Some of us have families, especially kids, who need our financial help. Others of us actually give to charity, or invest time in education or mentoring, all of which can put quite large burdens on that take home pay and encourage investment in the people around us, rather than in a home which we may move from in a few years. And while I applaud your effective use of resources, in many cities that less expensive house in the suburbs means a much longer commute time both ways, which eats hours of time every week.
I'll also admit that many home owners make very misleading estimates about the costs of owning a home, both in maintenance time and in costs. I've seen a number of my colleagues try to buy as much of their dream as they can manage to afford, rather than buying the minimum price that will help them be happy. The constant fraud and pressure to close the deal on the dream house, or to "flip that house" and scale their way up the property ladder is quite dangerous, and many of my younger colleagues were caught this way in the dotcom and real estate crisis. Both of these bankrupted many workers in IT who were misled by entire segments of the US economy lying wholesale to them.
There is a reason I chose that specific combination. It's a very cheap lunch bundle at the local 24 hour store, and does not include options for either fresh vegetables or bottled water.
I've worked professionally with most source control systems for decades. I'm afraid to say that the only remaining features which Subversion does better than git are the ability to check out only one directory of an upstream repository, rather than needing to check out the entire repository, and the inability to delete content from the upstream repository.
The ability to delete content is from experience a vital component, because developers can and will accidentally pollute the central repository with undesired content. This content ranges from bulky binary files, core dumps, and security sensitive content which they should not have submitted.
And Subversion's centralized control comes at a real price. It makes forking and doing an independent set of work, with local commits, effectively impossible.
> . One has more trouble eating a pound of butter than a pound of sugar
While you have a point, your question might be somewhat misleading. A pound of sugar has roughly 1300 calories. a pound of fat roughly 1800. And you might be surprised by the amount of fat in many popular foods.
There are many single, and poor, parents who are quite stressed for time. A 7-11 sandwich, a bottle of soda, and a bag of chips is just the sort of meal that many parents can afford the _time_ for when they're on the run to work, day care, and ordinary medical or educational meetings for their family.
> Only because working for somebody else was not the norm
While it may not have been the norm, it was certainly common. Apprentices at a craft, or journeyman, worked for the masters of their craft. Children worked for their parents. Guards worked for local landowners or nobility, and anyone who sold goods or services worked for their clients. Standing armies were far more rare, but existed, and merceneries also had employees. Out of work mercenaries were also a very _dangerous_ unemployment problem.
> Yes, I like that very much. Then again, what's on an FPGA (or in any other circuit) can be written down in terms of a software program.
This is demonstrably untrue for brains. Part of the key to a digital circuit, and program, is that it is deterministic. The same program run twice with the same nputs will produce the same output, and most of them can be modeled as Turing machines, so that they can be run on other hardware with sufficient resources.
I'm afraid that nerves are _analog_, with triggered changes of state that cannot be reliably predicted. And there are indeterminacy issues, where the effect of applying a probe or measuring tool to record one neural pattern actually modifies the neural pattern. Writing that as a software program is quite difficult.
I'm afraid that specs are not source code, nor are they a working application. Smalltalk itself was proprietary, and the free or open source re-implementations have been even more limited and unuseful for ordinary content publication. They were conceptually useful for people fascinated by the architecture, but their actual ability to publish and display desired content was profoundly hindered by the need to manually program the actual display.
> Interactivity in PDFs is problematic, though. Personally, I'd go for something like a Smalltalk virtual image instead.
Smalltalk was proprietary with a quite expensive license. It had a small user base, was unavailable for free university use, and required one to learn a scripting language rather than displaying content in a viable "What You See Is What You Get" format for new users. With dozens of distinct, subtly incompatible commercial implementations, it suffered deeply from the intellectually exciting but software destabilizing practices of excessive unnecessary recursion and undefined behavior from user created and not fully specified API's, API's which the author was philosophically and actively discouraged from examining.
One difficulty is that the observation of the interference patterns of double slit experiments with even single photons demonstrates the superposition of quantum states in a macroscopically observable way. It's very difficult to explain or understand the interference patterns of single photons fired through a double-slat experimental array without assuming that the individual photons do, in fact, have multiple locations.
