With proper credentials on this scale, you can make subtle changes that don't set off any red-flags to create your profit, and it may take years for the scale and scope of your meddling to really be determined.
That doesn't jive with my results though. At work, if I'm in the building in the center all day without appreciable service my phone doesn't last the day. If I'm at an outside wall, my phone barely makes it through the day without any significant usage, barely getting one bar. If I'm out and about I've had service work on standby for couple of days when I've forgotten to charge it overnight.
Admittedly we are right between a major power substation and high-voltage transmission lines, and there's a cell-tower out back; I don't know what carriers.
I used to be sold on pico/nano, but then I needed to do things that weren't terribly easy to do in pico/nano, like significant regular-expression parsing in thousand-line files. I ended up switching to vi, mostly because while the commands are not necessarily intuitive, the project is very mature and well documented. It's a pain sometimes, certainly, but necessity pushed me to it and for the most part I'm getting good with it.
It took me close to 20 years of using UNIX/Linux to finally have a need to make that change, for what it's worth.
Heh. I'd been running Linux exclusively on the desktop for about five years when my new-at-the-time laptop had a weird issue where the clock updated at a fast and seemingly random rate, minutes flying by almost like they were seconds. There was no solution, so I ended up on Windows again, and then I realised that I could play games again, and then I got lazy. But, In the intervening years I got tired of playing with computers at home when I work with them all day at the office, and I started playing with other things for hobbies.
I figured I'd give this another chance, and setting up a multihead, multiseat box as a MythTV install for use at my desk, my wife's desk, and the entertainment center station seemed worthwhile, but it's quickly becoming not-so. I'd attempted to use Debian to do it but one of the graphics cards isn't supported in Jessie anymore, and, and when I attempted to use Ubuntu 14.04 things really went to hell. I'd rather use a new-stable distro or in the case of Jessie, a new, soon-to-be-stable distro, but I'm getting tired of pounding at the keyboard without reaching the goal every weekend. I've got better things to do than fight with something abstract.
Yeah, I've got one project that I'm working with that uses PostgreSQL as its DB. I went looking for O'Reilly and other books that cover it, and none are current. Then I found the online stuff and was really, really surprised by how good it is.
As someone that has factory service manuals for every vehicle owned, and probably a few for vehicles that are long-gone, there's a difference between an owner's manual and a factory service manual, and most FOSS projects lack both, or lack the Owner's Manual and the first couple of chapters for extended but common maintenance service of the FSM.
Both general-use manuals and in-depth manuals have their places, but the manuals that don't exist don't help very much. To continue the car analogy, I may not need to replace the high-reverse piston in the transmission's front planetary sun gear, but I would sure like to know how to change the filter and fluid, and how to remove and reinstall the transmission without accidently dropping the torque converter on my face.
I always thought that the most fun, or at least the biggest feeling of smug satisfaction, was in seeing your project become a core, can't-live-without project. That requires at least a certain degree of documentation to exist to even reach that point.
I developed my chops working with MS-DOS in the early nineties as a kid, starting with version 3.3, which lacked an online help system. I had an MS-DOS manual that covered a whole lot of what could be done, and then when I moved on the MS-DOS 5 and online help appeared, I found it to be decent even if not great, and it only got better throughout the versions, until I stopped using DOS.
Maybe my perspective is a little skewed, but I like documents that decribe usage concisely, and I like examples when the usage can't be described concisely. It's okay if the complexity of a product or project can't be describe concisely, so long as good examples exist. When I first started using Linux it was Slackware back in the 2.0.0 kernel days, and I found that my UNIX-in-a-Nutshell book worked quite well even if there were a few things that didn't apply because of the System V vs BSD nature of UNIX as compared to whatever init Slackware used, plus the whole commercial UNIX versus GPL versions of things situation.
I totally get that if software isn't improved over time that it could die-on-the-vine, through lack of use over time, but those changes need to coincide with usage docs. If they don't then things could die-on-the-vine as they get too out-there for people to easily use.
Yup. And that's been the other part of the problem, poor versioning on the writeups that are out there, so there's a bit of research just to see if this document even applies to the project, package, and version that you're trying to work with. Since I was working with video, notorious for knocking down the local console to the point that a reboot is required, I decided to set up a serial TTY so that with my old laptop I could serial-console in. In the process I found instructions for configuring the bootloader to also use the TTY interface, but while Grub2 is better documented than a lot of projects I still found some erroneous documentation for Grub2 and some now-useless documentation for the first-generation Grub as well.
