A recent event made me realize just how great the man pages are. My father was visiting for Christmas, we were in the computer room together, playing with hardware, swapping stories and playing games. He isn't new to the computer scene, but its not his life either. Until 3 years ago, he used a C64 only. Since that point, he's had a Win machine. He has reached the point that he can install Win98, and fix most of the common problems for his friends. He even builds machines himself. He's never used Linux before though, and he calls me for more in depth technical questions.
So I showed him Linux. He thought the GUI was great (kde) but when I dropped to the CLI and told him I had more power there, he looked at me and said, "If had to learn to use that, your mother would kill me. I don't have the time.".
Alright.. I could understand that, but then I pulled up a man page... Immediately he blurts out "Is that a help file??" He sounds astonished. I explain that most standard *nix applications have man pages. He was VERY impressed and started going on about how much he "wished MS would have documentation that was 1/4 that extensive and clear."
You are all going to really regret having bought all that food and alchohol when you realize you forgot the toilet paper. You'll need those shovels to fight over that last square...
BTW, Hemos, I believe drinking distilled water is actually bad for you. Since it doesn't have the standard salts and minerals present in drinking water, it actually removes salts and minerals from your body as it passes through, and leaves you even worse off. Distilled water is for use in clothing irons and household use.
I've noticed a lot of people saying to skip the DVD drive since these are production machines, not there for gaming/movie watching, and DVD support under linux isn't great yet. I agreed with this for a while, then had a thought. Perhaps the Army is being forward thinking here. DVD writer support is already in the works, or exists IIRC. No, its not cheap, yet.
Just like CD, DVD will become a very viable method of storing large volumes of data. In that case, these machines won't have to be retrofitted for DVD at a later point. Given the current price of a 10x DVD drive with 40x CD-Rom support, as opposed to a plain 50x 40x CD-Rom, there isn't much reason they shouldn't go ahead and get it now as part of the package deal, have it installed, and ready to go when the need it in a year or two.
Honestly, the idea that the US Army would use Slashdot for their recommendations is silly. It gives me a pretty good twinge of fear about our national security.
This really depends on the project and the security clearance of the project. My younger brother's best friend, a 22 yr old Airman 1st Class in the USAF, regularly makes hardware and software recommendations to senior officers. Many times, he asks me for advice on different systems, configurations, and possibilities. Someone in his position could very easily ask for advice from/. . However, none of the recommendations he makes deal with systems that are "mission critical". "Mission critical" systems will have more funding and in turn, also have a much higher security clearance.
I do agree with other portions of your post however. From the sounds of it, they want a set of machines to do number crunching for them. Why are they buying new machines if they already have some SGIs? It might make sense to add a couple new machines add to the power of a collection of older SGIs.
I was thinking more along the lines of setting up web pages with meta-tags that consisted of an entire dictionary's worth of words, plus a common names book's worth of words. Then register it with every major search engine on the planet.
Or perhaps we should just copyright the word 'financial' and sue Transasia for using it in the name Leonardo Financial.
I've noticed that several people are already complaining about the fact that Marshall was a member of the military.
I keep getting this feeling that a lot of you believe that being a member of the military automatically makes you a violent person who likes to kill.
There are very few jobs in this world where the employee enjoys EVERY SINGLE task that they have to perform. The same is true of the military. If you took a poll of military people, and asked them how many look forward to war and killing people, I'll bet less that 1% answer that they want war and death.
Being Pro-military in the USA does not mean you are Pro-war, or even Pro-conflict. It means you are Pro-defense, and often Pro-peace.
Does the bully quit picking picking on the little guy because the little guy 'wants to talk about it'? Not likely. He will quit when someone with equal power and strength, or even less power and strength but more courage, stands up to him.
To say that you could like Marshall, except that he was a 'military man' is just dumb. The fact that he was a high ranking member of the military does not mean he was a murderer, a war-monger, hateful, or violent. It does mean he believed in defending what you believed to be right. The pen is not always mightier than the sword and sometimes physical power is required for defence as a last resort.
