I'd still much rather have this than this.. Because using a well-worn device of distinctive and legendary quality, class, and style can be better than a new device of derivative, trite, and unexciting quality.
Or to put it another way, "They just don't make 'em like that anymore."
This is clearly a clash of value systems. And, although my value are mostly utilitarian, that's not consistently so. My GP comment has a clue to the inconsistency: "older systems". Yup, I collect old personal computers and software. That's not rational from a pragmatic POV. But, OTOH, I actually use them. I wouldn't pay collector NIB NOS prices for, say, an Amiga 1000. (Pretend such a thing could legitimately be found. Besides, I still have mine from 1986.)
Again, if you or another collector gets a warm fuzzy feeling looking at your sealed 1977 Kenner Luke Skywalker figure, great. Me, I'd wanna play with the thing.
So, in the realm of serendipitous discoveries of neat old tech toys: If I find a nifty piece of retrotech that I can play with, at a price I consider reasonable solely on the "play" value, I'm buying. And using. If that destroys it from your perspective, so be it. I'm getting what I value out of it. If you want it, for whatever your reasons, you'd better find it first.
You know, oddly enough, making teh bux isn't the most important thing in life. If I get my hands on a new-in-box peripheral for one of my older computers, screw resale. I'm opening the box, hooking it up, and using it. That's the real value.
Frankly, the entire "minty-mint" collection mania is pathological. The perceived sale value boils down to "how much can I fleece a clueless schlub for?". And that's illogical.
GPO's only really lock down a machine for the uninformed.
Which is the point. No, GPOs (note the absence of the apostrophe) won't stop teh 1334 h@xor from breaking into the machine. Group policies just (mostly) stop the Admin assistant or the junior accountant in Finance from loading some stupid browser cursors (and associated spyware).
Breaking in, is as simple as rebooting with the right CD in the drive.
If it's that simple where you work, that needs to be fixed. And whoever's responsible for that travesty needs to be fired. Every pc I've worked with since about 2000 has (A) bios passwords, (B) boot order selection (so you can disallow booting off any media besides the chosen hard drive), and (C) DMI reporting of case intrusion, so you can't get easily get away with cracking the case to clear the password (or, for that matter, installing another hard drive instead of the normal boot drive, which is how I'd do it).
GPOs allow the workgroup administrator to apply consistent identity-based policies on client systems. They are, in fact, a non-negotiable necessity in most business settings. Handwaving and straw-manning the requirement away won't work; instead, OS workgroup server technology has to present a viable alternative implementation.
Re:Single provider and SOA?
on
The Zen of SOA
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
One question that recently cropped up is whether SOA makes any sense if you are only connecting with a single data provider?
You have a single data provider now. Will you rewrite the program from scratch when you add another? Will you "rework" it to accommodate the second? Or will you man up and design the thing from scratch as extensible and reusable?
This is the same architectural argument that's cropped up in the discipline since assembler v. compiler.
Hell, farther back than that. Eli Whitney's great innovation, not always recalled, was interchangeable components in firearms. Before that, every weapon was crafted from muzzle to buttplate as one unique system. But try to find an off-the-shelf replacement for the frizzen. Sorry, no can do.
But Whitney's flintlocks? Drop a big pile of mixed components on the table. I guarantee that as long as there's one of each part in the pile, you will be able to assemble a working rifle. Need a carbine? We'll make up a shorter barrel which is still compatible with the receiver and the stock. Converting to percussion cap? No problem, the entire lock mechanism is an engineered replaceable unit.
That's what SOA aims at: interchangeable components in systems. You're not crafting one big program, or complex of programs, from end-to-end, making it up as you go. You're building uniformly-structured and interchangeable components, and assembling them.
Yeah, it's cheaper to build stovepipe. It's just more expensive to use, maintain, and replace.
The folks who argue against these enterprise architecture innovations are the gunsmiths late 18th Century: each thing they turn out is a work of mastercraft, unique and tightly coupled, but entirely constrained by the human limitations on their ability, vision, and skill. But a rifle buyer isn't buying a work of art; he is buying a functional artifact, and if it can be engineered to function better (or differently, if the need arises) by no longer treating gunsmithy as a craft and more as an engineering discipline, so much the better. The artiste gunsmith may be offended. But too bad.
I must be dumb (ok, actually, that's not just highly probable, but actually guaranteed), but I can't imagine how you define "good".
Do you find the "point-and-drool, choose the default options" insulting? They're not talking to you. Don't take it personally.
