Guess how many times I've thanked 8 lb 6 oz baby Jesus that I had the foresight to separate the two?
My guess: At LEAST three.:-)
I have three partitions on my system:
/
/home
/usr/local
Home stores all my stuff,/usr/local stores all the stuff I download and build from source, and / is the stuff the distribution I use (currently Slackware 12.1) gets to muck with.
When I want a new distro, I can nuke and pave / with impunity, and depending on the age of things in/usr/local, they may need to be recompiled, and that's about all I need. Every now and then,/home and/usr/local get moved to a new, bigger drive, which is a lengthy, but fairly painless process. I don't clean out; I can't justify spending hours figuring out what I can purge and what I can't when storage is so cheap. I just buy a bigger drive, and the old smaller one becomes the new/. If the old system drive fails, it's no biggie. The new one gets its critical files backed up. If I lose it, there will be some pain, but I keep the "If I lose these files, I'd rather just die" stuff burned to disk, copied to my virtual server 1000 miles away, and on my USB keychain drive.
This is the very kind of [eggheaded woolly liberal|reactionary anti-intellectual conservative] thinking that has led our country to a [godless communist|theocratic fascist] condition. Surely you will be [sent to hell|purged in class warfare] for your [sins|crimes].
I wait for the day were the posts change from "Why don't my drivers work" to "Dude, wtf is the problem with this linux pos. This sux!!!'
The funny thing is I always had more success being a bit insulting when I needed Linux help on a forum. If I asked "I can't get foo to work. I've read the docs and tried bar and baz, but it didn't help." I'd get crickets. If I said "Linux sucks because it can't do foo." Then a ton of fanboys would pile on, call me every name in the book, and then explain in exacting detail how foo can be done. They might've thought I'm a retard, but at least my question got answered.:-)
Now Microsoft is copying advertising concepts from Apple? At least there's consistency
How long until we see Bill doing product announcements wearing a black turtleneck, jeans, and tennis shoes?
And no, I'm not an Apple fanboy. I have a WinXP desktop, a Linux desktop, and a Mac OS X laptop on my desk at home. The two desktops get used regularly. I last booted the OS X box 2 months ago. The work Mac runs iTunes and Safari, which only goes to Gmail and is a synergy client to my work Linux box.
will best achieve this, I believe, by allowing nurses and PA's to give shots, perform basic procedures, and so on. While this is perhaps an "overseer" position in a sense, it's an efficient use of my time that will allow me to create the greatest good for the most people. The downside is that it sabotages the intimacy that used to lie at the heart of the doctor-patient relationship. I don't have a good answer for that, unfortunately, except that perhaps all physicians must find their own balance of quantity vs. quality in the medical care of their patients.
Maybe you didn't get the memo, but this is Slashdot. We don't have much truck with thoughtful, nuanced opinions that clearly state the pros and cons of your position.:-)
Seriously, nice post. Sounds to me like you're going to make a good doctor someday.
you are either naive, or brainwashed, or extremely disillusioned.
And you are a condescending shit with the reading comprehension of a brain-damaged eight-year-old. Now that we've traded childish insults, this discussion is really over, but I will answer your points.
here is nothing such as "both are equal". they are different. a dolt would be able to say so. for starters, no 2 human being are the same.
Never said any such thing. That's you fighting the strawman you've erected. In fact, I pretty explicitly said there was a difference.
you have to choose from among viable options
Why? Because you say so? Maybe I say you should just shut up, but will you because I say so? I doubt it. You don't take orders from me and I don't take them from you. As to referring back to point A, see above. Not my argument.
'we are all doomed' is surrendering right at the start.
See your first point. Also not something I said. As to the distance I can go, if I think the direction is wrong, I can't get to riled up between picking between the guy who wants to go an inch and the other guy who wants to go a mile.
So, your first and third rebuttals don't even bear relation to what I said, so they're irrelevant. Your second, by itself, is just a restatement of your original statement, and is less than convincing.
Hey, you can choose to believe what you believe. I see where you're coming from, I just disagree with it. But you chose to not just disagree with me, but to insult me and then rebut my beliefs by vilifying positions that bear little to no resemblance to mine. Feel free to answer me, and pile on more insults if you want, but it's just posing for any of your buddies around here. I won't be reading it.
So voting is like betting on the horses? If I bet for the winner, I can get my ballot, and take is somewhere get paid on the odds? If I'm voting for who I don't want, I'm still throwing away my vote.
It's not living in a dream world to think that by voting for someone, you bear some responsibility for the things they do in office, good or bad. For my part, I will always vote for the person I think will do 80% good/20% bad, even if they have essentially zero chance of winning, rather than pick between the two who have even odds when I view them as 20% good vs. 10% good.
