There was a story about some antivirus ops room that had two entrances:
(1) the entrance with double bulletproof doors set into granite, with an armed guard and fingerprint scanner, to use when visitors were around so that they would go away with good stories about the level of security at the place
(2) the normal entrance, that people used to get into their office when visitors weren't around
"I respect my immediate manager a great deal. He is knowlegable but recognises that his team members have their own areas of expertise. He doesn't gloat if you make a mistake or don't know something, and he laughs a lot. I say you can't get better than that, and nor would you expect to."
And could he please stop looking over my shoulder / reading my slashdot comments...?
"Alot of OSS is developmental and experimental and truly is buggy."
Have you seen commercial software?
Darwin works in both camps -- there's a reason why most of sourceforge is crap, and there's a reason that most commercial software is crap. If you take the best examples of each (for example, the GNUWin2 CD, versus the commercial software that actually gets published), then the results look a lot more polished.
"The average user does not care about open source. They care about FREEWARE."
5-10 years ago, you'd have been right. When Winamp was the latest invention, when pkzip was common, when Netscape being free was still a novelty, people wanted freeware.
But since then, the split happened. Freeware authors went into one of two camps: (a) Those who decided they weren't getting enough money, became paraniod, experimented with copy-protected shareware, but finally became neurotic enough to invent adware, spyware, and later, viruses. (b) Those who thought group (a) were misguided and wanted to continue offering stuff for free. These people became Free Software authors.
The general public know this. They know that the WinAmp author got assimilated into AOL and spat out. They know that GetRight is spyware now. They know that Napster got bought, killed, and eventually became an undead version of HMV.com.
They've seen all this in the news, and freeware doesn't exist anymore. Authors with morals now label their wares as Free Software for fear of it being used against them for evil. Authors in in for the money became blubbering lunatics, trying ever more severe ways to "get back" at the users who didn't pay them.
And the users' reaction to all this? "If it's not GPL, it's not safe" seems to be one of the most practical ways to evaluate 'free' software...
Get an Apple keyboard -- they've got a perspex base, so when you spill something in you can see it all sloshing around between the pristine white plastic and the stylish perspex.
Of course, there's no way you can take it apart to remove the beer...
"A coworker of mine did a similar thing on a production machine with rpmbuild."
Wait, now I'm confused. Aren't slashdot readers all Windows trolls, with their "I'm the CTO for a fortune 500 company, managing $20B projects, and I can tell you that MS Word is the industry standard because..."
Now we have a poll, and every story is talking about "rm -f" this and "rpmbuild" that. Does noone have a story about updating the Microsoft Exchange server late at night and clicking the wrong button? Or of setting the Small Business Server administration rights, and locking themselves out of the computer?
"Maybe the other 99% of computer users that don't read Slashdot and Don't Care (tm) about such things?"
I think many (although not "most") normal computer users are well aware that the only reason for changing video standards would be to prevent their monitor working if it detected unapproved content, or to prevent their digital video recorder working, or to prevent their HDTV card working.
They're consumers -- they know only too well how much their suppliers hate them.
"People are going to start reporting blogs with which they disagree as spam in an attempt to have it shut down."
More like, spammers will use their thousands of autogenerated accounts to mark tens of thousands of legitimate sites as "inappropriate", just to distract the moderators (or whatever they'll be called) from the actual spam blogs.
Maybe they'll start by getting all 10,000 usernames to flag the blogs of anti-spammers, just out of spite, or perhaps they'll move straight onto the random link-clicking to distract google as much as possible. Maybe they'll auto-register thousands of fake spam blogs, and report those as spam, so that their real spam blogs last a little longer.
Anyone fancy posting a link to the actual download, rather than yet another javascript-implemented, advert-laden bullshit fest, registration required download portal?
So says cortana, who can't even implement the self-destruct sequence properly on her own starship...
It says more about a school when it looks like thier entire site was made with geocities geobuilder and Front Page 97.
