...any decent proxy runs a "has this page changed" request...
Actually, most decent proxy servers allow themselves to be tuned such that they do not perform any checks. If you're on a very slow dial-up connection, this can be a life saver.
how do you deal with an archive when you need to get rid of information that is a liability to you now
The first rule of email is: write every email assuming that everyone in the world will eventually read it.
The first rule of web-posting is not too dissimilar: post every document/picture/program/you-name-it assuming that it will always be readable by everyone.
Anyone who ignores these rules will suffer well deserved consequences. If you don't want your content cached, copied, archived, printed, et al then don't post it in the first place.
I am not a big believer in global warming, as caused by humans. However, I am a big believer in responsible consumption and taking care of our planet. Reducing polution (including CO2 emmisions) is part of being good stewards of our planet.
It is very sad to see posters trotting out the "economit hit" FUD argument against ratifying Kyoto. This same FUD was trundled out when companies were forced to stop using CFCs. Various companies whined, complained, and behaved like 3 year olds asked to pick up their toys---spouting all kinds of horse pucky about how they were going to lose their shirts, financially speaking.
In fact, the opposite turned out to be true. Those companies that embraced the change early turned out to be economic winners. The change from use of CFC-based solvents to other (often it was to using distilled water) almost always saved money and reduced employee health risks.
The fear mongering endorsed by meany of the posters to this thread is no different that the FUD Microsoft trotts out w.r.t. its corporate agenda.
Actually, if you click through and read the article the/. note refers to you will discover that Star Wars outsold Spiderman w.r.t. first weekend box office returns.
The azreporter.com article compares 4 days of Star Wars revenue with 2 weeks of Spiderman revenue, and then says Spiderman won.
I've been working for 17 years in Information Technology and don't have a degree, and even at this stage of my career it would benefit me to have that piece of paper; however, as AC points out, once you have a family, mortgage, kids in school, etc., it gets really, really hard to go back to school.
Lastly, the SysAdmin thing gets stale very quickly. Keep your options open.
I started but didn't complete university. From personal experience, let me say that I don't recommend this method (the one described in the posting I'm replying to). Even after being in the workplace for 10 years, I was denied a job because I didn't have a degree (at the job interview the manager looked at my resume and said, "Oh, you don't have a degree." and he ended the interview).
Sure, denying me access to interesting jobs was a stupid thing for that manager to do; however, I could have avoided all the pain if I'd just bit the bullet and put up with the university BS for another couple of years.
I've now been in the workplace for 17 years, and I still don't recommend the "don't bother getting a degree" method of career development.
My employer first began contracting work to India about 10 years ago. The first couple of projects were dismal failures; but we eventually got the hang of it and continue to use lots of India-based developers. Here are a few of our learnings:
make sure your design documents are very detailed: if you want a data structure built a certain way then write it out; if you want screens laid out a certain way then do mock-ups; the more written detail the remote team has to work with, the better
talk to them every day! Don't rely on email for your communications. Use IM from your home PC to stay in touch during the evenings. Set up a daily phone call with key team members and talk everything through
if you can afford to bring a couple of the remote team to North America for a few weeks, bring them over at the start of the project so that you can spend some time with them and get them started on their work while you can supervise them. This isn't because you don't trust them or they are incompetent, it's just a fact of life that colocated teams function better
plan project execution so that the application compiles, links, and runs from Day One. This is an area where Microsoft has it right: nightly compiles of the whole project that can be tested each day will ensure that the remote team is building the application the way you are expecting. The daily call provides a great opportunity to give the remote team immediate feedback on their work
...there is a factual error in the article. the GPL is the "General Public License". The G stands for General, not GNU...
To be fair to the article's author, you should have offered a complete explaination: GPL did originally for GNU Public License; just as LGPL originally stood for Library Gnu Public License (and not Lesser GPL as it does today). The error is more temporal than factual.
Read everything the other posters have written about why you should buy Dell, Gateway, etc. prebuilt systems. Read it again. They're right.
