Though I admit that it is at least partially my fault.
I don't mean that you should use the expensive local guys. However you should check them out. If you make one trade a year or less, they are not very expensive and the advice can be worth it. (can of course) If you make many trades it isn't worth it, but day-trading is a very dangerious move, and you should really follow the stock market for a long time before you do it.
There are many books on investing. I've seen criticisms of all of them, though some are overall good books and some are not. (even by the same autheors some books may be bad advice while others good) If your only going to read a few books, I'd recomend something by Benjiman Gramms. (I think he wrote his last book in the '30s though I could be wrong) His mythods are amoung the few that have stood the test of time. Warrent Buffet is one of his students, and also one of the richest investors in the country.
In the end, it is your money, and you CAN lose it all. I cringe when I hear of a good geek who thinks that because he is smart he should be able to make money in the stock market. While there is money to be made, there is also money to be lost. (while the indexs are up, the average stock lost money last year) Picking the winners isn't easy. Unfortunatly some investors are stupid, and pay outragious prices for bad stocks while letting good stocks lag. (sometimes they should lag) In the end you have to predict not just what intellegent people will do in the market, but also what the idiots will do.
I won't even get into options, shorts and other trades that reflect (and perhaps change) this price of a stock while allowing you to make money on the downside of a stock with completely different risks.
Online you pay $10-$30 for a trade, locally you pay $100 for a trade. Online you have no help, noone with expirence. Locally you can talk to someone with expirence.
Unfortunatly most local brokers are just phone slaves who want to sell you something to make money. There are some good ones who really care.
I only recomend these because it APPEARS that you know nothing about investment, other then you have a lot of money. The stock market can be worse then Vegas for turning a lot of money into a little. The current market allows many people to make a lot of money, but history shows that other markets like this often have the bottom drop out and you lose all the gains very quickly. That isn't to say that stocks are bad investments (something that only history can show conclusively) Only that you need to do a lot of homework before you invest.
That said, I have accounts with E*Trade and Morgan STanley Dean Wetter. The latter charges way too much, and I'm planning to get away from them in the future. I don't have much expirence trading either though, we are after all talking about my money, but once it hits the stock market it is subject to lots of pressures I have little control over.
I often hit no where I mean yes in make config under linux. My linux system is a 386 with 8 meg of ram, 80 meg hd, no monitor (normally). I telnet in, (from a TERM that isn't in linux's termcap database, at least not for my distribution, and with my space limits I won't want to fix it. this is a headless router after all)
On the above system I know exactly what I have and what I want. So I start out fine, and get to ethernet. I select my card, but then need to say no to the next 20 options. On a loaded 386, there is a noticeable lag between hitting a key and the next option coming up. I hit n (no) 20 times, and go to the bathroom. Get back, and the system is still churning my inputs. Opps, should have hit n 19 times, I needed the 20th option. Start over. I know I shouldn't work like this, but take a close look, there are many options in a row that I don't need before the next one I need - this is boring to watch. It gets worse the second time around, now all the defaults by one are correct, so hit enter a million times hoping I don't get bored and hit enter right through the option that I wanted.
I much prefer the config on my FreeBSD system. Once it is setup, it is always there, and I only need to glance at LINT to see if I want something new.
Just like my own particular branch of Christinanity is the one true way. In other words, this is partially a religious issue, though I doupt anyone will condem you to hellfire if you make the wrong choice.
Seriously though, in high school the TI is the most common and popular, in college and the real word the balance changes. Those who have the TI probaly stick with it, but the HP is more programable. RPM takes come getting used to, but it is a true geeks way to do things, and with little practice is easier.
As for programing, the HP wins, its programing language is beatiful in the way the onlt LISP can be beautiful. Of course not all geeks appreciate beauty, but most admit the LISP is nicer even if they can't stand it. (and there are many good arguments against LISP)
I forgot about that bit of stupidity. Last saw it with a guy who needed FreeBSD for work (to work at home), but wanted win95 for everything else. We won't mention the backwardness of working for a pure BSD company and then using windows at home though.
Turned at there was no way to do it because at the time neither FreeBSD nor Linux suppored 32bit FAT, and that CD made the entire hard disk a 32 bit FAT partition. This was just after the release of OSR2, FIPS and partition magic couldn't help yet either. Eventially we talked him into sticking with the real OS full time, but he hated it.
