Greyfox wrote: > > The trick isn't so much in the volume of smart people, the trick is in your HR Department's ability > to filter out the folks who are only in it for the money. >
So we really need to invest in...HR training?
I just received a bunch of wickedly-sharp Japanese Feather brand blades from a guy on shavemyface.com, eighty blade for $20 mailed. At a quarter apiece, even if I only used them for a week each, I'm set for, uh, a long time -- and at a price well below what I would pay for the cartirdges to fill one of those ridiculous novelty nine-bladed upgrade-treadmill things, plus I get to blow smoke about how I get a fabulous shave even using a cheap boar brush and lathering my off-market Canadian shaving cream in a coffee mug.
Macho, thrifty, and international; it works better, it's cheaper, and I'm not beholden to some ghastly corporate behmoth. That's pretty much the same argument that got me from Windows to UNIX!
gentimjs asked: > > I seem to recall that sun still pitches that "100% binary compatibility" thing ? >
Good point, but that's only their own stuff, you know?
They blew a lot of smoke about a partneership with Oracle, too, which I take with a grain of salt: until, for example, Oracle Enterprise Manager is certified on Solaris 10 and Sun x86, I will have to run it on Solaris 8 or 9, SPARC. Which, obviously, is lame, since development on these products trailed off into back-porting patches a good long time ago.
gentimjs wtrote: > > USIV and T1 are by far Suns big cash cows. While I'm typing this at an USIIIi powered workstation, and would > love a simple upgrade, I cant say that this upsets me in the least. I'd far rather Sun's R&D go into thier higher-end > stuff than entry-level stuff, since it will push the current "high end" crap down to the level that us mere mortals > will be able to get it! >
Right, well, I buy for a university, not for personal use, so I have to disagree here. The systems using UltraSPARC IV+ and T1 CPUs are mostly compatible with Solaris 10, and some of us are stuck with software certified only for Solaris 9 or even 8 -- so what boxes do we run it on then? I am about to buy a V210 with two US IIIi CPUs, but there were really only a few servers I could choose from for compatibility with Solaris 8 & 9.
Last year I was chided by our Sun rep for not adopting Solaris 10 across the board -- but our main applicaiton wasn't yet certified either for Sol 10 or Oracle 10 (which it runs atop), so I couldn't go shopping until that happened.
Sun, you have to get Oracle moving on certifying the rest of its products on x86, or keep cranking out SPARC boxes for me!
"European" was a joke, son, the implication being that a plug with two blades that actually lie on the same line (instead of being parallel) to each other is so different from typical American non-DC data center wiring that it may as well have come from a place with other funny electical wiring, like, say, Britain.
Clearly, this isn't as funny when explained as why delivered as a throw-away line.:7) Our electrician, however, thought it was a good one, and since he was such a big help, I'm re-running the joke for his enjoyment.
> > If this were possible (i.e., support all Win XP apps with such improvements > in the infrastructure) with a small engineering effort, why would MS not > have already done so? >
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!...
So let's say I'm no programmer, a fair-to-middlin' writer, but a fan-freakin-tastic editor & proof-reader (*and* humble as all get out). Where do I find the clearinghouse where I can select a project who wants help with their docs?
macdaddy357 wrote: > > Given the choice between two incompatible standards for AM Stereo, the market chose niether. > Ditto ditto quadraphonic records, ditto. >
Well, to be fair, quadrophonic sound died because there were just so few four-eared audiophiles willing to shell out for an extra pair of speakers.
Monkey of Rage correctly suggested: > > > > All my foes are spelling or grammar Nazis. > > > All of my foes are spelling or grammar Nazis >
And I would humbly suggest the addition of a hyphen like so: - - All of my foes are spelling- or grammar Nazis. -
But maybe that's just my personal preference.
SQLz asked: > > WTF Is an "Internet" department? >
Laugh all you want: my last job was in the Computer Department of a verrrry old, high-profile architectural firm in Baaahst'n. I'm not certain -- Rob The Archivist could confirm this -- but I believe the singluar "Computer" referred to all the technology that the firm had invested in prior to, uh, 1998 (and that was a little IBM box for the accountants).