One additional thought that I haven't seen expressed yet in this discussion: everything is negotiable. Here are examples of what I mean:
A good friend runs a small software shop here in town. The last time he had to buy computers, his Dell sales rep. offered to price match the cheap no-name clones that are available here in town.
You say that you only have enough money to replace 25-30% of the systems; however, you will find that Dell will be willing to replace all 60 machines in one shot, and provide financing to make the deal work for you. This will allow you to buy 60 identical machines, which lowers your ongoing support effort. If you choose one of their enterprise type systems---where the configurations---change less frequently, you will have some hope of purchasing additional close-to-identical systems at a later date.
A couple of posters have touched on warrantee treatment. Let me add one thought: go with the supplier's on site parts and labour three year warrantee. This means one less head ache for you. If you keep the machine configurations identical, this allows you to quickly swap components around to get a particular individual back up and running in an emergency (e.g, on a weekend). Also, if you do negotiate 60 machines in one shot, have the supplier commit to haveing a service technician on site once a day during the first week---that will ensure any DOA situations are fixed quickly (and your users will be happy).
Since the origins of this country, Free Speech has been one of our most treasured amendments.
Free Speech is also one of the most misapplied amendments. It's very sad that so many people mistakenly equate the freedom to express ideas with the abdication of responsibilty. Free Speech never had anything to do with shouting "fire" in a crowded movie theatre; hopefully it never will.
From where I sit, it appears that Free Speech has been twisted to mean many things other than the concept that was originally intended. In this instance, the majority of/. postings on this subject voice the opinion that somehow Free Speach means that minors should be free to do anything they want. Minors are free to speak their minds about this issue, but that doesn't mean the judge is wrong, society is evil, or that Free Speech has been diluted---it only means that you are not getting your way.
Have you ever "lost" a child at the mall? Didn't think so.
No matter how responsible and caring a parent you are, accidents happen. While this device isn't my first choice as a parent, if you have ever had to grieve with someone who had a child abducted from a public place you might sing a different tune.
Is xenu.net posting copyrighted documents without permission of the copyright holder?
Cults need to obscure the truth in order to deceive their prey.
The first issue is a serious one, and in the past this has been the method which the C. of S. used to shut down critics: those critics were breaking the law by reproducing copyrighted works. The law allows for critics to quote limited amounts source material within the context of written criticism. The law does not, and should not, allow wholesale copying of other poeple's material; regardless of whether that material contains lies.
The second issue is the real issue; however, as I've already noted, cults use the misbehaviour of their critics against them. Yes, let's put cults out of business; but let us also remember that "the end doesn't justify the means." Remember McCarthy and the mess he made while operating under and end justifies the means assumption.
Re:The BSD license principle still applies
on
Abusing the GPL?
·
· Score: 1
Source written for GPL release is written with readbility in mind.
You have obviously never tried to make changes to some of the GPLed projects that are floating around. In my experience, most OSS source code is so poorly written as to make it unusable by anyone except the author; and even then, if more than a few weeks passes then the author no longer recognizes it either.
Too many people believe that ownership of a text editor and a compiler is the key to being a big-time code jockey.
If the value that you get from giving the code to the tiny fraction of people who will actually do something useful with it is larger than the cost of doing the distribution, then distributing it is worthwhile.
Source code does have value, but that value is smaller than you assert. Over the past year there have been a couple of threads here on/. about how difficult it is to get others to reuse source code: those who could make use of the source code typically don't; they would rather rewrite an application from scratch than to learn someone else's implementation and add to it.
Examine Michi's source code assertion in the context of his talk: he is talking about large beneficial impacts upon society, where the individual directly experiences the benefits. Access to source code doesn't have high value in this context.
Imagine there was something wrong with your car's engine, and the only place that could fix it was Honda Corporate headquarters in Japan. Wouldn't you like to have the option to go to the local mechanic instead?
