HTML (and any other *ML I can think of) are simply document mark-up languages.
OpenDocument is a document mark-up language.
They are all flavors of the eXtensible Markup Language.
Wikipedia even says "The base format is inspired by HTML, and though far more complex, it should be reasonably legible to humans"
What about this requires that OpenDocument remain an Office Document Format?
Adoption as a "web language" may be another story, but there's certainly no technical reason that it couldn't replace (X)HTML. Imagine saving your OOorg doc into your Apache htdocs folder for immediate distribution. Even now, all you need is an XSLT attached to your OpenDocument, and IE/Firefox will render it for you on the client side! Wow!
To borrow from Fark, I'd tag its adoption as 'Unlikely', though.
I distribute my resume as a.PDF. Unfortunately, I almost always get the response: "Could you send this to me as a Word document? It's our standard format." Of course, not owning a copy of MS Word, I must try to use OO.org's converter and *pray* that it looks right on the other side.
I've especially had this problem with recruiters, since they like to re-format the resume and put it onto their standard letterhead and preferred layout. Since I know that, I'll generally try to get away with sending them an RTF, since it tends to be less dicey.
Distributing PDFs is a great idea, and if people were less anal about getting Word docs (many times as a matter of company policy or procedure), it'd work great.
With regard to Office for Linux, isn't this the whole idea of.NET and Mono? One must assume that they'll eventually want to port Office to.NET, which means it'll probably run on Mono, as well. Same goes for most new software projects.
Am I wrong? I know mono doesn't really support Windows Forms right now, but it's planned. Assuming its completion, what's the problem? Mono can presumable be ported to lots of architectures, so... MSOffice for *BSD? Solaris? Someone clue me in here.
The Road not Taken (Frost)
[snip]
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
You can be sure that Intel is no Robert Frost. They'll take the eight-lane superhighway every time.
The trouble with "doing the right thing for the wrong reasons" is that it's really just a coincidence. It's where the road less traveled and the superhighway happen to intersect. In other words, if that's the case, enjoy it while it lasts.
Heh. I'm originally from rural Pennsylvania, which is probably why I notice this stuff. I'm not very familiar with the rest of the state, but I did venture into the "North of I-80" region once or twice. Beautiful country, and point taken! I suppose I could be accused of being overly general in my choice of geographic appellations!:-)
That was probably the best description of the biggest (family) problems northern New Jersey faces. Coincidentally, I was just having the same discussion with my wife last night about the "lock-in" people around here face, exactly as you describe.
With regard to the immigrant workers around here, many of them (at least the nanny types) have excellent value systems, but are afraid to impose them on the little imps they care for, fearing that the parents will disagree. From what I see of comments here, most of you would disagree with the generally Catholic upbringing and value systems of the hispanic immigrants, and so their timidity is well-founded.
As for the language thing, the upside is that a lot of kids know Spanish by the time they're 5, which is certainly nice.
I'm new to New Jersey (about a year and a half now), and the oddest thing I've seen is that many families hire regular babysitters to work while one of the parents, usually the mom, is home. They want to go to the mall, get their hair done, etc, without being bothered by their offspring. While any parent can attest to sometimes needing a little help, the policy of outsourcing the rearing of their child when one of the parents is readily available on a regular basis seems a bit odd to me.
I don't really have a point. I just wanted to validate your observations with some of my own.
I agree with you 100%. My last job changed me forever in the same way. I worked many days on end, being in the office at 7am (with an 1.5+ hour one-way commute) and frequently taking a car service home at 11pm or later.
What happened? First, I started getting burned out, and found that the effort I was putting in was not only not being recognized, it was actually being actively denied by my manager, who continually insisted that I wasn't "putting in 100%". This to say nothing of the peach of a mood I was continually in with my family.
All the time I was being promised that, if the project were successful, "the year-end bonus would make it all worth it". But when I figured that I was almost working two weeks per week, plus commute time, the bonus would need to be nearly the same amount of my yearly salary to even allow me to break even on my time worked, and so, so be "worth it", it would need to exceed my yearly base by a substantial amount. Otherwise, I'd just be being paid for my time, or less.
