Re:TechnoAntiBlogDystopia
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Meet Joe Blog
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· Score: 2, Informative
Just had to get that off my chest.
And boy, did you ever...
It was great invective, too bad there wasn't an ounce of truth in it. I started on the Internet as an undergrad at University of Michigan, when it was mostly UM-Merit and connected only to other universities. In those days, the VAX had BBS system, quite crude. Later, I had an account of GEnie, General Electric's version of Compuserve. And I started pretty early on Usenet. Every one of those forums had much more "lite" talk than tech talk.
All this talk of PHP and XML and such are the technologies that keep providing new and fresh ways to interact. To a increasingly multimedia-centric populace. But let me tell you, in all of those old systems, the political and mundane poetry and off-topic crap DOMINATED the landscape in ALL of the aforementioned forums. For every forum on C programming, there were 25 on cooking, poetry, drinking beer - whatever. It was just that they had all the sophistication of Gopher. Actually, that's giving them too much credit, gopher uses the curses system within telnet for formatting, these didn't even have that. Oh yeah, we had to walk uphill both ways to school in the snow, and we liked it that way.
Just because Slashdot has a lot of technical articles on it, doesn't make it true of the net. In fact, I'd really suggest you find another forum to post to, since you don't seem to like much of what Slashdot is about. There are plenty of web boards out there, slashdot even has slashcode so you can go build a system like this one to discuss cutlery or art history or whatever tickles the fancy of what you perceive to be the Internet's true value.
Re:Isn't this the dream of the Internet?
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Meet Joe Blog
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· Score: 1, Troll
Time mentions Wonkette (wonkette.com) a little diity from an ex-editor at Suck.com. Lo and behold, she is a beltway insider-wannabe who had too much attitude to keep a corporate button down job. Now she dishes on politics with something approximating an attitude on her site.
Ostensibly, she should be interesting to read. But she's not. Despite agreeing with her politics, I find her "cute bitchy" tone to be sort of dull. But she is the kind of person who got sick of corporate types editing down her stuff.
Andrew Sullivan, at his blog of his own name, also mentions the same thing. Slate editors kept him in a tight little sandbox, and any real bombshell he could have set down would have been edited.
I find sites like Counterpunch and maybe an article on Slate by Hitchens to be the farthest left you can find off a university campus. Unless you subscribe to Mother Jones or something, it's a bit of work to find intelligent left of center content on the web. Blogs are mostly dominated by right-wingers, with their rah-rah military sites or their weak Rush limbaugh or Jim Rome imitations. Dittoheads and clones galore.
The UK's register and sometimes the BBC (although it's been hit by scandal like the NYT) will sometimes publish stuff that corporate controlled US media will shut down. Stuff like how halliburton was paid BEFORE the war started to file a secret plan how to rebuild Iraq. The stuff Cheney refuses to disclose.
Anyhow, keep reading Hitchens. His reformed Marxism now turned to supporting Bush and nation building (and now backing away from it), is fun to read. The guy is a wacko poli sci professor on steroids, but his take on Reagan was spot on. "An ugly lizard who was as dumb as a tree stump." will keep you believing in the power of free speech. When he reduces nancy reagan to how she got where she was - "a 2nd rate actress who needed to get off a hollywood blacklist, and ronny was the man to see, since he was ratting out the alleged communists during mccarthyism." - it makes you laugh with glee.
I thought about this very thing watching Jude Law play a robotic gigalo. Unless STDs and the fear of AIDS became rampant, would women really want this? Law's makeup was pancaked to show he was not the generation of Haley-Joel.
This is an interesting problem, if we don't continue to attempt to get to 100%, we will never get there - yet going through the 80th to 99th percentile will be creepy.
I don't have any issues doing it in computer gfx. Some of the new techniques used in Pixar's The Untouchables, such as the way hair moves in water - go towards the overall body of knowledge of how to create actors on screen that you don't know are real. The new Spiderman seems mostly CGI, or motion captured and sped up. This eventually makes for better movies, and games in which the protaganist NEEDS to be human is essential.
But in robotics, I even think the face in the new adaptation of Asimov's "I, Robot" is really sinister. I don't see society even accepting that in robotics. I think the farthest people will go is C-3P0.
Why on earth do we still give journals the right to act as gatekeepers for our information, when they give us almost nothing (basically just a referral service) in return?
