Ain't it the truth? On the other hand, there is a lot of knowledge sharing to be gained from respectful listening. If you have weekly operations or status meetings, make sure that someone from IT is at the table. Everywhere I've been where that was the practice has been a pleasant and effective workplace. When systems are running well, they're essentially invisible, and this is a highly desirable state of affairs. It's quite the opposite of neglect, but if there isn't active communication about what's going on, how do you ever expect to tell them apart? (Until it's too late, of course, and the chronically-underfunded, under-appreciated infrastructure finally falls down hard.)
this goes against the process of using virtualized servers since you can't do physical segmentation on a virtual machine
Ah, but you can. Modern hypervisors (and this includes lightweight Linux paravirtualization containers such as OpenVZ) are able to provide a virtual network for the nodes running under it. Often they have fairly limited capabilities, but anything worthy of the name will support basic VLANs. That's to meet exactly your segmentation requirement.
I sympathize, but your answer tells me that you're determined to repeat the same failed approach to problem resolution.
I've told you one way to get out of that. Switch providers, if you can. Switch to a smaller outfit, one in your community, if you can.
Here's another way. If you're not making reasonable progress, escalate. To do this most effectively, you should proactively record your conversations with the provider and make sure it's accurately timestamped. If you hit someone intelligent and knowledgeable at Tier 1, congratulations. If not, waste no further time. Politely request an escalation. If they push back, politely repeat the request and mention that you are recording the conversation. If they drop the call, hit redial. Anyone at Tier 2 is about 10x as likely to know what you're talking about. And if that doesn't work, request a further escalation and again explain that you're recording the call "for quality assurance purposes." They all do it, so don't be shy.
How far can you take this? Well, the senior network engineers are about as technically proficient as you're going to find anywhere. I used to reserve about 10% of my time for designing test frameworks so that we'd have hard evidence when calling bullshit on the modem vendors. If you manage to get to me, I'll back you up. Though honestly, any Tier 2 or Tier 3 you get should be more than sufficiently experienced. They've taught me a few things I didn't know.
If the problem is not technical but a result of policy, then you can skip the Director of Operations and go straight to the executive level. But you have to have laid the previous groundwork or you won't be taken seriously. I was once spammed for about a year by a large telco. Not only did I keep meticulous records of my polite requests to desist (web forms, emails, phone calls) but at about month 3 I said, "Hey, I get it now. The reason you're not acting on my requests is because you think this is something other than a violation of your own Acceptable Use Policy. You must be requesting services from me. You want me to process these spams in exchange for a fee. No problem! For $100 per unsolicited email, I will read and evaluate the content and send a concise written summary to you at the end of each month. I will take further unsolicited email from you as constituting acceptance of these terms."
So it went. I sent in regular summaries and invoices to their legal address, until they had racked up about $10K in unpaid debt. As it happened, just then their VP of Operations went on national radio to allay some of the many customer service concerns being raised by the public. I called in and identified myself, explaining that they owed me $10K in unpaid fees for reading their spam, and would the VP be able to help me or should I take the matter to court?
I never got paid, and I never took them to court. But the spam stopped two days later and hasn't been back since. My point is, you have to get serious, and you also have some fun with this stuff or you'll just end up whining about it on Slashdot. And what kind of a life is that? You decide.
Um, yes. Grossman seems to insist on conflating the entire Internet with web browsers. A browser exploit is therefore prima facie proof that the Internet is defective by design. It's not surprising that he also conflates browser vulnerabilities with system vulnerabilities.
So you're right. His proposed solution, to replace a general-purpose browser UX with a bunch of dedicated clients, is what everyone else in the room recognizes as good old client/server. This is such a familiar design pattern that we can weigh in fairly confidently about its strengths and weaknesses relative to the current state of the art regarding the web.
Certainly the web is being asked to do vastly more than it was originally designed to do because (same story as always) people generally prefer convenience over security. Designing for the web is convenient. You don't have to deploy client applications or worry about platform compatibility. Whee! Such freedom to innovate.
And so you end up with phpMyAdmin. Remote system administration is fine, as long as it can be done securely. Never mind whether the admin agent is secure, how can you determine whether your end is secure, when in the same browser and user account you're configuring the server and playing Texas Hold 'Em?
Yes, there is a place for dedicated client apps. Was this ever in doubt? No, I didn't think so either. Brilliant indeed!
Perhaps she mean MAC address. I can imagine that happening to anyone in the middle of a long dreary shift.
I worked for a few years as one of the senior network operations guys at a company that provides customer support on behalf of various regional ISPs. This was in Canada, where the expectation when calling tech support is that you will find a fellow human being on the other end of the line, not a weary, disinterested or passive-aggressive drone.
