Uh?
My little pretend program here enables total remote filesystem access and control through a TCP port is also written in C.
Does that make it as secure as Linux?
Or as secure as Windows? (no jokes, please).
Simply add the person in question to your address book, and the Junk filter will let it pass.
Also, there's a previous recipients list, which means Junk Mail won't filter out replies to mails you've sent.
disclaimer: I've yet to convince my company to go for Linux in a server role, though I've snuck in a few single-purpose Linux systems for things such as answerphone systems, webcam monitors etc...
One of the things I like about using Linux is that it's possible to understand the whole environment. Most every component is documented by the group who develop it, and there's an untold number of people doing similar work with Linux who share their knowledge.
My point is, with the right admin, support isn't necessarily vital. For everything but the most esoteric setups, you can work your way through configuration and maintenance yourself. If it starts misbehaving, crank up the logging verbosity and find out exactly what's going on. Consult docs, and fix. File bug reports, contribute code and finance developers if the problem is a faulty program rather than a configuration/implementation problem that can be worked-around.
I wouldn't say this is always practical in every situation -- and there's certainly a lot of value to be got from Linux vendors' support schemes. Certainly more so than Microsoft's support, which is like heroin. It doesn't give you any insight into why things are broken, just (if you're lucky) the fix needed to keep things moving along.
(wandering OT... sorry): If you learn the concepts behind what you're trying to achieve, Linux admin becomes that much easier. If you know how a protocol works, verbose logging is an absolute gem. Personally, I think if you're trying to implement anything serious, you owe it to yourself to know how the thing works at a pretty low level. So, you could be wading through man pages of an eve instead of getting drunk like those Windows admins, but you'll have an installation you can depend on to just keep working.
(oh - and to any Windows admins who take offence, I apologise. In my current job, I pretty much am a Win admin myself. If I could ask one thing of Windows Server machines, it'd be give me verbosity, dammit! If something doesn't work right, I want to know exactly what it's doing to get itself in a knot.
lol...
'burglarization' is my pet favo(u)rite.
'burgled' = 'burglarized' too, apparently.
Taking a perfectly good Saxon word and applying (of all things!) a 'zed-ified' French suffix. Net gain, 4 characters.:)
Your post sums things up quite well. Because we all pay for it, they have a duty to make sure it's available to all.
And that duty's not just 'something they should do to be nice', it's the law -- the Royal Charter and Agreement which the BBC operates under makes this clear.
Incidentally, the BBC are pretty big Linux/F/OSS proponents. Their entire BBC Interactive digital service is run from Linux systems. There are some very clever folk at the Beeb, used to 'rolling their own' technologies. I'd imagine something like Linux is the perfect tool to do this kinda stuff with. They've got vast amounts of in-house software and hardware which they've developed over the best part of a century.
Anyone else remember the BBC Micro? They, and the Open University have to take quite a significant amount of credit for kick-starting interest in computing in the UK during the late 70's and early 80's.
Incidentally, the Open University, whose course materials BBC 2 broadcast nationally and for free, is a fantastic organisation. Like the BBC, it was founded by Royal Charter, and is another example of how something spawned by government need not be tethered to it. It's been a highly respected institution from which to graduate for decades. Here's some info
Re:This should just be the start
on
Robocones
·
· Score: 1
I see lots of them like big snakes swirling around the sky relaying themselves
... and laying tarmac behind them? Won't the whole place be tarmac'd over eventually?!:)
Neat idea though. In a similar fashion (IIRC), there's a road in Singapore whose central reservation moves automatically. So, during the morning when everyone's heading into the city, the reservation moves over to provide more lanes for the traffic flow. During the day, it moves back to the middle. Then, for the journey home, it moves to the other side to allow for the returning traffic.
Great idea -- would love to know how it's done (assuming I've not imagined it).
It's not like you have to pass a test, get circumcised or know the secret handshake to try out these other options. If there's one thing I dislike as much as zealots, it's those who won't try something because of some stereotypical view of what existing users are like.
