There are situations when this is desirable - especially in testing environments.
I used to QA a series of imaging tools on Windows boxes, which envolved performing a series of regression tests over the software install and operation. The software had to work on 98/2K/2000/XP, with or without any number of updates and service packs, and in concert with several versions of either IE or Netscape (4,6,and 7 series). Having a block level copy of the disk of a test machine in various system configuration states allowed us to quickly bump the machine to a known state in order to run another test. While this environment didn't involve BSD, it does illustrate a use for block-level backup.
But in any case - (many) ways to do something is much better than (many-1) ways to do something.
Firstly, not one BSD distro I've ever put to a machine has worked with the ethernet and dhcp right off the bat. Much fiddling and farking was required and accompanied by much cursing of my fellow geeks for still resisting ease of use as if making too much sense, such as it should work the first time as advertised, was an affront against nature.
Not much fiddling and farking required, and it shouldn't be accompanied by much cursing of you and your companions for still resisting the reading of the manual as if learning how to operate your system was an affront to nature.
Need the entirety of the Unix would be so oblivious as to why Windows is where it is and Unix isn't?
Market cornering is hardly a related to this argument. That's how Windows got where it is. IF ease of use == market share, then Windows certainly wouldn't be the king right now, MacOS would. Microsoft scored lucrative deals with vendors to include exclusively their products on cheap hardware in the days of DOS (which was hardly user-friendly - want to run an app? change your emm config first amigo! Memory doesn't allocate itself you know!)
In seriousness, I'd like to counter your argument by saying that quickly hacking on a config file is much easier to do (and more independent of interactivity) than munging through a GUI tool hoping to find the right menu with the right option for what you want (if it's even available). Configuration is a one-step process of opening a text file and explicitly stating what configuration options the user wants. This is easy.
I have a hunch that by ease of use, you are actually referring to obviousness of use. While editing a text file really is not hard to do, it isn't necessarily obvious to the novice user. Personally, I think that users who want obvious should stick to something simple like Windows. It fits their purpose, which is probably surfing the web and writing emails to grandma. But for more serious users that want a serious system, there is BSD.
I am not opposed, however, to providing simple tools for simple users. I just do not want to sacrifice the power of the system to them.
Sure, I can accept that homosexuality occurs in nature - but I don't see a whole lot of it. At least not on the scale it occurs in human society.
Hey, sure! I can also accept that speech occurs in nature - but I don't see a whole lot of it. At least not on the scale it occurs in human society.
Humans are not the status quo of the animal world. Just because humans display a trait or behavior that isn't seen in other creatures doesn't mean that it is necessarily unnatural.
In the case of homosexuality, understand that identity and relationships in most animals is a case of physical and hormonal attributes. Humans develop their identities mentally more than physically. Our relationships are all based upon emotion and mental stimulation, and not sexual reproduction. Why is it then unnatural for humans to develop relationships that are not otherwise seen in nature? Human relationships like "pen pals" and "best friends forever" and "aunts" and "step-fathers" and "fathers-in-law" don't occur anywhere else in nature, but we all agree that these relationships are not unnatural. Homosexuality is another extension of the human ability to establish relationships on mental and emotional terms not regarding sexual reproduction.
So, if implanted Islets can be used to replace insulin producing cells, then ones grown from the patients own stem cells can too. And without rejection.
You're forgetting why a type 1 diabetic's islets are destroyed in the first place - a type 1 diabetic with no islets suffers from an autoimmune disorder in which their immune systems has targeted their natural islets. Regrowing islets from their own stems cells would just re-introduce islets that are already recognized as foreign material. The cure, I speculate, is hunged mostly on curing the autoimmune disorder. We've been able to transplant b-cells, pancreases, and now the islets. But the root cause for the disorder needs to be fixed before a transplant or islet regrowth can be successful in the long term.
Maybe it really shouldn't be legal to do much of anything until you're 29 or so.
