...which is what I really think is going on here, it's at least partly a classic case of turning off reasoning and common sense wherever technology is involved. The same amazingly intelligent people who can't operate the clock on the VCR are running the world and denying your claims.
I tend to agree. Since Jurassic Park wowed audiences, filmmakers seem to haved deferred to SFX to carry the movie, instead of good acting and original storyline. Look at the immense popularity of the first SW movies, and consider that they were made on much lower budgets (even counting inflation) and primitive SFX.
BTW - Hemos, I'm normally not the grammar Nazi type, but "from the better-then-crazy-lucas dept."? Can we at least get it right on the front page? Now cue someone pointing out some bad grammar in my post.
To say nothing of other relative advantages/disadvantages of these languages, the spelling is much more straightforward. My wife is a native Spanish-speaker, and she constantly tells me how much harder it is to spell and read English. Moreso, now that my son is learning how to spell, I find myself talking about the exceptions to an inordinate degree.
The thing is that Spanish (and Esperanto, I think) have additional letters in their alphabet that make the sounds that we attempt to make by smooshing letters together in odd formations. "eigh", "ay", etc, all make the "long a" sound, for example. Why don't we use a distinct letter for this sound, and another distinct letter for the "short a" sound? That's how dictionaries do it -- they even already have the symbols worked out. Just look at the pronunciation key.
If this were to happen, I believe that the answer is not in "spelling phonetically" -- at least with the existing alphabet. I believe the answer is to expand the alphabet to include the dictionary's phonetic symbols (or substituting them where appropriate). We'd end up teaching kids 35 symbols instead of 26, but I think that's a hell of a lot easier than teaching them myriad spelling exceptions, double letters, phonetic groupings, etc.
The only real drawback I see is that the alphabet song would need a new tune.
Or alternately, I can't imagine that the personnell retention rate of those security firms is very good: doesn't seem like it would be very hard to get someone on the inside to help you out a little bit.
It also probably wouldn't be hard to get a mole onto one of these security teams. Like you said, they don't have any special training coming in (military, police, etc). They're just department store types, and I can't imagine that the qualifications are much more than department store qualifications -- including simple "lack of criminal record".
For organized crime, I'm sure a little identity theft wouldn't be beyond them. John Smith steals Arthur Dent's papers, gets the job, and the police knock on Arthur's door when they realize it was an inside job.
You're right in that this is a political thread. What I find annoying are these non-sensical jibes that people mistake for political discourse and mod them "funny" or "insightful" when they're neither. Brainless snide remarks about "This Administration" and "The President" and "nukular" are beyond overdone.
I know I didn't express the root cause of my annoyance very well, but the ugly tone of most of the responses to my comment show the point pretty well. No one speaks against the groupthink because they get "wake the fuck up" and "fucking wanker". You talk about how oppressive "This Administration" is, when you can't even civilly tolerate a little criticism on an internet message board. Conversely, the absolute drivel that gets posted is +5 in a heartbeat if it says something like "Bush is a wanker. Har har." or makes a reference to "Stupid fat Americans" or "US-ians".
Note the comment that was the parent of my original post, and you'll see exactly what I mean.
I see what you mean -- and you're right. I guess my annoyance is more with the fact that it seems to be the same regurgitated rhetoric, if it can even be called rhetoric, time after time. Gets old after a while.
To tell you the truth, I don't even know why I said anything. I like political discussion if it's informed and thoughtful, which some of it is, but mostly it just seems like groupthink and mindless bashing for the sake of bashing. I've been reading this board for years, and I guess I should be used to it by now.
Guess now I'll go and see how many flames I got from brainless ACs. I'm sure there are a few.:-)
Why does every tech article, without fail, have more political jibes in it than tech comments? I just started reading the comments under this story, and this is only the first one I saw. I'm sure it won't be the last.
Slashdot should just save itself the trouble and redirect all of its traffic to MoveOn.org or DNC.org.
I'm not trying to troll here. It's just that this has gotten increasingly bad over the last couple months. Since there's nowhere else to make such a comment, I'll make it here and expect to get modded Offtopic / Troll / Overrated.
If I wanted to read this crap I'd go to Huffington's blog.
