I mean, there will be scam artists as long as people are uninformed enough to fall for a scam.
Internet is in more than one way a mirror of real life society. As long as there are people naive enough to disclose personal information, or lend money to people who'll never give it back, there will be people who do these kind of scams. The internet is not the place crooks are born, real life is. People seem to forget about that and mention internet as the source of all evil.
I almost completely agree that if you're dumb enough to fall for the scam, you deserve it.
I don't really share that opinion. Yes, people are too trusting far too often, but that doesn't mean that they earn getting ripped off.
The thing is that while now we may say "Oh, it's just some idiot who gave out his VISA number to a lot of scammers", who knows maybe we'll be the fools of the generation of scammers to come. I'd rather not have someone say "People who are too dumb deserve to scammed" then.
Our AD&D sessions were always fun, back when we had too much time and no girlfriends.
DM: "You see a hallway with three barrels"
Player #1: "I walk to the barrels and pry one open"
Player #2: "No wait, you idiot"
DM: "A witch comes out of the barrel and rolls dice is preparing to cast a spell"
Player #1: "I cast burning hands and grab her tits"
DM: sighs "The hideous hag slaps you and continues her casting"
Player #2: "I apologize for my companions behavior and hit her with my longsword"
Somewhere along the line we grew up and got a life, although we all fondly remember being half drunk and playing AD&D.
characters didn't fall in love, get betrayed, and learn important life lessons all in the space of 43 minutes
No, they take 42 episodes to find out they don't hate eachother, then another 42 episodes to find out whose baby it really is, and they get shot down after proposal for marriage.
And it wasn't, like so many shows, "something else" in space
No, it's soap opera in space.
I like farscape, but I'm not afraid to admit that it is a soap opera. The overly long drama between Aerin and Crighton gets old somewhere in season 3. The entire Scorpion joins them for 2 seasons only to be booted off the leviathan together with his limb-reattaching love slave and a nuclear bomb attached to his person was just overly dramatic. Never mind the fact that there's nympho on board ready to jump anything that even hints at being male, and occasionally female.
I believe that the songs name is "Everybody Hurts", and yes, it's the typical teeny-needs-a-good-cry-because-this-show-is-really -so-emotional song
whatever the ideas the writers come up with can sustain
I bet one of them is going "Oh, I know... Timetravel!!!" right now, provoking some sharks for when it's time to jump.
I agree with you for the most part. I enjoyed season 1 and 2 greatly, and even season 3. But the entire wormhole thing is getting old, and if this miniseries doesn't give the show a new angle I'm afraid it's going to jump the proverbial shark.
The more people that know its actually been leaked, the more that will go out on the net seeking it.
And 9 out of 10 people that go out seeking it and don't know where come back empty handed or with 4.3GB of pr0n. Yet, regular bittorrent users will have long found the torrent of their liking before it hits the papers.
It is because of things like this that we need technology like I2P and Freenet more than ever. Freenet seems to be stuck in a morass and making no progress but I2P is useful now and would have prevented Indymedia's servers from being taken down.
Until your government actually bans I2P and Freenet that is. Look at Type I and II remailers and how Canada outlawed them. As long as servers stay on land belonging to a government, it's hardly any wonder that they'll legislate what computers (those things that make up the Internet) can and cannot do.
Bruce Sterling's take on it: one of the few places the Average American is daily approached by criminals attempting to steal everything they own!
Oh, the internet is full of criminals, but so is our society. What happens on the internet is a reflection of what happens in our society. 419 scams are a reflection of the old "Can you borrow me $50, so I can pay insert believable excuse here which will bring me lots of money which I'll share with you"-skeem.
Sure, it's so stupid that you and I don't fall into that trap, but according to statistics 1 in 20 people do.
if we ourselves don't keep copyrighted material off file sharing systems, we're inviting Government to come and police what we, the geeks, have not self-policied.
True, but my problem with this statement is that the government currently isn't policing the Internet when it comes to copyright violations, but certain corporations are (eg RIAA). The government gets involved at the point where the corporation starts a lawsuit against the people who've violated copyright. Then again, this is all perhaps just a point of view.
I can sum up a few good reasons why the government should patrol the internet, and the most prominent one is perhaps pedophilia. Before I turn this thread into a "save the children" vs "too bad for the children", another example is fraud and scams.
Then again, when governments get involved up to this point in "controlling" the internet, we as people should do exactly what we should be doing in real life. Object if the government steps out of bounds! Unfortunatly, most people don't object, perhaps because of the "Save the Children" mentality or perhaps because people have a feeling of insecurity.
Nature abhors a vaccume, and The State abhors an anarchy.
In my country, certain speech is illegal. Racism for one, and denying the existance of the holocaust is another. Both of these I can live with, without any problem. Now, if I go online and rant that "race X is superior in all ways to race Y" just because I am under the guise of "anonimity", why should the government not be allowed to tell me that I'm doing something illegal?