Since I view both McCain and Obama to be poor choices, and since nobody else will win, I've already lost, and voting for the least objectionable doesn't absolve me of responsibility if and when they fuck up. Seriously, I've done all those "pick your candidates" quizzes and I have more in common with both the Socialist AND the Libertarian candidate than either Obama and McCain. And those are two parties I view as almost polar opposites.
I'm an Arizonan, and it would be a cold day in hell before I would vote for McCain for animal control officer, much less president. I was intrigued by Obama, but I read his foreign policy statement in Foreign Affairs last year, and like Gertrude Stein said about Oakland: "There was no 'there' there."
So, accuse me of living in a dream world all you want, but I'm not accepting the responsibility for these jokers' actions, and I will not contribute even the tiniest shred of support for their "mandate."
It's just the "soft sciences" being politically correct while using math terms they don't understand.
Interesting. You make a good logical argument, but while logic is a tool of science, it ain't science. Do you care to pull up any "hard science" argument to back up your claim that intelligence in the aggregate doesn't follow a normal distribution, or are you just playing "my field is purer than thine?"
Actually an impact analyzer has been proposed. In addition to doing some pretty nifty stratigraphic science, you gotta admit, kinetic strikes from orbit is freakin' cool.:-)
Thanks for update that companies are busy places. I really hadn't figured that out in the last quarter century I've spent working. Your condescension was also extremely persuasive.
Seriously, I'm not talking about 5 or even 10 minutes here. I'm a patient guy, and if you really knew me at all, you'd realize "introvert" is not a word people use to describe me. By about 10 or 15 minutes after the scheduled meet time, I would politely inquire again. At a half hour, there would be a second inquiry, including a request to reschedule if they wanted. I get that people are busy, and things happen, but damn, I'm busy too, you know? I've rarely been in the boat where I'm interviewing because I'm out of work. My time is also valuable. I'm not a clock Nazi, but when I set an appointment, I make a concerted effort to keep it, and if life has other plans for me, then I contact who I'm meeting and postpone or reschedule as soon as I can. That's just polite. If expecting a little reciprocity in politeness makes me a bad candidate, than fine; I'm a bad candidate. I'm sure I'll pick up the tattered pieces of my life and somehow find the strength to carry on.
People need to realize that the tone of an interview happens before the two parties ever introduce themselves.
Indeed. And if I show up for an interview and am left cooling my heels in the lobby for a half hour after the interview should start, I'd say that the tone has certainly been established.
Fill disclosure - I use Vista and actually LIKE Vista. I chose it specifically because it suits my needs more so than Linux, so if you wish to disregard my opinions based on this fact, and the fact I do not subscribe to the typical Slashdot groupthink, I'm fine with that.:)
Nothing wrong with running what you want. I like Linux and OSS, but I'm no zealot. My Linux box and my WinXP box, like Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder, live side by side in perfect harmony on my desktop.:-) In a couple weeks, MS is giving me a free copy of Vista Ultimate, and I figured I'd install that too. I have a Mac OS X laptop too. They all have things I like and scratch different itches.
As to what's better, learning how and using, I guess that's a subjective question. As a software engineer, for me, the two are essentially the same. If I don't know an OS but use it, it's just a program loader. But that's just me.
Question for you - how many times have you downloaded a movie/song/game, then decided that it was worth more to you than the cover price, so you kicked in the cover price plus an extra few bucks to the corporation that created it? Or is your "pays for in proportion to the piece's personal value to them" line just an elaborate rationalization?
You know, this would actually be something I'd like to see. Occasionally, I've gotten things that I thought were worth so much more than what I paid for it that I want to shoot the creators a few extra bucks. There's no mechanism for that most of the time.
Maybe because some of us actually like to learn new things and stretch ourselves. And compared to learning a musical instrument or making fine cabinetry with hand tools, not at all difficult.
"Why learn a new GUI?" when did Slashdot become Yahoo groups... *mumbles* damn kids on my lawn again.
the only reason we dont do this with nuclear waste now is that the cost-to-orbit sucks, but for a reactor on the moon or already in space, most of the cost is absorbed already.
And you need a LOT of delta-V to get anywhere near the sun. Once you've broken Earth's escape velocity, you're still in a nice low eccentricity 150 million km orbit around the sun. To get to the sun in free-fall, you would have to shed the 30 km/sec first. Even a Hohmann transfer orbit doesn't help much. And then, if you miss? You've put dangerous stuff in a highly eccentric orbit with aphelion near Earth's orbit. Not a recipe for good things, and in any case not doable with current technology unless you want to do really crazy years long slingshot orbits around Jupiter (yes, going out, not in) first.