This analogy doesn't work. W.r.t your car, source code is the equivelant of having all the raw materials (including lathes, etc.) to recreate all the components that go into your car. In the late 1800s this is how people repaired cars... guess what, cars were useless for the masses.
Richard's wrath is misdirected: if the MS Email clients emitted proper RFC compliant MIME email---where each message had a plain text part and a rich text (i.e., MS Word) part---then there wouldn't be the same issue. MS's very poor record complying to RFCs and other industry standards is the real problem, not the use of MS Word.
None of MS's email clients emit RFC compliant email. MS Outlook combined with an MS Exchange server running in Enterprise Mode can be coerced into sending almost compliant email messages, but it is tough to do and the messages are still problematic enough that some email systems cannot deal with the resultant messages (e.g., Exchange to Notes email is very troublesome).
It's not the paper; it's the wealth of information you get on your way to earning the paper.
Like everything in life, it's what you make of the experience that counts. Others have already posted their experiences regarding individuals without degrees who have been successful and others with degrees who were not. The fact that someone can attend 3 or 4 years of classes, obtain a piece of paper, and still not have learned how to learn, or learned how to problem solve, is a testament to the extreme stupidity many people exhibit.
University provides a wonderful environment where you may taste and experience many ideas you would otherwise find it difficult to become exposed to. If you embrace the experience and take away from it everything it offers, you and your future employers benefit greatly. If you are there soley to obtain a piece of paper in order to secure employment; you have wasted your time and money, and your future employer will end up with yet another bump on a log.
Let me predict the outcome based upon past events: with the exception of the USA, the entire world will make the switch to the official standard. Half of the US scientific community will switch and half won't. The 2014 first manned mission to Mars will fail because the the navigation computer design team specified 100gibs of RAM, but the implementation team only installed 100gigs of RAM and it is unable to perform course corrections---the crew and ship are lost in space.
I went looking (as I'm sure most of us have done) for my earliest post in the archive; it was a request for a repost of an article I had missed but which others were raving about. At the time, no one replied to my post and I never got to read the originating item.
Today, after seeing my request I did a search and pulled up that original article I had been looking for back in 1994. Sure enough, there is was. Isn't life wonderful.:)
It would be wonderful to see other similar message exchange systems have their archives made avalable too. FIDONET comes to mind, but I'm sure other/.ers have systems to suggest. I would hazard to guess that FIDONET had higher message traffic volumes than USENET, in the days before ubiquitous Internet access.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, most decent proxy servers allow themselves to be tuned such that they do not perform any checks. If you're on a very slow dial-up connection, this can be a life saver.
how do you deal with an archive when you need to get rid of information that is a liability to you now
The first rule of email is: write every email assuming that everyone in the world will eventually read it.
The first rule of web-posting is not too dissimilar: post every document/picture/program/you-name-it assuming that it will always be readable by everyone.
Anyone who ignores these rules will suffer well deserved consequences. If you don't want your content cached, copied, archived, printed, et al then don't post it in the first place.
I am not a big believer in global warming, as caused by humans. However, I am a big believer in responsible consumption and taking care of our planet. Reducing polution (including CO2 emmisions) is part of being good stewards of our planet.
It is very sad to see posters trotting out the "economit hit" FUD argument against ratifying Kyoto. This same FUD was trundled out when companies were forced to stop using CFCs. Various companies whined, complained, and behaved like 3 year olds asked to pick up their toys---spouting all kinds of horse pucky about how they were going to lose their shirts, financially speaking.
In fact, the opposite turned out to be true. Those companies that embraced the change early turned out to be economic winners. The change from use of CFC-based solvents to other (often it was to using distilled water) almost always saved money and reduced employee health risks.
The fear mongering endorsed by meany of the posters to this thread is no different that the FUD Microsoft trotts out w.r.t. its corporate agenda.
Actually, if you click through and read the article the /. note refers to you will discover that Star Wars outsold Spiderman w.r.t. first weekend box office returns.
