That's pretty much the key to the whole thing; it may have started as to a group that perhaps reached into three figures, but they were on the right track.
Anybody can read the RFCs, and there are probably millions who have now (well, maybe not all of them). They are among the most non-intimidating technical/specification documents I've ever gone through.
There's one little collection I wish had been around when I first got network access. Sending emails was a mind-fuck when you had to piss about with bang paths.
I was waiting for that. Second comment from the top, we've achieved a new level of predictability.
Count yourself lucky - The Belgian telco, Belgacom, decided when they were getting into the Internet business to call their ISP "Skynet" - check http://www.skynet.be/
This is similar to how all pilots who expect to fly internationally (and probably all commercial pilots regardless) are required to speak English. It is the standard language of air traffic control and such.
This, unless there has been a recent update, is incorrect. Management of air traffic may be conducted in English, French, or Russian. This - of course - causes its own problems and increases risk. You may be an English-only monolingual pilot flying into a French airport. The controllers will speak to you in English, but you lose a huge amount of situational awareness because most of the planes around you are talking French with ATC.
Doesn't significantly impact programming - you really do need to know English. Apart from aberrations like shell scripting, most languages not only rely on English keywords, but on basic English grammar for parsing the syntax.
We need a Listener's Rights Society, where we can be compensated for hearing music we DON'T want to hear. Think about it, how many times do you hear an awful song in a situation where you can't turn it off? And they want royalties for that?!
Bring it on!
I can't wait to see Brittney Spears and Michael Jackson made bankrupt for offending my ears!
...I received a letter from the SENA (equivalent of PRS) stating that I need to pay for music played in my own home, for my ears only.
Same shit applies in most European countries - seen it in Belgium. The irony of the case I saw, was it was a Thai supermarket - they only played music off imported Thai CDs. Do you think any of the original artists get a cent from this collection body?
What do they expect? IT staff that got their jobs outsourced to India to break into their old companies systems and fix the crud written by the people who got their jobs before they'd finished paying off their college loans?
Seriously, blow shit up. NOTHING gets a bored teenager more interested in science of any kind than an explosion.
Don't worry about the smart kids, unless - like me - they figure out how to make something like silver acetelide, con the lab assistant into handing out the needed chemicals, and then sprinkle the aforementioned unstable compound all over your desk.
If you really want to push the physics aspect of it, start something like a model rocketry club/group. Hell, you can even start out with a 2-litre coke bottle with water and pumping air into it. There's a lot of science in doing something as simple as that and seeing how high the bottle flies.
Hello, is that an armpit hoover? Or are you just pleased to see me?
I always make an effort to shower or bathe before I have a flight, especially if it is long-haul.
Now, I don't particularly care for the idea of a 'lie-sniffer', as it is just more tin-foil-hattery from leeches who can demand government funding to 'fight teh terrorists'. However, if they keep the guy that is a couple of hundred pounds overweight, and hasn't washed for a week, off the plane - I'll be happy.
Norton disk doctor and norton speedisk where both fantastic compared to the Microsoft alternatives under DOS 5/6/6.22 (my era) speedisk used to do a real, thorough defrag of the drive, sure it took a hell of a long time but it totally sped things up, especially logging disks in ztree.
Over the years it became worse and worse, I think the first one or two windows revisions were somewhat decent but it's been a good 6 or 7 years since I'd ever even consider installing their stuff on my machine anymore.
Yes, once upon a time Norton products were good. Now they are an expensive nuisance which 'nannies' every action you perform on a PC and has a hideous impact on performance.
I widely recommend AntiVir (http://www.free-av.com) as a far more lightweight alternative. I've never bought the full package with malware stuff and so on; I would be curious to hear the experiences of anyone who has.
Obviously an anti-virus is not enough nowadays, the development of malware has become commercially attractive - even Sony tried it.
...you don't use the browser for updates anymore. You haven't since XP.
Most of my Windows machines are still on XP - I have not mucked about with Win7, and only casually used a couple of Vista installs.
One thing I will point out from my XP experience is that I have frequently had to resort to using MSIE to 'revive' automatic updates. Some little patch or quirk in the auto-update software and the machine just stops getting updates. Only a visit to the Windowsupdate website gets the issue resolved.
Another case was XP's SP3 - this was an optional update for months before it was made mandatory. If you checked the website, you found out, and could schedule time to try it.