No he doesn't. It's that arrogance coming through again. The PM will continue to do his job with or without RMS's input. RMS is the one who wants to change things. RMS is the one who needs the PM to see things his way. RMS is the one who needs to see the PM.
To whit: The PM did not send an invitation to RMS. RMS sent a request for audience to the PM. Likely, the PM would otherwise have continued on blissfully unaware of RMS's existence.
Sir, you're missing the forest for the trees. Powerful ideas are only powerful if the messenger isn't dismissed before he delivers his message.
I'm sure you're a bright guy. Judging by your user number and implied age, you've probably even had a few jobs in your time. You can't tell me that you'd wear your grungies to a job interview, trusting that the employer will see that you're obviously a smart guy and give you the job. You may say "Well, if they care about that, then they're nobody I want to work for anyway", but the fact remains that you still didn't get the job because of your appearance, and your statement would amount to sour grapes.
At the very least, you must to admit that there are a good many jobs you wouldn't get because of your appearance, no matter how bright you may be. Like it or not, people use personal appearance to form initial judgements of intelligence and character. All the wishful thinking in the world won't change that.
No, I don't think that different attire would have gotten him an audience the other day. What bothers me is that he went looking like he did, expecting that an audience was a possibility, if not necessarily a probability.
By the way, he _is_ in a political career when he is representing 165k people. What else do you think politicians are, besides representatives of a group of people? Like it or not, when he starts showing up at politicians' doors claiming to represent other people, he needs to understand that he has crossed into another realm, with different expectations and demands than he's used to. That includes dressing and looking the part in order to be taken seriously.
If he intends to continue directly representing a group of constituents, then yes, I think he should clean up. That includes taming the hair and getting a few suits. Also, if he makes a habit of belching loudly at dinner, he should unlearn that one as well.
This stuff should be obvious to anyone over the age of twenty.
The importance of RMS isn't based on his appearance, but on his ideals and his efforts and accomplishments in furthering them.
..None of which the PM of France is likely to be even peripherally aware.
I can almost understand the advice to dress formally--while shallow and superficial, it's not a bad idea--but the emphasis on shaving is really appalling on your part.
The problem with idealists is that they ignore the real world. In the real world, people *are* shallow and superficial. I guarantee you that this Prime Minister will take one look at a shabbily-dressed figure and dismiss him out of hand, regardless of "his ideals and hist efforts and accomplishments".
This is absolutely amazing. Do you not realize that RMS:
*I* know who he is and what he has done. The Prime Minister of France does not. I sincerely doubt he reads up on every one of the people who want some of his time.
*Has* more respect than you could ever hope to have.
In certain circles, that may be true. Unfortunately, it's easy to think that, because you're well known in one circle, that you're well known and respected in *all* circles. This is quite obviously not the case.
Has devoted so much of his life to this selfless cause that it's the height of irony to suggest he hasn't actually *earned* the respect he has gained.
Earned my respect? Sure. Earned the Prime Minister's respect. Doubtful.
What you seem to be ignoring is the same fact that RMS himself ignored. He is likely *NOT* well known outside of computing. Unless the official he's going to see is a computer nerd, I highly doubt he has any inkling who RMS is, or what he has done.
The most important part of being persuasive is to know your audience. This is the part RMS is ignoring, either out of ignorance or arrogance. In his audience assessment, as in yours, he and you have failed to correctly determine whether or not his *audience* knows *him*. Making this assumption is foolish and embarrassing at best, and damning at worst.
But for someone who has such a distinguished and accomplished life has RMS has, your advice is really not helpful whatsoever.
My friend, if this advice were not helpful, it wouldn't have had to be given. RMS has a distinguished and accomplished life in the field of computing, not national politics. In that arena, I fear he has much to learn, and can use all of the advice he can get.
Very likely, the man he was trying to meet with had very little interest in who Stallman is or his mode of dress.
He does work with well dressed, well groomed, professional people on a daily basis. He most likely does expect that anyone with an educated and worthwhile opinion will probably be smart enough to dress appropriately for their meeting.
If someone is important enough that you need to secure their support, then they are important enough to meet their expectations and standards of appearance. It's well known that first impressions are the most lasting, so your appearance may well doom your cause before you even shake hands. At the very least, it will be a distraction during the whole meeting. Either way, you lose.
