>I wrote a look-alike, work-alike windows app in two weeks (using Borland C++ Builder) that worked with his USB printer >and could even import the data files from the old shitty program-- but he "couldn't figure out how to work it"
If you had succeeded in the "look alike, work alike" departments, he wouldn't have to know you changed it.
>I do realize that the airport security may not be the federal government
The TSA person frisking you is a Federal Agent, and is therefore acting as an arm of the Federal Government, and should be obligated to protect your Consitutional rights. This obligation extends all the way to an obligation that they protect your Constitutional rights with their own lives if neccessary.
>You think the TSA guys would have remembered me by now.
Oh come now. It's their first job. Possibly on the short list of jobs that were available after their rehab program. You don't really expect them to be competent do you?
Is public nudity a "sex crime?" If you get a ticket for swimming/sunbathing in your own yard or for doing a protest or just camping, something like this, will you be labeled "sex offender" with no distinction between what you did, and some guy who raped all the eight year olds in a sunday school day camp?
I know more than one person who was laid off from Intel. Worst one: A friend was on business in Hong Kong, with one other employee. They were fired *while* in Hong Kong. The company actually tried to not pay their return travel (!) This turns out to be legal (!)
I know some former Intel employees who were set to work on a project, and unknown to them, the project managers *also* put another team on the same project, and when they were determined to be making better progress, the whole other team was canned.
There's a whole culture at that company of aggressive, cutthroat competition among the business units. Basically, the theme is "screw your neighbor."
Single largest cause of failure of the Tandy 3000 (an early 286) was fire. Stores were not allowed (!) to sell these to consumers, only to business customers. I'm not sure if the fire detail was disclosed or not.
The fact that we couldn't sell 286s to home user was the last straw for me and that sales job. Tandy had missed the boat so thoroughly, but that was the worst, when consumer machines were already ubiquitous and much cheaper everywhere, and yet we were expected to sell obsolete crap. Obsolete, as in, machines without hard drives and with CGA video as late as 1989.
Then you should go all the way. Make them *typeset* their reports. And don't just teach them triangles. Make them learn 3-D geometry and do graphics in 3-space and make them *really* write proofs.
If you're going to give them tools, give them the need, and hold them to the expectations implied by the need.
I'm serious here. In my first geometry course, we only did triangles, only in the plane, because all we had was pencils and paper and chalkboards.
If we'd had computers, the bar could have (and should have) been raised.
If you give them internet access you should be expecting more depth and breadth of their research. If you give them word processors, you should expect far more comprehensive and far better edited work, than you would expect from typewriter or longhand papers.
I have about 10K of information that if I lost it, I would be at risk of losing real estate or going to jail, literally.
I have about 5 megabytes of information that represents the creative works of my entire career, mostly sheet music, a few stories, and several aborted novels.
I have about 600 hours of musical works that are better stored in some audio domain, be it digital audio files or tape.
Stuff I put on my website gets backed up by my company's really big Timberwolf.
So my point is, I'm trying to suggest that someone with a full-ish 250GB drive might want to consider what's important for frequent backups. I suspect that for most of them, it's illegitimate media in the first place. I have one jukebox that is stuffed with audio files. A lot of it is WAV data, stuff I record myself. That stuff is a bitch to backup because the volume is so huge. I actually sometimes wish I had a big digital audio tape drive or something, but DVD with FLAC works just fine for archiving, and the finite nature helps keep me disciplined. The rest of that data is basically MP3's of my CD and record collection, which I consider to *be* the backups. I do archive that stuff to DVD mostly to protect the labor of encoding it.
As for system backups, I just make sure I can re-install the OS, and I also am meticulous to avoid any software that requires any form of authentication or is otherwise bound to a single piece of hardware (the one exception being WindowsXP).
I suspect that many people who are overwhelmed by the magnitude of making a "full" backup, end up backing up *nothing*, even though the stuff they *really* need to protect amounts to a couple of kilobytes of data.
Seriously, William Shakespeare didn't write more than 5 Megs in his life. Wolfgang Mozart's entire career fits in a couple megs of MIDI data.
Photography is something that has taken a lot of people over the file storage threshold. But photographers who have needed file cabinets for negatives only need an envelope for a disc now. Here's what I do; whenever I frame a print, I put a disc behind the print with as many images from around the time of that photo. That way, I will always have some confidence that if I want to reproduce a print, I should not need to look anywhere else, and as a bonus, I can store a large number of images there as well.
