I can't blame the admins all the time, even though I do think that your average Unix admin is better then your average NT admin.
I wouldn't say better. More technically adept, maybe. Understand the technology behind the software better, maybe. But let's take a Unix admin and stick them in a MS environment, and poof. Suddenly their Unix skills are irrelevant.
I'm saying this as neither a Unix admin nor MS admin. I'm saying this as someone who tried to apply Apache concepts to IIS. It simply doesn't work. They use two different bases of use. IIS is meant to be easy for MS sysadmins to set up. Apache is meant to be easy for Unix-aware people to set up (although, once you get past the basic of basics, it fails miserably at that. Try the Rewrite module. It'll kick your ass and take your lunch money.)
Oh I forgot the whole issue of cookies, since I know someone will bring them up. You can't rely on cookies for stat tracking because people either have them disabled (stupidly - cookies aren't evil, they can't hurt you) or they clear them out frequently (I do it about once a week during my weekly disk-cleaning routine).
Ok, there's a difference between counting hits and counting visitors. You're wasting money if the same guy sees your ad over and over again, because he'll get desensitized to it and will ignore it after a while. But, you can't tell if those 47 hits from the same ISP is one guy or 47 guys, as he gets a different IP each time he dials in. Is that a unique visitor, or a refresh? Why is this person viewing this one page 12 times?
In short, sure, you can always count quantity using logs, but it's impossible to count quality with them. That's the point.
The other point is it's stupid to display an ad for MS Server 2003 to a person who doesn't deal with that kind of product. Why would Oracle want to display ads to the guy that maintains the Exchange server?
One problem is that right now, a lot of web advertising is hit-and-miss. You pay thousands for "targeted" advertising, just hoping someone who will actually need your product will see the ads.
Relevance and quality is the key in online advertising these days, not how many eyeballs you get. Counting is easy. Analyzing is hard. So, you're backwards, not the article.
I find it funny that RoboForm (an alternative that isn't scumware) will let you import gator info. It's funny because if that's a feature, it means that there's people out there that STILL USE GATOR.
who cares how old some language is or that it's "legacy", as you so stupidly put it, as long as it works? If a guy knows the basics of programming (control structures, variable types, etc.) he doesn't care what the language is as long as it's the best tool for the task.
Programming IS a mature field, because no matter what language you use, the concepts don't change that much. Medicine is a mature industry, right? Look how much that has changed over just the last 10 years! Surgeons have had to learn new devices, such as lasers and sound wave devices (forget what they're called), but the task of removing a kidney stone remains the same concept, just new and better tools.
But what you say about adapting and moving on is true. And make sure you don't become "that guy". You know, that guy that knows fortran, or that guy that knows how to do some ancient task. It'll end up that that'll be all you do.
since when is reboot frequency the sole measure of stability? IIS is pretty stable. Good webserver? Hell no. secure? it could be better. but stable? quite.
my apartment building offers free sbc dsl at a very good rate ($20/mo), but it's not mandatory. I could get a cable modem if I desire. Phone service is included in the rent, as the building used to be a hotel, but I'm not sure how much they add on to a standard rent for it.
Yeah, it's possible, and it's also possible that mutants will rise out of the ground and take over earth. Truth is, there's no evidence this kind of thing will happen soon, and I don't see any evidence of the SC deciding against the constitution any time soon.
If you're worried that the PATRIOT Act is being used against you or someone else unconstitutionally, then do something about it. The ACLU will always be willing to help.
Otherwise, until you can find a case where a law was passed that was unconstitutional and it was enforced, and someone took it up to the courts, and they lost on merit, then move along. A reactionary court system isn't all bad, it keeps the court clear of the hypothetical situations you seem to like.
no, not terribly scary because a case only takes that long if no one says anything about it.
The fact is that the Supreme Court is quite speedy in accepting and deciding cases. Don't cite the "under God" thing because nothing was said about it till this year, and that guy wasn't in any position to do anything about it.
