americans living in the same place as the company's main office.
Outsourcing (at least the offshore and H1-B components of it) is to a large extent about eliminating those jobs so the companies can reap larger profits by paying out tiny little Indian salaries instead of the living wage Americans require.
The situation isn't fair because there's no way the American developers can compete. The Indians have a tiny little cost of living to go with their tiny little salary, so they are actually living well at that wage. Since it's really all about money, the situation is unfairly tilted against the Americans. And our government, which is SUPPOSED to work for US, is selling us out for campaign contributions and kickbacks, by allowing this to take place.
That is the situation. Please don't conjure images of scrappy little companies trying to survive -- it's about giant corporations trying to squeeze an extra fifty cents' profit per share by letting their workers starve, and politicians selling their souls, whoring around for a little time on Capital Hill.
I don't understand how you arrived at this position. Running a Windows machine is MUCH more of a pain in the butt than running a Linux (or *BSD) machine. With Windows, something is ALWAYS going wrong. Someone's trying to hack you, some schmuck browsed a porn site and loaded you up with viruses or spyware or worse, you patch and crash your machine, worms run throughout your LAN because some CS senior got "frisky" with one of the PCs in the lab...
With a Linux or *BSD machine, you have to work for a few days to set it up initially (securing the machine, configuring services and firewall, fetching the initial set of patches, etc) but then things calm down. Sure, you'll check for patches fairly regularly, and patch the machine when something comes up, and you'll maintain your users and watch your logs...
But on a Windows box you'll be doing all that AND sweating bullets, watching your workstation with a handful of prayer beads, praying your college's OWN STUDENTS don't make a horse's ass out of you.
What good is the ease of point and click when your computer blows up on a regular basis? And, Windows is a pain to back up and fix, besides. It's not like you can pop in a live CD and rebuild your system, because of the registry, and so forth.
At least with Linux, you can always pop in a Knoppix and take a look around, fixing as you go.
I for one was really disappointed by the email. I was hoping for another monkey boy dance, or at least a little shouting. All I got was a big chunk of plaintext. What is he, on meds or something? It's just a big letdown.
Windows servers ARE more persnickety. Just recently, one of our development servers mysteriously stopped responding to anything we did. Keyboard and mouse were dead, and it stopped putting out video (black screen only). It was on a KVM switch, so we thought it might be that. So we reset the switch, we doublechecked the cables, etc... It wasn't the switch (the other computer on that switch was working fine). Eventually we hard-booted the computer, which came back up. It then reported that one of the services failed to start back up. Reboot again, this time normally. As far as I know, it went back to normal at that point -- I had to go to a meeting and couldn't wait around to see what happened.
I've never had a Linux box suddenly up and die on me, without warning. The Win2000 box just up and died. Weird.
Are you REALLY this big a dumbass, or are you trolling/fooling around? Because you're talking as if you think any of this shit actually matters... And as if you weren't pestering me for no reason whatsoever, other than patting yourself on the back for being so wise and honest, or whatever it is you're telling yourself.
Sigh... What nonsense. Ok, I'll play along with your troll, because I'm bored and this beats watching TV (hint: that's why MOST people post on Slashdot). So, since you want to play "psychiatrist", let me give you some free advice:
Taking these posts at face value, you are definitely a loser, clearly one of those idiot fanboys who thinks this is actually a NEWS site, and not a over-hyped chatroom where people spout off on their usually uninformed opinions. One of your major problems is that you think these posts actually MATTER, which is why you get so full of moral righteousness over a SILLY SLASHDOT POST, and why you spend so much time picking posts apart as if you were Woodward and Bernstein (hint #2: you're not, you're just another sad Slashdot obsessive).
I recommend you pull your head out of your butt as soon as possible because the air up there is killing you. I think you need to repeat to yourself, several times, "this is ONLY Slashdot. We are not journalists. We are not expert witnesses in court. We can say ANYTHING we want, or nothing if we want. And it isn't right for people to go around attacking others because they don't agree with them, like for instance, when I pester Crazyphilman, who is a kind and generous soul and who I should immediately send a most apologetic e-card and a box of mint milano cookies."
