I guess that explains why I walk around the house in the morning and feel like I'm in a permanant vegetative state.
Seriously though, when I graduated from high school, just a mere 18 years ago, we had no such things as cellphones, and gadgets and doohickies and whatnot to distract us from the all important task of learning.
As for computers, too much emphasis is placed nowadays on being able to 'use it' and not enough on why one needs to use it in the first place. Until probably as recently as 10 years ago, there were still books and libraries to go to, but now everything is geared toward breeding a generation that can't be bothered with actually working for the answer, and education in 2005 requires internet access in the home. You need to do a book report on subject whatever, google-search, read up on it, keep doing a search until you find someone who has already solved the problem for you, then do the report. That to some is learning. There is a distinctive difference between a 'college' and a 'university' and one teaches you 'things', the other teaches you how to 'think'. When it comes to learning, it's essential to reinvent the wheel, again and again, and again until reinventing the wheel is as natural as breathing. The only way to make smarter people is to make them think for themselves. By getting someone to crack open a book and do some reading on the facts and only the facts, it gives the reader a chance to think out the problem in their mind rather than accept whatever opinion on the subject they happen to come across.
I look at the university entrance exam my dad wrote when he applied and in all honesty it's so far over my head, I have no idea what the question is asking. There seems to have been a pretty serious slip in mental discipline over the decades, computers and TV are only adding to the problem.
Also, I challenge anyone to find a child (under 18) who will primarily use the computer for actual work (study) as opposed to playing games, instant messaging and other such activities. The life of today's teen hardly requires a storm of neural activity anymore, so it's no big surprise to me that there's an apparent "problem-solving deficit disorder" observed in children who use computers.
It's like christmas cards. You don't exactly want to throw them out right after reading them so you hold on to them for a little while.
Soon a little while becomes a while and a while becomes quite a while and soon you have a stack of cards that date back 4 or 5 years, Then the stack becomes so large, it takes longer to go sifting through them than to just chuck them on an ever growing pile.
I've got email that's 5 year old and I doubt I really need to hold on to any of them, but for me, it's more a matter of, well gee-whiz, I have to delete 600 emails.
And that's if I even think of deleting them which I confess doesn't enter my mind.
So for me, the fact that I hold on to them is more a matter of "well, I'm sure I'll eventually get around to deleting them, like when the sun stops producing heat". Spam is the one thing that gets the old delete key treatment right away.
The political nonsense and bureaucratic mess has certainly made NASA far less useful than that large a group of intelligent engineers should be.
I'd hoped people would see that being my point to begin with. I wasn't trying to say that space launches were inherently safe or unsafe or anything like that.
As for the first disaster, my memory of challenger was that when the dust settled, it was the top dog who said "launch" when the engineers said "don't launch". I wasn't entirely sure about the second, but last I heard of it, it was the heat tiles and if it was I suggested the possibility that it might have been yet some other bureaucratic mess.
There was an airplane whose cockpit window blew out and the pilot got sucked out. The cockpit crew managed to hold on to him long enough to get on the ground, which he miraculously survived. What ultimately caused that was the mechanic who had to work on that windshield, was under enormous pressure to get that plane out that night. In his haste he used bolts that looked the same but were not rated with the same strength. When the first one failed, they all popped like dominoes until cabin pressure blew out the windshield.
Accidents do happen, and it is unrealistic to overreact preventing it from happening in the first place (Although I could have an accident today, I should not drive to work. But then I could be on the bus and the bus could crash into a pole, so I should just stay home).
What I find inexcusable is the political nonsense that goes on in any industry. Crysler for example continued to sell their minivans knowing there was a flaw in the rear hatch latch and months later a kid was killed because that and another flaw caused the back seat he was in to be launched out the back. I can cite example after example of how some PHB sits in his nice ivory tower and works out how much a life is worth in lawsuits and will only fix foreseen problems when that outweights what it would cost to fix the original problem.
If I make a widget that breaks down and I knew it would break down ahead of time, as long as that flaw did not or could not cause loss of life, big friggin whoop, the only thing at stake is my reputation. When people are strapped onto a rocket like wile-e-coyote, the people who make or assume responsibility for said rocket, in my opinion, need to accept political fallout for playing it safe if there is sufficient cause for alarm for safetly.
After all, how much is a life worth anyway? Aparently, a fixed amount or something tangible in most industries.
The average user probably won't need it right now. Considering that they still sell very low end soldered-right-on-the-board athlon based processors at (last I heard) 1400MHz or 1600Mhz.