Accourding to http://www.SecureTax.com, SecureTax has been bought out by Intuit. They now re-direct you to the online version of TurboTax. As others have posted, in past years, TurboTax Online required that you be running either Windows or Mac. I haven't tried this out to see if the same still applies this year.
In case you find Cosworth's response to your ignorant and uninformed statement inflamatory, let me explain his situation to you in a more rational manner.
He claims having to set up X 70 times. In a major institution, I would assume this to be the tip of the iceburg. But lets assume he sets up X on 70 machines. It takes him 10 extra minutes to configure X on each of those machines.
70 x 10 = 700 minutes to set up X 60 x 8 = 480 minutes in the average work day 700/480 = 1.46 work days.
Thats right, it takes 1 1/2 extra days just to set up X with optimal settings. If you don't work, then you don't realize how much very important time that can be. Especially when you have deadlines to meet. As for setting up and optimally configuring X on your own box, that can be done after work hours, on your own time. But because someone added a nice feature to their own PC is no reason to say they should have to add the same features to every PC the institution owns.
I agree that MS hacking into the AOL IM network was wrong. I believe, however, that the statement "Microsoft was in the right on this one " refers only to the need for a standard. The actions MS took were wrong. The statement they made was right.
Can anyone explain exactly what point Katz is making here? The essay is definitely not a 'documentation of facts'. It is way too one sided for that. It appears to be an argumentative essay (an essay that attempts to change the readers belief point of view of the author).
If that is the case, what is he arguing for? The closest thing I found to a thesis statement was "The Human Genome Project may be the most inspiring and disturbing technological project ever undertaken."
His argument appears to be "the project is disturbing". If that is the case, then the question "So??" comes to mind. Mosquitos are disturbing too, but you don't see any articles out there discussing why mosquitos are disturbing. Why, because saying they are disturbing is pointless.
Mr Katz, I have read several of your articles now. In general, the content of your articles is fine. My true concern with your writing is the fact that you almost never state the purpose of the article. It always seems to be a rambling of loosely organized arguments without a common theme. You may want to go back through your English books and take a look at the 'keyhole structure'. This is not meant as a flame, but as constructive criticism. I believe I could really enjoy your articles if I could only find a thesis in them.
My wife already told me that we are going through genetic screening before we have children, and if something horrible comes up, we will be adopting instead. This is fine by me. Why should I bring a child into the world who is forced to lead a very difficult, and possibly unhappy life.
Depending on your beliefs and how you view the existance of souls. Concieving a child that has a very high risk of some horrible defect could be seen as evil and immoral to the soul you have brought into the material plane.
We would all have to lose all individuality as it stands currently before we could have a world without individuality. There is also another thought here. Why would I want my child to look like 'actor or statesman so and so'. Classically (read since the beginning of recorded history) parents have wanted to have their own children. Eg, a children of THEIR blood. A child who is like them. Henry VIII of England had 16 (correct me if I'm wrong) wives killed because he wanted a son. If he just wanted the perfect son to rule after him, he could have had spies search the country for the best looking, healthiest, brightest couple, stolen their baby, and had them killed to cover it up. But that isn't what he wanted. Many books have been written on the theory that people see their own existance continuing through the lives of their children. Because of this, most parents aren't going to want the 'Perfect Child'. They are going to want the 'Most perfect child possible that is a product of their DNA'. In this way, diversity will continue.
Along this same note, not everyone believes blond hair and blue eyes are the most attractive, and intelligence is still argueably a product of both genetics and environment. Even the 'Perfect Child' can end up a screwed up mess if they have a bad home life.
>> that's right, everyone looking attractive. Maybe they should all have blond hair and blue eyes too.
Your little rant here makes three mistakes:
1. It puts words into the mouth of the original poster.
2. It makes gross assumptions.
3. It makes huge, unbacked leaps of logic.
The original poster said nothing about his beliefs on what makes an attractive person. Beauty is still in the eyes of the beholder. Diversity is a beautiful thing and different people will always have different beliefs on what is good and what is bad.
>>Maybe, because we have this great new group of people the other people aren't needed anymore.
