By requiring that the entire platform be open source, the well-intentioned legislators just killed the bill. Do you think Microsoft and Sun are going to sit by and watch a market opportunity vanish?
What makes you think Sun sells an operating system that
isn't open source?
(Actually, they do: when you buy x86 Sun hardware,
you have your choice among three operating systems:
Solaris, Linux, and Windows. And of course one of
those operating systems isn't open source. But by
offering two open source alternatives, it seems like
they'd be OK with this requirement.)
PS. I like to think of Coke Zero as a tastier Diet Coke rather than a healthier Coke Classic.
I like to think of Coke Zero as a drink that tastes exactly like
regular Pepsi, but for some strange reason has a "Coke" label on it.
(Not that I'm complaining -- I like Pepsi reasonably well, and it's
nice to have a zero-calorie version that tastes almost the same,
even if for some reason it comes from the Coca Cola company instead
of Pepsico.)
Jeez. Semantics. The ability to adapt is a function of many things, not just genetics. My explanation was meant to be as simple as possibly, but it's not wrong.
Apologies. What I meant to emphasize was that your explanation
(being short) wasn't able to convey evolution exactly right.
Not because your understanding is wrong or because you
aren't good at explaining things, but because evolution has
subtleties that are nontrivial to grasp.
It's not immediately
obvious how it could work considering that an individual's
DNA can't change in response to the environment. It takes some
deeper thought to grasp that, through breeding and mutation, the
population's DNA makeup is shifting so that it explores the
search space of DNA sequences (actually, the search space is
broader than that in a way) and creates a mix that favors the
sequences that are useful in its environment.
Why is it disturbing to define intelligence as having a modicum of knowledge and rational analysis capability?
It's disturbing because you're defining intelligence in terms of
whether someone accepts materialism and empiricism as the
canonical, and only correct, avenue to gaining knowledge.
It's almost as if you have never even heard of epistemology,
and yet you're ready to call anyone dumb who has a different
epistemological stance than you.
I am not impressed with the idea that
all religious people are dumb, or that all people who
reject evolution are dumb. My uncle was a Baptist minister
and fairly fundamentalist in his beliefs, yet he had multiple
graduate degrees in various subjects, played the organ well
enough to participate in the occasional recital, was an
avid reader, was a pretty good chess player (better than me,
at least), and was virtually invincible at Trivial Pursuit.
There are other people like that. To believe that all
religious people or all creationists are dumb is itself
to ignore the facts, ironically.
I don't understand this line of thinking. Evolution is extraordinarily intuitive. In fact, it makes perfect sense. Two animals are born. One is unable to adapt to its environment, and dies.
The fact that you have just explained it in a way which is
subtly wrong supports the idea that it is counterintuitive.
An animal does not adapt. It is born with a certain set of
DNA, which it cannot change or control, and it lives or dies
as a result what DNA it has (along with other factors like
chance).
In fact, this makes for a bit of a paradox. A single organism
cannot ever adapt. Its DNA is essentially immutable, or at
least it certainly cannot do anything to change its own DNA
in any useful way. So you have an organism, and that organism
has offspring, and so on. You have a whole chain (lineage) of
organisms, and none of them can adapt, so how does the adaptation
occur?
The answer, of course, is that adaptation in that sense doesn't
really occur at all. What occurs is that new, different organisms
are created when organisms reproduce, and the different ones
either are already adapted or are not already adapted
at the moment they're born, and the well-adapted ones end up
reproducing.
This is a bit counter-intuitive because it's not how people
solve problems. Humans generally apply intelligence to a
problem. If you're a car company and you want to sell a new model
of car, you don't make a bunch of new types of car at random
without any direction, then ask potential customers if they
suck or not, then throw out the ones that suck.
That would be enormously wasteful and slow given limited
resources, so humans rarely ever do that. Instead, you
figure out what you want, you apply theory, and you make
a plan to go directly where you want to go (or as directly
as possible).