Name one case where it took 10 years to get a case to the supreme court from the first filing. You can't, because there are none. And guess what? while the cases go through appeals, if the courts think the case has a chance, they issue an order to halt the enforcement of the law. That's how it works.
Ok, let's look back at the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Almost no one in pop music wrote their own music then, either. Most Elvis tunes were blues songs in a former life. Most songs were recorded three or four times by different artists. Most of the great singers of the late 60s early 70s (think Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, etc.) were anonymous songwriters in the early-to-mid 60s
Hip-hop and punk have not sold out. The major, mainstream acts have, but you can still find many out there (the majority, even) that are in the decent-to-great category. There's even more that bubble just under the surface. The rapper Face from Houston is awesome, the Mudkids in Indianapolis is cool, and there's lots more. NOFX usually produces some good music.
And for the record, opera and classical music were NEVER "all the rage". Classical music was only listened to by royalty and the extremely rich, as it all had to be witnessed live. Back then, music had "patrons", rich people who would support a famous musician in exchange for the prestige of being able to say "I'm rich enough to be a patron".
The constitution is supposed to be vague - it deals with a lot of things! Statehood, congress, the whole framework of the federal government, etc. The key to the constitution is you can't make a law that goes against it without amending it (which is terribly hard to do).
This is a specific treaty, that deals with a specific issue, and has no need to be so vague. The Kyoto treaty isn't vague, it's quite clear. So why should this treaty be allowed such leeway?
Oh, I'm not saying that Linux sucks or anything, I really like it. However, I was pointing out that some complaints about Windows can be made about Linux, too.
And the shockwave thing, it's not a deal breaker. However, I do use shockwave from time to time.
One thing that sucks about windows is a lack of a cron-type app. Windows scheduler or whatever it's called is weak.
Another thing is the lack of a viable, native, free scripting language that is actually being worked on. I hate having to install python or perl on every Win machine I work on.
Also, some pages like WashingtonPost.com have a problem where it is constantly reloading itself (perhaps a JS error).
Um, that's not a bug. It's standard HTML. go to washingtonpost.com and view it's source. see in the first line the meta tag with the http-equiv="refresh" and the content="900;url=http://www.washingtonpost.com/?LO AD_PAGE&reload=true"? that's what's refreshing the page. It's the page, not firefox.
I work for a department in a medical school that deals with a lot of patient data. Due to HIPAA (medical privacy law that went into effect last year) and just plain old common sense, we had to come up with a standard plan of salvage of old machines. We now have a "drive wiping" kit that consists of a hammer and a drill.
that's what my grandfather did. got up at 3, out of the house by 4, return home from work between 2 and 3 in the afternoon. Sometimes fixed dinner because my grandmother would be tired after chasing their 8 kids around all day, then he would fall asleep after dinner, then start it all over again the next morning.
And he was a supervisor!
But, because he worked so hard, he could afford the nice house, new car every year (well, at least every other year), sending his kids to private school, etc. And, as he got older, he got promoted up and up and up and didn't have to slave away anymore.
He also did something that's very rare today: he was with the same company for over 45 years. got the job as soon as he got out of school, then served in the navy during korea, then went back. he started out sweeping the floors and eventually made it to plant manager.
heh, those are the same complaints I have for linux.
Mozilla always hanging, having to restart X (the bad ctrl-alt-backspace way) every 6 hours or so, getting java to even do anything at all, lack of plugins for mozilla (come on, no shockwave? weak!)
Plus, the apps don't make the OS. XP has been just as stable as my Linux box was. Last time the machine rebooted was due to power failure two weeks ago (UPS kicked in and shut it down after 5 minutes since i wasn't there). 3 weeks before that, it crashed due to a classmate's mistake (we were in a group project for a programming class and he put an endless loop in on accident).
a) People working in this field need to consider the possible risks.
