Coincidentally, I'm listening to Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear, a bio-thriller touching on related concepts. A very good book so far, but it is difficult to get out of the car for work.
Well, the espn and bbc are worthwhile. On the other hand, I had pre-decided to give it a year. For the first 3 or 4 months the comedy channel was awesome, until I kept hearing the same skits over and over again.
I didn't say the whole service was worthless, just that their song playlist pretty much sucks...
"The user can leave the software running unattended for hours and amass a vast library of songs."
Please insert "crappy" before "songs". I've had XM for a year and it's rare to hear two worthwhile songs back to back on any station. They seem to focus on "deep tracks", defined to be the stuff fans of the band don't even like.
After a few hours of listening to my friend's Sirius, I regretted choosing XM, and only chose XM because they seemed to have the subscriber numbers to last long term.
Emotional wounds are much harder to heal
on
Judges Junk Jailcam
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Humiliation makes others feel better, but the target tends to feel pissed off, c.f. Columbine shootings. If you assume from the start they can't be rehab'd, you might as well kill them, quickly. Putting them in jail doesn't solve anything.
Prison should not provide anything remotely beneficial beyond educational, occupational, or psychological support. There should be light at the end of the tunnel for those who want to travel that route and the rest can rot in a 4x6 cell.
Homer could barely drive, let alone design a car. This guy is a professor (which doesn't necessarily mean he can teach...) who appears to know his way around Cisco hardware. The chances of his suggestions being crap are fairly small. Big business is essentially known for ignoring suggestions from their customers.
However, half his target audience supposedly does not know how to turn on computers, and that scares me... The positive thing is this manual should present the information in a much more readable format than the free-as-in-sucky Cisco docs.
"Dumbed down" is the wrong phrase to use, but I have worked with a large number of people with their PhDs and who sit on thesis defences, and most of the research is not revolutionary or insightful, but is generally methodical: find a topic, conduct some research, write it up. The requirements are sound research and science, not that there is anything wrong with that. Being a grad student is more about hard work than anything else. If you honestly work hard, you will most likely get your PhD. For me, the reward of being an average researcher did not motivate me to work harder.
The entire steel industry hasn't moved overseas. The US still produces about 100 million tons of steel every year, approximately 12% of the world total, and relatively close to the alltime high (135 million in 1953?). China, a much larger country with less regulation (think safety and health), only produces about 200 million tons a year.
The loss of jobs is due to improved efficiency, unions pricing themselves out of the market, and low demand. It's quite difficult to compete with nations having cheaper workforces, but that's how capitalism is supposed to work. In the second reference below, it is stated the world uses 100 million tons less than it produces. Low demand means lower prices meaning fewer jobs.
Most PhD research is not very inspirational. The requirement of original, unique research means everyone is either brilliant or the work is just dumbed down and methodical. My observations from working at a research university, and from reading PhD thesis titles, leads me to believe the research is of the latter type.
The marginalization of the basic college degree requires an MS/MA/MBA degree to distinguish yourself (on paper) and, the PhD has become watered down due to the number of PhDs and the somewhat fixed percentage of truly inspirational/brilliant researchers.
Look at the state of lawyers: so many lawyers are churned out every year that the average ones end up doing the jobs of para-legals, except for 2-3x the salary.
When Peter Jackson went on and on about how he was going to be true to the novels and how many experts were working with him, what did everyone think? How about after your first viewing? And after you recovered from the resplendent beauty of filming? Were you able to? A lot of people who loved the movie could not read the books because FOTR was boring, probably because they didn't read the Hobbit first which is more accessible and sets up the expectation of Adventure. I found the movie dull, lifeless and melodramatic, removing all of the wonder and replacing the characters with Hollywood facsimiles.
LOTR was partially miscast and mostly miswritten and misacted. Visually, the casting for H2G2 seems really good, assuming they can act (I hope they don't all have American accents...) The American version of Coupling (a brilliant BBC sitcom) was so painfully enacted that I gave up after 15 minutes. It was like an elementary school production of Gone with the Wind.
While Kirkpatrick's heart seems in the right place, we'll have to see the execution. I do wonder what this guy has been doing with himself, as he doesn't have many credits since his first in 1990 and, most of his credits are for children's movies. Hopefully Jay Roach keeps everything good and proper.
In the US, a BA implies less coursework. At my old almer mater, you can get a Poly-Sci BA with 6 in-field classes, whereas my Physics and Astronomy BS required something like 12-14 plus five labs, not including the required math. A BA in Physics required about 7-8 classes.