Those are the processors that are good for the 'joe averages'.
What makes the dual core processors useful are the higher end systems where 'more power' is not just the call of the techno-whore but for those who really do need it, such as the video editing types.
On an aside, I've also been playing around with spyware on a sandbox computer and it's actually very very very easy to pick that stuff up. It's also been recently that one key piece of spyware will not do anything on its own but will download and launch several dozen other spyware which actually do the damage. The main damage in this case is poorly written spyware that have unoptimized loops or infinite loops and bleed the CPU cycles dry, turning any speed into the clunkiest piece of shit you could possibly imagine. In this case, the second core will help mitigate that.
Also, as I've pointed out a while back, what about joe average's parents who think what they see is what there is? While it might be true that when longhorn comes out you can turn all that crap off, I seriously doubt microsoft will leave it off by default, which means when it does, you'll need that second processor to help take the load off the first just to maintain all them thar pretty graphics.
Ahh. The last I had heard on this subject (or cared to hear on this subject) was a heat tile around the location of the landing gear. That's where their attention was focused at the time, but the leading edge of the wing explanation makes more sense.
Thanks for the info. Now my argument doesn't quite hold as much weight.
This is virtually non-sensical to me. Can anybody explain this to me in English?
You're right. Virtualization in this context is meaningless, or their specific claim is meaningless. The effort to virtualize an entire computer means you can theoretically run any O/S on it that you want, even another copy of windows.
What makes this statement so unique to me is that microsoft is using the interest and popularity of linux to cash in on their virtual server and to announce to the world "HEY EVERYBODY, LOOK AT US, WE PLAY NICE, OUR VIRTUAL SERVER SUPPORTS OUR GREATEST RIVAL LINUX".
It's like an oil company saying, "Hey, we've improved out gasoline formula. It provides better power, smoother operation, cleans the engine, AND EVEN RUNS ON HYBRID CARS". Of course, I'm with you and see this as nothing but a huge steaming pile of bovine excrement that came from microsofts P.R. department.
If they had left out the ",including linux" part, then their article would have been another, well it's about time moment. But those two extra words to me makes them look like bufoons finding a new and unique way of trying to appeal to the technically ignorant and push their latest product on them.
It's kinda like a drug dealer finding a new way to push their latest form of heroin on a junkie.
As far as I'm concerned, nasa does not really have a good track record for safety, despite all their efforts.
Before challenger blew up, the engineers tried to scrub the launch citing a possibility of the o-rings leaking. Pressure at the highest levels made sure it went as scheduled because before then, they had a flawless record and it was just a possibility and they had their image to maintain.
Of course, there was the investigation and they ultimately had to go lick their wounds. Years later and especially 9/11 later with budget cuts and the space program being scoffed at due to being essentially a money pit when it could be 'better spent', it's not surprising that a few years ago columbia vaporized on re-entry.
It may very well be damaged heat tiles by sheets of ice falling off the main fuel tank during launch which is the official story, but (...dons tin foil hat...) what might not be official is that due to such cuts and possibly a bit of politicking, pressure was put on all sectors of the space program including the 'garage' that inspects and repairs the heat tiles. If it's possible that the garage was under enormous pressure to get the aging columbia ready on time, they might have let a few suspect tiles go which they might not normally have let got and had they been replaced properly, they might have withstood the impact of the ice falling.
The russian space program seems to take the licking, learn from it and move on. Nasa to me seems to shuffle their feet for a while saying to themselves, 'how can we stop *THIS* from happening again?', but should instead ask the question, 'How can we stop accidents from happening again?'.
Re:So, what does Penguin taste like?
on
Linux Cookbook
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· Score: 3, Funny
I have to ask. I'm not brave enough to by the book and try it myself.
You don't need to buy the book to try the penguin. You need to buy the book to try the book, although I'm sure the penguin tastes a lot better than the book.
On the bright side, if you did try the book for yourself, you'd get more fibre in your diet. It's extremely dense so it's probably a lot more filling as well than penguin.
Auctions Expert used hired hands and automation........ They say the last thing they want to do is provide a "road map" to would-be frauders."
Why use hired hands to do repetitive tasks? All I have to do is go to one of the first google hits for "crack search" and by simply loading that web page, my computer becomes silently infected with dozens of spyware. Some of which go around trolling for advertising links to click.
It seems all one needs to do to make money these days is to provide some kind of web site with questionable content (porn, game cracks, etc), infest it with spyware that takes advantage of IE security flaws and have one's own ad clicking web client drone coming back to their 'advertiser' banners and 'clicking' on them.
