I pay mine through my banks online bill paying service; no automatic debits (except for the mortgage), I can sit down and figure out what needs to be spent where at what time.
I'm with you regarding letting people pull money out of my bank account without my knowledge, but you can still do away with the stamps.
We do the same, and we have a huge number of unused addresses. The way they're sold, you end up getting x with each class of line, so you buy a T2 or a T3 and you get a big pile of addresses, but we nat and proxy everything so we use hardly any of them.
Hell, I get 5 free with my DSL account, and 5 bucks more a month wouldn't be a deal breaker even there.
rewrite? What world are you living in where you didn't already have to do that? The corp where I work has a huge number of ip4 addresses, and we actually average about 1 per business unit...That's not even 10% of our assigned ips. Even if we wanted to put more things directly on the net, we'd never be able to afford the corporate mandated security architecture for every exposed machine.
Sounds to me like you're the one living in hobby-land. Most machines don't need an externally accessible IP.
The only time a gun should be a prescription item is when you're treating a horse...Unless they've suddenly become liberal on assisted suicide, but that's pretty unlikely.
What is this, intentional irony? The conservatives are just as much for the welfare state as the libs...They just want their welfare state to have more guns, illegal abortions, and bad air.//Hates the social conservatives.
Typical snobbery. As long as you're learning the theory, why shouldn't you do something practical? I'm sick to death of academics who work their asses off to create some wild assed "teaching language" or "teaching OS" just to prevent you from ever actually getting to touch the real thing.
In a practical field where you can do real assembly and work on a real OS, you ask why doing fake make-work is cruel?
Theory is fine, but theory shouldn't trump practical application in a field where practical applications are everywhere.
Re:They are using RPM 4.6.0 release candidate
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Fedora 10 Released
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· Score: 1
Fedora (and the old free (non-enterprise) Redhat) were always about the bleeding edge. You get the newest stuff that they can cram in, and bugs aren't that uncommon.
RedHat Enterprise uses much older, much more tested code. They use Fedora for their testbed, use them to push wider adoption and testing of software that they want to put into their flagship product.
It's not a bad deal, but people who put the "newest" redhat stuff on their servers make my skin crawl. It's not really for that.
Re:one of his less self-indulgent works, actually
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Anathem
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· Score: 1
Heh. I'm considering friending everyone who liked it, just on basic principle.
I'm not surprised at the differing reactions. It's dense, and it's intellectually challenging in a way that I've not had fiction challenge me in a long time. How long has it been since you've read a book that even had one good new original concept to flog? Just his exposition of the Mathic lifestyle is an interesting idea. Then you have some interesting ideas about technology and nanotech. The various bits of philosophy, some of which are significant enough to rate a whole interesting idea by themselves.
I had no problems with Cryptonomicon until the last 150-200 pages. He let the story get bogged down in uninteresting minutia. I haven't yet finished the Baroque cycle...I'm about half way; I pick it up and read a few hundred pages every now and then.
Re:Stephenson actually sucks. There. I've said it.
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Anathem
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I've read 'em both, and I can't believe you would make the "Crisply Written" argument using Vinge as your example. Are we talking about the same guy?
Asimov was crisp. Early Arthur C. Clarke was crisp. HG Wells was so crisp there aren't even words.
But modern Sci-fi? There is no one who comes even close. All the best are wordier, they add in exposition and scene setting that would have been considered frippery 50 years ago.
Stephenson's literary style is interesting. There is definitely some self-gratification there, but his writing is such that it's still pleasant (to me) to read it. His understated style of character development is very interesting.
Re:The reviewer is missing the point of the book
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Anathem
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Exactly.
I thought he chose well, and used his words to excellent effect. He also tended to put a whopping dictionary definition at the beginning of each chapter where he first introduced the word, and had a fricking glossary if you were still confused. Far as I was concerned he bent over backwards, and some of the words he invented so cleverly capture a meaning not currently adequately described, I'd like to see them in the fricking dictionary.
I don't know when people decided that they already knew enough words...Historically, sci-fi authors often invented words for new concepts.
Re:Can you have read the same book?
