Funny that, I actually wrote a paper on 1984 as a blueprint for modern tyranny for my comp-101 class last winter.
I whole-heartedly agree... Orwell was trying to write a cautionary tale, but one that I fear isn't being heard by anyone, or is taken as a good idea by the powers-that-be.
The United States and Russia have been disarming their arsenals for 20+ years now. There's a deliberate effort to maintain "nuclear parity" but to say that the U.S. isn't practicing what it preaches is disingenuous. From 10,000 to 2000 warheads in 20 years, and we're far better at protecting them than our ex-Soviet counterparts.
Try again. In 1792 who comprised "armed militias?" Armed "citizens."
This is why there's no clear-cut answer on the gun-control issue, the Second Amendment is the most vaguely written one. The founding fathers could not conceive of an environment where duels and armed individuals were unnecessary.
I think it's fair to note that in some, but not all, of those events, significant cause was due to undue Soviet involvement. While not in a shooting war, the United State and the Soviet Union spent 40 years in proxy wars with each other in third world countries. The rest were arguably caused by our flawed, IMHO, drug control policy.
I use a command line predominantly in Windows, as well. Why? Simply because the text manipulation tools of cygwin let me part through gigabytes of data quickly and efficiently, in ways that Notepad or Office cannot.
Arguably tools like TextPad and Ultraedit can give me similar abilities, but why, when the cygwin toolkit is the same on every platform I'm likely to use, and the aforementioned GUI tools are not?
While you make a good point that much of system configuration today is very dependent on knowing the specific syntax of configuration files of software and performing commandline editing (httpd.conf anyone?), it's NOT the reason we refuse to give up our commandline.
It's the reason that Microsoft has seen the light, and given us the Windows Scripting Host and PowerShell. Because even Microsoft knows that it's GUI tools just aren't good enough, especially when deploying or managing thousands of desktops and is exposing all it's configuration interfaces through COM or.NET for automation.
This shows just how each users experience is so different from each others.
I've been running a single instance of ff2 on my OpenSuSE 10.0 distro for the better part of four months without a single crash.
MONTHS!
Granted, I've been doing something similar on my Windows laptop as well... I have an instance of FF2 that was running for at least two months between reboots.
I think both systems have their uses, and lets face it, Linux is only getting better. Vista, arguably, is not a good example of Windows getting better.
Personally, I'd rather have the best of both worlds in a Macbook Pro, but I don't want to pay the price...
now take someone who wants to know how to change the oil in their car. So you calmly explain how to do it, step by step, showing them delicately and politely. 3000 miles later they come running at you bitching because they can't change the oil, and you fucked up the instructions... so you start asking questions, and you find out they the took off the oil filter with a hacksaw and poured the new oil into the transmission filler.
I'm not saying the attitude is proper, but when we've gone above and beyond to help you out and you fail to read or heed basic first-step principles, I have no sympathy.
But those were, AFAIK, only available for medium and large format cameras, like Mamiya and Hasselblad, not standard 35mm cameras like your Pentax or Minolta.
The article makes fun of the resolution and image carrying capacity of these devices, but fails to reflect on the fact that the removable storage of the time was measured in megabytes and the dSLR it champions, the D1, was a 2.7 MP camera.
The death of "silicon film" was the variety of different sizes they'd have to make the thing to work with all cameras, and probably the transport mechanism, getting that to work right.
When you consider that that time might otherwise have been spent camped out on a couch watching reruns of MASH, and you factor in the free drinks, making a profit of $10/h just sitting around jerking off in a casino seems like a decent ROI.
I've seen this with several financial and CRM "customization" projects that cost upwards of six figures and never brought a tenth of that in extra value to the company.
Sometimes it's better to mold your business processes to the way the software works, and to pick software that is extensible by the end user rather than high-priced consultants.
90% of the customizations I've ever had to do could have been done by a monkey with Crystal Reports and some basic data modelling knowledge.
Reminds me of a dot-bomb story - a buddy of mine took one of those systems in a spreadsheet and turned it into an access database that spit out pretty Word reports via VBA and reduced a days worth of work into five minutes. He'd spend his day sleeping in empty cubes and getting his job done just "on time" like everyone else.
