There are a lot of things worth discussing here: the poor quality of modern college educations, the rapacious greed that state college systems engage in so that they can offset the tax cuts their administrators are receiving, the total one-sidedness of the "responsibility" that we are expected to show toward loan guarantors. Who knows? Maybe we should all default on our student loans.
But if you were to imagine this guy's core point was a legal argument, his case would be dismissed immediately due to a lack of standing. We don't dismiss evidence based on who it's coming from, but this is not evidence. It's opinion, and we absolutely should set the value of the opinion based on the experience of the opinionator.
This protest may be peaceful, but it's far from civil. It's a protest against free speech rights for non-Muslims. It deserves all the mockery we can heap upon it.
Frankly, it was the manufacturers that insisted on making all phone interfaces high-res touch screens. If you're going to do that, the public needs them to be large, in order to actually be able to use the screen and the interface.
You don't define precisely what you mean by these things.
* If we're talking about switches, forget it. Cisco does it better and faster, easier to manage, with more robust hardware and a better service plan (limited lifetime warranty on all fixed configuration switches!). A non-Cisco switch doing anything of value on your network is a surefire way to convince me that you are bush league.
* Routers - it really depends. What are you going to do? Just route traffic between LAN interfaces? A Cisco L3-capable switch will probably be the fastest for this job, considering that many of its traffic routing tasks can be done in hardware which has been made to spec. But if you're looking to stick with Linux, you can configure a Linux server with the hardware you require and load it up with a network protocol you need it to run. A Linux server can certainly run OSPF or BGP. However, what else are you need? Do you also need a firewall, a VPN concentrator, an intrusion detector, a WAN optimizer, a small phone system? Because if you need those things as well, a hardware router will do these things at once in addition to its routing tasks, with a better performance:price ratio. Configuring it is not hard to learn to do. If you don't have time, you can always phone someone else who's contractually obligated to fix it.
* Firewall - this is wide open. Every single piece of firewall software seems to approach things in a totally different way, especially in terms of management interfaces. I would look around for the one that communicates to you in the way you find most intuitive, and then buy the gear that runs that. While I know Linux on a server will have some powerful firewalling capabilities, I simply can't use most of the Linux-based management packages because they just don't seem to think the way I do. Hopefully this is remedied soon, because most firewall vendors are incredibly overpriced and, in the case of Cisco especially, occasionally hard to even obtain at all.
I'm no Cisco fanboy, although I do rely on them for my income (full disclosure). I also don't want to be a Negative Nancy, as I understand that not everyone warms up to the whole "you should be grateful to have our logo in your rack" attitude you get from Cisco...I certainly don't. But there is a reason beyond simple groupthink that causes people to buy their stuff - frankly, there just is no serious alternative when it comes to switches or multi-function routers.
Under normal circumstances, sure, the guy has a right to believe and say what he wants. But if your job depends upon understanding how science works, and you're publicly making an ass of the organization that employs you, you kind of have it coming.
H.L. Mencken was a delightful troll, but he did always have something fun to say about democracy. Let's try this one:
"If X is the population of the United States and Y is the degree of imbecility of the average American, then democracy is the theory that X times Y is less than Y."
I don't know... I have always regarded the flat-panel LCD displays as one of those examples where the new technology was so much better than the old technology that I can't believe people put up with CRTs for as long as they did. I would never want to display anything on an old 15" CRT for any reason now, even for old-school authenticity. Please, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that they were totally awful and had next to zero redeeming qualities.
I think you'll find that when it comes to Drunken Sex Party Photos, most of us who are going out of our way to look at them really don't care whether or not they have been edited.
Even though the "conventional wisdom" is that the science of programming has entirely changed to consider security issues from end to end, in reality this does not appear to be the case at all.
I think this is a very interesting and valuable insight. The people doing the talking have completely sold everyone on a vision in which the coder keeps security in mind from the get-go, but the people doing the, uh... doing... are doing things the way they have always done them, and tacking on the security piece after the fact.
Is it that programmers in general simply believe that buyers are unreasonably paranoid? Or is it that planning for security throughout the process is too costly and time-consuming?