We didn't run a sweatshop. Most of our senior people had come up through the ranks. We didn't impose scripts on people. What we did do was hold sessions every few months to find out what questions and issues the staff were hitting, discuss what were the probable causes and what could be done about them, and then work with the staff to get that information into their wiki. It was a good place to work.
And still there's a certain percentage of staff who come into work after a night of partying, or who have newborns at home, or who just broke up with the love of their life, or who are going to school part-time. So, yeah, sometimes they space out and say dumb things. Other times, they'd blow your mind with how perceptive they are.
I think the main difference between that and what you experienced would be found in attitude. It's really hard to like talking to support when they make you feel like a worm that got squashed on the bottom of their shoe. That's not a very concrete thing to file a complaint about, but in my opinion when you see that then the rest inevitably follows. And let me tell you, it does not have to be that way. I appreciate that often you don't have much choice, but try switching to a smaller provider if you can.
Nice to be reminded of these ideas. While they come up most prominently in our early years as software developers, we tend after a decade or two either to take them for granted (should we be so fortunate as to work in a place where everyone writes clean code as a matter of course) or perhaps to give up on them in despair (when working in a code maintenance regime that puts a priority on generating minimal diffs where the code base is - and must perpetually remain - an ugly steaming mess.)
The practice of software development entails in the same undertaking aspects of style, design, engineering, and science. On that spectrum, the stylistic element can seem relatively trivial, subsumed into the others. Okay, fine. What that really means is that when we encounter stylistic failings and inconsistencies, we're bound to wonder what else is wrong with the code. Style, in other words, communicates something about care and attention in general.
As a form of communication, it's interesting to consider the Japanese tea ceremony. Few human activities are so completely formalized. Its essential form is pure simplicity, where every action in every detail of movement can be given full attention. Every tea practitioner knows this form intimately. What's interesting is that this form, while aesthetically pleasing, is seldom followed exactly. It functions sort of like a carrier wave. How a tea practitioner departs from form encodes the signal, superimposed on the carrier. In feudal days, the encoded aspect was critical. It provided a way for people to communicate on subjects that were politically dangerous.
In writing software, we're probably not concerning ourselves with political intrigue. But still, how we express an idea in code provides important information. Consistency of form is reassuring, whereas departures from form draw our attention. We're bound to ask "why did he do it this way over here but this other way over there?" In good code, the reason should be evident. We should feel a small kick of satisfaction that we're inside the mind of the programmer, that we're on the same groove.
It's the kind of code we should all aspire to write. Style is not mere decorative flourish. If it is, something is wrong, because form follows function, and this would be form without function.
True enough. My research lab used to have a Symbolics 2650 Lisp Machine, an expensive and exotic item definitely worthy of the history books. Ours eventually fell into disuse, though I did my very best to maintain it for historical reasons.
Then the disk drive failed. Although it was easy enough to find a supply of replacement SMD drives, the software to format them was closely held by Symbolics. And so, for want of a nail...
I'm glad to see you make this point. Grape pomace with its associated yeast lees is an excellent material for composting, being ideally friable and high in available energy. It accelerates the composting of less suitable materials, and goes a long way in encouraging a healthy compost ecosystem. I'm not sure that it's stable enough to recommend as animal feed in general, but I'm no expert. If it's near to hand and can be consumed within a few days, there could be value in it, though it would ideally be put in an enclosed feeder, since set out in the open it will sour quickly and give rise to impressive quantities of fruit flies.
After training a whole generation of people to mistrust software upgrades because, defective by design, they just move the pain points around a little - after all that training, does Microsoft really think that people will want to move off XP?
Whether measured in absolute expenditure, relative to GDP, or in terms of total military spending worldwide, the United States is far and away the most highly militarized country in the world.
This is not a subtle or contentious matter, and it takes about ten seconds to find out. Shame on you for not bothering.
Dude, you need to practice your critical reading skills. Nowhere did I speak of the US constitution. Nor did I refer to religious fundamentalism. By my repeated use of the word "political" I hoped it would be understood that I was speaking particular of political fundamentalism.
I doubt that our positions are essentially very far apart, in fact. Still, your writing helps to illustrate the point I was trying to make. You rush to defend the constitution - or its framers, I'm not sure which and perhaps the distinction is unimportant. This gesture, to me, is characteristic of American political fundamentalism. Not that there's anything wrong with the constitution, necessarily, as a document. We have one in Canada too. It's just not a big deal. Whereas, in American culture, the constitution as an symbol is elevated to such an extraordinary level that unscrupulous people can quite readily use it as a rhetorical device for "derailing reasonable discussion". If you try to wrap yourself in the flag in Canada, people will laugh at you. Personally, I think that's healthy.