Back on topic, I'm sure if I truly needed to do weekly backups of hundreds of megabytes, it would be driven by a need to protect thousands of dollars of weekly revenue or to avoid legal liabilities on that order of magnitude. Automated tape libraries are expensive but often justified. $5 grand for a nice network-attached tape drive is a lot of money but not if you're protecting data that you'll be sued for $50 grand for losing.
Home users don't have the same issues as business users. I'm conflicted, since I'm not just a "home user", I'm a professional software developer with numerous side projects and I'm running two distinct businesses from my home office. (And no, I really *don't* have time to be posting on slashdot.)
I understand your point of view and your numbers. I still say people should backup to DVD as an alternative to not backing up, *and* I say if they use the USB drive solution, they should backup that USB drive to DVD or something at least as effective. I've had too many disk drives fail from shelf rot and from acceleration. DVD-R may not be the most permanent medium available, but it certainly stores well and is not damaged by motion.
How do I run daily incrementals and weekly fulls with your system, and how do I ship them offsite? When I need to recover by date, or send something to court for discovery, how do I do it? You wonder why the enterprise still uses tape.
What would you suggest we replace our Timberwolf with?
>I haven't bought a blank dvd since last year - hard drives are just too cheap to bother with dvds any more.
Not cheaper than DVDs. Especially not if you want to do daily backups to a different medium, and do a different weekly. That will get very expensive, very fast, and require a lot of storage space.
"I'll tell you what misconception annoys me the most. It's the idea that you need to agree to the GPL in order to use the software."
The license is quite explicit and clear on this point. I fail to understand how anyone can actually read the license, even just to skim it, and not understand this.
If someone has commented on the license without reading it, I fail to understand why I would waste my time with them anyway.
>I think you're pretty naive if you truely think that this country is still of, by, and for the PEOPLE
I think you are naive if you fail to recognize the current state of affairs as being an expression of the general will of the people, which to my mind is much more frightening than a rogue government or one out of sync with the people.
It'e pretty easy, living in a city and associating with people in your own sphere, to forget just how many out there actually support the republican status quo. Sure, pretty much everybody *I* personally know thinks Bush is a moron. But none of them moved to Ohio in order to affect politics there.
"Therefore, you need a Macbook to view them, so they are providing a motivation to switch even if it's on a meta level. Not seeing the problem here. They work as designed on all levels."
Guess I should disclose the fact that I saw them later on my Powerbook. It does annoy me though, since I actually prefer my PCs to my Mac, for most things. Of course, I don't run Windows. And the "I'm a PC" guy doesn't say "I'm a well-specified PC running some version of BSD Unix and some version of NextStep like a Mac does":-)
I setup my office so that it would be lit during the day via sunlight through UV-reactive windows. I have a small desk lamp and an overhead incandescent light for night time, but they simply aren't needed in the daytime.
I live in Southern AZ and I run my (real) AC 24/7 during the summer. I have measured the difference between running continuously (on a thermostat, in a well-insulated house with UV-reactive windows and a decent roof), versus leaving it off during the hottest parts of the day and it turns out that due to the latency effect of cooling off a hot house, it's less expensive to maintain an equilibrium temperature.
If I cleaned up the params it probably would make a good exam question for a calc2 final.
>If that were true, then I would have a significant change in my heating bills in winter just by leaving lights >on.
I can measure my air conditioning usage quite accurately depending on whether lights are on or off -- more so than the curtains, since the UV-reactive windows do a really good job.
Is it significant? I wouldn't say that, not even averaged over a month. The cost of the amount of energy you'd save is still lost in the noise of the various taxes and fees that get tacked on the bill.
Slashdot Mirror
"If the other guy still sells his outdated piece of junk, that means there is a market for it -- you could try selling your app too!
"
Watch the "idiot" boss become very smart when it comes to intellectual property and work done for hire by an employee...
>That may be the case... but in the circles I hang out in, the big question has been "Is this real?"
The way to convince them is to use the flaw to root their box. Since you can't do that, they don't really feel motivated to respond.
Report your exploits anonymously. Then they won't know whose balls to put in the vise, but they will be under fire to fix it.
>A lot of these original Dos programs really haven't been beat
I don't *really* want to argue, because I have nostalgia for this stuff, but... http://www.kvraudio.com/
It's all been beat. Really, really beat.