Bonuses are very seldom worth the time. Yeah, they're nice, but show me the money now. Why? Bonuses don't always come. They're not only contingent on your own performance, but on the whim of your boss and his boss. I've been told many times that it would be 'worth it' at the end of the year, worked like crazy, and found that management has a different definition of "worth it" than I do.
Through hard experiences, I've found that:
1) Get over yourself. Never consider yourself irreplacable to a company. 2) Your boss will, at some point, probably play you for a pawn for his own purposes. Expect it, don't take it personally. If you're smart, you'll play along, and he just might help you out in return. 3) Don't expect him to help you out in return. 4) Don't fight management. Don't be the hero. Don't be the guy who's gonna change the insanity. I've tried this, and it just made me enemies with people who have vested interest in things staying the way they are. Go along, get experience, quit and go somewhere else. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. 5) Set limits to the amount of work you are willing to do, make those limits known to your boss, and stick to them except for under emergency conditions.
Numbers 3 and 4 are the biggies. Play it cool, maintain your quality of life at all costs. There are more jobs out there, and losing the one you have isn't the end of the world. In fact, I make it a policy never to work anywhere for more than 3 years.
Eh - enough rambling from me. Just my random thoughts. Hope it helps.
I understand the idea of the root DNS servers is to allow clients to locate com., net., etc, but can't this be distributed? I mean, isn't there a way to allow several root DNS servers (I know it's distributed now, technically, but I mean with regard to control)?
Say, EU controls one, China controls one, India one, etc. One of these decides to add a new TLD. Given a system to control/arbitrate collisions and some basic rules of etiquette, what's the big deal? Let the root-level sync up a couple times a week (I mean, how often are TLDs added, anyway?!).
The only thing I can think of is that one country starts creating TLDs en masse in an effort to grab all the 'good ones' (sovereign squatting?).
I haven't put a lot of thought into this, but it seems like the internet was generally designed around distribution and delegation of authority -- can't we work it out with DNS as well at the root level? Why does it have to be an all-or-nothing thing?
If everyone would stop the dick-slapping, this might actually work out to a technical advantage allowing better redundancy. The biggest trouble is making sure that no one takes advantage of their control, and that they all stay in synch.
*shrug*
Just a thought. It's Friday and I'm feeling optimistic.
...I've always tended to prefer sales taxes over income taxes.
I agree wholeheartedly. Trash the income tax and just tax what people buy! Simpler, less expensive overall (bye bye, IRS...), and allows the average citizen to see very directly just *how much* tax they're paying (25% sales tax?! WTF?! Write the Congress(wo)man!).
Problem is, that whole "trash the income tax" thing just doesn't seem to be pursued very agressively. This is just one more tax -- another liability and barrier to entry for small online business, and an added complication. I don't care how "simple" it is.
Additionally, how will this work for auction sites (E-bay and the like)? How do you determine whether an item should be taxed? Or do we just double-tax all used items sold on E-bay? Seems like a huge pain to enforce otherwise.
My last job was building a trade processing/messaging application under Linux. I wrote it chiefly in PERL and PL/SQL, yet, inexplicably, my boss insisted on hiring Visual Basic/Windows/SQL Server people, intending to send them to a 1-week Unix training course to "bring them up to speed". He just wouldn't understand why this was stupid and ill-advised, nor could he understand why the project was taking so long.
It takes a LOT more than a training course to get people into the 'frame of mind' that a new environment and language requires. Non-technical people tend to have the mindset that a programmer "should be able to learn anything". While this is true to some extent, most PHBs don't understand that different platforms have their own innate 'design philosophies' that govern their design, and that 'philosophy' can take a long time to really wrap one's head around. Until that's accomplished, programmers will tend to write bad/inefficient/nearly unmaintainable code under that platform while they 'get the hang of it'. (For example, I currently am re-working lots of PERL code written by C programmers who apparently never heard of a regular expression. We're lucky they were at least Unix guys, and knew their platform well, if not their language.)