I know that IDE (whatever they call it now) is almost as good today and a lot cheaper, but I still insist on pure SCSI parts. Cusomte built is the only way to get a desktop system with no IDE (Okay, the IDE connectors are on the board, but unconnected)
Video cards are the next reason. Some work better then others with xFree86. I'll use what works, thank you.
Third, quality. Granted most electronics last for a long time. Cooling fans don't, power supplies don't - unless I get them from www.pcpowerandcooling.com. I know that others make good fans and power supplies, perhaps for less, but once burns by hot water you always blow on milk the from fridgerator.
I could save money buying a pre-built. I'd get poor componants that may or may not work with FreeBSD. I'd get fans that may or may not last. Or I would have to buy an overbuild server system, pay far more, and still not be sure of quality parts everywhere, or freeBSD compatibility.
I've been trying to understand this encryption for a while. Obviously they inseret some codes that would tell a DVD writer not to write this data stream (simply to do without encryption, though encryption makes fitlersing impossibal without breaking the encryption)
Whats to stop me from taking apart a DVD writer (which I understand currently can'`t do this, but do to density of writing or some such, but eventially they will exist) and hooking it up to a dvd reader, again directly to the electronics. Granted this isn't easy, but I'm a geek, I can hack up enough controll software to do this. Note that I've not broken the encryption, I've just copied the moved encryption and all. This doesn't seem that difficult to me.
Ahh, but this is a local issue, NOT a national issue. Thus it would be unconstitutional for the US congress to get involved.
There is some question of if the clause in the constitution: All others are reserved for the state, applies to: Congress shall make no law regaurding the free practice of religion. (Both of the above are paraphrasied from memeory, I've probably messed them up a little, but my point still stands. Is a state religion legal (ie can Utah only allow Mormons to live there?), or is religion a right no matter where you live. Obviously current interputation is religion is a right, but you can see how lawyers can twist this.
Will this work in freeBSD? (Linux emulation is fine, but there are one or two things that don't run in linux emulation.)
Odds are it will run in freeBSD, and if so I'm gonnna have to buy simCity. One of the few games I even bother to play anymore, or at least last time I had a comptuer that would run it - the black and white orginial on a mac SE.
Accually I only asked this question is to make sure they test in freeBSD.
The best banks are the tardiotnal credit union. I do my banking at the local gas station, by the phone, by snail mail, or the web. My particular credit union has never been within easy driving distance of their customers, so they are well setup for this situation. (They are for state hiway department workers, who live around the state despite the bank offices being near only near the state capitol)
It is harder to get in as you need to live/work in the right place, or be a relative of someone who is a member.
When my parents wanted to buy a car they call the credit untion, the person (I've never been on hold, the person answering the phone can hanlde my buisness, and I always get a person imeadiatly) who answered the phone said "For that model of car don't pay more then $x, we are putting $x in your checking account, when you buy the car send us the title." Now granted my parents have a good creit rating, but this service is nice, they trust members with the bank's money.
Also, savings interest rates are higher, loan rates lower. And of course the service is better.
Just as an aside, After Jonah died, God did infact destroy Ninivah (the city God promissed to destroy), because while they repented and lived okay for a while, but their children (grandchildren, or latter?) didn't worship God, and were eventially destroied.
Hmm, does this mean that because we repented of y2, and fix the problem that everyone will call y2036 (2038? I can't recall offhand when 32 bit unix runs out, or something else) just crying wolf.
Re:But is it worht the risk to attempt
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Living Terrors
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· Score: 2
Not really. Those guys driving the boat left behind a country and people they felt were safer because for a short time a US ship was disabled. Self sacrafice for the greater goor is nothing new, but sacrafice of EVERYONE with your ideals is new. There is a difference. I'm willing to die for freedom if it means after my death people will be more free (in whatever way), but I'm not willing to die for freedom if it means that there will be nobody to enjoy the freedom. There is a difference.
But is it worht the risk to attempt
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Living Terrors
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· Score: 2
sure small pox is fairly easy to spread, and few people of reproductive age have had the vaccene. However is it worth trying to spread it? Remember with todays connected world you can expect anything highly contagious would spread back to their own country and kill their loved ones too. vacinating most people in russia (or wherever) is not easy to do, so they have to consider loss will strike their people heavialy too.