As it turns out, my sister is a Ph.D. student in genetics,
and I am a computer programmer. We've had conversations
about the similarities and differences of computer code
and genetic code, and it took me a while to grasp, but
there are really more differences than there are similarities.
If a programmer wants to create a construct, he sits down
with a piece of paper (or whiteboard), charts out what he
wants it to do, and writes some code, hopefully (if he has
any training) in a nice, orderly manner. If he's any
good, he makes it modular and separates concerns so that
(say) code for the GUI is not mixed in with code for the
filesystem.
DNA does not work like this AT ALL. There are huge,
gigantic sections of DNA code that are never used. Then
there are sections in certain places which are used for
two TOTALLY UNRELATED purposes just because the particular
sequence of base pairs happens to fit both purposes.
It is the equivalent of compiling a header file full of
constants (say, error codes or strings) and then after
you're done compiling, going, "Oh hey, since we are
using a Pentium processor, that sequence of bytes for
the error codes happens to also be a valid
sequence of opcodes.
So now I don't need to bother writing the first half
of memmove(), because it already exists
right there! Whoopee!" Except that it's worse than
that because the DNA will have 100 other copies of
memmove() in other places, all different,
all incompatible, and most with bugs. Except that
you can't call them bugs, because there is no spec.
You expect them to do "wrong" things every now and
then, indeed often, and the only real crime is to
do something so wrong that the organism doesn't
survive. And the only reason it does survive is
that the system is pretty redundant and tolerates
chaos pretty well, except when someone gets heart
disease, cancer, dementia, a sore lower back, etc.
The point is this: imagine how you would design a
human. Now look at a real human -- it's almost
nothing like what you'd make. It's
simultaneously way more "clever" and way sloppier.
It's totally whacked, totally effective, and the way
it works is pretty alien to how we think. Biology,
in general, is very complex and is not very intuitive.
The Vauxhall Astra Mk.2 (Opel Kadett E) had a design flaw in the steering column. Specifically, the steering column was rather weaker than the steering lock.
The upshot of it was when some little scrote decided to try and steal my car (this was way before cars were fitted with immobilisers), when he tried to break the steering lock the steering column snapped and the steering wheel came straight off in his hand.
Reminds me of a funny story a pastor once told: he used to drive a VW bug,
and like all VWs (then -- in the 60's -- and now), it was prone to
electrical quirks. Specifically, the horn came on whenever you tried
to start the car. He kept meaning to fix it since it was embarrassing,
but didn't get around to it, and was thankful he didn't when, sure enough,
he was awoken in the middle of the night when some jerk tried to steal it.
I think you're describing the Unix feature that you can replace an executable file while it is in use; the program that is using it will continue to see the deleted version of the file, and new programs will see the new version.
I think he's describing the way that ncpmount doesn't enforce the locks
that the remote Netware filesystem (presumably) says it's required to
support, thus allowing you to modify the filesystem in ways that the
regular Windows clients can't.
How about that great bug in many 8-bit ninendo games where you could "scroll" and enemy off the screen instead of killing it. I think SMB had this bug [... ]
Why not -- I mean, I don't see how a file-sharing protocol like SMB really
has characters that can scroll or be killed, but SMB has so many bugs,
it probably has this one (as well as most others you can think of).
You should always make a file named "-i" in important directories to prevent this.
First of all, that litters directories with silly files. Second, it wouldn't
even help in the original poster's case: rm -rf/etc/*.tmp will
never cause the shell to expand any pattern that puts -i on the
command line.
I prefer a different solution: you use bash (or other shells that support
this feature), you do set -o vi and then when you have typed
rm foo*, you hit ESC *. This causes bash to expand your
glob directly on the command line before you hit return, and you can review the list of files
to be deleted before you commit. (I'm positive there's a
set -o emacs equivalent, but I don't use emacs mode in
the shell, so I don't know what it is.)