I don't see any advantage to selecting options with a text/keyboard menu rather than a GUI. The default options on some of the things (like partition setup) can be annoying if they differ with your preferences, but it doesn't take that much effort to override them. And old-sk00l partition management (select a menu item from a numeric list, select a partition type from a 4-page numbered list of obscure partition types, type the partition size in CYLINDERS for the love of $DIETY)... stupider than dirt. Physical disk geometry hasn't appreciably mattered since 1998 or so. Partitions are measured in bytes, thank you.
I learned Unix by telnetting into some of the Project Athena boxen back in the mid-80s. I've sysadmined Solaris since 2.4, AIX since 5.0, and Linux since kernel 2.0.30-something (RH 5.0). I've set up and used Caldera OpenLinux (before Caldera became SCO Group and became totally evil.) I've set and and admin'd SCO Unixware. I've set up mainframe OSs, MS-DOS from 2.0 through 6.22, Windows from 1.0 (!) to XP Pro (not Vista, for which I'm grateful). AmigaDOS from 1.1 though 3.5. MacOS (from System 6 onwards to 8.6; no X please.)
I've seen good installers, horrible installers, installers that couldn't complete, installers that made all the decisions for me (wrong, of course)... and I cannot imagine why you think textmode Linux installers are superior.
Maybe, like me, you like indulging in a bit of curmudgeonly geek-cred-whoring. You know, the "get off my OS, you kids" stuff. "I'm old, I've seen it all, and it was better back in the day."
But, objectively, it really wasn't uniformly better.
Meh. Surely you don't mean the original PET 2001, with the cheap-calculator-keypad-on-growth-hormones keyboard? I might agree with your comment if you're talking about the -N versions or the 4000 family.
And Apple? Yeah, good keyboards. Outrageously expensive though.
BTW, I don't know where you came up with $200. In the words of Wikipedia, [Citation Needed].
My actual purchase was a TRS-80. Not a "Model I"; this was when there was only one model, thank you. The keyboard on that? Mushy touch, good keythrow... and the worst kkkkkkeybounce EVAR. I religiously loaded the "debounce" software from cassette every programming session. For all of that aggravation, I never got RSI from it.
According to this article, IBM switched over to glass substrate in consumer hard drives circa 2000. The surface of the platter is smoother so R/W head flight height can be lowered to accommodate higher data density.
Which is why I thought the consumer-level advice "hammer your hard drives" may be a bad idea if Joe Bag'o'donuts uncases the platters first. Can you say lawsuit for glass splinter injuries?
Not all of those things, at least in my limited experience, but the last time I was involved with destruction of hard drives with special access classified data, it involved quadruple overwrite (random patterns, etc.), uncasing, very high energy degaussing, scouring off all recording medum with abrasives, and physically deforming the aluminum platters (folding the platters over into quarters and hammering flat). And that's before the media left our facility, bound for an unspecified "final destruction facility", where even more stuff was going to be done to it. I can barely imagine what that might have been; perhaps the final result would have been ingots of aluminum alloy and a box of dross (what was left of the magnetic layer, burned) stuffed into a secure storage facility until the declassification date had passed.
Well... revoking access is hypothetically a no-brainer. ("Hypothetically" because it's still shockingly uncommon.)
But a former insider may still know enough about your environment to make an extremely effective blackhat. Not much you can do about that without using a big hammer, a la Catbert, to remove your employee's detailed knowledge before escorting him/her out.
The Ecofont works best when using font size 9 or 10. The results vary depending on your software. If you work on a Windows platform you could use ClearType.
Hell, I worked for the U.S. Air Force, and I wouldn't assume WE were good shots.
If you're living on an extended patch of ground between two nuclear adversaries, you'd have to be pretty cavalier about living to not have some kind of protection against "short rounds".
Slashdot Mirror
Or to put it another way, "They just don't make 'em like that anymore."
This is clearly a clash of value systems. And, although my value are mostly utilitarian, that's not consistently so. My GP comment has a clue to the inconsistency: "older systems". Yup, I collect old personal computers and software. That's not rational from a pragmatic POV. But, OTOH, I actually use them. I wouldn't pay collector NIB NOS prices for, say, an Amiga 1000. (Pretend such a thing could legitimately be found. Besides, I still have mine from 1986.)
Again, if you or another collector gets a warm fuzzy feeling looking at your sealed 1977 Kenner Luke Skywalker figure, great. Me, I'd wanna play with the thing.
So, in the realm of serendipitous discoveries of neat old tech toys: If I find a nifty piece of retrotech that I can play with, at a price I consider reasonable solely on the "play" value, I'm buying. And using. If that destroys it from your perspective, so be it. I'm getting what I value out of it. If you want it, for whatever your reasons, you'd better find it first.