Well, to try and answer honestly --- submissions editors add value. If one goes to the library and picks up the New England Journal of Medicine, you know that the articles in there fought to get in. Lots of sub-par research and writing was tossed or picked up by lesser journals. It serves as a kind of filter. If scientists just start setting up websites ad-hoc and there is no structure to papers being released, we end up with an Internet full of PDFs. What happens then, honestly, is corporate control of science. As somebody interested in say, stem-cell research, you maybe try Google to find papers, but somebody like Phizer may have it all neatly organized for you. Except it's just research by scientists paid by them, promoting their agenda.
Science is at a interesting point in history. It's primacy as technological and economic weapon is unchallenged. But there is a growing anti-secularism on the rise, in the both the West with Christianity and the middle east with Islam. People are attempting to "flood the airwaves" with pseudo-science or straight up bullshit science. Social structures to create peer review and weed out crap must exist somehow.
I've read all the 3+ posts here. So far, nobody has mentioned a really important fact.
because the skillsets in demand are always shifting, and because HR people really want to check off boxes in their application interviews, you get obsolete very fast. As you move into your 30s and 40s and beyond, your skill set is NOT like a lawyer's or doctor's. Their experiences over time make them stronger and stronger, and more valuable to society. You become LESS so. While a lawyer needs to learn about new laws and changes to the system, the rate of change doesn't invalidate what they already know.
Our company just laid off 10 people who were 50-ish COBOL programmers and IBM sysadmins. These people were very good at what they did, but they were no longer needed. They now start sliding DOWN the chain, taking jobs in their fields for LESS money. No matter how smart you think you are, there are college grads who will fight you for your job and take half your pay.
A previous poster compared sysadmins to auto mechanics. That was a good analogy, but he didn't follow it through. What happened to the mechanic industry in the 80s and 90s? They stagnated or dropped, as existing mechanics found it harder and harder to adapt to all the new technology, the demographic shift in average mechanic age fell.
I don't mean to be doom and gloom here, but for those who won't go into management or strike out and become busines owners, the future is this: you MUST stay on top of all emerging technologies and keep certifying and run along the treadmill, or you WILL get replaced by somebody younger. Whatever guru status you think you enjoy, and however many times your manager calls you his "goto guy", that status changes OVERNIGHT.
You should look at the sysadmin field like playing MLB in your 20s and early 30s. It's great to make it there, and it helps you make money you wouldn't have otherwise made - but eventually you will be replaced by somebody better and faster and cheaper. You need a plan to do something outside the field after 40.
Quick aside, I looked at some job ads in the last few weeks. I think HR people haven't figured out that some of these ads are stupid, and the economy is picking up and they can't cherry pick quite so much. I saw an ad that the company wanted you to have 10+ of systems integration experience, consulting experience, have technical certifications like RHCE and know shell, programming in C++, Java and be a certified disaster recovery specialist - AND - you know, in your spare time, ALSO be a CPA. That's right, a CPA!
Now maybe I just don't know enough smart people, but so far I have yet to meet a CPA that is also a programmer, much less a highly experienced sysadmin. I don't even know any that can SPELL UNIX. I would REALLY love to meet the applicant that gets that job.
No, distributors like Comstor and GE Access are just passing the manufacturer's discount on. It's a good question, actually. When a partner for a technology, say Sun, is big enough, they get a bigger discount. I assume that goes back all the way to Sun. They don't get involved. It would be Sun who would get the tax benefit.
The animation can't be interactive.
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OpenGL in PHP
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· Score: -1
It's neat, but I THINK is is ONLY competition for Flash. Not for.NET or Java. Anything that can be downloaded, can't open a socket back. I don't know how to make PHP do that, at least. It's server side.
Could somebody who knows WTF they are doing tell me if it's possible without using an applet to get this to open a socket back?
One thing that sort of pisses me off about Slashdot is that if you take time to read everything, and form a response - it's so far down that it probably doesn't get read.
I read - completely - Brown's webpage. Purple text gives you a headache. I then read Ta bu shi da yu's response on kuro5shin.
Andrew tannenbaum sums it up when he comments on his webpage about Brown's visit. Here was a guy (Brown) who clearly didn't understand patents, or how to sumbit patent applications or release them into the public domain. He didn't understand tenets of intellectual property law. His paper is full of deliberate misuse of terms. tannenbaum says he wasn't very sharp, and he was being nice.
