My wife called me today to try to recover a couple of hours work she lost when her computer crashed. It gave no warning, just rebooted. I tried walking her through finding any temp files that might have her work, but to no avail.
"Sorry," I said, "that's just Windows. It crashes. That's why I don't like it." I looked up the uptime on the Sun workstation where I was: 121 days. RHEL4 Server: 122 days. Oh yeah, I did patch those last summer, around Labor Day.
Computers don't crash: Windows does.
If admins were honest with their users and didn't try to defend Windows or say that all operating systems crash just as much, the world would be a better place.
When I shower in the morning it takes me like 20 minutes to do the exact same procedure I can complete in 10 minutes if take a shower in the middle of the day.
Perhaps you should find some other place to conduct that procedure. Most slashdotters do it in front of their PC at night, I think.
Shorry, I dinnt unnerstan that. Where's my damn coffee?
I have this stupid little dog that keeps waking up at night and yipping with this ear-piercing yelp. Something about taking a piss. I hate that little dog. Damn activists would have me in jail if I shot her, though.
So where's that coffee? Oh, here it is. Ahh.
Wow, what a stupid post. Better not press Submi...
I'd love to have array bounds checking and built in to the compiler, so it would complain when I leave a loop unbounded.
But things like race conditions in a multithreaded app, abuse of least privilege, or other runtime errors seem more difficult.
The cynic in me says that it's Symantec doing it, so they'll make a product you have to leave runnning all the time to be "secure". They're just doing the testing part, though. Besides, what would they call it, Symantec Antisecurity?
Patents are (supposed) to protect a novel way of doing something. If you can watch that something occur and come up with the same thing, how novel was it?
I know that doesn't mean much once someone already has a patent and a lawyer, but still.
it takes a special kind of brain damage to think stem cell research *encourages* women to have abortions. [...] Especially since one of the most commonly suggested sources of stem cells are excess fertilized eggs from fertility treatments that are going to be destroyed anyway.
No, it doesn't. You see, even if in reality no fetal tissue were ever used, that wouldn't keep the idea of it from being used as a softening touch to a young woman making her decision. "It's ok, like donating your body to science." Ignorance works both ways.
And the argument is not just about the effect on a woman making the decision, but about the condition of society at large and the respect for life. Experimentation on cells from embryos is no different than experimentation on cells from aborted fetuses; neither will ever live a life. The question is: what's to be done with them? The embryo's legal and moral status is the same as the fetus'.
What's to stop fertility clinics from making just a few more embryos when couples ask for IVF? After all, it's for research. They'll never be missed.
Pretending that your actions don't have side effects takes a special kind of brain damage.
Could this totally remove the argument about stem cell research?
The question is not whether stem cell research will help mankind. The question is who has to pay the price for the research, both literally and figuratively.
Anti-abortion folks believe that a fetuses are human beings, and that it's a horror for the government to fund experimentation on their dismembered bodies. They believe they are protecting the weakest from slaughter by discouraging research on new lines of stem cells. They certainly don't want their tax dollars used to fund something they consider an abomination.
Pro-abortion folks argue that stem cell research can save lives, and improve the quality of life, for the race. That's a gamble, however, since there aren't any quantifiable results yet.
Until the benefits of using embryonic stem cells can be shown to outweigh the costs, the policy probably won't change. The argument that we're encouraging abortion on a roll of the dice is pretty strong.
Here in the US we seem to be much more wrapped up in who owns the rights to something and how to make money from it.
You're holding up the BBC as an paragon of social virtue by comparing them to whom? CNN, or PBS? The BBC was created for this kind of thing. Making content available to the public is straight out of the
BBC Charter:
OBJECTS OF THE CORPORATION
3. The objects of the Corporation are as follows:-
(a) To provide, as public services, sound and television broadcasting services (whether by analogue or digital means) and to provide sound and television programmes of information, education and entertainment for general reception in Our United Kingdom [...]
It also offers transportability if one of my employees moves on or if we bring someone on for a contract gig.
