Hope you're not carrying your laptop in your shootin' hand, or you'll look stupid when someone takes your laptop anyway.
I don't carry a pistol, I just pay a shifty looking muslim to wear a turban and a bulky jacket and stand right next to me with a Koran in one hand and the other hand in his pocket. I find it a substantial upgrade from my previous security systems of "Oily Southern Baptist Street Preacher" (people kept beating him up) and "Pack of starving pit bulls" (surprisingly difficult to keep them both starving and effective).
Lot of them claim to be written at a lower level than windows checks, whatever the hell that means. It's all snakeoil. To get a really reliable system you have to get a lo-jack or some other theft tracking system, and those you have to pay a monthly fee for.
Just get it insured, and keep your backups current.
I agree completely. It's not a big group of people, and maintaining the kernel or even doing enough development to justify a fork would require a lot more people than they've got.
Fool! Do you not know that profit is the antithesis of open source? Taking one dollar in profit makes you no different from Microsoft! Next you'll be hoarding your sources and throwing chairs!
Shrug. Let 'em fork it. I doubt they'll be able to swing enough maintainers to seriously effect development on the main fork.
One of the great strengths of open source is that it allows for competing code. If the new fork is better (I view this as unlikely) then I'll switch. I'm about what works.
When the level of discourse falls to articles of faith and prejudice, it's not about what's best for the code anymore. It's about your personal ideology, y
That's a good point. Like any other security system, you have to weigh cost vs benefit...There is no need to add massive redundancy and overhead on every single server, and doing so would have other effects beyond just overhead...When you put maximum security on everything, what you're really doing is making the kiosk computer in the mail room the security equivalent of the accounting mainframe...Not good. That's the kind of thing the government is always trying to do.
Still, intelligent accurate logging on important systems and on springboard systems that could give an unscrupulous user leverage on better systems will save you a lot of heartache down the road.
No, I'm simply saying that while sure, in a perfect world where everyone is lawful good and all is sunshine and bunnies, it might be reasonable to expect the victim to be better than the aggressor, to show mercy even when they know none would have been shown them.
But here, in this world, it is far more likely that the many enemies SCO has made for itself will be lining up to tear bits out of them in any way they can, and while I personally take no joy in the fight now that it's over, I'm not going to start throwing moral judgments at the victors when they start doing as victors will.
I'm not sure what it says about your moral fiber that you're hot and bothered at the thought of geekish gloating, which you can then condemn. It's like the preacher taking names outside the titty bar...Sure he's there to look down on the patrons, but the simple fact of the matter is, he's also standing outside the titty bar. If he wasn't interested, he'd be somewhere else.
SCO is pathetic. I won't waste my scorn on them. Still, I can't help imagining what their attitude would be if the situation was reversed. Would they be magnanimous in victory?
To be fair, I was suspicious of him at first (anyone else suspicious of fantasy authors who skip paperback?), and didn't read it until it had been out for a few years...I was looking for reasons dislike him, and I found plenty.
It's rare that a shorter copy/editorial cycle will produce longer works. Anyway, the simple truth of it is that there are whole books that should have been edited out, and no one did it. Either he had amazing free reign: "You can have the first chapter when I finish the last chapter and any edits will cause the next book to be 6 months later" or someone was encouraging him to write longer.
But so so true. I've pulled all nighters and all weekers and all kinds of other crap. Did it for fun, did it for work, did it just because I didn't feel like "wasting time" with crap like sleep.
It's not about why you stay up, it's about your willingness to abuse your body to stay up. I abused the living crap out of legal stimulants, and I still have issues with it. Crap, I even drank too much coffee today, and I damn well should know better by now, but there is that persistent "The meat is weak" idea, where the mind is transcendent and the body is just a wimpy anchor holding you back.
The worst one I ever remember...I fell asleep in my car, parked in front of my apartment building. I'd managed to get back to the place, but I couldn't get up the energy to get out of the car. Slept there for 7 hours; someone eventually called the police.
It's news for nerds man, that's what we care about.