The guy, Brown, comes to visit him and Tannenbaum asks him outright who funds this "thinktank". He dodges the question. Andrew asks - OUTRIGHT - is it Microsoft? Of course, he knows it is. The guy won't answer. Brown then starts down a series of questions that shows he hasn't done ANY research into the history of UNIX. None! He doesn't know about the AT&T vs. BSD lawsuit? To the lawyers out there, this is tantamount to going before the Supreme Court to argue a racial discrimination suit and not knowing what Brown vs. Board of Education was about. It's that stupid.
It's clear that Andrew quickly sizes this guy up as a moron, and tries to educate him. Brown will have none of it, diverting the questioning into a series of leading questions.
It's pretty sickening. Andrew Tannenbaum is a super bright man. His book, "Computer networks, Fourth Edition." is the BIBLE for network professionals. It is to networking what Kernigan and Richie's book is to C programming. Actually, that's not right. K&R is a primer, nothing more. AT's book is the definitive history of how we got to where we are.
It genuinely sickens me when little turds like Brown get a few bucks from some Microsoft frontman, and then set off on a smear job like this. What it says, ultimately, is that Microsoft is afraid. I chalked that up to Slashdot hype and wishful thinking, but stuff like this makes me re-think that position. MySQL and PostgresSQL are beginning to really cut not into Oracle, but into SQLServer. Sun has been bought off, but IBM is coming hard with Linux and clustering. The Dell's and HPs out there are putting together bigger deals doing Linux. It's pissing Microsoft off, where before I honestly believed they didn't care. They ignored it.
I guess we should all be happy that guys like Tannenbaum exist, and that they choose teaching and University as their vocation. They are the counter-balance to the mass of hysterical bullshit. They will live to document this era correctly for the next few generations. Sorry to be so melodramatic, but it's basically true. In 100 years, whatever happens, people need to know how it went down. It didn't matter when crooks like Jack Tramiel decide to bust out companies for their personal fortunes and change the face of personal computing (sorry, still bitter over the Amiga all these years later). But the stakes are 1000x larger now.
I think it is because each time the swap file is allocated, it doesn't necessarily use the same inodes and blocks on the hard drive. Therefore, your hard drive has reminants of old swap files all over it.
Windows could just be set to not use a swap file at all. I'm not sure how far that would go towards solving the problem. Perhaps Garfinkel's USENIX paper will explain.
The word "Turbo" has become part of the lexicon for describing anything fast. I don't think anyone really understands that the product is not using it's own exhaust gases to boost internal horsepower. Imagine if Slashdot did that, it would FLY. God knows there is so much exhaust gas around here.
There is a systems integration and networking company here in the American West. I won't name their name, since the I'm going to say some pretty strong things...
The guy who owns gets a deep discount from distrubution partners because his is a "native-american" owned business. The company wraps themselves in the iconography and their logo is an animal synonymous with the American Indian.
This guy is ONE-EIGHTH American Indian. I won't even name the tribe. Doesn't matter. This guy is fat, pale white and bald and looks about as American Indian as Tony Soprano. perfect guy to compare him to, as well. Actually, I think Tony is less corrupt.
Nevertheless, he has a huge advantage over his competition. His discount is about 3 to 4 POINTS below a company without that status. Bidding an integration and database project that includes a $100,000 worth of Sun equipment? Going against these guys? Snap $4k off the top, just throw that money away or you WILL be underbid. Looking for an education contract? Good luck.
Want to know what else you are up against? the Tax benefits to a large corporation when they give business to a "Small Business Administration-certified 8(a)" firm. Want to double up the tax breaks? Do it in a HUBzone - Historically Underutilized Business Zone. Does your company need to be in the HUBZone to qualify for the tax break? Not necessarily. Quite a few legal entanglements there, depends what state your corporation is incorporated in.
Isn't about time we closed bullshit loopholes like these? I'm a Democrat and believe that certain inequalities exist and that in certain instances, Affirmative Action and tax incentives for areas make for good business and re-level a playing field that DOES have systematic racism in it. But laws regarding Indians are just being abused. Badly. I have a friend who is actually HALF Sioux. He moved away, but I wanted to start a business with him as an equal partner. 4 points on Cisco, Sun, and a myriad of other gear is big margin in the VAR world.
My college room mate and long time friend has been an electrical engineer at Fermi Lab for quite some time. He has a MSEE from a very good school. He will tell you, Physics Ph.Ds are sometimes the crazy professor types. He builds circuits and boards, and does alot of stuff that Physics Ph.Ds cannot do or know nothing about.
As to your assertion that Ph.Ds lose basic troubleshooting skills, I really don't think so. Most of them can't change spark plugs either, that doesn't mean they don't know how the car works.