If you're interested in the tech, and you've got the ability to try it, do so.
Reminds me of something a friend of mine once said: "I love Metallica. But there's one problem : I hate Metallica fans." (though that was before the Metallica/Napster debacle;)
I commute to & from work by bus. I get to read a book, listen to music... and if I'm a few mins late due to extraordinarily bad traffic, my employer isn't dumb enough not to understand.
Whenever I hear car drivers complaining about buses, I tell them this: All those people need to get where they're going somehow. Imagine all 70-odd people on that bus driving their own car.
Front-end to rock-solid software. For the most part:)
Check out the number of OSS tools that're either bundled with or have been ported to OS X. Then look at how many great UI's have been designed to work with them.
And if you want to do a bit of D.I.Y., AppleScript (or more appropriately, AppleScript Studio) applications are great ways to build a quick & simple bridge between the GUI and the command-line.
Personally, I've written a bunch of 6-10 line AppleScripts which I use as 'droplets' to perform command-line operations from the desktop.
Of course, it's horses for courses. Everyone should simply give everything they can get their hands on a throrough road-test, then pick what they like. No one environment's perfect, so you go with the system that niggles you least.
Jim(staring at Software Update Services admin page): Hey, Dave! Is it safe to apply this Combo-Uber-Hyper Security Update Patch for March 2004 for SQL, IIS, MDAC, Windows Scripting MediaWotsit Turbo?
Dave (not really paying attention): Yeah. Sure. Why not. We've got that Magic Roll-back Button they told us about in MSCE class, haven't we...
Jim: Cool. click... Uhh.. Approve.. yeah, that's it. click... Woohoo. Damn, this makes patch management easy! Christ, I'm smart.
FX: Alarms... sirens... flashing lights...
Dave (sighing)... clicks 'roll back' button... minutes pass... sirens continue
Jim: Uh-oh. I'll call someone.
Dave (rising panic): But.... the button! It said... roll back!(..close to tears now...) Oh, why does this happen every time... *sobs*.... those damn Roll Back engineers, I swear they just party all night and turn up to work with hangovers.... Well that's the final straw! I'm quitting. I'm gonna learn me some SCO and go work for EV1Servers. Ha!
Why on earth is Exchange so horrifically bad? It's the bane of my life at work... and the worst thing is we don't run the server... we just get all the calls from staff: "my email's down!"
Anyone wanna join me on a T-2 style trip back in time to kill the creators of Exchange/Outlook before they can create the damn thing? Or at least try to reason with them...
(OT... but I've just realised that it might be a good idea to spend less time reading websites when I bastardise 'automatically' into 'automagically' without even realising...)
True, but what happens if I were to say download one song, and then want the whole CD? Do I pay $9 + $2, or do I pay $13-$15 total. There's no reward for sampling.
Good point. I guess the 30-second free previews available for every track helps to a degree, though.
It's not so much about if I can stand it or not, it's that I'm getting an inferior reproduction to what I can get at a store or on a free network (if I search hard enough). I think retail places would score a bullet point if they said, "higher quality versions than what's available elsewhere."
At present, I suppose that's unfortunately just one of the trade-offs of the system. Maybe over time stores may upgrade their offerings. However as I mentioned, I tend to use online stores as a complimentary service to getting CDs from brick & mortar stores and via Amazon etc. If there's an album which I absolutely have to have in the best quality available, I'll wait for the CD to arrive. The rest of the time, I'll go for the instant-hit:)
What I think would be key is if music stores would let you download the versions of the songs right away, and then ship the CD to you. DRM might not be such an issue if a hard DRM-free copy is on the way.;)
Interesting... even if it was only a tie-up between iTunes and Amazon (for example). I already make a habit of checking out the 30-sec good-quality previews on iTunes before purchasing through Amazon. IIRC, there's even a few AppleScripts in iTunes/Mac that will automagically look up iTunes tracks at Amazon and vice-versa (although I might be delusional).
