Hey, its been over two months since the season. Its not like this came out January 8th or something. Think of it as... hmm... coming out early to catch the Spring Break holiday shopping. Yeah.
And Americans will be Americans - as you might realize in hindsight. I challenge you to go back and actually read the article - babelfish it if you must. Maybe then you'd realize that just because a/. summary says a thing doesn't mean that its accurate. This was not an attack on Google, far from it, more of an "attack" if you must use that word on his fellow countrymen to make sure that they did something similar. Just as you were lamenting.
Your zeal, while strong, seems a little... misapplied.
Thanks for your post. After reading it, I think that I have more of an appreciation for autism than I had before - its not something I have any experience with, or really any interest in beyond the curiosity of learning, but you did a great job of conveying both the facts and some of the mental/emotional feeling behind them. I don't have anything constructive to add, just wanted to say that it was appreciated, and probably made some small difference in the way that I will think about the subject in the future.
The problem with a software company filling this role is that their system is proprietary and unmodifiable by the client. Most companies *do* have the resources to hire a programmer or a contractor to add a feature to a piece of OSS.
Not quite. Most enterprise software comes with source available, and pretty much all of it gets customized once you get into bigger customers. Its actually a real PITA when it comes time to do upgrades. And yes, I'm an architect at an ERP vendor.
Personally, I think that they did exactly the right thing. Seriously.
Think about it for a minute. Do you really want some company like Verisign setting policies that state, "We assign identity-proving certificates to you if you can prove that your company meets the following standards... oh, but only if we like your company name?"
What about the classic first domain-hijacking for RoadRunner. That's almost universally dispised, but the policy you're asking for is very similar. Would a bigger company be able to "suggest" to Verisign that other smaller companies in their space not get certificates?
The only real way for a CA to work is for them to be impartial. If you want to go through the trouble and expense of creating a legal identity "You suck balls, LLC" and file a d/b/a as "You Suck Balls", then you should be able to get a Verisign certificate saying that you do indeed represent the organization known as "You Suck Balls."
That's all they do after all. You (and many others) already don't seem to like 'em much. Do you really want an opinion step to be thrown in to the mix?
Finally, its not as if "Click YES to continue," isn't a catchy name for a software download business, so I don't even know if you could catch them out should Verisign start doing manual reviews of its certificates.
Considering the space already available to install cameras, cabling, and God only knows what else above the ceiling, wouldn't it be easy to include large transmitters in the ceiling?
Sure. As long as you're okay with the ceiling being within four feet of the floor. That's the downside.
As long as you let it completely evaporate - and yes, it has to be complete - I don't see why this wouldn't work. You also have to be sure that there's no battery backup or anything, but a fader's probably safe there.
Why not just tell everyone that they can have free compost, but they have to bring their own bags? I doubt you'd get any complaints about that, quite frankly.
one company tried getting my SS# so they could list me as an employee and run taxes on me, etc. I told them no way...they can cut me a check to my business. They wanted that EIN number - again no way. B2B they only need your business name (only one business per state with that name allowed anyhow).
Actually, this isn't true. A standard part of a corporate vendor relationship is giving your client information, such as your EIN. For your information, they are legally required to file a 1099 with the IRS covering all payments that they made to you in any year where the total exceeded $600. To file that 1099 they need either your SSN if you're an individual/dba, or your EIN if you're a corporation. Its not just standard practice, its the law. This filing can be waived for some forms of corporations, but not all of them.
Er, why worry about the copyrights? If you're changing all of that, you could easily change the name of the show (and the crew) while keeping the basic societal premises intact. Its not like they were groundbreaking...
Please tell us what you did to your computer to ensure that figure (well, short of a fresh install with no 3rd-party applications). Mine easily takes 1-2 minutes - and this is without malware.
Wow. My XP box only takes 90 seconds - I know that's about what you said, but its a laptop running a 1.4ghz processor, a pathetically slow 4800rpm hard drive (the biggest system bottleneck), and several instances of Oracle, one of Informix, two Tomcat daemons, ad nauseum. And XP SP2.
Those are indeed your rights. Of course, your employer can also fire you, sue you, or promote you, either because of your blog or without knowing about it. Those are your employer's rights.
Actually, OnStar provides outbound celphone like service, for an additional fee. It has the advantage of working damn near everywhere, even in cel dead spots. It has the disadvantage of being expensive.
BTW: Don't read those books on Making Friends and Influencing People. You're not there to make friends, you're there to make shit happen. Try looking for How To Make Enemies And Infuriate People instead. Much more useful.