I see what you mean. I cut out a bunch of text there and it shows. What I mean is that boomers looked at themselves as victims of "the system" and that attitude lasted long after they became "the system.
Boomers took a look at the structure of their culture, found it lacking, and abandoned all of it. They did not like Dick and Jane, and so instead of improving upon it, they threw it out, and Chaucer along with it. It remains probably the 2nd worst case of "throwing the baby out with the bath water" in civilized history, the first being the French Revolution.
Anything not meeting an immediate earthy need was discarded. It began with "what the hell do I need with Brahms? Brahms isn't going to get me laid." Before long it became "what the hell do I need with religion? Religion doesn't dazzle me like LSD does." Finally it settled into "what the hell do I need with regulation and social betterment? There's money to be made."
How can there be any wonder that our parents' and bosses' generation is so insufferably self-centered? I find it pertinent that we talk about this within a week of J.D. Salinger's death, as his Holden Caulfield can be very illustrative in teaching us about the kind of dysfunctional, disenfranchised individual who currently runs our world. As far as the Boomers are concerned, they have defined the culture through their rebellion, and discouraged us from absorbing the kinds of things that gave context to our surroundings. We had to find them on our own. The newest generation entering college now is so detached from context that they seem to be aliens in their own world. They are idiots of course, but I don't hold them to account for it. Their entire world has been scrubbed of context.
I'm in Generation X, and I don't pretend that we did everything right either. We made mistakes, like fetishizing exclusivity, and needlessly feeding the rage of others. Yet at the end of our troubled youth, we sat down, and we wrote about it, as a way of hoping to establish some kind of context. I am slightly comforted in knowing that the next generation, if they hope to understand us any better, will at least be able to read something by Dave Eggers or the like. What worries me is that the coming generation will not read any of it, because they are not interested, and will not leave anything of their own for posterity either.
There must be some place in the world that welcomes those Americans who manage to not be complete morons.
Having just returned from abroad I can confidently say that the answer is "Er, sorry, no." Even if you have good grades and a valuable skill, there's still a possibility that you find your background as a dog walker grants you a dismissive understanding of evolutionary theory that exceeds that of biology PhDs, or that you will fight to the death for the human rights of a blastocyst. You're not worth the risk.
I swear to God, there is like 20 straight minutes of nothing but Wookiee language being spoken.
I was stoned when I saw it, and I think that made it even worse.
Sheesh, what a Glibertarian.
on
The Big Questions
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
There is a kind of person out there who is absolutely sure, with no evidence whatever, that basic numerical logic can be applied to complex human phenomena such as government, philosophy, and peace of mind with great success. I suspect that they are probably correct, if your measure of "great success" is also measured purely by basic numerical logic, i.e. a few additional points of efficiency that amounts to pennies in the pockets of people who could have done without them. And what they get in return is the satisfaction of knowing that they have total and complete control over those few pennies, which will never be delivered into the hands of bureaucracies which are inherently evil for some reason. Good for them. I'm sure Libertopia will one day be a grand place full of happy people who are overjoyed by the glib and peremptory assholes who would control debate, but I dare anyone to determine how the end result is markedly different from a society utterly ruled by any other kind of fervent belief - see the delightful anecdote about what kind of things Haselton teaches his six-year-old daughter, as if there was nothing more to it than "government takes your money and kills children. Sweet dreams honey." I don't know how you're doing worse than this if you're sending your kids off to Jesus Camp. It's a kind of unquestioning faith in the unproven for which most churches would kill...and have.
Interconnectedness is a basic fact of life. There are human forces much stronger than the kind of processes you learn in undergrad logic classes. Some gracefully accept it. Some never grow beyond fighting it. If you are of the very solid and hardly movable opinion that what really matters in life, what's really going to change the world, is precisely how you argue points of logic and how you pick apart someone else's, you're decidedly in the latter category, in which case there's a lot less of philosophy there than there is pathology. It's for that reason that I look forward to my down-modding with equanimity.
I don't know of a single IT department that hasn't been helped by virtualization of servers. It makes more efficient use of purchased hardware, keeps businesses from some of the manipulations to which their hardware and OS vendors can subject them, and is (in the long term) cheaper to operate than a traditional datacenter. IT departments have wondered for a long time: "if I have all this processing power, memory, and storage, why can't I use all of it?" Virtualization answers that question, and does it in an elegant way, so I don't consider it snake oil.
