Seriously, I hate having my inbox clogged up as much as the next guy, but wake me up when something actually HAPPENS. I'm sick of hearing the two sides verbally piss on each other, I think we can all agree that's been done to death. How this rehashing of the same old crap is newsworthy to anyone is beyond me. Different face, same words.
I'm with you as far as being tired of seeing this sort of thing go on for ages without any discernable progress. But you've got to understand, this is how things of this nature are hammered out. They say politics is the process of deciding who gets what in a society. This is just two different interest groups fighting for what they want. And, despite the negativity associated with the phrase "interest groups", they're not always evil.
As far as it being newsworthy or not, I think it is. You've heard it before, this is News for Nerds, and lots of/. readers are a part of one of these interest groups.
With a slow fan and decent heatsink, my CPU still sits around 48 degrees C.
I just installed a Thermalright SK-7 and Vantec Stealth fan with Arctic Silver 3 on a couple of machines running an XP 2000+. Idle temperature is in the low forties (Celsius) and the things are very quiet. Actually, the noise improvement over the retail heatsink/fan combo wasn't really noticeable, although temperatures did drop significantly.
We've also got a couple of machines running dual MP 1800+ CPUs, and they were *loud* with a cheapo heatsink and Global Win 60mm fan. Installing the Thermalright and Stealth lowered the temperature a few degrees, but cut noise by what seems like a factor of 3.
We bought all of this cooling gear from Best Byte and were pleased.
One of the most likeable things about programming is that on a low enough level, it's always predictable. This kind of goes hand-in-hand with the fact that computers don't make mistakes, humans do. As a programmer, it's very comforting (for lack of a better word) to have a chunk of code and know that, given X input, you'll get Y output. You can write a subroutine, document it well, and come back to it later, knowing how it will behave. Of course, other programmers can do the same with your code, without having to have intricate knowledge of how the code goes about returning the output.
But of course, there's a catch. It's probable that the programmer who wrote the subroutine initially didn't envision some special case, and therefore didn't write the code to handle it. If everybody is lucky, the program will hiccup and the second programmer will see the problem. The worse situation is when the error is seemingly minor, and goes unnoticed: when that floating point number gets converted to an integer and nobody notices.
I know this isn't some groundbreaking new look on abstraction in code, but it is pretty interesting to think about.
For the price of most PC Surround sound speakers and cards you could buy a nice Surround Sound stereo system and run your PC audio through it, and it usually sounds alot better.
A "nice" two-channel system (CD player, integrated amp or receiver, speakers, cabling) probably starts at around $800 to $1000, depending on what your tastes are and what kind of music you listen to. If you want the same fidelity coming from 5 speakers, you're looking at probably 2.5 times the cost. A $500 surround sound system is good at generating noise, that's about it.
I don't claim to be an audiophile, and I don't think you have to spend 5 figures to enjoy music, but you really do get what you pay for in audio, particularly at the lower-cost end of the hi-fi spectrum.
Asking a generation x geek today if they will 'retire from IT' might in 30 years seem as inappropriate a question as saying, "well gosh, do you think you could spend your career in education?"
Speaking of which, I'm surprised there isn't more mention of education in this thread. I'm a graduating senior in Business Information Systems (insert sound of CS majors snickering because they think IS majors choose such because they can't hack it in CS), and recently rethought my plans for the future. I could go to work in June making a good salary. I could be there at 8, sit in my cubicle, and leave at 5. Things would get better over the years, assuming I don't get laid off, but I'd always have to deal with office politics and other such BS.
So I went and talked to a professor that I'd had a year ago, and told him that I was interested in pursuing a PhD and eventually teaching at the college level. Let me tell you, if you all had heard what he said, you'd probably be lining up to get in a doctoral program and get a teaching/research position. There are clear benefits such as job security, a low-stress environment (generally), and the ability to do consulting work on the side. And on top of that you can influence students in a way that nobody else can.
