At first I thought that they were just having problems with (legitimate) torrent use, but I did have a Win2K box up at that point to run some software my wife needed for work. Lo and behold, despite patches and security, the box had been owned. I told them I had taken the 2K box off-line (booted it back into Linux and the other box was a Mac) and they immediately reactivated the account.
After which your DSL provider's technical support people informed you that your Linux box is not supported.:-)
Reading some of these anecdotes reminds of my dial-up days. I live in a small resort-ish community where, prior to SBC and Adelphia/Comcast's arrival, there was a single locally-owned mom and pop ISP. During my years with them, I never experienced a rate increase from the $18 per month I was paying, or a single busy number, delay in connecting, authentication, drop or any other sort of problem. I was able to download/upload All I Could Eat from usenet (the Supernews usenet feed was provided for free) and regularly did so.
Now I'm subscribed to SBC DSL with whom I regularly encounter problems of all sorts. The first year or so, my connection ran at about 90% of advertised. Then it dropped to 60%. Their NNTP feed as next to useless (even for text-based groups), so I incurred the additional cost of ten bucks per month for a premimum usenet service, which soon got throttled on my end. I eventually upgraded to an Uber-Premium DSL account with fixed IPs and and double the bandwidth (for twice the price, of course), and then watched the process repeat itself.
The irony is that my habits have long since changed and I have little need or interest in downloading anything other than an occasional ISO over HTTP. For that I'm paying what I consider an exorbitant sum. The commercials on TV make me wonder whether I'm missing out on some great fun, but the reality is that from a consumer perspective, we all hate our providers and we resent the added costs and decreasing level of service. Even more, I think we resent their resentment of us.
It is the height of meglomania to suggest that human beings have a greater impact on the planet than that big-ass hot thing that comes over the horizon every morning.
I'd suggest that holding to the belief that one's actions are beyond reproach or otherwise have little to no impact on the world one lives in would be an equally valid definition of megalomania.
Somewhere along the line everybody was convinced (I blame AOL) that you just couldn't understand how to use a computer unless everything you did was clicking on a picture. Somewhere along the way, society convinced itself that nobody could fucking read.
Somewhere along that same line, Microsoft clued into this trend and accelerated the trend that spawned generations of clueless computer users. Seems now it's a self-fulfilling and self-replicating prophecy. The irony, of course, is that behind the clicky pictures, things have become so convoluted that few can understand or manage the mess, Microsoft included.
Now, I'm not advocating a return to the days when computers were a pain in the ass to configure or use. All I'm saying is that (much like people used their car's heat and A/C before it was just "blue seated dudered dude") people tend to be as stupid as society allows them to be, or tells them they are. If Dell support tells your grandma "editing this text file is easy, here you can even cut-and-paste this", then she'll believe it's easy.
I *would* advocate that very approach, at least to the extent that computer users re-learn what computers are and how they work. Given that most all of us are going to spend the rest of our lives using computers, it seems perfectly appropriate to learn a damn thing or two.
As for the original "It's not ready for the desktop if I ever have to manually edit a config file", it's worth pointing out two things.
First, the "manually editing" construct is disingenuous in that it suggests some sort of onerous labour that most folks don't already do on a daily basis in a wordprocessor. I can't recall anyone complaining about "manually editing" a Word file.
And second, *nix systems are built around the concept of a terminal and files. All the clicking on widgets and pictures doesn't change any of that. And given that typically the results of all that clicking gets written to a file anyway, it should occur to those lamenting the necessity of "manually editing" things that they might skip opening up yet another window to click yet another series of widgets and do it directly. One can come up with hundreds of examples, but compare the following:
The current amount of stocks advertised by spam is human-manageable
Maybe yes, but according to the fine article:
SEC Chairman Christopher Cox said that not even the investor protection agency is immune to the onslaught of stock-related spam. He said the SEC's public affairs director, John Nester, received an e-mail touting the stock of one of the 35 companies.
``Not even the SEC's spam filter can stop all this spam,'' Cox said.
Rather funny, if you think about it; at one level, this could be a case of the Spamming the Wrong Guy. What isn't so funny is reading the trading volume numbers and being reminded that there's people out there who do read their spam.
LOL. Sounds like conversations I had with my daughter when she was just short of kindergarten.
Why? Because. Because why? Because...
She usually wins the round.
Software that sends personal information about you back to its master when you say you don't want to install it is generally considered spyware.
The interesting bit. One generally associates the term spyware with smaller shady companies out for a quick buck. In this case, we're discussing a multibillion dollar corporation respected by business-types, so I imagine many would consider the term inappropriate.
