That argument doesn't work anymore. Just because Fox News is a right wing tabloid doesn't mean they all have a bias. If the truth doesn't support your reality and the other news organizations won't bend their coverage to support your viewpoint, that doesn't make them biased.
The Fox News view of the world got crushed last night. It's an old, angry, failed philosophy and good riddance.
Nearly everything on a Linux server can be managed via a SSH connection.
It would be so hard getting by without that. When we first started development there was only one port open. When we fielded our first app there were two. When I first started reading the question, I though "PuTTY". Then I read this:
These boxes would regrettably nearly all be running Windows (with some VxWorks).
Bummer. The other day I had sessions open with servers in three different states, just tabbing between the windows. Between PuTTY and pico I could do everything I needed. Manage the box, update the database, make site changes, move files around. It's so fluid. With Windows you have to drag a GUI into everything you do.
I don't know. It's a retirement park so people come from all over. The area is one of the traditional Democratic strongholds in FL but their situation is unique.
Called my dad this morning and he said they were in and out in an hour. About 35 people in line but it went fast. He said the poll workers were really helpful and seemed well organized. I'm sure it's not going that well everywhere but the news isn't all bad.
If the Republicans get crushed and lose Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, I wonder if they're going to clean house or keep on with same failed people and platform that put them in the tank? Or if they'll blame Palin and minority turn out?
The Useful Idiots that the summary refers to have been around forever: people who are easily manipulated by professional intelligence services without a great deal of effort because they are naive, idealistic, or simply ignorant
This has been going on in industry for years. PR and advertising firms manipulate public discourse in social media at the service of industry and political causes, including here at Slashdot. What the Chinese are doing is simply capitalizing on the very large effect that can a small number of coordinated individuals can have on social dialog.
In their case that component probably pales in comparison to the wealth of data they can collect from common industrial espionage. It's not pretty but they don't have to be particularly elegant to be effective.
From the article:...designed to steal data from Microsoft Windows PCs.
That's the best thing about using Linux. When these sort of exploits roll through the computer world you can watch with amused interest instead of a knot in your stomach.
I don't laugh too loud because I think about all the places that might be storing my credit card number on a Windows box. It's been rare that I've ever accessed any of my bank or investment accounts from a Windows client and never in the last four years.
Again, I try not to get too high and mighty. No OS is completely immune to rootkits and IT history is full of Pearl Harbor events.
The general goal is to minimize the quantity of space debris, as even a golf ball sized hunk can put most satellites out of commission.
You'd think that would be the ideal job for a small robotic satellite. Wall-E jokes aside, a small satellite that collects space debris and deobrits. Or attaches to larger pieces and provides enough thrust to bring them down. They would have to be large or particularly sophisticated, just enough fuel to maneuver and change orbits to collect junk.
Haul one up every time the Russians send a supply ship up and you'd make a dent in the orbiting trash after a few years.
We built an application framework with a reporting module in it. Web service support was part of the specs from the beginning, it would be easy enough to add reporting requirements to that if we had a reason to do it. I don't understand the problem. You're locked into MS and SQL Server by SQL Reports? Or Crystal Reports? Or are you talking about exporting to desktop apps in Access or Excel? Neither one of those run on Ubuntu, so we don't have to worry about supporting them internally. We can spool off data to partners with web services, web page or csv, whatever they want. If they want some fancy report with charts and graphs in a portable format like a pdf file...we could figure out if someone wants to pay for the time. Otherwise we'll give them the data and they can write their own damn reports.
You'd be amazed how often I hear that. How do you do this or that? Then list off some...thing...MS wraps into their products with some cartoon wizard that some hack in accounting thinks makes him a haX04. How are you going to support that? Well, we won't. I'm not going to be locked into MSFT's way of doing things by bullshit like that. If it's that important to your company to support every bundled wizard that comes with MS, then shell out the money and shut your pie hole. Otherwise, we'll figure out a way to get the job far more efficiently for a fraction of the cost and while you're still at the office trying to figure out how to change the labels on your graph, we'll be at the bar having a couple after work and trying to flirt with the waitress who also dances at one of the local gentlemen's clubs on the weekend.
