Two roughly similar problems over 5 years might lead you to suppose they did this out of malevolence. But let's look at the value proposition. Bing Lord 1: Let's censor all Chines language results to please our Mainland Chinese overlords! Bing Lord 2: Good idea! They'll appreciate it if we solve a problem we already solved for them. Bing Lord 1: Yes! In the meantime we'll piss off everybody else who gets wind of it, and get lots of free publicity from the ensuing shit storm! Both: We are incredibly smart!
It seems more likely to me that this is the result of bungling at one or more points in the chain from design to infrastructure, probably caused by managerial bungling.
I haven't hung out on Slashdot for many years, so I come to the site with expectations shaped by years of use from the 90s to 2006 or so. The current site isn't too jarring from that point of view. The changes are mostly obvious improvements. Most important for me, the community is still recognizable. The same paranoid ranting and trolling, with occasionally very interesting/insightful/funny and useful contributions from a few posters, whose comments get modded up effectively. I think the motto, "News for Nerds" still applies, and that's comforting. (Although Slashdot seldom breaks a story, by design, it's a great place to get nerdy reactions to the news.)
The new design is familiar looking. It's the sort of thing you'll see on Google+ or many Wordpress blogs.Headlines are bigger. The in-your-face topic drop-down is startling, but effective. Assuming the sidebars are still customizable, I don't have an argument with the esthetics of the design. But it does affect my workflow to a slight degree. When I'm browsing Slashdot, I scan down the headlines until I see something that interests me. I immediately open the link to the original story in a new tab. If the article interests me, I keep the tab open, and click through to the comments in yet another tab. If I don't like the article, I close the tab and go back to scanning headlines. Since the link to the fine article isn't in the headline, the beta site forces me to open the submission just to get to TFA. It's a minor quibble, but I don't like change. (:)
I'd like to add a couple more notes. First of all, thanks for providing this mechanism and for listening. Despite the paranoid trolls, It's clear you are listening. Also, I can't imagine you aren't eating your own dog food on this one. Trolls that accuse you of this without a shred of evidence are annoying. (They wouldn't be trolls if they didn't try to be annoying. Right.) One more thing, I'm concerned by your statement that you are trying to make the site more accessible to less technical users. Though I totally understand you trying to grow your audience, you still have "News for Nerds" in your title. It's always a challenge to balance a friendly interface with a nerdy "give me information now" sensibility. Without irony, I wish you good luck in your efforts to achieve that.
I'll admit I haven't looked at this closely for a couple of years. But every time I have in the past, I concluded that SQL server only made sense where Windows was not optional. I know Microstuff has put a lot of effort into SQL server over the years, and no doubt it has improved from the bloated pig I once so cordially loathed, but then Oracle and IBM and the others haven't stood still in the interim either. And those folks can at least dispense with the GUI, and can employ TCP stacks that don't tune for the desktop by default. All of that helps when you are in a pitched battle for performance. But, like I say, I haven't looked recently. Perhaps Microcash has overcome those disadvantages. And perhaps pigs can fly. 8)
If someone else is paying for your tools. Visio will analyze any database that has an ODBC driver. (That includes MySQL and PostgreSQL.) Of course, then you end up struggling with two bloated Microsoft tools. But Visio at least can be used to draw pretty pictures. 8)
Access is frequently abused in the way you describe. Companies that have Office licenses often restrict distribution of the Access component, even if they are otherwise entitled to it, because of such abuse. Access is a very handy tool for a quick-and-dirty database design, so people use it for that - a lot. Pretty soon, you have little information islands all over the place, designed by amatuer DBAs, and containing gobs of misplaced but critical business data. I believe it is all another Nefarious Microsoft Plot (NGP) because when you switch to the solution for cleaning it all up - SQL server - your need for the software is so severe that you won't kick about the price, and expectations for performance are so low that SQL server easily passes muster. Of course, that's just the snide opinion of Yet Another Microsoft Detractor. 8)
Re:The diplomatic (accurate) response
on
The CVS Cop-Out
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
That's the ticket!
It's only a cop-out if the developer/development team leaves it at "fixed in source". Given the parent's approach, it isn't a cop out, since the full scope of the solution (fixing in source and releasing, eventually) is presented.
It's normal for software users to be impatient with the time it takes to produce quality stuff. In the closed-source world, that impatience often turns to frustration as the user's requirements are ignored, or copped-out on, by the vendor, whose internal process is completely opaque. With open source, there is at least the ability to check whether the "fixed in CVS" statement is actually true. And if you really, really can't live without the fix, you, or someone you hire, can take that source patch and apply it to a local copy. You lose external support that way, but at least you can solve your immediate problem.