This to me is nothing new, although might be for google. Either that or they're finally starting to do something about it.
Is there a size-of-company point at which this no longer holds? I doubt small sized companies would be capable or willing to hire a programmer to do something like that and rather simply use the product as it is - that is if the software is GPL or something.
I was referring more to the microsofts of the world whose software developed IS their product, not the tools used allowing them to make their product. I may be out to lunch, but I would say that once most companies that use software to run their business find a set of tools that work, they stop making that particular investment and focus on making their products.
In this case, the programming jobs over time would level off, perhaps even drop. Only the larger companies (like IBM, google, etc) with more petty cash than most people make in a year would have enough resources to keep such programmers on year after year, and while it might make sense from the perspective of large companies to hire programmers to write or improve upon software like firefox or php which they use internally, those smaller businesses essentially get to use it for free.
I don't really know economics, but I believe the strength of the economy (on any scale) depends on the concept of 'make work'. When retail stores for example don't spend money buying software they need but download FOSS or perhaps OSS and use it without paying for it, the people who would otherwise have written that software get laid off and don't have the money to buy the product sold by those retail stores.
running an equivalent command would absolutely not hose the system
I stand corrected. While it's true I'm more comfortable in unix than I am in windows, the fact of the matter is virtually all system files in unix are owned by root and you have to be root to the root user group to delete most of those files. Belonging to the root user group is not enough, it's root or not at all for most system files.
Unix/linux defaults to non-administrator type user and thus can't easily cause system wide damage. You (read system administrator) have to want that added user to be 'root like' which is something you have to go out of your way to accomplish (add 'root' as additional groups that user belongs to). Also you can't be same-as-root, you can only be root-like and even then many system files are only modifiable changeable by root.
Windows on the other hand defaults to administrator and any one of those additional administrator accounts are just as capable of destroying those critical system files. You have to go out of your way to be a neutered non administrator user and to NOT be an administrator capable of destroying the system simply because you forgot to change the radio button from 'administrator' to 'non-privileged' user
My argument of 'non-privileged' user was incorrect and I should have said 'any account with default access privileges other than the standard administrator account which can obviously do that', but for the most part, my argument that any account other than the one and only 'administrator' account still being cabable of hosing the entire system still holds. There is a difference between non-administrator and non-administrator, and there are many people out there who would not understand the difference.
As to what I do or don't know about windows, please don't assume I don't know anything.
Suppose microsoft for example maintains tight control of their development environment for windows, they can fall victim of their own success and soon, the OS is so bloated and buggy, no one can maintain it and eventually, you have the soggy mess that is XP. I don't know how many developers maintain it, but it might be only in the thousands.
Linux for example is fully open source and no one has the remotest monopoly on it. Anyone can add/edit/modify as they see fit, although a select group of individuals maintain the official and primary source. Given that in any reasonably large population of users, the number of competent developers looking at the code are able to find and report/fix those bugs. It should not be an unfair assumption to estimate that figure to be in the hundreds of thousands.
As far as the OS is concerned, I strongly believe that open source is essential. No one has strict control of it and thus the product improves because it is freely available to be modified for the greater good, not the whim of some evil empire out to control, dominate and maintain a monopoly.
To me, that is where the line should stop. I have no problem with closed source software maintained and sold by a corporate entity and for the most part, is necessary as developers like me have to eat like everyone else. While open source software can be beneficial, trying to sell the whole world on the greater benefit of open source as oposed to closed source is like the double edged sword and can cut both ways.
While I also prefer open source software for things like media players, utilties, etc, not everything need be. Games and special purpose applications for example, while possibly maintaining open standards, to me are better off as closed source projects. If the platform it runs on is an open standard and the files created by it are open standard, then a potential competitor can come along and make a better product on their own that works as good if not better than the original, and to me, that's where true innovation comes from.
Suppose windows was free open sourced and everyone could contribute to making it more stable/secure, there would be no special advantage of one company v.s. another to make an office suite that runs on it and the one that is truly less buggy and more feature rich and more secure is the one that ultimately wins. While the grand notion of developers working on an open source project for the sake of the art will either turn them into a 'starving artist', eventually making them feel jaded or unappreciated or they'll not do it at all become a corporate whore doing something else for pay. Either way, after a while, the gains of such a project may not be as great as one that generates revenue.
All I'm saying is that while OSS may very well work, I advise caution in its widespread adoption.