If society thought this way, the world would be in a constant state of war. Computer geeks are a 'great new group of people' who are considered 'brighter than the average citizen'. Are you suggesting all computer geeks are going to band together and start killing off the 'less intelligent'? Perhaps all the supermodels are going to start mowing down ugly people with machine guns soon to.
Can I ask what logic you used to make these jumps from 'there is nothing wrong with attractive children' to 'kill everyone who isn't like us'?
>>Maybe you should think before you say that having no individuality is great.
Where did the original poster state this as his belief? If this is something you interpreted from what he did say, I would like to know what logic you used to determine this.
If you are going to make a comment, think about it first. Your little tirade here is just plain dumb.
There are a couple points here that show that moderators are in no way liable for the content of posts.
1. No post is ever deleted. All posts are available to all users at all times. Some users just prefer to filter their posts.
2. In many cases, there would be no clear way to determine which moderator or group of moderators to hold liable. For example, if a specific post slanders John Doe. That post is never moderated. John Doe then, attempts to sue either/. or the Moderators for not removing the post and not moderating the post below the "standard" threshhold./. takes a 'No Edit' policy, thus is not the publisher of the post, and is therefor not accountable. The Moderators are not paid employees. Moderation is not their job, or their responsibility. They can only be held accountable for the moderation they do, not the moderation they do NOT do. If the Moderators were paid for Moderating, they would be held accountable for both their action AND their in-action in their job. In this case however, only action could make them accountable for the action taken. If Moderators could be sued for not moderating, then every other user of/. could be sued too (every user has the option to be a moderator).
I believe this concept could be expanded to deduce that moderators could not be held accountable for any action they may take as well, but I'm not going to attempt to go into that here.
Instead of complaining about this, local broadcasters need to be jumping on this chance. If they have a good format, people are going to watch them. If people watch them, then they have more viewers. If they have more viewers, then they get more advertisers. More advertisers means more money. The only real losers in this are the stations with poor formats and the cable company monopolies.
There shouldn't even be a fear that the big broadcasting companies (ABC, CBS, Fox, et al) will steal viewers and revenue away from local stations. The local stations will still have the best base for running local news, sports, and any other local information that people will always want to see.
This is also a much better way to see how many viewers are REALLY watching a particular show. Statistics are still statistics, and will always be open to interpretation and corruption, but checking the number of unique IP addresses that hit a show is much more likely to be accurate than a randum pole.
Of course, the technology isn't prefect, and bandwidth sucks.. but every technology has to start somewhere.
I have to disagree with you hear. You have to remember that there is one thing that Microsoft does EXTREMELY well. Marketing! They didn't win the desktop OS market with a superior product. They won it with superior marketing. Marketing is what RedHats big contribution to Linux. Redhat gives a name for CEO's to remember. Before RedHat got big, if you mentioned Linux to an executive type, he'd give you a dumb look. But today, mention RedHat to an exec, and she'll say, "Oh yah, they do that Linux thing right??"
More to the point, writers cramp has been around for centuries. The pen is no easier on your hand than the mouse is. The only real selling point here is that the pen is a more familiar tool for new computer users. The pen style interface is not new either. My Commodore 64 had a drawing program (Koala Paint I think) that came with a pen and a tablet. And that was in the early/mid '80s.
Ok.. so was there a point to his article? It appeared to me that he just rattled on. I felt like I was reading his journal about what he did for the day. There were words on the page, but there was no meaning. Did I miss something besides some PR for himself and MS?
St Louis is currently doing major improvements all over the city in its attempt to have the 2004 Worlds Fair here. It will be the Centennial of the 1904 Worlds Fair which was also held here in St Louis. Of course, this means my drive to work sucks and is congested due to road construction. But then again, in a few years, the roads are going to be outstanding, so I'm not complaining.
Slashdot Mirror
A recent event made me realize just how great the man pages are. My father was visiting for Christmas, we were in the computer room together, playing with hardware, swapping stories and playing games. He isn't new to the computer scene, but its not his life either. Until 3 years ago, he used a C64 only. Since that point, he's had a Win machine. He has reached the point that he can install Win98, and fix most of the common problems for his friends. He even builds machines himself. He's never used Linux before though, and he calls me for more in depth technical questions.
