It should be noted that many modern dSLRs will give you the large LCD-screen preview as well, since so many people buy dSLRs but want point-and-click features.
If you want clear photographs, one of the worst things you could do is hold the camera at arm's length. Use the view finder, tuck your elbows in and you'll see an immediate improvement in shot quality.
I am curious what advantages you imagine you'll get from having interchangeable lenses.
In my experience, it's all about the glass. You can get decent photos with a moderately good camera body, but if you have a shit lens, nothing's going to save you from a muddy pic.
This is why I'm inclined to suggest a DSLR. As others have said, entry-level camera bodies are pretty cheap these days, and they do most of the heavy lifting where shutter and aperture are concerned. But with a good prime lens (i.e. fixed-length, non-zoom), you can get remarkable clarity, right down to the pores on someone's face. You can get one for a fraction of the price of a comparable-quality zoom lens.
The only drawback is that you have to use your legs when composing a shot, but as long as you look behind you, that's generally not a problem.
Since when do incumbents face primaries? I've heard about it for very unpopular candidates, where even their own party won't back them for reelection, but not otherwise.
You just answered your own question. Make the candidate unpopular, and the primary has to happen. Register a lot of new members, stack the committees, or lobby them, or both, and make it clear that for as long as your representative stands by SOPA, his survival is far from assured.
I don't think you understand SOPA. SOPA isn't a problem with Technology.
You're exactly right. SOPA is the mere exercise of bare power. The problem is not the politicians' ignorance; they know full well what they're doing. The problem is that they don't care. They've gone to the well for campaign funding, and this is the bucket they brought the water back in. It's really that simple. Technical considerations don't even get a look in.
It threatens uploading content, it threatens internal networks, it threatens open source software, it threatens DNS, DNSSEC and internet security.
"So?" asked the Congressman, "What did FOSS, DNS and DNSSEC ever do for me?"
There are only two levers that can change a congressman's mind: Votes and money. The money (to buy the votes) is behind SOPA right now, so that's where he'll be found.
What needs to be made clear to him, therefore, is that no amount of money is going to be enough to save his seat. And rather than wait for election day (which will be too late), take a lesson from the Tea Party and primary the fucker. 'Tis the season, after all....
Putting together a well-organised campaign to get delegates up in arms about an issue as basic and important as this is neither too hard nor too expensive. Find a clear-eyed, presentable spokesperson who can explain the problem in a nutshell, and start working on your local party committee members to back him. You don't (necessarily) need to get your person (s)elected even. Long before that, you can be sure that your candidate will have a moment of epiphany where suddenly the problem becomes clear and his position switches accordingly.
This approach can't easily be countered by lobbyists, because they don't have a significant presence outside of Washington, they don't know the local ground nearly as well as you do, and they simply don't have enough money allocated to counter every primary challenge.
Tactically, this is insurgency warfare. Look to Iraq and Afghanistan for some indication of its effectiveness.
I really enjoy when, while posting, I know there are truck-sized holes in my argument - ones that could only be solved by making it TL,dr. Very occasionally, someone finds all of those holes in a response and presents it more effectively than I could have. And well.
Thank you. Take this as tacit agreement to all of your points.
You're welcome.
And thanks to whomever decided to reward this with a flamebait mod. It's gratifying to know that some people find mere rhetoric so threatening. It means it's working.
He's right. But, it showed poor judgement to say as much. The beer swilling, football watching masses don't get nuance. That "as long as" qualifies as nuance for that crowd. Now he's tarred as a pedophile sympathizer for life, at least on the idiot side of the house.
By whom? Certainly not by you, that's clear. But nevertheless, in spite of the fact that you agree with him, you're willing to distance yourself from difficult arguments (e.g. the full implications of individual freedom of conscience and belief) for fear of bringing the disapproval of the ignorant on your own head.
I want to love RMS but he makes it really hard to do so.
Yes, it is hard. If virtue came easy, there wouldn't be a sinner in the world.
It's because of cowardice like yours that I admire Stallmann all the more. I, for one, welcome my quirky, bearded overlord....
... because he's right[*].
------------
[*] I mean to say he's right to let the logic - rather than prejudice - lead him. And he's right to discuss these things, no matter how unpopular they might be.