If the mail is on gmail, it's theirs, not yours. When they leave, all that information goes with them. If the departure is... untidy, that could mean anything from simple spam to having competitors know your trade secrets. If the departure has legal implications, you lose valuable leverage.
Granted, a savvy employee can archive his email and keep it at home, or even plop an automatic dup in their.forward file, but most people don't do that. With gmail (or any free mail), they don't have to.
Why put any artificial barrier at all in front of your product? If your goal is to make them ubiquitous, then let nothing get in the way.
He recognizes capitalism's inexorable hand, but refuses to accept it. He'd be much better off working with it. Accept that there is going to be a market for the things, and sell into the market. Someone's going to.
For instance, he could make a bare-bones, fully-functional version of the product available to schools, but sell a more elaborate model to consumers, a similar but higher priced one to business, and a milspec one to the US DOD.
By working with capitalists, instead of fighting them, the project would stand a much better chance of actually succeeding.
I'd like to find these morons running these machines...
I think they found you first.
But besides, wouldn't it be much nicer to crap down the neck of the marketing genius who designed the operating system responsible for the mess in the first place?
But with ubiquitous high speed connections of the future only a fool would actually want to own and maintain his own computer.
Even with higher bandwidth, you're still going to have latency issues. Effective bandwidth will always be limited by traffic, so that at 6pm when Joe Sixpack sits down to check out his fantasy football league, my ssh session will crawl to a halt. Or at least enough to make my tunneled X11 CAD sessions slower than I'd like.
Sometimes those issues will explode when some bozo kills a router or fiber line. All that bandwidth is useless if your connection fails. It's nice to have some local resources.
Targeted advertising by user opt-in newsletters and e-mail campaigns (unlike spamming) or internal market research to get a grasp on its customer base isn't unethical, in my opinion.
Saying something isn't unethical "in my opinion" borders on redundancy. Ethics are simply a set of defined rules, and by definition are subjective. But that's not my real point.
Targeting advertising email is spam. The thing that distinguishes spam is the sender's attitude toward non-respondents. A spammer doesn't care what his non-respondents think of him -- he's only interested in the response rate. An advertiser with an ounce of sense realizes that he's going to drive away people by spamming, and doesn't want that. A spammer doesn't care.
A targeted email campaign may be more effective than simple spam, but it's still spam. Cleaning up your list will improve your response rate, but it still is going to drive people away.
I'm not generally in favor of the death penalty, but in the case of people who use my inbox for their foul spam, I'm on the fence.
I glossed a lot of detail. The car (a '97 Eagle Vision) has 190Km, and needs new CV joints and struts, front and rear. The paint is beginning to go, and the "check engine" light is constantly on due to intermittent misfires (despite new plugs and wires). It gets about 25mpg. All told, the price in parts for the fixes it needs exceed its fair market value. I still own it, because with three teenagers I figure one of them will step up and do the work.
I bought an '03 VW Jetta turbodiesel, which is rated at 49mpg highway. Like you, I drive about 700 miles/week, almost all on the interstate. I feel a lot better about the fuel economy.
My first car was a '69 pony. 0 to 60 in... well, about a block:-).
Good procrastination is avoiding errands to do real work.
As an inveterate procrastinator, I have to say that while I mostly agree with TFA's premise, it suffers from the usual oversimplification it decries.
Putting off little things can end in crushing defeat. Failing to do basic maintenance on one's body, one's vehicles, or other property, often will result in catastophic surprises, and usually at the last minute.
For years, I've regularly gotten my oil changed (or done it myself) in my vehicles. This past week I discovered the hard way what happens when you put off getting your coolant flushed. A blown head gasket meant I had to buy a new car. Merry Christmas to you, too.
Similarly, failure to do the little maintenance things at work (changing backup tapes, daily paperwork, etc.) can result in blowups of a more career-threatening sort. Every job has those details, and you ignore them at your peril.