The mathematics is fascinating: I've not explored for decades, but remember well my surprise that such logically confusing quantum effects were so easily measurable.
Keeping an eye open on SSH port probes from Estonia, China, and various parts of the USSR is a pretty good hint that foreign crackers attack US based systems constantly.Tracing it to a foreign security is more difficult. "The Cuckoo's Egg", written by Cliff Stoll, gives a fascinating view into the very real difficulties of tracking, reporting, and getting attacks against government and military operations by Markus Hess, who was apparently working for the KGB at the time.
I wouldn't claim that all the crackers around the world are working for intelligence and military agencies. But governments, especially intelligence departments, understandably grant immunity and resources to crackers doing what they cannot do publicly or officially. This can be especially helpful to provide plausible deniability if such crackers _do_ get exposed.
There are too many possible reasons for the DNS name resolution issues. Many of them may be local caching for services that use DHCP but do not use DHCP reservations. Another is hostnames that violate RFC standards with mixed case or non-permitted symbols. Another is the consistent use of the same short hostname for different services in different domains, such as "www.internal.example.com" and "www.example.com", where those are two different services, and only one of those domains is in your domain search path. This is compounded when your default search path has a wildcard: I've actually seen "www.example.com" resolved as the wildcard address for "*.example2.com" when "example.com" was the default domain, found as "www.example.com.example2.com". I was compelled to configure client software to use "www.example.com." to avoid the confusion.
Other problems can also occur when the reverse DNS does not match the forward DNS. Some security tools, like SSH, can throw alerts for this.
You publish as PDF, so that it has a better than reasonable chance of being visible for a decade. I used to say publish in Postscript, but Adobe's licensing for Postscript and licensing for ghostscript became much stranger over time. PDF has become a much more reliable standard.
As someone over 45, I appreciate those tickets. They let me, and my peers, know what the _users_ need the system to do, not what we wish the users wanted to do with our systems. And their requests are very good early warning signs of very real bugs, or of user documentation that needs to be improved.
> This is why you see big companies constantly patenting little things that are seemingly obvious or otherwise inane.
It's not the only reason. Having a broad suite of patents, even if they are unenforceable or easily blocked in court, can drain the resource of other plaintiffs who do _not_ have such a patent suite, whether or not their patents are legitimate.
The concern I'm raising is not about moderation or even cencorship per se. It's the "we'll secretly and semi-randomly lower the quality of the service to whomever we choose, without notification to them or to the rest of the community".
>> If I found such behavior in use on a forum I frequented, I would feel compelled to leave
> So the system works exactly as intended? I'm all for censorship if it means that people don't need to put up with arsehats
Does it? Is _my_ opinion that of the "asshat" you wish to discourage, and censor? Then you'd lose my technical input on the forum you've selected.
> By the way this isn't "censorship"
It seems to fit, very precisely, the most common definitions of the term. From the Merriam-Webster dictionary, "censorship" is the practice of censoring. In In that same dictionary, the first definition of "censor" is::
*: a person who supervises conduct and morals: such as a : an official who examines materials (as publications or films) for objectionable matter b : an official (as in time of war) who reads communications (as letters) and deletes material considered sensitive or harmful
Please be clear. What you were doing was not merely moderation, it was bureaucratic censorship. It can feel very powerful to control communications this way, but it's very dangerous because it encourages such clandestine abuse of clients, colleagues, and customers by example. It's very gratifying to be one of the "in" crowd that can enforce such arbitrary standards, but it leaves the lesson that such secretive, unannounced abuse by moderators is typical and should be accepted.
If I found such behavior in use on a forum I frequented, I would feel compelled to leave, even if the remaining content were of notabily better quality with this moderation in place. I would not feel able to trust the administrators of the forum because of such secretive censorship.
This is true, but it's not strictly a "form" issue, it's a "search optimization" issue. It does leave an excellent chance to do some repair, and some resume building. Ask the tough question, and find the first five responses that pop up. If possible, follow them up with the _correct_ answer, carefully explaining the trade-offs of the other answers and why this answer is best. This used to be easier to do when technical forums were mailing lists, but it's occasionally to get your corrected answer into the search results.