Because you spend so much time serving the Microsoft machine. Not just licensing, product activation and the time and resources that takes, but the constant upgrade cycles, new languages, new versions of the frameworks, security patches that break things...it's all freaking insane.
We scrapped all that. Servers, desktops, dev tools, everything and migrated our development environment and desktops to open source. We can scale for the cost of hardware, our dev tools are simple, don't take all day to install and don't hog all your system resources. We use a lot of command line and prefer it. While you're still installing VisualStudio and getting through registration, we're already working.
Our ROI is off the scale, we have more cash, spend more time actually working and we're turning out systems in time frames that would be the envy of any development shop. We use open source in business and our business works. I came out of a big Windows shop and we blow away anything they're doing with a fraction of the personnel.
So now MS wants to take elements from several product lines, put it in a blender, then lock developers into their way of doing things. Gosh, let me think about that...no.
If Microsoft offered real value, simple licensing terms, and provided products that actually contributed to our enterprise environment without being a dickish pain in the ass, we'd probably have a place for their products in our mix. But right now, no freaking way. Anything MS touches turns to crap. Their products are slow, complicated and bloated and we get by just fine without them.
I lived in Texas and in those days wrestling (pronounced wras-lin) was almost a religion and any suggestion that it was anything but real was considered complete heresy.
BizTalk plus.NET, add a little FrontPage, a dash of Silverlight and mix it all up on a hosted server. For some reason I just had flashbacks to the Bass-o-Matic on SNL.
If the machines were "switching votes", they'd do it internally and secretly, and not make it look like they're putting checkmarks next to the wrong boxes.
There are a lot less public ways to rig an election, putting something out there so obviously noticeable would be a big risk.
Funny no one ever thinks to take out their cell phone and get video of the machine actually switching a vote. Collect some actionable evidence.
In my mind the only use for touch screen machines is to aid in creating the printed ballot which can then be fed into a counter. That avoids hanging chads, butterfly ballots and the voter has a chance to verify it's correct before turning it in.
I personally know people on the local board of elections from both parties and, interestingly, the one thing everyone seems to agree on is making sure the ballots and instructions are clear and votes are counted properly. I hear partisan bickering about everything else, but not that. I believe a widespread effort at rigging elections would be handicapped by the sheer number of fairly decent and honest people involved in the process. Someone would talk.
But if anyone was looking for another reason why the military shouldn't be involved in law enforcement and domestic intelligence gathering, this would be a good one to add to the list.
The military shouldn't be a precision tool of foreign policy or engaged in law enforcement or peace keeping. Their job is to break things and kill people. Intelligence gathering by the military should be limited to supporting that core mission. Anything else is up to the CIA and NSA. That's why we have them.
It most certainly does not align with the 'culture' of any kind of functional workplace...
Thank you, Mr. Conventional Wisdom. I've had video games in the office with few problems. In the old days, we'd have a frag fest after hours and we played another team game called Netrek. We still got our work done.
And I'm going to have a game consoles in the new office. Planned on having it in by now but I had to slide it two quarters due to budget issues. Ping pong, foosball, Wii...as long as we're hitting our production deadlines and I can make my numbers nobody's questioning my judgment.
In my first couple months I managed to slash production and licensing costs while shortening delivery schedules. So, right now, with the numbers I'm putting up, if I wanted to install a brothel and could convince them it was legal, I could probably get away with it.
I don't want to hire people limited by old-style, conventional development methodologies. We couldn't find a framework that was just right for one of our projects, so the guys wrote one. Those are the kind of people I like working with. If you want someone who thinks out of the box, why would you want to hire someone comfortable in a box?
Got to put hands on one a couple months ago and had to admit it's pretty cool. The display is quite good, very readable. My only fear was if the battery went dead or it got old. What happens to all the books you bought?
I could just see it in the bottom of some box five years from now, dead as a barn nail, battery shot. Then what? Can you replace the battery and recover the books? What happens when Amazon stops supporting them?
as an engineer, with 10+ yrs in the industry, it still boggles the mind that closed source, proprietary software has such a stranglehold on the way businesses percieve 'value'.