What happens to your audit trail between sudo -s and Ctrl-D?
It's gone, as far as sudo is concerned. The contortions I describe, while a bit hard on the fingers, maintain the automatic record sudo makes of my rootly actions.
That works, but it's ugly, and I have to be able to invoke the shell with sudo in the first place.
I/O redirection is similarly broken. sudo grep root ~/cron_jobs >>/etc/crontab will fail because your shell will do the I/O redirection, not the sudo enabled grep. This works:
grep root ~/cron_jobs | sudo tee -a/etc/crontab >dev/null
This time, tee is the one appending the output, not the shell.
I use these workarounds with sudo quite a lot. It seems I need the latter more often than the former. But I stick with sudo regardless, for the shell environment consistency, and the ability to go back and see what I did wrong 12 hours after the 36 hour hacking session ended.
We get into an epistemological question here about the meaning of "brilliant." For me, the word doesn't mean "wonderful in all things" or "really smashingly good at one thing and tolerable at all others." Rather it means "really, outstandingly, awfully good at one or more things, period."
I know a person, who I consider brilliant, who also believes in Martians. No kidding. I call him brilliant because I've seen him, on many occasions, take a flying leap out of the ordinary course of problem solving, and land smack-dab in the middle of the solution. And not just any old solution, but the one that hindsight will show is the single most optimal one. He's difficult to talk to because of those leaps. And sometimes he lands in pretty strange places, like Mars.
This guy is good natured, if opinionated. But I've met folks who would be conventionally called "brilliant" who were monsterous human beings. I used to work in a Physics department at a major university. The senior faculty were a profoundly mixed bag in the humanity department. Some were quiet, unassuming. A few were very comfortable in ordinary conversation. A handful were among the finest examples of humanity I've ever met. And another handful were among the worst. All of them were tenured, and therefore had published significant work in their esoteric, profoundly difficult fields. Several are now in the pantheon of leading theoreticians. Interestingly, none of the "monsters" are as far as I know.
Physicists inhabit an extremely abstract world. Trying to visualize, or at least reason about 6 dimensional manifolds is not easy, so I'm told. My observation is that, in the prosperous US at least, the farther a person gets from ordinary reality the less likely they are to possess "people" skills. At the extremes, violations of this principle crop up. So I recall with fondness one senior prof who had the ability to make very abstract concepts seem concrete. He was an excellent teacher, too. Most of those guys (they were all men) were not excellent teachers, for undergrads, at least. An important point about that environment was the ego factor. As anyone who has been near academia at that level can testify, egos tend to be inflated, and fragile. The coin of the realm is prestige. This is the approval of your peers, denominated in publication citations. This commerce matches the abstract nature of the conduct of science rather well.
Anyhow, engineers tend to be less brilliant, and therefore less extreme in their manifestations of people skills or the lack thereof. They are fairly brainy, on average, though. So yes, I think there are "brilliant" engineers that need to be kept in a padded, though comfortable cell. Pipe in coffee, soda and soylent green. Make sure the bandwidth is high and the lights are low. Keep them away from the gentry. Thank your stars when they produce something useful and brilliant.
I agree with that. You can be very pleasant, and completely unable to help your customer. Although you might get a lot of dates^H^H^H^H^Hcompliments on your work attitude.
It's just that geeks, I consider myself one, are likely to overlook the human side. I'm sure we've all seen brilliant engineers who needed to be roped off from end users - and higher management. Often the technical problem can prevent you from seeing that the real solution is organizational or personal. Geeks like to sneer at "politics," but that's just personal relations scaled up to groups. If you aren't good at one-on-one, you are likely to have trouble with politics, too.
Books can give you ideas. Kindness and tolerance come from life experience. I can be convinced that tolerance is a good idea, and vow that I will be tolerant in all my actions. But the real test come when some #!%& clueless user starts to blame me for their stupid mistakes.
That's where you go to read humor. If you haven't learned humor (or had it hardwired in, as the case may be) you aren't going to laugh, even at a name like "Slarty Bartfarst."
Although "technical support" may seem to be about technology, it's really about people and their behavior under stress. Having filled dozens of support roles in 20 years as a systems guy, I can tell you that the greatest factors in my success have been patience and humor. What book do you go to to learn those things?