The azreporter.com article compares 4 days of Star Wars revenue with 2 weeks of Spiderman revenue, and then says Spiderman won.
Never trust the media... use your *brain* Luke.
I couldn't have said it better myself.
I've been working for 17 years in Information Technology and don't have a degree, and even at this stage of my career it would benefit me to have that piece of paper; however, as AC points out, once you have a family, mortgage, kids in school, etc., it gets really, really hard to go back to school.
Lastly, the SysAdmin thing gets stale very quickly. Keep your options open.
I started but didn't complete university. From personal experience, let me say that I don't recommend this method (the one described in the posting I'm replying to). Even after being in the workplace for 10 years, I was denied a job because I didn't have a degree (at the job interview the manager looked at my resume and said, "Oh, you don't have a degree." and he ended the interview).
Sure, denying me access to interesting jobs was a stupid thing for that manager to do; however, I could have avoided all the pain if I'd just bit the bullet and put up with the university BS for another couple of years.
I've now been in the workplace for 17 years, and I still don't recommend the "don't bother getting a degree" method of career development.
Just do the usual stuff...
...but in spades.
My employer first began contracting work to India about 10 years ago. The first couple of projects were dismal failures; but we eventually got the hang of it and continue to use lots of India-based developers. Here are a few of our learnings:
GPL never stood for "GNU Public License", actually. It has stood for "General Public License" since version 1 in Feb. 1989.
I did a bunch of searching on the net, and you're right, and I'm wrong.
However, my statement about LGPL is true.
To be fair to the article's author, you should have offered a complete explaination: GPL did originally for GNU Public License; just as LGPL originally stood for Library Gnu Public License (and not Lesser GPL as it does today). The error is more temporal than factual.
Read everything the other posters have written about why you should buy Dell, Gateway, etc. prebuilt systems. Read it again. They're right.
One additional thought that I haven't seen expressed yet in this discussion: everything is negotiable. Here are examples of what I mean:
A couple of posters have touched on warrantee treatment. Let me add one thought: go with the supplier's on site parts and labour three year warrantee. This means one less head ache for you. If you keep the machine configurations identical, this allows you to quickly swap components around to get a particular individual back up and running in an emergency (e.g, on a weekend). Also, if you do negotiate 60 machines in one shot, have the supplier commit to haveing a service technician on site once a day during the first week---that will ensure any DOA situations are fixed quickly (and your users will be happy).
Since the origins of this country, Free Speech has been one of our most treasured amendments.
Free Speech is also one of the most misapplied amendments. It's very sad that so many people mistakenly equate the freedom to express ideas with the abdication of responsibilty. Free Speech never had anything to do with shouting "fire" in a crowded movie theatre; hopefully it never will.
From where I sit, it appears that Free Speech has been twisted to mean many things other than the concept that was originally intended. In this instance, the majority of /. postings on this subject voice the opinion that somehow Free Speach means that minors should be free to do anything they want. Minors are free to speak their minds about this issue, but that doesn't mean the judge is wrong, society is evil, or that Free Speech has been diluted---it only means that you are not getting your way.
and everybody is surprise to see that the article is drivel. Consider the source?
Perl is obvious a tool in some hidden agenda Larry Wall is wreaking upon the hacker community because he was influenced by religion.
...is that it points to an old Salon piece about Larry Wall and the creation of Perl.
Have you ever "lost" a child at the mall? Didn't think so.
No matter how responsible and caring a parent you are, accidents happen. While this device isn't my first choice as a parent, if you have ever had to grieve with someone who had a child abducted from a public place you might sing a different tune.
There are two issues at hand:
The first issue is a serious one, and in the past this has been the method which the C. of S. used to shut down critics: those critics were breaking the law by reproducing copyrighted works. The law allows for critics to quote limited amounts source material within the context of written criticism. The law does not, and should not, allow wholesale copying of other poeple's material; regardless of whether that material contains lies.