However, in their favor I should admit that their first "PCs" for the staff were Sun Sparc Sations for the architects and Macs for everyone else. They only went over to Win32 around 2001 or 2002. And that's when I left, too. (Hi, Chris! how's Cal?)
Doc Ruby asks: > > So who's got a content GUI that's better than walls of shelves? >
Erm, either the catalog-view-with-covers or a tag cloud for librarything.com?
Browse on a computer or print out and stick in a three-ring binder. While I agree that raking my eyes and/or finger across a row of book- or CD-spines is fast, eventually even that system doesn't scale. if i can call up part of my collection and then visually scan that -- well, then, I'm much more likely to get what I want.
Plus, Tim Spaulding is about to specifically work on storing CD & DVD information in librarything, though already some people use it for that (and one person's got a catalog of MP3s of concert bootlegs!).
shooz wrote: > > If you've got 3500 books, and can't by memory put your hand on the one you're looking for within > 45 seconds, then you're a poseur, not a bibliophile. Just put the most expensive ones at eye level. > Come up with some other aesthetic criteria for the rest, and you'll be just fine. >
Methinks you've got it backwards: shelving your book by expense/apppearance makes you a poseur and not a book-lover. I have books far more precious to me (e.g., 1945 editions of Ernie Pyle or gifts from family) that didn't cost nearly as much as my college textbooks on Martin Luther or Chaucer, much less the science books I sold back for beer money.:7)
Not long after we were married, my wife rearranged just a couple of my bookshelves...by color. *boggle* Years later I still haven't found some of those books, and I don't buy her story thaat they were lost in the intervening move.
dshade69 wrote: > > librarything is the way to go for cataloging your books but for > organization the only thing you can really do is just pick a system > and start doing the grunt work of organizing. >
Yeah, librarything is the catalog -- but when you bulk-tag books, an organic organization will just sort of coalesce. (Creepy and Lovecraftian, when you think of it that way.)
When you go back and fine-tune your tags and then maybe rate the books, you can use the catalog to lay out your system mapped across your actual living space.
Plus, the time spent browsing your catalog is like time spent among the books theselves (in terms of re-familiarizing yourself with the whole population) but much faster. When you can scan down a tag cloud, or run searches through the catalog (vice your possible-faulty memory!), you get a more accurate idea of the work ahead of you! And it's fun.
After your book are in catalogged in librarything.com, add a tag indicating their location. Sort your whole catalog on a tag or keyword (or, heck, LOC code), print out sections at a time, shelve your books accordingly, and then bulk-tag them with an indication of where they live. (I use tags with names like "zloc:office" or, too often, "zloc:basementBox3.")
This gives you logical organization according to a scheme you've chosen yourself, and also allows you to record a physical location in the same data.
As his blog notes, "28,000 users adding two million books, finding people with similar interests, getting recommendations, doing crazy new Wikipedia-like things with cataloging, etc. Something is really going on here." Also, "LibraryThing has more than twice as many books by J. K. Rowling as Thomas Jefferson gave to the Library of Congress after the British destroyed the first collection by fire. There's a joke in here somewhere."
See www.librarything.com/blog/
Heck, email them and ask: the user community (which comments extensively on the blog) or Abigail The Real Live Librarian can probably make very useful suggestions. After all there's about twenty-five people with libraries larger than yours.
P.S. The author has a new baby: be kind to the site's server!!!
Make a free trial account, enter a few ISBNs, and once you're hooked shell out the few dollars for a full account and get rolling.
Tim that author is adding lots of data import filters and tagging options and other very geeky features, and an actual librarian has joined the project. (I know, I know: it's amazing seeing a non-commercial software service with a real-live subject matter expert! Just goes to show the author's not a real geek: he admitted that someone else's specialized knowledge might not be replaced by his own prejudices and SWAGs.)
chill wrote: > > You make checks out to "Theo de Raadt", which *isn't* going to happen from any really large company > with deep pockets. There is zero tracability and zero accountability. >
OpenSSH is one of my most important tools -- and it happens to be Open Source Software. I run Sun servers at a university and we pay for annual support contracts, but the accountants would laugh me out of the room if I asked them to just send Theo a check.
To support Samba I buy the books, though I know in my heart of hearts that they won't see much more than a fraction of the cover price. I'll order a set of openBSD CDs in order to give some support to OpenSSH, but, well, I just don't think those same accountants are going to order me a t-shirt.