Going back to the topic that MSIE can be removed, and it may be a sop to the EU antitrust actions, will Microsoft be forced to make access to patches with a non-IE browser easier?
A search function... yes, but it has to be very good. Would Google perhaps donate one of their search 'appliances' rather than insist everything go in their great database?
Linux.com has to be really good to serve any sort of evangelising purpose, and search will be critical to that.
You, tangentially, touch on another major issue with any computer related stuff - poorly phrased questions. Pose them to a search engine? You get squat. Pose them to a discussion area? Someone will probably ask you a bunch of questions back to work out what the problem is, and be able to provide a solution.
The latter requires more effort on someone's part, so may be the less-travelled road. The accumulation of poor questions, and volunteers working to resolve the issues causing them, should eventually help on the search side.
So, I'd want to see Linux.com with the right foundations to evolve into an indispensable site. I do not believe it can start as such.
When I think of Wall Street, one of the first things that springs to mind is a photo I saw sometime late last year. In it, a protester is holding a home-made sign with the text, "Jump you bastards".
They didn't jump, and I have only seen one or two articles mentioning trader or banker suicides.
I can only conclude that those working on Wall Street are so utterly detached from the riskier-than-roulette gambling they were engaged in, that the losses are meaningless to them. It wasn't their money, they had no real stake in any investment being viable in the long-term, and - what's worse - is I see zero effort to move away from the "must profit in the next quarter" philosophy.
I really don't care about any 'magic formula', and I doubt you can squarely lay the blame for the current problems at the foot of any. The issue is the drive to profit right now.
What is perhaps more worrying for the average person is that governments have been sucked into this mindset too - but perhaps not surprising when the only people who can get elected are those who have made the money to campaign from their own short-term investments, or by accepting backing from others who did so in exchange for perpetuating the system.
The suckyness that is Sharepoint is already digging its claws into the corporate market. I regularly see contracts for it, usually requiring other Microsoft lock-in technologies as well.
They might as well be burning the money, but - no. They're investing it in ways that ensure they are stuck with the whole family of Microsoft products.
It really is a typical short-term business solution, with serious long-term financial implications. Many, many companies could recoup the cost of investing in use of other, more open technologies in 5-10 years as they paid less 'Microsoft tax'. If the CIA, FBI, and US State Department can all use MediaWiki, why can't business? "But it doesn't integrate with Microsoft Product X" should not be a showstopper. Hire someone to write something to integrate them, if you go with the Sharepoint solution you'll be doing similar stuff for other systems/packages.
ISPs deliberately go out of their way to stop you from establishing a link between your IP address and any sort of identity.
By sheer luck, some people manage to get semi-static IPs, if you want it guaranteed you pay hand-over-fist. The rest of us? Bounced from one DHCP lease to the next in case we actually run some services on our machines.
You can count me in for a "reverse IP phone book" if they'll let me have ronald-dumsfeld.myisp.com
Listen to the song, Zappa wants to sell his soul to the devil for his titties and beer...
Devil: Listen fool, you've got to prove to me that you're rough Enough to get into hell, That you've got the style enough to get into hell, So start talkin'...
Zappa:Alright, lemme tell ya somethin'
Devil: Alright!
Zappa: I'll prove to you that I'm bad enough to go to hell
Devil: Yeah!
Zappa: Because I have been through it!
Devil: Yeah!
Zappa: I have seen it!
Devil: Yeah!
Zappa: It has happened to me!
Devil: Yeah!
Zappa: Remember, I was signed with Warner Brothers For eight fuckin' years!!!
So, fortunately, this clip will not be coming down.
Slashdot Mirror
That's pretty much the key to the whole thing; it may have started as to a group that perhaps reached into three figures, but they were on the right track.
Anybody can read the RFCs, and there are probably millions who have now (well, maybe not all of them). They are among the most non-intimidating technical/specification documents I've ever gone through.
There's one little collection I wish had been around when I first got network access. Sending emails was a mind-fuck when you had to piss about with bang paths.
So now what? revolution!
No. Just cut of their supply of garlic and snails.
Ah, yes Monsieur politician, we will put ze escargot back on ze menu when we will not get ze disconnection from the Intertubez.
I'd shoot you if you named it Skynet.
I was waiting for that. Second comment from the top, we've achieved a new level of predictability.