This isn't 1880 when my great-great grandpa went back to germany (a month travel each way) to vist family, and had to stay an extra 6 months because a war stoped all travel. With todays air travel infecting a small number of people with something that will get most of the target country will get all their allies will get all their allies will get... eventially everyone in your country as switzerlan is infected and then your peple get infected there.
The Flu spreads every year because people get incontact with someone with it. AIDS does not spread nearly as quickly because it is harder to spread. (One could make a case that a religion designed HIV to kill anyone willing to have sex with someone else who has multipul partners. True belivers are immune because they don't do that. Unlikely, but the case could be made.)
I installed slackware 3.0 back in about '95, on a 386. Kernel is now up to 2.0.36 (+- 1 minor version) Still running whatever 4.x version of sendmail is came with, amoung other secrutiy nightmares. The machine keeps running though, and it does everything I need. (Most of my work is on a different machine, this is just a firewall)
Date on the BIOS is augest of '91. Now why were all comptuers supposed to just crash suddenly? I don't get it, I intentially didn't upgrade this just to see what would happen. (Granted I've not rebooted yet)
While it is more difficlut to make Athalons multi-processor, the bus allows better multiprocessor. You can do it quick and cheap with the PIII, but with the athalon bus you spend more money and end up with more scaleability. The PIII design does not deal well with more then 4 processor in theory, and practice is worse. You get around this by doing what the athalon requires all along. And the Athalon scales to 16 processors easially in theory. (If someone would ever do it)
Don't forget about reliability. Quote from one of our top marketing people (I work for STK, we own the tape market on the high end) "It used to be that all unix systems, SUN, HP, SGI, etc came with Exabyte 8mm tape drives, and it was great, you could do backs all day any time no problem. You never could read the tapes backs, but at least you could check the little box that said you had a backup." (Exabyte has improved since then, and since he is in marketing he was stretching the truth a little) His point was that backups are worthless if you can't read them back. Some of those older tape drives wrote tapes that could only be read on the drive that wrote them (as they got older the heads went out of allignement), and then you were screwed if you had a failure.
That said, SCSI is not that expensive, and scsi drives have a better chance of working. Just buy a scsi adaptor. Soon you will be like me and refuse to touch IDE again...:)
I too am looking for a good backup. Problem is backups are not easy. I want to backup/home which will soon move to a 9 gig disk, or even bigger. (Amanda isn't happy about dealing with partitions bigger then the tape - not saying amanda is the best way to backup), I really want to backup some macs over my network, and nothing deals with that.
Not useful. I use the sliding focus all the time. I like a small window that I'm editing in, and a big window almost entirely covering the small one that contains the specs I'm writing from. What 0x40012080 maps to is far more important then the line I'm on. I however can type without looking at my keyboard, or what I'm typing. The eye therefore is wrong for me because I don't always wnat to look at the window that I want tohave focus.
(right now I'm looking at a window with a financial chart, not at this line. I'm sure there are one or two typos, but nothing major despite my lack of attention.)
I don't know what your situation is, but X windows solves many problems for me. I have a machine on my desk, but do to (stupid) licensing restrictions, the main program I run is on a computer way over there. I also work with headless machines in a lab, and pulling windows from them makes some debugging tasks easier.
Back home I have a powerful modern machine, and several older sun3s. Now I could buy more powerful machines, but those cheap sun3s make excellent terminals, and the powerful machine is fast enough for them all, but the suns are not fast enough.
I'll agree that X windows is a bit slow. I'll agree it isn't perfect. However it does solve many of my problems.
Last year my company spent 25 million on a new logo. A couple days before the big announcement of what the logo was they told all emploiees that we won't get a bonus because we were missed the target by 10 million. Conincidence? We think not. (Managment will disagree, but stock prices few several bucks just after the anouncement)
Ask anyone around here though, the surest sign of a big lay off is a company moving to a new building, changing their name, or changing their logo. The old timers hold that as true.
You miss several key points. In my home town the manager of a local buisness and the two late night emploiees were caught steeling from the buisness. The manager had insurance, the two emploies made up an armed robber (black man, 5'10, average hight, dark winter hat on (this was in winter), brown trench coat - ie very average), and the three of them split the money. They had their story down well enough that insurance paid the loss, until one of them confessed.