Try this several times, then send the cookies. Trust me, you'll feel better.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think "contrarians" are the problem; I think the problem is that the people who become journalists do so via a college program in which they don't actually learn ANYTHING except how to write cleverly (and supply the correct APA-format references).
;)
Think about how college courses are structured. Journalism majors have a few dozen required credits in "How to write using third-person while supplying a reference for every thought they express", the implication being that no one ever has an original thought -- everything must be attributed. If you've ever heard a journalism flack say "who said that" after you've said something witty, and felt the raw, unquenchable desire to grab that person by their lower jaw and start yanking it in different directions to see how much "play" there is in the joints, you know what I mean.
In the U.S. at least, journalism majors also have to select a minor, i.e. a couple of dozen credits in some specific knowledge area, to broaden their intellect. It doesn't work; they select whatever they think they can get good grades in without having to work too hard, something that looks vaguely interesting. It'll be something like art history, or art, or philosophy... I'm not saying these studies are easy, just that their MINORS are because you never get up to the upper level classes in a minor -- you just do the freshman and sophomore stuff, usually.
Finally, they have to select a few dozen credits worth of liberal arts classes, so they don't get too specialized (read: knowledeable). So they pick up a survey course here, an entry-level course there, all stuff that doesn't bend their brains too much.
The result of all this is a person who doesn't actually KNOW much of anything, but who believes he can write about anything provided he has access to a public library and the internet. He thinks that as long as his citations are in the correct format, everyone will agree that his research is good. And, he thinks that he's actually qualified to determine whether one side or another in a technical debate is "right" (or, if he, with his years of survey course wisdom, can't determine which one is right, that it's "up for grabs", so he gives both sides equal time).
It's the American system that is the problem. It sets up an environment in which the people writing about a thing are usually the least qualified to write about it.
The only way to fix the system would be for a newspaper (magazine, etc) to keep a well-educated technical staff on board for research purposes. But that'll never happen -- fact-checkers were journalism majors too. Such irony, there.
FWIW: I majored in computer science, minoring in mathematics. We in the techie subculture generally thought the journalism majors were a bunch of dumb drunks. But, to each, his own!
I see what you mean, but I can't help think this is going to turn into a cold-war style escalation which will lead us to the point where all resumes are considered fiction and no one is ever believed about anything they say.
The results of that, are anybody's guess. Maybe someone will come up with an on-the-spot skills test?
Taking Java as the example, I'd agree with you to a degree. The base language didn't change much, and many of the libraries were the same. However, the GUI development setup changed completely, so a large chunk of knowledge basically went out the window. While it's true you can still do AWT programming, a modern boss would probably require you to code in Swing, which has a big learning curve (the books are all huge, big old boat anchors).
.Net for two years, your head will be cluttered with competing ways of doing things, which are similar but oh-so-slightly different, and it'll take some time to get back in the swing of doing things the Java way (pardon the pun).
Then, you've got to learn a new IDE, generally, which is a pain.
And if you've been doing, say,
I never had the chance to check out Austin, myself, although I thought San Antonio was kind of cool. I loved the Riverwalk.
The real problem with your "it's possible" theorem is this: it takes three to five years of working experience for, say, a recruiter to consider you a seasoned professional in ANY technology. If you're working with more than one technology at a time, your attention is diluted between the two. If we're talking about three, five, seven, etc, then the situation becomes more and more unrealistic.
.Net for two more. If you now want to do Java, there will have been some language releases since you last touched it. Instead of AWT, you'll be looking at Swing or SWT. Your experience will no longer be relevant anyway, and just like that, you're a rookie again.
Another factor is, let's say that you work in Java for three years, then
Given five years of experience, it's very unlikely that a person will be able to really master and stay current in more than one or two. And given longer experience, older subjects will likely be obsolete.