I used to work in a telecom company that had it right. We had a mainframe and unix component to our application, and, rightly, staffed mainframe guys and unix guys to do the work. Everyone was required to have a basic understanding of the others' platform, but we were allowed to specialize. This produced a stable application that generally performed as expected. We were even able to comfortably maintain and enhance it with a team of only 5 people.
To finish up, I offer the obligatory analogy to Something Completely Unrelated (no, not cars this time!) Specialization is good. If you have a problem with your heart, you probably don't want to see a urinologist who 'cross-trained'.
I'm a fresh convert to Gentoo from Fedora, but I've found that this system applies equally due to precisely the point you bring up.
Basically, I'm quite happy using the distro tools (rpm/portage/apt/yast/etc) to maintain the basic OS/Desktop, but I find that this is typically not the way I prefer to handle larger applications, such as Firefox, Thunderbird, and OOo, to a lesser degree.
For these applications, I create a versioned 'apps' directory under/usr/local. I then install these apps under/usr/local/apps/${appname}/${version}/, and use a 'current' symlink to point to the $version I'd like to use.
So, firefox 1.0.6 and 1.0.7 can be installed side-by-side with an easy migration between the two, backwards and forwards, by simply swinging the 'current' symlink. Once you're sure 1.0.7 works for you, delete the 1.0.6 directory. If it barfs or has weird bugs, change 'current' back, and you've instantly rolled back your 'installation'.
For firefox, I also have a 'plugins' directory on the level of the versions, and I replace the 'plugins' directory with a symlink to it so I don't have to re-install my plugins when I change versions.
The advantage of this is that you can vet the apps yourself instead of waiting for ${distro} maintainers to do it for you, and you have a very quick and easy backout if the upgrade breaks anything.
I'm sure there are people who will tell me this is overcomplicated and dumb, but I prefer not overwriting old installations with new ones until I'm sure the new ones work. This makes the upgrades mostly atomic, and allows me to replace OldNBusted with NewHotness faster than waiting for the distros.
I used to do something like this using my personal web site. I didn't use it for exception reporting -- just for publishing generic statistics about our production stream. I could then monitor them remotely from my cell phone's web browser.
The key thing to be concerned about (as others have observed) is that any messages sent must be sufficiently generic so as not to give away vital information to the outside world.
When I published my stats, I used abbreviations that only I understood followed by percentages. That's it. If someone else saw it, they wouldn't understand it, and, even if they did, it was just non-vital aggregate information that wouldn't do them any good anyway.
This is the maximum level that such exception reporting could (wisely) rise to, and, as such, would be of limited value. I know from my own experience at large companies that log/exception output tends to contain things like userIDs, passwords, and server names, which could easily find itself passed along through these folks' API.
For this reason, it seems like a good service if installed internally, but a bad idea beyond proof of concept for anything larger than a mom-and-pop, where a single programmer knows and understands the whole system and can send sufficiently vague exceptions.
Really, if this can be controlled by just changing a dozen genes, then why on earth do we (mammals) not have this ability already?
Because natural selection is a random process. Just because a beneficial feature 'could' exist doesn't mean it will. In fact, there's a good chance that we have many such wonderful features in our genome just waiting to be turned on.
Apparently, we share like 90% of our genome with all of the other creatures on earth. Just think of all of the things they can do, and wonder if we can 'flip a switch' to 'turn on' those features! Five minutes in a lab, and you too could have the regenerative power of lizards, the claws of a tiger, the speed of a cheetah, and the wings of an eagle. You'd look awful funny, though.
I assume you're referring to natural selection -- a random process that drops good and bad features alike, as long as the creature isn't outright killed by the omission? Bummer that. Be careful assigning 'Intelligence' to anything so brute.
I think the important thing to take away from this is that people need to keep science in perspective. It seems, though, that a high percentage of the Slashdot crowd have created the Church of Science (insert Tom Cruise joke here). There is only one true Science, and Darwin is its prophet. Right.
I can't be the only one who reads this message board and is chagrined to see the religious fervor that's incited whenever anyone challenges evolution. I also can't be the only one who realized that, while the TFA said NOTHING about evolution, the very first post on this page was basically an apologist saying that, while the data might be wrong, that evolution is still right, when NO ONE had challenged it. Maybe some psychologists among us can explain that.