From the page: <TITLE>Kutztown Area High School</TITLE> <META NAME=GENERATOR CONTENT="Claris Home Page 3.0"> <X-CLARIS-WINDOW TOP=45 BOTTOM=592 LEFT=19 RIGHT=549> <X-CLARIS-TAGVIEW MODE=minimal>
"Heh, all well and good until your next project that has several thousand(!) discrete tasks spread out over several dozen people and at least another dozen or so checkpoints/milestones for integration with other projects that you, by the way, have no control over."
If that's your situation, and you're using MS Project to deal with it, then we should all offer our sympathy.
Personally, I've found MS project inadequate for planning even small things, and most of your time is spent trying to manage the project management software, rather than actually doing things.
"My initial response is that cadets needs to wise up about who's who when orders are given, but then I realized that it's probably a federal offense to impersonate a military officer in real life."
I'd hope that the US military has stronger defences against orders being given by random bystanders, than just charging them with "a federal offence" after-the-fact...
"The Mars Direct plan calls for a maximum of 130 contiguous days in space (on the return trip) with three other people, using chemical rockets, in a relatively large habitation module which (if I recall) is not much smaller than my apartment."
I think we have a plan for the next episode of Big Brother...
Slashdot Mirror
"For example, let's say that the aliens also had a religion based around Jesus."
Or maybe they'll arrive in a spaceship disguised as an airliner, stack up millions of souls around a volcano, and detonate a bomb in it...
There was a story about some antivirus ops room that had two entrances:
(1) the entrance with double bulletproof doors set into granite, with an armed guard and fingerprint scanner, to use when visitors were around so that they would go away with good stories about the level of security at the place
(2) the normal entrance, that people used to get into their office when visitors weren't around
"if you've got an iis server/.net framework running somewhere, check this out"
If they've got an iis server/.net framework running, they'll be too busy to play around with dashboard widgets!
" As has been said, "recent" is in geologic terms. They don't ask you CS guys to change your terminology to better suit the terms that they think in."
Wikipedia: Show recent changes
1: Jun 12, 8840 BC 12:42pm....
2:
"I respect my immediate manager a great deal. He is knowlegable but recognises that his team members have their own areas of expertise. He doesn't gloat if you make a mistake or don't know something, and he laughs a lot. I say you can't get better than that, and nor would you expect to."
And could he please stop looking over my shoulder / reading my slashdot comments...?
"I also remember hearing on TWiT that some guy has blocked all HTML e-mail outside of his whitelist to avoid spam"
What did he need the whitelist for?
"Alot of OSS is developmental and experimental and truly is buggy."
Have you seen commercial software?
Darwin works in both camps -- there's a reason why most of sourceforge is crap, and there's a reason that most commercial software is crap. If you take the best examples of each (for example, the GNUWin2 CD, versus the commercial software that actually gets published), then the results look a lot more polished.
"The average user does not care about open source. They care about FREEWARE."
5-10 years ago, you'd have been right. When Winamp was the latest invention, when pkzip was common, when Netscape being free was still a novelty, people wanted freeware.
But since then, the split happened. Freeware authors went into one of two camps:
(a) Those who decided they weren't getting enough money, became paraniod, experimented with copy-protected shareware, but finally became neurotic enough to invent adware, spyware, and later, viruses.
(b) Those who thought group (a) were misguided and wanted to continue offering stuff for free. These people became Free Software authors.
The general public know this. They know that the WinAmp author got assimilated into AOL and spat out. They know that GetRight is spyware now. They know that Napster got bought, killed, and eventually became an undead version of HMV.com.
They've seen all this in the news, and freeware doesn't exist anymore. Authors with morals now label their wares as Free Software for fear of it being used against them for evil. Authors in in for the money became blubbering lunatics, trying ever more severe ways to "get back" at the users who didn't pay them.
And the users' reaction to all this? "If it's not GPL, it's not safe" seems to be one of the most practical ways to evaluate 'free' software...