I know in one buisness I worked for one of the managers (different from the one above) was stealing from the safe. We knew who, but had no proof. Now send that manager to fill in at a different store and she gets their safe combonation. She knows when the store is closed, tells the compbination to one of her more expirenced theif friends, and some night the safe is robbed, and she isn't implicated because she didn't work their that night. (and in fact they probably forgot she knew the combonation) The only thing really keeping this down is the monthly changing of the safe combonation, and she doesn't know when that happens.
Good social engineering can also get people to tell the safe combination without intending to. There exist people who can sell air conditioning to esqimos. There are people who can sell sand in a desert, or salt water on the ocean. Some people have the gift of getting people to tell what they should. There are eskimos who won't buy airconditioning from everyone, just like there are people who won't reveal the combination. Many people will give the combination though, and that is enough. (these people always make sure on the night the robbery occures that they have many witnesses that they are not their, that way they can say "Yea he told me, but I'm an honest guy who wouldn't use it or tell anyone. And I was at this party with many people. Joe even videotaped some of it, get his tape I'm probably on it." Add in a small bribe and some people become less honest.
I'm trying to understand encryption in the audio world. They encrypt this disk, I can't play it except on autherised players. What is to prevent me, owner of two autherized players and the equipment to burn a DVD (This doesn't exits AFAIK, but it will soon) from making a copy of it? Oh sure, I can't play it in linux (if it is good encryption), but I can now make a couple digital copies of the encrypted disk.
My boss has said he will pay for my high speed internet access. DSL and Cable are unavaiable where I live (though most people here have one or the other) However with Qualcomm (or similear) trying to get high speed wireless over PCS out, that may be avaiable first. Then I can buy a laptop, a big battery, and spend the entire day fishing while still getting paid. Yeah, I'd probably browse from the boat while working from home, but at the moment I'm waiting for a new code download while checking/., so it won't cost productivity.
I really hope this works out. Are you listening Sprint?
Re:Study human factors before commenting please
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Interface Zen
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No, I'm not argueing against zenning out on your work. The point of the interface is assist the work you need to get done, and not get in the way the rest of the time. When you zen out on an interface, you have achived the above, but in the case of vi it may be achived DESPITE the interface. Note this is contrast to other programs which allow the work to get done faster, but don't allow the zenning out, into your work because the interface doesn't provide the functionality to get the work done.
In the case of the mouse, it can be traned. For myself, once I realised the for many operations the mouse really was better, I traned myself to use it, and now I can move over there and nudge the mouse to where I need it and be back on the home row without looking. (and in fact I can put the mouse on either side of the keyboard, and the closer hand will do the work) You can do this, it just takes practice. I cannot zen out of vi, even though the interface is powerful enough to allow it, because I don't know it. I used to zen out on emacs (but I've not touched it for years). Now I zen out on a GUI modeling tool, becuase that is the work I do all day, and you have to use the mouse on that. The last editor I've zened on was ed, which fit my needs well. (operating on a 386 with a load over 10)
Study human factors before commenting please
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Interface Zen
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I spent some time studing human factors in college. Human factors in breifly design of interfaces to be useful. All GUIs should be built from human factors, but obviously few are.
This zen is a common misconception in human factors. Bruce Togniziky (the Guy Apple had doing most of their mac design) put expirenced uses in front of a comptuer, and had them select text with the keyboard, and then do the same thing again with the mouse. The users reported the keyboard was faster, but his stop watch reported the mouse was faster! (This was for a very specific example, and he admits it doesn't generalise. This however changed my thinking, I no longer hate the mouse, I use it when it is faster, and keyboard when that is faster)
We know how long it takes someone to move to the mouse make a selection and move back. We also know how long it takes someone to type a few keys to invoke a command. We know how to design user interfaces so they are useful. Few people apply this.
Human factors is NOT about getting rid of the keyboard or all those shortcuts. That is a misconception, human factors requires shortcuts! Human factors doesn't require zoning on the interface because the user zoned into typing is wasting time when moving to the mouse (which brakes concentration unless you do it all the time) is faster.
If you want to write comments like this, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE read Donald Norman's Design of Everyday Things. This is a wonderful easy to read book that defines the field of human factors and could change your way of thinking.
Slashdot Mirror
Though I admit that it is at least partially my fault.