Couple that with the following quote from the article:
small sample sizes, poor study design, researcher bias, and selective reporting and other problems combine to make most research findings false
The key one here is 'researcher bias', which leads to 'selective reporting'. The scientific method guides scientists to start with no preconceived notions, gather as much data as possible, and try to interpret what the data points to. However, I fear that evolution, if it's wrong, will take a long time to fall to new ideas, since data that doesn't support it may be overlooked if it doesn't fit the mould, or suppressed if the researcher is afraid of reproach or ridicule from his peers. I would suppose it's very difficult for scientists nowadays to do objective research on the topic because of this.
I also submit to you that, evolution, true or false, does not prove or disprove God's existence. It's a non sequitur to believe otherwise. To prove an assembly line exists doesn't disprove the existence of a widget's designer, it speaks to his ingenuity.
The vogue on Slashdot is to declare that God is Dead (or Never Was) without providing any evidence for such a daring statement. The general complaint is that God is not falsifiable. That just makes the science of finding him difficult, but, again, doesn't speak to His (non-)existence. To say that it's impossible for Science to find God speaks to a deficiency in Science - not in God. But Slashdot unwittingly reinforces the notion of the article, namely, that Bias takes the place of Reasonable Conclusions in too many cases -- especially in cases where the Reasonable Conclusion is that a reasonable conclusion can't be drawn.
Ugh. I read the RSS headline "Microsoft Gets Virus", assumed it meant *computer* virus, and thought "Yeah! Microsoft gets their just desserts for crappy security!", only to read this piece of tripe about how funny it is that a potentially serious *human* disease may be spreading about Redmond.
Wonderful. Maybe the Microsofties will give it to their KIDS and they'll all DIE! Wouldn't that be GREAT?! Slashdot article at 11.
Look, I know I'm not the first person to sound in on how ludicrous this article is, so mod me redundant if you want. I just ask that we *PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD* keep our technical preferences and our *basic human compassion* from interfering with each other.
I've never been so disappointed in a Slashdot post. Ever.
I have no idea how far they'll get with this, but I say go for it!
Even if they don't get the ultimate goal, they'll probably come up with a lot of awesome stuff along the way. Who knows? It might even be better than what they were originally looking for!
If you reach for the impossible, sometimes you'll surprise yourself and actually get it.
I never really understand the "it's impossible" tech crowd. Of any group of people, we should be the first to know that our livelihoods and hobbies were 'impossible' fifty years ago. Such cynicism from such a young crowd. Eesh.
Have you ever *SEEN* a porn site? It's a lot more than people just sitting around and being naked. Most people don't get too worked up over simple nudity; it's the *actions* that are being, erm, performed, that people don't want their children exposed to.
Why? That's a softball. Children learn in two big ways:
1) by example. If they see the authority figure do something, they make the (not unreasonable) assumption that they can do it too. Understanding that young children have little or no moral basis on which to base their decisions, this is completely reasonable and obvious behavior.
2) by feedback or lack thereof. If children are rewarded for their good behavior (a sticker for a good test score), or disciplined for bad behavior (time out/spanking/whatever), the intended effect is generally achieved. What many don't realize is that, with children, silence on the part of a parent is implicit approval.
Children learn quickly what is bad because they get in trouble for it. If they consistently don't get in trouble for it, they make the totally reasonable assumption that the behavior is acceptable.
Now, to apply this to the issue at hand. No one is suggesting that a child should be taught to be ashamed of their bodies. That's a major cause of the current trend of anorexia, bulemia, and general low self esteem. But that's a far cry from teaching children that it's 'ok to just be naked with someone'.
Imagine the situation where a 14-15 year-old girl is with her same-age boyfriend. Nothing strange there -- until the girl decides to get changed with him in the room, because "there's nothing to be ashamed of" -- never fully understanding the effect she's having on her hormonal boyfriend, because he's a "good guy". It doesn't take a lot of imagination to figure out where this goes.