"Beer and keyboards don't mix"
Get an Apple keyboard -- they've got a perspex base, so when you spill something in you can see it all sloshing around between the pristine white plastic and the stylish perspex.
Of course, there's no way you can take it apart to remove the beer...
"A coworker of mine did a similar thing on a production machine with rpmbuild."
Wait, now I'm confused. Aren't slashdot readers all Windows trolls, with their "I'm the CTO for a fortune 500 company, managing $20B projects, and I can tell you that MS Word is the industry standard because..."
Now we have a poll, and every story is talking about "rm -f" this and "rpmbuild" that. Does noone have a story about updating the Microsoft Exchange server late at night and clicking the wrong button? Or of setting the Small Business Server administration rights, and locking themselves out of the computer?
Or is it just *NIX users who make mistakes?
There was a manager I knew. He decided to install WindowsXP on all the work computers...
"How can I delete my account?"
Sell it on ebay
" Microsoft's inclusion of RSS into the newest version of Internet Explorer appears to be the final nail in the coffin of the Atom specification"
{{npov}} {{cleanup}}
Well, you can get copywritten material too, but you don't tend to find much of it on places like slashdot...
"Maybe the other 99% of computer users that don't read Slashdot and Don't Care (tm) about such things?"
I think many (although not "most") normal computer users are well aware that the only reason for changing video standards would be to prevent their monitor working if it detected unapproved content, or to prevent their digital video recorder working, or to prevent their HDTV card working.
They're consumers -- they know only too well how much their suppliers hate them.
"People are going to start reporting blogs with which they disagree as spam in an attempt to have it shut down."
More like, spammers will use their thousands of autogenerated accounts to mark tens of thousands of legitimate sites as "inappropriate", just to distract the moderators (or whatever they'll be called) from the actual spam blogs.
Maybe they'll start by getting all 10,000 usernames to flag the blogs of anti-spammers, just out of spite, or perhaps they'll move straight onto the random link-clicking to distract google as much as possible. Maybe they'll auto-register thousands of fake spam blogs, and report those as spam, so that their real spam blogs last a little longer.
More info on the weblog spam problem
Anyone fancy posting a link to the actual download, rather than yet another javascript-implemented, advert-laden bullshit fest, registration required download portal?
So says cortana, who can't even implement the self-destruct sequence properly on her own starship...
They've got great photos of the teachers too...
It says more about a school when it looks like thier entire site was made with geocities geobuilder and Front Page 97.
From the page:
<TITLE>Kutztown Area High School</TITLE>
<META NAME=GENERATOR CONTENT="Claris Home Page 3.0">
<X-CLARIS-WINDOW TOP=45 BOTTOM=592 LEFT=19 RIGHT=549>
<X-CLARIS-TAGVIEW MODE=minimal>
"Heh, all well and good until your next project that has several thousand(!) discrete tasks spread out over several dozen people and at least another dozen or so checkpoints/milestones for integration with other projects that you, by the way, have no control over."
If that's your situation, and you're using MS Project to deal with it, then we should all offer our sympathy.
Personally, I've found MS project inadequate for planning even small things, and most of your time is spent trying to manage the project management software, rather than actually doing things.
Or a lot of people with cellphones as their "emergency contact"
"If the police can intercept your e-mail, then most likely it will become forbidden to encrypt it"
As others have mentioned, RIP. In the UK, you can go to prison for 2 years for not decrypting something on request.
"My initial response is that cadets needs to wise up about who's who when orders are given, but then I realized that it's probably a federal offense to impersonate a military officer in real life."
I'd hope that the US military has stronger defences against orders being given by random bystanders, than just charging them with "a federal offence" after-the-fact...
"The Mars Direct plan calls for a maximum of 130 contiguous days in space (on the return trip) with three other people, using chemical rockets, in a relatively large habitation module which (if I recall) is not much smaller than my apartment."
I think we have a plan for the next episode of Big Brother...