Alternatively, if you don't like using that feature, always start your
rm commands with echo rm instead. Then run the
echo command and see its output, and if that's really what
you want to happen, use command line editing to recall the command and
delete the echo. This works in every shell that has
interactive command-line editing. For example:
$ echo rm foo*
rm foo1 foo2 foo3
(hit up-arrow delete delete delete delete delete enter, or ESC-k d w enter, or C-p C-d C-d C-d C-d C-d enter, or whatever, yielding...) $ rm foo*
(foo1, foo2, and foo3 are removed) $
As a Perl programmer, I'm always surprised by programmers and mathematicians
who think 4 and 4.0 are numbers. Clearly, they are strings.
Unless you
try to use them as a number, of course, in which case this conversation
didn't happen and they've always been numbers, as far as you can
tell.
It's called "Iowa". Eliminate the Iowa caucuses as the "first in the nation" that every Presidential candidate must suck up to (and convince his party to suck up to) and you'll never hear about corn-based ethanol ever again.
Actually, apparently the corn-based ethanol thing has already been
gaining really significant momentum for at least 6 months, before
the recent campaigning started. Here's an article about it. The price of corn has essentially doubled in less than
a year, and farmers are seeing such huge increases in profits that
they are calling it the "dot corn boom". (When profit margins are
razor thin, and then revenue doubles, profits can go up an order
of magnitude.) John Deere has apparently completely sold out of
tractors and combines.
What's more, according to the article I mentioned, the market seems
to be betting that this drastic price increases will continue, because
apparently corn futures contracts are allowing sellers to lock in
high prices for years in the future. If the market thought this
ethanol-driven increase in corn prices was just a temporary aberration,
people wouldn't be agreeing to pay nearly double last year's price
for several years in the future.
So, while I don't disagree that Iowa has a strange position politically,
I think the corn-based ethanol thing has a reality outside of
political campaigning.
Wal-Mart alone would lobby that one right into the stratosphere.
Wal*Mart won't give a flying fuck whether, on paper, its suppliers
gain the legal right to walk away if Wal*Mart won't agree to
minimum price rules. Wal*Mart has its suppliers firmly by the
balls, and if they want to continue selling to Wal*Mart, they do
whatever Wal*Mart says.
And they do want to keep selling to Wal*Mart, because Wal*Mart is
literally the largest retailer that has ever existed in the known
universe, and no longer being able to sell to them is not good
for business.
I'm an Aussie, so I've never watched an NFL game such as this, but that notice "This telecast is copyrighted by the NFL for the private use of our audience, and any other use of this telecast or of any pictures, descriptions or accounts of the game without the NFL's consent is prohibited" is just plain crazy (hence her initial video posting I suppose)... I mean trying to stop people DESCRIBING an event... dear god who the F*ck do they think they are?
Hah! You think that's ridiculous? How about the NFL's assertion that if your
television is larger than 55 inches (diagonal measurement), you can't watch
the Superbowl?! It's so absurd you probably think I'm joking, but, frighteningly,
I'mnot.
(Search for "55 inch" in that second link.)
Yes, analog tape is durable. But let's take it and that "CD" and put them in front of a large electromagnet and see how each fares.
I once had a stack of 8mm Exabyte backup tapes that needed to be erased
before we threw them out. (We kept a log of how many times we used them
and then tossed them after a certain time, since tapes do wear out.)
In the storage room, we happened to have a large electromagnet from
Radio Shack. I believe it was called a "Bulk Eraser" or something
like that. So I turned it on an 8mm tape thinking this would save
me loads of time (not to mention head wear) over mt erase.
The 8mm tape rattled and shook violently. I let it go for maybe 30
seconds. Then I put the tape in one of the tape drives to see how
well it worked. It didn't do a damn thing. I could still read all
the data just fine.