Hey, wait, are we talking about tulips?
You know, oddly enough, making teh bux isn't the most important thing in life. If I get my hands on a new-in-box peripheral for one of my older computers, screw resale. I'm opening the box, hooking it up, and using it. That's the real value.
Frankly, the entire "minty-mint" collection mania is pathological. The perceived sale value boils down to "how much can I fleece a clueless schlub for?". And that's illogical.
Distinctly unlike Vuja de, the feeling you've never experienced this before.
Goodness, you are naive. Or missing the point.
GPO's only really lock down a machine for the uninformed.
Which is the point. No, GPOs (note the absence of the apostrophe) won't stop teh 1334 h@xor from breaking into the machine. Group policies just (mostly) stop the Admin assistant or the junior accountant in Finance from loading some stupid browser cursors (and associated spyware).
Breaking in, is as simple as rebooting with the right CD in the drive.
If it's that simple where you work, that needs to be fixed. And whoever's responsible for that travesty needs to be fired. Every pc I've worked with since about 2000 has (A) bios passwords, (B) boot order selection (so you can disallow booting off any media besides the chosen hard drive), and (C) DMI reporting of case intrusion, so you can't get easily get away with cracking the case to clear the password (or, for that matter, installing another hard drive instead of the normal boot drive, which is how I'd do it).
GPOs allow the workgroup administrator to apply consistent identity-based policies on client systems. They are, in fact, a non-negotiable necessity in most business settings. Handwaving and straw-manning the requirement away won't work; instead, OS workgroup server technology has to present a viable alternative implementation.
One question that recently cropped up is whether SOA makes any sense if you are only connecting with a single data provider?
You have a single data provider now. Will you rewrite the program from scratch when you add another? Will you "rework" it to accommodate the second? Or will you man up and design the thing from scratch as extensible and reusable?
This is the same architectural argument that's cropped up in the discipline since assembler v. compiler.
Hell, farther back than that. Eli Whitney's great innovation, not always recalled, was interchangeable components in firearms. Before that, every weapon was crafted from muzzle to buttplate as one unique system. But try to find an off-the-shelf replacement for the frizzen. Sorry, no can do.
But Whitney's flintlocks? Drop a big pile of mixed components on the table. I guarantee that as long as there's one of each part in the pile, you will be able to assemble a working rifle. Need a carbine? We'll make up a shorter barrel which is still compatible with the receiver and the stock. Converting to percussion cap? No problem, the entire lock mechanism is an engineered replaceable unit.
That's what SOA aims at: interchangeable components in systems. You're not crafting one big program, or complex of programs, from end-to-end, making it up as you go. You're building uniformly-structured and interchangeable components, and assembling them.
Yeah, it's cheaper to build stovepipe. It's just more expensive to use, maintain, and replace.
The folks who argue against these enterprise architecture innovations are the gunsmiths late 18th Century: each thing they turn out is a work of mastercraft, unique and tightly coupled, but entirely constrained by the human limitations on their ability, vision, and skill. But a rifle buyer isn't buying a work of art; he is buying a functional artifact, and if it can be engineered to function better (or differently, if the need arises) by no longer treating gunsmithy as a craft and more as an engineering discipline, so much the better. The artiste gunsmith may be offended. But too bad.
I must be dumb (ok, actually, that's not just highly probable, but actually guaranteed), but I can't imagine how you define "good".
Do you find the "point-and-drool, choose the default options" insulting? They're not talking to you. Don't take it personally.
I don't see any advantage to selecting options with a text/keyboard menu rather than a GUI. The default options on some of the things (like partition setup) can be annoying if they differ with your preferences, but it doesn't take that much effort to override them. And old-sk00l partition management (select a menu item from a numeric list, select a partition type from a 4-page numbered list of obscure partition types, type the partition size in CYLINDERS for the love of $DIETY)... stupider than dirt. Physical disk geometry hasn't appreciably mattered since 1998 or so. Partitions are measured in bytes, thank you.
I learned Unix by telnetting into some of the Project Athena boxen back in the mid-80s. I've sysadmined Solaris since 2.4, AIX since 5.0, and Linux since kernel 2.0.30-something (RH 5.0). I've set up and used Caldera OpenLinux (before Caldera became SCO Group and became totally evil.) I've set and and admin'd SCO Unixware. I've set up mainframe OSs, MS-DOS from 2.0 through 6.22, Windows from 1.0 (!) to XP Pro (not Vista, for which I'm grateful). AmigaDOS from 1.1 though 3.5. MacOS (from System 6 onwards to 8.6; no X please.)