Laying aside the whole, "Moment of silence for the fallen geek/Bell tolls for thee" moment, I really have very few questions. I'd be interested in knowing if he was hammering down the stimulants during his marathon session; that would make sense. But besides that, I really only care about what game he was playing.
The publisher is only going to encourage excess, because it prolongs the gravy train. I can't believe how many people are posting things like, "I started hating the series at book 8, but I'm heartbroken that I won't see the end!" They knew they had you hooked, and were just milking you for an extra dime.
The only two possibilities are the following:
RJ got famous enough that he could tell his editors to go screw themselves, and got lost in his own subplots. I call this "The Stephen King disease" after it's most famous victim.
or,
The publishers and editors actively encouraged him to linguistic excess to reap greater profits from his work.
I'd prefer the latter, honestly, because there is nothing worse than seeing a genius lose his focus and purity and fall vicitm to his own bad habits. Better it was greed than venal stupidity.
Fuck! David Gemmell is dead? Now THAT is a fucking tragedy. How the hell did I miss that?
You've spoiled the ironic amusement I felt at RJ's death...I knew he'd pull something off to avoid finishing the series. That's why I stopped reading it...A decade ago.
I read all the same people you read, but alas, my enjoyment of them has dimmed since I was younger. Williams has held up best, in my mind, followed by McCaffrey and Brooks. I never liked Goodkind (always viewed him as a Robert Jordan rip-off, actually), and Eddings, who I would have put near the top once...After you've read enough of his work, it all pales.
Meh. All that is pointless, because it doesn't address social engineering or intentional internal sabotage.
What you need are good audit and logging procedures, to help you pinpoint the vector of intrusion, and to minimize the damage caused. That's a basic principle for financial systems, and it's one that could benefit from being extended to general users.
The goal is not even to do big brother crap (though this could be misused that way) but simply to have an accurate record of what's going on in your systems. Once you have that, all other problems can be addressed more effectively, and solutions can be generated that can provide security without overly hindering users. If you don't have an accurate idea of how your systems are being breached, you're forced to employ blanket policies that hinder productivity and breed dissatisfaction.
Yea, I thought a lot of his ideas were very clever, very original...But that was quickly swamped by the sheer quantity of prose. For the first three books, which were very dense, you could hold out hope for an actual resolution...It really seemed like he was pushing toward something.
The ending of book three however, and the beginning of book four dashed those hopes. The only thing that kept me going past that was Matt, and as he became a less significant character I became less interested overall.
Rand never grabbed me as a protagonist. The "reluctant hero" archetype can only be played for so long before the hero has to man up and take some responsibility...Rand never did that (in any book I read)...The closest he came was trying to be what he thought a hero ought to be, and that's not the same at all.
Yea, I held on just in the hopes that he would wrap it up, though I stopped enjoying anything at 5, I believe. And the language I could handle, though the Eddings-esque character-typing, where you know the default reaction of every character to every situation by about the 4th book, was seriously annoying. All the women acted one way, all the men acted another way. The men never understood the women, the women never understood the men, blah blah blah hilarity fails to ensue.
But when he starts adding wildly unnecessary characters in book 6 and 7, that basically said to me, "Hi, I'm never going to wrap anything up, EVER! Ha! Sucker!"
I'll even admit to a grim chuckle when I found out he was diagnosed with a terminal disease...I don't wish him ill or anything, but stringing out a series that far, just because you can...Well, you're courting nonsense like this. And all the diehard fans, who bought your work eternally, and waded through entire books that didn't hardly advance the plot at all...Well, you screwed 'em. Hard core.
Agreed wrt Eddings...I read enough of his work to find it repetitive, and then went back over the older stuff, and was amazed at how pat it was. It definitely speaks to a younger audience.
Martin is interesting, and his scope is epic, and his tone is adult. I never really got hooked on the series though. Not enough characters that I really enjoyed.
Brooks is kind of a must-read if you're into fantasy epics...Certainly one of the big names. I'm not going to rhapsodize about the works, because they aren't all that, but they're original and interesting, with good tone and interesting settings. It's harder to read as an adult, however (similar to Eddings).