He's wrong on the details of this argument, though, because he hasn't considered a couple of critical points concerning the rights and property of others (necrophilia) and the nature of consent where children are concerned. Many countries have defined the age by which most humans are capable of knowing the implications of their choices. They do so explicitly to defend children from a situation in which they are led to agree to acts whose repercussions they cannot know. I know someone who had a 'consenting' sexual relationship from a very young age (8) and it scarred that person for life, causing (among other things) an inability to distinguish between love and sexuality, which led to a great deal of pain and suffering.
Did the guy mention that he copyrighted his work? If he put it out there with nothing indicating that, there's an argument that he put it into the public domain....
On the contrary. The default proposition is that it IS copyrighted and that all rights are reserved. Under Common Law, anyway.
If you set it for "total tickets" (higher=bad): you refuse to do things, add features etc, or you make it hard to contact IT to log a fault
If you set it for "time taken per ticket" (higher=bad): you end up pushing kludge solutions If you set it for "user rated response" (higher=good): you end up blackmailing the end users to rate you 10/10 otherwise their emails/logs/dirt etc get published and sent to boss/wife/etc
Black holes don't actually suck anything in. Things just more like... fall in.
Well, can't we put up a sign or something? How many innocent gas clouds have to suffer needlessly from this preventable hazard? I mean, what does it say about us as a civilisation if our scientists just sit around watching while this tragedy occurs?
When you use terminology like "MAFIAA" or tell them to go fuck themselves, whatever point you were trying to make just sounds ridiculous.
The tactics used by the media distribution cartels are actually quite similar in nature (albeit less violent) to early Mafia tactics. The analogy is an apt one. The fact that it's used to associate a despicable organisation with an outright illegal one is a pretty standard rhetorical trope.
Given the fact that these same organisations have conducted a concerted campaign to make their entire customer base feel like criminals, and given as well that they have a track record of ripping off the very artists you claim to sympathise with, I don't think a healthy 'Fuck you' is at all an inappropriate response.
If you can't engage in a rational argument that's garnished with a few rhetorical flourishes and an expletive or two, I'd recommend you never ever discuss anything of import with the irish, the French, the Scots (if you can find a true one), a goodly number of the British... or pretty much anyone from central Europe.
I'll end this with a smile and a word. As my Irish grandfather used to say:
Fuck you, you humourless cunt and have a beautiful fucking day. I hope the surgery to remove that giant stick up your ass isn't too painful. No, wait - I hope it is.
A knife has the ability to kill someone, that doesn't mean we should ban knives.
Perhaps, but we should absolutely ban leaving the knife unsheathed in the baby's crib.
Bear in mind that this software was first discovered because it was writing far too much data into the system log. If I understand the Android system correctly, any application at all could have accessed very detailed personal data simply by parsing the log.
Intention does matter.
That's true, and it seems that Carrier IQ actually did act in good faith.
That does not, however, justify negligence, which seems to be the real problem here.
[R]efuse it for long enough, and given the entitled "media should be free" attitude of the last 20 years.. Pretty soon, you should assume there will be no more high quality productions.
That's just not valid. People have demonstrated time and again that they are willing to pay for content. What they object to is DRM'ed, broken, zone-locked, un-saveable, unusable-on-any-other-device content. So, when the best (or only) alternative is bittorrent, that's what they use. But as soon as reputable players start offering a convenient, easy-to-use service (like Amazon, the App Store or iTunes), they flock to it en masse.
People hate commercials. People hate DRM. People hate being treated like criminals. People hate anything that stands between them and their enjoyment. But none of those statements mean that people do not ascribe value to the things that entertain them.
Yes, but its defiance is actually part of the problem.
Your publisher example wouldn't be a problem if we were all using IPv6. In such a scenario, running out of addresses would be inconce- er, hard to conceive. Unfortunately, silly, awkward shims like NAT give hardware manufacturers the excuse they need to avoid moving to the new standard.
As to your fridge example, before you share your fridge's address with every other fridge in the neighbourhood, I'd recommend you study man-in-the-middle attacks a little more carefully.
This should be the sole focus of the Occupy movement: a law that makes it illegal to engage in any business with the private industry which you have recently helped regulate, for a period of 10 years.
