I don't buy your reasoning that the issue is about the quantity of facts -- i.e. one fact or a "database's worth of facts."
The issue is this. Steinbecks Grapes of Wrath is not a collection of facts. There may be some facts in the book and there are some words and you can use either, but the particular arrangment "belongs" (or "belonged", depending on your view of copyright) to Steinbeck. Certainly, it's beyond doubt that he is the "creator" of that work. But what about an alphabetical list of the elements? Who created that? If I am the first person to list the elements, did I create that list in some meaninful way which entitles me to the royalties of those who use it? Who owns that the periodic table? How many ways are there to organize that information?
The issue, as I see it, is not how many facts you have in your database that match up with facts in someone else's database. The issue is how you came about those facts. If you steal the information, you may be prosecuted under present laws. If you violate someones terms of service and in the process injur another party economically, you can be sued. But facts are facts, and an attitude toward information of "first come, first served" is immoral. It is motivated soley by profit and does not benefit the people in any way, and in fact stands to do much harm to the peope.
It's not a failed analogy. He's saying that the person from Panama doesn't know what he's missing.
It was a perfectly legitimate reply. The question was, "I don't have these freedoms and don't know what the big deal is." And the reply was, "It's hard to explain why freedom is so important. You may have to have freedom to fully appreciate how bad the lack of freedom sucks"
Unfortunately when you get right down to things, if you start by being hostile and loud it usually doesn't help things. This is true regardless of whether you're talking to a cop, a secretary, airport security, or whatever.
And you, a person who believes that one can judge intelligence by looking at someone's eyes and who does not, apparently, know how to use correctly the word "literally", you are a rocket scientist, no?
I'm familiar with the quote, though my A Dictionary of Quotations, Jeffares & Gray, Eds. has it, "the sort of English up with which I will not put."
I'm with you on the foisted Latin. For instance, I think split infinitives should be used when they sound good and not when they don't. And same goes for ending sentences with prepositions. In speech, do what comes natural -- what's natural is what sounds good. But in writing, depending on your level of formality, your audience, etc., a little re-arranging can be more pleasant. I like a little artifice in my writing. Anyhow, here on slashdot, I normally wouldn't give a damn. Mostly, I like to quibble over usage with those who need a little poke in the ribs, e.g. overly serious people with whom I disagree, people who let it drop that they are teachers.
In other words I approve of the usage, "Hey, Jake! Which boat ya goin' in?" But I also prefer my government forms use the imperative, "Please indicate the state in which you reside," rather than, "Dude, write down what state you live in."
I may be an English grad, but I am a Southerner first.
Which brings to mind the old joke:
There's a dinner party and a Southern couple is seated next to a yankee couple.
Southern lady says to the yankee woman, "So where y'all from?"
Yankee woman replies, "We're from where we don't end our sentences with a preposition."
"Oh, excuse me," says the Southern lady. "So. Where y'all from -- bitch?"
There are some out there who say, let's judge what works by looking at the real world. They say, let's look at the successes and the failures and see how it all comes out in the wash. These people have the nerve to say, maybe the best opinions come from those successful in business, those whose asses are on the line, those who will buy a second house or mortgage the first one -- all depending on whether or not their business strategy is sound.
Would you believe these full time business men and women? Would you be so foolhardy? Would you guide your ship by the example of those businessmen, by those who do not get paid if it turns out they are full of shit?
Of course not!
You, smart fella that you are, take your business advice from someone who will keep his job regardless if someday he develops a crackpot theory that spaghetti is better than OOP, regardless if someday he publishes an entire book detailing how COBOL is the best language ever! You, oh wise one, will give deference to the opinion of a man who could only lose his job for sleeping with students -- and only then if they get pissed off and tattle. You, observant and calculating, will not take advice from the businessman who does not give advice, but who only betrays his strategy by doing business openly and by quietly pocketing customer dollars. No, Sir! You will only take advice from those learned gentlemen who do nothing but give advice, for you, Sir, know that they are great, learned Professors. And who on earth, you ask yourself, would profess something and dare to be talking out his ass?