Of course, all other speech in my country is free. I can happily proclaim that my prime minister is an idiot, openly speak my opinion about the gargantuan mistakes that my government has made in the past 4 years, and even protest against my own government as long as I don't start hurling objects at people. Some countries are not so lucky, and indeed have governments that will happily "seize power" over the internet and censor it so nothing "inappropriate" gets through.
But in that last case, Internet is again just a reflection of our society or rather societies, and the illusion that we all shared that internet was sovereign has long been smashed to pieces.
Witness the Great Firewall of China and the localized search features. It is scary because such governmental and corporate partnership indicates a possible rise of Global Fascism.
Global companies have no other choice than to comply. Considder for a moment that google wouldn't be available in China. Google has stockholders, and many of those will be not so happy to point out that google hasn't penetrated the Chinese search engine market.
So, google's staff has two options. Have a long talk about freedom of speech and the importance thereof with it's stockholders, or comply with chinese law and penetrate the chinese search engine market.
As a person it's easy to say "fuck the chinese government" and "to hell with censorship". As a corporation with stockholders it is not. While I wholeheartily agree with the fact that censorship is a Bad Thing, if the company I work for can make a lot of money complying by government law I will nod the traditional yes that the masses have nodded because it's either that or nothing.
Why was that guy fired? Did everyone else think the code look good. Or everyone else thought it sucked and he pushed it in anyway? Or he still thinks he hasn't done anything wrong?
The project was about 3 months overdue, mostly because of thread locking issues. Managers don't like the fact that perfectly working software suddenly doesn't perfectly work anymore. One of the problems in writing software for a living is that it's difficult for customers to understand that their software doesn't work because of thread locking issues. When a programmer tells the manager : "We've got an issue with threading and locking that is taking quite a bit of time debugging, but we can't seem to locate the exact problem, or we think we've located it but when we fix it new locking issues arise." the manager usually hears this: "We made a bug, the program locks up or crashes, we're too incompetent to fix it and we use big technical words to hide our incompetence."
If it's the former then it seems more a scapegoat thing, and you've lost someone who may have learnt one or two things more...
There is an old saying "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". Although the old piece of code was ugly and undocumented, it worked and there really wasn't any reason to replace it except for providing functionality that we might need in the future, but eventually didn't. It's difficult to defend someones code to a manager when it causes problems and didn't actually need replacing in the first place.
When programmers look at code, they look at design and functionality. When managers look at the product, they look at functionality and layout. That is the horrible truth of writing software.
Let me start out by saying that I'm not a kernel developer, as are most people on/., but I do get to maintain some C and C++ code on a regular basis.
A lot of the stuff in 2.6 may be useless to most people, but it's there because it's being maintained, is 99% stable and compatible with the current kernel ABI. You see, thread locking in general is a complicated matter, and I can only imagine how complicated all the locking code in the kernel is.
The RTL patch does some major adjustments to the internals of the linux kernel, and from what I gather has been just dumped into Linus' and co's mailbox. This is simply not done in ANY development project. Maintainers don't accept huge patches that change stuff everywhere on the belief that source code works. Hell, if there's a lock somewhere that isn't freed in some exceptional case your shiny new version of software X grinds to a halt often leaving end-users scratching their heads and developers gritting their teeth.
I was on a development project once where one of the coders had an inspirational idea and rewrote some shabby but working code into (what he called) clean and efficient code. It was a hefty patch and didn't break the program at first. But due to a bug in thread locking in "some" conditions, only 2 months later we found out some really nasty things about this "clean and efficient" code. Alas, it was too late to revert to our old model, and eventually spent a lot of time debugging and banging our heads against the wall. The guy was fired.
The point I'm trying to make is that you shouldn't judge people for being wary of accepting large globs of patches for software that already works great. Sure, linux can benefit a lot from this if it provides a foot in the door of telecom, but at the moment it's being used actively in many other areas. This article just seems bent on critisizing Linus for not including something because he believes there may be issues.
Most IT guys end up shoved into a corner of the server room with a bundle of CAT5 running right overhead and a shelf of backup tapes right behind the pile of old PC carcases on the floor.
You've just described my first job in IT down to the pc carcases on the floor.
a: forgot their passwords
I'll reset it right away, Miss.
b: broke their machines
I'm sure that dent was already there sir, let me take this one and see what's wrong with it, Sir
c: need you to come "right now"
No problem, I'll be there ASAP
d: introduced a trojan
I'm sure that all those popups don't come from surfing to porn, Sir. After all, it is against company policy.
yeah, always smile...people like that.... NOBODY trusts an unhappy IT guy.
Dumb user #23 : "Yeah, those nasty IT people are always up to no good. Why last week they complained when I sent all my scanned family albums to 200 of my closest friends and choked the mailserver. Who are they to tell me what I can and can't do in my e-mail?"
Dumb user #5 : "That IT guy seems to be cleaning his shotgun again. He never smiles. Seems like he could snap if I tell him that I've downloaded this pr0ndialer.exe again"
One reason that I'm not in IT is beause of the people
Why thank you, I try hard. I'm not in management, although I've had to "manage" a lot of situations (read: take the blame if something goes wrong, even if it isn't directly your fault). Considder this reply from the point of view of a geek/techie who takes a lot of crap from day to day.