I was curious about salaries, so I looked his up: six figures. He's about 45 years old. I checked some salaries of top-level ITS employees at the university, and only a handful of them were even close to a six-figure salary. Not to mention what they probably have to deal with on a daily basis. I quickly decided that such a career was not for me.
Of course the educational arena is not without its faults, and I'm sure there are plenty of happy senior system admins, but for me, the choice is easy.
The other thing with PHP is that there are now so many free projects using PHP it is often a lot better to look at they are coded, I think you gain a lot more pratical knowledge this way than you could glean from any book no matter how exhaustive.
The only problem I have with this is that sometimes new programmers want to use this copy-and-paste style coding before they really understand the language. I mean, most/. folks know the benefits of reusing code in this way, but doing so without knowing what it's doing is risky business. I don't think I need to explain why.
For that reason, there certainly is a place for beginner books, as this one seems to be.
Re:There goes another one of my solid beliefs :)
on
Moore's Law Disputed
·
· Score: 2
Re:Apples vs Oranges
on
Linux Is Cheaper
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
Ownership implies that you can do whatever you want with a product.
That's a strange definition. Most people would say that you can own a car. And those same people, when they get pulled over for speeding, don't say, "What?! But officer, I own this car! I can do whatever I want with it!"
Are you saying that it's impossible to own a car (or a gun, or a knife, or a pair of pants)?
Sure, but there are a lot of situations that could be interpreted as entrapment, although the courts will disagree with me.
Consider a criminal suspect. I would imagine that police frequently follow them around, noting where they go and when. It's certainly legal, and, I would imagine, the basis for much of the detective work that takes place when solving some crimes.
If I understand what you're saying, not quite. I can choose to buy a car that's more fuel efficiant, lowering the amount I pay in taxes for the gas that I use for driving the same distance.
Correct - that was my point, although perhaps not properly explained. We don't have to drive at all. We have choice in where we live and what kind of car we drive and what kind of job we have. Taxing gasoline or mileage isn't discrimination (in the negative sense of the word) because it's something we can do something about. It would be like taxing cell phone usage. Is it discriminatory against people who use cell phones a lot? Well, yes, but not in a violation-of-rights sort of way.
I'll stop here because I think that we're arguing the same point. Consider this post a further explanation of my previous post.
First of all, this is an invation of privacy. The State government has no right to know how many miles I drive or where I drive.
I think it is an invasion of privacy, but they do have the right to know where and how many miles you drive. It's perfectly legal for a police officer to follow you around, noting such data. Silly, yes, but legal.
Secondly, this tax will discriminate against those people who are forced to drive more miles then others because of their occupation or place of residence.
Aren't those same people then being discriminated against by having to pay more in gas? Perhaps if the state mandated where you live and work, this argument would work.
Don't get me wrong; I don't like the thought of the government (state or federal) having the ability to track my driving via GPS. I'm certain that such records would soon be available to law enforcement - and probably without even needing a warrant, thanks to things like "Homeland Security". Like many other posters, I don't see why they wouldn't just raise the gas tax. Or if they really want to tax based on mileage rather than how much gas you use, why not just use a glorified odometer rather than a complex and expensive GPS system? I suppose that they could tax certain roadways more with a GPS, but I don't think that ability would justify tracking all driving citizens.
Instead of focusing on more obtrusive, bigger pieces of real estate, perhaps Internet advertisements would work if they leveraged the unique nature of the medium to get their point across. Flash and/or Java ads that are visually interesting and interactive have a better chance of setting clicks than big, flashing banners.
I don't understand; you go from "Internet advertising doesn't work, period." to suggest a different kind of internet advertising, which would presumably work.
I think your topic is just misleading. Internet advertising is effective, but only if you follow basic advertising principles.
Porsche doesn't advertise during Saturday morning cartoons. Tampax doesn't advertise during the NCAA Final Four. Why should the internet be any different? It's not about view counts, it's about targeting advertising to a specific audience. That's why our personal data is so valuable that a company would give away software just to collect it.
If they were using their resources to do anything other than increase shareholder value, their shareholders would rightfully be pissed. The company's only duty is to increase shareholder value.