Heh. I wish that I could blame it on Github. Unfortunately the problems I encountered were with mainstream distribution prepackaged software from the stock repositories, not some third-party-sourced stuff. When core stuff like the display manager are heavily modified, they at least need their configuration and usage well-documented. I'm not a programmer so I'm not working directly with the libraries or functions myself, but if it's not even clear how to manage the configurations from a sysadmin perspective then it's useless.
A question, and please give this some thought before answering...
If something does what its user needs it to do, then how is it outdated?
I'm typing this on a nine-year-old Dell Latitude D410 running Windows XP. I've got a current version of Firefox, current versions of all of the plugins I use on a regular basis, and just about the only thing the laptop won't do well is full-screen flash video at high res, but that seems to be more a function of the poor implementation of flash than of the computer itself, and even with only 2GB RAM it's still faster than the four-years-newer Atom-based Ideapad S10-2 with Windows 7 that we got free with my wife's then-new computer. In some ways it's superior in that when my fancy Linux box's graphics broke I was able to use the serial port on the docking station to TTY in to the Linux box to work on it with just a null-modem cable, didn't need anything else.
For web surfing this old thing does just about everything that I need it to do, with the licensed OS that came with it, even with the original amount of RAM and the original hard disk drive. So, why should I change this? Because Microsoft wrote shitty code full of holes and now refuses to fix those holes?
This machine doesn't go out of the house, and at home it's behind a firewall. I've got noscript, flashblock, adblock, and https everywhere installed, so it'll be very difficult to infect it through the web browser. without a compelling reason to change it, why would I spend my hard-earned money on something that won't be used for more than I use this thing for now? It's for when I'm lounging on the couch being lazy.
I wish that they'd break-down their theft reports based on the platform generation of a vehicle, rather than based on model year, given that interchange usually is smooth between same-platform models across several years. A '94 Integra and an '01 Integra should be lumped-in together, and an '02 Dodge Ram should be lumped in with an '08.
I would expect people with highly advanced degrees in a special discipline to have specific terms for very specific things that they use correctly.
I don't expect a community slang term to necessarily be used correctly, if the nature of the evolution of slang even allows for a hard and fast definition.
Nice straw-man attack. No, I don't work for a system that licenses anything at all. Obviously it's possible for any system to be corrupted, but then again, if either city is having massive problems with traffic then it would make sense that the price to operate a ride for-hire would go up to account for that.
I don't pick up hitchhikers because most people that I've met that are begging for rides smell funny, and while they may not be dangerous necessarily, there are a lot of fairly crazy people out there too, and I don't really want to deal with them.
We get that you're still upset that the media has managed to take the term "hacker" and turn it into a pejorative, but I don't think that you're ever going to get it back. Probably time to just let it go move on.
How's educating those new Usenet users since September 1993 going?
Given that this is something that can be tested, I'd like to see real-world results before jumping to too much conclusion. Auto theft is primarily driven by economics, the demand for parts, rather than a desire to have the vehicle intact. At the moment the Cherokee, Q50, and then new-model Escalade aren't in much demand for parts, and given that none of them are massively-high-volume sellers it's unlikely that theft-for-parts will ever be a big deal with these models.
The most stolen vehicles are the Honda Accord, Honda Civic, Toyota Corolla, and the full-sized trucks from American manufacturers. All high-volume, all in-demand for stock parts.
It's not impossible to run a small business successfully, even a home-based one, but it can be a lot of work. I know one woman that runs an embroidery business for putting logos on polo shirts and hats and the like from her home, she has the contract for one of the major local utilities for workers' uniform shirts, hats, and cloth tool bags, and runs sixteen or so embroidery heads across three machines, so she can do a batch of something like eight identical at a time, or six identical at a time, or two identical at a time. She makes a lot of money, but probably has $100,000 into the machines and spends a lot off time changing broken thread and folding shirts.
Another friend runs an electronics business at home, making sound systems for businesses with easy and cheap zone volume control. He has PCBs etched and he assembles them himself or occasionally with a side-helper, and does most of the installs himself. It's taken awhile to get profitable (his wife is also an engineer and has been the primary breadwinner as his business has spun-up) but it looks like it's going to take off shortly as more local restaurants are approaching him about fixing their f-ed up sound.
Thing of it is, both of these businesses require at least some form of skill. The embroidery business requires at least some computer skills as she has to take the logos and turn them into something that can be embroidered, and has to have the dedication and persistence to babysit the machines and sort the merchandise for packaging and delivery. The electronics business requires time and effort to design and manufacture, and time committed to going to trade shows and developing the connections to make it happen.
Yeah, because once I'm mugged and all my personal electronics are stolen, I can give quite the negative review to that driver through the website...