So I showed him Linux. He thought the GUI was great (kde) but when I dropped to the CLI and told him I had more power there, he looked at me and said, "If had to learn to use that, your mother would kill me. I don't have the time.".
Alright.. I could understand that, but then I pulled up a man page... Immediately he blurts out "Is that a help file??" He sounds astonished. I explain that most standard *nix applications have man pages. He was VERY impressed and started going on about how much he "wished MS would have documentation that was 1/4 that extensive and clear."
That was some good warm fuzzies for me on x-mas.
Sorry for rambling. Just thought I would share.
You are all going to really regret having bought all that food and alchohol when you realize you forgot the toilet paper. You'll need those shovels to fight over that last square...
BTW, Hemos, I believe drinking distilled water is actually bad for you. Since it doesn't have the standard salts and minerals present in drinking water, it actually removes salts and minerals from your body as it passes through, and leaves you even worse off. Distilled water is for use in clothing irons and household use.
I've noticed a lot of people saying to skip the DVD drive since these are production machines, not there for gaming/movie watching, and DVD support under linux isn't great yet. I agreed with this for a while, then had a thought. Perhaps the Army is being forward thinking here. DVD writer support is already in the works, or exists IIRC. No, its not cheap, yet.
Just like CD, DVD will become a very viable method of storing large volumes of data. In that case, these machines won't have to be retrofitted for DVD at a later point. Given the current price of a 10x DVD drive with 40x CD-Rom support, as opposed to a plain 50x 40x CD-Rom, there isn't much reason they shouldn't go ahead and get it now as part of the package deal, have it installed, and ready to go when the need it in a year or two.
Honestly, the idea that the US Army would use Slashdot for their recommendations is silly. It gives me a pretty good twinge of fear about our national security.
/. . However, none of the recommendations he makes deal with systems that are "mission critical". "Mission critical" systems will have more funding and in turn, also have a much higher security clearance.
This really depends on the project and the security clearance of the project. My younger brother's best friend, a 22 yr old Airman 1st Class in the USAF, regularly makes hardware and software recommendations to senior officers. Many times, he asks me for advice on different systems, configurations, and possibilities. Someone in his position could very easily ask for advice from
I do agree with other portions of your post however. From the sounds of it, they want a set of machines to do number crunching for them. Why are they buying new machines if they already have some SGIs? It might make sense to add a couple new machines add to the power of a collection of older SGIs.
From the specs:
CPUs (2)
I am assuming the (2) means they intend to use dual processors.
I was thinking more along the lines of setting up web pages with meta-tags that consisted of an entire dictionary's worth of words, plus a common names book's worth of words. Then register it with every major search engine on the planet.
Or perhaps we should just copyright the word 'financial' and sue Transasia for using it in the name Leonardo Financial.
I've noticed that several people are already complaining about the fact that Marshall was a member of the military.
I keep getting this feeling that a lot of you believe that being a member of the military automatically makes you a violent person who likes to kill.
There are very few jobs in this world where the employee enjoys EVERY SINGLE task that they have to perform. The same is true of the military. If you took a poll of military people, and asked them how many look forward to war and killing people, I'll bet less that 1% answer that they want war and death.
Being Pro-military in the USA does not mean you are Pro-war, or even Pro-conflict. It means you are Pro-defense, and often Pro-peace.
Does the bully quit picking picking on the little guy because the little guy 'wants to talk about it'? Not likely. He will quit when someone with equal power and strength, or even less power and strength but more courage, stands up to him.
To say that you could like Marshall, except that he was a 'military man' is just dumb. The fact that he was a high ranking member of the military does not mean he was a murderer, a war-monger, hateful, or violent. It does mean he believed in defending what you believed to be right. The pen is not always mightier than the sword and sometimes physical power is required for defence as a last resort.
Accourding to http://www.SecureTax.com, SecureTax has been bought out by Intuit. They now re-direct you to the online version of TurboTax. As others have posted, in past years, TurboTax Online required that you be running either Windows or Mac. I haven't tried this out to see if the same still applies this year.