One of these days, I'm going to write this up, with all the math, so I can just post a link every time someone comes up with the "let's launch nuclear waste at the sun" idea.
Maybe I socialize with people in real-life? I think this is the first time in my life it's been implied that I'm anti-social for NOT using a computer for something.:-)
Nah, it didn't suck at all. It was a lot of fun, actually. I assure you things were not made for the lowest common denominator. It was more games tended to be exclusive to the platform they were written on, though there were some exceptions. You were so resource constrained that bumming every byte of memory was essential. You have single drivers on your system today that would not fit on the entire computer in that era. 64k was a lot of memory, and most systems were in the 16-32k range. Today's USB controller is a more sophisticated computer than the personal computers of the early 80s.:-)
The things that make games better and more sophisticated today have little to do with a single common platform and more to do with the tremendous advances in personal computing hardware over the last quarter century. And really, stretching back, I can only think of about 5 or 6 instruction sets in use for personal computers at the time: 65xx family, Z-80, 8080, 68xx family, 68000, and whatever TI processor was in the TI-99/4.
In those days, it was also possible for 1-3 person teams to make top-tier games, so (IMHO) there was a lot more creativity then. There was a lot of dreck, too, I won't kid you, but that's not changed. To make a AAA title now simply costs millions, because of all that's expected in one: original music, lots of art, amazing particle effects, cut scenes, writing, dialog with voice acting... the list goes on. The best a small group with an innovative idea can hope to do in this day and age is make a good demo and impress a larger house (Narbacular Drop becomes Portal) or maybe if you're very lucky, very good, and work very hard, you get to be someone like Introversion. But if you talk to the guys at Introversion, you find out quickly it's not all autographs and sunglasses for them, and it's a bit more than two or three guys.
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Guess how many times I've thanked 8 lb 6 oz baby Jesus that I had the foresight to separate the two?
My guess: At LEAST three. :-)
I have three partitions on my system:
Home stores all my stuff, /usr/local stores all the stuff I download and build from source, and / is the stuff the distribution I use (currently Slackware 12.1) gets to muck with.
When I want a new distro, I can nuke and pave / with impunity, and depending on the age of things in /usr/local, they may need to be recompiled, and that's about all I need. Every now and then, /home and /usr/local get moved to a new, bigger drive, which is a lengthy, but fairly painless process. I don't clean out; I can't justify spending hours figuring out what I can purge and what I can't when storage is so cheap. I just buy a bigger drive, and the old smaller one becomes the new /. If the old system drive fails, it's no biggie. The new one gets its critical files backed up. If I lose it, there will be some pain, but I keep the "If I lose these files, I'd rather just die" stuff burned to disk, copied to my virtual server 1000 miles away, and on my USB keychain drive.
Multiple partitions FTW.
It is so unfair that you are responding to my post when I have mod points. That is wholly deserving of a +1.
This is the very kind of [eggheaded woolly liberal|reactionary anti-intellectual conservative] thinking that has led our country to a [godless communist|theocratic fascist] condition. Surely you will be [sent to hell|purged in class warfare] for your [sins|crimes].
I wait for the day were the posts change from "Why don't my drivers work" to "Dude, wtf is the problem with this linux pos. This sux!!!'
The funny thing is I always had more success being a bit insulting when I needed Linux help on a forum. If I asked "I can't get foo to work. I've read the docs and tried bar and baz, but it didn't help." I'd get crickets. If I said "Linux sucks because it can't do foo." Then a ton of fanboys would pile on, call me every name in the book, and then explain in exacting detail how foo can be done. They might've thought I'm a retard, but at least my question got answered. :-)
Now Microsoft is copying advertising concepts from Apple? At least there's consistency
How long until we see Bill doing product announcements wearing a black turtleneck, jeans, and tennis shoes?
And no, I'm not an Apple fanboy. I have a WinXP desktop, a Linux desktop, and a Mac OS X laptop on my desk at home. The two desktops get used regularly. I last booted the OS X box 2 months ago. The work Mac runs iTunes and Safari, which only goes to Gmail and is a synergy client to my work Linux box.
will best achieve this, I believe, by allowing nurses and PA's to give shots, perform basic procedures, and so on. While this is perhaps an "overseer" position in a sense, it's an efficient use of my time that will allow me to create the greatest good for the most people. The downside is that it sabotages the intimacy that used to lie at the heart of the doctor-patient relationship. I don't have a good answer for that, unfortunately, except that perhaps all physicians must find their own balance of quantity vs. quality in the medical care of their patients.