Depends on the business. I got the top tech spot where I am precisely because of my background in both Windows and open source. Moving away from Windows as a host and development platform resulted in significant cash savings. We've even replaced a lot of our commodity workstations with Ubuntu and our productivity apps with a mix of GoogleDocs and OpenOffice.
Not only have we saved a lot of cash in licensing costs, but discovered that all the hype about increased training costs is just FUD. We haven't had any massive staff training costs, not even many calls to the help desk. The only ongoing annoyance is so many vendors want to use GoToMyPC and it doesn't support Linux. So we have to go scare up a Windows client.
Higher maintenance costs...FUD.
The line about paying more for qualified open source techs and developers is also FUD. We didn't have any problems replacing Windows only staff at competitive local rates. And our operating environment is so much calmer and more productive. You don't realize how much time you spend serving the Windows platform until you move away from it.
It's a pity it takes an economic crisis to get companies to look into a better way of doing business. You'll never make any progress taking advice from people invested in the MS platform, even if they're on your staff. The.NET developers said it would take us months to duplicate some of the systems they built, we did it in weeks. In one case days. We're down to converting the last couple core systems and the mood among the remaining.NET developers is grim. This is a bad time to be out looking for a job but I gave them a chance to get on board with the new order. We're shutting them down in the next couple months. Even the outsource vendors. I gave them the right answers the first day we met. Months later they're still trying to push.NET solutions.
I thing the point of this is to keep the rocket engines completely separate from the rover.
Too bad the sky crane couldn't drop the rover, then land somewhere to become a stationary observation station. Turn it over to a university to operate for whatever data they can get from it. Seems a waste just crash it somewhere. There wouldn't be a lot of room in there but it seems like you'd want to put instruments on just about anything you're going to send all the way to Mars.
Microsoft is not evil, they have merely raised incompetence to a level that's indistinguishable from malice. Redmond is not capable of the consistency of purpose and execution that really good evil requires.
Forcing sulfur atoms into silicon using femtosecond laser pulses...
Who sits around and dreams up a process like that? "Hey, I wonder what would happen hitting sulphur ions with a femtosecond laser pulse?" Just bizarre what some people sit around thinking about all day.
They are wrong. The last thing we need is another programming language tied to a specific platform.
We then turn around and sell them to customers. Customers love the price, but then later realize that they must buy a server to run in on, a copy of Windows, a server to run SQL on, a copy of Microsoft SQL Server, licenses, licenses to allow 'anonymous' internet connections, copies of Microsoft Office 2007 to be able to read the reports it spits out in Word 2007 format, etc...
Exactly why we opted out of the whole Microsoft environment, at least on the server and desktop side of the house. We have a couple Windows clients floating around with the sales staff but those are laptops that came with it.
Instead of constantly serving the MS machine, we can focus on working. If we need capacity, we just stand it up. New servers go in for the cost of the hardware. I don't consider myself stubborn, just practical. I'd rather focus on work than spend time keeping up the MS all-singing, all-dancing, constantly changing development environment. All the time you spend keeping up on security patches, learning new languages, hunting through the knowledge base, re-writing stuff the new framework broke...it's just nuts. You'd be amazed how productive you can be when you strip all the MS process out of your environment.
If you go with Google, make sure their proposal has phone support for administrative accounts. Their service is wonderful, their support wanks. And I'd stand on that. No support, no deal. Which ever one you go with, make sure you have an exit strategy in writing. How they're going to help you transition, including message migration, if the relationship sours. I expect Google to have a good option there, don't know about the other two.
Half your students are probably already using Gmail anyway.
a small asteroid approaching Earth with a 99.8% probability of colliding
O-M-G We're all going to die! It's the end of the world! Run! Agh, forget that, you'll just die tired! I'm freaking out! I'm freaking out!
The asteroid is assumed to be 3-4 meters in size...
This has been a test of the emergency end of the world system. Has this been the actual end of the world you would have been given explicit instructions to bend over and kiss your ass good bye.
This concludes this test of the emergency end of the world system.
Slashdot Mirror
That argument doesn't work anymore. Just because Fox News is a right wing tabloid doesn't mean they all have a bias. If the truth doesn't support your reality and the other news organizations won't bend their coverage to support your viewpoint, that doesn't make them biased.