In case you find Cosworth's response to your ignorant and uninformed statement inflamatory, let me explain his situation to you in a more rational manner.
He claims having to set up X 70 times. In a major institution, I would assume this to be the tip of the iceburg. But lets assume he sets up X on 70 machines. It takes him 10 extra minutes to configure X on each of those machines.
70 x 10 = 700 minutes to set up X
60 x 8 = 480 minutes in the average work day
700/480 = 1.46 work days.
Thats right, it takes 1 1/2 extra days just to set up X with optimal settings. If you don't work, then you don't realize how much very important time that can be. Especially when you have deadlines to meet. As for setting up and optimally configuring X on your own box, that can be done after work hours, on your own time. But because someone added a nice feature to their own PC is no reason to say they should have to add the same features to every PC the institution owns.
I agree that MS hacking into the AOL IM network was wrong. I believe, however, that the statement "Microsoft was in the right on this one
" refers only to the need for a standard. The actions MS took were wrong. The statement they made was right.
Can anyone explain exactly what point Katz is making here? The essay is definitely not a 'documentation of facts'. It is way too one sided for that. It appears to be an argumentative essay (an essay that attempts to change the readers belief point of view of the author).
If that is the case, what is he arguing for? The closest thing I found to a thesis statement was "The Human Genome Project may be the most inspiring and disturbing technological project ever undertaken."
His argument appears to be "the project is disturbing". If that is the case, then the question "So??" comes to mind. Mosquitos are disturbing too, but you don't see any articles out there discussing why mosquitos are disturbing. Why, because saying they are disturbing is pointless.
Mr Katz, I have read several of your articles now. In general, the content of your articles is fine. My true concern with your writing is the fact that you almost never state the purpose of the article. It always seems to be a rambling of loosely organized arguments without a common theme. You may want to go back through your English books and take a look at the 'keyhole structure'. This is not meant as a flame, but as constructive criticism. I believe I could really enjoy your articles if I could only find a thesis in them.
My wife already told me that we are going through genetic screening before we have children, and if something horrible comes up, we will be adopting instead. This is fine by me. Why should I bring a child into the world who is forced to lead a very difficult, and possibly unhappy life.
Depending on your beliefs and how you view the existance of souls. Concieving a child that has a very high risk of some horrible defect could be seen as evil and immoral to the soul you have brought into the material plane.
We would all have to lose all individuality as it stands currently before we could have a world without individuality. There is also another thought here. Why would I want my child to look like 'actor or statesman so and so'. Classically (read since the beginning of recorded history) parents have wanted to have their own children. Eg, a children of THEIR blood. A child who is like them. Henry VIII of England had 16 (correct me if I'm wrong) wives killed because he wanted a son. If he just wanted the perfect son to rule after him, he could have had spies search the country for the best looking, healthiest, brightest couple, stolen their baby, and had them killed to cover it up. But that isn't what he wanted. Many books have been written on the theory that people see their own existance continuing through the lives of their children. Because of this, most parents aren't going to want the 'Perfect Child'. They are going to want the 'Most perfect child possible that is a product of their DNA'. In this way, diversity will continue.
Along this same note, not everyone believes blond hair and blue eyes are the most attractive, and intelligence is still argueably a product of both genetics and environment. Even the 'Perfect Child' can end up a screwed up mess if they have a bad home life.
>> that's right, everyone looking attractive. Maybe they should all have blond hair and blue eyes too.
Your little rant here makes three mistakes:
1. It puts words into the mouth of the original poster.
2. It makes gross assumptions.
3. It makes huge, unbacked leaps of logic.
The original poster said nothing about his beliefs on what makes an attractive person. Beauty is still in the eyes of the beholder. Diversity is a beautiful thing and different people will always have different beliefs on what is good and what is bad.
>>Maybe, because we have this great new group of people the other people aren't needed anymore.