On the other hand, given the incremental nature of the changes Microsoft has put into effect since WinXP was released, those who do object to the term spyware might very well be like frogs in a pot of slowly heated water. The choice of words has a tendency to define the terms of the conversation, so while you say spyware, the folks in Microsoft's marketing department are using words like genuine and advantage. No one wants spyware, but we all want the advantages of things genuine, don't we?
just that most of the people with power in Hollywood seem to be Liberals today.
Allow me to fix the above for you.
just that most of creative people in Hollywood (like most creative folks anywhere throughout history), tend to be liberal in their outlook, while the guys who run the business side of things (producers, studio execs, accountants, managers, etc.) are invariably conservative.
Personally, I'd like to think this entire line of discussion is off-topic. At least to the degree someone making their views known with respect to global warning isn't so easily influenced by the steady stream of the opinion-peddling on AM radio and Fox News that passes for news or discussion, or otherwise suffers from an irrational distrust of everyone involved in the Clinton presidency.
That said, here's a tip: you'd be hard-pressed to find many business types "in Hollywood" who didn't vote for Bush in the last election, or the one prior. Shouldn't be much of a surprise. Folks whose business is money insist on keeping as much of it as possible and routinely vote for the "lower taxes and less government involvement" candidate. The same often holds true for people who regularly earn large sums of money; many of the news anchors and high-profile execs in the "liberal media" vote conserative. Ironic, huh?
I suppose it's to be expected, but it's a shame more scientists don't involve themselves more in the political process. Imagine a world where global warning wasn't an Al Gore thing and people instead relied on the efforts and conclusions of people who devote their professional lives to the subject. In time, perhaps. It wasn't too long ago that some nutjobs started to get hysterical about shit being dumped into rivers and oceans and complained so loudly that the government decided to create the EPA. Funny they're no longer considered the nutcases everyone back then thought they were.
Add a requirement for path statements to be defined with a prefixed combination of alphanumerics, colons and escape characters, throw in some voodoo quoting mechanisms, require a regedit for tab command-completion, etc., implement everything (the documentation, included) on an ad hoc basis while dismissing the notion of terminal as something that's quaint or needs reinventing, and you'll really feel like you're being kicked in the monads.
took typing in Grade 9 (yes, I'm from Canada) and we learned on Underwood Upright manual typewriters. I'll never forget our teacher's mantra, "Short, Snappy Strokes".
LOL. I'm from Canada, too -- sounds like we had the same teacher! FWIW, here in the US they have Grade 9, too. It's just that in high school, they only go to grade 12 and don't do the extra year we get.
I think the earlier poster's comment that typing was the best thing he learned in high school was spot on. Most of us spend our lives working at a keyboard. It can be a real drawback not being able to type effectively.
God, my first electric typewriter (and it was only semi-automatic, the carriage return was manual) was such a blessing compared to those upright beasts.
Agreed! But all that disciplined banging did your fingers good, didn't it?
But does it still make that super loud clicky noise when you type?
Even if it doesn't, it would definitely go a long way to training people to avoid the carpal-tunnel-inducing-typo-generating bad habit of resting their wrists on the keyboard.
For anyone who never learned to type in a typing class on a real typewriter, I'll point out that most everyone who finishes such a course ends up typing at about 90wpm. I enrolled on a lark (to meet girls, actually, but they all ended up resenting me because I typed faster than they did), but the habits drilled into me I keep to this day.
Take that Mavis Beacon. Now get off my lawn.
Great looking keyboard at any rate. What's missing is a big magnifying screen like those found in Terry Gilliam's Brazil. And some pneumatic tubes. Gotta have pneumatic tubes -- you can impress your friends and family and have fun scaring the shit out of the dog at the same time.
Bonus points for using a proper sig delimiter (to the extent it's meaningful anywhere outside an email or news client), but I'd like to think many of choose not to be subjected to advertising by disabling sigs.
The tricky part is getting users to use the system correctly and put their pithy quote of the day, advocacy announcement, or advertising plug where it belongs.
Because it wasn't enough to completely redesign the UI; they also had to arbitrarily change the name.
Going a bit off topic here, but years ago I discovered the workaround to Microsoft's nutty naming and interface issues (Start Menu, Control Panel, etc.) which, I think, started way back when with support for long (non-8.3) file names.