_______________ On a serious note, having been deep in the bowels of academia, I can tell you this. The only metrics of note in academia are publishing, peer recognition, and, occasionally, student feedback. No one ever gets published by saying, "Yep. The stuff we taught last year is still good." No one ever gets peer recognition by saying, "Yep. Still good." Student feedback isn't affected by what you teach, only how you grade and how much work you give. So what gets a professor recognition and approval is denying something else, someone's work, someone's theory, everyone's work, everyone's theories but your own, etc. A theory that no one has thought of is good. A theory that no one has thought of and which, if true, invalidates the theories of all your peers at other institutions is best. Only in some disciplines and in some cases does the chance of being proven false raise much of a spectre. Outside of the hard sciences, you can spew whatever crap you want and who's to say your wrong? So what if you think Chaucer is a misogynist and Open Source is a fool's paradise? Both opinions are pretty subjective and leave lots of wiggle room. If someone replies that Chaucer donated religiously to a widow's fund, you say, so what? He did it out of spite. If Novel's earnings rise for five years in a row after they buy SuSe, you say, just you wait until year six! And even if you are proven blatantly wrong, so what? Who follows up that? The story about the asteroid that might hit earth is always bigger than the story that it didn't. And anyway, next year's flood of contrived controversy issuing forth from the desks of your peers will drown out your personal load of horseshit.
As an example, look at New Math. What was wrong with Old Math, you know, the same math they taught to a generation of engineers who put us on the moon? Nothing. There was nothing wrong with it. Except that if you are taking a Ph.D. in Math Education, it doesn't look good to have a dissertation two sentences long: "Good job. Keep it up."
Everybody has an agenda. And it's good to be skeptical about agenda which appear to be altruistic. IBM, Novel, etc. -- there's nothing altruistic about their agenda. Their agenda is $$$, same as Microsoft, only they have a different strategy to that money. What is Howard Strauss's agenda? Is it enlightening the masses? Is it enlightening the CEO, the CIO? Is he doing this to enlighten anyone
It concerns me that you're a junior high teacher and in one paragraph you mix tenses, mispell a word, and end a sentence with a preposition.
The issue at hand is not pornography, it is political speech. Should your post be blocked because it discusses pornography? Block porn, block sites promoting gun violence. Do not block sites discussing these issues as politics. Especially to not block sites concerning one side of the issue and not the other.
Thanks for the reply, jo_ham. I think you are really making the lights change, but that the causal relationship is not between the lights changing and you flashing your lights. As you intimated in your reply, there is another more likely cause. There are (here in the US anyway, and I'm guessing in many other places as well), loops of wire embedded under the road at most important intersections. These loops are indeed motion detectors in that they measure a change in inductance caused by a metal object moving over them -- exactly the same mechanism as in some metal detectors (exept that in that case, the coil moves, not the object). What this sensor is, I cannot say.
I am pleased that you are open to other suggestions. I too am open to the idea that flashing your lights does change the signal. I'm still going with the idea that this is an urban myth.
While I hesitate to put you squarely in the club to which also belong those people who flap fresh polaroids in the belief that doing so makes them develope quicker, I have to take what you say with a measure of skepticism.
A quick, but admittedly not thorough, google search revealed no such devices. Furthermore, I have lived in Tallahassee, Florida all my life. One of your child posters said that they had these devices in Tallahassee and I have never heard of them nor have I seen them. I have also never seen people flashing their lights at intersections. And Tallahassee is not a big town.
I should like to mention, moreover, that my father has been a Traffic Engineer in Tallahassee, Florida for over 15 years. I just now called him up and asked him if he had ever heard of anything like this and he said he had not. He, a professional traffic engineer, said they sounded like a bad idea.
If you're interested, you might submit some sort of proof of your claims.
If it makes you happy flashing your lights, then I'm happy for you. But until I see better evidence, I'm going to remain skeptical on the proposition that there is a causal relationship in evidence here.
When people ask me about multiple monitors, I use this analogy. Image driving in a car and all you can see is a 20 inch square.
Think of it this way as well. You work on a *desktop*, right? Well, imagine yourself working in an office without computers, using just paper, and you have to work on a physical, wooden desktop only 20 inches square.
One aspect of multiple monitor use that usually does not occur to the uninitiated is that other monitors are handy for "storage". When you work with paper at a wooden desk, do you work with every paper in one pile? No, you spread them out, you have an inbox, you have a paper in front of you, you place one to the side because it's important and you want it visible so you don't forget, you put another piece of paper (or a book) to the other side to refer to.