Want to play the "YOU work for ME, Mister Man!" card as someone else on this thread was spewing? Go ahead. But get used to losing. That works about as well as telling the cop that you pay his salary.
I didn't want to go into the exceptions and how-to's of beard maintenance, so it seemed easier to write "Shave". RingDev's response is right on the money. I sport a beard myself from time to time, but I keep it well groomed. If one is incapable of doing so, as it appears RMS may be, I repeat my imperative: "Shave".
I looked at those pictures and was HORRIFIED by the man's appearance. It's once thing for a 60's computer nerd to dress and act like one in his own domain, but seriously, RMS, next time you're going to attempt to meet a leader of a farking country, please:
Shave.
Wear a suit and tie. A good one, not a $99 JC Penny clearance jobbie discounted to $75.
Shave.
Seriously, the khakis and polo shirt may partially balance off the boxcar hobo facial hair for your normal everyday operations, but it doesn't show a proper degree of respect for the person you're trying to meet who happens to be an elected official. Remember the hooplah about the college girls' soccer team who met the President in nice sun dresses and flip-flops? Just a hint: you don't half look as good as those girls -- maybe less. Work harder at your appearance. They did you a favor by not letting you in the door. You'd have embarrassed yourself and us looking like that.
When you are a leader, delegate, or some other form of representative, you need to give the proper impression of the people you are representing. It may well be that F/OSS people are old hippies with too much facial hair and a beer gut, but you do them a grave disservice to paint them that way. By showing up with that list of 165,000 people, you have appointed yourself their representative, and you painted them with a bad brush from first glance. You need to be their best face. The impression of you is the impression of them.
You want respect (and that's what this is all about, right?), you need to:
Give it.
Earn it.
...in that order. Good attire and personal hygiene go a long way toward both. Bad attire and personal hygiene go a long way against. You may have spent your life bucking the system, but at a certain point it becomes self-defeating. Sorry bud, but that's how the world works. Damn, man. I wear better clothes than that to work every day. I'd be embarrassed to show up at my day job looking like that. You want to represent me? Look better than me.
Does that mean net2phone's patent covers instant messaging software, SIP, IRC, and every other communication method that involves availability state and connection information being stored on the server? Hell, even POTS sorta implements this by knowing how to route your phone number ("address") and track your state ("busy").
Meh. PTO, I'll make this easy for you. This patent has "obvious" and "prior art" written all over it.
FTFPatent:
A point-to-point Internet protocol exchanges Internet Protocol (IP) addresses between processing units to establish a point-to-point communication link between the processing units through the Internet. A first point-to-point Internet protocol includes the steps of (a) storing in a database a respective IP address of a set of processing units that have an on-line status with respect to the Internet; (b) transmitting a query from a first processing unit to a connection server to determine the on-line status of a second processing unit; and (c) retrieving the IP address of the second unit from the database using the connection server, in response to the determination of a positive on-line status of the second processing unit, for establishing a point-to-point communication link between the first and second processing units through the Internet.
ICQ? Jabber? SIP? Napster? Bittorrent?
A second point-to-point Internet protocol includes the steps of (a) transmitting an E-mail signal, including a first IP address, from a first processing unit; (b) processing the E-mail signal through the Internet to deliver the E-mail signal to a second processing unit; and (c) transmitting a second IP address to the first processing unit for establishing a point-to-point communication link between the first and second processing units through the Internet.
Ok - I don't have time to read the whole patent, but WTF is an E-mail signal? Just the email address? So, the bright idea here is to use an obvious and invented wheel to resolve a peer's IP address, and to then send the e-mail address. fscking brilliant. Why didn't I think of that?
Damn. It doesn't take much to make a few million these days.
I see. You're right in that requiring apache for a totally versioned setup is a weak point. I was more concerned with/home.
For entire filesystems, I seem to remember that Sun's ZFS did some kind of copy-on-write versioning. I think it's only in OpenSolaris now (and didn't Apple pick it up?), but I'm sure it'll make it to Linux soon -- always assuming you're a Linux guy.