How many people have great ideas while brushing their teeth or do their best thinking in the shower? Handled correctly (as habits), the mundane details don't interfere with higher purposes. Handled incorrectly, they put the higher purposes hopelessly out of reach.
[...] the word refers to heterosexual judeo-christian marriage, which in turn is based (due to the genesis of christianity) on roman ceremonies which establish property rights.
You need to quit worrying about words. A word is a word, and could be any other word. We need words to describe concepts. Either a concept is useful, and needs a word (or several) to describe it, or the word never gets used and goes away.
Heterosexual marriage, one man, one woman, is the historical norm for all of human history, as far as we can tell. Even in prehistory, humans tended to pair up. Even in polygamy, a lead wife emerges, while the others hang on. Our laws codify that.
Polygamy is bad for women, both in terms of the setup inside the family and for the status of females in society. Except in sci-fi/fantasy literature, polygamy is always one man with several wives.
Homosexual marriage has no historical precedent. There are hints of it during a brief period of Roman decadence, which rotted the Empire from the inside. I'm not saying homosexuality ruined Rome, but that the decadent period, during which homosexual unions appear to have existed, led to its downfall. It doesn't have a good track record.
You think marriage is about property rights? You must be single.
How could you doubt the government who brought you the DMCA (which has virtually eliminated software and music piracy), capital punishment and gun control (which together have virtually eliminated murder and other violent crime), and mandatory car insurance (which has virtually eliminated insurance industry bankruptcy)?
Despite what you see on television, most police go years at a time without drawing their weapon. Still, they wear body armor when their jobs bring them into potential harm's way. Their main job is to diffuse situations before violence erupts.
While soldiers and marines can also go for years without drawing a weapon or receiving enemy fire, in a live battle situation it's the expectation that they will. It's the whole point of an army: go into harm's way so the harm doesn't get to the civilians.
Overall, your post shows the complacency of someone who's never had to defend his own liberty, yet is perfectly happy accepting the sacrifice of those who do. At the same time, you want to make their job more difficult.
is a powerful motivator. Bill, like everyone else, wants people to think he's a good guy. Since he's as famous as the Beatles (though not as famous as that Guy you don't want me to mention or you'll bash me as a zealot), he has to do more to be seen as a good guy.
But "there is no doubt that he and his wife have done more for charitable organizations than anyone in history" is a stretch. Ever hear of Andrew Carnegie? Built libraries, died broke. He gave more than Bill and the Missus, since he gave everything he had.
How about Stallman and Torvalds? They don't do much for charitable organizations per se, but having given us GCC and Linux I'd say they've done quite a bit of giving.
The Center on Philanthropy compiled a list of 531 gifts of $1 million or more in the first quarter of 2005 that were announced in various newsletters, newspapers, and other publications [...]
Lotsa folks give money. What do you do with the rest of yourself -- are you kind to others, or do you try to suck the last penny out of their pockets, taking the crumbs from the plates of the poor?
If a company loses a patent, it can no longer license it to other companies that make products. NTP's primary business is licensing patents that it owns. It makes no products.
I know running as admin is bad in principle, but from TFA:
Despite the fact that LUA is accepted within software security circles as a key to reducing damage from malicious hacker attacks, Margosis said a large percentage of customers still run Windows with full admin rights, making them sitting ducks for malware attacks that rely on "maximum privileges."
First all this malware spreading around was because we didn't have firewalls. Now it's because we're all running with admin rights. Never mind that it's the OS default, it's obviously our fault that all these bugs keep surfacing.
Of course, the next whipping boy is that faceless developer out there who wakes up one morning and decides to violate basic programming principles like Least Privelege. But it's not the developer's fault.
The problem for the developer is that Windows makes it difficult to do anything but run as admin. The environment assumes single-user, multiple apps, but not multiple users. It was designed with one user in mind, and the multi-user stuff layered on later.
But the real problem with complaining that we're violating Least Privilege is that it's a Redmond Herring (TM). It's ignoring the big problem, which is that since Windows source code is closed, no one without a vested interest in keeping bugs hidden can look at it.