Quite simply, adopt the *nix approach and learn to rely on the name of the executable itself. The same applies to.cpl applets,.msc consoles, and services (which invariably use sentence-length "descriptive" names). For example, running 'desk.cpl' or 'services.msc' at a command prompt is infinitely faster than the point and click nonsense. And if you have Cygwin installed, you can symlink everything and name/categorise things as you see fit. Alternatively, script a numbered menu-based selection screen that provides both a descriptive name and the actual names to choose from; you'll memorise the names in short order.
With regards to commonly used executables (like Word, Photoshop, whatever), the symlink approach works especially well in that it fixes the goofy path issues on Windows systems -- symlink everything into a single directory (using convenient names, all in lowercase with suffix stripped, of course), add that directory to your path statement, and call it a day.
Change too often, and your possible significant other may see you as:
1. Superficial or fickle. 2. Incapable of forming a relationship. 3. Irresponsible, immature, or otherwise unable to deal with obligations. 4. Not someone with whom any sort of investment should be made.
Don't change often enough, and you may be considered:
1. Complacent, unmotivated and aspiring to nothing. 2. Generally undesirable, or without talent. 3. Ill-equipped to form any new relationship. 4. Odd.
Like most things in life, our opinions are arrived at in some context. An employer who is seeking a superstar employee will view a stable work record differently than someone looking for to fill an empty slot.
My advice? Try to be mature in your decisions and decide what's right for you. Commitments you do make, however, should be respected. Personally, I've never objected to seeing 3-5 year minimums, given that there's few companies like IBM, GE, etc. around these days, and even fewer Jack Welsh types that you'll be working for. People get divorced at an increasing rate, so it's more acceptable than in the past that an invidividual won't spend his or her career with a single company.
You're using a 286? Don't make me laugh. Your Windows boots up in what, a day and a half?
LOL. Only a complete moron would do that. Anybody who knows anything would have used a 486.
Speaking of which...
There's an underlying irony to the goofy exercise described in the article. Once upon a time, the business world ran just fine on DOS and 3/486 machines. I remember one of my first real jobs was working as a lowly wordprocessor in an international law firm. Working up a 500 page prospectus was something I did on a daily basis and that, along with the related scheduling, timekeeping, billing and correspondence all just worked. I became the resident technical guru in short order, but what I did was little different than the hundreds of middle-aged secretaries who populated every floor of the firm. Go figure. A little old lady who can't tell the difference between a CPU and a hard drive using the command-line all day long and liking it.
I wonder how it came to be that we're now so reliant on high-powered machines to perform routine tasks which could be done similarly on machines far less powerful. What is so different about today? You can plop a Linux or current BSD distro onto a Soekris box (486) or a crappy little VIA 600MHz box and have it function just fine. Use it as a firewall, a file server. Hell, it would work great as an email server and you can use it generate documents, or whatever else you typically expect of a computer.
Personally, I'm finding the older I get, the more resistant to upping the processing power ante to continue what doing what I've been doing for years. Everyone has different needs, of course, but for the stuff we all do every day?
Just get off my lawn if you think you have the answers.
But the text on that website is extremely unprofessional; it reads more like a rant than an open letter...
I stopped at the
It's come to many in the Linux community's attention...
which, unfortunately, was the very first sentence.
If I was Balmer, I'd be thinking, "WTF? I run a billion dollar corporation and I'm supposed to read and respond to this? This is even worth picking up a small stool."
The problem is she's less of a whore than her sisters, but charges more.
The good part is that while she's definitely not oh so beautiful (at least any more than any other girl on your block), the cosmetic surgery she's had done has made her less ugly than the rest of her family, so you don't have to be embarrassed any more.
What about my data?... Will you guarantee... Will you offer...
That would be set forth in the license, wouldn't it? And TFA doesn't provide any details as to what form it would take, not that many of us could stomach reading through more than a few lines of what comes out of Microsoft's legal department without our eyes glazing over and a nasty fluid filling the back of our throats.
Put another way, and at the risk of making it sound more palatable than it is, we're not talking a purchase v. rental model, but instead, we're talking about a new form of licensing.
The article submitter's suggestion that:
Consumers still like the option of buying complete software packages.
is misleading, perhaps to the same degree consumers are routinely misled. They're not really buying anything (except for a piece of circular piece of plastic), but licensing a product for their use.
A friend of mine is a permanent U.S. resident, but is not a U.S. citizen...
Well, here's some first hand information from someone who is a Canadian who is a U.S. resident.