It's happened to me that a client or partner mentioned a particular solution they'd found on Google, one that they suggested I or a team member use instead of the approach we were doing. It's been very helpful to be able to refer them to the thread and point to the discussion further down the thread where the more detailed answer was written by me a decade previously. On occasion, when I've encountered what I thought was a wrong or worse, dangerous answer, I've even had my _own_ answer corrected due to my own misunderstanding. I've been grateful for those. And by proposing the better answer graciously, on occasion the original answer has been updated and made more clear, which benefits all later readers of those Google results.
Please do not insult _our_ HR people. _Our_ HR people have been supportive of us as employees and as colleagues. This was a client's HR department, one which was alienating their own employees.
This was not _my_ HR rep's concern. This the HR rep at a separate company with whom we were collaborating on a project. _Our_ HR rep had helped us reach this medical accomodation and was fully informed, and it had happened on other projects. Openness about personnel's availability has paid off repeatedly on our projects.
> Note that it's not the "bad words" people you call SJWs complain about, it's the actual racism behind them.
I'm afraid to say it's not just racism or bias. I've recently had a discussion with an HR person at a client's workplace because I discussed dealing with my colleague's PMS in terms of scheduling. My colleague, from my own team, has _horrible_ PMS. She suffers horrific cramping and does not normally work on those days, but we had a schedule to meet. I discussed how we'd accomodate her medical needs and she'd work offsite, for only limited hours, on those days, because she was a critical member of our team. I received a formal complaint, which _shocked_ me, and which I had to review with our company's lawyer and our HR personnel, and have my female colleague call the HR person and discuss. The HR person _did not want to speak to my colleague_, which also shocked me. My mention of the issue was, itself, considered sexual harassment.
The HR person was being what is sometimes called a "snowflake". They were actively disrupting their own company by over-reporting, and the engineers I worked with from their teams had quietly asked me and my team if there were openings at our company, or people hiring in the market. I could not, legally, due to basic agreements in our contracts. I can't discuss the details of advice I did provide: but the shift to workplace thought and speech policing is a familiar one as a company grows, and even accidental or completely factual speech can become politicized.
Slashdot Mirror
Some of us have families, especially kids, who need our financial help. Others of us actually give to charity, or invest time in education or mentoring, all of which can put quite large burdens on that take home pay and encourage investment in the people around us, rather than in a home which we may move from in a few years. And while I applaud your effective use of resources, in many cities that less expensive house in the suburbs means a much longer commute time both ways, which eats hours of time every week.
I'll also admit that many home owners make very misleading estimates about the costs of owning a home, both in maintenance time and in costs. I've seen a number of my colleagues try to buy as much of their dream as they can manage to afford, rather than buying the minimum price that will help them be happy. The constant fraud and pressure to close the deal on the dream house, or to "flip that house" and scale their way up the property ladder is quite dangerous, and many of my younger colleagues were caught this way in the dotcom and real estate crisis. Both of these bankrupted many workers in IT who were misled by entire segments of the US economy lying wholesale to them.
There is a reason I chose that specific combination. It's a very cheap lunch bundle at the local 24 hour store, and does not include options for either fresh vegetables or bottled water.
I've worked professionally with most source control systems for decades. I'm afraid to say that the only remaining features which Subversion does better than git are the ability to check out only one directory of an upstream repository, rather than needing to check out the entire repository, and the inability to delete content from the upstream repository.
The ability to delete content is from experience a vital component, because developers can and will accidentally pollute the central repository with undesired content. This content ranges from bulky binary files, core dumps, and security sensitive content which they should not have submitted.
And Subversion's centralized control comes at a real price. It makes forking and doing an independent set of work, with local commits, effectively impossible.
> . One has more trouble eating a pound of butter than a pound of sugar
While you have a point, your question might be somewhat misleading. A pound of sugar has roughly 1300 calories. a pound of fat roughly 1800. And you might be surprised by the amount of fat in many popular foods.
There are many single, and poor, parents who are quite stressed for time. A 7-11 sandwich, a bottle of soda, and a bag of chips is just the sort of meal that many parents can afford the _time_ for when they're on the run to work, day care, and ordinary medical or educational meetings for their family.