Re:We're talking about Samba and Linux here...
on
Samba 3 By Example
·
· Score: 1
.so's are usually read only in practice and a more secure system will mount/usr and/or/lib RO, avoiding all writes. With/etc, fixing a non-hw problem is as easy as booting off a CD and fixing the problem file with a text editor (not fondly remembering having to use ed in my SunOS days...)
The Windows registry is regularly read from and written to and, we know that static systems are less problematic than dynamic ones. It is also difficult to secure the registry because most software relies on write access, so allowing common users to install software can be a pain. (Right now I'm pissed because Oracle seems to require NLS_LANG to be defined only in the registry and reading it's value from Java requires JNI.)
Having said that, I haven't experienced too many registry problems, but with Windows you never really know what the problem is since the logging system is so pathetic.
But for Sun, which had rose through the ranks of a dozens similar workstation manufacturers through foresight, engineering skill and hard competition, Microsoft's mediocrity is an affront.
While Sun has had decent hardware, it wasn't better than SGI or HP. They were stagnant on the user side of innovation. There is no reason why Sun couldn't have developed a KDE or Gnome type UI (although I was mostly happy with Openlook...) They had years of warning in advance of MS who didn't really have a network interface until 1995ish and they failed to exploit it.
On the server side, they may have been the last *nix company to start bundling commonly installed GNU/OSS software in their distro like perl and bash.
In the 90s, McNeally is on record as saying if he had been Bill Gates, he'd have done the same stuff, referring to the business practices of MS.
The workstation manufacturers like SGI and Sun blew their chances because they used expensive, custom hardware and charged by the pound and were very slow to innovate from a user perspective. They targetted science, research, and graphics shops that could afford their hardware, because at the time it was the best performing. As soon as Intel and AMD caught up in hardware, and Linux and MS with the OS, their advantage disappeared quickly.
Sun will be remembered no differently than Netscape or Real, who blew their chances by stagnating. Don't get me wrong, MS's business practices are shameful, if not illegal, but the real problem is that MS was allowed the opportunity to catch up.
Capitalism does not work to benefit the consumer, only to maximize the profit of the company. They attempt to maximize profit for the least amount of effort/cost. Capitalism is also not risk-friendly. Trying something new, with unknown results, especially when the costs are significant when compared with the status quo, scares the heck out of companies. This explains the very minimal technical improvements in the (american) automotive industry, the general lack of imagination in body styles, and why Doom 3 will be the biggest seller of the year.
Capitalism doesn't work where emotions rule over rational thought or where the population size is too large. The big 5 in the music industry supposedly gross over 20 billion a year, over 1 billion CDs sold. A small percentage of those consumers really care that a) CDs are expensive when you think about it and b) the artists, in general, get screwed. These few cannot dictate change even if they feel they are in the right.
This is why unions were formed. The individual cannot make a difference unless he is leading a like minded rabble to correct perceived wrongs. Today, unions are inherently anti-corporate but they are not the antithesis of capitalism. They want to maximize profit for the workers' minimal amount of effort (e.g. gym teachers making over 80k/yr, auto workers making over 100k/yr).
In the end, it is the same as democracy. People vote with their feelings, not their head. Thinking hurts, especially when the issues become complicated and the possible answers blur together and conflict with their desires.
Assuming that Boomer is a Cylon (demonstrated the last scene...), and the Chief and Boomer are more than just kissing, which sexual position have they not yet tried? Or do their backs only grow red during orgasm and the Chief is a little self-centered?
It also implies that Baltar and the other chick were fairly straight forward in their lovemaking (granted there are a million and one other positions, but you probably hit doggie-style sooner than later and they had supposedly been together for two years.)
You do only have GF 4200 for gfx. The 4600 Ti doesn't even get listed anymore when peformance comparisons are made (I wish they did, though) and even some of the newer cards don't do too well on the tests.
Of course I'm just jealous because I have to buy a new card to replace a GF4MX as I can't even start the game!!!
I have no idea how old you are, but circa 1992, security for computers was slowly becoming a quiet issue, let alone the buzz word it has been recently. Right around that time was (one of?) the first big worm (i'm not bothering to research specifics, relying on a blurred memory)
In academia (still circa '92), servers and workstations were not usually behind a firewall for a variety of reasons (primarily money and remote access convenience.) Department budgets for IT were small and usually only had one staff member had more than minimal experience.
Regarding leaving food in the wild, I wonder how many years it took before Man realized he got sick from eating food that was left out too long? It took a few thousand years before bathing was commonly realized as important, let alone brushing his teeth.