Maybe you didn't get the memo, but this is Slashdot. We don't have much truck with thoughtful, nuanced opinions that clearly state the pros and cons of your position. :-)
Seriously, nice post. Sounds to me like you're going to make a good doctor someday.
How many Freudians does it take to change a light bulb?
Two. One to switch the bulb and the other to hold the penis.
you are either naive, or brainwashed, or extremely disillusioned.
And you are a condescending shit with the reading comprehension of a brain-damaged eight-year-old. Now that we've traded childish insults, this discussion is really over, but I will answer your points.
here is nothing such as "both are equal". they are different. a dolt would be able to say so. for starters, no 2 human being are the same.
Never said any such thing. That's you fighting the strawman you've erected. In fact, I pretty explicitly said there was a difference.
you have to choose from among viable options
Why? Because you say so? Maybe I say you should just shut up, but will you because I say so? I doubt it. You don't take orders from me and I don't take them from you. As to referring back to point A, see above. Not my argument.
'we are all doomed' is surrendering right at the start.
See your first point. Also not something I said. As to the distance I can go, if I think the direction is wrong, I can't get to riled up between picking between the guy who wants to go an inch and the other guy who wants to go a mile.
So, your first and third rebuttals don't even bear relation to what I said, so they're irrelevant. Your second, by itself, is just a restatement of your original statement, and is less than convincing.
Hey, you can choose to believe what you believe. I see where you're coming from, I just disagree with it. But you chose to not just disagree with me, but to insult me and then rebut my beliefs by vilifying positions that bear little to no resemblance to mine. Feel free to answer me, and pile on more insults if you want, but it's just posing for any of your buddies around here. I won't be reading it.
So voting is like betting on the horses? If I bet for the winner, I can get my ballot, and take is somewhere get paid on the odds? If I'm voting for who I don't want, I'm still throwing away my vote.
It's not living in a dream world to think that by voting for someone, you bear some responsibility for the things they do in office, good or bad. For my part, I will always vote for the person I think will do 80% good/20% bad, even if they have essentially zero chance of winning, rather than pick between the two who have even odds when I view them as 20% good vs. 10% good.
Since I view both McCain and Obama to be poor choices, and since nobody else will win, I've already lost, and voting for the least objectionable doesn't absolve me of responsibility if and when they fuck up. Seriously, I've done all those "pick your candidates" quizzes and I have more in common with both the Socialist AND the Libertarian candidate than either Obama and McCain. And those are two parties I view as almost polar opposites.
I'm an Arizonan, and it would be a cold day in hell before I would vote for McCain for animal control officer, much less president. I was intrigued by Obama, but I read his foreign policy statement in Foreign Affairs last year, and like Gertrude Stein said about Oakland: "There was no 'there' there."
So, accuse me of living in a dream world all you want, but I'm not accepting the responsibility for these jokers' actions, and I will not contribute even the tiniest shred of support for their "mandate."
It's just the "soft sciences" being politically correct while using math terms they don't understand.
Interesting. You make a good logical argument, but while logic is a tool of science, it ain't science. Do you care to pull up any "hard science" argument to back up your claim that intelligence in the aggregate doesn't follow a normal distribution, or are you just playing "my field is purer than thine?"
Actually an impact analyzer has been proposed. In addition to doing some pretty nifty stratigraphic science, you gotta admit, kinetic strikes from orbit is freakin' cool. :-)
Full disclosure: Phil Christensen is my boss.
I guess not.
Yes, NINE years ago. Can we now, as an alleged scientific and technical community, move on?
Thanks for update that companies are busy places. I really hadn't figured that out in the last quarter century I've spent working. Your condescension was also extremely persuasive.
Seriously, I'm not talking about 5 or even 10 minutes here. I'm a patient guy, and if you really knew me at all, you'd realize "introvert" is not a word people use to describe me. By about 10 or 15 minutes after the scheduled meet time, I would politely inquire again. At a half hour, there would be a second inquiry, including a request to reschedule if they wanted. I get that people are busy, and things happen, but damn, I'm busy too, you know? I've rarely been in the boat where I'm interviewing because I'm out of work. My time is also valuable. I'm not a clock Nazi, but when I set an appointment, I make a concerted effort to keep it, and if life has other plans for me, then I contact who I'm meeting and postpone or reschedule as soon as I can. That's just polite. If expecting a little reciprocity in politeness makes me a bad candidate, than fine; I'm a bad candidate. I'm sure I'll pick up the tattered pieces of my life and somehow find the strength to carry on.