Or when I get home from being dead in the ditch, I can really lay into them!
Re:The Free Market has the Technology Now
on
The Great Taxi Upheaval
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
And yet we all hate massive, faceless corporations that abuse us as customers but those are the most successful corporations, and often when dealing with companies we're stuck with either a premium price or dealing with the lesser-of-evils.
The "Free Market" is a myth. Suing to recover one's losses is a myth, at least as far as getting the defendant to actually respond to suits in small-claims is concerned. One can win by default judgement and then what? Good luck collecting.
There's a reason for taxi medallions, registrars of contractors, business licenses, landlord-tenant laws, and other regulation services, and it's to keep those that run those businesses honest and to protect the consumer. A bad-apple can operate for YEARS when new customers in a market don't know to avoid them, even if existing customers have reviewed them as bad. After all, when you're new to a market you don't necessarily even know how to find the reviews for that market, and a private service like Uber, while interested in providing reviews, won't go out of their way to disrespect their drivers as it in turn disrespects their very service. They have to tread a fine line as their service is dependent on their service providers, so they literally can't afford to be free-market in this sense.
I practice caveat emptor. Something that seems too good to be true often is. Something that starts out cheap and good probably won't be cheap and good for very long once its inertia sets in. Think about radio stations, when a station has a complete format change, the new station is often great, few ads, very short self-promotion clips, lots of music, DJs that don't talk that much. But that's when they're in the initial attract-listener phase. Once they've got a listener base they can sell ads. They need to bring the cost of the music down so they make longer self-promotion clips, and they have their DJs talk more since DJ airtime doesn't really cost anything, and soon they're no different that their competitors.
This would be really nice in the personal computer realm, be it laptop or desktop, assuming that it fits in those form-factors.
I barely need glasses to drive, for distance. I can read books held in my hands without glasses. Laptops and desktops are every so slightly too far away to usually be able to do that. I would love to be able to ditch the glasses when at my desk at work.
At least one major media distribution company's billing system runs on OpenVMS still
That would probably be one of the easiest things migrate off of VMS though, as there are already products for other platforms that can do that task. I'd expect special things like weather mapping, earthquake analysis, climate prediction, and other geophysical things to be harder.
Slashdot Mirror
With proper credentials on this scale, you can make subtle changes that don't set off any red-flags to create your profit, and it may take years for the scale and scope of your meddling to really be determined.
That doesn't jive with my results though. At work, if I'm in the building in the center all day without appreciable service my phone doesn't last the day. If I'm at an outside wall, my phone barely makes it through the day without any significant usage, barely getting one bar. If I'm out and about I've had service work on standby for couple of days when I've forgotten to charge it overnight.
Admittedly we are right between a major power substation and high-voltage transmission lines, and there's a cell-tower out back; I don't know what carriers.
knit picking doesn't count...
That's a different kind of sock...
I used to be sold on pico/nano, but then I needed to do things that weren't terribly easy to do in pico/nano, like significant regular-expression parsing in thousand-line files. I ended up switching to vi, mostly because while the commands are not necessarily intuitive, the project is very mature and well documented. It's a pain sometimes, certainly, but necessity pushed me to it and for the most part I'm getting good with it.
It took me close to 20 years of using UNIX/Linux to finally have a need to make that change, for what it's worth.
Why the hell did they take the configs out of /etc in the first place? That's what I want to know.
Heh. I'd been running Linux exclusively on the desktop for about five years when my new-at-the-time laptop had a weird issue where the clock updated at a fast and seemingly random rate, minutes flying by almost like they were seconds. There was no solution, so I ended up on Windows again, and then I realised that I could play games again, and then I got lazy. But, In the intervening years I got tired of playing with computers at home when I work with them all day at the office, and I started playing with other things for hobbies.
I figured I'd give this another chance, and setting up a multihead, multiseat box as a MythTV install for use at my desk, my wife's desk, and the entertainment center station seemed worthwhile, but it's quickly becoming not-so. I'd attempted to use Debian to do it but one of the graphics cards isn't supported in Jessie anymore, and, and when I attempted to use Ubuntu 14.04 things really went to hell. I'd rather use a new-stable distro or in the case of Jessie, a new, soon-to-be-stable distro, but I'm getting tired of pounding at the keyboard without reaching the goal every weekend. I've got better things to do than fight with something abstract.
Yeah, I've got one project that I'm working with that uses PostgreSQL as its DB. I went looking for O'Reilly and other books that cover it, and none are current. Then I found the online stuff and was really, really surprised by how good it is.