The difference here between that and "deltree c:\/y" for example is that in windows, a lot of system files get nuked in the process and you can ONLY reinstall the entire OS because enough files got nuked to make it unusable. The worst that happens when you do that as a regular user in unix/linux is that you manage to wipe out your home directory and possibly all the files in/tmp. The system is still intact, but all your personal data files are gone.
I think the original point was that unlike windows, as a non-privileged user, you can only screw yourself and not take down the whole system.
Anybody stup^H^H^H^Hbrave enough to use a beta version of anything from anyone for production use is asking for trouble.
The point of beta testing is to throw something out into the wild to see if it stands up. No matter how much rigorous testing is done, something is bound to fall through the cracks. Microsoft making the statement that it's "good enough for production use" and asking money for it would lead some PHBs to think they can get in early on the next latest widget from microsoft and assume it will work perfectly.
The reality is that nothing is secure or stable, and the first release to the public is far, far away from being anywhere near stable.
I've tried becoming a beta tester of software from various commercial companies and I have yet to see any of them actually allow me, even if I had to sign up, do so for free. Every one of them wants something more than a simple alias registration from me. I recently found a flaw in microsofts antispyware software and they don't even have a feedback form for that. Their private and internal newsgroup on that subject is a joke and I seriously doubt anyone who is responsible for that product even looks at that newsgroup. I think this is arrogant of them and they should be grovelling to the public at large to give their products a serious shakedown, even offer up rewards for flaws/bugs found.
To me, claiming any software younger than 2 years already thrown out into the wild as 'production ready' is not only putting the cart before the horse but trying to convince everyone that it's supposed to be that way. Software takes a very very long time to mature and immature software to me is simply not 'production ready'.
I just hope they get really lucky and nothing disasterous actually happens, because if some manager somewhere pushes their IT department to implement such a release and have the company's data chewed to hell because of an unforseen circumstance, it could leave a very bitter taste in that company's mouth. Right now microsoft is a giant, and just like in real life, they are slow, cumbersome and if they fall, the damage could be pretty serious.
I've worked on many projects, some with documentation, some without. I'm currently designing a point of sales system for my employer and trying to get information from him is worse than pulling teeth. At least with persistance, the teeth come out. I've gone days without getting a straight answer out of him, often without being able to get any kind of useful answer out of him at all, so I resort to implementing whatever the hell I want.
Sometimes that backfires and I have to rip it out, but for 99% of what I've been doing, it stays in. To make it more interesting, development and deployment are simultaneous and I can't exactly withhold adding new features for months on end before letting loose a new version that could break a bunch of stuff. I average a release every 2 to 3 weeks.
When I started working for him, I was going to do it right by ironing out exactly what he wanted on paper then implement. I got about 5 pages of design before I realized it wouldn't work here.
Code documentation can also be just as bad. I could spend up to 70% of my time maintaining comments and function documentation, only to accidentally let something slip when I subtly change the behaviour of the function or the block of code.
I've always been pretty good at reading the code directly to find out what it does. It might be time consuming to figure it out, but as I see it, the time I save not maintaining documentation which over the course of a complex project will invariably become incomplete/incorrect, can be better spent figuring out what the code is actually doing. The code does not lie. It can be very misleading, but it does not lie.
If I ever did plan to write up documentation (non user guide) on this project, it would be a very simplified overview of the environment, the tools required, the source control used, the database backup and archiving schemes, etc, but to get into serious detail of why this feature belongs or not, in my opinion can hide the forest for the trees.
The commute would be an awful bitch. One could always telecommute, but the ping delays would be a serious drag.
Seeing as how the site is always facing the sun, it would be kinda nice to have large kick ass solar panels to power a moon computer archive...... Wait a minute, the earth has a magnetic field to prevent solar radiation from cooking a lot of things. Even if we lived on the moon in a bubble, what would the long term effect of solar radiation (particle to create electrical disturbances and high energy radiation such as x rays) have on the equipment and/or body?
Slashdot Mirror
using poll mounted antennas or ground sensors
...............Oh wait..... Now I get it. It's supposed to be POLE and not POLL.... My bad.
For a second, I thought the article talked about polling the data rather than having the sensor device interrupt when data was available....
If the system becomes popular enough, they'll have to switch to DMA mounted antennas and ground sensors to handle the data throughput...
I guess that explains why I walk around the house in the morning and feel like I'm in a permanant vegetative state.
Seriously though, when I graduated from high school, just a mere 18 years ago, we had no such things as cellphones, and gadgets and doohickies and whatnot to distract us from the all important task of learning.