Mark - thanks for the insight into Google. What do you think caused you to fail the cut? Did you have any patents? Do you think there was any ageism? Had you worked with search technology before?
You're already modded up, just wanted to learn even more about your experience.
I call posts like these, the "slashdot slant". Since very few Computer Science Ph.Ds read or even bother with slashdot, and since it's mostly filled with early-20s sysadmins - the skewed bias is sometimes laughable. They rationalize that being a Ph.D makes you overqualified and makes it hard to find a job, but they have no real evidence to back it up.
Here is a clue: I know plenty of Ph.Ds, ALL of whom are gainfully employed and highly sought after. I also know alot of 20-something sysadmins with no degrees. They're the ones out of work.
You joke, but remember this technique was developed in Israel. You can bet that torture is one of the angles they have thought of. Why else would you develop such a technique.
Better not ride them south past McCormick Place, or they will find people that will quickly dismount them from the device and then beat the crap out of them for looking so dorky.
I can't wait until Chicagoans set up Segway jousting at Navy Pier. It's just a matter of time.
How come we never see Tony Sopranos sysadmin? Surely the Bada-Bing has a website! Ahh well, Tony would probably smack the guy over the head with a Dell laptop anyhow.
Hate to respond to myself, but I need to ward off the flame I know is coming. I know now that you can "buy" land for real money, using more of SL's server resources. I could have paid Linden Labs to "buy" an island, and then put the Nurburgring on it - and anything else I wanted.
I didn't know that at the time, I didn't really RTFM or get into the community properly, I just found it all kind of weird and then left. So, it's my own fault and I don't want to make it seem like the guys who run Second Life are bad or don't have this all worked out.
You laugh, but this is what Second Life is actually like! I don't know if yachts have been coded yet, but there are people who have attained wealthy baron status in SL, mainly - as far as I could tell - through pyramid schemes! Unlike power characters in EQ, which come from optimizing skill choices and time put in - it seemed as if SL more resembled real life in that people setup money making schemes where they barely had to do anything, outside of organization.
There are several sociology PhD studies in second life alone.
I "played" Second life for awhile. Began looking at the code for the bumper cars, wanted to make a virtual Nurburgring for cars to drive. I was simply fascinated by the fact the game loaded nothing on your drive beyond primitives. Everything was sent to you over the wire.
The graphics are obviously not on par with even EQ1, much less EQ2 - and the entire model doesn't lend itself to that.
When I went looking sometimes for where everyone was at, I found kind of an unseemly side of SL. Everyone had bondage outfits on and was hanging out at the virtual techno club, trying to pick each other up. There was some weird stuff going on the in "back rooms". Use your imagination. I ignored that side of the world, was more interested in things that were a little more accessible to kids.
Ultimately I found the tools were not as interesting as doing what I am doing now, working with web technologies to do my own game, and working on virtual tracks with tools designed for that purpose. (Google for Project Wildfire for N2003 if interested).
Anyhow, one of the immediate obstacles in doing a huge track like the Ring, is there was no way i was going to get the land I needed to do it. I asked a few people, sent a few emails. After all, they could just make the landmass bigger, right? It was all surrounded by one endless ocean. Well, I got some emails from other people saying essentially, no they couldn't do that. I guess there is some limit to the engine and how much land there is. I don't really know, I never got a response from anyone from Linden Lab.
Anyhow, when people ask me what could be done with fiber into everyone's homes anyhow, why do people need more bandwidth than they have - I show them second life. To have a fully Gibson like cyberspace means going down the development road of SL, where no "maps" exist on your hard drive.
I think it's flat out ridiculous that SL has a makeshift real estate market. Everyone was hogging the "coasts" to build gaudy beach homes - kind of like real life. And like real life, very few people had any taste - lots of cheap spiral staircases and stupid fountains on the "lawn" with tigerstripe bedspreads. Bunch of Hugh Hefners.
Oh, and one of the most popular clans were a bunch of bikers, guys with huge arms and denim vests with biker bitches on virtual hogs they rode around. Classy. Strange how the first things that popped up were sex clubs and biker gangs.
What we need is an olfactory based password. You scratch and SNIFF it, then type a number based on the smell. 1 is grape, 2 is orange. In Amsterdam, there are other possibilities.
If you give people scratch off cards with a one-time PIN on it, they will take a sharpie and write their username and password on the back of it. Guaranteed.
Slashdot Mirror
Just had to get that off my chest.
And boy, did you ever...