Bujold has made a recent foray into fantasy, and while the current "Sharing Knife" series doesn't thrill me, the three previous books (Curse of Chalion, Paladin of Souls, and Hallowed Hunt) were some of the best fantasy I've read in a very long time...Her sci-fi is top notch as well.
Terry Pratchett has grown on me as well; I read the first few discworld books when they came out and was unimpressed, but I got back into them later, and the last 10 or so have been phenomenal, and, better still, while related, they all stand alone.
One of the best series ever, but you couldn't finish it? How can you put those two together?
I thought it started with promise, imagination, and a world of potential, and then faltered and fell apart in the massive proliferations of boring subplots and uninteresting secondary...hell, tertiary characters.
Nothing was ever resolved. Whole books were taken up with conflicts that didn't even relate to the plot line of the series. Interesting main characters didn't even show up for whole books, while astoundingly boring third rank characters took up hundreds of pages!
I stopped reading after book 7, and the fact that nothing ever went anywhere just spoils the whole series for me.
So the bar for literary criticism is that you must be more famous than the person you're talking about? Or maybe just more published? If the latter, then there is no one who can talk about Jordan, because 11 thousand-page books is hard to top.
As another slashdotter who is not as published or as well known as Jordan, I feel nonetheless confident that in describing Jordan's work as over-wordy, slow-paced, and unfocused I am echoing the opinion of a great number of writers more accomplished than myself, and more accomplished than Jordan himself.
How so many people struggled beyond the 6th book, I'll never know. The man needed an editor to bitch slap him to the point where he could resolve something without immediately turning around and creating something else needful of resolution.
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't last beyond a hard drive wipe, and that would probably be done first thing, especially if you're running linux.
Hope you're not carrying your laptop in your shootin' hand, or you'll look stupid when someone takes your laptop anyway.
I don't carry a pistol, I just pay a shifty looking muslim to wear a turban and a bulky jacket and stand right next to me with a Koran in one hand and the other hand in his pocket. I find it a substantial upgrade from my previous security systems of "Oily Southern Baptist Street Preacher" (people kept beating him up) and "Pack of starving pit bulls" (surprisingly difficult to keep them both starving and effective).
Lot of them claim to be written at a lower level than windows checks, whatever the hell that means. It's all snakeoil. To get a really reliable system you have to get a lo-jack or some other theft tracking system, and those you have to pay a monthly fee for.
Just get it insured, and keep your backups current.
Especially because they reformulated semtex to make it more detectable by bomb sniffing dogs. They'll be on you like you're smuggling milkbones.
That's only true if it's not Jack Thompson.
QUICK! TO THE BANNEDWAGON!
I agree completely. It's not a big group of people, and maintaining the kernel or even doing enough development to justify a fork would require a lot more people than they've got.
Fool! Do you not know that profit is the antithesis of open source? Taking one dollar in profit makes you no different from Microsoft! Next you'll be hoarding your sources and throwing chairs!
Yadda yadda yadda, etc, and so forth.
Shrug. Let 'em fork it. I doubt they'll be able to swing enough maintainers to seriously effect development on the main fork.
One of the great strengths of open source is that it allows for competing code. If the new fork is better (I view this as unlikely) then I'll switch. I'm about what works.
When the level of discourse falls to articles of faith and prejudice, it's not about what's best for the code anymore. It's about your personal ideology, y
That's a good point. Like any other security system, you have to weigh cost vs benefit...There is no need to add massive redundancy and overhead on every single server, and doing so would have other effects beyond just overhead...When you put maximum security on everything, what you're really doing is making the kiosk computer in the mail room the security equivalent of the accounting mainframe...Not good. That's the kind of thing the government is always trying to do.
Still, intelligent accurate logging on important systems and on springboard systems that could give an unscrupulous user leverage on better systems will save you a lot of heartache down the road.