As for computers, too much emphasis is placed nowadays on being able to 'use it' and not enough on why one needs to use it in the first place. Until probably as recently as 10 years ago, there were still books and libraries to go to, but now everything is geared toward breeding a generation that can't be bothered with actually working for the answer, and education in 2005 requires internet access in the home. You need to do a book report on subject whatever, google-search, read up on it, keep doing a search until you find someone who has already solved the problem for you, then do the report. That to some is learning. There is a distinctive difference between a 'college' and a 'university' and one teaches you 'things', the other teaches you how to 'think'. When it comes to learning, it's essential to reinvent the wheel, again and again, and again until reinventing the wheel is as natural as breathing. The only way to make smarter people is to make them think for themselves. By getting someone to crack open a book and do some reading on the facts and only the facts, it gives the reader a chance to think out the problem in their mind rather than accept whatever opinion on the subject they happen to come across.
I look at the university entrance exam my dad wrote when he applied and in all honesty it's so far over my head, I have no idea what the question is asking. There seems to have been a pretty serious slip in mental discipline over the decades, computers and TV are only adding to the problem.
Also, I challenge anyone to find a child (under 18) who will primarily use the computer for actual work (study) as opposed to playing games, instant messaging and other such activities. The life of today's teen hardly requires a storm of neural activity anymore, so it's no big surprise to me that there's an apparent "problem-solving deficit disorder" observed in children who use computers.
It's like christmas cards. You don't exactly want to throw them out right after reading them so you hold on to them for a little while.
Soon a little while becomes a while and a while becomes quite a while and soon you have a stack of cards that date back 4 or 5 years, Then the stack becomes so large, it takes longer to go sifting through them than to just chuck them on an ever growing pile.
I've got email that's 5 year old and I doubt I really need to hold on to any of them, but for me, it's more a matter of, well gee-whiz, I have to delete 600 emails.
And that's if I even think of deleting them which I confess doesn't enter my mind.
So for me, the fact that I hold on to them is more a matter of "well, I'm sure I'll eventually get around to deleting them, like when the sun stops producing heat". Spam is the one thing that gets the old delete key treatment right away.
Hence mitigate, not prevent.
Which means you could likely be infected with twice as much spyware for the same lack of performance.
The political nonsense and bureaucratic mess has certainly made NASA far less useful than that large a group of intelligent engineers should be.
I'd hoped people would see that being my point to begin with. I wasn't trying to say that space launches were inherently safe or unsafe or anything like that.
As for the first disaster, my memory of challenger was that when the dust settled, it was the top dog who said "launch" when the engineers said "don't launch". I wasn't entirely sure about the second, but last I heard of it, it was the heat tiles and if it was I suggested the possibility that it might have been yet some other bureaucratic mess.
There was an airplane whose cockpit window blew out and the pilot got sucked out. The cockpit crew managed to hold on to him long enough to get on the ground, which he miraculously survived. What ultimately caused that was the mechanic who had to work on that windshield, was under enormous pressure to get that plane out that night. In his haste he used bolts that looked the same but were not rated with the same strength. When the first one failed, they all popped like dominoes until cabin pressure blew out the windshield.
Accidents do happen, and it is unrealistic to overreact preventing it from happening in the first place (Although I could have an accident today, I should not drive to work. But then I could be on the bus and the bus could crash into a pole, so I should just stay home).
What I find inexcusable is the political nonsense that goes on in any industry. Crysler for example continued to sell their minivans knowing there was a flaw in the rear hatch latch and months later a kid was killed because that and another flaw caused the back seat he was in to be launched out the back. I can cite example after example of how some PHB sits in his nice ivory tower and works out how much a life is worth in lawsuits and will only fix foreseen problems when that outweights what it would cost to fix the original problem.
If I make a widget that breaks down and I knew it would break down ahead of time, as long as that flaw did not or could not cause loss of life, big friggin whoop, the only thing at stake is my reputation. When people are strapped onto a rocket like wile-e-coyote, the people who make or assume responsibility for said rocket, in my opinion, need to accept political fallout for playing it safe if there is sufficient cause for alarm for safetly.
After all, how much is a life worth anyway? Aparently, a fixed amount or something tangible in most industries.
So what about the average user?
The average user probably won't need it right now. Considering that they still sell very low end soldered-right-on-the-board athlon based processors at (last I heard) 1400MHz or 1600Mhz.
Those are the processors that are good for the 'joe averages'.
What makes the dual core processors useful are the higher end systems where 'more power' is not just the call of the techno-whore but for those who really do need it, such as the video editing types.