No disrespect, but I find your claim a bit hard to swallow, too. You're only going to be current in the stuff you've been doing this year; think about it. Everything changes too fast for your experience to have such a long shelf life.
It's awful, isn't it? The worst thing is, if you've got a good resume, people assume you're lying, even though you're not. Makes you want to throw the whole thing in the river and become a mugger, specializing in HR flacks... ;)
Just out of curiosity, how'd a brit get to Texas, of all places???
True; I'm a better programmer than wordsmith. Actually, I was thinking of the kind of person who claims to be an expert COM+/ASP, J2EE, .Net, AND mainframe developer, with about four years experience. WTF???
If you've got four or five years, I might buy that you're exceptional at one, maybe two of the technologies, but ALL of them? How the hell would anyone keep all that crap in their head at the same time? It's bizarre that someone would even pretend to be able to do this.
I think maybe people mean "I've done a little bit of work in X technology, and I know how to use Google, so I'm an expert".
Heh heh... That's a good one. Ain't it the truth?
Although... The two fictional stories are quite different. If titled, they might be:
"A relatively boring story of four years in which nothing serious happens and everyone calms down" by Kerry.
"We are at war with Eurasia -- we have always been at war with Eurasia" By Bush.
I've given up on programming for a private company. There are plenty of jobs in civil service, academia, large public institutions... Many of those won't be programming jobs in the future, but at least they pay the bills.
The real last straw for me was the start of the recession, right around 2000, when I started seeing job offers that required several years experience in twenty technologies, some of which were mutually exclusive.
Let alone the fact (the FACT) that no one is capable of getting five years meaningful experience in all those technologies at a single company.
No, what really bothered me was this: Companies inflate their requirements for two primary reasons:
1. They want to make sure that NOBODY will qualify for the job so they can justify hiring an H1-B to fill it, instead of an American, or a Brit, or whatever.
2. They want to make sure that anyone they DO hire MUST have lied on the resume, so they can fire him whenever they want without paying unemployment benefits.
This wasn't what was going on where I used to work; that manager just didn't care, and didn't want to listen to my complaints. But you can be pretty sure that a lot of companies work this way.
Be careful with those resume fictions; they could bite you in the ass later, when you try to vest stock options or otherwise stand up for yourself.
Yeah, my old boss used to give me resumes to vet. I used to see stuff like "ten years .Net experience!" At first I was shocked, but then I got out my red pen and started annotating. I'd use very descriptive terms: "Bullshit", "He's lying, it hasn't existed that long", "Does this company even exist?" and so forth. Nobody cared. They ignored my comments, hired the low bid, and never asked me to look at resumes again.
Since then I've realized that at some companies, resumes really ARE expected to be fiction, and they select the fiction they enjoy the most.
YES, but if they cared at all about security, they wouldn't have mentioned that this even exists. They would have simply used it, and the country affected would just experience mysterious satellite outages. Then, they could have played dumb and carried out whatever plan they were working on.
:)
Now that they've said that they have this, and admitted that it exists, they've shot themselves in the foot.
First of all, announcing the idea gives everyone else the idea. Everyone who has the know-how to build something like this and the money to buy parts now at least has the subconscious thought, "Hey, that's pretty neat. I wonder if I can take out DirecTV with this?" If you've ever hung around physics majors when they're bored, you know I'm not exactly reaching here. And it only takes a couple of cases of beer to get a techie to decide to start a project up.
Second, and more worrying, now every time a satellite fails in a country we're not buddy-buddy with, they're going to be wondering if we're involved. Let's say we're negotiating with a country, and we haven't committed troops yet because things are still at the bargaining stage. Suddenly Nastistan's satellite fails -- maybe some space junk hits a solar panel, or a micrometeorite smacks into it. The ruler, who's probably flaky anyway, freaks out: "The Americans are going to blow us up! Everybody in the bunker!" Then all hell breaks loose. Now the damn ambassador has to coax them back out:
"Um... Mr. Nastistan President? Can you hear me in there?"
"GO AWAY. WE DON'T LIKE YOU ANYMORE."