When you capitalize a term, as you have done with the US Constitution and the Rights of Man, it may not seem to you that you're doing anything extraordinary. You've grown up in a culture where, as with terms like the Founding Fathers and so on, it's just part of the scenery, like saluting the flag and having a color guard at a high school graduation. But brother, you have to understand that, as seen from the world outside of the American culture, all this reverence looks just a little bit weird, not actually fetishistic but headed somewhat in that direction. That's because it's a particular characteristic of fundamentalism that certain symbols shall be above criticism. And these symbols abound in American culture.
Indeed, there's an oddly fundamentalist note to setting up any political principle as an absolute.
It's a peculiar quality that the United States has of having, on one hand, an abundance of sacred absolutes (right to bear arms, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion; all wonderful things), but on the other hand living within a highly-militarized police state. I wonder if all this talk of sacred absolutes hasn't proven useful as a kind of smoke screen to let politicians and big business set themselves up with judicial and extrajudicial powers that quite effectively bypass these same absolutes.
There's nothing quite like the love of rhetoric for derailing reasonable discussion. Political absolutes make ideal fuel for rhetoric. It's much easier to reach for an absolute than it is to reflectively ask, "Oh, what is it about this particular situation that is problematic, and what shall we do about it?" If, in fact, we must learn to navigate through various shades of grey, then let's admit that and get on with the work. In Canada, for example, we have laws that restrict hate speech. They were written in response to a particular situation. They do not address absolutes. They're probably flawed, and we'll discover those flaws as we encounter edge cases. It's all a bit grey, but does that mean that Canada is thereby at risk of becoming a police state? Hardly. The main movement in Canada toward bigger prisons, harsher jail sentences, and less funding of science by government is coming from - guess who? - the fundamentalists.
Social networking is no longer new; whether you consider it to have started with online communities in the mid-90s or with the beginnings of sites many people still use today.
I consider it to have started with Usenet. Based originally on UUCP, it was first connected to the ARPAnet in 1980 and flourished at an exponential rate along with it. It was not only a distributed social network but a fully decentralized, fully replicated one.
It was emphatically not supported by advertizing. The most infamous attempt to exploit its open nature for advertizing purposes was by American immigration lawyers Canter and Siegel in 1994, who managed to offend everyone on Usenet and were rapidly quashed. Still, a track record of 14 years of civilized use of a digital commons tells us that such projects can be eminently successful on their own merits.
This is a fascinating topic for any student of the human condition.
Most people are conditioned to experience boredom as a deeply unpleasant experience. I recall a program that Bill Moyers did a few years ago on the mind/body duality, in which he joined in a sitting meditation. It might have been zazen or something like it. He couldn't stand it. He found that he just couldn't remain in stillness, not even for a few minutes. Instead he became agitated and had to stand up and leave the room. The way he described it made me think it was a kind of panic attack. Of course he was deeply curious about this powerful reaction to nothing at all. I'm sure he's been thinking about it ever since. And so he should.
If you reflexively avoid boredom, you are not able to access the enormous richness of experience in just being. In my view, that's a terrible loss. Read any of Arthur Ransome's "Swallows and Amazons" books for children and you will get a taste of that experience of just being, as it was even a generation or two ago: people not always rushing about, multitasking and never really experiencing their real environment, but instead sitting and watching all the minute and lovely activities of the world. It's a child's way of looking at the world, and Ransome perfectly captures the wealth and innocence of it.
Or consider Hermann Hesse's "Siddhartha", in which the main character, when asked what makes it possible for him to succeed where others have so often failed, answers, "I can think. I can fast. I can wait."
The thing is, boredom is not real. It's an illusion, a passing symptom of addicive withdrawl, Beyond it lies a world of real experience, exquisite in its quiet subtlety. "Pay attention" says the Zen master, who is roundly ignored because the advice he gives isn't mysterious enough, doesn't require any shiny technology.
You mean Windows VMs. Do they constitute the majority of VM instances then? That's certainly not been my experience, and I'm smack in the middle of the industry.
If it's evident that in your present position you'll be rising to great things, then fine. In my experience that's very uncommon, but certainly it could happen.
However...
If your career history consists of advancement solely within a single organization, don't expect it to buy you nearly as much cred as a similar pattern of achievement across multiple employers.