It was great invective, too bad there wasn't an ounce of truth in it. I started on the Internet as an undergrad at University of Michigan, when it was mostly UM-Merit and connected only to other universities. In those days, the VAX had BBS system, quite crude. Later, I had an account of GEnie, General Electric's version of Compuserve. And I started pretty early on Usenet. Every one of those forums had much more "lite" talk than tech talk.
All this talk of PHP and XML and such are the technologies that keep providing new and fresh ways to interact. To a increasingly multimedia-centric populace. But let me tell you, in all of those old systems, the political and mundane poetry and off-topic crap DOMINATED the landscape in ALL of the aforementioned forums. For every forum on C programming, there were 25 on cooking, poetry, drinking beer - whatever. It was just that they had all the sophistication of Gopher. Actually, that's giving them too much credit, gopher uses the curses system within telnet for formatting, these didn't even have that. Oh yeah, we had to walk uphill both ways to school in the snow, and we liked it that way.
Just because Slashdot has a lot of technical articles on it, doesn't make it true of the net. In fact, I'd really suggest you find another forum to post to, since you don't seem to like much of what Slashdot is about. There are plenty of web boards out there, slashdot even has slashcode so you can go build a system like this one to discuss cutlery or art history or whatever tickles the fancy of what you perceive to be the Internet's true value.
Time mentions Wonkette (wonkette.com) a little diity from an ex-editor at Suck.com. Lo and behold, she is a beltway insider-wannabe who had too much attitude to keep a corporate button down job. Now she dishes on politics with something approximating an attitude on her site.
Ostensibly, she should be interesting to read. But she's not. Despite agreeing with her politics, I find her "cute bitchy" tone to be sort of dull. But she is the kind of person who got sick of corporate types editing down her stuff.
Andrew Sullivan, at his blog of his own name, also mentions the same thing. Slate editors kept him in a tight little sandbox, and any real bombshell he could have set down would have been edited.
I find sites like Counterpunch and maybe an article on Slate by Hitchens to be the farthest left you can find off a university campus. Unless you subscribe to Mother Jones or something, it's a bit of work to find intelligent left of center content on the web. Blogs are mostly dominated by right-wingers, with their rah-rah military sites or their weak Rush limbaugh or Jim Rome imitations. Dittoheads and clones galore.
The UK's register and sometimes the BBC (although it's been hit by scandal like the NYT) will sometimes publish stuff that corporate controlled US media will shut down. Stuff like how halliburton was paid BEFORE the war started to file a secret plan how to rebuild Iraq. The stuff Cheney refuses to disclose.
Anyhow, keep reading Hitchens. His reformed Marxism now turned to supporting Bush and nation building (and now backing away from it), is fun to read. The guy is a wacko poli sci professor on steroids, but his take on Reagan was spot on. "An ugly lizard who was as dumb as a tree stump." will keep you believing in the power of free speech. When he reduces nancy reagan to how she got where she was - "a 2nd rate actress who needed to get off a hollywood blacklist, and ronny was the man to see, since he was ratting out the alleged communists during mccarthyism." - it makes you laugh with glee.
...and Ken Brown and Darl McBride and Al Franken know the truth in spite of the facts.
Darl McBride is a journalist? When did that happen? I thought his business card just said "CEO and Bullshit Artist".
I thought about this very thing watching Jude Law play a robotic gigalo. Unless STDs and the fear of AIDS became rampant, would women really want this? Law's makeup was pancaked to show he was not the generation of Haley-Joel.
This is an interesting problem, if we don't continue to attempt to get to 100%, we will never get there - yet going through the 80th to 99th percentile will be creepy.
I don't have any issues doing it in computer gfx. Some of the new techniques used in Pixar's The Untouchables, such as the way hair moves in water - go towards the overall body of knowledge of how to create actors on screen that you don't know are real. The new Spiderman seems mostly CGI, or motion captured and sped up. This eventually makes for better movies, and games in which the protaganist NEEDS to be human is essential.
But in robotics, I even think the face in the new adaptation of Asimov's "I, Robot" is really sinister. I don't see society even accepting that in robotics. I think the farthest people will go is C-3P0.
You hear Carl Sagan saying "billlllions and billllions"...
Why on earth do we still give journals the right to act as gatekeepers for our information, when they give us almost nothing (basically just a referral service) in return?