20 extra years? Try five, if she's lucky. Artificial heart recipients typically don't last long. Heck, even recipients of a genuine human heart don't always last very long.
Many religious and philosophical systems were invented because of the situation you're in. It's not a technician problem, it's a human problem, and it's pervasive (OK, maybe more pervasive with IT people). I promise you, no matter how you present this problem to your managers or try to alter the behavior of your end-users, it will not help. Only fixing yourself can help. My sincerest suggestion to you would be to learn how to meditate. The technique known as Anapanasati seems to work wonders for calming me down and keeping me focused.
1. Sit down. Sit straight up. Close your eyes. 2. Briefly do a mental check of all parts of your body to make sure there's no unnecessary muscle tension anywhere. 3. Take a few deep breaths. 4. Start breathing naturally, without trying, into your abdomen. Breathe the same way you would if you were sleeping. This takes patience. 5. When your breathing has gone on auto-pilot, move the focus of your mind to the rims of your nostrils, where you can feel the breath moving in and out. Just keep 100% of your attention on that feeling. You should only be thinking "breath moving in" and "breath moving out." 6. When your mind starts to wander, think to yourself, "hmm, I got distracted and started thinking about Scarlett Johannson" and return your attention to your breath. 7. When it's time to stop, don't just snap out of it. Slowly bring yourself out of it and open your eyes gradually.
Do this for maybe 15 or 20 minutes. It may sound tedious, and I know this might sound nuts, but I guarantee that you will be calmer and thinking more clearly by the time you're done. I've been doing it for 4 years now and I'm pretty sure I would have probably punched someone in the face by now if I didn't find some way to calm myself.
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Not based on this guy's advice.
There are a lot of things worth discussing here: the poor quality of modern college educations, the rapacious greed that state college systems engage in so that they can offset the tax cuts their administrators are receiving, the total one-sidedness of the "responsibility" that we are expected to show toward loan guarantors. Who knows? Maybe we should all default on our student loans.
But if you were to imagine this guy's core point was a legal argument, his case would be dismissed immediately due to a lack of standing. We don't dismiss evidence based on who it's coming from, but this is not evidence. It's opinion, and we absolutely should set the value of the opinion based on the experience of the opinionator.
Keep at it, Stallman. I'm sure one day the forces of the Perfect will finally defeat the Very Good.
This protest may be peaceful, but it's far from civil. It's a protest against free speech rights for non-Muslims. It deserves all the mockery we can heap upon it.
I read this summary three times and I'm still struggling to figure it out.
Most importantly, how do we post cute pictures of it on the Internet?
And this, kids, is why it's important to get your units right. 1) It f*cks up your math, and 2) it opens you up to mockery.
Frankly, it was the manufacturers that insisted on making all phone interfaces high-res touch screens. If you're going to do that, the public needs them to be large, in order to actually be able to use the screen and the interface.
You don't define precisely what you mean by these things.
* If we're talking about switches, forget it. Cisco does it better and faster, easier to manage, with more robust hardware and a better service plan (limited lifetime warranty on all fixed configuration switches!). A non-Cisco switch doing anything of value on your network is a surefire way to convince me that you are bush league.
* Routers - it really depends. What are you going to do? Just route traffic between LAN interfaces? A Cisco L3-capable switch will probably be the fastest for this job, considering that many of its traffic routing tasks can be done in hardware which has been made to spec. But if you're looking to stick with Linux, you can configure a Linux server with the hardware you require and load it up with a network protocol you need it to run. A Linux server can certainly run OSPF or BGP. However, what else are you need? Do you also need a firewall, a VPN concentrator, an intrusion detector, a WAN optimizer, a small phone system? Because if you need those things as well, a hardware router will do these things at once in addition to its routing tasks, with a better performance:price ratio. Configuring it is not hard to learn to do. If you don't have time, you can always phone someone else who's contractually obligated to fix it.