Ah, that'll be another way to tell the difference between Unix
admins and the Windows admins: the Windows admins will be the
ones who carry their oxygen tanks with them all the time, and
the Unix guys will be the ones who have to go dig it out of the
bottom drawer of their desk.
Neon would also be quite nice. It's a noble gas too, so it would prevent
fires, and just think of the satisfaction you'd get from replacing your
blinkelights with blinkengas. Imagine an entire server room that glows
a brilliant red.
Its not that cheap, they are fudging the numbers, etc, etc, etc.
Or maybe it's just that US $3 will buy a
lot more electricity in India than it will in the United States.
Companies wouldn't try to outsource jobs to India if the wages
weren't a lot lower, so it stands to reason that if wages are
lower, prices would be too.
Oh, this is interesting: apparently electricity
is heavily subsidized in India, and even free in some economically
disadvantaged areas. (Not that the people in the economically-disadvantaged
areas in India can afford a US $7300 car! That's probably many times the
amount of money they earn in a year.)
But if enjoying life is doing everything that is bad for you, why not do all that stuff anyways?
That's a big "if". Sure, lots of people enjoy riding motorcycles,
drinking, skydiving, and smoking (though hopefully not all at the
same time), and there is nothing inherently
wrong with taking some risks to enjoy life more.
But there are lots of things that are enjoyable and
not bad for you. For instance, last weekend I was invited to a
thing where a bunch of people gather out on a beautiful farm in
the country and fire off model rockets. If there weren't a burn
ban in effect, there would've been a bonfire and fireworks as
well. There was camping the night before and after, and there
was a moon bounce for the kids. I didn't know most of the people,
but everyone was friendly and fun to be around, and it was very
beautiful out there, and we mostly just sat and chilled.
I can't think of anything bad for me (in any significant way)
that happened on that day, but it was a great day, and I definitely
went to sleep that night thinking I had really lived.
As a devil's advocate, though, what enforcement is there of robots.txt?
I could easily write a program that runs on my workstation and completely ignores it. In fact, I have a offline-browser that downloads sites and *does* completely ignore it while spidering for which pages to download (I won't name names.) There's nothing technical requiring spiders to honor it, presumably there's no legal system to honor it, it's all just trust.
That's a very good point, and I was thinking something similar a minute
ago. Someone else said in another comment that "robots.txt is the way to block web spiders from your site". I started wondering, is it the
way to block them, or is it one way to block them? Who decides
whether it is the right or wrong way? Sure, it's a very, very, very
common way to do it, but does that mean you have to use it?
Then I saw another comment that compared this to ignoring it when
someone yells "fore!" while you're on a golf course. That
analogy illustrates a really important point: there is no law
saying, "If you are on the golf course, 'fore' is the standard
word to use warn someone a ball is coming their way."
Nevertheless, I think if you were to sue someone for hitting
you with a golf ball, and if they yelled "fore" and you ignored
it, you are not going to win. Congress didn't declare "fore"
the official word for this purpose, but it is common sense,
and a reasonable person would choose to pay attention to it and
react. The question isn't whether there was some law about it.
Instead, the question is whether you made an effort using the
resources available to you to get the outcome you wanted.
If you didn't, you are at fault.
So, robots.txt isn't anything magical, but it is a de facto
standard, and it is widely known. That means it's reasonable
to say that if a search engine spiders a site despite the
presence of a robots.txt file telling them not to, then there
is intent to ignore the site's owner's wishes. And on the
other side, if a site's owner doesn't want search engines
spidering their site and they don't bother with a robots.txt,
they are not taking reasonable actions to prevent it, and
thus have no room to complain. It's a lot like complaining
that people are walking across your land, and then when they
ask why you didn't put up a "no trespassing" sign, you say,
"What? I've never heard of this 'no trespassing' sign thing.
You're an idiot." Or maybe, "I don't feel like I should
have to put up a sign because it's my land."