When adults choose to be intimate with each other in this way, they understand the dangers and consequences of their actions. Young teens don't really understand as much as they think they do, think that nothing will happen "to them", despite parental admonishions to the opposite (cue teenage rebellion).
The point I'm trying to make in a long-winded, round-about way is that this is a can of worms better not opened until the person is old enough to understand the consequences. Starting them out at whatever age they happen to come in contact with this stuff for the first time is just a patently Bad Idea. While it's difficult to control exactly when they become "Active", I think a quick poll of SlashParents will show that 'As Late As Possible' is the prevailing opinion.
Anyway, I could talk about this for the whole morning, but I've got a job to do. As a sentient human being, if you haven't gotten the point by now, you're never gonna. Good luck with that.
Slashdot Mirror
HTML (and any other *ML I can think of) are simply document mark-up languages.
OpenDocument is a document mark-up language.
They are all flavors of the eXtensible Markup Language.
Wikipedia even says "The base format is inspired by HTML, and though far more complex, it should be reasonably legible to humans"
What about this requires that OpenDocument remain an Office Document Format?
Adoption as a "web language" may be another story, but there's certainly no technical reason that it couldn't replace (X)HTML. Imagine saving your OOorg doc into your Apache htdocs folder for immediate distribution. Even now, all you need is an XSLT attached to your OpenDocument, and IE/Firefox will render it for you on the client side! Wow!
To borrow from Fark, I'd tag its adoption as 'Unlikely', though.
I distribute my resume as a .PDF. Unfortunately, I almost always get the response: "Could you send this to me as a Word document? It's our standard format." Of course, not owning a copy of MS Word, I must try to use OO.org's converter and *pray* that it looks right on the other side.
I've especially had this problem with recruiters, since they like to re-format the resume and put it onto their standard letterhead and preferred layout. Since I know that, I'll generally try to get away with sending them an RTF, since it tends to be less dicey.
Distributing PDFs is a great idea, and if people were less anal about getting Word docs (many times as a matter of company policy or procedure), it'd work great.
With regard to Office for Linux, isn't this the whole idea of .NET and Mono? One must assume that they'll eventually want to port Office to .NET, which means it'll probably run on Mono, as well. Same goes for most new software projects.
Am I wrong? I know mono doesn't really support Windows Forms right now, but it's planned. Assuming its completion, what's the problem? Mono can presumable be ported to lots of architectures, so... MSOffice for *BSD? Solaris? Someone clue me in here.
Thanks,
Walrus
The Road not Taken (Frost)
[snip]
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
You can be sure that Intel is no Robert Frost. They'll take the eight-lane superhighway every time.
The trouble with "doing the right thing for the wrong reasons" is that it's really just a coincidence. It's where the road less traveled and the superhighway happen to intersect. In other words, if that's the case, enjoy it while it lasts.
Heh. I'm originally from rural Pennsylvania, which is probably why I notice this stuff. I'm not very familiar with the rest of the state, but I did venture into the "North of I-80" region once or twice. Beautiful country, and point taken! I suppose I could be accused of being overly general in my choice of geographic appellations! :-)
Wow. Do you live in north Jersey?
That was probably the best description of the biggest (family) problems northern New Jersey faces. Coincidentally, I was just having the same discussion with my wife last night about the "lock-in" people around here face, exactly as you describe.
With regard to the immigrant workers around here, many of them (at least the nanny types) have excellent value systems, but are afraid to impose them on the little imps they care for, fearing that the parents will disagree. From what I see of comments here, most of you would disagree with the generally Catholic upbringing and value systems of the hispanic immigrants, and so their timidity is well-founded.
As for the language thing, the upside is that a lot of kids know Spanish by the time they're 5, which is certainly nice.
I'm new to New Jersey (about a year and a half now), and the oddest thing I've seen is that many families hire regular babysitters to work while one of the parents, usually the mom, is home. They want to go to the mall, get their hair done, etc, without being bothered by their offspring. While any parent can attest to sometimes needing a little help, the policy of outsourcing the rearing of their child when one of the parents is readily available on a regular basis seems a bit odd to me.