"Come on, you know we wouldn't kill your satellite. We're friends, we were talking. Come out and have a beer."
"NO. You just want to kill me. We're not friends anymore. And we're keeping our oil too."
"Ok, hang on there, let's not get rash, if you come out, I'll give you a snickers."
"What? Are you nuts? I've got twenty pounds of Halvah in here. Kiss my ass."
"What about a nice, shiny new Palm Pilot? I know you've been admiring mine... If you come out and resume talks, you can have it. I promise not to blow anything up."
"I'm not coming out. That crazy Cheney person is probably out there with a bazooka."
"There are NO BAZOOKAS out here. I promise. Honest. Come on, won't you come out for a few minutes? Just a few?"
And so it goes. All because the air force can't keep its mouth shut. Sigh...
Do "Towers of Hanoi".
You've got three posts, and up to 64 disks, with the largest disk slid down to the bottom of the first post and the smallest disk at the top, and the diameters of the disks tapering.
You have to move all the disks from the first post to the third post in such a way that no disk is ever placed on a smaller disk, and only one disk is moved at a time, one post at a time. It's harder than it looks.
Your goal: model the three posts and the 64 disks. Write a program that moves the disks from the first post to the third via the middle one, without ever violating the rules. Record the sequence, and let it run, finding the shortest sequence that works.
It's kind of a fun one.
I don't think it's another topic; if you're talking about running a minimal set of services, then security has to rear its head because it's one of the best reasons to do that (besides performance, that is). It's a dual-whammy; you get a performance and a security boost.
But don't think this only matters in firewalls. Desktop computers without security built-in (whether they're behind a firewall or not) are incomplete.
Well, Red Hat's a primarily North American distro, all their defaults target the U.S. That probably explains why you ended up with a set of settings that were a pain. SuSE or Mandrake would probably have been a little more "open minded" if you know what I mean.
Sorry about implying that non-English languages were obscure. What I was trying ham-handedly to get at was, most of the distros I know are North American (Red Hat, Slackware, Debian I think) so they generally default to English, with a lot of users going for the default. Considering that market, an accent character would be a little obscure, a non-ordinary thing to use. Hope this pulls my foot out of my mouth... ?
There's another reason you want to turn off ALL unessential services: security.
/etc/rc.d and comment out all the lines that start services you're not running, "just in case". You can always uncomment them if you change your mind later.
I run Slackware at my apartment, and when I installed it, the first thing I did was make sure that the only services I installed in the first place were the ones I was going to be using daily. Since I'm using the laptop as a workstation, that means I installed almost nothing except CUPS and the client for DHCP so I could hit the web from KDE.
You might also want to go into
But, backup for your point, I have a pretty minimal set of stuff running. And, my Slackware runs like the wind on a Pentium-III, 600Mhz with 384MB Ram. Including, believe it or not, Netbeans IDE, which is a resource hog and a half. Slackware gives it plenty of room, and I didn't even recompile anything (I like kernel modules). Fedora ran like crap, by the way, and wasn't java friendly (it installed a weird C library and I couldn't get the install to work).
You're talking about one relatively obscure thing. At least here in the U.S. no one uses "accent" and the default installs work perfectly well.
The fact that one very specific thing is difficult won't affect the rate at which people who don't use it adopt a tool.
And, anyway, in Europe (I assume this is a European language thing? Like an umlaut or something?) there are plenty of Linux guys -- if this is an issue, someone will fix it. What distro were you using? Maybe you should lean towards a European-origin distro, they probably have this worked out in their default install.
Or maybe you clicked through the localization part of the installation? They ask you which country you're in, which keyboard you're using, and so forth... Maybe you chose the wrong setting for your country/hardware?
"I find Firefox way too slow on OS X -- which is sad, because I like Firefox, but it's just too much of a hog on my Powerbook"
Try Mozilla 1.7.3. I've been using it on my iBook and it seems to run just fine. I tried Firefox and liked Mozilla better.