The point being this: there is, or at least should be, some
support from the legal system for robots.txt. It does not
make it impossible to violate the site's owner's intentions,
but it does make it almost impossible to claim you didn't know
what their intentions were. And that's its purpose.
I've heard lots of creative justifications, but they are BS when you get down to it. It is just legacy. Back in the day, Mac was it for graphics work. Windows couldn't do it and didn't have the apps in any case. So it was Mac or nothing. Likewise with things like digital audio. ...
Well, many people don't like change, thus they stick with Macs because that's what they've always used.
No doubt there is some of that going on. People stick with what they're
familiar with and they make up reasons why it's supposedly the only
reasonable choice.
But, there is another reason creative people use the Mac. Windows has
caught up or mostly caught up with the Mac in the area of usability.
But, the Windows user interface remains butt ugly, and many Windows
applications take ugliness to a new level. They get the job done
fine, but they make you want to close your eyes while they do it.
Meanwhile, the Mac is clean and simple, from the hardware to the
operating system to most of the applications. And that matters
to creative people. It matters to them a LOT. Clean, pleasing
aesthetics are as much a part of the creative process as caffeine
is part of the programming process. It's all about getting
yourself into the right frame of mind, or as a creative person
might say, creating a good vibe. This is why even home
recording studios have neat-looking rugs and candles, and it's
why it's not uncommon for professional recording studios to be
located on an acreage with a view in the country and have a
swimming pool, a nice deck, comfortable couches, really excellent
food, or whatever.
More efficient (not running ps, grep, or cut), more reliable
(no race condition), more portable (not relying
on the output format of ps), and definitely more readable.
Slashdot Mirror
What makes you think Sun sells an operating system that isn't open source?
(Actually, they do: when you buy x86 Sun hardware, you have your choice among three operating systems: Solaris, Linux, and Windows. And of course one of those operating systems isn't open source. But by offering two open source alternatives, it seems like they'd be OK with this requirement.)
I like to think of Coke Zero as a drink that tastes exactly like regular Pepsi, but for some strange reason has a "Coke" label on it.
(Not that I'm complaining -- I like Pepsi reasonably well, and it's nice to have a zero-calorie version that tastes almost the same, even if for some reason it comes from the Coca Cola company instead of Pepsico.)
Apologies. What I meant to emphasize was that your explanation (being short) wasn't able to convey evolution exactly right. Not because your understanding is wrong or because you aren't good at explaining things, but because evolution has subtleties that are nontrivial to grasp.
It's not immediately obvious how it could work considering that an individual's DNA can't change in response to the environment. It takes some deeper thought to grasp that, through breeding and mutation, the population's DNA makeup is shifting so that it explores the search space of DNA sequences (actually, the search space is broader than that in a way) and creates a mix that favors the sequences that are useful in its environment.
It's disturbing because you're defining intelligence in terms of whether someone accepts materialism and empiricism as the canonical, and only correct, avenue to gaining knowledge. It's almost as if you have never even heard of epistemology, and yet you're ready to call anyone dumb who has a different epistemological stance than you.
I am not impressed with the idea that all religious people are dumb, or that all people who reject evolution are dumb. My uncle was a Baptist minister and fairly fundamentalist in his beliefs, yet he had multiple graduate degrees in various subjects, played the organ well enough to participate in the occasional recital, was an avid reader, was a pretty good chess player (better than me, at least), and was virtually invincible at Trivial Pursuit. There are other people like that. To believe that all religious people or all creationists are dumb is itself to ignore the facts, ironically.
I think you mean evangelical movement.
The fact that you have just explained it in a way which is subtly wrong supports the idea that it is counterintuitive. An animal does not adapt. It is born with a certain set of DNA, which it cannot change or control, and it lives or dies as a result what DNA it has (along with other factors like chance).