I don't mean that you should use the expensive local guys. However you should check them out. If you make one trade a year or less, they are not very expensive and the advice can be worth it. (can of course) If you make many trades it isn't worth it, but day-trading is a very dangerious move, and you should really follow the stock market for a long time before you do it.
There are many books on investing. I've seen criticisms of all of them, though some are overall good books and some are not. (even by the same autheors some books may be bad advice while others good) If your only going to read a few books, I'd recomend something by Benjiman Gramms. (I think he wrote his last book in the '30s though I could be wrong) His mythods are amoung the few that have stood the test of time. Warrent Buffet is one of his students, and also one of the richest investors in the country.
In the end, it is your money, and you CAN lose it all. I cringe when I hear of a good geek who thinks that because he is smart he should be able to make money in the stock market. While there is money to be made, there is also money to be lost. (while the indexs are up, the average stock lost money last year) Picking the winners isn't easy. Unfortunatly some investors are stupid, and pay outragious prices for bad stocks while letting good stocks lag. (sometimes they should lag) In the end you have to predict not just what intellegent people will do in the market, but also what the idiots will do.
I won't even get into options, shorts and other trades that reflect (and perhaps change) this price of a stock while allowing you to make money on the downside of a stock with completely different risks.
Online you pay $10-$30 for a trade, locally you pay $100 for a trade. Online you have no help, noone with expirence. Locally you can talk to someone with expirence.
Unfortunatly most local brokers are just phone slaves who want to sell you something to make money. There are some good ones who really care.
I only recomend these because it APPEARS that you know nothing about investment, other then you have a lot of money. The stock market can be worse then Vegas for turning a lot of money into a little. The current market allows many people to make a lot of money, but history shows that other markets like this often have the bottom drop out and you lose all the gains very quickly. That isn't to say that stocks are bad investments (something that only history can show conclusively) Only that you need to do a lot of homework before you invest.
That said, I have accounts with E*Trade and Morgan STanley Dean Wetter. The latter charges way too much, and I'm planning to get away from them in the future. I don't have much expirence trading either though, we are after all talking about my money, but once it hits the stock market it is subject to lots of pressures I have little control over.
I often hit no where I mean yes in make config under linux. My linux system is a 386 with 8 meg of ram, 80 meg hd, no monitor (normally). I telnet in, (from a TERM that isn't in linux's termcap database, at least not for my distribution, and with my space limits I won't want to fix it. this is a headless router after all)
On the above system I know exactly what I have and what I want. So I start out fine, and get to ethernet. I select my card, but then need to say no to the next 20 options. On a loaded 386, there is a noticeable lag between hitting a key and the next option coming up. I hit n (no) 20 times, and go to the bathroom. Get back, and the system is still churning my inputs. Opps, should have hit n 19 times, I needed the 20th option. Start over. I know I shouldn't work like this, but take a close look, there are many options in a row that I don't need before the next one I need - this is boring to watch. It gets worse the second time around, now all the defaults by one are correct, so hit enter a million times hoping I don't get bored and hit enter right through the option that I wanted.
I much prefer the config on my FreeBSD system. Once it is setup, it is always there, and I only need to glance at LINT to see if I want something new.
Just like my own particular branch of Christinanity is the one true way. In other words, this is partially a religious issue, though I doupt anyone will condem you to hellfire if you make the wrong choice.
Seriously though, in high school the TI is the most common and popular, in college and the real word the balance changes. Those who have the TI probaly stick with it, but the HP is more programable. RPM takes come getting used to, but it is a true geeks way to do things, and with little practice is easier.
As for programing, the HP wins, its programing language is beatiful in the way the onlt LISP can be beautiful. Of course not all geeks appreciate beauty, but most admit the LISP is nicer even if they can't stand it. (and there are many good arguments against LISP)
I forgot about that bit of stupidity. Last saw it with a guy who needed FreeBSD for work (to work at home), but wanted win95 for everything else. We won't mention the backwardness of working for a pure BSD company and then using windows at home though.
Turned at there was no way to do it because at the time neither FreeBSD nor Linux suppored 32bit FAT, and that CD made the entire hard disk a 32 bit FAT partition. This was just after the release of OSR2, FIPS and partition magic couldn't help yet either. Eventially we talked him into sticking with the real OS full time, but he hated it.