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Anathem
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I definitely think his style is maturing, and I completely agree with the statement about the ending. Either he ended it in media res or it wound down in a particularly boring fashion...Neither is fully satisfying.
Anathem built slowly, something I think was required for the vast amount of world building he had to pull off, and then he took all that he'd built and blitzed it for 400 pages of crazy.
It's the first real piece of old-school intellectual sci-fi I've read in a while that didn't feel shallow or contrived. Hats off, I'd love to see more of the same.
//Loved Snow Crash, Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon
//Liked Big U and Zodiac
//May one day finish the Baroque Cycle.
Re:Halfway through the book, and ...
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Anathem
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Thirded. The books not an easy read, I'll give them that, but when did that become a requirement of sci-fi?
I've read it several times now, and the social commentary is so multi-layered I keep getting more out of it, and the philosophy is interesting enough that I keep turning it over and over in my head.
I'm glad he didn't feel the need to release a mass-market, dumbed-down action piece. Look at The Diamond Age, by far his most award winning novel: he wasn't afraid to throw down the intellectual beat down there either, and it made for a better product.
The problem is not too little technology. All too often technology is crammed in where it doesn't belong, under the supervision of people who aren't capable of maintaining or correctly utilizing it.
Unless you are teaching something intrinsically tecnological, the utility of a bunch of computers is limited, doubly so if there is no budget for maintenance.
Approaching members of the opposite sex isn't something you learn from your parents, it's something you learn by doing. You have to be willing to go out and fall on your face a few times.
Some girls will approach, some girls won't. The ones that do will approach you because you impressed them from a distance; not something that the introverted geek does very often;)
The only advice I've really got is not to give up if it's something you want. I know plenty of shy single girls (no, you can't have their numbers) who would be really cool to date but put themselves in that same "I guess it's not for me" boat because of some crap experiences.
Yea I know. I was actually the "Decoy Boyfriend" for some of my female CS and Science friends, and even then they'd have people approaching them because I clearly wasn't treating them right and/or was almost certainly dating this other girl.
There is a level after which interest becomes excessive. If she's wearing a decoy ring, the answer is "No" by default. If she likes you, she'll let you know...That's the whole point.
Repeated "creepy" advances on a female coworker are more than enough to get you reprimanded and or fired. If they find it offensive, you need to back the hell off.
Mod this joker up. The vast majority of female programmers I know are older than me, and I'm not young...We're talking people who were in college in the 70's and 80's.
Why were there more then, when this wasn't even much of a profession?
I have an actual work anecdote. I'm one of two programmers that maintain a pair of mainframes full of old COBOL. All the COBOL was written by 4 programmers, all female. The youngest of them will be 43 this year. They worked at two different properties which were (at the time) owned by different parent companies but are now owned by the same.
Today, counting all the programmers in all the properties in 3 states in any direction (~10) there are no female programmers.
Now explain to me how the ratio was 4 in 5, 10 years ago, and and is 0 to 19 today in a larger sample set? When we interviewed for the other programmer who works with me, we didn't even get a single resume from a female.
Wow. You know, I'll come right out and say that the modern feminist movement irritates the living shit out of me. I'm a guy, they blame us for everything, this isn't surprising.
But this whole fucking thread is doing nothing but prove the point of everyone who says CS is hostile to women. It's fricking humiliating to be reading this thread at all because of how fucking RIGHT they apparently are.
I went to a school where the ratio was even higher than 12 to 1, and it absolutely does make for a shitty environment when a horde of socially incompetent geeks is constantly trying to chat up the few females. It'd make a normal person uncomfortable if it was a bunch of socially well-adjusted people doing it, now take the female geeky introvert, and throw them to the socially inept OMFG boobies geeks.
And your response is what? That they should be flattered? That they shouldn't be bothered? I'm pretty socially competent myself, and my grooming is well above the minimum standard (minus details like shaving every day and ironing my clothes). I get in a perfectly decent conversation with a nice geek girl, and once she becomes a non-moving target, we get mobbed by a bunch of morons.
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I pay mine through my banks online bill paying service; no automatic debits (except for the mortgage), I can sit down and figure out what needs to be spent where at what time.