I used to think the same way until I took a class that dealt heavily with ethics. If what you say is true, then a company should illegally dump toxic waste if the increase in profit outweighs the potential loss if they get caught. Can you really argue that position? If so, I think you seriously need to examine your priorities.
I'm not saying that Gateway using their CPU cycles for profit rather than public gain is analogous to dumping toxic waste, but to say that the only duty of a company is to profit represents (to me) a good bit of what is wrong with the corporate world today.
They have the right to view, modify, collect, own, trade, sell, transfer, move, and classify every piece of data they can collect.
As others have said in previous topics, just because it's in a contract doesn't make it lawful or enforceable. You most certainly do not negate your privacy rights simply by using their service. Do you really think that my phone service provider could record my phone conversations and distribute them as they please?
While I agree that the suspects did wrong and deserve a punishment, I also agree with essentially every other poster in claiming excessive force in the search/arrest of these suspects.
Personally, I think the individual(s) at Buckeye should be held accountable for their estimate of $250,000+ in damages, assuming that the figure is inflated (and it seems that it is). What if my neighbor was being too loud when I was trying to sleep, and as a result, I called the police and reported multiple gunshots and screams coming from his house? While this case isn't perfectly analogous, the desired result seems to be the same. In essence, I'd be "teaching him a lesson." Unless this quarter of a million dollar figure is accurate, should someone at Buckeye not be held responsible? The FBI is not at the beck-and-call of every mid-size corporate goon with a bone to pick.
I'm far from being a bigshot Windows admin (or Unix admin, for that matter), but this seems to be a huge problem in Windows. I work at a university, and in my department we end up having to give nearly all users administrator rights because they have to run programs that require them. In the searching I have done, there is no way to fine-tune these rights. For example, in Unix I would either set permissions/ownership appropriately, or if something truly needed root, I'd set up a command alias in sudo to allow it.
Can anything like this be done in Windows (2000 Professional)?
I've also learned that the business people know as little as the rest of us about where things are going. Thir guesses are never right.
If only that were true... then things would be like the episode of Seinfeld where George decides to do the exact opposite of what he would normally do.
"If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right."
I don't know any rational person who thinks that a patch is "bad." The problem with patches from Microsoft is that there are essentially four steps to them materializing:
1. A vulnerability is discovered in Microsoft software 2. Microsoft acknowledges the vulnerability 3. Microsoft issues a patch 4. Administrators apply the patch based on Microsoft's terms
Ask yourself, who's in control of that entire process? Is it one entity? An entity that has an interest in profit and corporate image? Do you think those two things come before "what's best for the computing world?"
Ideally, OSS eliminates the problems with this process. Anybody can discover a vulnerability, make it public, and issue a patch. Likewise, anybody can apply that patch in any way they see fit.
Watch out for the EULA on service pack 3, its a killer.
I see this as the main problem with closed-source software. I work at a university, and all of the professors in the department in which I work run Windows (95% are 2000 Professional). Security is a very big issue, because universities are often targeted by crackers because of our resources (bandwidth and hardware). Keeping computers secure is a difficult job when you're relying on a single vendor to (1) acknowledge security vulnerabilities and (2) provide patches for those vulnerabilities. If Microsoft doesn't want to acknowledge a flaw for fear of having egg on its proverbial face, we're SOL.
So when they do issue patches/service packs, we're usually quick to apply them. But in the case of SP3, in order to secure our computers, we also have to accept an overly-broad EULA. A grad student geek and I were talking about this today while I was installing SP3 on a computer that had not yet had the patch applied.
So do you give up control of your machines to Microsoft or to crackers? Right now we've chosen Microsoft, and I'm not completely convinced that the other alternative wouldn't be better.
Slashdot Mirror
Many apartments have pretty thick ceilings and floors
Obviously we don't have the same landlord.
Seriously, I hate having my inbox clogged up as much as the next guy, but wake me up when something actually HAPPENS. I'm sick of hearing the two sides verbally piss on each other, I think we can all agree that's been done to death. How this rehashing of the same old crap is newsworthy to anyone is beyond me. Different face, same words.