On an aside, I've also been playing around with spyware on a sandbox computer and it's actually very very very easy to pick that stuff up. It's also been recently that one key piece of spyware will not do anything on its own but will download and launch several dozen other spyware which actually do the damage. The main damage in this case is poorly written spyware that have unoptimized loops or infinite loops and bleed the CPU cycles dry, turning any speed into the clunkiest piece of shit you could possibly imagine. In this case, the second core will help mitigate that.
Also, as I've pointed out a while back, what about joe average's parents who think what they see is what there is? While it might be true that when longhorn comes out you can turn all that crap off, I seriously doubt microsoft will leave it off by default, which means when it does, you'll need that second processor to help take the load off the first just to maintain all them thar pretty graphics.
Ahh. The last I had heard on this subject (or cared to hear on this subject) was a heat tile around the location of the landing gear. That's where their attention was focused at the time, but the leading edge of the wing explanation makes more sense.
Thanks for the info. Now my argument doesn't quite hold as much weight.
This is virtually non-sensical to me. Can anybody explain this to me in English?
You're right. Virtualization in this context is meaningless, or their specific claim is meaningless. The effort to virtualize an entire computer means you can theoretically run any O/S on it that you want, even another copy of windows.
What makes this statement so unique to me is that microsoft is using the interest and popularity of linux to cash in on their virtual server and to announce to the world "HEY EVERYBODY, LOOK AT US, WE PLAY NICE, OUR VIRTUAL SERVER SUPPORTS OUR GREATEST RIVAL LINUX".
It's like an oil company saying, "Hey, we've improved out gasoline formula. It provides better power, smoother operation, cleans the engine, AND EVEN RUNS ON HYBRID CARS". Of course, I'm with you and see this as nothing but a huge steaming pile of bovine excrement that came from microsofts P.R. department.
If they had left out the ",including linux" part, then their article would have been another, well it's about time moment. But those two extra words to me makes them look like bufoons finding a new and unique way of trying to appeal to the technically ignorant and push their latest product on them.
It's kinda like a drug dealer finding a new way to push their latest form of heroin on a junkie.
Does this mean I can finally run Linux under Wine?
This means you can run windows apps under wine running on linux running under microsoft's virtual server.
Microsoft really knows how to innovate.
As far as I'm concerned, nasa does not really have a good track record for safety, despite all their efforts.
Before challenger blew up, the engineers tried to scrub the launch citing a possibility of the o-rings leaking. Pressure at the highest levels made sure it went as scheduled because before then, they had a flawless record and it was just a possibility and they had their image to maintain.
Of course, there was the investigation and they ultimately had to go lick their wounds. Years later and especially 9/11 later with budget cuts and the space program being scoffed at due to being essentially a money pit when it could be 'better spent', it's not surprising that a few years ago columbia vaporized on re-entry.
It may very well be damaged heat tiles by sheets of ice falling off the main fuel tank during launch which is the official story, but (...dons tin foil hat...) what might not be official is that due to such cuts and possibly a bit of politicking, pressure was put on all sectors of the space program including the 'garage' that inspects and repairs the heat tiles. If it's possible that the garage was under enormous pressure to get the aging columbia ready on time, they might have let a few suspect tiles go which they might not normally have let got and had they been replaced properly, they might have withstood the impact of the ice falling.
The russian space program seems to take the licking, learn from it and move on. Nasa to me seems to shuffle their feet for a while saying to themselves, 'how can we stop *THIS* from happening again?', but should instead ask the question, 'How can we stop accidents from happening again?'.
...for scientists to find intelligent life on earth.
im hoping to get a book on Linux, I have a handheld one at the moment
?????????
Aren't all books handheld ones?
Actually it was unclear if he called RMS himself "smelly" or if he was referring to RMS like people "smelly".
Either way that could not be a good thing.
I'd rather wait for the movie to come out.
I have to ask. I'm not brave enough to by the book and try it myself.
You don't need to buy the book to try the penguin. You need to buy the book to try the book, although I'm sure the penguin tastes a lot better than the book.
On the bright side, if you did try the book for yourself, you'd get more fibre in your diet. It's extremely dense so it's probably a lot more filling as well than penguin.
Auctions Expert used hired hands and automation........
They say the last thing they want to do is provide a "road map" to would-be frauders."
Why use hired hands to do repetitive tasks? All I have to do is go to one of the first google hits for "crack search" and by simply loading that web page, my computer becomes silently infected with dozens of spyware. Some of which go around trolling for advertising links to click.