1. They get paid a LOT more than minimum wage.
Not true in my case. I make little over minimum, and the people that run behind garbage trucks for 3 years make more than I do, and get healthcare and insurance benefits that I don't.
2. They usually get to work in a climate controlled office.
If by climate controlled you mean freezing in the winter and tropical in the summer, you've got this one right. Our heating is either broken during winter, or during the summer we get to sweat it out because airco is something invented to keep employees nagging.
3. They usually get to sit down.
Or scale a roof to adjust a wavelan antenna that should've been obsoleted years ago, or lie on your back in a basement about a two feet high pulling cables in the near dark. Oh, I get to sit most of the time, but some days I get to do stuff I'm pretty sure I'm not covered by insurance to do.
4. They generally don't have to punch a time clock.
True, but we have more than enough overtime every week to make people realize that the installation of a time clock would cost them more because they'd actually have to pay us or give us extra days off.
I'm not dissatisfied by my job, although I do emphasize the negative aspects from time to time. From time to time you end up talking to friends about their salaries, and you come to the conclusion that they make about 1.5 times of what you earn, and they don't get to do some of the crazy stuff you get to do like scaling a roof, or wiring a building from a basement just high enough to hide a human body.
A friend of mine earns 1.5 times what I earn just for clicking on F*CKING CHECKBOXES, and she's got a bloody manual to cover in what order she needs to click them and what possible errors can happen if she clicks the wrong one. She has trouble installing windows (which is quite easy), but she sure knows how to click checkboxes. She gets to wear the title "consultant", but has no redeeming skills and has the same college degree as I do.
Yeah, we IT'ers are all a bunch of complaining bastards and spoiled brats because we all believed that we could be good in something and got suckered into doing all that for much less than most people earn.
Mod this flamebait, I don't care. There are others who share these kind of experiences and will gladly tell you their own horrors.
slackware is considering dropping gnome support, but this isn't some kind of mass migration away from GNOME
It's the first one to officially say "It's too much work to maintain.". This is the kind of talk that easily starts snowball effects. Managers pick up on the news, ask their package monkeys if it is true, and only one of them has to say "Yeah, it's a lot of work, but it gives the user a choice" to make it worth considdering to drop gnome.
look at what Novell & Sun base their linux desktops on
Novell has a vested interest in using gnome, or rather Evolution. It's the ideal companion for their Open Exchange, but mind you that's what they're selling when they're not pushing eDirectory to their customers. Don't get me wrong, I think it's cool that Novell is investing in open source, it's just that they'd much rather sell expensive closed solutions than open source ones. But I'm diverting from the topic at hand.
My personal opinion on this matter is still that gnome is way to much work to compile yourself (manually, not gentoo style). It's a regular dependency nightmare as most LFS'ers know. I switched to debian a couple of years ago and they do a pretty neat job of having a functional gnome in their distribution.
Regarding slackware, if Patrick Volkerding ever stops, one of the few last of the die hard linux distributions will go away. If the workload becomes to high because of gnome taking a week to be done properly, I can't blame him for dropping it. Most people who use slack don't bother with gnome anyway, and those that do use dropline gnome.
We have a saying at our workplace: those who had a positive learning experience with slackware are the ones who can solve problems. The reason for that isn't that slackware is riddled with bugs (which it isn't), but that those are usually the kind of people who when they first learned linux got their hands dirty in most configuration files to get their system to do what they wanted it to do.
While I haven't used slack in quite a while now, everytime I see slackware mentioned on slashdot it takes me back a few years and brings a smile on my face.
Some PR people have taken game journalists to strip clubs and on some occasions, purchased prostitutes for them.
Son of a... Get into IT they said... See the world they said... All I ever got from a PR person is a dirty look when I told him it was a bad idea to put all his contacts in the To: header of his mail.
Has this site shifted to a newbie-oriented focus or something?
That's the reason I blocked out Ask Slashdot. "I'm looking for software that will let me execute jobs at regular intervals, but can't seem to find it. I want my computer to emit a loud beep every 20 minutes so that my boss thinks I'm actually working on code while I'm really reading slashdot. What are these manpages and HOWTOs everyone keeps shouting about?"
Maybe I miss something interesting every once in a while, but I save on the frustration of seeing the new users ask for droolproof paper instructions on setting up samba.
Now it's "Total Dummies Guide To Turning Your Computer On" and "Choose Your Own Adventure" titles.
You forgot "Blondes guide to breathing" and "Fixing computers with strange tools: the screwdriver explained". I commented on yesterdays book revision that hardly any books get the thumbs down signal. I'd actually give a book like this a thumbs down signal and feed it to the lions like the romans of old used to do with christians.