I'm sorry, but I don't think that the existence of people that are too stupid or lazy to be responsible for themselves should dictate that the rest of society should have no rights. There will always be people that, even well into their 60's, can't make shit of a sense as to how they should behave or how to be responsible for their own actions. That is why we have judicial and correctional systems - to help these people hammer the finishing nails into their coffins of stupidity, or give them a rope to climb out of the hole with.
And don't give me that "society made me this way, it's responsible" bullshit either. It's true, 18 year olds can be very good at killing people, but they can also be very good at getting jobs, going to school, and doing something worthwhile with themselves too. They just have to make the decision to not piss away their lives.
Because the USA has pretty piss poor programming education compared to some other countries in the world?
Education is not at its best here, however there is more to it than just that. ACM membership and renewal is dropping: ahref=http://www.acm.org/sigs/sgb/fy03annrpt/sgb03.htmlhttp://www.acm.org/sigs/sgb/fy03annrpt/sgb03. html>
. In my own experience, at Oklahoma State University the ACM is virtually non-existant. I served as PR Officer in my last semester, and I think we had 4 meetings. Besides the officers, only a handful of people attended the regular meetings, and the only reason anyone signed up to be a member was because we stopped charging a local chapter membership fee. I don't think any local chapter members got a national membership. Our faculty and staff were not at all envolved in the ACM. There are also fewer and fewer students getting into programming these days - if anyone touches a computer field they go after business comm or MIS, because of the lure of better cash without having to learn so much math and science. So I point the finger at envolvement. In my experience, there was not enough envolvement by the students or faculty to get a team of competitive, motivated programmers to represent our school. I'm curious as to whether other schools in the US have the same problems.
Public blacklisters should be blown away completely. I used to work tech support at a large ISP, which unfortunately had the bad habit of buying out smaller ISPs and melding them into its core. Now, in the process of this the large ISP would relay mail for the domains and IP blocks that were purchased. Quite a number of overzealous blacklisters (blackhole for one) essentially saw our mail exchangers to be 'open-relay', and we only found out about it when someone called to complain that she tried to send pictures of her baby to her mother on AOL and got a nasty email back accusing her of sending spam.
Since our mail servers were not the source of the malfunction, we as support personnel were required to direct the user to complain to the destination that was not allowing her mail to get through. This of course was often a dead-end street for the user, and weeks would go by before any action was taken by the ISP using the blacklist, or the blacklist itself. As a result, we had many unhappy customers that could not send mail to networks that were run by lazy administrators that preferred to let a blacklist determine what could send mail to their network, rather than do their own jobs.
"Some of the terms being bandied around are more suitable for a computer programmers' convention than for people who want to go online at home, " said Will Smith, AOL's net security expert.
From killing aliens to instructing on dating to informing the world's computer users that they're utter morons, Will Smith is always smooth!
Computers are a lot like automobiles. They are very powerful, sometimes dangerous appliances that most people are expected to own and operate. And in the same notion, people tend to learn about as much about their computers as they do about their cars: how the radio works, and where the pedals are. And when their rack-and-pinion or CV joint fails, they have about as much Clue as when they install spyware or take the bait on a phishing scam. The problem is not the terminology - we could pass along the word to refer to a Trojan Horse as a "malicious, security-breaking program that is disguised as something benign, such as a directory lister, archiver, [or] game" http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/t/Trojanhorse.htm l but it wouldn't change the fact that the average computer user still wouldn't take the initiative to understand what the implications of a Trojan are or how to protect themselves. You can tell your teenage daughter time and time again that her car needs an oil change every 3,000 miles, she should check the oil level before going on long drives, and that her brake pads need replacement when they squeal. But invariably none of the advice will be heeded because she doesn't want to mess with the care of the car, and she'll drive it into the dirt within a year. Similarly, people want the benefits of a computer without having to know the encumbering details of how to maintain it and how to avoid problems. When I am told that my intake manifold is leaking antifreeze and it needs to be fixed, as a responsible car owner I do research on the problem and understand what has failed, why, and how it can be fixed. If it's beyond my abilities, I take it to the mechanic with a sound notion of what should be done ot fix it and how much the job should cost. Similarly, when I get a suspicious email in my inbox that informs me that my Ebay account needs to be verified, having done my research I know that Ebay will not ever try to contact me by email, and that I should never give out my personal or account information over email. If I'm more technically capable, I examine the message headers and realize that the email's source (random schmoe IP address) is not in any way affiliated with Ebay, and I know someone is trying to scam me. People are simply too expecant of instant, worry-free gratification.