Duh. You can apply that to any profession. Doctors have to worry about all kinds of infectious and communicable diseases, bus drivers have to avoid accidents, and machinists such as my late grandfather have to be careful of the metal particulates in the air.
Look, this is all part of life. You find out that something is a risk, you do things to mitigate that risk. Take my grandfather for instance. When he joined the Navy in the '50s, they didn't know about the dangers of working in an engine room of a ship. The fumes, exhaust, chemicals, and such were deadly stuff, but they didn't know. All he was worried about was not getting killed when a steam line burst above his head. Later on, when they found out the danger of such things, rules were put into place to make the environment safer.
And surely some of that is due to misdiagnosis. My nephew was diagnosed with autism at age 5 by a school psychologist after some behavioral problems. Turned out they were wrong and the boy was just having separation anxiety from being away from his mom at kindergarten.
The doctor who diagnosed the separation anxiety said that autism has become the ADD of this decade. If you can't find a reasonable answer, it must be autism.
In my high school chemistry class, we made soap and got free used tallow from wendy's (used beef fat from the fries). mix that with something (don't remember - some kind of acid, it's been 7 years - must be why i got a d in chem) and if you get the mixture right - voila! soap! if you get it wrong, it burns.
Windows XP (maybe 2000 as well) has something like this too, called something like indexing service. It keeps an index of your files for faster searching. Unfortunately, the program as it now stands is bloated and doesn't seem to speed up searches significantly, so most power users just turn it off.
Ahh, but the same people don't end up with it. It's well known that the majority of farm subsidies end up in the pockets of the corporate farms. The small farmer can't afford a lawyer, so has no way to apply/appeal for farm subsidies.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't blame the admins all the time, even though I do think that your average Unix admin is better then your average NT admin.
I wouldn't say better. More technically adept, maybe. Understand the technology behind the software better, maybe. But let's take a Unix admin and stick them in a MS environment, and poof. Suddenly their Unix skills are irrelevant.
I'm saying this as neither a Unix admin nor MS admin. I'm saying this as someone who tried to apply Apache concepts to IIS. It simply doesn't work. They use two different bases of use. IIS is meant to be easy for MS sysadmins to set up. Apache is meant to be easy for Unix-aware people to set up (although, once you get past the basic of basics, it fails miserably at that. Try the Rewrite module. It'll kick your ass and take your lunch money.)
Oh I forgot the whole issue of cookies, since I know someone will bring them up. You can't rely on cookies for stat tracking because people either have them disabled (stupidly - cookies aren't evil, they can't hurt you) or they clear them out frequently (I do it about once a week during my weekly disk-cleaning routine).
Ok, there's a difference between counting hits and counting visitors. You're wasting money if the same guy sees your ad over and over again, because he'll get desensitized to it and will ignore it after a while. But, you can't tell if those 47 hits from the same ISP is one guy or 47 guys, as he gets a different IP each time he dials in. Is that a unique visitor, or a refresh? Why is this person viewing this one page 12 times?
In short, sure, you can always count quantity using logs, but it's impossible to count quality with them. That's the point.
The other point is it's stupid to display an ad for MS Server 2003 to a person who doesn't deal with that kind of product. Why would Oracle want to display ads to the guy that maintains the Exchange server?
One problem is that right now, a lot of web advertising is hit-and-miss. You pay thousands for "targeted" advertising, just hoping someone who will actually need your product will see the ads.
Relevance and quality is the key in online advertising these days, not how many eyeballs you get. Counting is easy. Analyzing is hard. So, you're backwards, not the article.
I find it funny that RoboForm (an alternative that isn't scumware) will let you import gator info. It's funny because if that's a feature, it means that there's people out there that STILL USE GATOR.
I still can't find anyone that can tell me the difference between Word 2000, Word XP, and Word 2003 besides packaging.
who cares how old some language is or that it's "legacy", as you so stupidly put it, as long as it works? If a guy knows the basics of programming (control structures, variable types, etc.) he doesn't care what the language is as long as it's the best tool for the task.