A couple-few of those points aren't a problem (at least with iTunes)
Each song may well be $0.99, but a full album is most often $9.99.
You do get artwork. It appears right there in iTunes. Not tried it, but you can most likely copy & paste (or just drag) it to save/print it. There's a host of programs (including AppleScripts for iTunes on the Mac) which makes automating that a breeze.
The format's lossy, true. It's up to you if you can't possibly stand less than 44,100/16-bit.
The extras is a good point. But then I don't see online music stores as replacements for real CDs, just complimentary.
If I want to share purchased music with friends, I create the playlist of my eeeeeevil DRM music, and click Burn. I can hand over the CD physically, or ISO it or re-rip it for sending electronically.
Also, due to the fractional nature of the imperal system, small measurments are easy to figure out. For example, half of 5/8 is also half of 10/16, which comes out to 5/16.
Fractio.... 5... slashy thing...8... 10 slash 16? What is this bizarre mumbo-jumbo?;)
Half of 0.625
is 0.3125!
isn't as simple.
I beg to differ;-)... Anything's easy if you're brought up with it and it becomes second nature. Writing in anything other than the Roman alphabet seems extraordinary to me, but billions of people manage it without so much as a second thought.
Sorry about that - re-read my post and it's more flippant in tone than it should've been.
I did RTA, and you're absolutely correct. The point I was rather ham-fistedly attempting to make was that debian's current lack of an installer does not mean it should take second place to distro's such as Mandrake or Red Hat on the x86 platform (or on the PPC platform either, where Knoppix is also available).
Slashdot Mirror
Yay... my favourite A/C posts again!
/. could do with a little more surrealism.
These posts have the air of having been seen in visions or passed down from the mountain-top.
Uh? My little pretend program here enables total remote filesystem access and control through a TCP port is also written in C. Does that make it as secure as Linux? Or as secure as Windows? (no jokes, please).
TBL invented the World Wide Web
... and of course, like almost every invention ever, it only happened because of progress made by others before him.
WWW != Internet.
I don't think any honest inventor can, without hubris, claim they are wholly responsible for their innovation.
Simply add the person in question to your address book, and the Junk filter will let it pass. Also, there's a previous recipients list, which means Junk Mail won't filter out replies to mails you've sent.
disclaimer: I've yet to convince my company to go for Linux in a server role, though I've snuck in a few single-purpose Linux systems for things such as answerphone systems, webcam monitors etc...
One of the things I like about using Linux is that it's possible to understand the whole environment. Most every component is documented by the group who develop it, and there's an untold number of people doing similar work with Linux who share their knowledge.
My point is, with the right admin, support isn't necessarily vital. For everything but the most esoteric setups, you can work your way through configuration and maintenance yourself. If it starts misbehaving, crank up the logging verbosity and find out exactly what's going on. Consult docs, and fix. File bug reports, contribute code and finance developers if the problem is a faulty program rather than a configuration/implementation problem that can be worked-around.
I wouldn't say this is always practical in every situation -- and there's certainly a lot of value to be got from Linux vendors' support schemes. Certainly more so than Microsoft's support, which is like heroin. It doesn't give you any insight into why things are broken, just (if you're lucky) the fix needed to keep things moving along.
(wandering OT... sorry): If you learn the concepts behind what you're trying to achieve, Linux admin becomes that much easier. If you know how a protocol works, verbose logging is an absolute gem. Personally, I think if you're trying to implement anything serious, you owe it to yourself to know how the thing works at a pretty low level. So, you could be wading through man pages of an eve instead of getting drunk like those Windows admins, but you'll have an installation you can depend on to just keep working.
(oh - and to any Windows admins who take offence, I apologise. In my current job, I pretty much am a Win admin myself. If I could ask one thing of Windows Server machines, it'd be give me verbosity, dammit! If something doesn't work right, I want to know exactly what it's doing to get itself in a knot.
Excellent post. Thanks!
"Would you like to eat this apple? Yes/No"
....