Also, although I can understand that some people might feel completely fulfilled professionally by working their entire career for a single employer, I confess that I'm not one of those people. I'm also happy that I didn't marry my high school sweetheart, though we're still excellent friends a continent apart and 40 years later. The only point to this is one famously associated with the mythologist Joseph Campbell: follow your bliss. As he explained his own life and career through the Depression, your may end up rich or poor, famous or infamous or utterly forgotten. Who knows what your life will become? But if nothing else, at least you'll have your bliss.
As someone who's been through a very interesting and sometimes bumpy ride along the career path, I can say for sure that you can only grow so far by staying in one place. Change is never easy, especially if you're thinking about leaving something known and secure and pleasant for something which is necessarily uncertain.
But the best time to leave is with all of your old working relationships in their best form. And be sure to go back and visit! It's an ideal way to solidify reputation as someone everyone likes to work with. You're off to a good start, and it only improves with practice.
VM consoles are typically tty, so that wouldn't do much good. But you're right in a more general sense. Any system (it certainly doesn't have to be a VM) which supports remote windowing (X Windows, rdesktop, Citrix for example) provides all the bitmap you need, and its security is exactly as strong as the window server.
If it's that close that it's difficult to count, does it really matter who wins?
Yes, it tends to matter a lot in a parliamentary system. Look what happened in our last Federal election. The Harper Conservatives formed a majority government even though they held less than 40% of the popular vote.
This was a predictable consequence of vote-splitting among the other parties, all of which occupy similar points on the left side of the political spectrum, which happens to be the sentiment of most Canadians. The Harper Conservatives, having been formed from the former Reform, Alliance, and Conservative parties, had essentially no competition on the political right.
In a situation like this, with a multiparty first-past-the-post system, it's all about margin. Although in the aggregate we might say that there's a bimodal distribution across the political spectrum, at the riding level the race is often down to one or two prominent candidates whose popularity doesn't necessarily match the general distribution.
So to sum up: in practice, we see that there are often many close ridings; in many ridings there is a mismatch between the general party sentiment and the popularity of individual candidates; due to vote splitting there can easily develop an overall mismatch between popular opinion and the party which wins the most seats; and finally, the party with the most seats fairly often does not win a majority of seats. Each of these four aspects can be sensitive to minor changes in vote count. Add them all together and you can end up with something statistically very different than you would get if you just asked every voter to record "yes" or "no" to some referendum question.
I think absolutely everything depends on the child. That should be the focus. At age seven , his personality is taking on a definite form that will likely carry with him all his life, shaping his career and his choice of social experiences. The wisest and most generous gift you can offer as a parent is to encourage him in his exploration of the world through his natural aptitudes and interests - and of course in the discipline that helps to realize them. As career advice, Joseph Campbell famously said "follow your bliss." At age 56 and looking back on a life well lived, I think that advice applies here as well.
A general-purpose programmable computer is a pretty amazing thing. If he's the kind of child who wants to get inside things and figure out how they work, nothing less than Linux will do. If he's a builder and fascinated with tools, then upgradeable hardware will be much more rewarding than some kind of laptop. If he's highly social, then as a parent you may have to take a deep breath and buy something that will help to enhance his social status and, if he's lucky, teach him something about social responsibility - even if it's something that seems from an adult perspective to be somewhat vacuous. If he's heavily into reading, then consider a platform with superior access to e-books. If he's particularly interested in design and aesthetics (I was at his age - I got myself an adult library card and brought home everything there was on architecture and industrial design) then it seems likely that Apple will be the way to go.
As technical matters go, it's not a desperately pivotal question. You're not going to make a terribly blunder by giving him the wrong device. That said, there's no guarantee that he will take to the device in the way you think he will. It's worth giving him something that has several obvious potentialities and then see which ones he pursues most diligently. I was going to say "eagerly" but in this case I think a slow burn is better than something whose interest fades after the novelty wears off.
You never know what's going to click. When I was his age, my dad gave me a small slide rule, probably acquired as conference swag or maybe at the checkout line at some campus bookstore. Whatever. I didn't care about fine precision. I just wanted to have it in my hands and play with it. We were learning multiplication and division at school, and I could understand how to use a slide rule for that. With a bit of a stretch, I could see how squares and square roots were a kind of special case. And just by using the slide rule, I got an intuitive feel for exponents and logarithms, though I don't think I could have put it into words that multiplication was merely adding exponents. I can tell you that slide rules taste like Legos. See, it's all valuable knowledge.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, thanks for sharing your ignorance.
Micro-managing I.T. is almost never wise.