It's not that this sort of book shouldn't exist IMHO, because there is definatly demand for these kind of books for network enthusiasts, but honestly most people here (should) know how TCP/IP works in general, and a little in depth material (eg. firewalling, GRE, QOS,...) would be more welcome every now and then.
Anyone serious about networking will go for a book that'll teach you these things without having to refer to a networking elephant or use "networking clouds".
Odom starts by defining a network in terms of its constituent elements, and goes on to explain how three blind guys -- the Server Guy, the Cabling Guy, and the Network Guy -- perceive the Network 'Elephant.'
So three blind guys, a server-administrator, a cablelayer and a network-administrator go into this bar, and there's this elephant sitting there with a UTP socket in it's snout...
Companies now have to "rewrite their applications to prevent exploits" because of a security flaw in Microsoft's software? Would not it be simpler and easier for Microsoft's customers for Microsoft to fix the flaw?
Not jumping to the defense of MS here, as I have no particular love for them, but most OSS that has a nasty bug always comes with a workaround so admins can secure their systems until their distribution/compiler/monkey makes another package available.
Let's say the fix is easy and only requires say, three hours to recode and test......that is how many hours of lost productivity to the world's GDP? 8.7 Million hours of lost productivity!
Let's say you have 20 unix machines on which you have to distribute an RPM, or log into and apt-get upgrade, or compile from source. You're spending some time on those machines as well if a security flaw is detected.
The trick is to create an agreement with your customer where you can bill the time you spend upgrading/patching to the end-customer. It's a practice that's quite common in consultancy, and the customer usually likes the idea that some scriptkiddy can't disturb their business. The small cost of the upgrade is usually not a concern to companies compared to the possible cost of a defaced website or the recovery of a deleted database.
so many google features, why no porn.google.com?:o(
one word: usenet
alt.binaries.*.erotica.* is the biggest source of fresh porn you can imagine (even if you have a big imagination). Yes, it's got spam too, but if you don't like that try your luck on any p2p network (type your favourite female/male body part in the search box and instant entertainment)
Internet is the biggest provider of adult entertainment if you ask me.
but what does it do for me? If I'm intrested in a book I go to amazon and a few other shops if I don't find it there. They have this search box on amazon, which is handy for finding what I need. Kind of like google, only on the site itself and on their database itself showing me how much they still have in stock, etc.
I don't know, it just seems so reduntant to be able to do this on google as well now.
I'm wondering if there ever was a book review on slashdot that had as a title "Don't buy this, stay clear, vaporware". I know that the general intention of book reviews is to recommend good books to others, but what about the really bad ones? Not the obvious bad ones like "Teach yourself linux in 25 minutes" or "Cooking with Penguins".
It's just that I've never seen someone say something negative in the first paragraph of the article. It just seems like authors registered a slashdot account and started promoting their book
Creating a postgresql user who has the ability to create databases makes that user a superuser of ALL databases.
Not jumping to the defense of postgresql or anything (although I do have to use it quite frequently), by why would want to give a user permission to create a database anyway? Most hosting companies will provide you with one database, and that's it. If you need another one, you pay extra.
Also, most web applications are not written to take advantage of features such as stored procedures.
So instead of stuffing their database logic where it belongs they write complicated "sql libraries" that are a pain in the behind, riddled with bugs, and eventually just make your code more complicated.
I've been involved in a couple of projects where I had to maintain other peoples code, and I've seen bad code, really bad code, and really really bad code when it comes to databases. One project involved a database that was supposed to keep track of visa clearing, and for each step that happened in the clearing process (there were 3 if I remember correctly) a log had to be kept in the database. The original developer had a good table design but the library that did all the logging sucked bad. Somewhere he forgot to mark a 'status' field as false and in certain conditions the shit really hit the fan (read: some customers got billed twice, or too much).
If he had taken the time to write either stored procedures for that table (over the course of the 3 years I ran that project, the table itself never needed to be altered) his code wouldn't have been such a mess, and the modifications to that project wouldn't have taken so long.
This is probably partly because the developers don't understand them, and partly because MySQL is so common already.
Let's not forget the most important factor in webdevelopment projects: cost. Customers want results, and they want them fast and cheap. Having to explain to a customer that you need to design a solid database before you can write a letter of code alone is more than enough excuse for that customer to go to another developer who claims he doesn't spend that much time on his database.
Even worse, to most customers application development couldn't possibly be more complicated than Visual Basic. Webprogramming can hardly be any more difficult than drawing boxes on your screen and the program you draw those boxes in does most of the work. Explaining to people with that attitude that a solid database design will save them possible problems in the future is like banging your head against a brick wall. The wall doesn't understand what you're trying to do, and you're left with a headache at the end of the day.
How about the average broadband connection having an upstream quota cap. 1.5GB of upstream traffic a month for me, and not a byte more unless I "contribute" a generous amount to my ISP.
This is still one of the major issues for me when it comes to ISPs. If I would download something popular from bittorrent or edonkey, 1.5GB is absolutely nothing. So the only solution would be if I were to firewall incoming connection and be a leech, or put QOS on all traffic going out, limiting it to 0.5K/s.