People need to realize that the tone of an interview happens before the two parties ever introduce themselves.
Indeed. And if I show up for an interview and am left cooling my heels in the lobby for a half hour after the interview should start, I'd say that the tone has certainly been established.
Please tell me what bank you are using that pays 3% interest per month. I'll switch tomorrow.
Fill disclosure - I use Vista and actually LIKE Vista. I chose it specifically because it suits my needs more so than Linux, so if you wish to disregard my opinions based on this fact, and the fact I do not subscribe to the typical Slashdot groupthink, I'm fine with that. :)
Nothing wrong with running what you want. I like Linux and OSS, but I'm no zealot. My Linux box and my WinXP box, like Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder, live side by side in perfect harmony on my desktop. :-) In a couple weeks, MS is giving me a free copy of Vista Ultimate, and I figured I'd install that too. I have a Mac OS X laptop too. They all have things I like and scratch different itches.
As to what's better, learning how and using, I guess that's a subjective question. As a software engineer, for me, the two are essentially the same. If I don't know an OS but use it, it's just a program loader. But that's just me.
I heard the American publisher of Checkers just ripped off a British game called Draughts.
Question for you - how many times have you downloaded a movie/song/game, then decided that it was worth more to you than the cover price, so you kicked in the cover price plus an extra few bucks to the corporation that created it? Or is your "pays for in proportion to the piece's personal value to them" line just an elaborate rationalization?
You know, this would actually be something I'd like to see. Occasionally, I've gotten things that I thought were worth so much more than what I paid for it that I want to shoot the creators a few extra bucks. There's no mechanism for that most of the time.
So let me get this straight. You have the right to charge for mindless crap, but if you create something better, you have to give it away?
Yes, this plan will no doubt create a new flowering of the arts and humanities.
Maybe because some of us actually like to learn new things and stretch ourselves. And compared to learning a musical instrument or making fine cabinetry with hand tools, not at all difficult.
"Why learn a new GUI?" when did Slashdot become Yahoo groups... *mumbles* damn kids on my lawn again.
the only reason we dont do this with nuclear waste now is that the cost-to-orbit sucks, but for a reactor on the moon or already in space, most of the cost is absorbed already.
And you need a LOT of delta-V to get anywhere near the sun. Once you've broken Earth's escape velocity, you're still in a nice low eccentricity 150 million km orbit around the sun. To get to the sun in free-fall, you would have to shed the 30 km/sec first. Even a Hohmann transfer orbit doesn't help much. And then, if you miss? You've put dangerous stuff in a highly eccentric orbit with aphelion near Earth's orbit. Not a recipe for good things, and in any case not doable with current technology unless you want to do really crazy years long slingshot orbits around Jupiter (yes, going out, not in) first.
One of these days, I'm going to write this up, with all the math, so I can just post a link every time someone comes up with the "let's launch nuclear waste at the sun" idea.
Maybe I socialize with people in real-life? I think this is the first time in my life it's been implied that I'm anti-social for NOT using a computer for something. :-)
Jeez, bite my head off, why don't you? So sorry I intruded.
Nah, it didn't suck at all. It was a lot of fun, actually. I assure you things were not made for the lowest common denominator. It was more games tended to be exclusive to the platform they were written on, though there were some exceptions. You were so resource constrained that bumming every byte of memory was essential. You have single drivers on your system today that would not fit on the entire computer in that era. 64k was a lot of memory, and most systems were in the 16-32k range. Today's USB controller is a more sophisticated computer than the personal computers of the early 80s. :-)
The things that make games better and more sophisticated today have little to do with a single common platform and more to do with the tremendous advances in personal computing hardware over the last quarter century. And really, stretching back, I can only think of about 5 or 6 instruction sets in use for personal computers at the time: 65xx family, Z-80, 8080, 68xx family, 68000, and whatever TI processor was in the TI-99/4.
In those days, it was also possible for 1-3 person teams to make top-tier games, so (IMHO) there was a lot more creativity then. There was a lot of dreck, too, I won't kid you, but that's not changed. To make a AAA title now simply costs millions, because of all that's expected in one: original music, lots of art, amazing particle effects, cut scenes, writing, dialog with voice acting... the list goes on. The best a small group with an innovative idea can hope to do in this day and age is make a good demo and impress a larger house (Narbacular Drop becomes Portal) or maybe if you're very lucky, very good, and work very hard, you get to be someone like Introversion. But if you talk to the guys at Introversion, you find out quickly it's not all autographs and sunglasses for them, and it's a bit more than two or three guys.