>I wrote a look-alike, work-alike windows app in two weeks (using Borland C++ Builder) that worked with his USB printer
>and could even import the data files from the old shitty program-- but he "couldn't figure out how to work it"
If you had succeeded in the "look alike, work alike" departments, he wouldn't have to know you changed it.
>I do realize that the airport security may not be the federal government
The TSA person frisking you is a Federal Agent, and is therefore acting as an arm of the Federal Government, and should be obligated to protect your Consitutional rights. This obligation extends all the way to an obligation that they protect your Constitutional rights with their own lives if neccessary.
>You think the TSA guys would have remembered me by now.
Oh come now. It's their first job. Possibly on the short list of jobs that were available after their rehab program.
You don't really expect them to be competent do you?
Is public nudity a "sex crime?" If you get a ticket for swimming/sunbathing in your own yard or for doing a protest or just camping, something like this, will you be labeled "sex offender" with no distinction between what you did, and some guy who raped all the eight year olds in a sunday school day camp?
>Seriously, where are the good paying jobs going to come from in the next 50-100 years in the US?
The overall trend toward poverty will change the perception of what constitutes a "good paying job".
I know more than one person who was laid off from Intel. Worst one: A friend was on business in Hong Kong, with one other employee. They were fired *while* in Hong Kong. The company actually tried to not pay their return travel (!)
This turns out to be legal (!)
I know some former Intel employees who were set to work on a project, and unknown to them, the project managers *also* put another team on the same project, and when they were determined to be making better progress, the whole other team was canned.
There's a whole culture at that company of aggressive, cutthroat competition among the business units. Basically, the theme is "screw your neighbor."
Single largest cause of failure of the Tandy 3000 (an early 286) was fire.
Stores were not allowed (!) to sell these to consumers, only to business customers.
I'm not sure if the fire detail was disclosed or not.
The fact that we couldn't sell 286s to home user was the last straw for me and that sales job.
Tandy had missed the boat so thoroughly, but that was the worst, when consumer machines were already ubiquitous
and much cheaper everywhere, and yet we were expected to sell obsolete crap. Obsolete, as in, machines without hard drives and with CGA video as late as 1989.
Then you should go all the way. Make them *typeset* their reports. And don't just teach them triangles. Make them learn 3-D geometry and do graphics in 3-space and make them *really* write proofs.
If you're going to give them tools, give them the need, and hold them to the expectations implied by the need.
I'm serious here. In my first geometry course, we only did triangles, only in the plane, because all we had was pencils and paper and chalkboards.
If we'd had computers, the bar could have (and should have) been raised.
If you give them internet access you should be expecting more depth and breadth of their research. If you give them word processors, you should expect far more comprehensive and far better edited work, than you would expect from typewriter or longhand papers.
I have about 10K of information that if I lost it, I would be at risk of losing real estate or going to jail, literally.
I have about 5 megabytes of information that represents the creative works of my entire career, mostly sheet music, a few stories, and several aborted novels.
I have about 600 hours of musical works that are better stored in some audio domain, be it digital audio files or tape.
Stuff I put on my website gets backed up by my company's really big Timberwolf.
So my point is, I'm trying to suggest that someone with a full-ish 250GB drive might want to consider what's important for frequent backups. I suspect that for most of them, it's illegitimate media in the first place. I have one jukebox that is stuffed with audio files. A lot of it is WAV data, stuff I record myself. That stuff is a bitch to backup because the volume is so huge. I actually sometimes wish I had a big digital audio tape drive or something, but DVD with FLAC works just fine for archiving, and the finite nature helps keep me disciplined. The rest of that data is basically MP3's of my CD and record collection, which I consider to *be* the backups. I do archive that stuff to DVD mostly to protect the labor of encoding it.
As for system backups, I just make sure I can re-install the OS, and I also am meticulous to avoid any software that requires any form of authentication or is otherwise bound to a single piece of hardware (the one exception being WindowsXP).
I suspect that many people who are overwhelmed by the magnitude of making a "full" backup, end up backing up *nothing*, even though the stuff they *really* need to protect amounts to a couple of kilobytes of data.
Seriously, William Shakespeare didn't write more than 5 Megs in his life. Wolfgang Mozart's entire career fits in a couple megs of MIDI data.
Photography is something that has taken a lot of people over the file storage threshold. But photographers who have needed file cabinets for negatives only need an envelope for a disc now. Here's what I do; whenever I frame a print, I put a disc behind the print with as many images from around the time of that photo. That way, I will always have some confidence that if I want to reproduce a print, I should not need to look anywhere else, and as a bonus, I can store a large number of images there as well.