What else is a guy to do?
Again, the Samba team have days jobs, and someone big (is it IBM?) ponies up major dollars for their project. What organization will give Theo & Co. the appearance of "respectability" that they need for us to help pay for OpenBSD/OpenSSH? I would love to be able to float them some of my employer's money to keep them working, but it looks like a scam this way.:7)
Rude Turnip wrote: > > I think a far more interesting proposition would be to pit a 100lb pit > bull against 100lbs of chihuahuas. >
Prior art -- of a sort -- can be found in the grudge Match, "A Rottweiler vs. a Rottweiler's Weight of Chihuahuas":
www.grudge-match.com/History/rott-chi.shtml
jellomizer wrote: > > I personally find little reason to go to RadioShack much anyways, > they no longer have as much as the stuff I really wanted. >
Hey now, I go there every few months because they sell replacement foam covers for my earphones & cell phone earbud (which I always seem to tear somehow). And they also have...uh...alkaline batteries?
imemyself wrote: > > I mean it is brain-dead easy to copy files on to a Palm or PocketPC, and > with an CF or SD card(I believe they are up to the 2 or 4 GB range > now-days) you could get a ton of stuff out of work. Hell, you could even > hide the card in your shoe or something afterwards if you weren't allowed > to take your PDA home or something >
Am I the only one who read this and thought of Christopher Walken telling the story about carrying a gold watch in his ass while in a POW camp?
Slashdot Mirror
Greyfox wrote:
>
> The trick isn't so much in the volume of smart people, the trick is in your HR Department's ability
> to filter out the folks who are only in it for the money.
>
So we really need to invest in...HR training?
Just kidding.
I just received a bunch of wickedly-sharp Japanese Feather brand blades from a guy on shavemyface.com, eighty blade for $20 mailed. At a quarter apiece, even if I only used them for a week each, I'm set for, uh, a long time -- and at a price well below what I would pay for the cartirdges to fill one of those ridiculous novelty nine-bladed upgrade-treadmill things, plus I get to blow smoke about how I get a fabulous shave even using a cheap boar brush and lathering my off-market Canadian shaving cream in a coffee mug.
Macho, thrifty, and international; it works better, it's cheaper, and I'm not beholden to some ghastly corporate behmoth. That's pretty much the same argument that got me from Windows to UNIX!
HughesT wrote:
>
> Wikipedia works on the principle that sociopaths are few.
>
Few, yes, but very, very dedicated...
gentimjs asked:
>
> I seem to recall that sun still pitches that "100% binary compatibility" thing ?
>
Good point, but that's only their own stuff, you know?
They blew a lot of smoke about a partneership with Oracle, too, which I take with a grain of salt: until, for example, Oracle Enterprise Manager is certified on Solaris 10 and Sun x86, I will have to run it on Solaris 8 or 9, SPARC. Which, obviously, is lame, since development on these products trailed off into back-porting patches a good long time ago.
*sigh*
Oh, Sun, you break my heart!
gentimjs wtrote:
>
> USIV and T1 are by far Suns big cash cows. While I'm typing this at an USIIIi powered workstation, and would
> love a simple upgrade, I cant say that this upsets me in the least. I'd far rather Sun's R&D go into thier higher-end
> stuff than entry-level stuff, since it will push the current "high end" crap down to the level that us mere mortals
> will be able to get it!
>
Right, well, I buy for a university, not for personal use, so I have to disagree here. The systems using UltraSPARC IV+ and T1 CPUs are mostly compatible with Solaris 10, and some of us are stuck with software certified only for Solaris 9 or even 8 -- so what boxes do we run it on then? I am about to buy a V210 with two US IIIi CPUs, but there were really only a few servers I could choose from for compatibility with Solaris 8 & 9.
Last year I was chided by our Sun rep for not adopting Solaris 10 across the board -- but our main applicaiton wasn't yet certified either for Sol 10 or Oracle 10 (which it runs atop), so I couldn't go shopping until that happened.
Sun, you have to get Oracle moving on certifying the rest of its products on x86, or keep cranking out SPARC boxes for me!