This all is of course hypothetically speaking...;)
An addiction is when your "addiction" creates negative consequences in daily life.
I have a friend with a brother who's got what you could call a gaming addiction. College didn't intrest him very much, he's already skipped out (and got fired of) a couple of jobs, and finally got his lazy ass kicked off of social security for not showing up at mandatory work courses.
The truth about his case is that when he was in high school, the problem wasn't that bad for him. He went to school, and in the evening he played games, like any normal teenager. When he was faced with the choice of going to college or getting a job, he opted out and simply fired up counterstrike.
He's been doing that for the past couple of YEARS now, and there is no sign of improvement.
If you play for 13 hours straight, eating while you play over a saturday night because nothing better is going on or you're going through a social life slump, that is not an addiction.
For many people the social slump is an excellent reason for escaping into video games, and for a few it's a good reason to not want to come out of their virtual world. I'll be the last one to say that playing video games when you have nothing better to do is going to affect your personal life, as I play a lot of games during those "oh dear, everyone has something to do except for me"-saturdays.
I'm 26 and it's been nearly three months with two consecutive (sp?) days that I haven't played a videogame. It helps me relax when I've had a stressful day at work and I can fire up some FPS to kill something, or I can steal cars in GTA and simply drive over pedestrians. It's simply an a way for me to vent some steam, but I guess in a way it's also an escape from the hectic daily life (stress from work, family problems, or boredom of the slump on those odd saturdays).
Some people sit in front of their TV during the evening (actually most people do), some play games... As long as it doesn't affect your life in such a drastic way that you're alienating from the world around you, who cares...
Slashdot Mirror
Internet is in more than one way a mirror of real life society. As long as there are people naive enough to disclose personal information, or lend money to people who'll never give it back, there will be people who do these kind of scams. The internet is not the place crooks are born, real life is. People seem to forget about that and mention internet as the source of all evil.
I don't really share that opinion. Yes, people are too trusting far too often, but that doesn't mean that they earn getting ripped off.
The thing is that while now we may say "Oh, it's just some idiot who gave out his VISA number to a lot of scammers", who knows maybe we'll be the fools of the generation of scammers to come. I'd rather not have someone say "People who are too dumb deserve to scammed" then.
Our AD&D sessions were always fun, back when we had too much time and no girlfriends.
Somewhere along the line we grew up and got a life, although we all fondly remember being half drunk and playing AD&D.
No, they take 42 episodes to find out they don't hate eachother, then another 42 episodes to find out whose baby it really is, and they get shot down after proposal for marriage.
And it wasn't, like so many shows, "something else" in spaceNo, it's soap opera in space.
I like farscape, but I'm not afraid to admit that it is a soap opera. The overly long drama between Aerin and Crighton gets old somewhere in season 3. The entire Scorpion joins them for 2 seasons only to be booted off the leviathan together with his limb-reattaching love slave and a nuclear bomb attached to his person was just overly dramatic. Never mind the fact that there's nympho on board ready to jump anything that even hints at being male, and occasionally female.
I believe that the songs name is "Everybody Hurts", and yes, it's the typical teeny-needs-a-good-cry-because-this-show-is-really -so-emotional song
I bet one of them is going "Oh, I know... Timetravel!!!" right now, provoking some sharks for when it's time to jump.
I agree with you for the most part. I enjoyed season 1 and 2 greatly, and even season 3. But the entire wormhole thing is getting old, and if this miniseries doesn't give the show a new angle I'm afraid it's going to jump the proverbial shark.
And 9 out of 10 people that go out seeking it and don't know where come back empty handed or with 4.3GB of pr0n. Yet, regular bittorrent users will have long found the torrent of their liking before it hits the papers.
Until your government actually bans I2P and Freenet that is. Look at Type I and II remailers and how Canada outlawed them. As long as servers stay on land belonging to a government, it's hardly any wonder that they'll legislate what computers (those things that make up the Internet) can and cannot do.
Oh, the internet is full of criminals, but so is our society. What happens on the internet is a reflection of what happens in our society. 419 scams are a reflection of the old "Can you borrow me $50, so I can pay insert believable excuse here which will bring me lots of money which I'll share with you"-skeem.
Sure, it's so stupid that you and I don't fall into that trap, but according to statistics 1 in 20 people do.
True, but my problem with this statement is that the government currently isn't policing the Internet when it comes to copyright violations, but certain corporations are (eg RIAA). The government gets involved at the point where the corporation starts a lawsuit against the people who've violated copyright. Then again, this is all perhaps just a point of view.
I can sum up a few good reasons why the government should patrol the internet, and the most prominent one is perhaps pedophilia. Before I turn this thread into a "save the children" vs "too bad for the children", another example is fraud and scams.
Then again, when governments get involved up to this point in "controlling" the internet, we as people should do exactly what we should be doing in real life. Object if the government steps out of bounds! Unfortunatly, most people don't object, perhaps because of the "Save the Children" mentality or perhaps because people have a feeling of insecurity.