Ain't it the truth? On the other hand, there is a lot of knowledge sharing to be gained from respectful listening. If you have weekly operations or status meetings, make sure that someone from IT is at the table. Everywhere I've been where that was the practice has been a pleasant and effective workplace. When systems are running well, they're essentially invisible, and this is a highly desirable state of affairs. It's quite the opposite of neglect, but if there isn't active communication about what's going on, how do you ever expect to tell them apart? (Until it's too late, of course, and the chronically-underfunded, under-appreciated infrastructure finally falls down hard.)
this goes against the process of using virtualized servers since you can't do physical segmentation on a virtual machine
Ah, but you can. Modern hypervisors (and this includes lightweight Linux paravirtualization containers such as OpenVZ) are able to provide a virtual network for the nodes running under it. Often they have fairly limited capabilities, but anything worthy of the name will support basic VLANs. That's to meet exactly your segmentation requirement.
I sympathize, but your answer tells me that you're determined to repeat the same failed approach to problem resolution.
I've told you one way to get out of that. Switch providers, if you can. Switch to a smaller outfit, one in your community, if you can.
Here's another way. If you're not making reasonable progress, escalate. To do this most effectively, you should proactively record your conversations with the provider and make sure it's accurately timestamped. If you hit someone intelligent and knowledgeable at Tier 1, congratulations. If not, waste no further time. Politely request an escalation. If they push back, politely repeat the request and mention that you are recording the conversation. If they drop the call, hit redial. Anyone at Tier 2 is about 10x as likely to know what you're talking about. And if that doesn't work, request a further escalation and again explain that you're recording the call "for quality assurance purposes." They all do it, so don't be shy.
How far can you take this? Well, the senior network engineers are about as technically proficient as you're going to find anywhere. I used to reserve about 10% of my time for designing test frameworks so that we'd have hard evidence when calling bullshit on the modem vendors. If you manage to get to me, I'll back you up. Though honestly, any Tier 2 or Tier 3 you get should be more than sufficiently experienced. They've taught me a few things I didn't know.
If the problem is not technical but a result of policy, then you can skip the Director of Operations and go straight to the executive level. But you have to have laid the previous groundwork or you won't be taken seriously. I was once spammed for about a year by a large telco. Not only did I keep meticulous records of my polite requests to desist (web forms, emails, phone calls) but at about month 3 I said, "Hey, I get it now. The reason you're not acting on my requests is because you think this is something other than a violation of your own Acceptable Use Policy. You must be requesting services from me. You want me to process these spams in exchange for a fee. No problem! For $100 per unsolicited email, I will read and evaluate the content and send a concise written summary to you at the end of each month. I will take further unsolicited email from you as constituting acceptance of these terms."
So it went. I sent in regular summaries and invoices to their legal address, until they had racked up about $10K in unpaid debt. As it happened, just then their VP of Operations went on national radio to allay some of the many customer service concerns being raised by the public. I called in and identified myself, explaining that they owed me $10K in unpaid fees for reading their spam, and would the VP be able to help me or should I take the matter to court?
I never got paid, and I never took them to court. But the spam stopped two days later and hasn't been back since. My point is, you have to get serious, and you also have some fun with this stuff or you'll just end up whining about it on Slashdot. And what kind of a life is that? You decide.
Um, yes. Grossman seems to insist on conflating the entire Internet with web browsers. A browser exploit is therefore prima facie proof that the Internet is defective by design. It's not surprising that he also conflates browser vulnerabilities with system vulnerabilities.
So you're right. His proposed solution, to replace a general-purpose browser UX with a bunch of dedicated clients, is what everyone else in the room recognizes as good old client/server. This is such a familiar design pattern that we can weigh in fairly confidently about its strengths and weaknesses relative to the current state of the art regarding the web.
Certainly the web is being asked to do vastly more than it was originally designed to do because (same story as always) people generally prefer convenience over security. Designing for the web is convenient. You don't have to deploy client applications or worry about platform compatibility. Whee! Such freedom to innovate.
And so you end up with phpMyAdmin. Remote system administration is fine, as long as it can be done securely. Never mind whether the admin agent is secure, how can you determine whether your end is secure, when in the same browser and user account you're configuring the server and playing Texas Hold 'Em?
Yes, there is a place for dedicated client apps. Was this ever in doubt? No, I didn't think so either. Brilliant indeed!
Perhaps she mean MAC address. I can imagine that happening to anyone in the middle of a long dreary shift.
I worked for a few years as one of the senior network operations guys at a company that provides customer support on behalf of various regional ISPs. This was in Canada, where the expectation when calling tech support is that you will find a fellow human being on the other end of the line, not a weary, disinterested or passive-aggressive drone.