I don't really have a point. I just wanted to validate your observations with some of my own.
I agree with you 100%. My last job changed me forever in the same way. I worked many days on end, being in the office at 7am (with an 1.5+ hour one-way commute) and frequently taking a car service home at 11pm or later.
What happened? First, I started getting burned out, and found that the effort I was putting in was not only not being recognized, it was actually being actively denied by my manager, who continually insisted that I wasn't "putting in 100%". This to say nothing of the peach of a mood I was continually in with my family.
All the time I was being promised that, if the project were successful, "the year-end bonus would make it all worth it". But when I figured that I was almost working two weeks per week, plus commute time, the bonus would need to be nearly the same amount of my yearly salary to even allow me to break even on my time worked, and so, so be "worth it", it would need to exceed my yearly base by a substantial amount. Otherwise, I'd just be being paid for my time, or less.
Bonuses are very seldom worth the time. Yeah, they're nice, but show me the money now. Why? Bonuses don't always come. They're not only contingent on your own performance, but on the whim of your boss and his boss. I've been told many times that it would be 'worth it' at the end of the year, worked like crazy, and found that management has a different definition of "worth it" than I do.
Through hard experiences, I've found that:
1) Get over yourself. Never consider yourself irreplacable to a company.
2) Your boss will, at some point, probably play you for a pawn for his own purposes. Expect it, don't take it personally. If you're smart, you'll play along, and he just might help you out in return.
3) Don't expect him to help you out in return.
4) Don't fight management. Don't be the hero. Don't be the guy who's gonna change the insanity. I've tried this, and it just made me enemies with people who have vested interest in things staying the way they are. Go along, get experience, quit and go somewhere else. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
5) Set limits to the amount of work you are willing to do, make those limits known to your boss, and stick to them except for under emergency conditions.
Numbers 3 and 4 are the biggies. Play it cool, maintain your quality of life at all costs. There are more jobs out there, and losing the one you have isn't the end of the world. In fact, I make it a policy never to work anywhere for more than 3 years.
Eh - enough rambling from me. Just my random thoughts. Hope it helps.
I understand the idea of the root DNS servers is to allow clients to locate com., net., etc, but can't this be distributed? I mean, isn't there a way to allow several root DNS servers (I know it's distributed now, technically, but I mean with regard to control)?
Say, EU controls one, China controls one, India one, etc. One of these decides to add a new TLD. Given a system to control/arbitrate collisions and some basic rules of etiquette, what's the big deal? Let the root-level sync up a couple times a week (I mean, how often are TLDs added, anyway?!).
The only thing I can think of is that one country starts creating TLDs en masse in an effort to grab all the 'good ones' (sovereign squatting?).
I haven't put a lot of thought into this, but it seems like the internet was generally designed around distribution and delegation of authority -- can't we work it out with DNS as well at the root level? Why does it have to be an all-or-nothing thing?
If everyone would stop the dick-slapping, this might actually work out to a technical advantage allowing better redundancy. The biggest trouble is making sure that no one takes advantage of their control, and that they all stay in synch.
*shrug*
Just a thought. It's Friday and I'm feeling optimistic.
I agree wholeheartedly. Trash the income tax and just tax what people buy! Simpler, less expensive overall (bye bye, IRS...), and allows the average citizen to see very directly just *how much* tax they're paying (25% sales tax?! WTF?! Write the Congress(wo)man!).
Problem is, that whole "trash the income tax" thing just doesn't seem to be pursued very agressively. This is just one more tax -- another liability and barrier to entry for small online business, and an added complication. I don't care how "simple" it is.
Additionally, how will this work for auction sites (E-bay and the like)? How do you determine whether an item should be taxed? Or do we just double-tax all used items sold on E-bay? Seems like a huge pain to enforce otherwise.
Good one! And pigs might fly out of Monkey Boy's butt at that *very moment*!