U.S. Customs officials are federal employees. No suprise there, but I wonder how many U.S. citizens has have had the pleasure of an encounter with one, say a security guard at federal court house? You know, the guy with the $4 buzz cut, gun in his holster, and no personality or sense of humour ready and eager to assert his power. And, quite frankly and typically, zero interest or patience with f'rnrs or their problems.
Crossing into Canada, well, you get a Canadian. The usual stereotype. Relaxed, friendly and good natured, doesn't take himself that seriously and tries to do a good job because he thinks it's the right thing to do. He's a product of a country that has had liberal immigration laws for decades, so he his outlook isn't tied into any sense of nationalism or a fear or dislike of immigrants.
The above two descriptions are valid irrespective of whether you're American or Canadian, or in which direction you're headed. Put another way, going into Canada is typically a breeze and comes with a "Have a nice visit", while crossing into the U.S. is an ugly experience, assuming, of course, you don't get turned away which happens on such a regular basis it's almost to be expected. And if you're a legal U.S. resident thinking you'll have no problems, you shouldn't be too outraged if the official decides to detain you or just decides to confiscate your residency card for an arbitrary reason before sending you back. It happened to me. Twice. I could recite the horror stories of friends, relatives and acquaintances from any number of nationalities (American included), so if I sound overly critical, know that I consider my own experiences fairly minor by comparison.
Canadians may be going through growing pains, and/or be influenced or pressured by their neighbour to the south, so border issues may be of greater concern, but I have few worries in that regard. It's the American side that distinguishes itself with nationalistic values, a concern about immigrants, worries of terrorists and terrorism, and a population where the average citizen is unlikely to have travelled outside of his state, let alone outside his country. Legitimate concerns there, perhaps, but that doesn't make the crossing any less miserable.
Because obviously the hacker is guilty of more crimes than that judge.
Indeed. What makes this one case interesting (at least with respect to the judge) is that it worked out fine and A Bad Guy got snared. Considering the general nature of the crime(s), I'm inclined to overlook or even dismiss everything else. It's for a good cause, right?
On the other hand, it's fair, reasonable and probably customary for someone committing a crime for a greater good to be charged with those crimes, leaving it to the discretion of the court to decide mitigating factors and sentence the defendant appropriately. That most definitely didn't happen here, and by the tone of the two articles, such judicial concepts strangely aren't even part of the conversation. If the subject was a different one, he would be regarded as a first-class felon.
I'd be more interested in the other 3,000 "investigations", just as I'd be interested in knowing WTF a 19 year old kid is spending his formative years exclusively focused on the subject of dirty pictures and possible crimes against kids, and his pursuing vigilante justice. It's possible he has saintly qualities, but my guess is there's something serious wrong with him, just as there's something unseemly about what he was doing and trying to do.
The whole thing stinks, doesn't it? A strange kid working with a vigilante group writing trojans and rummaging around in people's personal lives. Everyone has something they'd prefer to remain private, just as everyone is probably guilty of committing crimes large and small at one time or another. I know I'd be more comfortable if people like him were behind bars.
1.... 2. Take the gerund of the verb and register it as a Web domain. 3.... 4. Advertise your site on Slashdot, where opinionated fussbudgets, girlfriendless nerds, and Grammar Nazis (often all the same thing) will gleefully and mercilessly attack your competence and judgement.
A post lamenting "grammar nazis" from someone can spell, writes in full sentences, and knows WTF a gerund is?
I don't know about other nations, but in the US recycling is immensely popular, especially in the suburbs. Everyone has their little sorted recycling boxes out. And in rural America the services often provide semi-sorted recycling where minimum wage workers sort the plastics for you.
We're not talking about paper, or even plastics. Fluorescents are typically regarded and classified as hazardous waste. Which means in most communities they need to be picked up, accepted by, stored or processed by certified hazardous waste recyclers. Even in urban areas, finding one isn't as easy as you think, and the drive that may be required may make it not worth the trouble.
The result? Fluorescents will get dumped in the regular trash where they fit nicely. That's where we put our dead batteries, after all. The mercury contamination will be a problem we won't have to worry about for a few more generations.
Slashdot Mirror
Get it right: the blog name is "27B Stroke 6" which is a beautiful reference to the out-of-control bureaucracy in Terry Gilliam's movie "Brazil".
I've always thought "tubes" jokes would be a lot funnier if more people, including a certain senator from Alaska, had seen this movie.
At first I thought that they were just having problems with (legitimate) torrent use, but I did have a Win2K box up at that point to run some software my wife needed for work. Lo and behold, despite patches and security, the box had been owned. I told them I had taken the 2K box off-line (booted it back into Linux and the other box was a Mac) and they immediately reactivated the account.