That's my view from the perspective of a customer and employee of IBM, and a user, booster and (minor) author of F/L OSS for 18 years or so. (Only a couple at IBM, so far.)
I'm not speaking for the corporation, despite what that sounded like. I think I got it about right, though.
The truth is somewhere between "tradition" and "today's passing greed based fad." IBM believes that the basic technology underlying IT will increasingly become a commodity. They feel that Free/Libre and Open Source Software is a major driver of this trend. They made a huge bet 10 years ago that services layered on top of commodity software would be where the growth would be in IT spending. Because the facts have continued to show they were right about this, they have continued to commit the company to courses of action consistent with this direction in the years since. Support by IBM for F/L OSS is completely consistent with this strategic view. Although this is not the same thing as signing on, for example, to Richard Stallman's ethical code, it isn't a flash in the pan, and it won't go away overnight.
"The question is, can you tell me again what exactly the story is?"
Once upon a time...
Story meanings depend in complicated ways on both the teller and listener. But briefly, from my point of view, there was a time in the late 1980s when it looked like Unix workstation vendors might reach down into the commodity PC market and seriously challenge Microsoft for dominance there. Intel CPUs were getting faster and more capable, and it was thought that Unix would soon be viable running on cheap commodity PCs. This may have been a vain hope to start with, given the fact that the Unix vendors had little idea of how to create systems that were usable by the average PC owner, but the fact that there were half a dozen "differentiated" flavors of Unix was a more immediate cause of failure in this regard, at least according to my version of the story.
Sadly, I think you are right about that. Although I think Novell/SuSE is well enough differentiated through their approach to usability. The problem I see with this is, it's the same thinking that drove the Unix vendors to implement dozens of solutions for every single problem, each in the name of "adding value to" or "differentiating" their offering from all the others. This led famously to balkanization of the technical computing market, and ultimate failure in the battle with Microsoft for domination of the desktop. I see Microsoft potentially benefitting from the same phenomenon here.
I don't know much about Immunix. It may bring things to the table beyond what SELinux offers. But if it just solves the same problems, then I reserve my right to bitch about it, and to point out the history of Unix as a cautionary tale.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm waiting to see if my SFO to CLT flight will be cancelled this morning. Oh, right. This isn't Facebook.
Two roughly similar problems over 5 years might lead you to suppose they did this out of malevolence. But let's look at the value proposition. Bing Lord 1: Let's censor all Chines language results to please our Mainland Chinese overlords! Bing Lord 2: Good idea! They'll appreciate it if we solve a problem we already solved for them. Bing Lord 1: Yes! In the meantime we'll piss off everybody else who gets wind of it, and get lots of free publicity from the ensuing shit storm! Both: We are incredibly smart! It seems more likely to me that this is the result of bungling at one or more points in the chain from design to infrastructure, probably caused by managerial bungling.
I haven't hung out on Slashdot for many years, so I come to the site with expectations shaped by years of use from the 90s to 2006 or so. The current site isn't too jarring from that point of view. The changes are mostly obvious improvements. Most important for me, the community is still recognizable. The same paranoid ranting and trolling, with occasionally very interesting/insightful/funny and useful contributions from a few posters, whose comments get modded up effectively. I think the motto, "News for Nerds" still applies, and that's comforting. (Although Slashdot seldom breaks a story, by design, it's a great place to get nerdy reactions to the news.)
The new design is familiar looking. It's the sort of thing you'll see on Google+ or many Wordpress blogs.Headlines are bigger. The in-your-face topic drop-down is startling, but effective. Assuming the sidebars are still customizable, I don't have an argument with the esthetics of the design. But it does affect my workflow to a slight degree. When I'm browsing Slashdot, I scan down the headlines until I see something that interests me. I immediately open the link to the original story in a new tab. If the article interests me, I keep the tab open, and click through to the comments in yet another tab. If I don't like the article, I close the tab and go back to scanning headlines. Since the link to the fine article isn't in the headline, the beta site forces me to open the submission just to get to TFA. It's a minor quibble, but I don't like change. ( :)
I'd like to add a couple more notes. First of all, thanks for providing this mechanism and for listening. Despite the paranoid trolls, It's clear you are listening. Also, I can't imagine you aren't eating your own dog food on this one. Trolls that accuse you of this without a shred of evidence are annoying. (They wouldn't be trolls if they didn't try to be annoying. Right.) One more thing, I'm concerned by your statement that you are trying to make the site more accessible to less technical users. Though I totally understand you trying to grow your audience, you still have "News for Nerds" in your title. It's always a challenge to balance a friendly interface with a nerdy "give me information now" sensibility. Without irony, I wish you good luck in your efforts to achieve that.