It seems all one needs to do to make money these days is to provide some kind of web site with questionable content (porn, game cracks, etc), infest it with spyware that takes advantage of IE security flaws and have one's own ad clicking web client drone coming back to their 'advertiser' banners and 'clicking' on them.
This to me is nothing new, although might be for google. Either that or they're finally starting to do something about it.
That's a very good point I hadn't considered.
Is there a size-of-company point at which this no longer holds? I doubt small sized companies would be capable or willing to hire a programmer to do something like that and rather simply use the product as it is - that is if the software is GPL or something.
I was referring more to the microsofts of the world whose software developed IS their product, not the tools used allowing them to make their product. I may be out to lunch, but I would say that once most companies that use software to run their business find a set of tools that work, they stop making that particular investment and focus on making their products.
In this case, the programming jobs over time would level off, perhaps even drop. Only the larger companies (like IBM, google, etc) with more petty cash than most people make in a year would have enough resources to keep such programmers on year after year, and while it might make sense from the perspective of large companies to hire programmers to write or improve upon software like firefox or php which they use internally, those smaller businesses essentially get to use it for free.
I don't really know economics, but I believe the strength of the economy (on any scale) depends on the concept of 'make work'. When retail stores for example don't spend money buying software they need but download FOSS or perhaps OSS and use it without paying for it, the people who would otherwise have written that software get laid off and don't have the money to buy the product sold by those retail stores.
running an equivalent command would absolutely not hose the system
I stand corrected. While it's true I'm more comfortable in unix than I am in windows, the fact of the matter is virtually all system files in unix are owned by root and you have to be root to the root user group to delete most of those files. Belonging to the root user group is not enough, it's root or not at all for most system files.
Unix/linux defaults to non-administrator type user and thus can't easily cause system wide damage. You (read system administrator) have to want that added user to be 'root like' which is something you have to go out of your way to accomplish (add 'root' as additional groups that user belongs to). Also you can't be same-as-root, you can only be root-like and even then many system files are only modifiable changeable by root.
Windows on the other hand defaults to administrator and any one of those additional administrator accounts are just as capable of destroying those critical system files. You have to go out of your way to be a neutered non administrator user and to NOT be an administrator capable of destroying the system simply because you forgot to change the radio button from 'administrator' to 'non-privileged' user
My argument of 'non-privileged' user was incorrect and I should have said 'any account with default access privileges other than the standard administrator account which can obviously do that', but for the most part, my argument that any account other than the one and only 'administrator' account still being cabable of hosing the entire system still holds. There is a difference between non-administrator and non-administrator, and there are many people out there who would not understand the difference.
As to what I do or don't know about windows, please don't assume I don't know anything.
Suppose microsoft for example maintains tight control of their development environment for windows, they can fall victim of their own success and soon, the OS is so bloated and buggy, no one can maintain it and eventually, you have the soggy mess that is XP. I don't know how many developers maintain it, but it might be only in the thousands.
Linux for example is fully open source and no one has the remotest monopoly on it. Anyone can add/edit/modify as they see fit, although a select group of individuals maintain the official and primary source. Given that in any reasonably large population of users, the number of competent developers looking at the code are able to find and report/fix those bugs. It should not be an unfair assumption to estimate that figure to be in the hundreds of thousands.
As far as the OS is concerned, I strongly believe that open source is essential. No one has strict control of it and thus the product improves because it is freely available to be modified for the greater good, not the whim of some evil empire out to control, dominate and maintain a monopoly.
To me, that is where the line should stop. I have no problem with closed source software maintained and sold by a corporate entity and for the most part, is necessary as developers like me have to eat like everyone else. While open source software can be beneficial, trying to sell the whole world on the greater benefit of open source as oposed to closed source is like the double edged sword and can cut both ways.
While I also prefer open source software for things like media players, utilties, etc, not everything need be. Games and special purpose applications for example, while possibly maintaining open standards, to me are better off as closed source projects. If the platform it runs on is an open standard and the files created by it are open standard, then a potential competitor can come along and make a better product on their own that works as good if not better than the original, and to me, that's where true innovation comes from.
Suppose windows was free open sourced and everyone could contribute to making it more stable/secure, there would be no special advantage of one company v.s. another to make an office suite that runs on it and the one that is truly less buggy and more feature rich and more secure is the one that ultimately wins. While the grand notion of developers working on an open source project for the sake of the art will either turn them into a 'starving artist', eventually making them feel jaded or unappreciated or they'll not do it at all become a corporate whore doing something else for pay. Either way, after a while, the gains of such a project may not be as great as one that generates revenue.