I know that IDE (whatever they call it now) is almost as good today and a lot cheaper, but I still insist on pure SCSI parts. Cusomte built is the only way to get a desktop system with no IDE (Okay, the IDE connectors are on the board, but unconnected)
Video cards are the next reason. Some work better then others with xFree86. I'll use what works, thank you.
Third, quality. Granted most electronics last for a long time. Cooling fans don't, power supplies don't - unless I get them from www.pcpowerandcooling.com. I know that others make good fans and power supplies, perhaps for less, but once burns by hot water you always blow on milk the from fridgerator.
I could save money buying a pre-built. I'd get poor componants that may or may not work with FreeBSD. I'd get fans that may or may not last. Or I would have to buy an overbuild server system, pay far more, and still not be sure of quality parts everywhere, or freeBSD compatibility.
I've been trying to understand this encryption for a while. Obviously they inseret some codes that would tell a DVD writer not to write this data stream (simply to do without encryption, though encryption makes fitlersing impossibal without breaking the encryption)
Whats to stop me from taking apart a DVD writer (which I understand currently can'`t do this, but do to density of writing or some such, but eventially they will exist) and hooking it up to a dvd reader, again directly to the electronics. Granted this isn't easy, but I'm a geek, I can hack up enough controll software to do this. Note that I've not broken the encryption, I've just copied the moved encryption and all. This doesn't seem that difficult to me.
Ahh, but this is a local issue, NOT a national issue. Thus it would be unconstitutional for the US congress to get involved.
There is some question of if the clause in the constitution: All others are reserved for the state, applies to: Congress shall make no law regaurding the free practice of religion. (Both of the above are paraphrasied from memeory, I've probably messed them up a little, but my point still stands. Is a state religion legal (ie can Utah only allow Mormons to live there?), or is religion a right no matter where you live. Obviously current interputation is religion is a right, but you can see how lawyers can twist this.
Will this work in freeBSD? (Linux emulation is fine, but there are one or two things that don't run in linux emulation.)
Odds are it will run in freeBSD, and if so I'm gonnna have to buy simCity. One of the few games I even bother to play anymore, or at least last time I had a comptuer that would run it - the black and white orginial on a mac SE.
Accually I only asked this question is to make sure they test in freeBSD.
The best banks are the tardiotnal credit union. I do my banking at the local gas station, by the phone, by snail mail, or the web. My particular credit union has never been within easy driving distance of their customers, so they are well setup for this situation. (They are for state hiway department workers, who live around the state despite the bank offices being near only near the state capitol)
It is harder to get in as you need to live/work in the right place, or be a relative of someone who is a member.
When my parents wanted to buy a car they call the credit untion, the person (I've never been on hold, the person answering the phone can hanlde my buisness, and I always get a person imeadiatly) who answered the phone said "For that model of car don't pay more then $x, we are putting $x in your checking account, when you buy the car send us the title." Now granted my parents have a good creit rating, but this service is nice, they trust members with the bank's money.
Also, savings interest rates are higher, loan rates lower. And of course the service is better.
Just as an aside, After Jonah died, God did infact destroy Ninivah (the city God promissed to destroy), because while they repented and lived okay for a while, but their children (grandchildren, or latter?) didn't worship God, and were eventially destroied.
Hmm, does this mean that because we repented of y2, and fix the problem that everyone will call y2036 (2038? I can't recall offhand when 32 bit unix runs out, or something else) just crying wolf.
Not really. Those guys driving the boat left behind a country and people they felt were safer because for a short time a US ship was disabled. Self sacrafice for the greater goor is nothing new, but sacrafice of EVERYONE with your ideals is new. There is a difference. I'm willing to die for freedom if it means after my death people will be more free (in whatever way), but I'm not willing to die for freedom if it means that there will be nobody to enjoy the freedom. There is a difference.
sure small pox is fairly easy to spread, and few people of reproductive age have had the vaccene. However is it worth trying to spread it? Remember with todays connected world you can expect anything highly contagious would spread back to their own country and kill their loved ones too. vacinating most people in russia (or wherever) is not easy to do, so they have to consider loss will strike their people heavialy too.