The Fox News view of the world got crushed last night. It's an old, angry, failed philosophy and good riddance.
Nearly everything on a Linux server can be managed via a SSH connection.
It would be so hard getting by without that. When we first started development there was only one port open. When we fielded our first app there were two. When I first started reading the question, I though "PuTTY". Then I read this:
These boxes would regrettably nearly all be running Windows (with some VxWorks).
Bummer. The other day I had sessions open with servers in three different states, just tabbing between the windows. Between PuTTY and pico I could do everything I needed. Manage the box, update the database, make site changes, move files around. It's so fluid. With Windows you have to drag a GUI into everything you do.
I don't know. It's a retirement park so people come from all over. The area is one of the traditional Democratic strongholds in FL but their situation is unique.
Called my dad this morning and he said they were in and out in an hour. About 35 people in line but it went fast. He said the poll workers were really helpful and seemed well organized. I'm sure it's not going that well everywhere but the news isn't all bad.
If the Republicans get crushed and lose Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, I wonder if they're going to clean house or keep on with same failed people and platform that put them in the tank? Or if they'll blame Palin and minority turn out?
The Useful Idiots that the summary refers to have been around forever: people who are easily manipulated by professional intelligence services without a great deal of effort because they are naive, idealistic, or simply ignorant
This has been going on in industry for years. PR and advertising firms manipulate public discourse in social media at the service of industry and political causes, including here at Slashdot. What the Chinese are doing is simply capitalizing on the very large effect that can a small number of coordinated individuals can have on social dialog.
In their case that component probably pales in comparison to the wealth of data they can collect from common industrial espionage. It's not pretty but they don't have to be particularly elegant to be effective.
From the article: ...designed to steal data from Microsoft Windows PCs.
That's the best thing about using Linux. When these sort of exploits roll through the computer world you can watch with amused interest instead of a knot in your stomach.
I don't laugh too loud because I think about all the places that might be storing my credit card number on a Windows box. It's been rare that I've ever accessed any of my bank or investment accounts from a Windows client and never in the last four years.
Again, I try not to get too high and mighty. No OS is completely immune to rootkits and IT history is full of Pearl Harbor events.
The general goal is to minimize the quantity of space debris, as even a golf ball sized hunk can put most satellites out of commission.
You'd think that would be the ideal job for a small robotic satellite. Wall-E jokes aside, a small satellite that collects space debris and deobrits. Or attaches to larger pieces and provides enough thrust to bring them down. They would have to be large or particularly sophisticated, just enough fuel to maneuver and change orbits to collect junk.
Haul one up every time the Russians send a supply ship up and you'd make a dent in the orbiting trash after a few years.
We built an application framework with a reporting module in it. Web service support was part of the specs from the beginning, it would be easy enough to add reporting requirements to that if we had a reason to do it. I don't understand the problem. You're locked into MS and SQL Server by SQL Reports? Or Crystal Reports? Or are you talking about exporting to desktop apps in Access or Excel? Neither one of those run on Ubuntu, so we don't have to worry about supporting them internally. We can spool off data to partners with web services, web page or csv, whatever they want. If they want some fancy report with charts and graphs in a portable format like a pdf file...we could figure out if someone wants to pay for the time. Otherwise we'll give them the data and they can write their own damn reports.
You'd be amazed how often I hear that. How do you do this or that? Then list off some...thing...MS wraps into their products with some cartoon wizard that some hack in accounting thinks makes him a haX04. How are you going to support that? Well, we won't. I'm not going to be locked into MSFT's way of doing things by bullshit like that. If it's that important to your company to support every bundled wizard that comes with MS, then shell out the money and shut your pie hole. Otherwise, we'll figure out a way to get the job far more efficiently for a fraction of the cost and while you're still at the office trying to figure out how to change the labels on your graph, we'll be at the bar having a couple after work and trying to flirt with the waitress who also dances at one of the local gentlemen's clubs on the weekend.
See ya Monday.
Because you spend so much time serving the Microsoft machine. Not just licensing, product activation and the time and resources that takes, but the constant upgrade cycles, new languages, new versions of the frameworks, security patches that break things...it's all freaking insane.