My experience is that many non-techies look at multiple monitor use as superfluous. They think it's just a toy. At my last job, I was the first one to use multiple monitors (I worked in the surplus property department) and the IT managers thought it was wastefull. But other people saw it and wanted it. Then they found out how useful it is and the trend took off there. The managers still don't get it, though. Why would they? All they ever use is email. For most people though, it's sort of an ah-ha moment when they really try it out. When I first mentioned to my Dad that he ought to use multiple monitors, he dismissed it as a "gee-whiz" kind of thing -- cool if you're a geek, but otherwise not very usefull. Now he has six monitors on one computer.
I use three at home and, just as an example as I write I have open on separate monitors Opera, Bash (x2) and System Monitor, and Evolution. At work I have two monitors on one machine. The second monitor I took off of a second machine under my desk. That second machine is physically headless, but it runs VNC and I have it displayed on my primary machine's second monitor.
Matter of fact, multiple monitors is so important to me that this issue is what held me up from going totally Linux on my primary machine at home. Once I had that -- bye, bye Windows.
As far as coding, I don't see how you can even do it without multiple monitors (I feel this way in hindsight, of course). Having used VB at work (yuck), it was indispensible to have code on the main monitor, the GUI on another, and debugging, project explorer, help, etc. on the third.
If you haven't used multiple monitors, do yourself a favor and try it. It's like taking the blinders off.
I agree that the poster made a mistake. But his usage could also mean that Lindows will release a great deal of money, i.e. send forth a great deal of money. It doesn't quite make sense, but, then, this is slashdot, so one must ask one's self, is the poster an idiot or does he simply have poor English skills? A similar usage which does make sense is that these parties are all going to loose a pack of lawyers into the fray.
Yes, I tried those and I've gotten it to work. I should have been clearer, however. What I wanted to know was more detail on the parent's statement "then typing a one-liner to make it permanent."
How do you make it permanent? I read the readme and on that subject it says putting knoppix on your hard drive is possible and then it lists several steps.
I was a 91G, Behavioral Science Specialist (mental health counselor) at Fort Gordon. Most of my patients were Signal Corps trainees. You and your parent poster complain about the discipline while you were in AIT.
In my experiece, the average 17-20 year old Signal Corps trainee is just like every other trainee. They are patriotic, eager, bright, and motivated. Unfortunately, there are also plenty of trainees who are undisiplined, whining little brats. They join the military and -- Surprise! -- it's tough. They get in Basic and AIT and they came to me and told me that training sucks.
And here's what I told them. Guess what -- it's supposed to be tough. It's part of the design. If it was easy and the DIs held your hand and pampered you along so that you didn't get your pretty little pink panties dirty, then we wouldn't have much of a military, would we? So sorry you're incovenienced.
This is the part of the session where the whiny little brat would say, "I miss my mom. I don't think I'm meant to be in the Army. I want out." I had the power to recommend to a soldier's Commander that the soldier be discharged from the Army and, most of the time, the Commander took my advice. So I pretty much had the power to let these brats get out of the Army.
My response to them? It's tough. It's meant to be that way. I'm recommending you stay in. You obviously need it as a character building exercise. Suck it up and drive on.
As far as the training goes, yes, AIT is not MIT, it's not RedHat boot camp. Most of the good stuff you learn, you learn on the job. Like most everything else in life, the experience is in large part what you make of it. If you spend your time partying, doing what you have to in order to get by, and showing up late for formations, you'll get the shit duties and learn nothing. If you bust your ass and make a soldier out of yourself and volunteer and work hard, you can do all kinds of stuff.
I was a mental health counselor. We had a psych test that we scored by hand and it was a pain in the ass. Without telling anyone what I was up to, I came in after hours for a while, taught myself to program, and wrote an application to score the test and print out a graph of the results. When I turned it in to my boss, I was awarded the Army Commendation Medal, and I was the only one in my unit below the rank of Sergeant to wear that ribbon. That's how I got started in IT. And I wasn't even in an IT MOS (military occupation specialty).
Summary:
1) The military is tough.
2) Garbage in, garbage out.
As Gomer Pyle, USMC, would say -- Surprise, surprise, surprise!
Once, when I was in the Army, I was given a direct order to watch about 8 hours of porn.
See, the Colonel and Lt. Colonel in my section hated my NCOIC. They hated him because he was a weasel, but then they were weasels as well. And they were always looking for ways to give him hell. Well, my NCOIC was retiring and had boxed up a buch of personal stuff from his office with a buch of work stuff. He hadn't removed it from the building, however, and claimed that he was going to sort it all out later, so they couldn't do anything about that.