:-)
After which your DSL provider's technical support people informed you that your Linux box is not supported.
Reading some of these anecdotes reminds of my dial-up days. I live in a small resort-ish community where, prior to SBC and Adelphia/Comcast's arrival, there was a single locally-owned mom and pop ISP. During my years with them, I never experienced a rate increase from the $18 per month I was paying, or a single busy number, delay in connecting, authentication, drop or any other sort of problem. I was able to download/upload All I Could Eat from usenet (the Supernews usenet feed was provided for free) and regularly did so.
Now I'm subscribed to SBC DSL with whom I regularly encounter problems of all sorts. The first year or so, my connection ran at about 90% of advertised. Then it dropped to 60%. Their NNTP feed as next to useless (even for text-based groups), so I incurred the additional cost of ten bucks per month for a premimum usenet service, which soon got throttled on my end. I eventually upgraded to an Uber-Premium DSL account with fixed IPs and and double the bandwidth (for twice the price, of course), and then watched the process repeat itself.
The irony is that my habits have long since changed and I have little need or interest in downloading anything other than an occasional ISO over HTTP. For that I'm paying what I consider an exorbitant sum. The commercials on TV make me wonder whether I'm missing out on some great fun, but the reality is that from a consumer perspective, we all hate our providers and we resent the added costs and decreasing level of service. Even more, I think we resent their resentment of us.
It is the height of meglomania to suggest that human beings have a greater impact on the planet than that big-ass hot thing that comes over the horizon every morning.
I'd suggest that holding to the belief that one's actions are beyond reproach or otherwise have little to no impact on the world one lives in would be an equally valid definition of megalomania.
Ask a polar bear.
Somewhere along the line everybody was convinced (I blame AOL) that you just couldn't understand how to use a computer unless everything you did was clicking on a picture. Somewhere along the way, society convinced itself that nobody could fucking read.
/etc/resolv.conf
;-)
Somewhere along that same line, Microsoft clued into this trend and accelerated the trend that spawned generations of clueless computer users. Seems now it's a self-fulfilling and self-replicating prophecy. The irony, of course, is that behind the clicky pictures, things have become so convoluted that few can understand or manage the mess, Microsoft included.
Now, I'm not advocating a return to the days when computers were a pain in the ass to configure or use. All I'm saying is that (much like people used their car's heat and A/C before it was just "blue seated dudered dude") people tend to be as stupid as society allows them to be, or tells them they are. If Dell support tells your grandma "editing this text file is easy, here you can even cut-and-paste this", then she'll believe it's easy.
I *would* advocate that very approach, at least to the extent that computer users re-learn what computers are and how they work. Given that most all of us are going to spend the rest of our lives using computers, it seems perfectly appropriate to learn a damn thing or two.
As for the original "It's not ready for the desktop if I ever have to manually edit a config file", it's worth pointing out two things.
First, the "manually editing" construct is disingenuous in that it suggests some sort of onerous labour that most folks don't already do on a daily basis in a wordprocessor. I can't recall anyone complaining about "manually editing" a Word file.
And second, *nix systems are built around the concept of a terminal and files. All the clicking on widgets and pictures doesn't change any of that. And given that typically the results of all that clicking gets written to a file anyway, it should occur to those lamenting the necessity of "manually editing" things that they might skip opening up yet another window to click yet another series of widgets and do it directly. One can come up with hundreds of examples, but compare the following:
$ echo "nameserver 192.168.1.1" >>
Start -> Control Panel -> Network and Dialup Connections -> Local Network -> Properties -> Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) -> Properties -> etc -> 192.168.1.1 -> etc
The second option is hard to follow without a series of screenshots, isn't it?
Maybe yes, but according to the fine article:
Rather funny, if you think about it; at one level, this could be a case of the Spamming the Wrong Guy. What isn't so funny is reading the trading volume numbers and being reminded that there's people out there who do read their spam.
I see your "So?" and raise you a "Because!"
...
LOL. Sounds like conversations I had with my daughter when she was just short of kindergarten.
Why?
Because.
Because why?
Because
She usually wins the round.
Software that sends personal information about you back to its master when you say you don't want to install it is generally considered spyware.
The interesting bit. One generally associates the term spyware with smaller shady companies out for a quick buck. In this case, we're discussing a multibillion dollar corporation respected by business-types, so I imagine many would consider the term inappropriate.