V'GER is that which seeks The Creator.
The Creator is that which V'GER seeks.
As someone that has factory service manuals for every vehicle owned, and probably a few for vehicles that are long-gone, there's a difference between an owner's manual and a factory service manual, and most FOSS projects lack both, or lack the Owner's Manual and the first couple of chapters for extended but common maintenance service of the FSM.
Both general-use manuals and in-depth manuals have their places, but the manuals that don't exist don't help very much. To continue the car analogy, I may not need to replace the high-reverse piston in the transmission's front planetary sun gear, but I would sure like to know how to change the filter and fluid, and how to remove and reinstall the transmission without accidently dropping the torque converter on my face.
I always thought that the most fun, or at least the biggest feeling of smug satisfaction, was in seeing your project become a core, can't-live-without project. That requires at least a certain degree of documentation to exist to even reach that point.
I developed my chops working with MS-DOS in the early nineties as a kid, starting with version 3.3, which lacked an online help system. I had an MS-DOS manual that covered a whole lot of what could be done, and then when I moved on the MS-DOS 5 and online help appeared, I found it to be decent even if not great, and it only got better throughout the versions, until I stopped using DOS.
Maybe my perspective is a little skewed, but I like documents that decribe usage concisely, and I like examples when the usage can't be described concisely. It's okay if the complexity of a product or project can't be describe concisely, so long as good examples exist. When I first started using Linux it was Slackware back in the 2.0.0 kernel days, and I found that my UNIX-in-a-Nutshell book worked quite well even if there were a few things that didn't apply because of the System V vs BSD nature of UNIX as compared to whatever init Slackware used, plus the whole commercial UNIX versus GPL versions of things situation.
I totally get that if software isn't improved over time that it could die-on-the-vine, through lack of use over time, but those changes need to coincide with usage docs. If they don't then things could die-on-the-vine as they get too out-there for people to easily use.
Yup. And that's been the other part of the problem, poor versioning on the writeups that are out there, so there's a bit of research just to see if this document even applies to the project, package, and version that you're trying to work with. Since I was working with video, notorious for knocking down the local console to the point that a reboot is required, I decided to set up a serial TTY so that with my old laptop I could serial-console in. In the process I found instructions for configuring the bootloader to also use the TTY interface, but while Grub2 is better documented than a lot of projects I still found some erroneous documentation for Grub2 and some now-useless documentation for the first-generation Grub as well.
Heh. I wish that I could blame it on Github. Unfortunately the problems I encountered were with mainstream distribution prepackaged software from the stock repositories, not some third-party-sourced stuff. When core stuff like the display manager are heavily modified, they at least need their configuration and usage well-documented. I'm not a programmer so I'm not working directly with the libraries or functions myself, but if it's not even clear how to manage the configurations from a sysadmin perspective then it's useless.
A question, and please give this some thought before answering...
If something does what its user needs it to do, then how is it outdated?
I'm typing this on a nine-year-old Dell Latitude D410 running Windows XP. I've got a current version of Firefox, current versions of all of the plugins I use on a regular basis, and just about the only thing the laptop won't do well is full-screen flash video at high res, but that seems to be more a function of the poor implementation of flash than of the computer itself, and even with only 2GB RAM it's still faster than the four-years-newer Atom-based Ideapad S10-2 with Windows 7 that we got free with my wife's then-new computer. In some ways it's superior in that when my fancy Linux box's graphics broke I was able to use the serial port on the docking station to TTY in to the Linux box to work on it with just a null-modem cable, didn't need anything else.
For web surfing this old thing does just about everything that I need it to do, with the licensed OS that came with it, even with the original amount of RAM and the original hard disk drive. So, why should I change this? Because Microsoft wrote shitty code full of holes and now refuses to fix those holes?
This machine doesn't go out of the house, and at home it's behind a firewall. I've got noscript, flashblock, adblock, and https everywhere installed, so it'll be very difficult to infect it through the web browser. without a compelling reason to change it, why would I spend my hard-earned money on something that won't be used for more than I use this thing for now? It's for when I'm lounging on the couch being lazy.
I wish that they'd break-down their theft reports based on the platform generation of a vehicle, rather than based on model year, given that interchange usually is smooth between same-platform models across several years. A '94 Integra and an '01 Integra should be lumped-in together, and an '02 Dodge Ram should be lumped in with an '08.
I would expect people with highly advanced degrees in a special discipline to have specific terms for very specific things that they use correctly.
I don't expect a community slang term to necessarily be used correctly, if the nature of the evolution of slang even allows for a hard and fast definition.