Anyway, in the stuff in his office they found lots of porn tapes. On the off chance that they contained kiddie porn (they did not) and they could bust him on that, they made me watch the whole collection. Sadly, it was mostly skanky 1970s German porn. I fast-forwarded through a lot of it.
That was the best order I ever got. If only I had been ordered to drink beer, then my life would be complete.
IANAL (neither are you, I assume), but I want to clarify something in your post.
You mention at several points that someone is allowed to use force if such-and-such happens. You are only partially correct. The law in most places states that you have a duty to flee, if you can, before you use force.
To give you an example of why this is so, imagine you are in your car at a stop light. A guy on the corner pulls out a knife and says he is going to kill you. At that moment, the light before you turns green. Instead of stepping on the gas and getting the hell out of Dodge, you shut off your engine, pull out a baseball bat and proceed to beat the crap out of the guy. You see what's wrong here? The laws regarding self-defense are not about tit for tat. They are about ensuring that as few people as possible are assaulted. If you can flee and you don't, you essentially become just another violent agressor. People have been sent to prison because they used force when they could have fled.
Everyone who lives in the US should be aware of this fact:
Security gaurds have no more law enforcement rights than ordinary citizens. That means that, just like ordinary citizens, they can perform a citizen's arrest. They often do this in the case of shoplifting where they see someone commit the crime. And since the shoplifter is guilty, no harm comes to the security gaurd. But if a guard tries to detain you and has not personally witnessed the alleged crime, he can well be sued. So, if you are ever in a confrontation with a security guard and you have done nothing wrong, simply walk away, as there is nothing he can do, legally speaking. If, however, he does something, sue his ass and the store.
Having said all that, you might be interested to know that most security guards are given some sort of training and the above information is included. In other words, they know better than the general public what they can and cannot do. Your comment is simply a rehash of a tired stereotype.
Cheers to this person for his scepticism and cheers to you, parent, for your research.
The person who submitted this article and the editor who approved it are obviously both mothers (in the litteral sense, anyway, I can't speak for the figurative). After all, isn't it overly credulous mothers who are responsible for this cruft being forwarded all over hell and back?
I applaud the geekily dry, the useless, the trivial, that bit of info that is a perfect waste of time. I can forgive a wide range of factual errors made in good faith and good skeptical effort. But I expect better than this. Why not next start posting stories about a kid with cancer who wants greeting cards?
I'm guilty of the test file too. And if my test.c or test.py outputs or sends a test message, I've gotten to where my test message is, "This is the ubiquitious, obligatory test message."
It's getting so I'm beginning to think my whole life is a test.
I've also recently decided to go all ascii on my email. I'm in the process of writing a complete set of email components (in the Unix philosophy of separate apps that do one thing well) to store each email as a text file. I've used and liked both Outlook and Evolution just for the UI, but nothing is quite so portable as text files which is especially import for backup purposes. All my Outlook.pst files are sort of useless now, but I have a hard time seeing a time in my life when text files will be unreadable (given migration to newer media). Right now, I'm happy reading raw emails, headers and all, in vi, but I suspect that I'll eventually get around to putting a GUI front end on my system so that I get a prettier view, possibly my own trimmed down clone of the Outlook UI. There is something about a tree/list GUI that just warms my heart. But then, too, while I don't mind the mouse too much, I don't like constantly switching between mouse and keyboard, so a CLI email system has its benefits.
I'm also text-file-ifying everything else, complete with a daemon to watch a folder of appointments and at the appropriate time send a message to whatever shell/terminal I'm in and/or raise a pop-up.
I'm also going to re-do my drive and make a partition just for my/home dir because if I want to reload my machine or I fuck it up, I don't have to worry about my data directory. And any file that's mine (as opposed to the OS's -- and I include as 'mine' my X config, Samba config, etc.) that for some reason doesn't belong in the data directory, I'll do a symlink and have my backup script follow symlinks (that link to files outside of/home).
Obviously, none of the above comes anywhere close to revolutionary, but it's taken awhile for me to put it all together in my head, and it also took a while for me to finally go totally Linux where I actually have all the power I need to do what I want to do. How the hell did I ever live without grep?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't buy your reasoning that the issue is about the quantity of facts -- i.e. one fact or a "database's worth of facts."