> Only because working for somebody else was not the norm
While it may not have been the norm, it was certainly common. Apprentices at a craft, or journeyman, worked for the masters of their craft. Children worked for their parents. Guards worked for local landowners or nobility, and anyone who sold goods or services worked for their clients. Standing armies were far more rare, but existed, and merceneries also had employees. Out of work mercenaries were also a very _dangerous_ unemployment problem.
> Yes, I like that very much. Then again, what's on an FPGA (or in any other circuit) can be written down in terms of a software program.
This is demonstrably untrue for brains. Part of the key to a digital circuit, and program, is that it is deterministic. The same program run twice with the same nputs will produce the same output, and most of them can be modeled as Turing machines, so that they can be run on other hardware with sufficient resources.
I'm afraid that nerves are _analog_, with triggered changes of state that cannot be reliably predicted. And there are indeterminacy issues, where the effect of applying a probe or measuring tool to record one neural pattern actually modifies the neural pattern. Writing that as a software program is quite difficult.
I'm afraid that specs are not source code, nor are they a working application. Smalltalk itself was proprietary, and the free or open source re-implementations have been even more limited and unuseful for ordinary content publication. They were conceptually useful for people fascinated by the architecture, but their actual ability to publish and display desired content was profoundly hindered by the need to manually program the actual display.
> Interactivity in PDFs is problematic, though. Personally, I'd go for something like a Smalltalk virtual image instead.
Smalltalk was proprietary with a quite expensive license. It had a small user base, was unavailable for free university use, and required one to learn a scripting language rather than displaying content in a viable "What You See Is What You Get" format for new users. With dozens of distinct, subtly incompatible commercial implementations, it suffered deeply from the intellectually exciting but software destabilizing practices of excessive unnecessary recursion and undefined behavior from user created and not fully specified API's, API's which the author was philosophically and actively discouraged from examining.
I mis-spoke. The experiment typically involves electrons, not photons.
One difficulty is that the observation of the interference patterns of double slit experiments with even single photons demonstrates the superposition of quantum states in a macroscopically observable way. It's very difficult to explain or understand the interference patterns of single photons fired through a double-slat experimental array without assuming that the individual photons do, in fact, have multiple locations.
The mathematics is fascinating: I've not explored for decades, but remember well my surprise that such logically confusing quantum effects were so easily measurable.
Keeping an eye open on SSH port probes from Estonia, China, and various parts of the USSR is a pretty good hint that foreign crackers attack US based systems constantly.Tracing it to a foreign security is more difficult. "The Cuckoo's Egg", written by Cliff Stoll, gives a fascinating view into the very real difficulties of tracking, reporting, and getting attacks against government and military operations by Markus Hess, who was apparently working for the KGB at the time.
I wouldn't claim that all the crackers around the world are working for intelligence and military agencies. But governments, especially intelligence departments, understandably grant immunity and resources to crackers doing what they cannot do publicly or officially. This can be especially helpful to provide plausible deniability if such crackers _do_ get exposed.
There are too many possible reasons for the DNS name resolution issues. Many of them may be local caching for services that use DHCP but do not use DHCP reservations. Another is hostnames that violate RFC standards with mixed case or non-permitted symbols. Another is the consistent use of the same short hostname for different services in different domains, such as "www.internal.example.com" and "www.example.com", where those are two different services, and only one of those domains is in your domain search path. This is compounded when your default search path has a wildcard: I've actually seen "www.example.com" resolved as the wildcard address for "*.example2.com" when "example.com" was the default domain, found as "www.example.com.example2.com". I was compelled to configure client software to use "www.example.com." to avoid the confusion.
Other problems can also occur when the reverse DNS does not match the forward DNS. Some security tools, like SSH, can throw alerts for this.
Outlook and calendar integration,
You publish as PDF, so that it has a better than reasonable chance of being visible for a decade. I used to say publish in Postscript, but Adobe's licensing for Postscript and licensing for ghostscript became much stranger over time. PDF has become a much more reliable standard.
As someone over 45, I appreciate those tickets. They let me, and my peers, know what the _users_ need the system to do, not what we wish the users wanted to do with our systems. And their requests are very good early warning signs of very real bugs, or of user documentation that needs to be improved.
> This is why you see big companies constantly patenting little things that are seemingly obvious or otherwise inane.