Count yourself lucky - The Belgian telco, Belgacom, decided when they were getting into the Internet business to call their ISP "Skynet" - check http://www.skynet.be/
This is not an April Fool's joke. This is real AND no one can remove shit like this from the internet. The cat is far out of the bag.
The cat is not just out the bag - it's in a book
This is similar to how all pilots who expect to fly internationally (and probably all commercial pilots regardless) are required to speak English. It is the standard language of air traffic control and such.
This, unless there has been a recent update, is incorrect. Management of air traffic may be conducted in English, French, or Russian. This - of course - causes its own problems and increases risk. You may be an English-only monolingual pilot flying into a French airport. The controllers will speak to you in English, but you lose a huge amount of situational awareness because most of the planes around you are talking French with ATC.
Doesn't significantly impact programming - you really do need to know English. Apart from aberrations like shell scripting, most languages not only rely on English keywords, but on basic English grammar for parsing the syntax.
We need a Listener's Rights Society, where we can be compensated for hearing music we DON'T want to hear. Think about it, how many times do you hear an awful song in a situation where you can't turn it off? And they want royalties for that?!
Bring it on!
I can't wait to see Brittney Spears and Michael Jackson made bankrupt for offending my ears!
...I received a letter from the SENA (equivalent of PRS) stating that I need to pay for music played in my own home, for my ears only.
Same shit applies in most European countries - seen it in Belgium. The irony of the case I saw, was it was a Thai supermarket - they only played music off imported Thai CDs. Do you think any of the original artists get a cent from this collection body?
No, neither do I.
What do they expect? IT staff that got their jobs outsourced to India to break into their old companies systems and fix the crud written by the people who got their jobs before they'd finished paying off their college loans?
This is what I would have if I had money to burn.
I'm looking forward to NC-17 rated superhero movies instead.
"Bigger, Bluer, and Uncut!"
"Uncut"? I wasn't paying attention enough - I didn't notice Doctor Manhattan was circumcised.
A mildly amusing snipe at the end of the article mentions the author missing out on computers that used good-old cassette tape.
Some of us remember punched cards, the things we had at home were toys with cassette players attached.
I still think the Z80 and successors were great processors - why did we end up with that piece of shit the 8086?
Sounds like a class where I can just make up answers out of absolutely nothing. It's a miracle anyone passes!
It is not a miracle, it is a case of divine intervention
Seriously, blow shit up. NOTHING gets a bored teenager more interested in science of any kind than an explosion.
Don't worry about the smart kids, unless - like me - they figure out how to make something like silver acetelide, con the lab assistant into handing out the needed chemicals, and then sprinkle the aforementioned unstable compound all over your desk.
If you really want to push the physics aspect of it, start something like a model rocketry club/group. Hell, you can even start out with a 2-litre coke bottle with water and pumping air into it. There's a lot of science in doing something as simple as that and seeing how high the bottle flies.
I'm 40. Excuse me while I nip outside and shoot myself.
Hello, is that an armpit hoover? Or are you just pleased to see me?
I always make an effort to shower or bathe before I have a flight, especially if it is long-haul.
Now, I don't particularly care for the idea of a 'lie-sniffer', as it is just more tin-foil-hattery from leeches who can demand government funding to 'fight teh terrorists'. However, if they keep the guy that is a couple of hundred pounds overweight, and hasn't washed for a week, off the plane - I'll be happy.
Norton disk doctor and norton speedisk where both fantastic compared to the Microsoft alternatives under DOS 5/6/6.22 (my era) speedisk used to do a real, thorough defrag of the drive, sure it took a hell of a long time but it totally sped things up, especially logging disks in ztree.
Over the years it became worse and worse, I think the first one or two windows revisions were somewhat decent but it's been a good 6 or 7 years since I'd ever even consider installing their stuff on my machine anymore.
Yes, once upon a time Norton products were good. Now they are an expensive nuisance which 'nannies' every action you perform on a PC and has a hideous impact on performance.
I widely recommend AntiVir (http://www.free-av.com) as a far more lightweight alternative. I've never bought the full package with malware stuff and so on; I would be curious to hear the experiences of anyone who has.
Obviously an anti-virus is not enough nowadays, the development of malware has become commercially attractive - even Sony tried it.
...you don't use the browser for updates anymore. You haven't since XP.