"European" was a joke, son, the implication being that a plug with two blades that actually lie on the same line (instead of being parallel) to each other is so different from typical American non-DC data center wiring that it may as well have come from a place with other funny electical wiring, like, say, Britain.
:7) Our electrician, however, thought it was a good one, and since he was such a big help, I'm re-running the joke for his enjoyment.
Clearly, this isn't as funny when explained as why delivered as a throw-away line.
And the V490 has some kind of fruity European 208V power supplies, which only the V890 seems to share. Gaaah!
> ...
> If this were possible (i.e., support all Win XP apps with such improvements
> in the infrastructure) with a small engineering effort, why would MS not
> have already done so?
>
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
Wait, you mean that?
SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!!!!
*wipes spittle from lips*
*hugs kindred spirit*
Oh, trust me, proof readers are *tops* on every guest list to begin with...
So let's say I'm no programmer, a fair-to-middlin' writer, but a fan-freakin-tastic editor & proof-reader (*and* humble as all get out). Where do I find the clearinghouse where I can select a project who wants help with their docs?
macdaddy357 wrote:
>
> Given the choice between two incompatible standards for AM Stereo, the market chose niether.
> Ditto ditto quadraphonic records, ditto.
>
Well, to be fair, quadrophonic sound died because there were just so few four-eared audiophiles willing to shell out for an extra pair of speakers.
Monkey of Rage correctly suggested:
> >
> > All my foes are spelling or grammar Nazis.
> >
> All of my foes are spelling or grammar Nazis
>
And I would humbly suggest the addition of a hyphen like so:
-
- All of my foes are spelling- or grammar Nazis.
-
But maybe that's just my personal preference.
aapold asked of ARM:
>
> Those were the guys that fought the CORE, right?
>
No, it's who Gil Hamilton worked for in the Niven books.
voidware split the hair:
>
> A/C is amps per coulomb. Since an amp is a coulomb per second, the parent is clearly refering to the frequency.
>
Does anyone remember "Running Scared" with Billy Crystal and What's His Name? " It's not the volts. It's the amps."
SQLz asked:
>
> WTF Is an "Internet" department?
>
Laugh all you want: my last job was in the Computer Department of a verrrry old, high-profile architectural firm in Baaahst'n. I'm not certain -- Rob The Archivist could confirm this -- but I believe the singluar "Computer" referred to all the technology that the firm had invested in prior to, uh, 1998 (and that was a little IBM box for the accountants).
However, in their favor I should admit that their first "PCs" for the staff were Sun Sparc Sations for the architects and Macs for everyone else. They only went over to Win32 around 2001 or 2002. And that's when I left, too. (Hi, Chris! how's Cal?)
Doc Ruby asks:
>
> So who's got a content GUI that's better than walls of shelves?
>
Erm, either the catalog-view-with-covers or a tag cloud for librarything.com?
Browse on a computer or print out and stick in a three-ring binder. While I agree that raking my eyes and/or finger across a row of book- or CD-spines is fast, eventually even that system doesn't scale. if i can call up part of my collection and then visually scan that -- well, then, I'm much more likely to get what I want.
Plus, Tim Spaulding is about to specifically work on storing CD & DVD information in librarything, though already some people use it for that (and one person's got a catalog of MP3s of concert bootlegs!).
shooz wrote:
:7)
>
> If you've got 3500 books, and can't by memory put your hand on the one you're looking for within
> 45 seconds, then you're a poseur, not a bibliophile. Just put the most expensive ones at eye level.
> Come up with some other aesthetic criteria for the rest, and you'll be just fine.
>
Methinks you've got it backwards: shelving your book by expense/apppearance makes you a poseur and not a book-lover. I have books far more precious to me (e.g., 1945 editions of Ernie Pyle or gifts from family) that didn't cost nearly as much as my college textbooks on Martin Luther or Chaucer, much less the science books I sold back for beer money.
Not long after we were married, my wife rearranged just a couple of my bookshelves...by color. *boggle* Years later I still haven't found some of those books, and I don't buy her story thaat they were lost in the intervening move.
dshade69 wrote:
>
> librarything is the way to go for cataloging your books but for
> organization the only thing you can really do is just pick a system
> and start doing the grunt work of organizing.