Programming IS a mature field, because no matter what language you use, the concepts don't change that much. Medicine is a mature industry, right? Look how much that has changed over just the last 10 years! Surgeons have had to learn new devices, such as lasers and sound wave devices (forget what they're called), but the task of removing a kidney stone remains the same concept, just new and better tools.
But what you say about adapting and moving on is true. And make sure you don't become "that guy". You know, that guy that knows fortran, or that guy that knows how to do some ancient task. It'll end up that that'll be all you do.
doh, i was revising the post and missed it. i was going to say free cable AND sbc dsl. thanks for pointing out my failures, you insensitive clod.
since when is reboot frequency the sole measure of stability? IIS is pretty stable. Good webserver? Hell no. secure? it could be better. but stable? quite.
my apartment building offers free sbc dsl at a very good rate ($20/mo), but it's not mandatory. I could get a cable modem if I desire. Phone service is included in the rent, as the building used to be a hotel, but I'm not sure how much they add on to a standard rent for it.
Yeah, it's possible, and it's also possible that mutants will rise out of the ground and take over earth. Truth is, there's no evidence this kind of thing will happen soon, and I don't see any evidence of the SC deciding against the constitution any time soon.
If you're worried that the PATRIOT Act is being used against you or someone else unconstitutionally, then do something about it. The ACLU will always be willing to help.
Otherwise, until you can find a case where a law was passed that was unconstitutional and it was enforced, and someone took it up to the courts, and they lost on merit, then move along. A reactionary court system isn't all bad, it keeps the court clear of the hypothetical situations you seem to like.
no, not terribly scary because a case only takes that long if no one says anything about it.
The fact is that the Supreme Court is quite speedy in accepting and deciding cases. Don't cite the "under God" thing because nothing was said about it till this year, and that guy wasn't in any position to do anything about it.
Name one case where it took 10 years to get a case to the supreme court from the first filing. You can't, because there are none. And guess what? while the cases go through appeals, if the courts think the case has a chance, they issue an order to halt the enforcement of the law. That's how it works.
No one writes their own music anymore.
Ok, let's look back at the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Almost no one in pop music wrote their own music then, either. Most Elvis tunes were blues songs in a former life. Most songs were recorded three or four times by different artists. Most of the great singers of the late 60s early 70s (think Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, etc.) were anonymous songwriters in the early-to-mid 60s
Hip-hop and punk have not sold out. The major, mainstream acts have, but you can still find many out there (the majority, even) that are in the decent-to-great category. There's even more that bubble just under the surface. The rapper Face from Houston is awesome, the Mudkids in Indianapolis is cool, and there's lots more. NOFX usually produces some good music.
And for the record, opera and classical music were NEVER "all the rage". Classical music was only listened to by royalty and the extremely rich, as it all had to be witnessed live. Back then, music had "patrons", rich people who would support a famous musician in exchange for the prestige of being able to say "I'm rich enough to be a patron".
The constitution is supposed to be vague - it deals with a lot of things! Statehood, congress, the whole framework of the federal government, etc. The key to the constitution is you can't make a law that goes against it without amending it (which is terribly hard to do).
This is a specific treaty, that deals with a specific issue, and has no need to be so vague. The Kyoto treaty isn't vague, it's quite clear. So why should this treaty be allowed such leeway?
Oh, I'm not saying that Linux sucks or anything, I really like it. However, I was pointing out that some complaints about Windows can be made about Linux, too.
And the shockwave thing, it's not a deal breaker. However, I do use shockwave from time to time.
One thing that sucks about windows is a lack of a cron-type app. Windows scheduler or whatever it's called is weak.
Another thing is the lack of a viable, native, free scripting language that is actually being worked on. I hate having to install python or perl on every Win machine I work on.