Two problems with that idea:
1) They would simply be hired by 'independent' think tanks, then be contracted from there by the lobbyists to provide 'expert advice'. Abstract as desired until it's legal again.
2) Experience and expertise are absolutely necessary when legislation and regulation are being drafted. Outlawing that would be worse than letting the corporations write their own legislation. Seriously.
You can't make immorality illegal, no matter how hard you try. The problem is cultural. The mantra that companies' sole priority is to increase shareholder value via any legal means necessary will inevitably lead to companies trying to affect the 'legal means' part of the equation.
I know whereof I speak, by the way. I live in a very small country, and am fairly often asked for expert advice on matters pertaining to technology policy by players on both sides of the field. I answer any request for information to the extent that I can. If it takes a lot of my time, I charge for it. I have only one condition: I refuse to change my advice, nor to hide my opinion, nor to serve one side differently from the other.
In one case, someone involved in litigation asked me to brief his legal team on the particulars of technology in this country. I said I would, but that he should be advised that, while I'd not repeat what was said in the meeting room, I would offer the same advice and information to anyone who asked. He didn't seem pleased with the idea, and never followed up on the request.
As long as profit is the only criterion for success in the US, you're going to have the problem of people gaming the system and congratulating themselves when they do. That has to stop. Competition is not about playing with the rules, it's about playing by them.
What you really need is a generation that says, 'There are some things that I simply will not do.' That won't be easy.
Ah, fuck, who am I kidding. Microsoft's inevitably going to misuse this. Anyone would. Hell, you could hand me the big remote (that's how they do it, right? Giant remote control?) and I'd probably misuse it.
You need an economic disincentive to do so, besides "it pisses off consumers and we'll lose business". "Pulled apps are refunded" is a good disincentive - at the very least, they'd have to make a lot of money by pulling an app in order to use it. That's pretty unlikely.
MEGACORP: We want you to kill our competitor's app.
MICROSOFT: Ca't do that. We'd piss people off and lose revenue.
MEGACORP: How much revenue?
MICROSOFT: [Looks at spreadsheet.] Hmmm... about $20 million a year. Why?
MEGACORP: We want you to kill our competitor's app... for $25 million.
MICROSOFT: Done! [To Lackey:] Bring me The Remote.
I know I'll be modded down, but I have to say it: what they describe is already available in Powershell, where objects can be piped in search/filter functions.
Sure, and it's been possible in Perl (for example) forever:
use File::Slurp;
my $multi_line_pattern = join("", @ARGV);
my $text = read_file( 'filename' );
if ($text =~/$multi_line_pattern/){
# do something useful.
}
The only problem with the above is that it fails in anything other than trivial situations.
The issue isn't passing things through filters, it's doing so in a way that you don't have to write insanely devious and complex filters. This grep tool is still only at the design stage, so I'll not speculate about whether it actually succeeds at this goal or not.
This level of quality exists for almost anything you would care to buy. These items costs a bit more and they don't carry them at Walmart, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.
This is a bit of a side question, but it begs to be asked: I've often wondered if there is a rep or senator that actually knows what the difference between "computer" and "CPU" without help from his staff.
Tragically, Herman Cain and Ross Perot are about as close as you're going to get. Apparently, something happens to geeks when they enter politics that reduces their cognitive functions to nil, resulting in their inability to do aught else besides sloganeering.
It can be the cause of stressing components past the design limits.
If the original firmware limited tx power to 50% due to thermal design and the custom firmware ran it at 100% and components failed, whos fault is it?
What if the charging circuit was software controlled and the custom firmware wasn't set correctly for the manufactures design and the battery exploded, killing the cute little lolcat sitting next to it?
Good points. But what we're missing here is the potential for a 3rd party after market, similar to VARs and PC support businesses, who offer value-added services under their own warranty.
With vendor-locked devices, such a market can't easily exist, especially if they're hounded out of business by $VENDOR's lawyers.
But it should exist. More to the point it absolutely should have the right to exist. Because of that, I'm 100% in support of the EFF on this campaign.
This is actually the kind of career building stuff one should leap at. What would you rather say in an interview for your next job:
- I took this system that was falling apart and made it run like clockwork.. downtime and issue frequency went from "it's down again" to "been up all year"..