At work, they have a.snapshots directory, which contains directories like.week.month.hour, and it contains copies of all my files in those timeframes. I suspect that this is an automatic COW feature of the FS, since I can't see them copying everyone's files every hour. That works great, because if you clobber a file you've been working on for more than an hour, you can always grab it from.snapshots. Granted, it's time-based versioning instead of per-save-based like the dav/svn solution, but it'll sure save yer bacon in a pinch.
I think you're looking for Subversion + Apache with mod_dav_svn. You can mount your subversion repository as a filesystem, and all of your changes will be transparently tracked via subversion.
I've never done this myself, but I was looking for exactly the same thing a while ago, and stumbled on this (rather amazing) bit of setup. Perhaps someone with a little more knowledge of it can fill you in, but I know it's possible, and Google is probably your friend.
This wheel has already been invented, and extremely well by the looks of it. It's even HTTP-based, so it should work through proxies.
I read State of Fear (Michael Crighton) a while ago. Good book. I don't remember it word for word, obviously, but it seems like it fits.
Agree with Crighton or not, he cites his sources in the book, which is more than I can say for most of the GW scaremongering I've ever seen. Usually it's just "[experts|scientists] [say|warn]", which bothers the shit out of me.
It may surprise many Slashdotters that there are people in the world who can effectively write both English *AND* PERL. I detect a lack of effort, education, or both.
I think his point was that it's a pain in the rear to carry around extra "fuel" or to make a trip to buy some, when electrical outlets are pretty ubiquitous.
It's also worth noting that these fuel cells had better standardize on their "fuel" sooner than later, cuz I don't want to have to try to pick out the right one from a rack of 70 different types. In that respect, I fear that they'll very closely resemble batteries. Only instead of AA, AAA, C, D, I'll have to pick from words that look like they came from the ingredient list of a processed food packet.
Remember, kids - if you can't pronounce it, don't eat it.
I used Gentoo for a long time, but I finally switched to Debian when I continually ran into sources that simply wouldn't compile. I got used to taking days to install larger packages, and finally, I tried Ubuntu on my wife's machine because of all the hype on Slashdot. When I saw it install packages and dependencies in seconds, I ditched Gentoo, installed Debian on my machine, and never looked back.
I have to say that I really enjoyed Gentoo, and I thought the idea of Portage was stellar. As a professional programmer, I didn't even mind the compile-time waits too much. What I minded was waiting a couple hours for a compile (wxGTK, anyone??), only to have it break several hours in.
Since I went Debian, I've only a few times been thwarted by broken packages. The difference is that I only wait about 5 seconds to find out that they're broken.
Slashdot Mirror
...which is what I really think is going on here, it's at least partly a classic case of turning off reasoning and common sense wherever technology is involved. The same amazingly intelligent people who can't operate the clock on the VCR are running the world and denying your claims.
I tend to agree. Since Jurassic Park wowed audiences, filmmakers seem to haved deferred to SFX to carry the movie, instead of good acting and original storyline. Look at the immense popularity of the first SW movies, and consider that they were made on much lower budgets (even counting inflation) and primitive SFX.
BTW - Hemos, I'm normally not the grammar Nazi type, but "from the better-then-crazy-lucas dept."? Can we at least get it right on the front page? Now cue someone pointing out some bad grammar in my post.
To say nothing of other relative advantages/disadvantages of these languages, the spelling is much more straightforward. My wife is a native Spanish-speaker, and she constantly tells me how much harder it is to spell and read English. Moreso, now that my son is learning how to spell, I find myself talking about the exceptions to an inordinate degree.
The thing is that Spanish (and Esperanto, I think) have additional letters in their alphabet that make the sounds that we attempt to make by smooshing letters together in odd formations. "eigh", "ay", etc, all make the "long a" sound, for example. Why don't we use a distinct letter for this sound, and another distinct letter for the "short a" sound? That's how dictionaries do it -- they even already have the symbols worked out. Just look at the pronunciation key.
If this were to happen, I believe that the answer is not in "spelling phonetically" -- at least with the existing alphabet. I believe the answer is to expand the alphabet to include the dictionary's phonetic symbols (or substituting them where appropriate). We'd end up teaching kids 35 symbols instead of 26, but I think that's a hell of a lot easier than teaching them myriad spelling exceptions, double letters, phonetic groupings, etc.
The only real drawback I see is that the alphabet song would need a new tune.