Also, some pages like WashingtonPost.com have a problem where it is constantly reloading itself (perhaps a JS error).
O AD_PAGE&reload=true"? that's what's refreshing the page. It's the page, not firefox.
Um, that's not a bug. It's standard HTML. go to washingtonpost.com and view it's source. see in the first line the meta tag with the http-equiv="refresh" and the content="900;url=http://www.washingtonpost.com/?L
I work for a department in a medical school that deals with a lot of patient data. Due to HIPAA (medical privacy law that went into effect last year) and just plain old common sense, we had to come up with a standard plan of salvage of old machines. We now have a "drive wiping" kit that consists of a hammer and a drill.
that's what my grandfather did. got up at 3, out of the house by 4, return home from work between 2 and 3 in the afternoon. Sometimes fixed dinner because my grandmother would be tired after chasing their 8 kids around all day, then he would fall asleep after dinner, then start it all over again the next morning.
And he was a supervisor!
But, because he worked so hard, he could afford the nice house, new car every year (well, at least every other year), sending his kids to private school, etc. And, as he got older, he got promoted up and up and up and didn't have to slave away anymore.
He also did something that's very rare today: he was with the same company for over 45 years. got the job as soon as he got out of school, then served in the navy during korea, then went back. he started out sweeping the floors and eventually made it to plant manager.
heh, those are the same complaints I have for linux.
Mozilla always hanging, having to restart X (the bad ctrl-alt-backspace way) every 6 hours or so, getting java to even do anything at all, lack of plugins for mozilla (come on, no shockwave? weak!)
Plus, the apps don't make the OS. XP has been just as stable as my Linux box was. Last time the machine rebooted was due to power failure two weeks ago (UPS kicked in and shut it down after 5 minutes since i wasn't there). 3 weeks before that, it crashed due to a classmate's mistake (we were in a group project for a programming class and he put an endless loop in on accident).
Hell, XP is more dependable than my cable box!
that honor belongs to chisenbop, which uses your fingers as the mechanical parts. It's theorized that the abacus came from chisenbop.
The problem is, not many UI people and artists are interested in open-source projects. Many open-source GUI-based projects face the same shortage.
a) People working in this field need to consider the possible risks.
Duh. You can apply that to any profession. Doctors have to worry about all kinds of infectious and communicable diseases, bus drivers have to avoid accidents, and machinists such as my late grandfather have to be careful of the metal particulates in the air.
Look, this is all part of life. You find out that something is a risk, you do things to mitigate that risk. Take my grandfather for instance. When he joined the Navy in the '50s, they didn't know about the dangers of working in an engine room of a ship. The fumes, exhaust, chemicals, and such were deadly stuff, but they didn't know. All he was worried about was not getting killed when a steam line burst above his head. Later on, when they found out the danger of such things, rules were put into place to make the environment safer.
And surely some of that is due to misdiagnosis. My nephew was diagnosed with autism at age 5 by a school psychologist after some behavioral problems. Turned out they were wrong and the boy was just having separation anxiety from being away from his mom at kindergarten.
The doctor who diagnosed the separation anxiety said that autism has become the ADD of this decade. If you can't find a reasonable answer, it must be autism.
In my high school chemistry class, we made soap and got free used tallow from wendy's (used beef fat from the fries). mix that with something (don't remember - some kind of acid, it's been 7 years - must be why i got a d in chem) and if you get the mixture right - voila! soap! if you get it wrong, it burns.
Windows XP (maybe 2000 as well) has something like this too, called something like indexing service. It keeps an index of your files for faster searching. Unfortunately, the program as it now stands is bloated and doesn't seem to speed up searches significantly, so most power users just turn it off.
Ahh, but the same people don't end up with it. It's well known that the majority of farm subsidies end up in the pockets of the corporate farms. The small farmer can't afford a lawyer, so has no way to apply/appeal for farm subsidies.