In fact, this makes for a bit of a paradox. A single organism cannot ever adapt. Its DNA is essentially immutable, or at least it certainly cannot do anything to change its own DNA in any useful way. So you have an organism, and that organism has offspring, and so on. You have a whole chain (lineage) of organisms, and none of them can adapt, so how does the adaptation occur?
The answer, of course, is that adaptation in that sense doesn't really occur at all. What occurs is that new, different organisms are created when organisms reproduce, and the different ones either are already adapted or are not already adapted at the moment they're born, and the well-adapted ones end up reproducing.
This is a bit counter-intuitive because it's not how people solve problems. Humans generally apply intelligence to a problem. If you're a car company and you want to sell a new model of car, you don't make a bunch of new types of car at random without any direction, then ask potential customers if they suck or not, then throw out the ones that suck. That would be enormously wasteful and slow given limited resources, so humans rarely ever do that. Instead, you figure out what you want, you apply theory, and you make a plan to go directly where you want to go (or as directly as possible).
As it turns out, my sister is a Ph.D. student in genetics, and I am a computer programmer. We've had conversations about the similarities and differences of computer code and genetic code, and it took me a while to grasp, but there are really more differences than there are similarities. If a programmer wants to create a construct, he sits down with a piece of paper (or whiteboard), charts out what he wants it to do, and writes some code, hopefully (if he has any training) in a nice, orderly manner. If he's any good, he makes it modular and separates concerns so that (say) code for the GUI is not mixed in with code for the filesystem.
DNA does not work like this AT ALL. There are huge, gigantic sections of DNA code that are never used. Then there are sections in certain places which are used for two TOTALLY UNRELATED purposes just because the particular sequence of base pairs happens to fit both purposes. It is the equivalent of compiling a header file full of constants (say, error codes or strings) and then after you're done compiling, going, "Oh hey, since we are using a Pentium processor, that sequence of bytes for the error codes happens to also be a valid sequence of opcodes. So now I don't need to bother writing the first half of memmove(), because it already exists right there! Whoopee!" Except that it's worse than that because the DNA will have 100 other copies of memmove() in other places, all different, all incompatible, and most with bugs. Except that you can't call them bugs, because there is no spec. You expect them to do "wrong" things every now and then, indeed often, and the only real crime is to do something so wrong that the organism doesn't survive. And the only reason it does survive is that the system is pretty redundant and tolerates chaos pretty well, except when someone gets heart disease, cancer, dementia, a sore lower back, etc.
The point is this: imagine how you would design a human. Now look at a real human -- it's almost nothing like what you'd make. It's simultaneously way more "clever" and way sloppier. It's totally whacked, totally effective, and the way it works is pretty alien to how we think. Biology, in general, is very complex and is not very intuitive.
Reminds me of a funny story a pastor once told: he used to drive a VW bug, and like all VWs (then -- in the 60's -- and now), it was prone to electrical quirks. Specifically, the horn came on whenever you tried to start the car. He kept meaning to fix it since it was embarrassing, but didn't get around to it, and was thankful he didn't when, sure enough, he was awoken in the middle of the night when some jerk tried to steal it.
I think he's describing the way that ncpmount doesn't enforce the locks that the remote Netware filesystem (presumably) says it's required to support, thus allowing you to modify the filesystem in ways that the regular Windows clients can't.
Why not -- I mean, I don't see how a file-sharing protocol like SMB really has characters that can scroll or be killed, but SMB has so many bugs, it probably has this one (as well as most others you can think of).
First of all, that litters directories with silly files. Second, it wouldn't even help in the original poster's case: rm -rf /etc /*.tmp will
never cause the shell to expand any pattern that puts -i on the
command line.
I prefer a different solution: you use bash (or other shells that support this feature), you do set -o vi and then when you have typed rm foo*, you hit ESC *. This causes bash to expand your glob directly on the command line before you hit return, and you can review the list of files to be deleted before you commit. (I'm positive there's a set -o emacs equivalent, but I don't use emacs mode in the shell, so I don't know what it is.)