"They took systems designed for isolated desktop systems and put them on the Net without thinking about evildoers" - BJ
I haven't really followed Joy's career and what he's created, but if you look at everything on the net, TCP/IP, SMTP, et. al., they were initially dependent on unfounded trust. Once the masses got ahold of it, the evildoers expoited that trust.
For years, Sun shipped systems that were completely insecure right out of the box (blank root password, every inetd service enabled, etc...) It wasn't until the mid-90s that Sun started to do anything about it.
Granted, MS should have known better seeing as they were so late to the party, but Linux systems were no different until enough bitching occurred to make someone change the defaults.
Insert "perceived" before profits and you'll be correct.
Right now MS sees the market as locked up, much more so than Netscape did when they dropped the ball with version 4. The failure of improving your product generally leads to stagnation and loss of market share. (c.f. WordPerfect, WordStar, Lotus, and many others.)
To shake things up, Mozilla or Opera would need to be shipped with every Dell, Gateway, IBM, HP, etc. system as a default option. Additionally, there would need to be a little flash app introducing the wonders of tabbed browsing, and the other benefits these browsers provide.
With broadband fairly prevalent, a good ad campaign alone would make a significant difference. But OSS doesn't tend to have the cash flow to generate interest or knowledge of their produts and relies heavily on word of mouth and media coverage. In the case of media coverage, there is little incentive ($$$) for them to push alternate MS technologies.
People continue to smoke (in the USA) even though it is heavily taxed, not to mention bad for your health (if you are genetically susceptible...), disgusting, and stinky.
I skimmed the article earlier today and I didn't see it address the education aspect of the problem. If the corporate and education networks are vulnerable, how can you expect joe schmoe to know what to do in a timely fashion? Windows XP and Red Hat have auto update options, but there is a certain level of trust (or ignorance) you need to implement their services.
So, if end users get fined, they will probably opt out of the service altogether by the 2nd or 3rd fine, depriving ISPs of future revenue. Also, it sounded to me like it would be in ISPs best interest to propagate internet viruses, worms, etc. because they would get a portion of the fine.
Slashdot Mirror
Coincidentally, I'm listening to Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear, a bio-thriller touching on related concepts. A very good book so far, but it is difficult to get out of the car for work.
http://www.callofcthulhu.com/
Well, the espn and bbc are worthwhile. On the other hand, I had pre-decided to give it a year. For the first 3 or 4 months the comedy channel was awesome, until I kept hearing the same skits over and over again.
I didn't say the whole service was worthless, just that their song playlist pretty much sucks...
"The user can leave the software running unattended for hours and amass a vast library of songs."
Please insert "crappy" before "songs". I've had XM for a year and it's rare to hear two worthwhile songs back to back on any station. They seem to focus on "deep tracks", defined to be the stuff fans of the band don't even like.
After a few hours of listening to my friend's Sirius, I regretted choosing XM, and only chose XM because they seemed to have the subscriber numbers to last long term.
Humiliation makes others feel better, but the target tends to feel pissed off, c.f. Columbine shootings. If you assume from the start they can't be rehab'd, you might as well kill them, quickly. Putting them in jail doesn't solve anything.
Prison should not provide anything remotely beneficial beyond educational, occupational, or psychological support. There should be light at the end of the tunnel for those who want to travel that route and the rest can rot in a 4x6 cell.
Homer could barely drive, let alone design a car. This guy is a professor (which doesn't necessarily mean he can teach...) who appears to know his way around Cisco hardware. The chances of his suggestions being crap are fairly small. Big business is essentially known for ignoring suggestions from their customers.
However, half his target audience supposedly does not know how to turn on computers, and that scares me... The positive thing is this manual should present the information in a much more readable format than the free-as-in-sucky Cisco docs.
"Dumbed down" is the wrong phrase to use, but I have worked with a large number of people with their PhDs and who sit on thesis defences, and most of the research is not revolutionary or insightful, but is generally methodical: find a topic, conduct some research, write it up. The requirements are sound research and science, not that there is anything wrong with that. Being a grad student is more about hard work than anything else. If you honestly work hard, you will most likely get your PhD. For me, the reward of being an average researcher did not motivate me to work harder.
The entire steel industry hasn't moved overseas. The US still produces about 100 million tons of steel every year, approximately 12% of the world total, and relatively close to the alltime high (135 million in 1953?). China, a much larger country with less regulation (think safety and health), only produces about 200 million tons a year.