I'm with you regarding letting people pull money out of my bank account without my knowledge, but you can still do away with the stamps.
We do the same, and we have a huge number of unused addresses. The way they're sold, you end up getting x with each class of line, so you buy a T2 or a T3 and you get a big pile of addresses, but we nat and proxy everything so we use hardly any of them.
Hell, I get 5 free with my DSL account, and 5 bucks more a month wouldn't be a deal breaker even there.
rewrite? What world are you living in where you didn't already have to do that? The corp where I work has a huge number of ip4 addresses, and we actually average about 1 per business unit...That's not even 10% of our assigned ips. Even if we wanted to put more things directly on the net, we'd never be able to afford the corporate mandated security architecture for every exposed machine.
Sounds to me like you're the one living in hobby-land. Most machines don't need an externally accessible IP.
The only time a gun should be a prescription item is when you're treating a horse...Unless they've suddenly become liberal on assisted suicide, but that's pretty unlikely.
What is this, intentional irony? The conservatives are just as much for the welfare state as the libs...They just want their welfare state to have more guns, illegal abortions, and bad air. //Hates the social conservatives.
...While number of licensed copies remains the same.
Typical snobbery. As long as you're learning the theory, why shouldn't you do something practical? I'm sick to death of academics who work their asses off to create some wild assed "teaching language" or "teaching OS" just to prevent you from ever actually getting to touch the real thing.
In a practical field where you can do real assembly and work on a real OS, you ask why doing fake make-work is cruel?
Theory is fine, but theory shouldn't trump practical application in a field where practical applications are everywhere.
Fedora (and the old free (non-enterprise) Redhat) were always about the bleeding edge. You get the newest stuff that they can cram in, and bugs aren't that uncommon.
RedHat Enterprise uses much older, much more tested code. They use Fedora for their testbed, use them to push wider adoption and testing of software that they want to put into their flagship product.
It's not a bad deal, but people who put the "newest" redhat stuff on their servers make my skin crawl. It's not really for that.
Heh. I'm considering friending everyone who liked it, just on basic principle.
I'm not surprised at the differing reactions. It's dense, and it's intellectually challenging in a way that I've not had fiction challenge me in a long time. How long has it been since you've read a book that even had one good new original concept to flog? Just his exposition of the Mathic lifestyle is an interesting idea. Then you have some interesting ideas about technology and nanotech. The various bits of philosophy, some of which are significant enough to rate a whole interesting idea by themselves.
I had no problems with Cryptonomicon until the last 150-200 pages. He let the story get bogged down in uninteresting minutia. I haven't yet finished the Baroque cycle...I'm about half way; I pick it up and read a few hundred pages every now and then.
I've read 'em both, and I can't believe you would make the "Crisply Written" argument using Vinge as your example. Are we talking about the same guy?
Asimov was crisp. Early Arthur C. Clarke was crisp. HG Wells was so crisp there aren't even words.
But modern Sci-fi? There is no one who comes even close. All the best are wordier, they add in exposition and scene setting that would have been considered frippery 50 years ago.
Stephenson's literary style is interesting. There is definitely some self-gratification there, but his writing is such that it's still pleasant (to me) to read it. His understated style of character development is very interesting.
Exactly.
I thought he chose well, and used his words to excellent effect. He also tended to put a whopping dictionary definition at the beginning of each chapter where he first introduced the word, and had a fricking glossary if you were still confused. Far as I was concerned he bent over backwards, and some of the words he invented so cleverly capture a meaning not currently adequately described, I'd like to see them in the fricking dictionary.
I don't know when people decided that they already knew enough words...Historically, sci-fi authors often invented words for new concepts.
I definitely think his style is maturing, and I completely agree with the statement about the ending. Either he ended it in media res or it wound down in a particularly boring fashion...Neither is fully satisfying.
Anathem built slowly, something I think was required for the vast amount of world building he had to pull off, and then he took all that he'd built and blitzed it for 400 pages of crazy.
It's the first real piece of old-school intellectual sci-fi I've read in a while that didn't feel shallow or contrived. Hats off, I'd love to see more of the same.