We didn't run a sweatshop. Most of our senior people had come up through the ranks. We didn't impose scripts on people. What we did do was hold sessions every few months to find out what questions and issues the staff were hitting, discuss what were the probable causes and what could be done about them, and then work with the staff to get that information into their wiki. It was a good place to work.
And still there's a certain percentage of staff who come into work after a night of partying, or who have newborns at home, or who just broke up with the love of their life, or who are going to school part-time. So, yeah, sometimes they space out and say dumb things. Other times, they'd blow your mind with how perceptive they are.
I think the main difference between that and what you experienced would be found in attitude. It's really hard to like talking to support when they make you feel like a worm that got squashed on the bottom of their shoe. That's not a very concrete thing to file a complaint about, but in my opinion when you see that then the rest inevitably follows. And let me tell you, it does not have to be that way. I appreciate that often you don't have much choice, but try switching to a smaller provider if you can.
Nice to be reminded of these ideas. While they come up most prominently in our early years as software developers, we tend after a decade or two either to take them for granted (should we be so fortunate as to work in a place where everyone writes clean code as a matter of course) or perhaps to give up on them in despair (when working in a code maintenance regime that puts a priority on generating minimal diffs where the code base is - and must perpetually remain - an ugly steaming mess.)
The practice of software development entails in the same undertaking aspects of style, design, engineering, and science. On that spectrum, the stylistic element can seem relatively trivial, subsumed into the others. Okay, fine. What that really means is that when we encounter stylistic failings and inconsistencies, we're bound to wonder what else is wrong with the code. Style, in other words, communicates something about care and attention in general.
As a form of communication, it's interesting to consider the Japanese tea ceremony. Few human activities are so completely formalized. Its essential form is pure simplicity, where every action in every detail of movement can be given full attention. Every tea practitioner knows this form intimately. What's interesting is that this form, while aesthetically pleasing, is seldom followed exactly. It functions sort of like a carrier wave. How a tea practitioner departs from form encodes the signal, superimposed on the carrier. In feudal days, the encoded aspect was critical. It provided a way for people to communicate on subjects that were politically dangerous.
In writing software, we're probably not concerning ourselves with political intrigue. But still, how we express an idea in code provides important information. Consistency of form is reassuring, whereas departures from form draw our attention. We're bound to ask "why did he do it this way over here but this other way over there?" In good code, the reason should be evident. We should feel a small kick of satisfaction that we're inside the mind of the programmer, that we're on the same groove.
It's the kind of code we should all aspire to write. Style is not mere decorative flourish. If it is, something is wrong, because form follows function, and this would be form without function.
True enough. My research lab used to have a Symbolics 2650 Lisp Machine, an expensive and exotic item definitely worthy of the history books. Ours eventually fell into disuse, though I did my very best to maintain it for historical reasons.
Then the disk drive failed. Although it was easy enough to find a supply of replacement SMD drives, the software to format them was closely held by Symbolics. And so, for want of a nail...
The horses have run. Hurry up and close that barn door!
The Dunning-Kruger effect, AKA "unskilled and unaware".
I'm glad to see you make this point. Grape pomace with its associated yeast lees is an excellent material for composting, being ideally friable and high in available energy. It accelerates the composting of less suitable materials, and goes a long way in encouraging a healthy compost ecosystem. I'm not sure that it's stable enough to recommend as animal feed in general, but I'm no expert. If it's near to hand and can be consumed within a few days, there could be value in it, though it would ideally be put in an enclosed feeder, since set out in the open it will sour quickly and give rise to impressive quantities of fruit flies.
After training a whole generation of people to mistrust software upgrades because, defective by design, they just move the pain points around a little - after all that training, does Microsoft really think that people will want to move off XP?
This is called the Law of Karma.
Whether measured in absolute expenditure, relative to GDP, or in terms of total military spending worldwide, the United States is far and away the most highly militarized country in the world.
This is not a subtle or contentious matter, and it takes about ten seconds to find out. Shame on you for not bothering.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures
Dude, you need to practice your critical reading skills. Nowhere did I speak of the US constitution. Nor did I refer to religious fundamentalism. By my repeated use of the word "political" I hoped it would be understood that I was speaking particular of political fundamentalism.
I doubt that our positions are essentially very far apart, in fact. Still, your writing helps to illustrate the point I was trying to make. You rush to defend the constitution - or its framers, I'm not sure which and perhaps the distinction is unimportant. This gesture, to me, is characteristic of American political fundamentalism. Not that there's anything wrong with the constitution, necessarily, as a document. We have one in Canada too. It's just not a big deal. Whereas, in American culture, the constitution as an symbol is elevated to such an extraordinary level that unscrupulous people can quite readily use it as a rhetorical device for "derailing reasonable discussion". If you try to wrap yourself in the flag in Canada, people will laugh at you. Personally, I think that's healthy.