Most of my Windows machines are still on XP - I have not mucked about with Win7, and only casually used a couple of Vista installs.
One thing I will point out from my XP experience is that I have frequently had to resort to using MSIE to 'revive' automatic updates. Some little patch or quirk in the auto-update software and the machine just stops getting updates. Only a visit to the Windowsupdate website gets the issue resolved.
Another case was XP's SP3 - this was an optional update for months before it was made mandatory. If you checked the website, you found out, and could schedule time to try it.
Going back to the topic that MSIE can be removed, and it may be a sop to the EU antitrust actions, will Microsoft be forced to make access to patches with a non-IE browser easier?
A search function... yes, but it has to be very good. Would Google perhaps donate one of their search 'appliances' rather than insist everything go in their great database?
Linux.com has to be really good to serve any sort of evangelising purpose, and search will be critical to that.
You, tangentially, touch on another major issue with any computer related stuff - poorly phrased questions. Pose them to a search engine? You get squat. Pose them to a discussion area? Someone will probably ask you a bunch of questions back to work out what the problem is, and be able to provide a solution.
The latter requires more effort on someone's part, so may be the less-travelled road. The accumulation of poor questions, and volunteers working to resolve the issues causing them, should eventually help on the search side.
So, I'd want to see Linux.com with the right foundations to evolve into an indispensable site. I do not believe it can start as such.
When I think of Wall Street, one of the first things that springs to mind is a photo I saw sometime late last year. In it, a protester is holding a home-made sign with the text, "Jump you bastards".
They didn't jump, and I have only seen one or two articles mentioning trader or banker suicides.
I can only conclude that those working on Wall Street are so utterly detached from the riskier-than-roulette gambling they were engaged in, that the losses are meaningless to them. It wasn't their money, they had no real stake in any investment being viable in the long-term, and - what's worse - is I see zero effort to move away from the "must profit in the next quarter" philosophy.
I really don't care about any 'magic formula', and I doubt you can squarely lay the blame for the current problems at the foot of any. The issue is the drive to profit right now.
What is perhaps more worrying for the average person is that governments have been sucked into this mindset too - but perhaps not surprising when the only people who can get elected are those who have made the money to campaign from their own short-term investments, or by accepting backing from others who did so in exchange for perpetuating the system.
The suckyness that is Sharepoint is already digging its claws into the corporate market. I regularly see contracts for it, usually requiring other Microsoft lock-in technologies as well.
They might as well be burning the money, but - no. They're investing it in ways that ensure they are stuck with the whole family of Microsoft products.
It really is a typical short-term business solution, with serious long-term financial implications. Many, many companies could recoup the cost of investing in use of other, more open technologies in 5-10 years as they paid less 'Microsoft tax'. If the CIA, FBI, and US State Department can all use MediaWiki, why can't business? "But it doesn't integrate with Microsoft Product X" should not be a showstopper. Hire someone to write something to integrate them, if you go with the Sharepoint solution you'll be doing similar stuff for other systems/packages.
ISPs deliberately go out of their way to stop you from establishing a link between your IP address and any sort of identity.
By sheer luck, some people manage to get semi-static IPs, if you want it guaranteed you pay hand-over-fist. The rest of us? Bounced from one DHCP lease to the next in case we actually run some services on our machines.
You can count me in for a "reverse IP phone book" if they'll let me have ronald-dumsfeld.myisp.com
Bleh, talentless hack.
Try The Credit Crunch Blues instead. Yes, it's on archive.org so the page may be a bit slow to load.
Listen to the song, Zappa wants to sell his soul to the devil for his titties and beer...
Devil: Listen fool, you've got to prove to me that you're rough Enough to get into hell, That you've got the style enough to get into hell, So start talkin'...
Zappa:Alright, lemme tell ya somethin'
Devil: Alright!
Zappa: I'll prove to you that I'm bad enough to go to hell
Devil: Yeah!
Zappa: Because I have been through it!
Devil: Yeah!
Zappa: I have seen it!
Devil: Yeah!
Zappa: It has happened to me!
Devil: Yeah!
Zappa: Remember, I was signed with Warner Brothers For eight fuckin' years!!!
So, fortunately, this clip will not be coming down.
Beer? Great! But what is beer without titties?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwb1s1DYnDU
Surely this is political suicide? The German Wikipedia - as I understand it - carries a great deal of clout in the form of goodwill it has fostered.