If society thought this way, the world would be in a constant state of war. Computer geeks are a 'great new group of people' who are considered 'brighter than the average citizen'. Are you suggesting all computer geeks are going to band together and start killing off the 'less intelligent'? Perhaps all the supermodels are going to start mowing down ugly people with machine guns soon to.
Can I ask what logic you used to make these jumps from 'there is nothing wrong with attractive children' to 'kill everyone who isn't like us'?
>>Maybe you should think before you say that having no individuality is great.
Where did the original poster state this as his belief? If this is something you interpreted from what he did say, I would like to know what logic you used to determine this.
If you are going to make a comment, think about it first. Your little tirade here is just plain dumb.
There are a couple points here that show that moderators are in no way liable for the content of posts.
/. or the Moderators for not removing the post and not moderating the post below the "standard" threshhold. /. takes a 'No Edit' policy, thus is not the publisher of the post, and is therefor not accountable. The Moderators are not paid employees. Moderation is not their job, or their responsibility. They can only be held accountable for the moderation they do, not the moderation they do NOT do. If the Moderators were paid for Moderating, they would be held accountable for both their action AND their in-action in their job. In this case however, only action could make them accountable for the action taken. If Moderators could be sued for not moderating, then every other user of /. could be sued too (every user has the option to be a moderator).
1. No post is ever deleted. All posts are available to all users at all times. Some users just prefer to filter their posts.
2. In many cases, there would be no clear way to determine which moderator or group of moderators to hold liable. For example, if a specific post slanders John Doe. That post is never moderated. John Doe then, attempts to sue either
I believe this concept could be expanded to deduce that moderators could not be held accountable for any action they may take as well, but I'm not going to attempt to go into that here.
Instead of complaining about this, local broadcasters need to be jumping on this chance. If they have a good format, people are going to watch them. If people watch them, then they have more viewers. If they have more viewers, then they get more advertisers. More advertisers means more money. The only real losers in this are the stations with poor formats and the cable company monopolies.
There shouldn't even be a fear that the big broadcasting companies (ABC, CBS, Fox, et al) will steal viewers and revenue away from local stations. The local stations will still have the best base for running local news, sports, and any other local information that people will always want to see.
This is also a much better way to see how many viewers are REALLY watching a particular show. Statistics are still statistics, and will always be open to interpretation and corruption, but checking the number of unique IP addresses that hit a show is much more likely to be accurate than a randum pole.
Of course, the technology isn't prefect, and bandwidth sucks.. but every technology has to start somewhere.
Please ignore my spelling mistakes.....
I have to disagree with you hear. You have to remember that there is one thing that Microsoft does EXTREMELY well. Marketing! They didn't win the desktop OS market with a superior product. They won it with superior marketing. Marketing is what RedHats big contribution to Linux. Redhat gives a name for CEO's to remember. Before RedHat got big, if you mentioned Linux to an executive type, he'd give you a dumb look. But today, mention RedHat to an exec, and she'll say, "Oh yah, they do that Linux thing right??"
More to the point, writers cramp has been around for centuries. The pen is no easier on your hand than the mouse is. The only real selling point here is that the pen is a more familiar tool for new computer users. The pen style interface is not new either. My Commodore 64 had a drawing program (Koala Paint I think) that came with a pen and a tablet. And that was in the early/mid '80s.
Ok.. so was there a point to his article? It appeared to me that he just rattled on. I felt like I was reading his journal about what he did for the day. There were words on the page, but there was no meaning. Did I miss something besides some PR for himself and MS?
"Where's the beef?"
Crusoe->Debian->Dreamcast->Cinnabon->Corbis
Don't forget Sybase too.
...any hungry Morlocks down there?
St Louis is currently doing major improvements all over the city in its attempt to have the 2004 Worlds Fair here. It will be the Centennial of the 1904 Worlds Fair which was also held here in St Louis. Of course, this means my drive to work sucks and is congested due to road construction. But then again, in a few years, the roads are going to be outstanding, so I'm not complaining.
I e-mailed you with the information. Let me know if you don't get it, or if you have any questions.
Expect an ICQ message at some point within the next 24 hours. I'm not a recruiter, but I'll give you all the info I can.