Or alternately, I can't imagine that the personnell retention rate of those security firms is very good: doesn't seem like it would be very hard to get someone on the inside to help you out a little bit.
It also probably wouldn't be hard to get a mole onto one of these security teams. Like you said, they don't have any special training coming in (military, police, etc). They're just department store types, and I can't imagine that the qualifications are much more than department store qualifications -- including simple "lack of criminal record".
For organized crime, I'm sure a little identity theft wouldn't be beyond them. John Smith steals Arthur Dent's papers, gets the job, and the police knock on Arthur's door when they realize it was an inside job.
Seems pretty basic to me.
You're right in that this is a political thread. What I find annoying are these non-sensical jibes that people mistake for political discourse and mod them "funny" or "insightful" when they're neither. Brainless snide remarks about "This Administration" and "The President" and "nukular" are beyond overdone.
I know I didn't express the root cause of my annoyance very well, but the ugly tone of most of the responses to my comment show the point pretty well. No one speaks against the groupthink because they get "wake the fuck up" and "fucking wanker". You talk about how oppressive "This Administration" is, when you can't even civilly tolerate a little criticism on an internet message board. Conversely, the absolute drivel that gets posted is +5 in a heartbeat if it says something like "Bush is a wanker. Har har." or makes a reference to "Stupid fat Americans" or "US-ians".
Note the comment that was the parent of my original post, and you'll see exactly what I mean.
I see what you mean -- and you're right. I guess my annoyance is more with the fact that it seems to be the same regurgitated rhetoric, if it can even be called rhetoric, time after time. Gets old after a while.
:-)
To tell you the truth, I don't even know why I said anything. I like political discussion if it's informed and thoughtful, which some of it is, but mostly it just seems like groupthink and mindless bashing for the sake of bashing. I've been reading this board for years, and I guess I should be used to it by now.
Guess now I'll go and see how many flames I got from brainless ACs. I'm sure there are a few.
Why does every tech article, without fail, have more political jibes in it than tech comments? I just started reading the comments under this story, and this is only the first one I saw. I'm sure it won't be the last.
Slashdot should just save itself the trouble and redirect all of its traffic to MoveOn.org or DNC.org.
I'm not trying to troll here. It's just that this has gotten increasingly bad over the last couple months. Since there's nowhere else to make such a comment, I'll make it here and expect to get modded Offtopic / Troll / Overrated.
If I wanted to read this crap I'd go to Huffington's blog.
No he doesn't. It's that arrogance coming through again. The PM will continue to do his job with or without RMS's input. RMS is the one who wants to change things. RMS is the one who needs the PM to see things his way. RMS is the one who needs to see the PM.
To whit: The PM did not send an invitation to RMS. RMS sent a request for audience to the PM. Likely, the PM would otherwise have continued on blissfully unaware of RMS's existence.
Sir, you're missing the forest for the trees. Powerful ideas are only powerful if the messenger isn't dismissed before he delivers his message.
I'm sure you're a bright guy. Judging by your user number and implied age, you've probably even had a few jobs in your time. You can't tell me that you'd wear your grungies to a job interview, trusting that the employer will see that you're obviously a smart guy and give you the job. You may say "Well, if they care about that, then they're nobody I want to work for anyway", but the fact remains that you still didn't get the job because of your appearance, and your statement would amount to sour grapes.
At the very least, you must to admit that there are a good many jobs you wouldn't get because of your appearance, no matter how bright you may be. Like it or not, people use personal appearance to form initial judgements of intelligence and character. All the wishful thinking in the world won't change that.
No, I don't think that different attire would have gotten him an audience the other day. What bothers me is that he went looking like he did, expecting that an audience was a possibility, if not necessarily a probability.
By the way, he _is_ in a political career when he is representing 165k people. What else do you think politicians are, besides representatives of a group of people? Like it or not, when he starts showing up at politicians' doors claiming to represent other people, he needs to understand that he has crossed into another realm, with different expectations and demands than he's used to. That includes dressing and looking the part in order to be taken seriously.
If he intends to continue directly representing a group of constituents, then yes, I think he should clean up. That includes taming the hair and getting a few suits. Also, if he makes a habit of belching loudly at dinner, he should unlearn that one as well.
This stuff should be obvious to anyone over the age of twenty.