On the other hand, given the incremental nature of the changes Microsoft has put into effect since WinXP was released, those who do object to the term spyware might very well be like frogs in a pot of slowly heated water. The choice of words has a tendency to define the terms of the conversation, so while you say spyware, the folks in Microsoft's marketing department are using words like genuine and advantage. No one wants spyware, but we all want the advantages of things genuine, don't we?
just that most of the people with power in Hollywood seem to be Liberals today.
Allow me to fix the above for you.
just that most of creative people in Hollywood (like most creative folks anywhere throughout history), tend to be liberal in their outlook, while the guys who run the business side of things (producers, studio execs, accountants, managers, etc.) are invariably conservative.
Personally, I'd like to think this entire line of discussion is off-topic. At least to the degree someone making their views known with respect to global warning isn't so easily influenced by the steady stream of the opinion-peddling on AM radio and Fox News that passes for news or discussion, or otherwise suffers from an irrational distrust of everyone involved in the Clinton presidency.
That said, here's a tip: you'd be hard-pressed to find many business types "in Hollywood" who didn't vote for Bush in the last election, or the one prior. Shouldn't be much of a surprise. Folks whose business is money insist on keeping as much of it as possible and routinely vote for the "lower taxes and less government involvement" candidate. The same often holds true for people who regularly earn large sums of money; many of the news anchors and high-profile execs in the "liberal media" vote conserative. Ironic, huh?
I suppose it's to be expected, but it's a shame more scientists don't involve themselves more in the political process. Imagine a world where global warning wasn't an Al Gore thing and people instead relied on the efforts and conclusions of people who devote their professional lives to the subject. In time, perhaps. It wasn't too long ago that some nutjobs started to get hysterical about shit being dumped into rivers and oceans and complained so loudly that the government decided to create the EPA. Funny they're no longer considered the nutcases everyone back then thought they were.
That's nothing.
Add a requirement for path statements to be defined with a prefixed combination of alphanumerics, colons and escape characters, throw in some voodoo quoting mechanisms, require a regedit for tab command-completion, etc., implement everything (the documentation, included) on an ad hoc basis while dismissing the notion of terminal as something that's quaint or needs reinventing, and you'll really feel like you're being kicked in the monads.
I kid, of course. It's probably worse.
took typing in Grade 9 (yes, I'm from Canada) and we learned on Underwood Upright manual typewriters. I'll never forget our teacher's mantra, "Short, Snappy Strokes".
LOL. I'm from Canada, too -- sounds like we had the same teacher! FWIW, here in the US they have Grade 9, too. It's just that in high school, they only go to grade 12 and don't do the extra year we get.
I think the earlier poster's comment that typing was the best thing he learned in high school was spot on. Most of us spend our lives working at a keyboard. It can be a real drawback not being able to type effectively.
God, my first electric typewriter (and it was only semi-automatic, the carriage return was manual) was such a blessing compared to those upright beasts.
Agreed! But all that disciplined banging did your fingers good, didn't it?
But does it still make that super loud clicky noise when you type?
Even if it doesn't, it would definitely go a long way to training people to avoid the carpal-tunnel-inducing-typo-generating bad habit of resting their wrists on the keyboard.
For anyone who never learned to type in a typing class on a real typewriter, I'll point out that most everyone who finishes such a course ends up typing at about 90wpm. I enrolled on a lark (to meet girls, actually, but they all ended up resenting me because I typed faster than they did), but the habits drilled into me I keep to this day.
Take that Mavis Beacon. Now get off my lawn.
Great looking keyboard at any rate. What's missing is a big magnifying screen like those found in Terry Gilliam's Brazil. And some pneumatic tubes. Gotta have pneumatic tubes -- you can impress your friends and family and have fun scaring the shit out of the dog at the same time.
--
Great hosting 200GB Storage, 2_TB_ bandwidth, php, mysql, ssh, $7.95
Bonus points for using a proper sig delimiter (to the extent it's meaningful anywhere outside an email or news client), but I'd like to think many of choose not to be subjected to advertising by
disabling sigs.
The tricky part is getting users to use the system correctly and put their pithy quote of the day, advocacy announcement, or advertising plug where it belongs.
Because it wasn't enough to completely redesign the UI; they also had to arbitrarily change the name.
.cpl applets, .msc consoles, and services (which invariably use sentence-length "descriptive" names). For example, running 'desk.cpl' or 'services.msc' at a command prompt is infinitely faster than the point and click nonsense. And if you have Cygwin installed, you can symlink everything and name/categorise things as you see fit. Alternatively, script a numbered menu-based selection screen that provides both a descriptive name and the actual names to choose from; you'll memorise the names in short order.