In my country, certain speech is illegal. Racism for one, and denying the existance of the holocaust is another. Both of these I can live with, without any problem. Now, if I go online and rant that "race X is superior in all ways to race Y" just because I am under the guise of "anonimity", why should the government not be allowed to tell me that I'm doing something illegal?
Of course, all other speech in my country is free. I can happily proclaim that my prime minister is an idiot, openly speak my opinion about the gargantuan mistakes that my government has made in the past 4 years, and even protest against my own government as long as I don't start hurling objects at people. Some countries are not so lucky, and indeed have governments that will happily "seize power" over the internet and censor it so nothing "inappropriate" gets through.
But in that last case, Internet is again just a reflection of our society or rather societies, and the illusion that we all shared that internet was sovereign has long been smashed to pieces.
Global companies have no other choice than to comply. Considder for a moment that google wouldn't be available in China. Google has stockholders, and many of those will be not so happy to point out that google hasn't penetrated the Chinese search engine market.
So, google's staff has two options. Have a long talk about freedom of speech and the importance thereof with it's stockholders, or comply with chinese law and penetrate the chinese search engine market.
As a person it's easy to say "fuck the chinese government" and "to hell with censorship". As a corporation with stockholders it is not. While I wholeheartily agree with the fact that censorship is a Bad Thing, if the company I work for can make a lot of money complying by government law I will nod the traditional yes that the masses have nodded because it's either that or nothing.
The project was about 3 months overdue, mostly because of thread locking issues. Managers don't like the fact that perfectly working software suddenly doesn't perfectly work anymore. One of the problems in writing software for a living is that it's difficult for customers to understand that their software doesn't work because of thread locking issues. When a programmer tells the manager : "We've got an issue with threading and locking that is taking quite a bit of time debugging, but we can't seem to locate the exact problem, or we think we've located it but when we fix it new locking issues arise." the manager usually hears this: "We made a bug, the program locks up or crashes, we're too incompetent to fix it and we use big technical words to hide our incompetence."
There is an old saying "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". Although the old piece of code was ugly and undocumented, it worked and there really wasn't any reason to replace it except for providing functionality that we might need in the future, but eventually didn't. It's difficult to defend someones code to a manager when it causes problems and didn't actually need replacing in the first place.
When programmers look at code, they look at design and functionality. When managers look at the product, they look at functionality and layout. That is the horrible truth of writing software.
Let me start out by saying that I'm not a kernel developer, as are most people on /., but I do get to maintain some C and C++ code on a regular basis.
A lot of the stuff in 2.6 may be useless to most people, but it's there because it's being maintained, is 99% stable and compatible with the current kernel ABI. You see, thread locking in general is a complicated matter, and I can only imagine how complicated all the locking code in the kernel is.
The RTL patch does some major adjustments to the internals of the linux kernel, and from what I gather has been just dumped into Linus' and co's mailbox. This is simply not done in ANY development project. Maintainers don't accept huge patches that change stuff everywhere on the belief that source code works. Hell, if there's a lock somewhere that isn't freed in some exceptional case your shiny new version of software X grinds to a halt often leaving end-users scratching their heads and developers gritting their teeth.
I was on a development project once where one of the coders had an inspirational idea and rewrote some shabby but working code into (what he called) clean and efficient code. It was a hefty patch and didn't break the program at first. But due to a bug in thread locking in "some" conditions, only 2 months later we found out some really nasty things about this "clean and efficient" code. Alas, it was too late to revert to our old model, and eventually spent a lot of time debugging and banging our heads against the wall. The guy was fired.
The point I'm trying to make is that you shouldn't judge people for being wary of accepting large globs of patches for software that already works great. Sure, linux can benefit a lot from this if it provides a foot in the door of telecom, but at the moment it's being used actively in many other areas. This article just seems bent on critisizing Linus for not including something because he believes there may be issues.
You've just described my first job in IT down to the pc carcases on the floor.
I'll reset it right away, Miss.
I'm sure that dent was already there sir, let me take this one and see what's wrong with it, Sir
No problem, I'll be there ASAP
I'm sure that all those popups don't come from surfing to porn, Sir. After all, it is against company policy.
Dumb user #23 : "Yeah, those nasty IT people are always up to no good. Why last week they complained when I sent all my scanned family albums to 200 of my closest friends and choked the mailserver. Who are they to tell me what I can and can't do in my e-mail?"
Dumb user #5 : "That IT guy seems to be cleaning his shotgun again. He never smiles. Seems like he could snap if I tell him that I've downloaded this pr0ndialer.exe again"
Why thank you, I try hard. I'm not in management, although I've had to "manage" a lot of situations (read: take the blame if something goes wrong, even if it isn't directly your fault). Considder this reply from the point of view of a geek/techie who takes a lot of crap from day to day.
Not true in my case. I make little over minimum, and the people that run behind garbage trucks for 3 years make more than I do, and get healthcare and insurance benefits that I don't.