/. readers are a part of one of these interest groups.
I'm with you as far as being tired of seeing this sort of thing go on for ages without any discernable progress. But you've got to understand, this is how things of this nature are hammered out. They say politics is the process of deciding who gets what in a society. This is just two different interest groups fighting for what they want. And, despite the negativity associated with the phrase "interest groups", they're not always evil.
As far as it being newsworthy or not, I think it is. You've heard it before, this is News for Nerds, and lots of
#!/bin/bash
echo "Scanning for viruses..."
sleep 360
echo "Virus scan complete! 0 viruses detected."
I said the metric systm is the tool of the devil! My car gets 40 rods to the hog's head, and that's the way I likes it!
With a slow fan and decent heatsink, my CPU still sits around 48 degrees C.
I just installed a Thermalright SK-7 and Vantec Stealth fan with Arctic Silver 3 on a couple of machines running an XP 2000+. Idle temperature is in the low forties (Celsius) and the things are very quiet. Actually, the noise improvement over the retail heatsink/fan combo wasn't really noticeable, although temperatures did drop significantly.
We've also got a couple of machines running dual MP 1800+ CPUs, and they were *loud* with a cheapo heatsink and Global Win 60mm fan. Installing the Thermalright and Stealth lowered the temperature a few degrees, but cut noise by what seems like a factor of 3.
We bought all of this cooling gear from Best Byte and were pleased.
I had lunch with a nice girl nearly daily for about 6 months before she realized I didn't know what her name was.
Mulva?
I agree, and would like to add my thoughts.
One of the most likeable things about programming is that on a low enough level, it's always predictable. This kind of goes hand-in-hand with the fact that computers don't make mistakes, humans do. As a programmer, it's very comforting (for lack of a better word) to have a chunk of code and know that, given X input, you'll get Y output. You can write a subroutine, document it well, and come back to it later, knowing how it will behave. Of course, other programmers can do the same with your code, without having to have intricate knowledge of how the code goes about returning the output.
But of course, there's a catch. It's probable that the programmer who wrote the subroutine initially didn't envision some special case, and therefore didn't write the code to handle it. If everybody is lucky, the program will hiccup and the second programmer will see the problem. The worse situation is when the error is seemingly minor, and goes unnoticed: when that floating point number gets converted to an integer and nobody notices.
I know this isn't some groundbreaking new look on abstraction in code, but it is pretty interesting to think about.
For the price of most PC Surround sound speakers and cards you could buy a nice Surround Sound stereo system and run your PC audio through it, and it usually sounds alot better.
A "nice" two-channel system (CD player, integrated amp or receiver, speakers, cabling) probably starts at around $800 to $1000, depending on what your tastes are and what kind of music you listen to. If you want the same fidelity coming from 5 speakers, you're looking at probably 2.5 times the cost. A $500 surround sound system is good at generating noise, that's about it.
I don't claim to be an audiophile, and I don't think you have to spend 5 figures to enjoy music, but you really do get what you pay for in audio, particularly at the lower-cost end of the hi-fi spectrum.
Asking a generation x geek today if they will 'retire from IT' might in 30 years seem as inappropriate a question as saying, "well gosh, do you think you could spend your career in education?"
Speaking of which, I'm surprised there isn't more mention of education in this thread. I'm a graduating senior in Business Information Systems (insert sound of CS majors snickering because they think IS majors choose such because they can't hack it in CS), and recently rethought my plans for the future. I could go to work in June making a good salary. I could be there at 8, sit in my cubicle, and leave at 5. Things would get better over the years, assuming I don't get laid off, but I'd always have to deal with office politics and other such BS.
So I went and talked to a professor that I'd had a year ago, and told him that I was interested in pursuing a PhD and eventually teaching at the college level. Let me tell you, if you all had heard what he said, you'd probably be lining up to get in a doctoral program and get a teaching/research position. There are clear benefits such as job security, a low-stress environment (generally), and the ability to do consulting work on the side. And on top of that you can influence students in a way that nobody else can.