You think that theorizing about black holes makes you less ignorant? We are all ignorant of such things and wasting time guessing about how stuff works is just pointless.
I hate feeding trolls. But for this I'll make an exception.
First off, I don't theorize about black holes, and I don't think the act of theorizing about black holes makes any one person non-ignorant. The act of learning makes our societies less ignorant of the world around us and enables us to create more enabling technology. And if you think I'm wrong, just remember that if nobody theorized and guessed and figured out about electricity, and just stuck to the notion that it was a mystical device of the wrath of god, we'd be having this conversation by candlelight on dixie cups and fishing wire.
The idea that learning is somehow "bad" is completely incomprehensible to me.
Do you want artificial gravity? Well, black holes cover the sorts of issues that will one day be listed as landmarks on the road to that problem. It might take multiple lifetimes to get there so what's so wrong about getting started now?
Yes. We all benefit from science with "no application". Science with no application has no application because it's new and unapplied. Fire was once science with no application for the betterment of humanity, but then we learned that it wasn't only good for roasting poor humans and applied it to all sorts of problems - heating, cooking food, warding off predators, razing Dresden to the ground, et cetera.
Science is repsonsible for discovery of things and how they work; industry then applies that knowledge to problems. If we can understand the fundamental nature of gravity, and overcome the oil giants, your next car just may be powered by an artificial gravity engine that gets 120,000 miles to every atom of fuel.
But really what I think is most important is that we should never pass up the opportunity to investigate and learn about anything. Ignorance certainly has less application to humanity than this kind of science. Ignorance only serves the propagation of uninformed and unfounded beliefs and ideas in absence of fact.
While commonly referred to as a "defect," Sony says the off-colored pixel problem is common in all LCD screens. "A very small number of dark pixels or continuously lit pixels is normal for LCD screens, and is not a sign of a malfunction," a representative for Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) told GameSpot.
In other words,
While commonly referred to as "fraud," Sony says the failure to provide and warranty properly working hardware is common in all computer equipment manufacturers. "A very small number of actual working products is normal in the computer industry, and is not a sign of customers getting shafted," a representative for Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) told GameSpot.
John Carmack is an algorithm Genie. The real value of Doom 3 is not in its gameplay, sales, or playerbase, but in its technology. The Doom3 graphics engine is a thing of beauty, filled with fantastic lighting algorithms, detail preservation architecture, and a slew of other goodies you'll usually only see in SIGGRAPH papers, ready for the next generation of hardware to support it. iD has always been like this - ahead of the game in engine tech, and softer on the other goodies. Carmack knows he'll have a slew of studios that are masters of gameplay and content throwing money at him for licensing rights on the engine to develop the next generation of FPS titles. It's his niche, and he's good at it.
Exactly. I'm pretty sure that the concepts of prostitution and murder predate video games by a few dozen centuries... But then again, Al Gore also invented the internet... so this wouldn't be the first time the Clinton Clan would try to alter history.
In any case, the fundamental problem here is that in America we like to pretend that this stuff doesn't happen, and that by covering Junior's eyes ears and mouth until he's 18 and he can be kicked out of the house (having done his duty in saving mom and dad some tax debt). Then he'll go to college, study hard, marry a virgin that's happy to raise babies and make his pot roast every night. Unfortunately, the Brady Bunch was only a TV show and the real world is much more complex. Yes there are hookers. Yes there are murderers. It's up to the parents to introduce their kids to these facts in a way that's constructive. If they don't, then it's very possible that - video game or not - their kid will be hit headfirst without guidance with the ideas of sex and murder and they will either steer clear or revel in it.