Back on topic, I'm sure if I truly needed to do weekly backups of hundreds of megabytes, it would be driven by a need to protect thousands of dollars of weekly revenue or to avoid legal liabilities on that order of magnitude. Automated tape libraries are expensive but often justified. $5 grand for a nice network-attached tape drive is a lot of money but not if you're protecting data that you'll be sued for $50 grand for losing.
Home users don't have the same issues as business users. I'm conflicted, since I'm not just a "home user", I'm a professional software developer with numerous side projects and I'm running two distinct businesses from my home office. (And no, I really *don't* have time to be posting on slashdot.)
I understand your point of view and your numbers. I still say people should backup to DVD as an alternative to not backing up, *and* I say if they use the USB drive solution, they should backup that USB drive to DVD or something at least as effective. I've had too many disk drives fail from shelf rot and from acceleration. DVD-R may not be the most permanent medium available, but it certainly stores well and is not damaged by motion.
WTF? Who modded me down for pointing out that people comment on the GPL without actually reading it?
Would you accept a film review from a critic who didn't actually watch the movie?
How do I run daily incrementals and weekly fulls with your system, and how do I ship them offsite? When I need to recover by date, or send something to court for discovery, how do I do it? You wonder why the enterprise still uses tape.
What would you suggest we replace our Timberwolf with?
>USB hard drives are nice to backup a lot of stuff
If you're only going to make *one* backup and the next time you backup you are willing to overwrite that one.
Maybe your budget allows you to burn through and store a USB drive once per month or whatever.
[I realize your argument is in favor of DVD over discs.]
>I haven't bought a blank dvd since last year - hard drives are just too cheap to bother with dvds any more.
Not cheaper than DVDs. Especially not if you want to do daily backups to a different medium, and do a different weekly.
That will get very expensive, very fast, and require a lot of storage space.
>The end user of source code are other devlopers...
Some are, some aren't.
"I'll tell you what misconception annoys me the most. It's the idea that you need to agree to the GPL in order to use the software."
The license is quite explicit and clear on this point. I fail to understand how anyone can actually read the license, even just to skim it, and not understand this.
If someone has commented on the license without reading it, I fail to understand why I would waste my time with them anyway.
>I think you're pretty naive if you truely think that this country is still of, by, and for the PEOPLE
I think you are naive if you fail to recognize the current state of affairs as being an expression of the general will of the people, which to my mind is much more frightening than a rogue government or one out of sync with the people.
It'e pretty easy, living in a city and associating with people in your own sphere, to forget just how many out there actually support the republican status quo. Sure, pretty much everybody *I* personally know thinks Bush is a moron.
But none of them moved to Ohio in order to affect politics there.
"Therefore, you need a Macbook to view them, so they are providing a motivation to switch even if it's on a meta level. Not seeing the problem here. They work as designed on all levels."
:-)
Guess I should disclose the fact that I saw them later on my Powerbook. It does annoy me though, since I actually prefer my PCs to my Mac, for most things. Of course, I don't run Windows. And the "I'm a PC" guy doesn't say "I'm a well-specified PC running some version of BSD Unix and some version of NextStep like a Mac does"
>Of course, a big slug of water with lots of surface area is really efficient at transmitting heat into the room
:-)
We have a fish room too. I can't think of a better way to illustrate the high specific heat of DHMO
I setup my office so that it would be lit during the day via sunlight through UV-reactive windows. I have a small desk lamp and an overhead incandescent light for night time, but they simply aren't needed in the daytime.
How many towns can I save?
I live in Southern AZ and I run my (real) AC 24/7 during the summer. I have measured the difference between running continuously (on a thermostat, in a well-insulated house with UV-reactive windows and a decent roof), versus leaving it off during the hottest parts of the day and it turns out that due to the latency effect of cooling off a hot house, it's less expensive to maintain an equilibrium temperature.
If I cleaned up the params it probably would make a good exam question for a calc2 final.
>If that were true, then I would have a significant change in my heating bills in winter just by leaving lights
>on.
I can measure my air conditioning usage quite accurately depending on whether lights are on or off -- more so than the curtains, since the UV-reactive windows do a really good job.
Is it significant? I wouldn't say that, not even averaged over a month. The cost of the amount of energy you'd save is still lost in the noise of the various taxes and fees that get tacked on the bill.