Alternatively, if you don't like using that feature, always start your rm commands with echo rm instead. Then run the echo command and see its output, and if that's really what you want to happen, use command line editing to recall the command and delete the echo. This works in every shell that has interactive command-line editing. For example:
$ echo rm foo*
rm foo1 foo2 foo3
(hit up-arrow delete delete delete delete delete enter, or ESC-k d w enter, or C-p C-d C-d C-d C-d C-d enter, or whatever, yielding...)
$ rm foo*
(foo1, foo2, and foo3 are removed)
$
As a Perl programmer, I'm always surprised by programmers and mathematicians who think 4 and 4.0 are numbers. Clearly, they are strings.
Unless you try to use them as a number, of course, in which case this conversation didn't happen and they've always been numbers, as far as you can tell.
Actually, apparently the corn-based ethanol thing has already been gaining really significant momentum for at least 6 months, before the recent campaigning started. Here's an article about it. The price of corn has essentially doubled in less than a year, and farmers are seeing such huge increases in profits that they are calling it the "dot corn boom". (When profit margins are razor thin, and then revenue doubles, profits can go up an order of magnitude.) John Deere has apparently completely sold out of tractors and combines.
What's more, according to the article I mentioned, the market seems to be betting that this drastic price increases will continue, because apparently corn futures contracts are allowing sellers to lock in high prices for years in the future. If the market thought this ethanol-driven increase in corn prices was just a temporary aberration, people wouldn't be agreeing to pay nearly double last year's price for several years in the future.
So, while I don't disagree that Iowa has a strange position politically, I think the corn-based ethanol thing has a reality outside of political campaigning.
You might even say the internet is often used as a vehicle to deliver car analogies.
Wal*Mart won't give a flying fuck whether, on paper, its suppliers gain the legal right to walk away if Wal*Mart won't agree to minimum price rules. Wal*Mart has its suppliers firmly by the balls, and if they want to continue selling to Wal*Mart, they do whatever Wal*Mart says. And they do want to keep selling to Wal*Mart, because Wal*Mart is literally the largest retailer that has ever existed in the known universe, and no longer being able to sell to them is not good for business.
Well, first there's a serious erosion of personal liberties as the Constitution is ignored, then there's a war, then there's another war...
Hah! You think that's ridiculous? How about the NFL's assertion that if your television is larger than 55 inches (diagonal measurement), you can't watch the Superbowl?! It's so absurd you probably think I'm joking, but, frighteningly, I'm not. (Search for "55 inch" in that second link.)
I once had a stack of 8mm Exabyte backup tapes that needed to be erased before we threw them out. (We kept a log of how many times we used them and then tossed them after a certain time, since tapes do wear out.) In the storage room, we happened to have a large electromagnet from Radio Shack. I believe it was called a "Bulk Eraser" or something like that. So I turned it on an 8mm tape thinking this would save me loads of time (not to mention head wear) over mt erase.
The 8mm tape rattled and shook violently. I let it go for maybe 30 seconds. Then I put the tape in one of the tape drives to see how well it worked. It didn't do a damn thing. I could still read all the data just fine.
Ah, that'll be another way to tell the difference between Unix admins and the Windows admins: the Windows admins will be the ones who carry their oxygen tanks with them all the time, and the Unix guys will be the ones who have to go dig it out of the bottom drawer of their desk.
Neon would also be quite nice. It's a noble gas too, so it would prevent fires, and just think of the satisfaction you'd get from replacing your blinkelights with blinkengas. Imagine an entire server room that glows a brilliant red.
Or maybe it's just that US $3 will buy a lot more electricity in India than it will in the United States. Companies wouldn't try to outsource jobs to India if the wages weren't a lot lower, so it stands to reason that if wages are lower, prices would be too.
Oh, this is interesting: apparently electricity is heavily subsidized in India, and even free in some economically disadvantaged areas. (Not that the people in the economically-disadvantaged areas in India can afford a US $7300 car! That's probably many times the amount of money they earn in a year.)