I know what you mean.
Up a couple of years ago, I didn't have much use for macs. I thought they were pretty machines, but they just didn't feel all that useful to me. Since '95, I've generally leant heavily towards Linux systems, built from parts. I bought a blueberry iBook as an experiment, but I didn't think it was suitable for my purposes. I ended up giving it to my parents, who never touched it. I ended up selling it on Ebay.
But when they came out with OS/X, things changed. I got an iBook, and it was perfect for me. I really liked it. I ended up getting my folks an eMac, which solved their virus/trojan problem instantly. And, I found that just about anything I might want to do was there.
OS/X was the turning point for the company, I think. Their older OSes were pretty limited, but this one is great, top notch. And, my iBook rules, I use it as my main computer at home. Nothing else is as smooth to use, as refined. I really dig it.
But like you said, I like it because of what it is NOW. I didn't like their older stuff.
Individual people are starting to get really annoyed about Windows. You hear them kvetching all the time, "My computer screwed up again", "My email's all messed up", "I think I've got a virus or something, my PC's acting funny"... You hear it at work, you hear it on the web. It's a much bigger deal than all these "business pundit" types imagine. People will change the way they do things to avoid aggravation, no matter WHAT they're told to do by Microsoft or the tech pundit of the week.
Prediction Number One:
The people who will adopt Linux first are actually the home users everyone thinks will go last. The reasons are easy enough:
1. It's free.
2. It's easy enough to install and the UI is familiar enough for them to use it comfortably, especially with KDE. Plus, it does everything a home user typically does (word processing, web browsing, email) much better than Windows would.
3. It's free.
4. There is a LOT of info online about how to do Linux-related things, and people are getting used to Googling for information. This is true despite the constant assertion by techno-snobs that Joe Sixpack is too stupid or lazy to do this. Maybe they forgot to tell Joe.
5. It's free.
6. Unlike a business, there's no boss to tell you that you can't switch to Linux.
7. It's free.
8. Home users will feel cool and hackerish using Linux -- they'll feel they're clued in to something, hip and different. People DO care about this. It turns 'em on, and makes them look cool to their friends. Social capital -- don't underestimate it.
9. It's free.
People are going to say this is bullshit. But look how many people are picking up Firefox. It's clear they have the initiative to try new things when they're annoyed enough. And they're definitely annoyed.
Prediction Number Two:
People with enough money to buy a Mac are going to switch to Mac OS/X in larger numbers, faster, than the x86 crowd, because of the "cool" factor. Most artists, writers, etc, already use Macs. They're very trendy computers. And the more rich/popular people use Macs, the more regular people will see changing to something different as an attractive thing. So Mac use will foster eventual Linux use among people who can't afford Macs.
Prediction Number Three:
The holdouts will be organizations which are averse to change, which move glacially. Governments, for example. Individual departments might switch over, but as a whole, it'll be slow going. I know MY shop will be among the last to change over. There's a whole cultural pro-Windows bias there. I see any transition happening on the server-side first, because we're already running some unix boxen and that transition would be the easiest. We're talking far backend, not middleware or frontend, here.
Some private companies might be slow to switch over, too, because of their investment in custom software, and their lack of Linux-related expertise. THIS transition is going to be very painful.
So, here it is in a nutshell:
Rich/affluent people: Mac OS/X on fast machines.
Regular people: Mostly switching to some form of Linux, whichever gets buzz for being easiest to install and manage.
Techies: Linux or OS/X depending on relative wealth. Maybe both in lots of cases.
Small, fast companies: Linux or *BSD.
Large, cautious companies: Windows for many years.
Government: Mixed bag.
There's one giant hole in your argument.
Most (almost all) software development performed for American companies is custom IT work for internal systems. Most of this was traditionally done by Americans living in the same place as the company's main office.
Outsourcing (at least the offshore and H1-B components of it) is to a large extent about eliminating those jobs so the companies can reap larger profits by paying out tiny little Indian salaries instead of the living wage Americans require.