This isn't 1880 when my great-great grandpa went back to germany (a month travel each way) to vist family, and had to stay an extra 6 months because a war stoped all travel. With todays air travel infecting a small number of people with something that will get most of the target country will get all their allies will get all their allies will get ... eventially everyone in your country as switzerlan is infected and then your peple get infected there.
The Flu spreads every year because people get incontact with someone with it. AIDS does not spread nearly as quickly because it is harder to spread. (One could make a case that a religion designed HIV to kill anyone willing to have sex with someone else who has multipul partners. True belivers are immune because they don't do that. Unlikely, but the case could be made.)
I installed slackware 3.0 back in about '95, on a 386. Kernel is now up to 2.0.36 (+- 1 minor version) Still running whatever 4.x version of sendmail is came with, amoung other secrutiy nightmares. The machine keeps running though, and it does everything I need. (Most of my work is on a different machine, this is just a firewall)
Date on the BIOS is augest of '91. Now why were all comptuers supposed to just crash suddenly? I don't get it, I intentially didn't upgrade this just to see what would happen. (Granted I've not rebooted yet)
While it is more difficlut to make Athalons multi-processor, the bus allows better multiprocessor. You can do it quick and cheap with the PIII, but with the athalon bus you spend more money and end up with more scaleability. The PIII design does not deal well with more then 4 processor in theory, and practice is worse. You get around this by doing what the athalon requires all along. And the Athalon scales to 16 processors easially in theory. (If someone would ever do it)
The last good version of SunOS was in the 4.x series, they when with SysV for sunOS 5.x and byond.
Linux is okay, but it isn't BSD, and us old school people still demand the idiocrancies of BSD. (Linux isn't really SysV)
I suppose most /. readers these days won't have any idea what I'm talking about since the BSD vs SysV was ages ago.
Don't forget about reliability. Quote from one of our top marketing people (I work for STK, we own the tape market on the high end) "It used to be that all unix systems, SUN, HP, SGI, etc came with Exabyte 8mm tape drives, and it was great, you could do backs all day any time no problem. You never could read the tapes backs, but at least you could check the little box that said you had a backup." (Exabyte has improved since then, and since he is in marketing he was stretching the truth a little) His point was that backups are worthless if you can't read them back. Some of those older tape drives wrote tapes that could only be read on the drive that wrote them (as they got older the heads went out of allignement), and then you were screwed if you had a failure.
That said, SCSI is not that expensive, and scsi drives have a better chance of working. Just buy a scsi adaptor. Soon you will be like me and refuse to touch IDE again... :)
I too am looking for a good backup. Problem is backups are not easy. I want to backup /home which will soon move to a 9 gig disk, or even bigger. (Amanda isn't happy about dealing with partitions bigger then the tape - not saying amanda is the best way to backup), I really want to backup some macs over my network, and nothing deals with that.
Not useful. I use the sliding focus all the time. I like a small window that I'm editing in, and a big window almost entirely covering the small one that contains the specs I'm writing from. What 0x40012080 maps to is far more important then the line I'm on. I however can type without looking at my keyboard, or what I'm typing. The eye therefore is wrong for me because I don't always wnat to look at the window that I want tohave focus.
(right now I'm looking at a window with a financial chart, not at this line. I'm sure there are one or two typos, but nothing major despite my lack of attention.)
I don't know what your situation is, but X windows solves many problems for me. I have a machine on my desk, but do to (stupid) licensing restrictions, the main program I run is on a computer way over there. I also work with headless machines in a lab, and pulling windows from them makes some debugging tasks easier.
Back home I have a powerful modern machine, and several older sun3s. Now I could buy more powerful machines, but those cheap sun3s make excellent terminals, and the powerful machine is fast enough for them all, but the suns are not fast enough.
I'll agree that X windows is a bit slow. I'll agree it isn't perfect. However it does solve many of my problems.
Last year my company spent 25 million on a new logo. A couple days before the big announcement of what the logo was they told all emploiees that we won't get a bonus because we were missed the target by 10 million. Conincidence? We think not. (Managment will disagree, but stock prices few several bucks just after the anouncement)
Ask anyone around here though, the surest sign of a big lay off is a company moving to a new building, changing their name, or changing their logo. The old timers hold that as true.