Spoken by someone who's obviously never read that particular book, since it covers much the same ground that you were talking about (but does it in a much better way - no offence, but he is a pro). So... why were you belittling someone's work when they were ready to support you, just to make your post sound more informed? And could that be a management problem?
Its interesting. I had some RSI starting, so I used a natural keyboard for a while, then I switched to laptops. I keep my wrists straight, which means they come in angled, but I have my chair slightly lower so that my fingers are naturally higher, and they arch down more (think traditional pianist). This lets me bend my fingers slightly differently, and they all end up on the home row with little or no tension in them.
It does mean that I use slightly different fingering for some words - I wouldn't use the same fingers for e and d for example (middle for e, pointing for d), so a previous post made me have to think about it. But it works well for me, and I can type pretty quickly using this technique with no pain.
More than anything else, the key for me is ubiquity. QWERTY layouts are everywhere. For the same reason that I eventually uninstalled Norton Desktop and went back to Program Manager in the 3.1 days, I'll stick to the traditional layout: I want to be able to type what I want, wherever I happen to be, with a fairly good chance of being comfortable doing it.
And that, I'm afraid, means a QWERTY layout. Like SMTP, the fact that its everywhere (at least in English speaking countries) outweighs almost all other potential gains.
And that's always an option too. I didn't say anything about bringing all provided services down - just bringing a machine down. Some operations have dead time - some don't. Either way, by doing it formally all the time you're in much better shape when you have to do it for whatever reason.
I've been in shops before where a machine has been running for a couple of years and needs an upgrade, and everyone's really fscking scared to touch it because they have no confidence that it will come back up. Doing a bounce on a regular basis at least lets you make sure that - if something's happened to the boot sequence - it was recent, and can be fixed.
One of the last steps of our standard deployment was a full hard shutdown and restore from backup. This was shceduled to happen approximately a week before bringing the machines live - after a lot of data setup had been done.
Many customers - and internal staff - really, really got scared at that point. The thing is, if you don't trust your backups, what good are they? Its amazing what things got taken care of and found during double-checks the week before the backup/restoration test.
Oh, and we always went with scheduled reboots as well, for very much the same reason as you mentioned. An hour a month of scheduled downtime is almost always available - usually we booted every week and had an optional downtime window on a monthly basis. And if your (talking to readers here, not parent) organization can't afford to be without a single machine for a 2-3 hour block once a month, WTF is your plan to handle a hardware failure? Prayer?
Completely wrong. They're not talking about browsers at all. They're talking about what can be done with a program like prince (which one of the author's wrote). Current browser incompatibility is totally irrelevant.
Alright, let me restate my sentence.
The fact of the matter seems to be that they're comparing what you can do today, with a little work, using XSL transforms in any application that supports them, to what you may be able to do tomorrow with a proposed dedicated language in their own custom-written application.
Right, but this would be a damn sight more useful if IE actually supported it as well. Right now our webapps - and many others - have a "Print" option on each screen which generally renders a server-side PDF version of the information they're looking at. Its the only way to guarantee a decent hardcopy. Using this to do the transformation client-side would be really great - if it was supported in the standard XHTML viewers (ie: webbrowsers).
Even better, because there's no need to use the intermediate PDF step, instead the user would just print from their browser and they'd get the nicely formatted output pages. Ideally things like page size would be set from the print dialog, et cetera, for best transparency rather than being hardcoded into the CSS at all, something you need if you're dumping to PDF instead of going directly to a printer.
More recently, a W3C Candidate Recommendation (called CSS3 Paged Media Module) added functionality to describe headers, footers, and more...
The big difference is that XSL provides the tools to perform this transformation - from XHTML to a printable layout - without needing to change the standard itself. The same goes for the argument made about page sizes, which are built into the latest CSS and which have to be handled manually with XSL.
Now, once you have wide support for the latest CSS (and who knows how long that will take), I would wholeheartedly agree that it would be a better choice for printing as shown here. The fact of the matter seems to be that they're comparing what you can do today, with a little work, using XSL transforms, to what you may be able to do tomorrow with a proposed dedicated language. I'd be pretty surprised if the latter couldn't do what its designed to do better than a general purpose language.
At least, that's the way I see it. So, there's some good stuff coming down the pipe with CSS. That's worth knowing about. But until it has wide support, there's XSLT. And that's worth knowing about as well, and a damn sight more useful - for now.
I didn't read anything to indicate that the authors weren't asked, "Hey, we're having an auction, can you donate something?" At least, that would be my assumption. So, if true, I would assume that the authors were in favor of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, its been over two months since the season. Its not like this came out January 8th or something. Think of it as... hmm... coming out early to catch the Spring Break holiday shopping. Yeah.
I was referring to the original editorial, btw.