The only reason he never told anyone about it was to prevent a dozen people from getting fired, or losing his own job.
So yeah, I think there's plenty of blame to go around, from divisions who buy and implement software from 3rd parties and then expect IT to support it, to people who start projects on the sly that are customer-critical and cost us boatloads of penalty money when the Optiplex 110 workstation it was running on dies.
Then again, IT is just as much to blame for their surly, "we own the universe" attitudes.
Time scales are relative. Plumbing and electrical and communications (telephone) networks HAVE been upgrades every "few" years, few being relative, from 5-10 to 20-30. Yes, those networks do get upgraded constantly. The difference is, they are very mature compared to networking. We've had three major network upgrade waves in the past 15 years. From everything else to Ethernet, from 10BaseT to 100BaseT, and from that to Gigabit Ethernet.
I know of several companies who are going to replace thousands of pounds of functioning servers simply because they've reached the end of their 3year service life. When we stop measuring server lifespans in months and do so instead in decades, we'll have matured as an industry. And then people will understand computers as they understand electricity, telephones and plumbing.
I'll use an example very close to myself. I consider myself a pretty damn good sysadmin both Windows and many flavors of Unix.
But sitting down at an OpenVMS prompt or a CRT connected to an AS/400 system, and I'm lost. Good and solidly lost. Most of the easily accessible "Help" on those systems is geared towards end-users, not sysadmins.
I could learn it if someone pushed me in the right direction to give me a start and a fighting chance, but nowhere near comprehensible to the uninitiated.
Nice generalization. I knew a truly amazing perl hacker who could make incomprehensible regexps. That's how I learned; but he never put anything like that in production code. He'd write a single line regexp into a 30 line program just to insure it was readable. He knew that in six months he'd have to revisit and relearn it.
Um, sorry, but my area (Boston) has had restaurants that for YEARS and possibly DECADES had separate smoking and non-smoking sections. Pizza Hut, IHOP, Bickfords... all of which started eliminating smoking sections in the late 80's and 90's voluntarily until Bickfords and Dennys was the only restaurant I knew still had separate sections. Now it's banned everywhere except private clubs.
I think this is a side effect of the poorly executed plans to ban indoor smoking. When Boston did this, the amount of cigarette butts on the sidewalks quadrupled overnight. I'm surprised Boston hasn't considered an outdoor ban yet.
Part of why I like the Fair Tax idea. Instead of income tax, you pay a 23% sales tax. The goal of money, after all, is to be spent. You can save it forever, tax free, but when you die, your grandkids are going to spend it, and it's going to get taxed. Why tax inheritance, savings (interest), dividends, profit taking? Just tax at point of sale.
There are, arguably, some serious issues with the implementation, but if you want to keep money flowing, tax it at Point of Sale. It will always keep flowing. It may pause during a conversion, but bills still need to be paid, people will still want their cheap foreign imports and entertainment... the economy will go on.
I think the big reason is that the difference in quality between a CD and an AAC from iTunes is FAR more subjective than a compressed MP4/Divx and an HD movie.
People seem to not understand that WindowsME was a necessary stepping stone to XP, IMHO.
If the incompatible changes to some key DOS type stuff weren't made in ME, a lot of software vendors would never have made the switch to XP, it would not have been the runaway success that it was/is. Fact is that ME woke a lot of people up that big things were going to be happening and gave people a good year and a half to fix them.
I think of Vista in the same fashion. I like the new look, but it's a dog performance-wise. Vista is the house-cleaner. It's the clue to business that 4+GB and dual/quad core desktops are going to be necessary for the future of Windows.
Well, I'm going to call you a troll, because you don't mention any apps that have been broken...
Yes, there certainly are releases of software that get into the wild and turn out to have SEVERE bugs (Subversion) that are very quickly redacted, and also have database format changes (Subversion) that are also VERY clearly identified, and if you toasted your repo because you didn't export it before a major version update (from 1.1 to 1.4 maybe), you're an idiot.
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Funny that, I actually wrote a paper on 1984 as a blueprint for modern tyranny for my comp-101 class last winter.
I whole-heartedly agree... Orwell was trying to write a cautionary tale, but one that I fear isn't being heard by anyone, or is taken as a good idea by the powers-that-be.