If by climate controlled you mean freezing in the winter and tropical in the summer, you've got this one right. Our heating is either broken during winter, or during the summer we get to sweat it out because airco is something invented to keep employees nagging.
Or scale a roof to adjust a wavelan antenna that should've been obsoleted years ago, or lie on your back in a basement about a two feet high pulling cables in the near dark. Oh, I get to sit most of the time, but some days I get to do stuff I'm pretty sure I'm not covered by insurance to do.
True, but we have more than enough overtime every week to make people realize that the installation of a time clock would cost them more because they'd actually have to pay us or give us extra days off.
I'm not dissatisfied by my job, although I do emphasize the negative aspects from time to time. From time to time you end up talking to friends about their salaries, and you come to the conclusion that they make about 1.5 times of what you earn, and they don't get to do some of the crazy stuff you get to do like scaling a roof, or wiring a building from a basement just high enough to hide a human body.
A friend of mine earns 1.5 times what I earn just for clicking on F*CKING CHECKBOXES, and she's got a bloody manual to cover in what order she needs to click them and what possible errors can happen if she clicks the wrong one. She has trouble installing windows (which is quite easy), but she sure knows how to click checkboxes. She gets to wear the title "consultant", but has no redeeming skills and has the same college degree as I do.
Yeah, we IT'ers are all a bunch of complaining bastards and spoiled brats because we all believed that we could be good in something and got suckered into doing all that for much less than most people earn.
Mod this flamebait, I don't care. There are others who share these kind of experiences and will gladly tell you their own horrors.
It's the first one to officially say "It's too much work to maintain.". This is the kind of talk that easily starts snowball effects. Managers pick up on the news, ask their package monkeys if it is true, and only one of them has to say "Yeah, it's a lot of work, but it gives the user a choice" to make it worth considdering to drop gnome.
Novell has a vested interest in using gnome, or rather Evolution. It's the ideal companion for their Open Exchange, but mind you that's what they're selling when they're not pushing eDirectory to their customers. Don't get me wrong, I think it's cool that Novell is investing in open source, it's just that they'd much rather sell expensive closed solutions than open source ones. But I'm diverting from the topic at hand.
My personal opinion on this matter is still that gnome is way to much work to compile yourself (manually, not gentoo style). It's a regular dependency nightmare as most LFS'ers know. I switched to debian a couple of years ago and they do a pretty neat job of having a functional gnome in their distribution.
Regarding slackware, if Patrick Volkerding ever stops, one of the few last of the die hard linux distributions will go away. If the workload becomes to high because of gnome taking a week to be done properly, I can't blame him for dropping it. Most people who use slack don't bother with gnome anyway, and those that do use dropline gnome.
We have a saying at our workplace: those who had a positive learning experience with slackware are the ones who can solve problems. The reason for that isn't that slackware is riddled with bugs (which it isn't), but that those are usually the kind of people who when they first learned linux got their hands dirty in most configuration files to get their system to do what they wanted it to do.
While I haven't used slack in quite a while now, everytime I see slackware mentioned on slashdot it takes me back a few years and brings a smile on my face.
Son of a... Get into IT they said... See the world they said... All I ever got from a PR person is a dirty look when I told him it was a bad idea to put all his contacts in the To: header of his mail.
Not according to this.
I'm sorry, I got the point you were trying to make, just attempted to be funny
That's the reason I blocked out Ask Slashdot.
"I'm looking for software that will let me execute jobs at regular intervals, but can't seem to find it. I want my computer to emit a loud beep every 20 minutes so that my boss thinks I'm actually working on code while I'm really reading slashdot. What are these manpages and HOWTOs everyone keeps shouting about?"
Maybe I miss something interesting every once in a while, but I save on the frustration of seeing the new users ask for droolproof paper instructions on setting up samba.
You forgot "Blondes guide to breathing" and "Fixing computers with strange tools: the screwdriver explained". I commented on yesterdays book revision that hardly any books get the thumbs down signal. I'd actually give a book like this a thumbs down signal and feed it to the lions like the romans of old used to do with christians.
It's not that this sort of book shouldn't exist IMHO, because there is definatly demand for these kind of books for network enthusiasts, but honestly most people here (should) know how TCP/IP works in general, and a little in depth material (eg. firewalling, GRE, QOS, ...) would be more welcome every now and then.
Anyone serious about networking will go for a book that'll teach you these things without having to refer to a networking elephant or use "networking clouds".
So three blind guys, a server-administrator, a cablelayer and a network-administrator go into this bar, and there's this elephant sitting there with a UTP socket in it's snout...
I'm sorry, I just couldn't resist
Not jumping to the defense of MS here, as I have no particular love for them, but most OSS that has a nasty bug always comes with a workaround so admins can secure their systems until their distribution/compiler/monkey makes another package available.
Let's say you have 20 unix machines on which you have to distribute an RPM, or log into and apt-get upgrade, or compile from source. You're spending some time on those machines as well if a security flaw is detected.