- Yeah it was pretty good when I got there, and I maintained the status quo
I just spent a couple of years stabilising and formalising an online organisation's systems, and I've got to say I'm of two minds on this one.
First off, this kind of undertaking is neither for the inexperienced nor the faint of heart. I took the job as a labour of love. The organisation I work for provides a critical service to millions of people, so it really had to continue. It's been running in its current form since about 2004, so you can imagine how much cruft it accumulated over the years.
For the first year, I worked alone. During one four month period, I worked seven days a week (half-days on Sundays). In that time, I standardised, automated and documented most aspects of the operation. I installed online and off-site backup and instituted backup and recovery protocols. I installed remote management capabilities, so that I could deal with everything except catastrophic hardware failure without having to be physically present. I implemented proper user management, single sign-on to all critical resources, and access control for important data.
By the end of the first year, I had a promising trainee, and within a year of that I had a second assistant helping with software development.
Wherever possible, I DID NOT invent anything. I appropriated simple tools and worked in the smallest possible increments. And this is a critical lesson: For everything you do, make the cost of failure as small as possible. If you bring operations to a halt, you had better be able to get them going again immediately.
Things are significantly better than they were, but I just gave my notice, anyway. Upper management have made it clear they don't understand the resource requirements we have, and they've refused to commit to contract extensions for key staff members, including my assistant. I know that if I stay, it'll only end in tears.
Bottom line: Don't take this on unless you're experienced enough to be able to spot the traps and to know how to get past them. And when I say 'know' I don't mean, 'I've heard about this great approach' or 'I've seen this done before.' This kind of environment is no place to learn. And even if you are experienced enough and committed enough to handle it, you still need to know when to walk away.
Slashdot Mirror
It should be noted that many modern dSLRs will give you the large LCD-screen preview as well, since so many people buy dSLRs but want point-and-click features.
If you want clear photographs, one of the worst things you could do is hold the camera at arm's length. Use the view finder, tuck your elbows in and you'll see an immediate improvement in shot quality.
I am curious what advantages you imagine you'll get from having interchangeable lenses.
In my experience, it's all about the glass. You can get decent photos with a moderately good camera body, but if you have a shit lens, nothing's going to save you from a muddy pic.
This is why I'm inclined to suggest a DSLR. As others have said, entry-level camera bodies are pretty cheap these days, and they do most of the heavy lifting where shutter and aperture are concerned. But with a good prime lens (i.e. fixed-length, non-zoom), you can get remarkable clarity, right down to the pores on someone's face. You can get one for a fraction of the price of a comparable-quality zoom lens.
The only drawback is that you have to use your legs when composing a shot, but as long as you look behind you, that's generally not a problem.
That said, make sure you like photography before you jump in.
Since when do incumbents face primaries? I've heard about it for very unpopular candidates, where even their own party won't back them for reelection, but not otherwise.
You just answered your own question. Make the candidate unpopular, and the primary has to happen. Register a lot of new members, stack the committees, or lobby them, or both, and make it clear that for as long as your representative stands by SOPA, his survival is far from assured.
I don't think you understand SOPA. SOPA isn't a problem with Technology.
You're exactly right. SOPA is the mere exercise of bare power. The problem is not the politicians' ignorance; they know full well what they're doing. The problem is that they don't care. They've gone to the well for campaign funding, and this is the bucket they brought the water back in. It's really that simple. Technical considerations don't even get a look in.
It threatens uploading content, it threatens internal networks, it threatens open source software, it threatens DNS, DNSSEC and internet security.
"So?" asked the Congressman, "What did FOSS, DNS and DNSSEC ever do for me?"
There are only two levers that can change a congressman's mind: Votes and money. The money (to buy the votes) is behind SOPA right now, so that's where he'll be found.
What needs to be made clear to him, therefore, is that no amount of money is going to be enough to save his seat. And rather than wait for election day (which will be too late), take a lesson from the Tea Party and primary the fucker. 'Tis the season, after all....
Putting together a well-organised campaign to get delegates up in arms about an issue as basic and important as this is neither too hard nor too expensive. Find a clear-eyed, presentable spokesperson who can explain the problem in a nutshell, and start working on your local party committee members to back him. You don't (necessarily) need to get your person (s)elected even. Long before that, you can be sure that your candidate will have a moment of epiphany where suddenly the problem becomes clear and his position switches accordingly.