You want a security principle violation? Hiding your code is the biggest one there is.
i dont even have faith in the system when votes are done by hand, much less so in digitizing it.
The trouble comes in throwing out the paper altogether. There has to be a way for an untrained human to look at a ballot and know what it says. The voting machines should just be more accurate at producing the ballot, which a voter then examines and puts in the box. Maybe they have to put it in the box once it's printed, or maybe you keep a tally of how many people don't.
Behind the scenes, the votes should be tallied by two separate systems: electronically (inside the voting machines, without regard to what happens to the paper ballots) and also mechanically, by examinining the paper ballots. The electronic method would be essentially realtime, so the unofficial results would be available as soon as the polls closed. The official results should come from the paper. If the two differ by some small margin, do an audit.
Slashdot Mirror
It's called "irony". The situation is ripe for an ironic post, and GP seems to have hit all the bases. All the ones that are belong to us, that is.
After all, in Communist China, the lab joins you.
My wife called me today to try to recover a couple of hours work she lost when her computer crashed. It gave no warning, just rebooted. I tried walking her through finding any temp files that might have her work, but to no avail.
"Sorry," I said, "that's just Windows. It crashes. That's why I don't like it." I looked up the uptime on the Sun workstation where I was: 121 days. RHEL4 Server: 122 days. Oh yeah, I did patch those last summer, around Labor Day.
Computers don't crash: Windows does.
If admins were honest with their users and didn't try to defend Windows or say that all operating systems crash just as much, the world would be a better place.
Sorry. I just woke up.
Perhaps you should find some other place to conduct that procedure. Most slashdotters do it in front of their PC at night, I think.
Shorry, I dinnt unnerstan that. Where's my damn coffee?
I have this stupid little dog that keeps waking up at night and yipping with this ear-piercing yelp. Something about taking a piss. I hate that little dog. Damn activists would have me in jail if I shot her, though.
So where's that coffee? Oh, here it is. Ahh.
Wow, what a stupid post. Better not press Submi...
I'd love to have array bounds checking and built in to the compiler, so it would complain when I leave a loop unbounded.
But things like race conditions in a multithreaded app, abuse of least privilege, or other runtime errors seem more difficult.
The cynic in me says that it's Symantec doing it, so they'll make a product you have to leave runnning all the time to be "secure". They're just doing the testing part, though. Besides, what would they call it, Symantec Antisecurity?
Patents are (supposed) to protect a novel way of doing something. If you can watch that something occur and come up with the same thing, how novel was it?
I know that doesn't mean much once someone already has a patent and a lawyer, but still.
No, it doesn't. You see, even if in reality no fetal tissue were ever used, that wouldn't keep the idea of it from being used as a softening touch to a young woman making her decision. "It's ok, like donating your body to science." Ignorance works both ways.
And the argument is not just about the effect on a woman making the decision, but about the condition of society at large and the respect for life. Experimentation on cells from embryos is no different than experimentation on cells from aborted fetuses; neither will ever live a life. The question is: what's to be done with them? The embryo's legal and moral status is the same as the fetus'.
What's to stop fertility clinics from making just a few more embryos when couples ask for IVF? After all, it's for research. They'll never be missed.
Pretending that your actions don't have side effects takes a special kind of brain damage.
The question is not whether stem cell research will help mankind. The question is who has to pay the price for the research, both literally and figuratively.
Anti-abortion folks believe that a fetuses are human beings, and that it's a horror for the government to fund experimentation on their dismembered bodies. They believe they are protecting the weakest from slaughter by discouraging research on new lines of stem cells. They certainly don't want their tax dollars used to fund something they consider an abomination.
Pro-abortion folks argue that stem cell research can save lives, and improve the quality of life, for the race. That's a gamble, however, since there aren't any quantifiable results yet.
Until the benefits of using embryonic stem cells can be shown to outweigh the costs, the policy probably won't change. The argument that we're encouraging abortion on a roll of the dice is pretty strong.