We scrapped all that. Servers, desktops, dev tools, everything and migrated our development environment and desktops to open source. We can scale for the cost of hardware, our dev tools are simple, don't take all day to install and don't hog all your system resources. We use a lot of command line and prefer it. While you're still installing VisualStudio and getting through registration, we're already working.
Our ROI is off the scale, we have more cash, spend more time actually working and we're turning out systems in time frames that would be the envy of any development shop. We use open source in business and our business works. I came out of a big Windows shop and we blow away anything they're doing with a fraction of the personnel.
So now MS wants to take elements from several product lines, put it in a blender, then lock developers into their way of doing things. Gosh, let me think about that...no.
If Microsoft offered real value, simple licensing terms, and provided products that actually contributed to our enterprise environment without being a dickish pain in the ass, we'd probably have a place for their products in our mix. But right now, no freaking way. Anything MS touches turns to crap. Their products are slow, complicated and bloated and we get by just fine without them.
I lived in Texas and in those days wrestling (pronounced wras-lin) was almost a religion and any suggestion that it was anything but real was considered complete heresy.
So, no, this comes as no surprise.
There are other countries in the world? When did that happen?
Next you're going to be telling me they all don't speak English as a native language. Everyone can understand English if you say it loud enough.
BizTalk plus .NET, add a little FrontPage, a dash of Silverlight and mix it all up on a hosted server. For some reason I just had flashbacks to the Bass-o-Matic on SNL.
If the machines were "switching votes", they'd do it internally and secretly, and not make it look like they're putting checkmarks next to the wrong boxes.
There are a lot less public ways to rig an election, putting something out there so obviously noticeable would be a big risk.
Funny no one ever thinks to take out their cell phone and get video of the machine actually switching a vote. Collect some actionable evidence.
In my mind the only use for touch screen machines is to aid in creating the printed ballot which can then be fed into a counter. That avoids hanging chads, butterfly ballots and the voter has a chance to verify it's correct before turning it in.
I personally know people on the local board of elections from both parties and, interestingly, the one thing everyone seems to agree on is making sure the ballots and instructions are clear and votes are counted properly. I hear partisan bickering about everything else, but not that. I believe a widespread effort at rigging elections would be handicapped by the sheer number of fairly decent and honest people involved in the process. Someone would talk.
But if anyone was looking for another reason why the military shouldn't be involved in law enforcement and domestic intelligence gathering, this would be a good one to add to the list.
The military shouldn't be a precision tool of foreign policy or engaged in law enforcement or peace keeping. Their job is to break things and kill people. Intelligence gathering by the military should be limited to supporting that core mission. Anything else is up to the CIA and NSA. That's why we have them.
I'm sorry but I find your post incredibly disingenuous.
You're fired.
It most certainly does not align with the 'culture' of any kind of functional workplace...
Thank you, Mr. Conventional Wisdom. I've had video games in the office with few problems. In the old days, we'd have a frag fest after hours and we played another team game called Netrek. We still got our work done.
And I'm going to have a game consoles in the new office. Planned on having it in by now but I had to slide it two quarters due to budget issues. Ping pong, foosball, Wii...as long as we're hitting our production deadlines and I can make my numbers nobody's questioning my judgment.
In my first couple months I managed to slash production and licensing costs while shortening delivery schedules. So, right now, with the numbers I'm putting up, if I wanted to install a brothel and could convince them it was legal, I could probably get away with it.
I don't want to hire people limited by old-style, conventional development methodologies. We couldn't find a framework that was just right for one of our projects, so the guys wrote one. Those are the kind of people I like working with. If you want someone who thinks out of the box, why would you want to hire someone comfortable in a box?
Got to put hands on one a couple months ago and had to admit it's pretty cool. The display is quite good, very readable. My only fear was if the battery went dead or it got old. What happens to all the books you bought?
I could just see it in the bottom of some box five years from now, dead as a barn nail, battery shot. Then what? Can you replace the battery and recover the books? What happens when Amazon stops supporting them?
as an engineer, with 10+ yrs in the industry, it still boggles the mind that closed source, proprietary software has such a stranglehold on the way businesses percieve 'value'.