Kudos on avoiding a certain looney cult's keyword search.
Read TFA.
Facebook does what it does. Just say no to liking commercial products.
I'll admit I haven't looked at this closely for a couple of years. But every time I have in the past, I concluded that SQL server only made sense where Windows was not optional. I know Microstuff has put a lot of effort into SQL server over the years, and no doubt it has improved from the bloated pig I once so cordially loathed, but then Oracle and IBM and the others haven't stood still in the interim either. And those folks can at least dispense with the GUI, and can employ TCP stacks that don't tune for the desktop by default. All of that helps when you are in a pitched battle for performance. But, like I say, I haven't looked recently. Perhaps Microcash has overcome those disadvantages. And perhaps pigs can fly. 8)
Access is frequently abused in the way you describe. Companies that have Office licenses often restrict distribution of the Access component, even if they are otherwise entitled to it, because of such abuse. Access is a very handy tool for a quick-and-dirty database design, so people use it for that - a lot. Pretty soon, you have little information islands all over the place, designed by amatuer DBAs, and containing gobs of misplaced but critical business data. I believe it is all another Nefarious Microsoft Plot (NGP) because when you switch to the solution for cleaning it all up - SQL server - your need for the software is so severe that you won't kick about the price, and expectations for performance are so low that SQL server easily passes muster. Of course, that's just the snide opinion of Yet Another Microsoft Detractor. 8)
It's only a cop-out if the developer/development team leaves it at "fixed in source". Given the parent's approach, it isn't a cop out, since the full scope of the solution (fixing in source and releasing, eventually) is presented.
It's normal for software users to be impatient with the time it takes to produce quality stuff. In the closed-source world, that impatience often turns to frustration as the user's requirements are ignored, or copped-out on, by the vendor, whose internal process is completely opaque. With open source, there is at least the ability to check whether the "fixed in CVS" statement is actually true. And if you really, really can't live without the fix, you, or someone you hire, can take that source patch and apply it to a local copy. You lose external support that way, but at least you can solve your immediate problem.
That's ridiculous! If you keep spreading rumors like that, I'm going to find out where you live, and pay a visit, along with Mr. Smith and Mr Wesson.
Oh.. wait..
It's gone, as far as sudo is concerned. The contortions I describe, while a bit hard on the fingers, maintain the automatic record sudo makes of my rootly actions.
You don't. Globbing is broken because the shell does it before sudo is run. This gets around the problem:
sudo "sh -c '(cd /var/spool/mqueue;egrep ^From:\ Postmaster qf*)'"
That works, but it's ugly, and I have to be able to invoke the shell with sudo in the first place.
I/O redirection is similarly broken. sudo grep root ~/cron_jobs >> /etc/crontab will fail because your shell will do the I/O redirection, not the sudo enabled grep. This works:
grep root ~/cron_jobs | sudo tee -a /etc/crontab >dev/null
This time, tee is the one appending the output, not the shell.
I use these workarounds with sudo quite a lot. It seems I need the latter more often than the former. But I stick with sudo regardless, for the shell environment consistency, and the ability to go back and see what I did wrong 12 hours after the 36 hour hacking session ended.
We get into an epistemological question here about the meaning of "brilliant." For me, the word doesn't mean "wonderful in all things" or "really smashingly good at one thing and tolerable at all others." Rather it means "really, outstandingly, awfully good at one or more things, period."
I know a person, who I consider brilliant, who also believes in Martians. No kidding. I call him brilliant because I've seen him, on many occasions, take a flying leap out of the ordinary course of problem solving, and land smack-dab in the middle of the solution. And not just any old solution, but the one that hindsight will show is the single most optimal one. He's difficult to talk to because of those leaps. And sometimes he lands in pretty strange places, like Mars.
This guy is good natured, if opinionated. But I've met folks who would be conventionally called "brilliant" who were monsterous human beings. I used to work in a Physics department at a major university. The senior faculty were a profoundly mixed bag in the humanity department. Some were quiet, unassuming. A few were very comfortable in ordinary conversation. A handful were among the finest examples of humanity I've ever met. And another handful were among the worst. All of them were tenured, and therefore had published significant work in their esoteric, profoundly difficult fields. Several are now in the pantheon of leading theoreticians. Interestingly, none of the "monsters" are as far as I know.