Read it translated (courtesy of Google) here.
And Americans will be Americans - as you might realize in hindsight. I challenge you to go back and actually read the article - babelfish it if you must. Maybe then you'd realize that just because a /. summary says a thing doesn't mean that its accurate. This was not an attack on Google, far from it, more of an "attack" if you must use that word on his fellow countrymen to make sure that they did something similar. Just as you were lamenting.
... misapplied.
Your zeal, while strong, seems a little
Thanks for your post. After reading it, I think that I have more of an appreciation for autism than I had before - its not something I have any experience with, or really any interest in beyond the curiosity of learning, but you did a great job of conveying both the facts and some of the mental/emotional feeling behind them. I don't have anything constructive to add, just wanted to say that it was appreciated, and probably made some small difference in the way that I will think about the subject in the future.
/. post, that's remarkable.
For a
The problem with a software company filling this role is that their system is proprietary and unmodifiable by the client. Most companies *do* have the resources to hire a programmer or a contractor to add a feature to a piece of OSS.
Not quite. Most enterprise software comes with source available, and pretty much all of it gets customized once you get into bigger customers. Its actually a real PITA when it comes time to do upgrades. And yes, I'm an architect at an ERP vendor.
Personally, I think that they did exactly the right thing. Seriously.
... oh, but only if we like your company name?"
Think about it for a minute. Do you really want some company like Verisign setting policies that state, "We assign identity-proving certificates to you if you can prove that your company meets the following standards
What about the classic first domain-hijacking for RoadRunner. That's almost universally dispised, but the policy you're asking for is very similar. Would a bigger company be able to "suggest" to Verisign that other smaller companies in their space not get certificates?
The only real way for a CA to work is for them to be impartial. If you want to go through the trouble and expense of creating a legal identity "You suck balls, LLC" and file a d/b/a as "You Suck Balls", then you should be able to get a Verisign certificate saying that you do indeed represent the organization known as "You Suck Balls."
That's all they do after all. You (and many others) already don't seem to like 'em much. Do you really want an opinion step to be thrown in to the mix?
Finally, its not as if "Click YES to continue," isn't a catchy name for a software download business, so I don't even know if you could catch them out should Verisign start doing manual reviews of its certificates.
Considering the space already available to install cameras, cabling, and God only knows what else above the ceiling, wouldn't it be easy to include large transmitters in the ceiling?
Sure. As long as you're okay with the ceiling being within four feet of the floor. That's the downside.
Just the way its written.
As long as you let it completely evaporate - and yes, it has to be complete - I don't see why this wouldn't work. You also have to be sure that there's no battery backup or anything, but a fader's probably safe there.
Why not just tell everyone that they can have free compost, but they have to bring their own bags? I doubt you'd get any complaints about that, quite frankly.
one company tried getting my SS# so they could list me as an employee and run taxes on me, etc. I told them no way...they can cut me a check to my business. They wanted that EIN number - again no way. B2B they only need your business name (only one business per state with that name allowed anyhow).
Actually, this isn't true. A standard part of a corporate vendor relationship is giving your client information, such as your EIN. For your information, they are legally required to file a 1099 with the IRS covering all payments that they made to you in any year where the total exceeded $600. To file that 1099 they need either your SSN if you're an individual/dba, or your EIN if you're a corporation. Its not just standard practice, its the law. This filing can be waived for some forms of corporations, but not all of them.
Er, why worry about the copyrights? If you're changing all of that, you could easily change the name of the show (and the crew) while keeping the basic societal premises intact. Its not like they were groundbreaking...
Please tell us what you did to your computer to ensure that figure (well, short of a fresh install with no 3rd-party applications). Mine easily takes 1-2 minutes - and this is without malware.
Wow. My XP box only takes 90 seconds - I know that's about what you said, but its a laptop running a 1.4ghz processor, a pathetically slow 4800rpm hard drive (the biggest system bottleneck), and several instances of Oracle, one of Informix, two Tomcat daemons, ad nauseum. And XP SP2.
"OS/2 for PS/2 - Half an operating system for half a computer."
Am I the only one who had one of those buttons?
Those are indeed your rights. Of course, your employer can also fire you, sue you, or promote you, either because of your blog or without knowing about it. Those are your employer's rights.
Actually, OnStar provides outbound celphone like service, for an additional fee. It has the advantage of working damn near everywhere, even in cel dead spots. It has the disadvantage of being expensive.
Last I checked Oracle was available for OSX as well. Its not quite free, but then again, it's Oracle.
BTW: Don't read those books on Making Friends and Influencing People. You're not there to make friends, you're there to make shit happen. Try looking for How To Make Enemies And Infuriate People instead. Much more useful.