Depends on the business. I got the top tech spot where I am precisely because of my background in both Windows and open source. Moving away from Windows as a host and development platform resulted in significant cash savings. We've even replaced a lot of our commodity workstations with Ubuntu and our productivity apps with a mix of GoogleDocs and OpenOffice.
Not only have we saved a lot of cash in licensing costs, but discovered that all the hype about increased training costs is just FUD. We haven't had any massive staff training costs, not even many calls to the help desk. The only ongoing annoyance is so many vendors want to use GoToMyPC and it doesn't support Linux. So we have to go scare up a Windows client.
Higher maintenance costs...FUD.
The line about paying more for qualified open source techs and developers is also FUD. We didn't have any problems replacing Windows only staff at competitive local rates. And our operating environment is so much calmer and more productive. You don't realize how much time you spend serving the Windows platform until you move away from it.
It's a pity it takes an economic crisis to get companies to look into a better way of doing business. You'll never make any progress taking advice from people invested in the MS platform, even if they're on your staff. The .NET developers said it would take us months to duplicate some of the systems they built, we did it in weeks. In one case days. We're down to converting the last couple core systems and the mood among the remaining .NET developers is grim. This is a bad time to be out looking for a job but I gave them a chance to get on board with the new order. We're shutting them down in the next couple months. Even the outsource vendors. I gave them the right answers the first day we met. Months later they're still trying to push .NET solutions.
I thing the point of this is to keep the rocket engines completely separate from the rover.
Too bad the sky crane couldn't drop the rover, then land somewhere to become a stationary observation station. Turn it over to a university to operate for whatever data they can get from it. Seems a waste just crash it somewhere. There wouldn't be a lot of room in there but it seems like you'd want to put instruments on just about anything you're going to send all the way to Mars.
Choice is Good. Specialization is for insects.
Microsoft Dung Beetle. Now that's a catchy product name!
Microsoft is not evil, they have merely raised incompetence to a level that's indistinguishable from malice. Redmond is not capable of the consistency of purpose and execution that really good evil requires.
Forcing sulfur atoms into silicon using femtosecond laser pulses...
Who sits around and dreams up a process like that? "Hey, I wonder what would happen hitting sulphur ions with a femtosecond laser pulse?" Just bizarre what some people sit around thinking about all day.
Yeah--because they are probably wrong.
They are wrong. The last thing we need is another programming language tied to a specific platform.
We then turn around and sell them to customers. Customers love the price, but then later realize that they must buy a server to run in on, a copy of Windows, a server to run SQL on, a copy of Microsoft SQL Server, licenses, licenses to allow 'anonymous' internet connections, copies of Microsoft Office 2007 to be able to read the reports it spits out in Word 2007 format, etc...
Exactly why we opted out of the whole Microsoft environment, at least on the server and desktop side of the house. We have a couple Windows clients floating around with the sales staff but those are laptops that came with it.
Instead of constantly serving the MS machine, we can focus on working. If we need capacity, we just stand it up. New servers go in for the cost of the hardware. I don't consider myself stubborn, just practical. I'd rather focus on work than spend time keeping up the MS all-singing, all-dancing, constantly changing development environment. All the time you spend keeping up on security patches, learning new languages, hunting through the knowledge base, re-writing stuff the new framework broke...it's just nuts. You'd be amazed how productive you can be when you strip all the MS process out of your environment.
If you go with Google, make sure their proposal has phone support for administrative accounts. Their service is wonderful, their support wanks. And I'd stand on that. No support, no deal. Which ever one you go with, make sure you have an exit strategy in writing. How they're going to help you transition, including message migration, if the relationship sours. I expect Google to have a good option there, don't know about the other two.
Half your students are probably already using Gmail anyway.
a small asteroid approaching Earth with a 99.8% probability of colliding
O-M-G We're all going to die! It's the end of the world! Run! Agh, forget that, you'll just die tired! I'm freaking out! I'm freaking out!
The asteroid is assumed to be 3-4 meters in size...
This has been a test of the emergency end of the world system. Has this been the actual end of the world you would have been given explicit instructions to bend over and kiss your ass good bye.
This concludes this test of the emergency end of the world system.