The issue is this. Steinbecks Grapes of Wrath is not a collection of facts. There may be some facts in the book and there are some words and you can use either, but the particular arrangment "belongs" (or "belonged", depending on your view of copyright) to Steinbeck. Certainly, it's beyond doubt that he is the "creator" of that work. But what about an alphabetical list of the elements? Who created that? If I am the first person to list the elements, did I create that list in some meaninful way which entitles me to the royalties of those who use it? Who owns that the periodic table? How many ways are there to organize that information?
The issue, as I see it, is not how many facts you have in your database that match up with facts in someone else's database. The issue is how you came about those facts. If you steal the information, you may be prosecuted under present laws. If you violate someones terms of service and in the process injur another party economically, you can be sued. But facts are facts, and an attitude toward information of "first come, first served" is immoral. It is motivated soley by profit and does not benefit the people in any way, and in fact stands to do much harm to the peope.
It's not a failed analogy. He's saying that the person from Panama doesn't know what he's missing.
It was a perfectly legitimate reply. The question was, "I don't have these freedoms and don't know what the big deal is." And the reply was, "It's hard to explain why freedom is so important. You may have to have freedom to fully appreciate how bad the lack of freedom sucks"
Unfortunately when you get right down to things, if you start by being hostile and loud it usually doesn't help things. This is true regardless of whether you're talking to a cop, a secretary, airport security, or whatever.
I've never been arrested for sassing a secretary.
And you, a person who believes that one can judge intelligence by looking at someone's eyes and who does not, apparently, know how to use correctly the word "literally", you are a rocket scientist, no?
I'm familiar with the quote, though my A Dictionary of Quotations, Jeffares & Gray, Eds. has it, "the sort of English up with which I will not put."
I'm with you on the foisted Latin. For instance, I think split infinitives should be used when they sound good and not when they don't. And same goes for ending sentences with prepositions. In speech, do what comes natural -- what's natural is what sounds good. But in writing, depending on your level of formality, your audience, etc., a little re-arranging can be more pleasant. I like a little artifice in my writing. Anyhow, here on slashdot, I normally wouldn't give a damn. Mostly, I like to quibble over usage with those who need a little poke in the ribs, e.g. overly serious people with whom I disagree, people who let it drop that they are teachers.
In other words I approve of the usage, "Hey, Jake! Which boat ya goin' in?" But I also prefer my government forms use the imperative, "Please indicate the state in which you reside," rather than, "Dude, write down what state you live in."
I may be an English grad, but I am a Southerner first.
Which brings to mind the old joke:
There's a dinner party and a Southern couple is seated next to a yankee couple.
Southern lady says to the yankee woman, "So where y'all from?"
Yankee woman replies, "We're from where we don't end our sentences with a preposition."
"Oh, excuse me," says the Southern lady. "So. Where y'all from -- bitch?"
There are some out there who say, let's judge what works by looking at the real world. They say, let's look at the successes and the failures and see how it all comes out in the wash. These people have the nerve to say, maybe the best opinions come from those successful in business, those whose asses are on the line, those who will buy a second house or mortgage the first one -- all depending on whether or not their business strategy is sound.
Would you believe these full time business men and women? Would you be so foolhardy? Would you guide your ship by the example of those businessmen, by those who do not get paid if it turns out they are full of shit?
Of course not!
You, smart fella that you are, take your business advice from someone who will keep his job regardless if someday he develops a crackpot theory that spaghetti is better than OOP, regardless if someday he publishes an entire book detailing how COBOL is the best language ever! You, oh wise one, will give deference to the opinion of a man who could only lose his job for sleeping with students -- and only then if they get pissed off and tattle. You, observant and calculating, will not take advice from the businessman who does not give advice, but who only betrays his strategy by doing business openly and by quietly pocketing customer dollars. No, Sir! You will only take advice from those learned gentlemen who do nothing but give advice, for you, Sir, know that they are great, learned Professors. And who on earth, you ask yourself, would profess something and dare to be talking out his ass?