The situation isn't fair because there's no way the American developers can compete. The Indians have a tiny little cost of living to go with their tiny little salary, so they are actually living well at that wage. Since it's really all about money, the situation is unfairly tilted against the Americans. And our government, which is SUPPOSED to work for US, is selling us out for campaign contributions and kickbacks, by allowing this to take place.
That is the situation. Please don't conjure images of scrappy little companies trying to survive -- it's about giant corporations trying to squeeze an extra fifty cents' profit per share by letting their workers starve, and politicians selling their souls, whoring around for a little time on Capital Hill.
I don't understand how you arrived at this position. Running a Windows machine is MUCH more of a pain in the butt than running a Linux (or *BSD) machine. With Windows, something is ALWAYS going wrong. Someone's trying to hack you, some schmuck browsed a porn site and loaded you up with viruses or spyware or worse, you patch and crash your machine, worms run throughout your LAN because some CS senior got "frisky" with one of the PCs in the lab...
With a Linux or *BSD machine, you have to work for a few days to set it up initially (securing the machine, configuring services and firewall, fetching the initial set of patches, etc) but then things calm down. Sure, you'll check for patches fairly regularly, and patch the machine when something comes up, and you'll maintain your users and watch your logs...
But on a Windows box you'll be doing all that AND sweating bullets, watching your workstation with a handful of prayer beads, praying your college's OWN STUDENTS don't make a horse's ass out of you.
What good is the ease of point and click when your computer blows up on a regular basis? And, Windows is a pain to back up and fix, besides. It's not like you can pop in a live CD and rebuild your system, because of the registry, and so forth.
At least with Linux, you can always pop in a Knoppix and take a look around, fixing as you go.
I for one was really disappointed by the email. I was hoping for another monkey boy dance, or at least a little shouting. All I got was a big chunk of plaintext. What is he, on meds or something? It's just a big letdown.
Maybe if we got him some espresso...
Windows servers ARE more persnickety. Just recently, one of our development servers mysteriously stopped responding to anything we did. Keyboard and mouse were dead, and it stopped putting out video (black screen only). It was on a KVM switch, so we thought it might be that. So we reset the switch, we doublechecked the cables, etc... It wasn't the switch (the other computer on that switch was working fine). Eventually we hard-booted the computer, which came back up. It then reported that one of the services failed to start back up. Reboot again, this time normally. As far as I know, it went back to normal at that point -- I had to go to a meeting and couldn't wait around to see what happened.
I've never had a Linux box suddenly up and die on me, without warning. The Win2000 box just up and died. Weird.
Are you REALLY this big a dumbass, or are you trolling/fooling around? Because you're talking as if you think any of this shit actually matters... And as if you weren't pestering me for no reason whatsoever, other than patting yourself on the back for being so wise and honest, or whatever it is you're telling yourself.
Sigh... What nonsense. Ok, I'll play along with your troll, because I'm bored and this beats watching TV (hint: that's why MOST people post on Slashdot). So, since you want to play "psychiatrist", let me give you some free advice:
Taking these posts at face value, you are definitely a loser, clearly one of those idiot fanboys who thinks this is actually a NEWS site, and not a over-hyped chatroom where people spout off on their usually uninformed opinions. One of your major problems is that you think these posts actually MATTER, which is why you get so full of moral righteousness over a SILLY SLASHDOT POST, and why you spend so much time picking posts apart as if you were Woodward and Bernstein (hint #2: you're not, you're just another sad Slashdot obsessive).
I recommend you pull your head out of your butt as soon as possible because the air up there is killing you. I think you need to repeat to yourself, several times, "this is ONLY Slashdot. We are not journalists. We are not expert witnesses in court. We can say ANYTHING we want, or nothing if we want. And it isn't right for people to go around attacking others because they don't agree with them, like for instance, when I pester Crazyphilman, who is a kind and generous soul and who I should immediately send a most apologetic e-card and a box of mint milano cookies."
Try this several times, then send the cookies. Trust me, you'll feel better.