It's not the only reason. Having a broad suite of patents, even if they are unenforceable or easily blocked in court, can drain the resource of other plaintiffs who do _not_ have such a patent suite, whether or not their patents are legitimate.
The concern I'm raising is not about moderation or even cencorship per se. It's the "we'll secretly and semi-randomly lower the quality of the service to whomever we choose, without notification to them or to the rest of the community".
>> If I found such behavior in use on a forum I frequented, I would feel compelled to leave
> So the system works exactly as intended? I'm all for censorship if it means that people don't need to put up with arsehats
Does it? Is _my_ opinion that of the "asshat" you wish to discourage, and censor? Then you'd lose my technical input on the forum you've selected.
> By the way this isn't "censorship"
It seems to fit, very precisely, the most common definitions of the term. From the Merriam-Webster dictionary, "censorship" is the practice of censoring. In In that same dictionary, the first definition of "censor" is::
*: a person who supervises conduct and morals: such as
a : an official who examines materials (as publications or films) for objectionable matter
b : an official (as in time of war) who reads communications (as letters) and deletes material considered sensitive or harmful
Please be clear. What you were doing was not merely moderation, it was bureaucratic censorship. It can feel very powerful to control communications this way, but it's very dangerous because it encourages such clandestine abuse of clients, colleagues, and customers by example. It's very gratifying to be one of the "in" crowd that can enforce such arbitrary standards, but it leaves the lesson that such secretive, unannounced abuse by moderators is typical and should be accepted.
If I found such behavior in use on a forum I frequented, I would feel compelled to leave, even if the remaining content were of notabily better quality with this moderation in place. I would not feel able to trust the administrators of the forum because of such secretive censorship.
This is true, but it's not strictly a "form" issue, it's a "search optimization" issue. It does leave an excellent chance to do some repair, and some resume building. Ask the tough question, and find the first five responses that pop up. If possible, follow them up with the _correct_ answer, carefully explaining the trade-offs of the other answers and why this answer is best. This used to be easier to do when technical forums were mailing lists, but it's occasionally to get your corrected answer into the search results.
It's happened to me that a client or partner mentioned a particular solution they'd found on Google, one that they suggested I or a team member use instead of the approach we were doing. It's been very helpful to be able to refer them to the thread and point to the discussion further down the thread where the more detailed answer was written by me a decade previously. On occasion, when I've encountered what I thought was a wrong or worse, dangerous answer, I've even had my _own_ answer corrected due to my own misunderstanding. I've been grateful for those. And by proposing the better answer graciously, on occasion the original answer has been updated and made more clear, which benefits all later readers of those Google results.
I certainly have. A day's data with calendared applications, or newly stored passphrases, can be an expensive loss.
Please do not insult _our_ HR people. _Our_ HR people have been supportive of us as employees and as colleagues. This was a client's HR department, one which was alienating their own employees.
This was not _my_ HR rep's concern. This the HR rep at a separate company with whom we were collaborating on a project. _Our_ HR rep had helped us reach this medical accomodation and was fully informed, and it had happened on other projects. Openness about personnel's availability has paid off repeatedly on our projects.
> Note that it's not the "bad words" people you call SJWs complain about, it's the actual racism behind them.
I'm afraid to say it's not just racism or bias. I've recently had a discussion with an HR person at a client's workplace because I discussed dealing with my colleague's PMS in terms of scheduling. My colleague, from my own team, has _horrible_ PMS. She suffers horrific cramping and does not normally work on those days, but we had a schedule to meet. I discussed how we'd accomodate her medical needs and she'd work offsite, for only limited hours, on those days, because she was a critical member of our team. I received a formal complaint, which _shocked_ me, and which I had to review with our company's lawyer and our HR personnel, and have my female colleague call the HR person and discuss. The HR person _did not want to speak to my colleague_, which also shocked me. My mention of the issue was, itself, considered sexual harassment.
The HR person was being what is sometimes called a "snowflake". They were actively disrupting their own company by over-reporting, and the engineers I worked with from their teams had quietly asked me and my team if there were openings at our company, or people hiring in the market. I could not, legally, due to basic agreements in our contracts. I can't discuss the details of advice I did provide: but the shift to workplace thought and speech policing is a familiar one as a company grows, and even accidental or completely factual speech can become politicized.