The United States and Russia have been disarming their arsenals for 20+ years now. There's a deliberate effort to maintain "nuclear parity" but to say that the U.S. isn't practicing what it preaches is disingenuous. From 10,000 to 2000 warheads in 20 years, and we're far better at protecting them than our ex-Soviet counterparts.
Try again. In 1792 who comprised "armed militias?" Armed "citizens."
This is why there's no clear-cut answer on the gun-control issue, the Second Amendment is the most vaguely written one. The founding fathers could not conceive of an environment where duels and armed individuals were unnecessary.
They could withdraw from the NPT, which IIRC, North Korea has done.
http://www.cdi.org/nuclear/nk-fact-sheet.cfm [Jan 10, 2003]
I think it's fair to note that in some, but not all, of those events, significant cause was due to undue Soviet involvement. While not in a shooting war, the United State and the Soviet Union spent 40 years in proxy wars with each other in third world countries. The rest were arguably caused by our flawed, IMHO, drug control policy.
I use a command line predominantly in Windows, as well. Why? Simply because the text manipulation tools of cygwin let me part through gigabytes of data quickly and efficiently, in ways that Notepad or Office cannot.
.NET for automation.
Arguably tools like TextPad and Ultraedit can give me similar abilities, but why, when the cygwin toolkit is the same on every platform I'm likely to use, and the aforementioned GUI tools are not?
While you make a good point that much of system configuration today is very dependent on knowing the specific syntax of configuration files of software and performing commandline editing (httpd.conf anyone?), it's NOT the reason we refuse to give up our commandline.
It's the reason that Microsoft has seen the light, and given us the Windows Scripting Host and PowerShell. Because even Microsoft knows that it's GUI tools just aren't good enough, especially when deploying or managing thousands of desktops and is exposing all it's configuration interfaces through COM or
This shows just how each users experience is so different from each others.
I've been running a single instance of ff2 on my OpenSuSE 10.0 distro for the better part of four months without a single crash.
MONTHS!
Granted, I've been doing something similar on my Windows laptop as well... I have an instance of FF2 that was running for at least two months between reboots.
I think both systems have their uses, and lets face it, Linux is only getting better. Vista, arguably, is not a good example of Windows getting better.
Personally, I'd rather have the best of both worlds in a Macbook Pro, but I don't want to pay the price...
now take someone who wants to know how to change the oil in their car. So you calmly explain how to do it, step by step, showing them delicately and politely. 3000 miles later they come running at you bitching because they can't change the oil, and you fucked up the instructions... so you start asking questions, and you find out they the took off the oil filter with a hacksaw and poured the new oil into the transmission filler.
I'm not saying the attitude is proper, but when we've gone above and beyond to help you out and you fail to read or heed basic first-step principles, I have no sympathy.
But those were, AFAIK, only available for medium and large format cameras, like Mamiya and Hasselblad, not standard 35mm cameras like your Pentax or Minolta.
The article makes fun of the resolution and image carrying capacity of these devices, but fails to reflect on the fact that the removable storage of the time was measured in megabytes and the dSLR it champions, the D1, was a 2.7 MP camera.
The death of "silicon film" was the variety of different sizes they'd have to make the thing to work with all cameras, and probably the transport mechanism, getting that to work right.
No, that's a release candidate.
I've got a new Sony receiver with 3 HDMI inputs on it. I still have my one remote home theatre setup.
When you consider that that time might otherwise have been spent camped out on a couch watching reruns of MASH, and you factor in the free drinks, making a profit of $10/h just sitting around jerking off in a casino seems like a decent ROI.
It's all relative.
I've seen this with several financial and CRM "customization" projects that cost upwards of six figures and never brought a tenth of that in extra value to the company.
Sometimes it's better to mold your business processes to the way the software works, and to pick software that is extensible by the end user rather than high-priced consultants.
90% of the customizations I've ever had to do could have been done by a monkey with Crystal Reports and some basic data modelling knowledge.
Reminds me of a dot-bomb story - a buddy of mine took one of those systems in a spreadsheet and turned it into an access database that spit out pretty Word reports via VBA and reduced a days worth of work into five minutes. He'd spend his day sleeping in empty cubes and getting his job done just "on time" like everyone else.