No, I'm simply saying that while sure, in a perfect world where everyone is lawful good and all is sunshine and bunnies, it might be reasonable to expect the victim to be better than the aggressor, to show mercy even when they know none would have been shown them.
But here, in this world, it is far more likely that the many enemies SCO has made for itself will be lining up to tear bits out of them in any way they can, and while I personally take no joy in the fight now that it's over, I'm not going to start throwing moral judgments at the victors when they start doing as victors will.
It's just the way of the world.
I'm not sure what it says about your moral fiber that you're hot and bothered at the thought of geekish gloating, which you can then condemn. It's like the preacher taking names outside the titty bar...Sure he's there to look down on the patrons, but the simple fact of the matter is, he's also standing outside the titty bar. If he wasn't interested, he'd be somewhere else.
SCO is pathetic. I won't waste my scorn on them. Still, I can't help imagining what their attitude would be if the situation was reversed. Would they be magnanimous in victory?
Somehow I doubt it.
Wizards First Rule was the only one I read...
To be fair, I was suspicious of him at first (anyone else suspicious of fantasy authors who skip paperback?), and didn't read it until it had been out for a few years...I was looking for reasons dislike him, and I found plenty.
It's rare that a shorter copy/editorial cycle will produce longer works. Anyway, the simple truth of it is that there are whole books that should have been edited out, and no one did it. Either he had amazing free reign: "You can have the first chapter when I finish the last chapter and any edits will cause the next book to be 6 months later" or someone was encouraging him to write longer.
But so so true. I've pulled all nighters and all weekers and all kinds of other crap. Did it for fun, did it for work, did it just because I didn't feel like "wasting time" with crap like sleep.
It's not about why you stay up, it's about your willingness to abuse your body to stay up. I abused the living crap out of legal stimulants, and I still have issues with it. Crap, I even drank too much coffee today, and I damn well should know better by now, but there is that persistent "The meat is weak" idea, where the mind is transcendent and the body is just a wimpy anchor holding you back.
The worst one I ever remember...I fell asleep in my car, parked in front of my apartment building. I'd managed to get back to the place, but I couldn't get up the energy to get out of the car. Slept there for 7 hours; someone eventually called the police.
It's news for nerds man, that's what we care about.
Laying aside the whole, "Moment of silence for the fallen geek/Bell tolls for thee" moment, I really have very few questions. I'd be interested in knowing if he was hammering down the stimulants during his marathon session; that would make sense. But besides that, I really only care about what game he was playing.
Yea. There are ways of doing black-box auditing and logging...Not the least to have a terminal-output hardcopy.
It's not really an often-pursued option these days, however.
The publisher is only going to encourage excess, because it prolongs the gravy train. I can't believe how many people are posting things like, "I started hating the series at book 8, but I'm heartbroken that I won't see the end!" They knew they had you hooked, and were just milking you for an extra dime.
The only two possibilities are the following:
RJ got famous enough that he could tell his editors to go screw themselves, and got lost in his own subplots. I call this "The Stephen King disease" after it's most famous victim.
or,
The publishers and editors actively encouraged him to linguistic excess to reap greater profits from his work.
I'd prefer the latter, honestly, because there is nothing worse than seeing a genius lose his focus and purity and fall vicitm to his own bad habits. Better it was greed than venal stupidity.
Fuck! David Gemmell is dead? Now THAT is a fucking tragedy. How the hell did I miss that?
You've spoiled the ironic amusement I felt at RJ's death...I knew he'd pull something off to avoid finishing the series. That's why I stopped reading it...A decade ago.
I read all the same people you read, but alas, my enjoyment of them has dimmed since I was younger. Williams has held up best, in my mind, followed by McCaffrey and Brooks. I never liked Goodkind (always viewed him as a Robert Jordan rip-off, actually), and Eddings, who I would have put near the top once...After you've read enough of his work, it all pales.
Meh. All that is pointless, because it doesn't address social engineering or intentional internal sabotage.
What you need are good audit and logging procedures, to help you pinpoint the vector of intrusion, and to minimize the damage caused. That's a basic principle for financial systems, and it's one that could benefit from being extended to general users.