The problem with idealists is that they ignore the real world. In the real world, people *are* shallow and superficial. I guarantee you that this Prime Minister will take one look at a shabbily-dressed figure and dismiss him out of hand, regardless of "his ideals and hist efforts and accomplishments".
*I* know who he is and what he has done. The Prime Minister of France does not. I sincerely doubt he reads up on every one of the people who want some of his time.
In certain circles, that may be true. Unfortunately, it's easy to think that, because you're well known in one circle, that you're well known and respected in *all* circles. This is quite obviously not the case.
Earned my respect? Sure. Earned the Prime Minister's respect. Doubtful.
What you seem to be ignoring is the same fact that RMS himself ignored. He is likely *NOT* well known outside of computing. Unless the official he's going to see is a computer nerd, I highly doubt he has any inkling who RMS is, or what he has done.
The most important part of being persuasive is to know your audience. This is the part RMS is ignoring, either out of ignorance or arrogance. In his audience assessment, as in yours, he and you have failed to correctly determine whether or not his *audience* knows *him*. Making this assumption is foolish and embarrassing at best, and damning at worst.
My friend, if this advice were not helpful, it wouldn't have had to be given. RMS has a distinguished and accomplished life in the field of computing, not national politics. In that arena, I fear he has much to learn, and can use all of the advice he can get.
Very likely, the man he was trying to meet with had very little interest in who Stallman is or his mode of dress.
He does work with well dressed, well groomed, professional people on a daily basis. He most likely does expect that anyone with an educated and worthwhile opinion will probably be smart enough to dress appropriately for their meeting.
If someone is important enough that you need to secure their support, then they are important enough to meet their expectations and standards of appearance. It's well known that first impressions are the most lasting, so your appearance may well doom your cause before you even shake hands. At the very least, it will be a distraction during the whole meeting. Either way, you lose.
Want to play the "YOU work for ME, Mister Man!" card as someone else on this thread was spewing? Go ahead. But get used to losing. That works about as well as telling the cop that you pay his salary.
I didn't want to go into the exceptions and how-to's of beard maintenance, so it seemed easier to write "Shave". RingDev's response is right on the money. I sport a beard myself from time to time, but I keep it well groomed. If one is incapable of doing so, as it appears RMS may be, I repeat my imperative: "Shave".
Seriously, the khakis and polo shirt may partially balance off the boxcar hobo facial hair for your normal everyday operations, but it doesn't show a proper degree of respect for the person you're trying to meet who happens to be an elected official. Remember the hooplah about the college girls' soccer team who met the President in nice sun dresses and flip-flops? Just a hint: you don't half look as good as those girls -- maybe less. Work harder at your appearance. They did you a favor by not letting you in the door. You'd have embarrassed yourself and us looking like that.
When you are a leader, delegate, or some other form of representative, you need to give the proper impression of the people you are representing. It may well be that F/OSS people are old hippies with too much facial hair and a beer gut, but you do them a grave disservice to paint them that way. By showing up with that list of 165,000 people, you have appointed yourself their representative, and you painted them with a bad brush from first glance. You need to be their best face. The impression of you is the impression of them.
You want respect (and that's what this is all about, right?), you need to:
Does that mean net2phone's patent covers instant messaging software, SIP, IRC, and every other communication method that involves availability state and connection information being stored on the server? Hell, even POTS sorta implements this by knowing how to route your phone number ("address") and track your state ("busy").
Meh. PTO, I'll make this easy for you. This patent has "obvious" and "prior art" written all over it.
FTFPatent:
A point-to-point Internet protocol exchanges Internet Protocol (IP) addresses between processing units to establish a point-to-point communication link between the processing units through the Internet. A first point-to-point Internet protocol includes the steps of (a) storing in a database a respective IP address of a set of processing units that have an on-line status with respect to the Internet; (b) transmitting a query from a first processing unit to a connection server to determine the on-line status of a second processing unit; and (c) retrieving the IP address of the second unit from the database using the connection server, in response to the determination of a positive on-line status of the second processing unit, for establishing a point-to-point communication link between the first and second processing units through the Internet.
ICQ? Jabber? SIP? Napster? Bittorrent?