You're holding up the BBC as an paragon of social virtue by comparing them to whom? CNN, or PBS? The BBC was created for this kind of thing. Making content available to the public is straight out of the BBC Charter:
If the mail is on gmail, it's theirs, not yours. When they leave, all that information goes with them. If the departure is
Granted, a savvy employee can archive his email and keep it at home, or even plop an automatic dup in their
Why put any artificial barrier at all in front of your product? If your goal is to make them ubiquitous, then let nothing get in the way.
He recognizes capitalism's inexorable hand, but refuses to accept it. He'd be much better off working with it. Accept that there is going to be a market for the things, and sell into the market. Someone's going to.
For instance, he could make a bare-bones, fully-functional version of the product available to schools, but sell a more elaborate model to consumers, a similar but higher priced one to business, and a milspec one to the US DOD.
By working with capitalists, instead of fighting them, the project would stand a much better chance of actually succeeding.
I think they found you first.
But besides, wouldn't it be much nicer to crap down the neck of the marketing genius who designed the operating system responsible for the mess in the first place?
Even with higher bandwidth, you're still going to have latency issues. Effective bandwidth will always be limited by traffic, so that at 6pm when Joe Sixpack sits down to check out his fantasy football league, my ssh session will crawl to a halt. Or at least enough to make my tunneled X11 CAD sessions slower than I'd like.
Sometimes those issues will explode when some bozo kills a router or fiber line. All that bandwidth is useless if your connection fails. It's nice to have some local resources.
Saying something isn't unethical "in my opinion" borders on redundancy. Ethics are simply a set of defined rules, and by definition are subjective. But that's not my real point.
Targeting advertising email is spam. The thing that distinguishes spam is the sender's attitude toward non-respondents. A spammer doesn't care what his non-respondents think of him -- he's only interested in the response rate. An advertiser with an ounce of sense realizes that he's going to drive away people by spamming, and doesn't want that. A spammer doesn't care.
A targeted email campaign may be more effective than simple spam, but it's still spam. Cleaning up your list will improve your response rate, but it still is going to drive people away.
I'm not generally in favor of the death penalty, but in the case of people who use my inbox for their foul spam, I'm on the fence.
I glossed a lot of detail. The car (a '97 Eagle Vision) has 190Km, and needs new CV joints and struts, front and rear. The paint is beginning to go, and the "check engine" light is constantly on due to intermittent misfires (despite new plugs and wires). It gets about 25mpg. All told, the price in parts for the fixes it needs exceed its fair market value. I still own it, because with three teenagers I figure one of them will step up and do the work.
... well, about a block :-).
I bought an '03 VW Jetta turbodiesel, which is rated at 49mpg highway. Like you, I drive about 700 miles/week, almost all on the interstate. I feel a lot better about the fuel economy.
My first car was a '69 pony. 0 to 60 in
As an inveterate procrastinator, I have to say that while I mostly agree with TFA's premise, it suffers from the usual oversimplification it decries.
Putting off little things can end in crushing defeat. Failing to do basic maintenance on one's body, one's vehicles, or other property, often will result in catastophic surprises, and usually at the last minute.
For years, I've regularly gotten my oil changed (or done it myself) in my vehicles. This past week I discovered the hard way what happens when you put off getting your coolant flushed. A blown head gasket meant I had to buy a new car. Merry Christmas to you, too.
Similarly, failure to do the little maintenance things at work (changing backup tapes, daily paperwork, etc.) can result in blowups of a more career-threatening sort. Every job has those details, and you ignore them at your peril.
How many people have great ideas while brushing their teeth or do their best thinking in the shower? Handled correctly (as habits), the mundane details don't interfere with higher purposes. Handled incorrectly, they put the higher purposes hopelessly out of reach.
You need to quit worrying about words. A word is a word, and could be any other word. We need words to describe concepts. Either a concept is useful, and needs a word (or several) to describe it, or the word never gets used and goes away.