>
Yeah, librarything is the catalog -- but when you bulk-tag books, an organic organization will just sort of coalesce. (Creepy and Lovecraftian, when you think of it that way.)
When you go back and fine-tune your tags and then maybe rate the books, you can use the catalog to lay out your system mapped across your actual living space.
Plus, the time spent browsing your catalog is like time spent among the books theselves (in terms of re-familiarizing yourself with the whole population) but much faster. When you can scan down a tag cloud, or run searches through the catalog (vice your possible-faulty memory!), you get a more accurate idea of the work ahead of you! And it's fun.
*sigh* Good ol' books...
...Aaaaand replying to myself:
After your book are in catalogged in librarything.com, add a tag indicating their location. Sort your whole catalog on a tag or keyword (or, heck, LOC code), print out sections at a time, shelve your books accordingly, and then bulk-tag them with an indication of where they live. (I use tags with names like "zloc:office" or, too often, "zloc:basementBox3.")
This gives you logical organization according to a scheme you've chosen yourself, and also allows you to record a physical location in the same data.
As his blog notes, "28,000 users adding two million books, finding people with similar interests, getting recommendations, doing crazy new Wikipedia-like things with cataloging, etc. Something is really going on here." Also, "LibraryThing has more than twice as many books by J. K. Rowling as Thomas Jefferson gave to the Library of Congress after the British destroyed the first collection by fire. There's a joke in here somewhere."
See www.librarything.com/blog/
Heck, email them and ask: the user community (which comments extensively on the blog) or Abigail The Real Live Librarian can probably make very useful suggestions. After all there's about twenty-five people with libraries larger than yours.
P.S. The author has a new baby: be kind to the site's server!!!
Just use librarything.com.
Make a free trial account, enter a few ISBNs, and once you're hooked shell out the few dollars for a full account and get rolling.
Tim that author is adding lots of data import filters and tagging options and other very geeky features, and an actual librarian has joined the project. (I know, I know: it's amazing seeing a non-commercial software service with a real-live subject matter expert! Just goes to show the author's not a real geek: he admitted that someone else's specialized knowledge might not be replaced by his own prejudices and SWAGs.)
Go, librarything, go!
chill wrote:
:7)
>
> You make checks out to "Theo de Raadt", which *isn't* going to happen from any really large company
> with deep pockets. There is zero tracability and zero accountability.
>
OpenSSH is one of my most important tools -- and it happens to be Open Source Software. I run Sun servers at a university and we pay for annual support contracts, but the accountants would laugh me out of the room if I asked them to just send Theo a check.
To support Samba I buy the books, though I know in my heart of hearts that they won't see much more than a fraction of the cover price. I'll order a set of openBSD CDs in order to give some support to OpenSSH, but, well, I just don't think those same accountants are going to order me a t-shirt.
What else is a guy to do?
Again, the Samba team have days jobs, and someone big (is it IBM?) ponies up major dollars for their project. What organization will give Theo & Co. the appearance of "respectability" that they need for us to help pay for OpenBSD/OpenSSH? I would love to be able to float them some of my employer's money to keep them working, but it looks like a scam this way.
Rude Turnip wrote:
>
> I think a far more interesting proposition would be to pit a 100lb pit
> bull against 100lbs of chihuahuas.
>
Prior art -- of a sort -- can be found in the grudge Match, "A Rottweiler vs. a Rottweiler's Weight of Chihuahuas":
www.grudge-match.com/History/rott-chi.shtml
jellomizer wrote:
>
> I personally find little reason to go to RadioShack much anyways,
> they no longer have as much as the stuff I really wanted.
>
Hey now, I go there every few months because they sell replacement foam covers for my earphones & cell phone earbud (which I always seem to tear somehow). And they also have...uh...alkaline batteries?
imemyself wrote:
>
> I mean it is brain-dead easy to copy files on to a Palm or PocketPC, and
> with an CF or SD card(I believe they are up to the 2 or 4 GB range
> now-days) you could get a ton of stuff out of work. Hell, you could even
> hide the card in your shoe or something afterwards if you weren't allowed
> to take your PDA home or something
>
Am I the only one who read this and thought of Christopher Walken telling the story about carrying a gold watch in his ass while in a POW camp?