_______________
On a serious note, having been deep in the bowels of academia, I can tell you this. The only metrics of note in academia are publishing, peer recognition, and, occasionally, student feedback. No one ever gets published by saying, "Yep. The stuff we taught last year is still good." No one ever gets peer recognition by saying, "Yep. Still good." Student feedback isn't affected by what you teach, only how you grade and how much work you give. So what gets a professor recognition and approval is denying something else, someone's work, someone's theory, everyone's work, everyone's theories but your own, etc. A theory that no one has thought of is good. A theory that no one has thought of and which, if true, invalidates the theories of all your peers at other institutions is best. Only in some disciplines and in some cases does the chance of being proven false raise much of a spectre. Outside of the hard sciences, you can spew whatever crap you want and who's to say your wrong? So what if you think Chaucer is a misogynist and Open Source is a fool's paradise? Both opinions are pretty subjective and leave lots of wiggle room. If someone replies that Chaucer donated religiously to a widow's fund, you say, so what? He did it out of spite. If Novel's earnings rise for five years in a row after they buy SuSe, you say, just you wait until year six! And even if you are proven blatantly wrong, so what? Who follows up that? The story about the asteroid that might hit earth is always bigger than the story that it didn't. And anyway, next year's flood of contrived controversy issuing forth from the desks of your peers will drown out your personal load of horseshit.
As an example, look at New Math. What was wrong with Old Math, you know, the same math they taught to a generation of engineers who put us on the moon? Nothing. There was nothing wrong with it. Except that if you are taking a Ph.D. in Math Education, it doesn't look good to have a dissertation two sentences long: "Good job. Keep it up."
Everybody has an agenda. And it's good to be skeptical about agenda which appear to be altruistic. IBM, Novel, etc. -- there's nothing altruistic about their agenda. Their agenda is $$$, same as Microsoft, only they have a different strategy to that money. What is Howard Strauss's agenda? Is it enlightening the masses? Is it enlightening the CEO, the CIO? Is he doing this to enlighten anyone
It concerns me that you're a junior high teacher and in one paragraph you mix tenses, mispell a word, and end a sentence with a preposition.
The issue at hand is not pornography, it is political speech. Should your post be blocked because it discusses pornography? Block porn, block sites promoting gun violence. Do not block sites discussing these issues as politics. Especially to not block sites concerning one side of the issue and not the other.
Thanks for the reply, jo_ham. I think you are really making the lights change, but that the causal relationship is not between the lights changing and you flashing your lights. As you intimated in your reply, there is another more likely cause. There are (here in the US anyway, and I'm guessing in many other places as well), loops of wire embedded under the road at most important intersections. These loops are indeed motion detectors in that they measure a change in inductance caused by a metal object moving over them -- exactly the same mechanism as in some metal detectors (exept that in that case, the coil moves, not the object). What this sensor is, I cannot say. I am pleased that you are open to other suggestions. I too am open to the idea that flashing your lights does change the signal. I'm still going with the idea that this is an urban myth.
While I hesitate to put you squarely in the club to which also belong those people who flap fresh polaroids in the belief that doing so makes them develope quicker, I have to take what you say with a measure of skepticism.
A quick, but admittedly not thorough, google search revealed no such devices. Furthermore, I have lived in Tallahassee, Florida all my life. One of your child posters said that they had these devices in Tallahassee and I have never heard of them nor have I seen them. I have also never seen people flashing their lights at intersections. And Tallahassee is not a big town.
I should like to mention, moreover, that my father has been a Traffic Engineer in Tallahassee, Florida for over 15 years . I just now called him up and asked him if he had ever heard of anything like this and he said he had not. He, a professional traffic engineer, said they sounded like a bad idea.
If you're interested, you might submit some sort of proof of your claims.
If it makes you happy flashing your lights, then I'm happy for you. But until I see better evidence, I'm going to remain skeptical on the proposition that there is a causal relationship in evidence here.
When people ask me about multiple monitors, I use this analogy. Image driving in a car and all you can see is a 20 inch square.
Think of it this way as well. You work on a *desktop*, right? Well, imagine yourself working in an office without computers, using just paper, and you have to work on a physical, wooden desktop only 20 inches square.
One aspect of multiple monitor use that usually does not occur to the uninitiated is that other monitors are handy for "storage". When you work with paper at a wooden desk, do you work with every paper in one pile? No, you spread them out, you have an inbox, you have a paper in front of you, you place one to the side because it's important and you want it visible so you don't forget, you put another piece of paper (or a book) to the other side to refer to.
My experience is that many non-techies look at multiple monitor use as superfluous. They think it's just a toy. At my last job, I was the first one to use multiple monitors (I worked in the surplus property department) and the IT managers thought it was wastefull. But other people saw it and wanted it. Then they found out how useful it is and the trend took off there. The managers still don't get it, though. Why would they? All they ever use is email. For most people though, it's sort of an ah-ha moment when they really try it out. When I first mentioned to my Dad that he ought to use multiple monitors, he dismissed it as a "gee-whiz" kind of thing -- cool if you're a geek, but otherwise not very usefull. Now he has six monitors on one computer.