Heterosexual marriage, one man, one woman, is the historical norm for all of human history, as far as we can tell. Even in prehistory, humans tended to pair up. Even in polygamy, a lead wife emerges, while the others hang on. Our laws codify that.
Polygamy is bad for women, both in terms of the setup inside the family and for the status of females in society. Except in sci-fi/fantasy literature, polygamy is always one man with several wives.
Homosexual marriage has no historical precedent. There are hints of it during a brief period of Roman decadence, which rotted the Empire from the inside. I'm not saying homosexuality ruined Rome, but that the decadent period, during which homosexual unions appear to have existed, led to its downfall. It doesn't have a good track record.
You think marriage is about property rights? You must be single.
How could you doubt the government who brought you the DMCA (which has virtually eliminated software and music piracy), capital punishment and gun control (which together have virtually eliminated murder and other violent crime), and mandatory car insurance (which has virtually eliminated insurance industry bankruptcy)?
I find your lack of faith disturbing.
Your post displays a remarkable lack of insight.
Despite what you see on television, most police go years at a time without drawing their weapon. Still, they wear body armor when their jobs bring them into potential harm's way. Their main job is to diffuse situations before violence erupts.
While soldiers and marines can also go for years without drawing a weapon or receiving enemy fire, in a live battle situation it's the expectation that they will. It's the whole point of an army: go into harm's way so the harm doesn't get to the civilians.
Overall, your post shows the complacency of someone who's never had to defend his own liberty, yet is perfectly happy accepting the sacrifice of those who do. At the same time, you want to make their job more difficult.
And yet it is for you that our soldiers die.
is a powerful motivator. Bill, like everyone else, wants people to think he's a good guy. Since he's as famous as the Beatles (though not as famous as that Guy you don't want me to mention or you'll bash me as a zealot), he has to do more to be seen as a good guy.
But "there is no doubt that he and his wife have done more for charitable organizations than anyone in history" is a stretch. Ever hear of Andrew Carnegie? Built libraries, died broke. He gave more than Bill and the Missus, since he gave everything he had.
How about Stallman and Torvalds? They don't do much for charitable organizations per se, but having given us GCC and Linux I'd say they've done quite a bit of giving.
But that's an aside. From IUPUI:
Lotsa folks give money. What do you do with the rest of yourself -- are you kind to others, or do you try to suck the last penny out of their pockets, taking the crumbs from the plates of the poor?
In other words, they're parasuits.
First all this malware spreading around was because we didn't have firewalls. Now it's because we're all running with admin rights. Never mind that it's the OS default, it's obviously our fault that all these bugs keep surfacing.
Of course, the next whipping boy is that faceless developer out there who wakes up one morning and decides to violate basic programming principles like Least Privelege. But it's not the developer's fault.
The problem for the developer is that Windows makes it difficult to do anything but run as admin. The environment assumes single-user, multiple apps, but not multiple users. It was designed with one user in mind, and the multi-user stuff layered on later.
But the real problem with complaining that we're violating Least Privilege is that it's a Redmond Herring (TM). It's ignoring the big problem, which is that since Windows source code is closed, no one without a vested interest in keeping bugs hidden can look at it.
You want a security principle violation? Hiding your code is the biggest one there is.
The point is that older programs should be updated, not that anyone should be try to compatible with them. LUA is a Good Thing.
The trouble comes in throwing out the paper altogether. There has to be a way for an untrained human to look at a ballot and know what it says. The voting machines should just be more accurate at producing the ballot, which a voter then examines and puts in the box. Maybe they have to put it in the box once it's printed, or maybe you keep a tally of how many people don't.
Behind the scenes, the votes should be tallied by two separate systems: electronically (inside the voting machines, without regard to what happens to the paper ballots) and also mechanically, by examinining the paper ballots. The electronic method would be essentially realtime, so the unofficial results would be available as soon as the polls closed. The official results should come from the paper. If the two differ by some small margin, do an audit.
There, was that so hard?