Thirded. The books not an easy read, I'll give them that, but when did that become a requirement of sci-fi?
I've read it several times now, and the social commentary is so multi-layered I keep getting more out of it, and the philosophy is interesting enough that I keep turning it over and over in my head.
I'm glad he didn't feel the need to release a mass-market, dumbed-down action piece. Look at The Diamond Age, by far his most award winning novel: he wasn't afraid to throw down the intellectual beat down there either, and it made for a better product.
The problem is not too little technology. All too often technology is crammed in where it doesn't belong, under the supervision of people who aren't capable of maintaining or correctly utilizing it.
Unless you are teaching something intrinsically tecnological, the utility of a bunch of computers is limited, doubly so if there is no budget for maintenance.
Volcanic ash would be a pretty good substitute for lunar dust. Sounds fine to me, and you could chill on the beach when the work day is done.
If it doesn't matter to you at all, then whats the problem? Why complain about the injustice of their unwillingness to do all the work?
You clearly have strong feelings about the subject, so I'm trying to figure out where they're coming from if you really don't care?
The fact that the salary bubble popped along with the .Coms doesn't mean that CS isn't still a relatively well-paying career.
That's just not a plausible explanation.
Approaching members of the opposite sex isn't something you learn from your parents, it's something you learn by doing. You have to be willing to go out and fall on your face a few times.
Some girls will approach, some girls won't. The ones that do will approach you because you impressed them from a distance; not something that the introverted geek does very often ;)
The only advice I've really got is not to give up if it's something you want. I know plenty of shy single girls (no, you can't have their numbers) who would be really cool to date but put themselves in that same "I guess it's not for me" boat because of some crap experiences.
Wow. Legally permissible, THAT says a welcoming environment to me.
If you treat people like shit, they leave. Legally permissible or not.
Yea I know. I was actually the "Decoy Boyfriend" for some of my female CS and Science friends, and even then they'd have people approaching them because I clearly wasn't treating them right and/or was almost certainly dating this other girl.
There is a level after which interest becomes excessive. If she's wearing a decoy ring, the answer is "No" by default. If she likes you, she'll let you know...That's the whole point.
Repeated "creepy" advances on a female coworker are more than enough to get you reprimanded and or fired. If they find it offensive, you need to back the hell off.
Mod this joker up. The vast majority of female programmers I know are older than me, and I'm not young...We're talking people who were in college in the 70's and 80's.
Why were there more then, when this wasn't even much of a profession?
You have a female friend, we get it.
I have an actual work anecdote. I'm one of two programmers that maintain a pair of mainframes full of old COBOL. All the COBOL was written by 4 programmers, all female. The youngest of them will be 43 this year. They worked at two different properties which were (at the time) owned by different parent companies but are now owned by the same.
Today, counting all the programmers in all the properties in 3 states in any direction (~10) there are no female programmers.
Now explain to me how the ratio was 4 in 5, 10 years ago, and and is 0 to 19 today in a larger sample set? When we interviewed for the other programmer who works with me, we didn't even get a single resume from a female.
Something has changed.
Wow. You know, I'll come right out and say that the modern feminist movement irritates the living shit out of me. I'm a guy, they blame us for everything, this isn't surprising.
But this whole fucking thread is doing nothing but prove the point of everyone who says CS is hostile to women. It's fricking humiliating to be reading this thread at all because of how fucking RIGHT they apparently are.
I went to a school where the ratio was even higher than 12 to 1, and it absolutely does make for a shitty environment when a horde of socially incompetent geeks is constantly trying to chat up the few females. It'd make a normal person uncomfortable if it was a bunch of socially well-adjusted people doing it, now take the female geeky introvert, and throw them to the socially inept OMFG boobies geeks.
And your response is what? That they should be flattered? That they shouldn't be bothered? I'm pretty socially competent myself, and my grooming is well above the minimum standard (minus details like shaving every day and ironing my clothes). I get in a perfectly decent conversation with a nice geek girl, and once she becomes a non-moving target, we get mobbed by a bunch of morons.
It's no wonder this profession is a sausage-fest.