Spoken by someone who's obviously never read that particular book, since it covers much the same ground that you were talking about (but does it in a much better way - no offence, but he is a pro). So... why were you belittling someone's work when they were ready to support you, just to make your post sound more informed? And could that be a management problem?
Its interesting. I had some RSI starting, so I used a natural keyboard for a while, then I switched to laptops. I keep my wrists straight, which means they come in angled, but I have my chair slightly lower so that my fingers are naturally higher, and they arch down more (think traditional pianist). This lets me bend my fingers slightly differently, and they all end up on the home row with little or no tension in them.
It does mean that I use slightly different fingering for some words - I wouldn't use the same fingers for e and d for example (middle for e, pointing for d), so a previous post made me have to think about it. But it works well for me, and I can type pretty quickly using this technique with no pain.
More than anything else, the key for me is ubiquity. QWERTY layouts are everywhere. For the same reason that I eventually uninstalled Norton Desktop and went back to Program Manager in the 3.1 days, I'll stick to the traditional layout: I want to be able to type what I want, wherever I happen to be, with a fairly good chance of being comfortable doing it.
And that, I'm afraid, means a QWERTY layout. Like SMTP, the fact that its everywhere (at least in English speaking countries) outweighs almost all other potential gains.
And that's always an option too. I didn't say anything about bringing all provided services down - just bringing a machine down. Some operations have dead time - some don't. Either way, by doing it formally all the time you're in much better shape when you have to do it for whatever reason.
I've been in shops before where a machine has been running for a couple of years and needs an upgrade, and everyone's really fscking scared to touch it because they have no confidence that it will come back up. Doing a bounce on a regular basis at least lets you make sure that - if something's happened to the boot sequence - it was recent, and can be fixed.
One of the last steps of our standard deployment was a full hard shutdown and restore from backup. This was shceduled to happen approximately a week before bringing the machines live - after a lot of data setup had been done.
Many customers - and internal staff - really, really got scared at that point. The thing is, if you don't trust your backups, what good are they? Its amazing what things got taken care of and found during double-checks the week before the backup/restoration test.
Oh, and we always went with scheduled reboots as well, for very much the same reason as you mentioned. An hour a month of scheduled downtime is almost always available - usually we booted every week and had an optional downtime window on a monthly basis. And if your (talking to readers here, not parent) organization can't afford to be without a single machine for a 2-3 hour block once a month, WTF is your plan to handle a hardware failure? Prayer?
Completely wrong. They're not talking about browsers at all. They're talking about what can be done with a program like prince (which one of the author's wrote). Current browser incompatibility is totally irrelevant.
Alright, let me restate my sentence.
The fact of the matter seems to be that they're comparing what you can do today, with a little work, using XSL transforms in any application that supports them, to what you may be able to do tomorrow with a proposed dedicated language in their own custom-written application.
Well, color me impressed.
Right, but this would be a damn sight more useful if IE actually supported it as well. Right now our webapps - and many others - have a "Print" option on each screen which generally renders a server-side PDF version of the information they're looking at. Its the only way to guarantee a decent hardcopy. Using this to do the transformation client-side would be really great - if it was supported in the standard XHTML viewers (ie: webbrowsers).
Even better, because there's no need to use the intermediate PDF step, instead the user would just print from their browser and they'd get the nicely formatted output pages. Ideally things like page size would be set from the print dialog, et cetera, for best transparency rather than being hardcoded into the CSS at all, something you need if you're dumping to PDF instead of going directly to a printer.
From TFA:
More recently, a W3C Candidate Recommendation (called CSS3 Paged Media Module) added functionality to describe headers, footers, and more...
The big difference is that XSL provides the tools to perform this transformation - from XHTML to a printable layout - without needing to change the standard itself. The same goes for the argument made about page sizes, which are built into the latest CSS and which have to be handled manually with XSL.
Now, once you have wide support for the latest CSS (and who knows how long that will take), I would wholeheartedly agree that it would be a better choice for printing as shown here. The fact of the matter seems to be that they're comparing what you can do today, with a little work, using XSL transforms, to what you may be able to do tomorrow with a proposed dedicated language. I'd be pretty surprised if the latter couldn't do what its designed to do better than a general purpose language.
At least, that's the way I see it. So, there's some good stuff coming down the pipe with CSS. That's worth knowing about. But until it has wide support, there's XSLT. And that's worth knowing about as well, and a damn sight more useful - for now.
I didn't read anything to indicate that the authors weren't asked, "Hey, we're having an auction, can you donate something?" At least, that would be my assumption. So, if true, I would assume that the authors were in favor of it.