This approach can't easily be countered by lobbyists, because they don't have a significant presence outside of Washington, they don't know the local ground nearly as well as you do, and they simply don't have enough money allocated to counter every primary challenge.
Tactically, this is insurgency warfare. Look to Iraq and Afghanistan for some indication of its effectiveness.
I really enjoy when, while posting, I know there are truck-sized holes in my argument - ones that could only be solved by making it TL,dr. Very occasionally, someone finds all of those holes in a response and presents it more effectively than I could have. And well.
Thank you. Take this as tacit agreement to all of your points.
You're welcome.
And thanks to whomever decided to reward this with a flamebait mod. It's gratifying to know that some people find mere rhetoric so threatening. It means it's working.
He's right. But, it showed poor judgement to say as much. The beer swilling, football watching masses don't get nuance. That "as long as" qualifies as nuance for that crowd. Now he's tarred as a pedophile sympathizer for life, at least on the idiot side of the house.
By whom? Certainly not by you, that's clear. But nevertheless, in spite of the fact that you agree with him, you're willing to distance yourself from difficult arguments (e.g. the full implications of individual freedom of conscience and belief) for fear of bringing the disapproval of the ignorant on your own head.
Discretion is the better part of valor.
Quoth Falstaff, shortly before be was abjured by his king and left to die in penury.
I want to love RMS but he makes it really hard to do so.
Yes, it is hard. If virtue came easy, there wouldn't be a sinner in the world.
It's because of cowardice like yours that I admire Stallmann all the more. I, for one, welcome my quirky, bearded overlord....
... because he's right[*].
------------
[*] I mean to say he's right to let the logic - rather than prejudice - lead him. And he's right to discuss these things, no matter how unpopular they might be.
He's wrong on the details of this argument, though, because he hasn't considered a couple of critical points concerning the rights and property of others (necrophilia) and the nature of consent where children are concerned. Many countries have defined the age by which most humans are capable of knowing the implications of their choices. They do so explicitly to defend children from a situation in which they are led to agree to acts whose repercussions they cannot know. I know someone who had a 'consenting' sexual relationship from a very young age (8) and it scarred that person for life, causing (among other things) an inability to distinguish between love and sexuality, which led to a great deal of pain and suffering.
clisdue! I'm gonna fucking KILL you! I've done it before and I'll do it again! You're history, clisdue, I swear it!
Chairs,
Steve Ballmer.
Did the guy mention that he copyrighted his work? If he put it out there with nothing indicating that, there's an argument that he put it into the public domain....
On the contrary. The default proposition is that it IS copyrighted and that all rights are reserved. Under Common Law, anyway.
[A]bort [R]etrial [F]ail
If you set it for "total tickets" (higher=bad): you refuse to do things, add features etc, or you make it hard to contact IT to log a fault
If you set it for "time taken per ticket" (higher=bad): you end up pushing kludge solutions
If you set it for "user rated response" (higher=good): you end up blackmailing the end users to rate you 10/10 otherwise their emails/logs/dirt etc get published and sent to boss/wife/etc
So... 'user-rated response' it is, then.
Thanks!
Black holes don't actually suck anything in. Things just more like... fall in.
Well, can't we put up a sign or something? How many innocent gas clouds have to suffer needlessly from this preventable hazard? I mean, what does it say about us as a civilisation if our scientists just sit around watching while this tragedy occurs?
WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE HYDROGEN?!?
>unions in other jobs poor metrics can do have done worse and unions are big help to fix bad metrics.
Really?
Just wait for his newsletter. All will be explained. You'll find it fascinating.
When you use terminology like "MAFIAA" or tell them to go fuck themselves, whatever point you were trying to make just sounds ridiculous.
The tactics used by the media distribution cartels are actually quite similar in nature (albeit less violent) to early Mafia tactics. The analogy is an apt one. The fact that it's used to associate a despicable organisation with an outright illegal one is a pretty standard rhetorical trope.
Given the fact that these same organisations have conducted a concerted campaign to make their entire customer base feel like criminals, and given as well that they have a track record of ripping off the very artists you claim to sympathise with, I don't think a healthy 'Fuck you' is at all an inappropriate response.