That's a big "if". Sure, lots of people enjoy riding motorcycles, drinking, skydiving, and smoking (though hopefully not all at the same time), and there is nothing inherently wrong with taking some risks to enjoy life more. But there are lots of things that are enjoyable and not bad for you. For instance, last weekend I was invited to a thing where a bunch of people gather out on a beautiful farm in the country and fire off model rockets. If there weren't a burn ban in effect, there would've been a bonfire and fireworks as well. There was camping the night before and after, and there was a moon bounce for the kids. I didn't know most of the people, but everyone was friendly and fun to be around, and it was very beautiful out there, and we mostly just sat and chilled.
I can't think of anything bad for me (in any significant way) that happened on that day, but it was a great day, and I definitely went to sleep that night thinking I had really lived.
Oh, Kevin's fault. I thought you said it was Kelvin's fault.
That's a very good point, and I was thinking something similar a minute ago. Someone else said in another comment that "robots.txt is the way to block web spiders from your site". I started wondering, is it the way to block them, or is it one way to block them? Who decides whether it is the right or wrong way? Sure, it's a very, very, very common way to do it, but does that mean you have to use it?
Then I saw another comment that compared this to ignoring it when someone yells "fore!" while you're on a golf course. That analogy illustrates a really important point: there is no law saying, "If you are on the golf course, 'fore' is the standard word to use warn someone a ball is coming their way." Nevertheless, I think if you were to sue someone for hitting you with a golf ball, and if they yelled "fore" and you ignored it, you are not going to win. Congress didn't declare "fore" the official word for this purpose, but it is common sense, and a reasonable person would choose to pay attention to it and react. The question isn't whether there was some law about it. Instead, the question is whether you made an effort using the resources available to you to get the outcome you wanted. If you didn't, you are at fault.
So, robots.txt isn't anything magical, but it is a de facto standard, and it is widely known. That means it's reasonable to say that if a search engine spiders a site despite the presence of a robots.txt file telling them not to, then there is intent to ignore the site's owner's wishes. And on the other side, if a site's owner doesn't want search engines spidering their site and they don't bother with a robots.txt, they are not taking reasonable actions to prevent it, and thus have no room to complain. It's a lot like complaining that people are walking across your land, and then when they ask why you didn't put up a "no trespassing" sign, you say, "What? I've never heard of this 'no trespassing' sign thing. You're an idiot." Or maybe, "I don't feel like I should have to put up a sign because it's my land."
The point being this: there is, or at least should be, some support from the legal system for robots.txt. It does not make it impossible to violate the site's owner's intentions, but it does make it almost impossible to claim you didn't know what their intentions were. And that's its purpose.
No doubt there is some of that going on. People stick with what they're familiar with and they make up reasons why it's supposedly the only reasonable choice.
But, there is another reason creative people use the Mac. Windows has caught up or mostly caught up with the Mac in the area of usability. But, the Windows user interface remains butt ugly, and many Windows applications take ugliness to a new level. They get the job done fine, but they make you want to close your eyes while they do it.
Meanwhile, the Mac is clean and simple, from the hardware to the operating system to most of the applications. And that matters to creative people. It matters to them a LOT. Clean, pleasing aesthetics are as much a part of the creative process as caffeine is part of the programming process. It's all about getting yourself into the right frame of mind, or as a creative person might say, creating a good vibe. This is why even home recording studios have neat-looking rugs and candles, and it's why it's not uncommon for professional recording studios to be located on an acreage with a view in the country and have a swimming pool, a nice deck, comfortable couches, really excellent food, or whatever.
There's a slightly simpler way! Here:
cat /dev/cxm0 > $2 &
PID=$!
More efficient (not running ps, grep, or cut), more reliable (no race condition), more portable (not relying on the output format of ps), and definitely more readable.