When you capitalize a term, as you have done with the US Constitution and the Rights of Man, it may not seem to you that you're doing anything extraordinary. You've grown up in a culture where, as with terms like the Founding Fathers and so on, it's just part of the scenery, like saluting the flag and having a color guard at a high school graduation. But brother, you have to understand that, as seen from the world outside of the American culture, all this reverence looks just a little bit weird, not actually fetishistic but headed somewhat in that direction. That's because it's a particular characteristic of fundamentalism that certain symbols shall be above criticism. And these symbols abound in American culture.
Indeed, there's an oddly fundamentalist note to setting up any political principle as an absolute.
It's a peculiar quality that the United States has of having, on one hand, an abundance of sacred absolutes (right to bear arms, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion; all wonderful things), but on the other hand living within a highly-militarized police state. I wonder if all this talk of sacred absolutes hasn't proven useful as a kind of smoke screen to let politicians and big business set themselves up with judicial and extrajudicial powers that quite effectively bypass these same absolutes.
There's nothing quite like the love of rhetoric for derailing reasonable discussion. Political absolutes make ideal fuel for rhetoric. It's much easier to reach for an absolute than it is to reflectively ask, "Oh, what is it about this particular situation that is problematic, and what shall we do about it?" If, in fact, we must learn to navigate through various shades of grey, then let's admit that and get on with the work. In Canada, for example, we have laws that restrict hate speech. They were written in response to a particular situation. They do not address absolutes. They're probably flawed, and we'll discover those flaws as we encounter edge cases. It's all a bit grey, but does that mean that Canada is thereby at risk of becoming a police state? Hardly. The main movement in Canada toward bigger prisons, harsher jail sentences, and less funding of science by government is coming from - guess who? - the fundamentalists.
Dude, I'd like to understand your argument, but so far you haven't presented one. Which suggests to me that you don't really have one.
In what sense do you think Usenet does not qualify as social networking?
Social networking is no longer new; whether you consider it to have started with online communities in the mid-90s or with the beginnings of sites many people still use today.
I consider it to have started with Usenet. Based originally on UUCP, it was first connected to the ARPAnet in 1980 and flourished at an exponential rate along with it. It was not only a distributed social network but a fully decentralized, fully replicated one.
It was emphatically not supported by advertizing. The most infamous attempt to exploit its open nature for advertizing purposes was by American immigration lawyers Canter and Siegel in 1994, who managed to offend everyone on Usenet and were rapidly quashed. Still, a track record of 14 years of civilized use of a digital commons tells us that such projects can be eminently successful on their own merits.
Nicholas Carr offering a "balanced overview" of anything?
Extraordinary.
This is a fascinating topic for any student of the human condition.
Most people are conditioned to experience boredom as a deeply unpleasant experience. I recall a program that Bill Moyers did a few years ago on the mind/body duality, in which he joined in a sitting meditation. It might have been zazen or something like it. He couldn't stand it. He found that he just couldn't remain in stillness, not even for a few minutes. Instead he became agitated and had to stand up and leave the room. The way he described it made me think it was a kind of panic attack. Of course he was deeply curious about this powerful reaction to nothing at all. I'm sure he's been thinking about it ever since. And so he should.
If you reflexively avoid boredom, you are not able to access the enormous richness of experience in just being. In my view, that's a terrible loss. Read any of Arthur Ransome's "Swallows and Amazons" books for children and you will get a taste of that experience of just being, as it was even a generation or two ago: people not always rushing about, multitasking and never really experiencing their real environment, but instead sitting and watching all the minute and lovely activities of the world. It's a child's way of looking at the world, and Ransome perfectly captures the wealth and innocence of it.
Or consider Hermann Hesse's "Siddhartha", in which the main character, when asked what makes it possible for him to succeed where others have so often failed, answers, "I can think. I can fast. I can wait."
The thing is, boredom is not real. It's an illusion, a passing symptom of addicive withdrawl, Beyond it lies a world of real experience, exquisite in its quiet subtlety. "Pay attention" says the Zen master, who is roundly ignored because the advice he gives isn't mysterious enough, doesn't require any shiny technology.
You mean Windows VMs. Do they constitute the majority of VM instances then? That's certainly not been my experience, and I'm smack in the middle of the industry.
If it's evident that in your present position you'll be rising to great things, then fine. In my experience that's very uncommon, but certainly it could happen.
However...