All I'm saying is that while OSS may very well work, I advise caution in its widespread adoption.
I dare you to try this
/y" for example is that in windows, a lot of system files get nuked in the process and you can ONLY reinstall the entire OS because enough files got nuked to make it unusable. The worst that happens when you do that as a regular user in unix/linux is that you manage to wipe out your home directory and possibly all the files in /tmp. The system is still intact, but all your personal data files are gone.
The difference here between that and "deltree c:\
I think the original point was that unlike windows, as a non-privileged user, you can only screw yourself and not take down the whole system.
Anybody stup^H^H^H^Hbrave enough to use a beta version of anything from anyone for production use is asking for trouble.
The point of beta testing is to throw something out into the wild to see if it stands up. No matter how much rigorous testing is done, something is bound to fall through the cracks. Microsoft making the statement that it's "good enough for production use" and asking money for it would lead some PHBs to think they can get in early on the next latest widget from microsoft and assume it will work perfectly.
The reality is that nothing is secure or stable, and the first release to the public is far, far away from being anywhere near stable.
I've tried becoming a beta tester of software from various commercial companies and I have yet to see any of them actually allow me, even if I had to sign up, do so for free. Every one of them wants something more than a simple alias registration from me. I recently found a flaw in microsofts antispyware software and they don't even have a feedback form for that. Their private and internal newsgroup on that subject is a joke and I seriously doubt anyone who is responsible for that product even looks at that newsgroup. I think this is arrogant of them and they should be grovelling to the public at large to give their products a serious shakedown, even offer up rewards for flaws/bugs found.
To me, claiming any software younger than 2 years already thrown out into the wild as 'production ready' is not only putting the cart before the horse but trying to convince everyone that it's supposed to be that way. Software takes a very very long time to mature and immature software to me is simply not 'production ready'.
I just hope they get really lucky and nothing disasterous actually happens, because if some manager somewhere pushes their IT department to implement such a release and have the company's data chewed to hell because of an unforseen circumstance, it could leave a very bitter taste in that company's mouth. Right now microsoft is a giant, and just like in real life, they are slow, cumbersome and if they fall, the damage could be pretty serious.
I've worked on many projects, some with documentation, some without. I'm currently designing a point of sales system for my employer and trying to get information from him is worse than pulling teeth. At least with persistance, the teeth come out. I've gone days without getting a straight answer out of him, often without being able to get any kind of useful answer out of him at all, so I resort to implementing whatever the hell I want.
Sometimes that backfires and I have to rip it out, but for 99% of what I've been doing, it stays in. To make it more interesting, development and deployment are simultaneous and I can't exactly withhold adding new features for months on end before letting loose a new version that could break a bunch of stuff. I average a release every 2 to 3 weeks.
When I started working for him, I was going to do it right by ironing out exactly what he wanted on paper then implement. I got about 5 pages of design before I realized it wouldn't work here.
Code documentation can also be just as bad. I could spend up to 70% of my time maintaining comments and function documentation, only to accidentally let something slip when I subtly change the behaviour of the function or the block of code.
I've always been pretty good at reading the code directly to find out what it does. It might be time consuming to figure it out, but as I see it, the time I save not maintaining documentation which over the course of a complex project will invariably become incomplete/incorrect, can be better spent figuring out what the code is actually doing. The code does not lie. It can be very misleading, but it does not lie.
If I ever did plan to write up documentation (non user guide) on this project, it would be a very simplified overview of the environment, the tools required, the source control used, the database backup and archiving schemes, etc, but to get into serious detail of why this feature belongs or not, in my opinion can hide the forest for the trees.
the best spot to settle on the Moon
The commute would be an awful bitch. One could always telecommute, but the ping delays would be a serious drag.
Seeing as how the site is always facing the sun, it would be kinda nice to have large kick ass solar panels to power a moon computer archive...... Wait a minute, the earth has a magnetic field to prevent solar radiation from cooking a lot of things. Even if we lived on the moon in a bubble, what would the long term effect of solar radiation (particle to create electrical disturbances and high energy radiation such as x rays) have on the equipment and/or body?
Pretty soon, a blank piece of paper will be accepted.
They'll recon, if you can tear open the ream's envelope, you're smart enough.
Bonus marks, for the students who submit 'this side up' up.
and it will be rebooted in 5 minutes... is that related to these patches?
Nope, that's the windows starter edition of the MSBlaster virus.... It gives you a 5 minute shutdown warning instead of the standard 1 minute.
If you wanted the standard 1 minute shutdown notice, you'd have to pay more for it.