Physicists inhabit an extremely abstract world. Trying to visualize, or at least reason about 6 dimensional manifolds is not easy, so I'm told. My observation is that, in the prosperous US at least, the farther a person gets from ordinary reality the less likely they are to possess "people" skills. At the extremes, violations of this principle crop up. So I recall with fondness one senior prof who had the ability to make very abstract concepts seem concrete. He was an excellent teacher, too. Most of those guys (they were all men) were not excellent teachers, for undergrads, at least. An important point about that environment was the ego factor. As anyone who has been near academia at that level can testify, egos tend to be inflated, and fragile. The coin of the realm is prestige. This is the approval of your peers, denominated in publication citations. This commerce matches the abstract nature of the conduct of science rather well.
Anyhow, engineers tend to be less brilliant, and therefore less extreme in their manifestations of people skills or the lack thereof. They are fairly brainy, on average, though. So yes, I think there are "brilliant" engineers that need to be kept in a padded, though comfortable cell. Pipe in coffee, soda and soylent green. Make sure the bandwidth is high and the lights are low. Keep them away from the gentry. Thank your stars when they produce something useful and brilliant.
I agree with that. You can be very pleasant, and completely unable to help your customer. Although you might get a lot of dates^H^H^H^H^Hcompliments on your work attitude.
It's just that geeks, I consider myself one, are likely to overlook the human side. I'm sure we've all seen brilliant engineers who needed to be roped off from end users - and higher management. Often the technical problem can prevent you from seeing that the real solution is organizational or personal. Geeks like to sneer at "politics," but that's just personal relations scaled up to groups. If you aren't good at one-on-one, you are likely to have trouble with politics, too.
Books can give you ideas. Kindness and tolerance come from life experience. I can be convinced that tolerance is a good idea, and vow that I will be tolerant in all my actions. But the real test come when some #!%& clueless user starts to blame me for their stupid mistakes.
Oops. 8)
No, really. This is serious. 8)
Although "technical support" may seem to be about technology, it's really about people and their behavior under stress. Having filled dozens of support roles in 20 years as a systems guy, I can tell you that the greatest factors in my success have been patience and humor. What book do you go to to learn those things?
Umm, no. But it's an indication that the effort to rip and replace IE only code is advancing.
That's my view from the perspective of a customer and employee of IBM, and a user, booster and (minor) author of F/L OSS for 18 years or so. (Only a couple at IBM, so far.)
I'm not speaking for the corporation, despite what that sounded like. I think I got it about right, though.
ROTFL!
It has to make sense??
The hitch in that plan was all those Intranet apps that required IE ... get it?
The truth is somewhere between "tradition" and "today's passing greed based fad." IBM believes that the basic technology underlying IT will increasingly become a commodity. They feel that Free/Libre and Open Source Software is a major driver of this trend. They made a huge bet 10 years ago that services layered on top of commodity software would be where the growth would be in IT spending. Because the facts have continued to show they were right about this, they have continued to commit the company to courses of action consistent with this direction in the years since. Support by IBM for F/L OSS is completely consistent with this strategic view. Although this is not the same thing as signing on, for example, to Richard Stallman's ethical code, it isn't a flash in the pan, and it won't go away overnight.
Once upon a time ...
Story meanings depend in complicated ways on both the teller and listener. But briefly, from my point of view, there was a time in the late 1980s when it looked like Unix workstation vendors might reach down into the commodity PC market and seriously challenge Microsoft for dominance there. Intel CPUs were getting faster and more capable, and it was thought that Unix would soon be viable running on cheap commodity PCs. This may have been a vain hope to start with, given the fact that the Unix vendors had little idea of how to create systems that were usable by the average PC owner, but the fact that there were half a dozen "differentiated" flavors of Unix was a more immediate cause of failure in this regard, at least according to my version of the story.
Sadly, I think you are right about that. Although I think Novell/SuSE is well enough differentiated through their approach to usability. The problem I see with this is, it's the same thinking that drove the Unix vendors to implement dozens of solutions for every single problem, each in the name of "adding value to" or "differentiating" their offering from all the others. This led famously to balkanization of the technical computing market, and ultimate failure in the battle with Microsoft for domination of the desktop. I see Microsoft potentially benefitting from the same phenomenon here.
I don't know much about Immunix. It may bring things to the table beyond what SELinux offers. But if it just solves the same problems, then I reserve my right to bitch about it, and to point out the history of Unix as a cautionary tale.
If your life get's sweeter, simpler etc. as a result of ths change, then you are entitled not to bitch about it. 8)