That it isn't the other WMs. The whole beauty of the window manager being just a client to the X Server is that the user is free to choose whatever window manager they seem to like, and change it at any time. I myself use WindowMaker on one box and KDE on another. Sometimes twm is sufficient to meet my needs, or I'll forgo the window manager altogether. It's the choice that is important. Your question is analogous to asking why some people eat at Burger King and others MacDonald's.
At that, I'd like to make it really clear that fanboys that scream at the top of their capslock that window manager or desktop [x] is better than everything else, why does anyone use anything else, it should be incorporated into X, etc. are neglecting the entire philosphy that makes X attractive in the first place. The availability and freedom of choice is what makes the system superior, not its restrictions. To tout one window manager to rule them all is to take one giant neanderthal leap backwards into the dark abyss of Microsoftism.
I'm pretty sure there would be some trouble if all burger joints were converted to Burger Kings based on the merits of their flame-broiling techniques. Although, I certainly wouldn't mind.
Re:The participants answered questions
on
ID Theft Made Easy
·
· Score: 1
Every time I have to re-install Realplayer, I make sure that bob@dole.com wants to recieve a weekly newsletter from Real.com.
I got a powerbook here, this whole THREE BUTTON MOUSE!!!!! thing is killin' me!
I fail to see how the fact that your advanced apple computers have an inferior pointing device is sufficient argument for a change in the clipboard in X, regardless of your capitalization.
Universities are now run by "System CEOs" who are much more concerned with the financial and social stability of their empire than the freedom of information for what they see is a group of drunken kids looking to fill their hard drives and iPods with free music and porn. The freedoms of those lowly students to be innocent until proven guilty of stepping on the toes of their school CEO's financial buddies are the last things on the minds of the administrative staff. They want that cold hard Alumni cash and some big beefy corporate donations to rename their football fields with.
All your stadium are belong to T. Boone Pickens, yo!
A good starting point is to understand finite automata and regular languages first. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automata_theory/ for a good first reference on automata. If you can grok automata, regular expressions will click with you.
Slashdot Mirror
There are situations when this is desirable - especially in testing environments.
I used to QA a series of imaging tools on Windows boxes, which envolved performing a series of regression tests over the software install and operation. The software had to work on 98/2K/2000/XP, with or without any number of updates and service packs, and in concert with several versions of either IE or Netscape (4,6,and 7 series). Having a block level copy of the disk of a test machine in various system configuration states allowed us to quickly bump the machine to a known state in order to run another test. While this environment didn't involve BSD, it does illustrate a use for block-level backup.
But in any case - (many) ways to do something is much better than (many-1) ways to do something.
FreeBSD:
rc.conf - ifconfig_if0="DHCP"
NetBSD:
ifconfig.if0 - !dhclient $int
Not much fiddling and farking required, and it shouldn't be accompanied by much cursing of you and your companions for still resisting the reading of the manual as if learning how to operate your system was an affront to nature. Market cornering is hardly a related to this argument. That's how Windows got where it is. IF ease of use == market share, then Windows certainly wouldn't be the king right now, MacOS would. Microsoft scored lucrative deals with vendors to include exclusively their products on cheap hardware in the days of DOS (which was hardly user-friendly - want to run an app? change your emm config first amigo! Memory doesn't allocate itself you know!)
In seriousness, I'd like to counter your argument by saying that quickly hacking on a config file is much easier to do (and more independent of interactivity) than munging through a GUI tool hoping to find the right menu with the right option for what you want (if it's even available). Configuration is a one-step process of opening a text file and explicitly stating what configuration options the user wants. This is easy.
I have a hunch that by ease of use, you are actually referring to obviousness of use. While editing a text file really is not hard to do, it isn't necessarily obvious to the novice user. Personally, I think that users who want obvious should stick to something simple like Windows. It fits their purpose, which is probably surfing the web and writing emails to grandma. But for more serious users that want a serious system, there is BSD.