I was curious about salaries, so I looked his up: six figures. He's about 45 years old. I checked some salaries of top-level ITS employees at the university, and only a handful of them were even close to a six-figure salary. Not to mention what they probably have to deal with on a daily basis. I quickly decided that such a career was not for me.
Of course the educational arena is not without its faults, and I'm sure there are plenty of happy senior system admins, but for me, the choice is easy.
The other thing with PHP is that there are now so many free projects using PHP it is often a lot better to look at they are coded, I think you gain a lot more pratical knowledge this way than you could glean from any book no matter how exhaustive.
/. folks know the benefits of reusing code in this way, but doing so without knowing what it's doing is risky business. I don't think I need to explain why.
The only problem I have with this is that sometimes new programmers want to use this copy-and-paste style coding before they really understand the language. I mean, most
For that reason, there certainly is a place for beginner books, as this one seems to be.
Christian Right Lobbies to Overturn Second Law of Thermodynamics
No doubt about it, you are most definitely a geek if you find this funny:
True in a Nutshell
Ownership implies that you can do whatever you want with a product.
That's a strange definition. Most people would say that you can own a car. And those same people, when they get pulled over for speeding, don't say, "What?! But officer, I own this car! I can do whatever I want with it!"
Are you saying that it's impossible to own a car (or a gun, or a knife, or a pair of pants)?
Couldn't that be construed as intimidation?
Sure, but there are a lot of situations that could be interpreted as entrapment, although the courts will disagree with me.
Consider a criminal suspect. I would imagine that police frequently follow them around, noting where they go and when. It's certainly legal, and, I would imagine, the basis for much of the detective work that takes place when solving some crimes.
If I understand what you're saying, not quite. I can choose to buy a car that's more fuel efficiant, lowering the amount I pay in taxes for the gas that I use for driving the same distance.
Correct - that was my point, although perhaps not properly explained. We don't have to drive at all. We have choice in where we live and what kind of car we drive and what kind of job we have. Taxing gasoline or mileage isn't discrimination (in the negative sense of the word) because it's something we can do something about. It would be like taxing cell phone usage. Is it discriminatory against people who use cell phones a lot? Well, yes, but not in a violation-of-rights sort of way.
I'll stop here because I think that we're arguing the same point. Consider this post a further explanation of my previous post.
First of all, this is an invation of privacy. The State government has no right to know how many miles I drive or where I drive.
I think it is an invasion of privacy, but they do have the right to know where and how many miles you drive. It's perfectly legal for a police officer to follow you around, noting such data. Silly, yes, but legal.
Secondly, this tax will discriminate against those people who are forced to drive more miles then others because of their occupation or place of residence.
Aren't those same people then being discriminated against by having to pay more in gas? Perhaps if the state mandated where you live and work, this argument would work.
Don't get me wrong; I don't like the thought of the government (state or federal) having the ability to track my driving via GPS. I'm certain that such records would soon be available to law enforcement - and probably without even needing a warrant, thanks to things like "Homeland Security". Like many other posters, I don't see why they wouldn't just raise the gas tax. Or if they really want to tax based on mileage rather than how much gas you use, why not just use a glorified odometer rather than a complex and expensive GPS system? I suppose that they could tax certain roadways more with a GPS, but I don't think that ability would justify tracking all driving citizens.
Instead of focusing on more obtrusive, bigger pieces of real estate, perhaps Internet advertisements would work if they leveraged the unique nature of the medium to get their point across. Flash and/or Java ads that are visually interesting and interactive have a better chance of setting clicks than big, flashing banners.
I don't understand; you go from "Internet advertising doesn't work, period." to suggest a different kind of internet advertising, which would presumably work.
I think your topic is just misleading. Internet advertising is effective, but only if you follow basic advertising principles.