Going a bit off topic here, but years ago I discovered the workaround to Microsoft's nutty naming and interface issues (Start Menu, Control Panel, etc.) which, I think, started way back when with support for long (non-8.3) file names.
Quite simply, adopt the *nix approach and learn to rely on the name of the executable itself. The same applies to
With regards to commonly used executables (like Word, Photoshop, whatever), the symlink approach works especially well in that it fixes the goofy path issues on Windows systems -- symlink everything into a single directory (using convenient names, all in lowercase with suffix stripped, of course), add that directory to your path statement, and call it a day.
I wonder if he has judicial ambitions.
;-)
Who cares?
What's far more interesting is that someone can fashion a construct like quasinominative determinism and use it in a Slashdot article.
Is changing relationships too often a bad thing?
Change too often, and your possible significant other may see you as:
1. Superficial or fickle.
2. Incapable of forming a relationship.
3. Irresponsible, immature, or otherwise unable to deal with obligations.
4. Not someone with whom any sort of investment should be made.
Don't change often enough, and you may be considered:
1. Complacent, unmotivated and aspiring to nothing.
2. Generally undesirable, or without talent.
3. Ill-equipped to form any new relationship.
4. Odd.
Like most things in life, our opinions are arrived at in some context. An employer who is seeking a superstar employee will view a stable work record differently than someone looking for to fill an empty slot.
My advice? Try to be mature in your decisions and decide what's right for you. Commitments you do make, however, should be respected. Personally, I've never objected to seeing 3-5 year minimums, given that there's few companies like IBM, GE, etc. around these days, and even fewer Jack Welsh types that you'll be working for. People get divorced at an increasing rate, so it's more acceptable than in the past that an invidividual won't spend his or her career with a single company.
[T]hey run it just like it's supposed to be, as a VMWare image sandboxed inside their *nix/BSD workstation.
BSD isn't supported as a VMWare host OS.
You're using a 286? Don't make me laugh. Your Windows boots up in what, a day and a half?
...
LOL. Only a complete moron would do that. Anybody who knows anything would have used a 486.
Speaking of which
There's an underlying irony to the goofy exercise described in the article. Once upon a time, the business world ran just fine on DOS and 3/486 machines. I remember one of my first real jobs was working as a lowly wordprocessor in an international law firm. Working up a 500 page prospectus was something I did on a daily basis and that, along with the related scheduling, timekeeping, billing and correspondence all just worked. I became the resident technical guru in short order, but what I did was little different than the hundreds of middle-aged secretaries who populated every floor of the firm. Go figure. A little old lady who can't tell the difference between a CPU and a hard drive using the command-line all day long and liking it.
I wonder how it came to be that we're now so reliant on high-powered machines to perform routine tasks which could be done similarly on machines far less powerful. What is so different about today? You can plop a Linux or current BSD distro onto a Soekris box (486) or a crappy little VIA 600MHz box and have it function just fine. Use it as a firewall, a file server. Hell, it would work great as an email server and you can use it generate documents, or whatever else you typically expect of a computer.
Personally, I'm finding the older I get, the more resistant to upping the processing power ante to continue what doing what I've been doing for years. Everyone has different needs, of course, but for the stuff we all do every day?
Just get off my lawn if you think you have the answers.
I stopped at the
which, unfortunately, was the very first sentence.
If I was Balmer, I'd be thinking, "WTF? I run a billion dollar corporation and I'm supposed to read and respond to this? This is even worth picking up a small stool."
so vista is like an expensive whore with STDs?
The problem is she's less of a whore than her sisters, but charges more.
The good part is that while she's definitely not oh so beautiful (at least any more than any other girl on your block), the cosmetic surgery she's had done has made her less ugly than the rest of her family, so you don't have to be embarrassed any more.
That would be set forth in the license, wouldn't it? And TFA doesn't provide any details as to what form it would take, not that many of us could stomach reading through more than a few lines of what comes out of Microsoft's legal department without our eyes glazing over and a nasty fluid filling the back of our throats.
Put another way, and at the risk of making it sound more palatable than it is, we're not talking a purchase v. rental model, but instead, we're talking about a new form of licensing.
The article submitter's suggestion that:
is misleading, perhaps to the same degree consumers are routinely misled. They're not really buying anything (except for a piece of circular piece of plastic), but licensing a product for their use.
A friend of mine is a permanent U.S. resident, but is not a U.S. citizen ...
Well, here's some first hand information from someone who is a Canadian who is a U.S. resident.