A second point-to-point Internet protocol includes the steps of (a) transmitting an E-mail signal, including a first IP address, from a first processing unit; (b) processing the E-mail signal through the Internet to deliver the E-mail signal to a second processing unit; and (c) transmitting a second IP address to the first processing unit for establishing a point-to-point communication link between the first and second processing units through the Internet.
Ok - I don't have time to read the whole patent, but WTF is an E-mail signal? Just the email address? So, the bright idea here is to use an obvious and invented wheel to resolve a peer's IP address, and to then send the e-mail address. fscking brilliant. Why didn't I think of that?
Damn. It doesn't take much to make a few million these days.
I see. You're right in that requiring apache for a totally versioned setup is a weak point. I was more concerned with /home.
.snapshots directory, which contains directories like .week .month .hour, and it contains copies of all my files in those timeframes. I suspect that this is an automatic COW feature of the FS, since I can't see them copying everyone's files every hour. That works great, because if you clobber a file you've been working on for more than an hour, you can always grab it from .snapshots. Granted, it's time-based versioning instead of per-save-based like the dav/svn solution, but it'll sure save yer bacon in a pinch.
For entire filesystems, I seem to remember that Sun's ZFS did some kind of copy-on-write versioning. I think it's only in OpenSolaris now (and didn't Apple pick it up?), but I'm sure it'll make it to Linux soon -- always assuming you're a Linux guy.
At work, they have a
I think you're looking for Subversion + Apache with mod_dav_svn. You can mount your subversion repository as a filesystem, and all of your changes will be transparently tracked via subversion.
I've never done this myself, but I was looking for exactly the same thing a while ago, and stumbled on this (rather amazing) bit of setup. Perhaps someone with a little more knowledge of it can fill you in, but I know it's possible, and Google is probably your friend.
This wheel has already been invented, and extremely well by the looks of it. It's even HTTP-based, so it should work through proxies.
I think in this case, the egg may have been laying the chicken. :-P
I read State of Fear (Michael Crighton) a while ago. Good book. I don't remember it word for word, obviously, but it seems like it fits.
Agree with Crighton or not, he cites his sources in the book, which is more than I can say for most of the GW scaremongering I've ever seen. Usually it's just "[experts|scientists] [say|warn]", which bothers the shit out of me.
It may surprise many Slashdotters that there are people in the world who can effectively write both English *AND* PERL. I detect a lack of effort, education, or both.
I think his point was that it's a pain in the rear to carry around extra "fuel" or to make a trip to buy some, when electrical outlets are pretty ubiquitous.
It's also worth noting that these fuel cells had better standardize on their "fuel" sooner than later, cuz I don't want to have to try to pick out the right one from a rack of 70 different types. In that respect, I fear that they'll very closely resemble batteries. Only instead of AA, AAA, C, D, I'll have to pick from words that look like they came from the ingredient list of a processed food packet.
Remember, kids - if you can't pronounce it, don't eat it.
DART Seeks its Target
NASA launches a DART to target an orbiting bull's-eye.
Given the objective, I don't see the problem here. Way to go, guys!
I used Gentoo for a long time, but I finally switched to Debian when I continually ran into sources that simply wouldn't compile. I got used to taking days to install larger packages, and finally, I tried Ubuntu on my wife's machine because of all the hype on Slashdot. When I saw it install packages and dependencies in seconds, I ditched Gentoo, installed Debian on my machine, and never looked back.
I have to say that I really enjoyed Gentoo, and I thought the idea of Portage was stellar. As a professional programmer, I didn't even mind the compile-time waits too much. What I minded was waiting a couple hours for a compile (wxGTK, anyone??), only to have it break several hours in.
Since I went Debian, I've only a few times been thwarted by broken packages. The difference is that I only wait about 5 seconds to find out that they're broken.
Perhaps it's more accurate to say that I had more faith in humanity than was apparently warranted.
Oh. That's terrifying. Way to go, MS!! Always putting "higher" education first!
It's always too soon and never long enough for a game like this. What's next? Flight Sim 9/11 ?
What in the hell is wrong with people?
BTW -- Oddly appropriate slashdot fortune from the bottom of the page:
Murder is contrary to the laws of man and God. -- M-5 Computer, "The Ultimate Computer", stardate 4731.3