I use three at home and, just as an example as I write I have open on separate monitors Opera, Bash (x2) and System Monitor, and Evolution. At work I have two monitors on one machine. The second monitor I took off of a second machine under my desk. That second machine is physically headless, but it runs VNC and I have it displayed on my primary machine's second monitor.
Matter of fact, multiple monitors is so important to me that this issue is what held me up from going totally Linux on my primary machine at home. Once I had that -- bye, bye Windows.
As far as coding, I don't see how you can even do it without multiple monitors (I feel this way in hindsight, of course). Having used VB at work (yuck), it was indispensible to have code on the main monitor, the GUI on another, and debugging, project explorer, help, etc. on the third.
If you haven't used multiple monitors, do yourself a favor and try it. It's like taking the blinders off.
I agree that the poster made a mistake. But his usage could also mean that Lindows will release a great deal of money, i.e. send forth a great deal of money. It doesn't quite make sense, but, then, this is slashdot, so one must ask one's self, is the poster an idiot or does he simply have poor English skills? A similar usage which does make sense is that these parties are all going to loose a pack of lawyers into the fray.
Oh, crap. I knew I was forgetting something!
Yes, I tried those and I've gotten it to work. I should have been clearer, however. What I wanted to know was more detail on the parent's statement "then typing a one-liner to make it permanent."
What's the one-liner? That would be news to me.
i think the one thing that's really bringing you down is only ingesting trace amounts of science
Very witty and very true. I think most people fall into that category.
How do you make it permanent? I read the readme and on that subject it says putting knoppix on your hard drive is possible and then it lists several steps.
I was a 91G, Behavioral Science Specialist (mental health counselor) at Fort Gordon. Most of my patients were Signal Corps trainees. You and your parent poster complain about the discipline while you were in AIT.
In my experiece, the average 17-20 year old Signal Corps trainee is just like every other trainee. They are patriotic, eager, bright, and motivated. Unfortunately, there are also plenty of trainees who are undisiplined, whining little brats. They join the military and -- Surprise! -- it's tough. They get in Basic and AIT and they came to me and told me that training sucks.
And here's what I told them. Guess what -- it's supposed to be tough. It's part of the design. If it was easy and the DIs held your hand and pampered you along so that you didn't get your pretty little pink panties dirty, then we wouldn't have much of a military, would we? So sorry you're incovenienced.
This is the part of the session where the whiny little brat would say, "I miss my mom. I don't think I'm meant to be in the Army. I want out." I had the power to recommend to a soldier's Commander that the soldier be discharged from the Army and, most of the time, the Commander took my advice. So I pretty much had the power to let these brats get out of the Army.
My response to them? It's tough. It's meant to be that way. I'm recommending you stay in. You obviously need it as a character building exercise. Suck it up and drive on.
As far as the training goes, yes, AIT is not MIT, it's not RedHat boot camp. Most of the good stuff you learn, you learn on the job. Like most everything else in life, the experience is in large part what you make of it. If you spend your time partying, doing what you have to in order to get by, and showing up late for formations, you'll get the shit duties and learn nothing. If you bust your ass and make a soldier out of yourself and volunteer and work hard, you can do all kinds of stuff.
I was a mental health counselor. We had a psych test that we scored by hand and it was a pain in the ass. Without telling anyone what I was up to, I came in after hours for a while, taught myself to program, and wrote an application to score the test and print out a graph of the results. When I turned it in to my boss, I was awarded the Army Commendation Medal, and I was the only one in my unit below the rank of Sergeant to wear that ribbon. That's how I got started in IT. And I wasn't even in an IT MOS (military occupation specialty).
Summary:
1) The military is tough.
2) Garbage in, garbage out.
As Gomer Pyle, USMC, would say -- Surprise, surprise, surprise!
Just in case anyone wants to know, that's by Woody Guthrie.
Thank you. I appreciate the thought. Fortunately, however, my rank now is PFC (Private Fucking Civilian) and I only take orders from my wife.
Once, when I was in the Army, I was given a direct order to watch about 8 hours of porn.
See, the Colonel and Lt. Colonel in my section hated my NCOIC. They hated him because he was a weasel, but then they were weasels as well. And they were always looking for ways to give him hell. Well, my NCOIC was retiring and had boxed up a buch of personal stuff from his office with a buch of work stuff. He hadn't removed it from the building, however, and claimed that he was going to sort it all out later, so they couldn't do anything about that.