Well, to try and answer honestly --- submissions editors add value. If one goes to the library and picks up the New England Journal of Medicine, you know that the articles in there fought to get in. Lots of sub-par research and writing was tossed or picked up by lesser journals. It serves as a kind of filter. If scientists just start setting up websites ad-hoc and there is no structure to papers being released, we end up with an Internet full of PDFs. What happens then, honestly, is corporate control of science. As somebody interested in say, stem-cell research, you maybe try Google to find papers, but somebody like Phizer may have it all neatly organized for you. Except it's just research by scientists paid by them, promoting their agenda.
Science is at a interesting point in history. It's primacy as technological and economic weapon is unchallenged. But there is a growing anti-secularism on the rise, in the both the West with Christianity and the middle east with Islam. People are attempting to "flood the airwaves" with pseudo-science or straight up bullshit science. Social structures to create peer review and weed out crap must exist somehow.
I've read all the 3+ posts here. So far, nobody has mentioned a really important fact.
because the skillsets in demand are always shifting, and because HR people really want to check off boxes in their application interviews, you get obsolete very fast. As you move into your 30s and 40s and beyond, your skill set is NOT like a lawyer's or doctor's. Their experiences over time make them stronger and stronger, and more valuable to society. You become LESS so. While a lawyer needs to learn about new laws and changes to the system, the rate of change doesn't invalidate what they already know.
Our company just laid off 10 people who were 50-ish COBOL programmers and IBM sysadmins. These people were very good at what they did, but they were no longer needed. They now start sliding DOWN the chain, taking jobs in their fields for LESS money. No matter how smart you think you are, there are college grads who will fight you for your job and take half your pay.
A previous poster compared sysadmins to auto mechanics. That was a good analogy, but he didn't follow it through. What happened to the mechanic industry in the 80s and 90s? They stagnated or dropped, as existing mechanics found it harder and harder to adapt to all the new technology, the demographic shift in average mechanic age fell.
I don't mean to be doom and gloom here, but for those who won't go into management or strike out and become busines owners, the future is this: you MUST stay on top of all emerging technologies and keep certifying and run along the treadmill, or you WILL get replaced by somebody younger. Whatever guru status you think you enjoy, and however many times your manager calls you his "goto guy", that status changes OVERNIGHT.
You should look at the sysadmin field like playing MLB in your 20s and early 30s. It's great to make it there, and it helps you make money you wouldn't have otherwise made - but eventually you will be replaced by somebody better and faster and cheaper. You need a plan to do something outside the field after 40.
Quick aside, I looked at some job ads in the last few weeks. I think HR people haven't figured out that some of these ads are stupid, and the economy is picking up and they can't cherry pick quite so much. I saw an ad that the company wanted you to have 10+ of systems integration experience, consulting experience, have technical certifications like RHCE and know shell, programming in C++, Java and be a certified disaster recovery specialist - AND - you know, in your spare time, ALSO be a CPA. That's right, a CPA!
Now maybe I just don't know enough smart people, but so far I have yet to meet a CPA that is also a programmer, much less a highly experienced sysadmin. I don't even know any that can SPELL UNIX. I would REALLY love to meet the applicant that gets that job.
No, distributors like Comstor and GE Access are just passing the manufacturer's discount on. It's a good question, actually. When a partner for a technology, say Sun, is big enough, they get a bigger discount. I assume that goes back all the way to Sun. They don't get involved. It would be Sun who would get the tax benefit.
It's neat, but I THINK is is ONLY competition for Flash. Not for .NET or Java. Anything that can be downloaded, can't open a socket back. I don't know how to make PHP do that, at least. It's server side.
Could somebody who knows WTF they are doing tell me if it's possible without using an applet to get this to open a socket back?
One thing that sort of pisses me off about Slashdot is that if you take time to read everything, and form a response - it's so far down that it probably doesn't get read.
I read - completely - Brown's webpage. Purple text gives you a headache. I then read Ta bu shi da yu's response on kuro5shin.
Andrew tannenbaum sums it up when he comments on his webpage about Brown's visit. Here was a guy (Brown) who clearly didn't understand patents, or how to sumbit patent applications or release them into the public domain. He didn't understand tenets of intellectual property law. His paper is full of deliberate misuse of terms . tannenbaum says he wasn't very sharp, and he was being nice.
The guy, Brown, comes to visit him and Tannenbaum asks him outright who funds this "thinktank". He dodges the question. Andrew asks - OUTRIGHT - is it Microsoft? Of course, he knows it is. The guy won't answer. Brown then starts down a series of questions that shows he hasn't done ANY research into the history of UNIX. None! He doesn't know about the AT&T vs. BSD lawsuit? To the lawyers out there, this is tantamount to going before the Supreme Court to argue a racial discrimination suit and not knowing what Brown vs. Board of Education was about. It's that stupid.