If you can't engage in a rational argument that's garnished with a few rhetorical flourishes and an expletive or two, I'd recommend you never ever discuss anything of import with the irish, the French, the Scots (if you can find a true one), a goodly number of the British... or pretty much anyone from central Europe.
I'll end this with a smile and a word. As my Irish grandfather used to say:
Fuck you, you humourless cunt and have a beautiful fucking day. I hope the surgery to remove that giant stick up your ass isn't too painful. No, wait - I hope it is.
A knife has the ability to kill someone, that doesn't mean we should ban knives.
Perhaps, but we should absolutely ban leaving the knife unsheathed in the baby's crib.
Bear in mind that this software was first discovered because it was writing far too much data into the system log. If I understand the Android system correctly, any application at all could have accessed very detailed personal data simply by parsing the log.
Intention does matter.
That's true, and it seems that Carrier IQ actually did act in good faith.
That does not, however, justify negligence, which seems to be the real problem here.
[R]efuse it for long enough, and given the entitled "media should be free" attitude of the last 20 years.. Pretty soon, you should assume there will be no more high quality productions.
That's just not valid. People have demonstrated time and again that they are willing to pay for content. What they object to is DRM'ed, broken, zone-locked, un-saveable, unusable-on-any-other-device content. So, when the best (or only) alternative is bittorrent, that's what they use. But as soon as reputable players start offering a convenient, easy-to-use service (like Amazon, the App Store or iTunes), they flock to it en masse.
People hate commercials. People hate DRM. People hate being treated like criminals. People hate anything that stands between them and their enjoyment. But none of those statements mean that people do not ascribe value to the things that entertain them.
Nat is defiantly a solution.
Yes, but its defiance is actually part of the problem.
Your publisher example wouldn't be a problem if we were all using IPv6. In such a scenario, running out of addresses would be inconce- er, hard to conceive. Unfortunately, silly, awkward shims like NAT give hardware manufacturers the excuse they need to avoid moving to the new standard.
As to your fridge example, before you share your fridge's address with every other fridge in the neighbourhood, I'd recommend you study man-in-the-middle attacks a little more carefully.
This should be the sole focus of the Occupy movement: a law that makes it illegal to engage in any business with the private industry which you have recently helped regulate, for a period of 10 years.
Two problems with that idea:
You can't make immorality illegal, no matter how hard you try. The problem is cultural. The mantra that companies' sole priority is to increase shareholder value via any legal means necessary will inevitably lead to companies trying to affect the 'legal means' part of the equation.
I know whereof I speak, by the way. I live in a very small country, and am fairly often asked for expert advice on matters pertaining to technology policy by players on both sides of the field. I answer any request for information to the extent that I can. If it takes a lot of my time, I charge for it. I have only one condition: I refuse to change my advice, nor to hide my opinion, nor to serve one side differently from the other.
In one case, someone involved in litigation asked me to brief his legal team on the particulars of technology in this country. I said I would, but that he should be advised that, while I'd not repeat what was said in the meeting room, I would offer the same advice and information to anyone who asked. He didn't seem pleased with the idea, and never followed up on the request.
As long as profit is the only criterion for success in the US, you're going to have the problem of people gaming the system and congratulating themselves when they do. That has to stop. Competition is not about playing with the rules, it's about playing by them.
What you really need is a generation that says, 'There are some things that I simply will not do.' That won't be easy.
Troll? *sigh* Obviously the mods today can't take a joke. Maybe I should have added a big 'READ THIS IN MR. BURNS' VOICE' on top.....
Ah, fuck, who am I kidding. Microsoft's inevitably going to misuse this. Anyone would. Hell, you could hand me the big remote (that's how they do it, right? Giant remote control?) and I'd probably misuse it.
You need an economic disincentive to do so, besides "it pisses off consumers and we'll lose business". "Pulled apps are refunded" is a good disincentive - at the very least, they'd have to make a lot of money by pulling an app in order to use it. That's pretty unlikely.
MEGACORP: We want you to kill our competitor's app.
MICROSOFT: Ca't do that. We'd piss people off and lose revenue.
MEGACORP: How much revenue?