5 99 .html1 SteelTa riffsQuotas.html
The loss of jobs is due to improved efficiency, unions pricing themselves out of the market, and low demand. It's quite difficult to compete with nations having cheaper workforces, but that's how capitalism is supposed to work. In the second reference below, it is stated the world uses 100 million tons less than it produces. Low demand means lower prices meaning fewer jobs.
http://www.freetrade.org/pubs/speeches/ct-dg022
http://www.useu.be/Categories/Trade/Dec070
Most PhD research is not very inspirational. The requirement of original, unique research means everyone is either brilliant or the work is just dumbed down and methodical. My observations from working at a research university, and from reading PhD thesis titles, leads me to believe the research is of the latter type.
The marginalization of the basic college degree requires an MS/MA/MBA degree to distinguish yourself (on paper) and, the PhD has become watered down due to the number of PhDs and the somewhat fixed percentage of truly inspirational/brilliant researchers.
Look at the state of lawyers: so many lawyers are churned out every year that the average ones end up doing the jobs of para-legals, except for 2-3x the salary.
PS Not directed at the parent author...
When Peter Jackson went on and on about how he was going to be true to the novels and how many experts were working with him, what did everyone think? How about after your first viewing? And after you recovered from the resplendent beauty of filming? Were you able to? A lot of people who loved the movie could not read the books because FOTR was boring, probably because they didn't read the Hobbit first which is more accessible and sets up the expectation of Adventure. I found the movie dull, lifeless and melodramatic, removing all of the wonder and replacing the characters with Hollywood facsimiles.
LOTR was partially miscast and mostly miswritten and misacted. Visually, the casting for H2G2 seems really good, assuming they can act (I hope they don't all have American accents...) The American version of Coupling (a brilliant BBC sitcom) was so painfully enacted that I gave up after 15 minutes. It was like an elementary school production of Gone with the Wind.
While Kirkpatrick's heart seems in the right place, we'll have to see the execution. I do wonder what this guy has been doing with himself, as he doesn't have many credits since his first in 1990 and, most of his credits are for children's movies. Hopefully Jay Roach keeps everything good and proper.
In the US, a BA implies less coursework. At my old almer mater, you can get a Poly-Sci BA with 6 in-field classes, whereas my Physics and Astronomy BS required something like 12-14 plus five labs, not including the required math. A BA in Physics required about 7-8 classes.
.so's are usually read only in practice and a more secure system will mount /usr and/or /lib RO, avoiding all writes. With /etc, fixing a non-hw problem is as easy as booting off a CD and fixing the problem file with a text editor (not fondly remembering having to use ed in my SunOS days...)
The Windows registry is regularly read from and written to and, we know that static systems are less problematic than dynamic ones. It is also difficult to secure the registry because most software relies on write access, so allowing common users to install software can be a pain. (Right now I'm pissed because Oracle seems to require NLS_LANG to be defined only in the registry and reading it's value from Java requires JNI.)
Having said that, I haven't experienced too many registry problems, but with Windows you never really know what the problem is since the logging system is so pathetic.
But for Sun, which had rose through the ranks of a dozens similar workstation manufacturers through foresight, engineering skill and hard competition, Microsoft's mediocrity is an affront.
While Sun has had decent hardware, it wasn't better than SGI or HP. They were stagnant on the user side of innovation. There is no reason why Sun couldn't have developed a KDE or Gnome type UI (although I was mostly happy with Openlook...) They had years of warning in advance of MS who didn't really have a network interface until 1995ish and they failed to exploit it.
On the server side, they may have been the last *nix company to start bundling commonly installed GNU/OSS software in their distro like perl and bash.
In the 90s, McNeally is on record as saying if he had been Bill Gates, he'd have done the same stuff, referring to the business practices of MS.
The workstation manufacturers like SGI and Sun blew their chances because they used expensive, custom hardware and charged by the pound and were very slow to innovate from a user perspective. They targetted science, research, and graphics shops that could afford their hardware, because at the time it was the best performing. As soon as Intel and AMD caught up in hardware, and Linux and MS with the OS, their advantage disappeared quickly.
Sun will be remembered no differently than Netscape or Real, who blew their chances by stagnating. Don't get me wrong, MS's business practices are shameful, if not illegal, but the real problem is that MS was allowed the opportunity to catch up.
Capitalism does not work to benefit the consumer, only to maximize the profit of the company. They attempt to maximize profit for the least amount of effort/cost. Capitalism is also not risk-friendly. Trying something new, with unknown results, especially when the costs are significant when compared with the status quo, scares the heck out of companies. This explains the very minimal technical improvements in the (american) automotive industry, the general lack of imagination in body styles, and why Doom 3 will be the biggest seller of the year.