The only reason he never told anyone about it was to prevent a dozen people from getting fired, or losing his own job.
So yeah, I think there's plenty of blame to go around, from divisions who buy and implement software from 3rd parties and then expect IT to support it, to people who start projects on the sly that are customer-critical and cost us boatloads of penalty money when the Optiplex 110 workstation it was running on dies.
Then again, IT is just as much to blame for their surly, "we own the universe" attitudes.
Time scales are relative. Plumbing and electrical and communications (telephone) networks HAVE been upgrades every "few" years, few being relative, from 5-10 to 20-30. Yes, those networks do get upgraded constantly. The difference is, they are very mature compared to networking. We've had three major network upgrade waves in the past 15 years. From everything else to Ethernet, from 10BaseT to 100BaseT, and from that to Gigabit Ethernet.
I know of several companies who are going to replace thousands of pounds of functioning servers simply because they've reached the end of their 3year service life. When we stop measuring server lifespans in months and do so instead in decades, we'll have matured as an industry. And then people will understand computers as they understand electricity, telephones and plumbing.
They'll still call a specialist.
I'll use an example very close to myself. I consider myself a pretty damn good sysadmin both Windows and many flavors of Unix.
But sitting down at an OpenVMS prompt or a CRT connected to an AS/400 system, and I'm lost. Good and solidly lost. Most of the easily accessible "Help" on those systems is geared towards end-users, not sysadmins.
I could learn it if someone pushed me in the right direction to give me a start and a fighting chance, but nowhere near comprehensible to the uninitiated.
Nice generalization. I knew a truly amazing perl hacker who could make incomprehensible regexps. That's how I learned; but he never put anything like that in production code. He'd write a single line regexp into a 30 line program just to insure it was readable. He knew that in six months he'd have to revisit and relearn it.
Or the Intel microcode fixes which actually modify the CPU at runtime?
That's cuz the morons STOPPED at Plymouth, and didn't head for Virginia.
They'd have done fine without help in Virginia, aside from the aforementioned smallpox.
Um, sorry, but my area (Boston) has had restaurants that for YEARS and possibly DECADES had separate smoking and non-smoking sections. Pizza Hut, IHOP, Bickfords... all of which started eliminating smoking sections in the late 80's and 90's voluntarily until Bickfords and Dennys was the only restaurant I knew still had separate sections. Now it's banned everywhere except private clubs.
I think this is a side effect of the poorly executed plans to ban indoor smoking. When Boston did this, the amount of cigarette butts on the sidewalks quadrupled overnight. I'm surprised Boston hasn't considered an outdoor ban yet.
Part of why I like the Fair Tax idea. Instead of income tax, you pay a 23% sales tax. The goal of money, after all, is to be spent. You can save it forever, tax free, but when you die, your grandkids are going to spend it, and it's going to get taxed. Why tax inheritance, savings (interest), dividends, profit taking? Just tax at point of sale.
There are, arguably, some serious issues with the implementation, but if you want to keep money flowing, tax it at Point of Sale. It will always keep flowing. It may pause during a conversion, but bills still need to be paid, people will still want their cheap foreign imports and entertainment... the economy will go on.
I think the big reason is that the difference in quality between a CD and an AAC from iTunes is FAR more subjective than a compressed MP4/Divx and an HD movie.
Significantly.
People seem to not understand that WindowsME was a necessary stepping stone to XP, IMHO.
If the incompatible changes to some key DOS type stuff weren't made in ME, a lot of software vendors would never have made the switch to XP, it would not have been the runaway success that it was/is. Fact is that ME woke a lot of people up that big things were going to be happening and gave people a good year and a half to fix them.
I think of Vista in the same fashion. I like the new look, but it's a dog performance-wise. Vista is the house-cleaner. It's the clue to business that 4+GB and dual/quad core desktops are going to be necessary for the future of Windows.
Well, I'm going to call you a troll, because you don't mention any apps that have been broken...
:-)
Yes, there certainly are releases of software that get into the wild and turn out to have SEVERE bugs (Subversion) that are very quickly redacted, and also have database format changes (Subversion) that are also VERY clearly identified, and if you toasted your repo because you didn't export it before a major version update (from 1.1 to 1.4 maybe), you're an idiot.
Just an example.
Cheers.