MICROSOFT: [Looks at spreadsheet.] Hmmm... about $20 million a year. Why?
MEGACORP: We want you to kill our competitor's app... for $25 million.
MICROSOFT: Done! [To Lackey:] Bring me The Remote.
I know I'll be modded down, but I have to say it: what they describe is already available in Powershell, where objects can be piped in search/filter functions.
Sure, and it's been possible in Perl (for example) forever:
use File::Slurp;
; /$multi_line_pattern/){
my $multi_line_pattern = join("", @ARGV);
my $text = read_file( 'filename' )
if ($text =~
# do something useful.
}
The only problem with the above is that it fails in anything other than trivial situations.
The issue isn't passing things through filters, it's doing so in a way that you don't have to write insanely devious and complex filters. This grep tool is still only at the design stage, so I'll not speculate about whether it actually succeeds at this goal or not.
This level of quality exists for almost anything you would care to buy. These items costs a bit more and they don't carry them at Walmart, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.
Congratulations, you've just discovered the Sam Vimes' Boots theory of wealth.
TL;DR: Only the rich can afford to save money.
This is a bit of a side question, but it begs to be asked: I've often wondered if there is a rep or senator that actually knows what the difference between "computer" and "CPU" without help from his staff.
Tragically, Herman Cain and Ross Perot are about as close as you're going to get. Apparently, something happens to geeks when they enter politics that reduces their cognitive functions to nil, resulting in their inability to do aught else besides sloganeering.
It can be the cause of stressing components past the design limits. If the original firmware limited tx power to 50% due to thermal design and the custom firmware ran it at 100% and components failed, whos fault is it? What if the charging circuit was software controlled and the custom firmware wasn't set correctly for the manufactures design and the battery exploded, killing the cute little lolcat sitting next to it?
Good points. But what we're missing here is the potential for a 3rd party after market, similar to VARs and PC support businesses, who offer value-added services under their own warranty.
With vendor-locked devices, such a market can't easily exist, especially if they're hounded out of business by $VENDOR's lawyers.
But it should exist. More to the point it absolutely should have the right to exist. Because of that, I'm 100% in support of the EFF on this campaign.
You can pretty well set your watch by adobe exploits. Get it together, guys...
You actually have several options: If you want it to run fast, set by exploits. If you want it to run slow, set by fixes.
Yep. I believe the Mayan calendar cycle is based on Adobe patches....
This is actually the kind of career building stuff one should leap at. What would you rather say in an interview for your next job: - I took this system that was falling apart and made it run like clockwork.. downtime and issue frequency went from "it's down again" to "been up all year" ..
- Yeah it was pretty good when I got there, and I maintained the status quo
I just spent a couple of years stabilising and formalising an online organisation's systems, and I've got to say I'm of two minds on this one.
First off, this kind of undertaking is neither for the inexperienced nor the faint of heart. I took the job as a labour of love. The organisation I work for provides a critical service to millions of people, so it really had to continue. It's been running in its current form since about 2004, so you can imagine how much cruft it accumulated over the years.
For the first year, I worked alone. During one four month period, I worked seven days a week (half-days on Sundays). In that time, I standardised, automated and documented most aspects of the operation. I installed online and off-site backup and instituted backup and recovery protocols. I installed remote management capabilities, so that I could deal with everything except catastrophic hardware failure without having to be physically present. I implemented proper user management, single sign-on to all critical resources, and access control for important data.
By the end of the first year, I had a promising trainee, and within a year of that I had a second assistant helping with software development.
Wherever possible, I DID NOT invent anything. I appropriated simple tools and worked in the smallest possible increments. And this is a critical lesson: For everything you do, make the cost of failure as small as possible. If you bring operations to a halt, you had better be able to get them going again immediately.
Things are significantly better than they were, but I just gave my notice, anyway. Upper management have made it clear they don't understand the resource requirements we have, and they've refused to commit to contract extensions for key staff members, including my assistant. I know that if I stay, it'll only end in tears.
Bottom line: Don't take this on unless you're experienced enough to be able to spot the traps and to know how to get past them. And when I say 'know' I don't mean, 'I've heard about this great approach' or 'I've seen this done before.' This kind of environment is no place to learn. And even if you are experienced enough and committed enough to handle it, you still need to know when to walk away.