Porsche doesn't advertise during Saturday morning cartoons. Tampax doesn't advertise during the NCAA Final Four. Why should the internet be any different? It's not about view counts, it's about targeting advertising to a specific audience. That's why our personal data is so valuable that a company would give away software just to collect it.
If they were using their resources to do anything other than increase shareholder value, their shareholders would rightfully be pissed. The company's only duty is to increase shareholder value.
I used to think the same way until I took a class that dealt heavily with ethics. If what you say is true, then a company should illegally dump toxic waste if the increase in profit outweighs the potential loss if they get caught. Can you really argue that position? If so, I think you seriously need to examine your priorities.
I'm not saying that Gateway using their CPU cycles for profit rather than public gain is analogous to dumping toxic waste, but to say that the only duty of a company is to profit represents (to me) a good bit of what is wrong with the corporate world today.
They have the right to view, modify, collect, own, trade, sell, transfer, move, and classify every piece of data they can collect.
As others have said in previous topics, just because it's in a contract doesn't make it lawful or enforceable. You most certainly do not negate your privacy rights simply by using their service. Do you really think that my phone service provider could record my phone conversations and distribute them as they please?
While I agree that the suspects did wrong and deserve a punishment, I also agree with essentially every other poster in claiming excessive force in the search/arrest of these suspects.
Personally, I think the individual(s) at Buckeye should be held accountable for their estimate of $250,000+ in damages, assuming that the figure is inflated (and it seems that it is). What if my neighbor was being too loud when I was trying to sleep, and as a result, I called the police and reported multiple gunshots and screams coming from his house? While this case isn't perfectly analogous, the desired result seems to be the same. In essence, I'd be "teaching him a lesson." Unless this quarter of a million dollar figure is accurate, should someone at Buckeye not be held responsible? The FBI is not at the beck-and-call of every mid-size corporate goon with a bone to pick.
I'm far from being a bigshot Windows admin (or Unix admin, for that matter), but this seems to be a huge problem in Windows. I work at a university, and in my department we end up having to give nearly all users administrator rights because they have to run programs that require them. In the searching I have done, there is no way to fine-tune these rights. For example, in Unix I would either set permissions/ownership appropriately, or if something truly needed root, I'd set up a command alias in sudo to allow it.
Can anything like this be done in Windows (2000 Professional)?
I've also learned that the business people know as little as the rest of us about where things are going. Thir guesses are never right.
If only that were true... then things would be like the episode of Seinfeld where George decides to do the exact opposite of what he would normally do.
"If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right."
/bin/false
It really is much more secure.
I don't know any rational person who thinks that a patch is "bad." The problem with patches from Microsoft is that there are essentially four steps to them materializing:
1. A vulnerability is discovered in Microsoft software
2. Microsoft acknowledges the vulnerability
3. Microsoft issues a patch
4. Administrators apply the patch based on Microsoft's terms
Ask yourself, who's in control of that entire process? Is it one entity? An entity that has an interest in profit and corporate image? Do you think those two things come before "what's best for the computing world?"
Ideally, OSS eliminates the problems with this process. Anybody can discover a vulnerability, make it public, and issue a patch. Likewise, anybody can apply that patch in any way they see fit.
Watch out for the EULA on service pack 3, its a killer.
I see this as the main problem with closed-source software. I work at a university, and all of the professors in the department in which I work run Windows (95% are 2000 Professional). Security is a very big issue, because universities are often targeted by crackers because of our resources (bandwidth and hardware). Keeping computers secure is a difficult job when you're relying on a single vendor to (1) acknowledge security vulnerabilities and (2) provide patches for those vulnerabilities. If Microsoft doesn't want to acknowledge a flaw for fear of having egg on its proverbial face, we're SOL.
So when they do issue patches/service packs, we're usually quick to apply them. But in the case of SP3, in order to secure our computers, we also have to accept an overly-broad EULA. A grad student geek and I were talking about this today while I was installing SP3 on a computer that had not yet had the patch applied.
So do you give up control of your machines to Microsoft or to crackers? Right now we've chosen Microsoft, and I'm not completely convinced that the other alternative wouldn't be better.