The second issue is the real issue; however, as I've already noted, cults use the misbehaviour of their critics against them. Yes, let's put cults out of business; but let us also remember that "the end doesn't justify the means." Remember McCarthy and the mess he made while operating under and end justifies the means assumption.
Source written for GPL release is written with readbility in mind.
You have obviously never tried to make changes to some of the GPLed projects that are floating around. In my experience, most OSS source code is so poorly written as to make it unusable by anyone except the author; and even then, if more than a few weeks passes then the author no longer recognizes it either.
Too many people believe that ownership of a text editor and a compiler is the key to being a big-time code jockey.
If the value that you get from giving the code to the tiny fraction of people who will actually do something useful with it is larger than the cost of doing the distribution, then distributing it is worthwhile.
Source code does have value, but that value is smaller than you assert. Over the past year there have been a couple of threads here on /. about how difficult it is to get others to reuse source code: those who could make use of the source code typically don't; they would rather rewrite an application from scratch than to learn someone else's implementation and add to it.
Examine Michi's source code assertion in the context of his talk: he is talking about large beneficial impacts upon society, where the individual directly experiences the benefits. Access to source code doesn't have high value in this context.
Imagine there was something wrong with your car's engine, and the only place that could fix it was Honda Corporate headquarters in Japan. Wouldn't you like to have the option to go to the local mechanic instead?
This analogy doesn't work. W.r.t your car, source code is the equivelant of having all the raw materials (including lathes, etc.) to recreate all the components that go into your car. In the late 1800s this is how people repaired cars... guess what, cars were useless for the masses.
Richard's wrath is misdirected: if the MS Email clients emitted proper RFC compliant MIME email---where each message had a plain text part and a rich text (i.e., MS Word) part---then there wouldn't be the same issue. MS's very poor record complying to RFCs and other industry standards is the real problem, not the use of MS Word.
None of MS's email clients emit RFC compliant email. MS Outlook combined with an MS Exchange server running in Enterprise Mode can be coerced into sending almost compliant email messages, but it is tough to do and the messages are still problematic enough that some email systems cannot deal with the resultant messages (e.g., Exchange to Notes email is very troublesome).
It's not the paper; it's the wealth of information you get on your way to earning the paper.
Like everything in life, it's what you make of the experience that counts. Others have already posted their experiences regarding individuals without degrees who have been successful and others with degrees who were not. The fact that someone can attend 3 or 4 years of classes, obtain a piece of paper, and still not have learned how to learn, or learned how to problem solve, is a testament to the extreme stupidity many people exhibit.
University provides a wonderful environment where you may taste and experience many ideas you would otherwise find it difficult to become exposed to. If you embrace the experience and take away from it everything it offers, you and your future employers benefit greatly. If you are there soley to obtain a piece of paper in order to secure employment; you have wasted your time and money, and your future employer will end up with yet another bump on a log.
Ah... sounds like the cry of an English units bigot. Merry Christmas :).
Let me predict the outcome based upon past events: with the exception of the USA, the entire world will make the switch to the official standard. Half of the US scientific community will switch and half won't. The 2014 first manned mission to Mars will fail because the the navigation computer design team specified 100gibs of RAM, but the implementation team only installed 100gigs of RAM and it is unable to perform course corrections---the crew and ship are lost in space.
Confused? Then see SEPTEMBER 30, 1999 Likely Cause Of Orbiter Loss Found The peer review preliminary findings indicate that one team used English units (e.g., inches, feet and pounds) while the other used metric units for a key spacecraft operation.
Today, after seeing my request I did a search and pulled up that original article I had been looking for back in 1994. Sure enough, there is was. Isn't life wonderful. :)
It would be wonderful to see other similar message exchange systems have their archives made avalable too. FIDONET comes to mind, but I'm sure other /.ers have systems to suggest. I would hazard to guess that FIDONET had higher message traffic volumes than USENET, in the days before ubiquitous Internet access.