I am not opposed, however, to providing simple tools for simple users. I just do not want to sacrifice the power of the system to them.
Depending on the idiom of "just", I think Microsoft is on the right track here.
Consider:
"You get a just a D in this class"
"You earn just $10 of allowance this week"
"There are just 50mg of sodium in diet coke"
Longhorn - It Just Works!
Does it work well? I'm not saying!
Humans are not the status quo of the animal world. Just because humans display a trait or behavior that isn't seen in other creatures doesn't mean that it is necessarily unnatural.
In the case of homosexuality, understand that identity and relationships in most animals is a case of physical and hormonal attributes. Humans develop their identities mentally more than physically. Our relationships are all based upon emotion and mental stimulation, and not sexual reproduction. Why is it then unnatural for humans to develop relationships that are not otherwise seen in nature? Human relationships like "pen pals" and "best friends forever" and "aunts" and "step-fathers" and "fathers-in-law" don't occur anywhere else in nature, but we all agree that these relationships are not unnatural. Homosexuality is another extension of the human ability to establish relationships on mental and emotional terms not regarding sexual reproduction.
And don't give me that "society made me this way, it's responsible" bullshit either. It's true, 18 year olds can be very good at killing people, but they can also be very good at getting jobs, going to school, and doing something worthwhile with themselves too. They just have to make the decision to not piss away their lives.
. In my own experience, at Oklahoma State University the ACM is virtually non-existant. I served as PR Officer in my last semester, and I think we had 4 meetings. Besides the officers, only a handful of people attended the regular meetings, and the only reason anyone signed up to be a member was because we stopped charging a local chapter membership fee. I don't think any local chapter members got a national membership. Our faculty and staff were not at all envolved in the ACM. There are also fewer and fewer students getting into programming these days - if anyone touches a computer field they go after business comm or MIS, because of the lure of better cash without having to learn so much math and science. So I point the finger at envolvement. In my experience, there was not enough envolvement by the students or faculty to get a team of competitive, motivated programmers to represent our school. I'm curious as to whether other schools in the US have the same problems.
Public blacklisters should be blown away completely. I used to work tech support at a large ISP, which unfortunately had the bad habit of buying out smaller ISPs and melding them into its core. Now, in the process of this the large ISP would relay mail for the domains and IP blocks that were purchased. Quite a number of overzealous blacklisters (blackhole for one) essentially saw our mail exchangers to be 'open-relay', and we only found out about it when someone called to complain that she tried to send pictures of her baby to her mother on AOL and got a nasty email back accusing her of sending spam.
Since our mail servers were not the source of the malfunction, we as support personnel were required to direct the user to complain to the destination that was not allowing her mail to get through. This of course was often a dead-end street for the user, and weeks would go by before any action was taken by the ISP using the blacklist, or the blacklist itself. As a result, we had many unhappy customers that could not send mail to networks that were run by lazy administrators that preferred to let a blacklist determine what could send mail to their network, rather than do their own jobs.
Computers are a lot like automobiles. They are very powerful, sometimes dangerous appliances that most people are expected to own and operate. And in the same notion, people tend to learn about as much about their computers as they do about their cars: how the radio works, and where the pedals are. And when their rack-and-pinion or CV joint fails, they have about as much Clue as when they install spyware or take the bait on a phishing scam. The problem is not the terminology - we could pass along the word to refer to a Trojan Horse as a "malicious, security-breaking program that is disguised as something benign, such as a directory lister, archiver, [or] game" http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/t/Trojanhorse.ht
IMHO of course.
First off, I don't theorize about black holes, and I don't think the act of theorizing about black holes makes any one person non-ignorant. The act of learning makes our societies less ignorant of the world around us and enables us to create more enabling technology. And if you think I'm wrong, just remember that if nobody theorized and guessed and figured out about electricity, and just stuck to the notion that it was a mystical device of the wrath of god, we'd be having this conversation by candlelight on dixie cups and fishing wire.
The idea that learning is somehow "bad" is completely incomprehensible to me.