Anyway, in the stuff in his office they found lots of porn tapes. On the off chance that they contained kiddie porn (they did not) and they could bust him on that, they made me watch the whole collection. Sadly, it was mostly skanky 1970s German porn. I fast-forwarded through a lot of it.
That was the best order I ever got. If only I had been ordered to drink beer, then my life would be complete.
IANAL (neither are you, I assume), but I want to clarify something in your post.
You mention at several points that someone is allowed to use force if such-and-such happens. You are only partially correct. The law in most places states that you have a duty to flee, if you can, before you use force.
To give you an example of why this is so, imagine you are in your car at a stop light. A guy on the corner pulls out a knife and says he is going to kill you. At that moment, the light before you turns green. Instead of stepping on the gas and getting the hell out of Dodge, you shut off your engine, pull out a baseball bat and proceed to beat the crap out of the guy. You see what's wrong here? The laws regarding self-defense are not about tit for tat. They are about ensuring that as few people as possible are assaulted. If you can flee and you don't, you essentially become just another violent agressor. People have been sent to prison because they used force when they could have fled.
Everyone who lives in the US should be aware of this fact:
Security gaurds have no more law enforcement rights than ordinary citizens. That means that, just like ordinary citizens, they can perform a citizen's arrest. They often do this in the case of shoplifting where they see someone commit the crime. And since the shoplifter is guilty, no harm comes to the security gaurd. But if a guard tries to detain you and has not personally witnessed the alleged crime, he can well be sued. So, if you are ever in a confrontation with a security guard and you have done nothing wrong, simply walk away, as there is nothing he can do, legally speaking. If, however, he does something, sue his ass and the store.
Having said all that, you might be interested to know that most security guards are given some sort of training and the above information is included. In other words, they know better than the general public what they can and cannot do. Your comment is simply a rehash of a tired stereotype.
Will they be multi-threaded?
I for one welcome our new denimn masters.
Cheers to this person for his scepticism and cheers to you, parent, for your research.
The person who submitted this article and the editor who approved it are obviously both mothers (in the litteral sense, anyway, I can't speak for the figurative). After all, isn't it overly credulous mothers who are responsible for this cruft being forwarded all over hell and back?
I applaud the geekily dry, the useless, the trivial, that bit of info that is a perfect waste of time. I can forgive a wide range of factual errors made in good faith and good skeptical effort. But I expect better than this. Why not next start posting stories about a kid with cancer who wants greeting cards?
For shame, Slashdot. For shame.
I'm guilty of the test file too. And if my test.c or test.py outputs or sends a test message, I've gotten to where my test message is, "This is the ubiquitious, obligatory test message."
It's getting so I'm beginning to think my whole life is a test.
Hmmm, maybe I'm on to something there . . .
Amen to all of that, brother.
.pst files are sort of useless now, but I have a hard time seeing a time in my life when text files will be unreadable (given migration to newer media). Right now, I'm happy reading raw emails, headers and all, in vi, but I suspect that I'll eventually get around to putting a GUI front end on my system so that I get a prettier view, possibly my own trimmed down clone of the Outlook UI. There is something about a tree/list GUI that just warms my heart. But then, too, while I don't mind the mouse too much, I don't like constantly switching between mouse and keyboard, so a CLI email system has its benefits.
/home dir because if I want to reload my machine or I fuck it up, I don't have to worry about my data directory. And any file that's mine (as opposed to the OS's -- and I include as 'mine' my X config, Samba config, etc.) that for some reason doesn't belong in the data directory, I'll do a symlink and have my backup script follow symlinks (that link to files outside of /home).
I've also recently decided to go all ascii on my email. I'm in the process of writing a complete set of email components (in the Unix philosophy of separate apps that do one thing well) to store each email as a text file. I've used and liked both Outlook and Evolution just for the UI, but nothing is quite so portable as text files which is especially import for backup purposes. All my Outlook
I'm also text-file-ifying everything else, complete with a daemon to watch a folder of appointments and at the appropriate time send a message to whatever shell/terminal I'm in and/or raise a pop-up.
I'm also going to re-do my drive and make a partition just for my
Obviously, none of the above comes anywhere close to revolutionary, but it's taken awhile for me to put it all together in my head, and it also took a while for me to finally go totally Linux where I actually have all the power I need to do what I want to do. How the hell did I ever live without grep?
Thanks for letting me share. I feel much better.