* Firewall - this is wide open. Every single piece of firewall software seems to approach things in a totally different way, especially in terms of management interfaces. I would look around for the one that communicates to you in the way you find most intuitive, and then buy the gear that runs that. While I know Linux on a server will have some powerful firewalling capabilities, I simply can't use most of the Linux-based management packages because they just don't seem to think the way I do. Hopefully this is remedied soon, because most firewall vendors are incredibly overpriced and, in the case of Cisco especially, occasionally hard to even obtain at all.
I'm no Cisco fanboy, although I do rely on them for my income (full disclosure). I also don't want to be a Negative Nancy, as I understand that not everyone warms up to the whole "you should be grateful to have our logo in your rack" attitude you get from Cisco...I certainly don't. But there is a reason beyond simple groupthink that causes people to buy their stuff - frankly, there just is no serious alternative when it comes to switches or multi-function routers.
I think the point you're making is covered pretty comprehensively in this article:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=valve_linux_dampfnudeln&num=1
Under normal circumstances, sure, the guy has a right to believe and say what he wants. But if your job depends upon understanding how science works, and you're publicly making an ass of the organization that employs you, you kind of have it coming.
H.L. Mencken was a delightful troll, but he did always have something fun to say about democracy. Let's try this one:
"If X is the population of the United States and Y is the degree of imbecility of the average American, then democracy is the theory that X times Y is less than Y."
And yet Seth MacFarlane's life and work seem to confirm it.
I don't know ... I have always regarded the flat-panel LCD displays as one of those examples where the new technology was so much better than the old technology that I can't believe people put up with CRTs for as long as they did. I would never want to display anything on an old 15" CRT for any reason now, even for old-school authenticity. Please, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that they were totally awful and had next to zero redeeming qualities.
I think you'll find that when it comes to Drunken Sex Party Photos, most of us who are going out of our way to look at them really don't care whether or not they have been edited.
Even though the "conventional wisdom" is that the science of programming has entirely changed to consider security issues from end to end, in reality this does not appear to be the case at all.
I think this is a very interesting and valuable insight. The people doing the talking have completely sold everyone on a vision in which the coder keeps security in mind from the get-go, but the people doing the, uh ... doing ... are doing things the way they have always done them, and tacking on the security piece after the fact.
Is it that programmers in general simply believe that buyers are unreasonably paranoid? Or is it that planning for security throughout the process is too costly and time-consuming?
ME: Can you help me out here? I scraped a concrete barrier while trying to park my car.
REPAIR SHOP: Sure we can. That will be seven thousand dollars.
Girls don't like poor guys.
I see what you mean. I cut out a bunch of text there and it shows. What I mean is that boomers looked at themselves as victims of "the system" and that attitude lasted long after they became "the system.
Boomers took a look at the structure of their culture, found it lacking, and abandoned all of it. They did not like Dick and Jane, and so instead of improving upon it, they threw it out, and Chaucer along with it. It remains probably the 2nd worst case of "throwing the baby out with the bath water" in civilized history, the first being the French Revolution.
Anything not meeting an immediate earthy need was discarded. It began with "what the hell do I need with Brahms? Brahms isn't going to get me laid." Before long it became "what the hell do I need with religion? Religion doesn't dazzle me like LSD does." Finally it settled into "what the hell do I need with regulation and social betterment? There's money to be made."
How can there be any wonder that our parents' and bosses' generation is so insufferably self-centered? I find it pertinent that we talk about this within a week of J.D. Salinger's death, as his Holden Caulfield can be very illustrative in teaching us about the kind of dysfunctional, disenfranchised individual who currently runs our world. As far as the Boomers are concerned, they have defined the culture through their rebellion, and discouraged us from absorbing the kinds of things that gave context to our surroundings. We had to find them on our own. The newest generation entering college now is so detached from context that they seem to be aliens in their own world. They are idiots of course, but I don't hold them to account for it. Their entire world has been scrubbed of context.
I'm in Generation X, and I don't pretend that we did everything right either. We made mistakes, like fetishizing exclusivity, and needlessly feeding the rage of others. Yet at the end of our troubled youth, we sat down, and we wrote about it, as a way of hoping to establish some kind of context. I am slightly comforted in knowing that the next generation, if they hope to understand us any better, will at least be able to read something by Dave Eggers or the like. What worries me is that the coming generation will not read any of it, because they are not interested, and will not leave anything of their own for posterity either.