"To complete digestion, your intestines must be restarted. Click Yes to restart now, or No if you intend to empty your intestines manually."
"Are you sure you wish to move apple core to the recycle bin?"
one for linux:
"core dumped"
*groan*
and one fine day, I might just remember to set that damn thing to 'Plain Old Text'
Grr.
lol... 'burglarization' is my pet favo(u)rite. 'burgled' = 'burglarized' too, apparently. Taking a perfectly good Saxon word and applying (of all things!) a 'zed-ified' French suffix. Net gain, 4 characters. :)
Your post sums things up quite well. Because we all pay for it, they have a duty to make sure it's available to all.
And that duty's not just 'something they should do to be nice', it's the law -- the Royal Charter and Agreement which the BBC operates under makes this clear.
Incidentally, the BBC are pretty big Linux/F/OSS proponents. Their entire BBC Interactive digital service is run from Linux systems. There are some very clever folk at the Beeb, used to 'rolling their own' technologies. I'd imagine something like Linux is the perfect tool to do this kinda stuff with. They've got vast amounts of in-house software and hardware which they've developed over the best part of a century.
Anyone else remember the BBC Micro? They, and the Open University have to take quite a significant amount of credit for kick-starting interest in computing in the UK during the late 70's and early 80's.
Incidentally, the Open University, whose course materials BBC 2 broadcast nationally and for free, is a fantastic organisation. Like the BBC, it was founded by Royal Charter, and is another example of how something spawned by government need not be tethered to it. It's been a highly respected institution from which to graduate for decades. Here's some info
I see lots of them like big snakes swirling around the sky relaying themselves
... and laying tarmac behind them? Won't the whole place be tarmac'd over eventually?! :)
Neat idea though. In a similar fashion (IIRC), there's a road in Singapore whose central reservation moves automatically. So, during the morning when everyone's heading into the city, the reservation moves over to provide more lanes for the traffic flow. During the day, it moves back to the middle. Then, for the journey home, it moves to the other side to allow for the returning traffic.
Great idea -- would love to know how it's done (assuming I've not imagined it).
...then you're doing yourself a disservice.
;)
It's not like you have to pass a test, get circumcised or know the secret handshake to try out these other options. If there's one thing I dislike as much as zealots, it's those who won't try something because of some stereotypical view of what existing users are like.
If you're interested in the tech, and you've got the ability to try it, do so.
Reminds me of something a friend of mine once said: "I love Metallica. But there's one problem : I hate Metallica fans." (though that was before the Metallica/Napster debacle
Exactly.
I commute to & from work by bus. I get to read a book, listen to music... and if I'm a few mins late due to extraordinarily bad traffic, my employer isn't dumb enough not to understand.
Whenever I hear car drivers complaining about buses, I tell them this: All those people need to get where they're going somehow. Imagine all 70-odd people on that bus driving their own car.
You've just described how OS X does things.
:)
Front-end to rock-solid software. For the most part
Check out the number of OSS tools that're either bundled with or have been ported to OS X. Then look at how many great UI's have been designed to work with them.
And if you want to do a bit of D.I.Y., AppleScript (or more appropriately, AppleScript Studio) applications are great ways to build a quick & simple bridge between the GUI and the command-line.
Personally, I've written a bunch of 6-10 line AppleScripts which I use as 'droplets' to perform command-line operations from the desktop.
Of course, it's horses for courses. Everyone should simply give everything they can get their hands on a throrough road-test, then pick what they like. No one environment's perfect, so you go with the system that niggles you least.
Why? Are you offering to stand next to the parent poster on dates as an 'ugly' friend so he looks good by comparison?
Just kidding. I'm sure you're every bit as handsome as the rest of us.
Yeah, MSCE should read MCSE. I know what one is, I just can't be bothered to get one.
Jim(staring at Software Update Services admin page): Hey, Dave! Is it safe to apply this Combo-Uber-Hyper Security Update Patch for March 2004 for SQL, IIS, MDAC, Windows Scripting MediaWotsit Turbo?