You miss several key points. In my home town the manager of a local buisness and the two late night emploiees were caught steeling from the buisness. The manager had insurance, the two emploies made up an armed robber (black man, 5'10, average hight, dark winter hat on (this was in winter), brown trench coat - ie very average), and the three of them split the money. They had their story down well enough that insurance paid the loss, until one of them confessed.
I know in one buisness I worked for one of the managers (different from the one above) was stealing from the safe. We knew who, but had no proof. Now send that manager to fill in at a different store and she gets their safe combonation. She knows when the store is closed, tells the compbination to one of her more expirenced theif friends, and some night the safe is robbed, and she isn't implicated because she didn't work their that night. (and in fact they probably forgot she knew the combonation) The only thing really keeping this down is the monthly changing of the safe combonation, and she doesn't know when that happens.
Good social engineering can also get people to tell the safe combination without intending to. There exist people who can sell air conditioning to esqimos. There are people who can sell sand in a desert, or salt water on the ocean. Some people have the gift of getting people to tell what they should. There are eskimos who won't buy airconditioning from everyone, just like there are people who won't reveal the combination. Many people will give the combination though, and that is enough. (these people always make sure on the night the robbery occures that they have many witnesses that they are not their, that way they can say "Yea he told me, but I'm an honest guy who wouldn't use it or tell anyone. And I was at this party with many people. Joe even videotaped some of it, get his tape I'm probably on it." Add in a small bribe and some people become less honest.
I'm trying to understand encryption in the audio world. They encrypt this disk, I can't play it except on autherised players. What is to prevent me, owner of two autherized players and the equipment to burn a DVD (This doesn't exits AFAIK, but it will soon) from making a copy of it? Oh sure, I can't play it in linux (if it is good encryption), but I can now make a couple digital copies of the encrypted disk.
My boss has said he will pay for my high speed internet access. DSL and Cable are unavaiable where I live (though most people here have one or the other) However with Qualcomm (or similear) trying to get high speed wireless over PCS out, that may be avaiable first. Then I can buy a laptop, a big battery, and spend the entire day fishing while still getting paid. Yeah, I'd probably browse from the boat while working from home, but at the moment I'm waiting for a new code download while checking /., so it won't cost productivity.
I really hope this works out. Are you listening Sprint?
No, I'm not argueing against zenning out on your work. The point of the interface is assist the work you need to get done, and not get in the way the rest of the time. When you zen out on an interface, you have achived the above, but in the case of vi it may be achived DESPITE the interface. Note this is contrast to other programs which allow the work to get done faster, but don't allow the zenning out, into your work because the interface doesn't provide the functionality to get the work done.
In the case of the mouse, it can be traned. For myself, once I realised the for many operations the mouse really was better, I traned myself to use it, and now I can move over there and nudge the mouse to where I need it and be back on the home row without looking. (and in fact I can put the mouse on either side of the keyboard, and the closer hand will do the work) You can do this, it just takes practice. I cannot zen out of vi, even though the interface is powerful enough to allow it, because I don't know it. I used to zen out on emacs (but I've not touched it for years). Now I zen out on a GUI modeling tool, becuase that is the work I do all day, and you have to use the mouse on that. The last editor I've zened on was ed, which fit my needs well. (operating on a 386 with a load over 10)
I spent some time studing human factors in college. Human factors in breifly design of interfaces to be useful. All GUIs should be built from human factors, but obviously few are.
This zen is a common misconception in human factors. Bruce Togniziky (the Guy Apple had doing most of their mac design) put expirenced uses in front of a comptuer, and had them select text with the keyboard, and then do the same thing again with the mouse. The users reported the keyboard was faster, but his stop watch reported the mouse was faster! (This was for a very specific example, and he admits it doesn't generalise. This however changed my thinking, I no longer hate the mouse, I use it when it is faster, and keyboard when that is faster)
We know how long it takes someone to move to the mouse make a selection and move back. We also know how long it takes someone to type a few keys to invoke a command. We know how to design user interfaces so they are useful. Few people apply this.
Human factors is NOT about getting rid of the keyboard or all those shortcuts. That is a misconception, human factors requires shortcuts! Human factors doesn't require zoning on the interface because the user zoned into typing is wasting time when moving to the mouse (which brakes concentration unless you do it all the time) is faster.
If you want to write comments like this, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE read Donald Norman's Design of Everyday Things. This is a wonderful easy to read book that defines the field of human factors and could change your way of thinking.