It's clear that Andrew quickly sizes this guy up as a moron, and tries to educate him. Brown will have none of it, diverting the questioning into a series of leading questions.
It's pretty sickening. Andrew Tannenbaum is a super bright man. His book, "Computer networks, Fourth Edition." is the BIBLE for network professionals. It is to networking what Kernigan and Richie's book is to C programming. Actually, that's not right. K&R is a primer, nothing more. AT's book is the definitive history of how we got to where we are.
It genuinely sickens me when little turds like Brown get a few bucks from some Microsoft frontman, and then set off on a smear job like this. What it says, ultimately, is that Microsoft is afraid. I chalked that up to Slashdot hype and wishful thinking, but stuff like this makes me re-think that position. MySQL and PostgresSQL are beginning to really cut not into Oracle, but into SQLServer. Sun has been bought off, but IBM is coming hard with Linux and clustering. The Dell's and HPs out there are putting together bigger deals doing Linux. It's pissing Microsoft off, where before I honestly believed they didn't care. They ignored it.
I guess we should all be happy that guys like Tannenbaum exist, and that they choose teaching and University as their vocation. They are the counter-balance to the mass of hysterical bullshit. They will live to document this era correctly for the next few generations. Sorry to be so melodramatic, but it's basically true. In 100 years, whatever happens, people need to know how it went down. It didn't matter when crooks like Jack Tramiel decide to bust out companies for their personal fortunes and change the face of personal computing (sorry, still bitter over the Amiga all these years later). But the stakes are 1000x larger now.
I think it is because each time the swap file is allocated, it doesn't necessarily use the same inodes and blocks on the hard drive. Therefore, your hard drive has reminants of old swap files all over it.
Windows could just be set to not use a swap file at all. I'm not sure how far that would go towards solving the problem. Perhaps Garfinkel's USENIX paper will explain.
Turbo Pascal, product by Borland.
The word "Turbo" has become part of the lexicon for describing anything fast. I don't think anyone really understands that the product is not using it's own exhaust gases to boost internal horsepower. Imagine if Slashdot did that, it would FLY. God knows there is so much exhaust gas around here.
There is a systems integration and networking company here in the American West. I won't name their name, since the I'm going to say some pretty strong things...
The guy who owns gets a deep discount from distrubution partners because his is a "native-american" owned business. The company wraps themselves in the iconography and their logo is an animal synonymous with the American Indian.
This guy is ONE-EIGHTH American Indian. I won't even name the tribe. Doesn't matter. This guy is fat, pale white and bald and looks about as American Indian as Tony Soprano. perfect guy to compare him to, as well. Actually, I think Tony is less corrupt.
Nevertheless, he has a huge advantage over his competition. His discount is about 3 to 4 POINTS below a company without that status. Bidding an integration and database project that includes a $100,000 worth of Sun equipment? Going against these guys? Snap $4k off the top, just throw that money away or you WILL be underbid. Looking for an education contract? Good luck.
Want to know what else you are up against? the Tax benefits to a large corporation when they give business to a "Small Business Administration-certified 8(a)" firm. Want to double up the tax breaks? Do it in a HUBzone - Historically Underutilized Business Zone. Does your company need to be in the HUBZone to qualify for the tax break? Not necessarily. Quite a few legal entanglements there, depends what state your corporation is incorporated in.
Isn't about time we closed bullshit loopholes like these? I'm a Democrat and believe that certain inequalities exist and that in certain instances, Affirmative Action and tax incentives for areas make for good business and re-level a playing field that DOES have systematic racism in it. But laws regarding Indians are just being abused. Badly. I have a friend who is actually HALF Sioux. He moved away, but I wanted to start a business with him as an equal partner. 4 points on Cisco, Sun, and a myriad of other gear is big margin in the VAR world.
My college room mate and long time friend has been an electrical engineer at Fermi Lab for quite some time. He has a MSEE from a very good school. He will tell you, Physics Ph.Ds are sometimes the crazy professor types. He builds circuits and boards, and does alot of stuff that Physics Ph.Ds cannot do or know nothing about.
As to your assertion that Ph.Ds lose basic troubleshooting skills, I really don't think so. Most of them can't change spark plugs either, that doesn't mean they don't know how the car works.
Mark - thanks for the insight into Google. What do you think caused you to fail the cut? Did you have any patents? Do you think there was any ageism? Had you worked with search technology before?