The trick is to create an agreement with your customer where you can bill the time you spend upgrading/patching to the end-customer. It's a practice that's quite common in consultancy, and the customer usually likes the idea that some scriptkiddy can't disturb their business. The small cost of the upgrade is usually not a concern to companies compared to the possible cost of a defaced website or the recovery of a deleted database.
one word: usenet
alt.binaries.*.erotica.* is the biggest source of fresh porn you can imagine (even if you have a big imagination). Yes, it's got spam too, but if you don't like that try your luck on any p2p network (type your favourite female/male body part in the search box and instant entertainment)
Internet is the biggest provider of adult entertainment if you ask me.
but what does it do for me? If I'm intrested in a book I go to amazon and a few other shops if I don't find it there. They have this search box on amazon, which is handy for finding what I need. Kind of like google, only on the site itself and on their database itself showing me how much they still have in stock, etc.
I don't know, it just seems so reduntant to be able to do this on google as well now.
I'm wondering if there ever was a book review on slashdot that had as a title "Don't buy this, stay clear, vaporware". I know that the general intention of book reviews is to recommend good books to others, but what about the really bad ones? Not the obvious bad ones like "Teach yourself linux in 25 minutes" or "Cooking with Penguins".
It's just that I've never seen someone say something negative in the first paragraph of the article. It just seems like authors registered a slashdot account and started promoting their book
Not jumping to the defense of postgresql or anything (although I do have to use it quite frequently), by why would want to give a user permission to create a database anyway? Most hosting companies will provide you with one database, and that's it. If you need another one, you pay extra.
So instead of stuffing their database logic where it belongs they write complicated "sql libraries" that are a pain in the behind, riddled with bugs, and eventually just make your code more complicated.
I've been involved in a couple of projects where I had to maintain other peoples code, and I've seen bad code, really bad code, and really really bad code when it comes to databases. One project involved a database that was supposed to keep track of visa clearing, and for each step that happened in the clearing process (there were 3 if I remember correctly) a log had to be kept in the database. The original developer had a good table design but the library that did all the logging sucked bad. Somewhere he forgot to mark a 'status' field as false and in certain conditions the shit really hit the fan (read: some customers got billed twice, or too much).
If he had taken the time to write either stored procedures for that table (over the course of the 3 years I ran that project, the table itself never needed to be altered) his code wouldn't have been such a mess, and the modifications to that project wouldn't have taken so long.
Let's not forget the most important factor in webdevelopment projects: cost. Customers want results, and they want them fast and cheap. Having to explain to a customer that you need to design a solid database before you can write a letter of code alone is more than enough excuse for that customer to go to another developer who claims he doesn't spend that much time on his database.
Even worse, to most customers application development couldn't possibly be more complicated than Visual Basic. Webprogramming can hardly be any more difficult than drawing boxes on your screen and the program you draw those boxes in does most of the work. Explaining to people with that attitude that a solid database design will save them possible problems in the future is like banging your head against a brick wall. The wall doesn't understand what you're trying to do, and you're left with a headache at the end of the day.
How about the average broadband connection having an upstream quota cap. 1.5GB of upstream traffic a month for me, and not a byte more unless I "contribute" a generous amount to my ISP.
This is still one of the major issues for me when it comes to ISPs. If I would download something popular from bittorrent or edonkey, 1.5GB is absolutely nothing. So the only solution would be if I were to firewall incoming connection and be a leech, or put QOS on all traffic going out, limiting it to 0.5K/s.
This all is of course hypothetically speaking... ;)
I have a friend with a brother who's got what you could call a gaming addiction. College didn't intrest him very much, he's already skipped out (and got fired of) a couple of jobs, and finally got his lazy ass kicked off of social security for not showing up at mandatory work courses.
The truth about his case is that when he was in high school, the problem wasn't that bad for him. He went to school, and in the evening he played games, like any normal teenager. When he was faced with the choice of going to college or getting a job, he opted out and simply fired up counterstrike.
He's been doing that for the past couple of YEARS now, and there is no sign of improvement.
For many people the social slump is an excellent reason for escaping into video games, and for a few it's a good reason to not want to come out of their virtual world. I'll be the last one to say that playing video games when you have nothing better to do is going to affect your personal life, as I play a lot of games during those "oh dear, everyone has something to do except for me"-saturdays.
I'm 26 and it's been nearly three months with two consecutive (sp?) days that I haven't played a videogame. It helps me relax when I've had a stressful day at work and I can fire up some FPS to kill something, or I can steal cars in GTA and simply drive over pedestrians. It's simply an a way for me to vent some steam, but I guess in a way it's also an escape from the hectic daily life (stress from work, family problems, or boredom of the slump on those odd saturdays).
Some people sit in front of their TV during the evening (actually most people do), some play games... As long as it doesn't affect your life in such a drastic way that you're alienating from the world around you, who cares...
It was a winnebago, but you might be thinking of Space Quest 5. Roger Wilco was captain of a garbage ship in that one.
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