Capitalism doesn't work where emotions rule over rational thought or where the population size is too large. The big 5 in the music industry supposedly gross over 20 billion a year, over 1 billion CDs sold. A small percentage of those consumers really care that a) CDs are expensive when you think about it and b) the artists, in general, get screwed. These few cannot dictate change even if they feel they are in the right.
This is why unions were formed. The individual cannot make a difference unless he is leading a like minded rabble to correct perceived wrongs. Today, unions are inherently anti-corporate but they are not the antithesis of capitalism. They want to maximize profit for the workers' minimal amount of effort (e.g. gym teachers making over 80k/yr, auto workers making over 100k/yr).
In the end, it is the same as democracy. People vote with their feelings, not their head. Thinking hurts, especially when the issues become complicated and the possible answers blur together and conflict with their desires.
Vancouver & BC have world's largest outbreak of syphilis
Eventually this may hop over into the general public...
Assuming that Boomer is a Cylon (demonstrated the last scene...), and the Chief and Boomer are more than just kissing, which sexual position have they not yet tried? Or do their backs only grow red during orgasm and the Chief is a little self-centered?
It also implies that Baltar and the other chick were fairly straight forward in their lovemaking (granted there are a million and one other positions, but you probably hit doggie-style sooner than later and they had supposedly been together for two years.)
You do only have GF 4200 for gfx. The 4600 Ti doesn't even get listed anymore when peformance comparisons are made (I wish they did, though) and even some of the newer cards don't do too well on the tests.
Of course I'm just jealous because I have to buy a new card to replace a GF4MX as I can't even start the game!!!
I have no idea how old you are, but circa 1992, security for computers was slowly becoming a quiet issue, let alone the buzz word it has been recently. Right around that time was (one of?) the first big worm (i'm not bothering to research specifics, relying on a blurred memory)
In academia (still circa '92), servers and workstations were not usually behind a firewall for a variety of reasons (primarily money and remote access convenience.) Department budgets for IT were small and usually only had one staff member had more than minimal experience.
Regarding leaving food in the wild, I wonder how many years it took before Man realized he got sick from eating food that was left out too long? It took a few thousand years before bathing was commonly realized as important, let alone brushing his teeth.
"They took systems designed for isolated desktop systems and put them on the Net without thinking about evildoers" - BJ
I haven't really followed Joy's career and what he's created, but if you look at everything on the net, TCP/IP, SMTP, et. al., they were initially dependent on unfounded trust. Once the masses got ahold of it, the evildoers expoited that trust.
For years, Sun shipped systems that were completely insecure right out of the box (blank root password, every inetd service enabled, etc...) It wasn't until the mid-90s that Sun started to do anything about it.
Granted, MS should have known better seeing as they were so late to the party, but Linux systems were no different until enough bitching occurred to make someone change the defaults.
What was that about not knowing your history?
Insert "perceived" before profits and you'll be correct.
Right now MS sees the market as locked up, much more so than Netscape did when they dropped the ball with version 4. The failure of improving your product generally leads to stagnation and loss of market share. (c.f. WordPerfect, WordStar, Lotus, and many others.)
To shake things up, Mozilla or Opera would need to be shipped with every Dell, Gateway, IBM, HP, etc. system as a default option. Additionally, there would need to be a little flash app introducing the wonders of tabbed browsing, and the other benefits these browsers provide.
With broadband fairly prevalent, a good ad campaign alone would make a significant difference. But OSS doesn't tend to have the cash flow to generate interest or knowledge of their produts and relies heavily on word of mouth and media coverage. In the case of media coverage, there is little incentive ($$$) for them to push alternate MS technologies.
This christmas season it should cost those who love you a fortune.
People continue to smoke (in the USA) even though it is heavily taxed, not to mention bad for your health (if you are genetically susceptible...), disgusting, and stinky.
I skimmed the article earlier today and I didn't see it address the education aspect of the problem. If the corporate and education networks are vulnerable, how can you expect joe schmoe to know what to do in a timely fashion? Windows XP and Red Hat have auto update options, but there is a certain level of trust (or ignorance) you need to implement their services.
So, if end users get fined, they will probably opt out of the service altogether by the 2nd or 3rd fine, depriving ISPs of future revenue. Also, it sounded to me like it would be in ISPs best interest to propagate internet viruses, worms, etc. because they would get a portion of the fine.
Bah. Not sure how that space got in there...
KDE MYTHS
http://kdemyths.urbanlizard.com/viewMyth.php?mythI D=60