... clicks 'roll back' button... minutes pass... sirens continue
.... those damn Roll Back engineers, I swear they just party all night and turn up to work with hangovers.... Well that's the final straw! I'm quitting. I'm gonna learn me some SCO and go work for EV1Servers. Ha!
Dave (not really paying attention): Yeah. Sure. Why not. We've got that Magic Roll-back Button they told us about in MSCE class, haven't we...
Jim: Cool. click... Uhh.. Approve.. yeah, that's it. click... Woohoo. Damn, this makes patch management easy! Christ, I'm smart.
FX: Alarms... sirens... flashing lights...
Dave (sighing)
Jim: Uh-oh. I'll call someone.
Dave (rising panic): But.... the button! It said... roll back! (..close to tears now...) Oh, why does this happen every time... *sobs*
Why on earth is Exchange so horrifically bad? It's the bane of my life at work... and the worst thing is we don't run the server ... we just get all the calls from staff: "my email's down!"
Anyone wanna join me on a T-2 style trip back in time to kill the creators of Exchange/Outlook before they can create the damn thing? Or at least try to reason with them...
Offtopic? Oh, come on!
"who woulda thunk it?"
thunk -- code that performs a translation or conversion... like the stylesheet?
Okay... so I'm stretching definitions slightly. But I'll do anything for a pun.
Two words:
:)
'skew' and 'interleave'
ahhh.... good times, good times...
(OT... but I've just realised that it might be a good idea to spend less time reading websites when I bastardise 'automatically' into 'automagically' without even realising...)
True, but what happens if I were to say download one song, and then want the whole CD? Do I pay $9 + $2, or do I pay $13-$15 total. There's no reward for sampling.
:)
;)
Good point. I guess the 30-second free previews available for every track helps to a degree, though.
It's not so much about if I can stand it or not, it's that I'm getting an inferior reproduction to what I can get at a store or on a free network (if I search hard enough). I think retail places would score a bullet point if they said, "higher quality versions than what's available elsewhere."
At present, I suppose that's unfortunately just one of the trade-offs of the system. Maybe over time stores may upgrade their offerings. However as I mentioned, I tend to use online stores as a complimentary service to getting CDs from brick & mortar stores and via Amazon etc. If there's an album which I absolutely have to have in the best quality available, I'll wait for the CD to arrive. The rest of the time, I'll go for the instant-hit
What I think would be key is if music stores would let you download the versions of the songs right away, and then ship the CD to you. DRM might not be such an issue if a hard DRM-free copy is on the way.
Interesting... even if it was only a tie-up between iTunes and Amazon (for example). I already make a habit of checking out the 30-sec good-quality previews on iTunes before purchasing through Amazon. IIRC, there's even a few AppleScripts in iTunes/Mac that will automagically look up iTunes tracks at Amazon and vice-versa (although I might be delusional).
A couple-few of those points aren't a problem (at least with iTunes)
Each song may well be $0.99, but a full album is most often $9.99.
You do get artwork. It appears right there in iTunes. Not tried it, but you can most likely copy & paste (or just drag) it to save/print it. There's a host of programs (including AppleScripts for iTunes on the Mac) which makes automating that a breeze.
The format's lossy, true. It's up to you if you can't possibly stand less than 44,100/16-bit.
The extras is a good point. But then I don't see online music stores as replacements for real CDs, just complimentary.
If I want to share purchased music with friends, I create the playlist of my eeeeeevil DRM music, and click Burn. I can hand over the CD physically, or ISO it or re-rip it for sending electronically.
Fractio.... 5
is 0.3125!
I beg to differ
Umm.. So OT, I've forgotten what the T was...
Sorry about that - re-read my post and it's more flippant in tone than it should've been.
I did RTA, and you're absolutely correct. The point I was rather ham-fistedly attempting to make was that debian's current lack of an installer does not mean it should take second place to distro's such as Mandrake or Red Hat on the x86 platform (or on the PPC platform either, where Knoppix is also available).