U.S. Customs officials are federal employees. No suprise there, but I wonder how many U.S. citizens has have had the pleasure of an encounter with one, say a security guard at federal court house? You know, the guy with the $4 buzz cut, gun in his holster, and no personality or sense of humour ready and eager to assert his power. And, quite frankly and typically, zero interest or patience with f'rnrs or their problems.
Crossing into Canada, well, you get a Canadian. The usual stereotype. Relaxed, friendly and good natured, doesn't take himself that seriously and tries to do a good job because he thinks it's the right thing to do. He's a product of a country that has had liberal immigration laws for decades, so he his outlook isn't tied into any sense of nationalism or a fear or dislike of immigrants.
The above two descriptions are valid irrespective of whether you're American or Canadian, or in which direction you're headed. Put another way, going into Canada is typically a breeze and comes with a "Have a nice visit", while crossing into the U.S. is an ugly experience, assuming, of course, you don't get turned away which happens on such a regular basis it's almost to be expected. And if you're a legal U.S. resident thinking you'll have no problems, you shouldn't be too outraged if the official decides to detain you or just decides to confiscate your residency card for an arbitrary reason before sending you back. It happened to me. Twice. I could recite the horror stories of friends, relatives and acquaintances from any number of nationalities (American included), so if I sound overly critical, know that I consider my own experiences fairly minor by comparison.
Canadians may be going through growing pains, and/or be influenced or pressured by their neighbour to the south, so border issues may be of greater concern, but I have few worries in that regard. It's the American side that distinguishes itself with nationalistic values, a concern about immigrants, worries of terrorists and terrorism, and a population where the average citizen is unlikely to have travelled outside of his state, let alone outside his country. Legitimate concerns there, perhaps, but that doesn't make the crossing any less miserable.
The Arabs got zero from the Indians through their trading contacts actually. See the Wikipedia entry: History of Zero.
Nah, that was just one of the first examples of outsourcing.
A more interesting link.
Because obviously the hacker is guilty of more crimes than that judge.
Indeed. What makes this one case interesting (at least with respect to the judge) is that it worked out fine and A Bad Guy got snared. Considering the general nature of the crime(s), I'm inclined to overlook or even dismiss everything else. It's for a good cause, right?
On the other hand, it's fair, reasonable and probably customary for someone committing a crime for a greater good to be charged with those crimes, leaving it to the discretion of the court to decide mitigating factors and sentence the defendant appropriately. That most definitely didn't happen here, and by the tone of the two articles, such judicial concepts strangely aren't even part of the conversation. If the subject was a different one, he would be regarded as a first-class felon.
I'd be more interested in the other 3,000 "investigations", just as I'd be interested in knowing WTF a 19 year old kid is spending his formative years exclusively focused on the subject of dirty pictures and possible crimes against kids, and his pursuing vigilante justice. It's possible he has saintly qualities, but my guess is there's something serious wrong with him, just as there's something unseemly about what he was doing and trying to do.
The whole thing stinks, doesn't it? A strange kid working with a vigilante group writing trojans and rummaging around in people's personal lives. Everyone has something they'd prefer to remain private, just as everyone is probably guilty of committing crimes large and small at one time or another. I know I'd be more comfortable if people like him were behind bars.
I see that the humour flew over your cuckoo's nest at quite an altitude, Sir.
Look, mister, dangling participles don't scare me. Maybe pour yourself a tall one and re-read what I wrote?
Cheers.
1. ... ...
2. Take the gerund of the verb and register it as a Web domain.
3.
4. Advertise your site on Slashdot, where opinionated fussbudgets, girlfriendless nerds, and Grammar Nazis (often all the same thing) will gleefully and mercilessly attack your competence and judgement.
A post lamenting "grammar nazis" from someone can spell, writes in full sentences, and knows WTF a gerund is?
I don't know about other nations, but in the US recycling is immensely popular, especially in the suburbs. Everyone has their little sorted recycling boxes out. And in rural America the services often provide semi-sorted recycling where minimum wage workers sort the plastics for you.
We're not talking about paper, or even plastics. Fluorescents are typically regarded and classified as hazardous waste. Which means in most communities they need to be picked up, accepted by, stored or processed by certified hazardous waste recyclers. Even in urban areas, finding one isn't as easy as you think, and the drive that may be required may make it not worth the trouble.
The result? Fluorescents will get dumped in the regular trash where they fit nicely. That's where we put our dead batteries, after all. The mercury contamination will be a problem we won't have to worry about for a few more generations.