Nice straw-man attack. No, I don't work for a system that licenses anything at all. Obviously it's possible for any system to be corrupted, but then again, if either city is having massive problems with traffic then it would make sense that the price to operate a ride for-hire would go up to account for that.
I don't pick up hitchhikers because most people that I've met that are begging for rides smell funny, and while they may not be dangerous necessarily, there are a lot of fairly crazy people out there too, and I don't really want to deal with them.
We get that you're still upset that the media has managed to take the term "hacker" and turn it into a pejorative, but I don't think that you're ever going to get it back. Probably time to just let it go move on.
How's educating those new Usenet users since September 1993 going?
Given that this is something that can be tested, I'd like to see real-world results before jumping to too much conclusion. Auto theft is primarily driven by economics, the demand for parts, rather than a desire to have the vehicle intact. At the moment the Cherokee, Q50, and then new-model Escalade aren't in much demand for parts, and given that none of them are massively-high-volume sellers it's unlikely that theft-for-parts will ever be a big deal with these models.
The most stolen vehicles are the Honda Accord, Honda Civic, Toyota Corolla, and the full-sized trucks from American manufacturers. All high-volume, all in-demand for stock parts.
It's not impossible to run a small business successfully, even a home-based one, but it can be a lot of work. I know one woman that runs an embroidery business for putting logos on polo shirts and hats and the like from her home, she has the contract for one of the major local utilities for workers' uniform shirts, hats, and cloth tool bags, and runs sixteen or so embroidery heads across three machines, so she can do a batch of something like eight identical at a time, or six identical at a time, or two identical at a time. She makes a lot of money, but probably has $100,000 into the machines and spends a lot off time changing broken thread and folding shirts.
Another friend runs an electronics business at home, making sound systems for businesses with easy and cheap zone volume control. He has PCBs etched and he assembles them himself or occasionally with a side-helper, and does most of the installs himself. It's taken awhile to get profitable (his wife is also an engineer and has been the primary breadwinner as his business has spun-up) but it looks like it's going to take off shortly as more local restaurants are approaching him about fixing their f-ed up sound.
Thing of it is, both of these businesses require at least some form of skill. The embroidery business requires at least some computer skills as she has to take the logos and turn them into something that can be embroidered, and has to have the dedication and persistence to babysit the machines and sort the merchandise for packaging and delivery. The electronics business requires time and effort to design and manufacture, and time committed to going to trade shows and developing the connections to make it happen.
Yeah, because once I'm mugged and all my personal electronics are stolen, I can give quite the negative review to that driver through the website...
Or when I get home from being dead in the ditch, I can really lay into them!
And yet we all hate massive, faceless corporations that abuse us as customers but those are the most successful corporations, and often when dealing with companies we're stuck with either a premium price or dealing with the lesser-of-evils.
The "Free Market" is a myth. Suing to recover one's losses is a myth, at least as far as getting the defendant to actually respond to suits in small-claims is concerned. One can win by default judgement and then what? Good luck collecting.
There's a reason for taxi medallions, registrars of contractors, business licenses, landlord-tenant laws, and other regulation services, and it's to keep those that run those businesses honest and to protect the consumer. A bad-apple can operate for YEARS when new customers in a market don't know to avoid them, even if existing customers have reviewed them as bad. After all, when you're new to a market you don't necessarily even know how to find the reviews for that market, and a private service like Uber, while interested in providing reviews, won't go out of their way to disrespect their drivers as it in turn disrespects their very service. They have to tread a fine line as their service is dependent on their service providers, so they literally can't afford to be free-market in this sense.
I practice caveat emptor. Something that seems too good to be true often is. Something that starts out cheap and good probably won't be cheap and good for very long once its inertia sets in. Think about radio stations, when a station has a complete format change, the new station is often great, few ads, very short self-promotion clips, lots of music, DJs that don't talk that much. But that's when they're in the initial attract-listener phase. Once they've got a listener base they can sell ads. They need to bring the cost of the music down so they make longer self-promotion clips, and they have their DJs talk more since DJ airtime doesn't really cost anything, and soon they're no different that their competitors.
This would be really nice in the personal computer realm, be it laptop or desktop, assuming that it fits in those form-factors.
I barely need glasses to drive, for distance. I can read books held in my hands without glasses. Laptops and desktops are every so slightly too far away to usually be able to do that. I would love to be able to ditch the glasses when at my desk at work.
That would probably be one of the easiest things migrate off of VMS though, as there are already products for other platforms that can do that task. I'd expect special things like weather mapping, earthquake analysis, climate prediction, and other geophysical things to be harder.