You're already modded up, just wanted to learn even more about your experience.
I call posts like these, the "slashdot slant". Since very few Computer Science Ph.Ds read or even bother with slashdot, and since it's mostly filled with early-20s sysadmins - the skewed bias is sometimes laughable. They rationalize that being a Ph.D makes you overqualified and makes it hard to find a job, but they have no real evidence to back it up.
Here is a clue: I know plenty of Ph.Ds, ALL of whom are gainfully employed and highly sought after. I also know alot of 20-something sysadmins with no degrees. They're the ones out of work.
You joke, but remember this technique was developed in Israel. You can bet that torture is one of the angles they have thought of. Why else would you develop such a technique.
Now presenting... The Manchurian Password...
Better not ride them south past McCormick Place, or they will find people that will quickly dismount them from the device and then beat the crap out of them for looking so dorky.
I can't wait until Chicagoans set up Segway jousting at Navy Pier. It's just a matter of time.
I know a couple people who were DJB's students at UIC. They weren't too happy with his instruction, let's just say that.
How come we never see Tony Sopranos sysadmin? Surely the Bada-Bing has a website! Ahh well, Tony would probably smack the guy over the head with a Dell laptop anyhow.
Hate to respond to myself, but I need to ward off the flame I know is coming. I know now that you can "buy" land for real money, using more of SL's server resources. I could have paid Linden Labs to "buy" an island, and then put the Nurburgring on it - and anything else I wanted.
I didn't know that at the time, I didn't really RTFM or get into the community properly, I just found it all kind of weird and then left. So, it's my own fault and I don't want to make it seem like the guys who run Second Life are bad or don't have this all worked out.
You laugh, but this is what Second Life is actually like! I don't know if yachts have been coded yet, but there are people who have attained wealthy baron status in SL, mainly - as far as I could tell - through pyramid schemes! Unlike power characters in EQ, which come from optimizing skill choices and time put in - it seemed as if SL more resembled real life in that people setup money making schemes where they barely had to do anything, outside of organization.
There are several sociology PhD studies in second life alone.
I "played" Second life for awhile. Began looking at the code for the bumper cars, wanted to make a virtual Nurburgring for cars to drive. I was simply fascinated by the fact the game loaded nothing on your drive beyond primitives. Everything was sent to you over the wire.
The graphics are obviously not on par with even EQ1, much less EQ2 - and the entire model doesn't lend itself to that.
When I went looking sometimes for where everyone was at, I found kind of an unseemly side of SL. Everyone had bondage outfits on and was hanging out at the virtual techno club, trying to pick each other up. There was some weird stuff going on the in "back rooms". Use your imagination. I ignored that side of the world, was more interested in things that were a little more accessible to kids.
Ultimately I found the tools were not as interesting as doing what I am doing now, working with web technologies to do my own game, and working on virtual tracks with tools designed for that purpose. (Google for Project Wildfire for N2003 if interested).
Anyhow, one of the immediate obstacles in doing a huge track like the Ring, is there was no way i was going to get the land I needed to do it. I asked a few people, sent a few emails. After all, they could just make the landmass bigger, right? It was all surrounded by one endless ocean. Well, I got some emails from other people saying essentially, no they couldn't do that. I guess there is some limit to the engine and how much land there is. I don't really know, I never got a response from anyone from Linden Lab.
Anyhow, when people ask me what could be done with fiber into everyone's homes anyhow, why do people need more bandwidth than they have - I show them second life. To have a fully Gibson like cyberspace means going down the development road of SL, where no "maps" exist on your hard drive.
I think it's flat out ridiculous that SL has a makeshift real estate market. Everyone was hogging the "coasts" to build gaudy beach homes - kind of like real life. And like real life, very few people had any taste - lots of cheap spiral staircases and stupid fountains on the "lawn" with tigerstripe bedspreads. Bunch of Hugh Hefners.
Oh, and one of the most popular clans were a bunch of bikers, guys with huge arms and denim vests with biker bitches on virtual hogs they rode around. Classy. Strange how the first things that popped up were sex clubs and biker gangs.
What we need is an olfactory based password. You scratch and SNIFF it, then type a number based on the smell. 1 is grape, 2 is orange. In Amsterdam, there are other possibilities.
Of course, in France, this scheme breaks down...
Ah yes, here come the flamebait mods...
If you give people scratch off cards with a one-time PIN on it, they will take a sharpie and write their username and password on the back of it. Guaranteed.