Science is repsonsible for discovery of things and how they work; industry then applies that knowledge to problems. If we can understand the fundamental nature of gravity, and overcome the oil giants, your next car just may be powered by an artificial gravity engine that gets 120,000 miles to every atom of fuel.
But really what I think is most important is that we should never pass up the opportunity to investigate and learn about anything. Ignorance certainly has less application to humanity than this kind of science. Ignorance only serves the propagation of uninformed and unfounded beliefs and ideas in absence of fact.
While commonly referred to as "fraud," Sony says the failure to provide and warranty properly working hardware is common in all computer equipment manufacturers. "A very small number of actual working products is normal in the computer industry, and is not a sign of customers getting shafted," a representative for Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) told GameSpot.
Actually, I didn't... I only speak some german as a second language, and english is my native tongue. I meant Genie, but genius is just as fitting.
And my german grammar is sorely lacking...
John Carmack is an algorithm Genie. The real value of Doom 3 is not in its gameplay, sales, or playerbase, but in its technology. The Doom3 graphics engine is a thing of beauty, filled with fantastic lighting algorithms, detail preservation architecture, and a slew of other goodies you'll usually only see in SIGGRAPH papers, ready for the next generation of hardware to support it. iD has always been like this - ahead of the game in engine tech, and softer on the other goodies. Carmack knows he'll have a slew of studios that are masters of gameplay and content throwing money at him for licensing rights on the engine to develop the next generation of FPS titles. It's his niche, and he's good at it.
That comment was not to be taken seriously, and was nowhere near the focal point of my argument.
Exactly. I'm pretty sure that the concepts of prostitution and murder predate video games by a few dozen centuries... But then again, Al Gore also invented the internet... so this wouldn't be the first time the Clinton Clan would try to alter history.
In any case, the fundamental problem here is that in America we like to pretend that this stuff doesn't happen, and that by covering Junior's eyes ears and mouth until he's 18 and he can be kicked out of the house (having done his duty in saving mom and dad some tax debt). Then he'll go to college, study hard, marry a virgin that's happy to raise babies and make his pot roast every night. Unfortunately, the Brady Bunch was only a TV show and the real world is much more complex. Yes there are hookers. Yes there are murderers. It's up to the parents to introduce their kids to these facts in a way that's constructive. If they don't, then it's very possible that - video game or not - their kid will be hit headfirst without guidance with the ideas of sex and murder and they will either steer clear or revel in it.
At that, I'd like to make it really clear that fanboys that scream at the top of their capslock that window manager or desktop [x] is better than everything else, why does anyone use anything else, it should be incorporated into X, etc. are neglecting the entire philosphy that makes X attractive in the first place. The availability and freedom of choice is what makes the system superior, not its restrictions. To tout one window manager to rule them all is to take one giant neanderthal leap backwards into the dark abyss of Microsoftism.
I'm pretty sure there would be some trouble if all burger joints were converted to Burger Kings based on the merits of their flame-broiling techniques. Although, I certainly wouldn't mind.
Every time I have to re-install Realplayer, I make sure that bob@dole.com wants to recieve a weekly newsletter from Real.com.
In America, you hit the gas.
In Soviet Russia, the gas hits you!
yoda: When 900 years old you reach, look as good you will not!
class You:
look = as_good
def reach(years):
if( years = 900 ):
self.look = not as_good
Universities are now run by "System CEOs" who are much more concerned with the financial and social stability of their empire than the freedom of information for what they see is a group of drunken kids looking to fill their hard drives and iPods with free music and porn. The freedoms of those lowly students to be innocent until proven guilty of stepping on the toes of their school CEO's financial buddies are the last things on the minds of the administrative staff. They want that cold hard Alumni cash and some big beefy corporate donations to rename their football fields with.
All your stadium are belong to T. Boone Pickens, yo!
IMHO, of course.
A good starting point is to understand finite automata and regular languages first. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automata_theory/ for a good first reference on automata. If you can grok automata, regular expressions will click with you.