The goal is not even to do big brother crap (though this could be misused that way) but simply to have an accurate record of what's going on in your systems. Once you have that, all other problems can be addressed more effectively, and solutions can be generated that can provide security without overly hindering users. If you don't have an accurate idea of how your systems are being breached, you're forced to employ blanket policies that hinder productivity and breed dissatisfaction.
Yea, I thought a lot of his ideas were very clever, very original...But that was quickly swamped by the sheer quantity of prose. For the first three books, which were very dense, you could hold out hope for an actual resolution...It really seemed like he was pushing toward something.
The ending of book three however, and the beginning of book four dashed those hopes. The only thing that kept me going past that was Matt, and as he became a less significant character I became less interested overall.
Rand never grabbed me as a protagonist. The "reluctant hero" archetype can only be played for so long before the hero has to man up and take some responsibility...Rand never did that (in any book I read)...The closest he came was trying to be what he thought a hero ought to be, and that's not the same at all.
Yea, I held on just in the hopes that he would wrap it up, though I stopped enjoying anything at 5, I believe. And the language I could handle, though the Eddings-esque character-typing, where you know the default reaction of every character to every situation by about the 4th book, was seriously annoying. All the women acted one way, all the men acted another way. The men never understood the women, the women never understood the men, blah blah blah hilarity fails to ensue.
But when he starts adding wildly unnecessary characters in book 6 and 7, that basically said to me, "Hi, I'm never going to wrap anything up, EVER! Ha! Sucker!"
I'll even admit to a grim chuckle when I found out he was diagnosed with a terminal disease...I don't wish him ill or anything, but stringing out a series that far, just because you can...Well, you're courting nonsense like this. And all the diehard fans, who bought your work eternally, and waded through entire books that didn't hardly advance the plot at all...Well, you screwed 'em. Hard core.
Agreed wrt Eddings...I read enough of his work to find it repetitive, and then went back over the older stuff, and was amazed at how pat it was. It definitely speaks to a younger audience.
Martin is interesting, and his scope is epic, and his tone is adult. I never really got hooked on the series though. Not enough characters that I really enjoyed.
Brooks is kind of a must-read if you're into fantasy epics...Certainly one of the big names. I'm not going to rhapsodize about the works, because they aren't all that, but they're original and interesting, with good tone and interesting settings. It's harder to read as an adult, however (similar to Eddings).
Bujold has made a recent foray into fantasy, and while the current "Sharing Knife" series doesn't thrill me, the three previous books (Curse of Chalion, Paladin of Souls, and Hallowed Hunt) were some of the best fantasy I've read in a very long time...Her sci-fi is top notch as well.
Terry Pratchett has grown on me as well; I read the first few discworld books when they came out and was unimpressed, but I got back into them later, and the last 10 or so have been phenomenal, and, better still, while related, they all stand alone.
One of the best series ever, but you couldn't finish it? How can you put those two together?
I thought it started with promise, imagination, and a world of potential, and then faltered and fell apart in the massive proliferations of boring subplots and uninteresting secondary...hell, tertiary characters.
Nothing was ever resolved. Whole books were taken up with conflicts that didn't even relate to the plot line of the series. Interesting main characters didn't even show up for whole books, while astoundingly boring third rank characters took up hundreds of pages!
I stopped reading after book 7, and the fact that nothing ever went anywhere just spoils the whole series for me.
So the bar for literary criticism is that you must be more famous than the person you're talking about? Or maybe just more published? If the latter, then there is no one who can talk about Jordan, because 11 thousand-page books is hard to top.
As another slashdotter who is not as published or as well known as Jordan, I feel nonetheless confident that in describing Jordan's work as over-wordy, slow-paced, and unfocused I am echoing the opinion of a great number of writers more accomplished than myself, and more accomplished than Jordan himself.
How so many people struggled beyond the 6th book, I'll never know. The man needed an editor to bitch slap him to the point where he could resolve something without immediately turning around and creating something else needful of resolution.