I've seen good installers, horrible installers, installers that couldn't complete, installers that made all the decisions for me (wrong, of course)... and I cannot imagine why you think textmode Linux installers are superior.
Maybe, like me, you like indulging in a bit of curmudgeonly geek-cred-whoring. You know, the "get off my OS, you kids" stuff. "I'm old, I've seen it all, and it was better back in the day."
But, objectively, it really wasn't uniformly better.
So if the Crown approves rigging up a photocopier and a colander as a "lie detector", and you get convicted on its "evidence"... your only recourse is that the copier maintenance guy hadn't removed the most recent paper jam lately?
Right. Remove Canada from my list of countries to flee to.
+1 Babylon 5 reference
No one as used ASCII in years,
At least ASCII has the letter "h".
Not true. Sony Corp. owns the Sony Group, and has a direct historical and managerial relationship with them.
Nonetheless:
True, I believe. It seems he learned from the criticism. That alone put him in the top 10% of humanity.
Perhaps the most on-topic xkcd soundbite ever:
"...it's like herding lolcats."
Not posting anonymously, 'cuz it's not whoring if you do it out of love.
detect the implied insult?
"If you're gullible enough to spend $60k on a Toyota, here's a deal for you!"
Meh. Surely you don't mean the original PET 2001, with the cheap-calculator-keypad-on-growth-hormones keyboard? I might agree with your comment if you're talking about the -N versions or the 4000 family.
And Apple? Yeah, good keyboards. Outrageously expensive though.
BTW, I don't know where you came up with $200. In the words of Wikipedia, [Citation Needed].
My actual purchase was a TRS-80. Not a "Model I"; this was when there was only one model, thank you. The keyboard on that? Mushy touch, good keythrow... and the worst kkkkkkeybounce EVAR. I religiously loaded the "debounce" software from cassette every programming session. For all of that aggravation, I never got RSI from it.
You have no idea.
I've used a TI 99/4. I've actually tried typing programs into an original IBM PCjr. I used extensively, and almost bought, an Atari 400.
What do they have in common with each other, and this keyboard?
Crappy, short throw, lousy-feedback keys.
If you think you're seeing an old-timer smiling in nostalgic pleasure at this thing, you've mis-identified a grimace of remembered pain.
This place needs a "+1 Ironic" mod.
According to this article, IBM switched over to glass substrate in consumer hard drives circa 2000. The surface of the platter is smoother so R/W head flight height can be lowered to accommodate higher data density.
Which is why I thought the consumer-level advice "hammer your hard drives" may be a bad idea if Joe Bag'o'donuts uncases the platters first. Can you say lawsuit for glass splinter injuries?
Not all of those things, at least in my limited experience, but the last time I was involved with destruction of hard drives with special access classified data, it involved quadruple overwrite (random patterns, etc.), uncasing, very high energy degaussing, scouring off all recording medum with abrasives, and physically deforming the aluminum platters (folding the platters over into quarters and hammering flat). And that's before the media left our facility, bound for an unspecified "final destruction facility", where even more stuff was going to be done to it. I can barely imagine what that might have been; perhaps the final result would have been ingots of aluminum alloy and a box of dross (what was left of the magnetic layer, burned) stuffed into a secure storage facility until the declassification date had passed.
Why, then, does it make sense for our government to take that risk.
Because governments are too big to fail!*
*With a few exceptions, like Denmark, 1813; most of Latin America circa 2004-2005; Iceland, right now...
buggy slashcode
+1 Redundant
Well... revoking access is hypothetically a no-brainer. ("Hypothetically" because it's still shockingly uncommon.)
But a former insider may still know enough about your environment to make an extremely effective blackhat. Not much you can do about that without using a big hammer, a la Catbert, to remove your employee's detailed knowledge before escorting him/her out.
It's not as if it's GP's idea to use 9pt:
http://www.ecofont.eu/faq_en.html
These Ecofont folks say that 9- to 10-point is, for visual quality, as good as it gets. So your eyes will suffer either way.
And the type is based on Verdana, for Hoefler's sake! Ick!
You're assuming that the Russkies are good shots.
Hell, I worked for the U.S. Air Force, and I wouldn't assume WE were good shots.
If you're living on an extended patch of ground between two nuclear adversaries, you'd have to be pretty cavalier about living to not have some kind of protection against "short rounds".
Determine based on the code if you actually need to spend $$ at mechanic
Buy a gas cap to replace the one you lost but assumed wasn't all that important
Profit!