There must be some place in the world that welcomes those Americans who manage to not be complete morons.
Having just returned from abroad I can confidently say that the answer is "Er, sorry, no." Even if you have good grades and a valuable skill, there's still a possibility that you find your background as a dog walker grants you a dismissive understanding of evolutionary theory that exceeds that of biology PhDs, or that you will fight to the death for the human rights of a blastocyst. You're not worth the risk.
I swear to God, there is like 20 straight minutes of nothing but Wookiee language being spoken.
I was stoned when I saw it, and I think that made it even worse.
There is a kind of person out there who is absolutely sure, with no evidence whatever, that basic numerical logic can be applied to complex human phenomena such as government, philosophy, and peace of mind with great success. I suspect that they are probably correct, if your measure of "great success" is also measured purely by basic numerical logic, i.e. a few additional points of efficiency that amounts to pennies in the pockets of people who could have done without them. And what they get in return is the satisfaction of knowing that they have total and complete control over those few pennies, which will never be delivered into the hands of bureaucracies which are inherently evil for some reason. Good for them. I'm sure Libertopia will one day be a grand place full of happy people who are overjoyed by the glib and peremptory assholes who would control debate, but I dare anyone to determine how the end result is markedly different from a society utterly ruled by any other kind of fervent belief - see the delightful anecdote about what kind of things Haselton teaches his six-year-old daughter, as if there was nothing more to it than "government takes your money and kills children. Sweet dreams honey." I don't know how you're doing worse than this if you're sending your kids off to Jesus Camp. It's a kind of unquestioning faith in the unproven for which most churches would kill...and have.
Interconnectedness is a basic fact of life. There are human forces much stronger than the kind of processes you learn in undergrad logic classes. Some gracefully accept it. Some never grow beyond fighting it. If you are of the very solid and hardly movable opinion that what really matters in life, what's really going to change the world, is precisely how you argue points of logic and how you pick apart someone else's, you're decidedly in the latter category, in which case there's a lot less of philosophy there than there is pathology. It's for that reason that I look forward to my down-modding with equanimity.
I don't know of a single IT department that hasn't been helped by virtualization of servers. It makes more efficient use of purchased hardware, keeps businesses from some of the manipulations to which their hardware and OS vendors can subject them, and is (in the long term) cheaper to operate than a traditional datacenter. IT departments have wondered for a long time: "if I have all this processing power, memory, and storage, why can't I use all of it?" Virtualization answers that question, and does it in an elegant way, so I don't consider it snake oil.
20 extra years? Try five, if she's lucky. Artificial heart recipients typically don't last long. Heck, even recipients of a genuine human heart don't always last very long.
Many religious and philosophical systems were invented because of the situation you're in. It's not a technician problem, it's a human problem, and it's pervasive (OK, maybe more pervasive with IT people). I promise you, no matter how you present this problem to your managers or try to alter the behavior of your end-users, it will not help. Only fixing yourself can help. My sincerest suggestion to you would be to learn how to meditate. The technique known as Anapanasati seems to work wonders for calming me down and keeping me focused.
1. Sit down. Sit straight up. Close your eyes.
2. Briefly do a mental check of all parts of your body to make sure there's no unnecessary muscle tension anywhere.
3. Take a few deep breaths.
4. Start breathing naturally, without trying, into your abdomen. Breathe the same way you would if you were sleeping. This takes patience.
5. When your breathing has gone on auto-pilot, move the focus of your mind to the rims of your nostrils, where you can feel the breath moving in and out. Just keep 100% of your attention on that feeling. You should only be thinking "breath moving in" and "breath moving out."
6. When your mind starts to wander, think to yourself, "hmm, I got distracted and started thinking about Scarlett Johannson" and return your attention to your breath.
7. When it's time to stop, don't just snap out of it. Slowly bring yourself out of it and open your eyes gradually.
Do this for maybe 15 or 20 minutes. It may sound tedious, and I know this might sound nuts, but I guarantee that you will be calmer and thinking more clearly by the time you're done. I've been doing it for 4 years now and I'm pretty sure I would have probably punched someone in the face by now if I didn't find some way to calm myself.