If your career history consists of advancement solely within a single organization, don't expect it to buy you nearly as much cred as a similar pattern of achievement across multiple employers.
Also, although I can understand that some people might feel completely fulfilled professionally by working their entire career for a single employer, I confess that I'm not one of those people. I'm also happy that I didn't marry my high school sweetheart, though we're still excellent friends a continent apart and 40 years later. The only point to this is one famously associated with the mythologist Joseph Campbell: follow your bliss. As he explained his own life and career through the Depression, your may end up rich or poor, famous or infamous or utterly forgotten. Who knows what your life will become? But if nothing else, at least you'll have your bliss.
As someone who's been through a very interesting and sometimes bumpy ride along the career path, I can say for sure that you can only grow so far by staying in one place. Change is never easy, especially if you're thinking about leaving something known and secure and pleasant for something which is necessarily uncertain.
But the best time to leave is with all of your old working relationships in their best form. And be sure to go back and visit! It's an ideal way to solidify reputation as someone everyone likes to work with. You're off to a good start, and it only improves with practice.
VM consoles are typically tty, so that wouldn't do much good. But you're right in a more general sense. Any system (it certainly doesn't have to be a VM) which supports remote windowing (X Windows, rdesktop, Citrix for example) provides all the bitmap you need, and its security is exactly as strong as the window server.
If it's that close that it's difficult to count, does it really matter who wins?
Yes, it tends to matter a lot in a parliamentary system. Look what happened in our last Federal election. The Harper Conservatives formed a majority government even though they held less than 40% of the popular vote.
This was a predictable consequence of vote-splitting among the other parties, all of which occupy similar points on the left side of the political spectrum, which happens to be the sentiment of most Canadians. The Harper Conservatives, having been formed from the former Reform, Alliance, and Conservative parties, had essentially no competition on the political right.
In a situation like this, with a multiparty first-past-the-post system, it's all about margin. Although in the aggregate we might say that there's a bimodal distribution across the political spectrum, at the riding level the race is often down to one or two prominent candidates whose popularity doesn't necessarily match the general distribution.
So to sum up: in practice, we see that there are often many close ridings; in many ridings there is a mismatch between the general party sentiment and the popularity of individual candidates; due to vote splitting there can easily develop an overall mismatch between popular opinion and the party which wins the most seats; and finally, the party with the most seats fairly often does not win a majority of seats. Each of these four aspects can be sensitive to minor changes in vote count. Add them all together and you can end up with something statistically very different than you would get if you just asked every voter to record "yes" or "no" to some referendum question.
I think absolutely everything depends on the child. That should be the focus. At age seven , his personality is taking on a definite form that will likely carry with him all his life, shaping his career and his choice of social experiences. The wisest and most generous gift you can offer as a parent is to encourage him in his exploration of the world through his natural aptitudes and interests - and of course in the discipline that helps to realize them. As career advice, Joseph Campbell famously said "follow your bliss." At age 56 and looking back on a life well lived, I think that advice applies here as well.
A general-purpose programmable computer is a pretty amazing thing. If he's the kind of child who wants to get inside things and figure out how they work, nothing less than Linux will do. If he's a builder and fascinated with tools, then upgradeable hardware will be much more rewarding than some kind of laptop. If he's highly social, then as a parent you may have to take a deep breath and buy something that will help to enhance his social status and, if he's lucky, teach him something about social responsibility - even if it's something that seems from an adult perspective to be somewhat vacuous. If he's heavily into reading, then consider a platform with superior access to e-books. If he's particularly interested in design and aesthetics (I was at his age - I got myself an adult library card and brought home everything there was on architecture and industrial design) then it seems likely that Apple will be the way to go.
As technical matters go, it's not a desperately pivotal question. You're not going to make a terribly blunder by giving him the wrong device. That said, there's no guarantee that he will take to the device in the way you think he will. It's worth giving him something that has several obvious potentialities and then see which ones he pursues most diligently. I was going to say "eagerly" but in this case I think a slow burn is better than something whose interest fades after the novelty wears off.
You never know what's going to click. When I was his age, my dad gave me a small slide rule, probably acquired as conference swag or maybe at the checkout line at some campus bookstore. Whatever. I didn't care about fine precision. I just wanted to have it in my hands and play with it. We were learning multiplication and division at school, and I could understand how to use a slide rule for that. With a bit of a stretch, I could see how squares and square roots were a kind of special case. And just by using the slide rule, I got an intuitive feel for exponents and logarithms, though I don't think I could have put it into words that multiplication was merely adding exponents. I can tell you that slide rules taste like Legos. See, it's all valuable knowledge.