Well Gee Wiz... It worked for Spidey! ;-)
My last job was building a trade processing/messaging application under Linux. I wrote it chiefly in PERL and PL/SQL, yet, inexplicably, my boss insisted on hiring Visual Basic/Windows/SQL Server people, intending to send them to a 1-week Unix training course to "bring them up to speed". He just wouldn't understand why this was stupid and ill-advised, nor could he understand why the project was taking so long.
It takes a LOT more than a training course to get people into the 'frame of mind' that a new environment and language requires. Non-technical people tend to have the mindset that a programmer "should be able to learn anything". While this is true to some extent, most PHBs don't understand that different platforms have their own innate 'design philosophies' that govern their design, and that 'philosophy' can take a long time to really wrap one's head around. Until that's accomplished, programmers will tend to write bad/inefficient/nearly unmaintainable code under that platform while they 'get the hang of it'. (For example, I currently am re-working lots of PERL code written by C programmers who apparently never heard of a regular expression. We're lucky they were at least Unix guys, and knew their platform well, if not their language.)
I used to work in a telecom company that had it right. We had a mainframe and unix component to our application, and, rightly, staffed mainframe guys and unix guys to do the work. Everyone was required to have a basic understanding of the others' platform, but we were allowed to specialize. This produced a stable application that generally performed as expected. We were even able to comfortably maintain and enhance it with a team of only 5 people.
To finish up, I offer the obligatory analogy to Something Completely Unrelated (no, not cars this time!) Specialization is good. If you have a problem with your heart, you probably don't want to see a urinologist who 'cross-trained'.
I'm a fresh convert to Gentoo from Fedora, but I've found that this system applies equally due to precisely the point you bring up.
/usr/local. I then install these apps under /usr/local/apps/${appname}/${version}/, and use a 'current' symlink to point to the $version I'd like to use.
Basically, I'm quite happy using the distro tools (rpm/portage/apt/yast/etc) to maintain the basic OS/Desktop, but I find that this is typically not the way I prefer to handle larger applications, such as Firefox, Thunderbird, and OOo, to a lesser degree.
For these applications, I create a versioned 'apps' directory under
So, firefox 1.0.6 and 1.0.7 can be installed side-by-side with an easy migration between the two, backwards and forwards, by simply swinging the 'current' symlink. Once you're sure 1.0.7 works for you, delete the 1.0.6 directory. If it barfs or has weird bugs, change 'current' back, and you've instantly rolled back your 'installation'.
For firefox, I also have a 'plugins' directory on the level of the versions, and I replace the 'plugins' directory with a symlink to it so I don't have to re-install my plugins when I change versions.
The advantage of this is that you can vet the apps yourself instead of waiting for ${distro} maintainers to do it for you, and you have a very quick and easy backout if the upgrade breaks anything.
I'm sure there are people who will tell me this is overcomplicated and dumb, but I prefer not overwriting old installations with new ones until I'm sure the new ones work. This makes the upgrades mostly atomic, and allows me to replace OldNBusted with NewHotness faster than waiting for the distros.
In Soviet Russia, the Data screws YOU!
I used to do something like this using my personal web site. I didn't use it for exception reporting -- just for publishing generic statistics about our production stream. I could then monitor them remotely from my cell phone's web browser.
The key thing to be concerned about (as others have observed) is that any messages sent must be sufficiently generic so as not to give away vital information to the outside world.
When I published my stats, I used abbreviations that only I understood followed by percentages. That's it. If someone else saw it, they wouldn't understand it, and, even if they did, it was just non-vital aggregate information that wouldn't do them any good anyway.
This is the maximum level that such exception reporting could (wisely) rise to, and, as such, would be of limited value. I know from my own experience at large companies that log/exception output tends to contain things like userIDs, passwords, and server names, which could easily find itself passed along through these folks' API.
For this reason, it seems like a good service if installed internally, but a bad idea beyond proof of concept for anything larger than a mom-and-pop, where a single programmer knows and understands the whole system and can send sufficiently vague exceptions.
Really, if this can be controlled by just changing a dozen genes, then why on earth do we (mammals) not have this ability already?
Because natural selection is a random process. Just because a beneficial feature 'could' exist doesn't mean it will. In fact, there's a good chance that we have many such wonderful features in our genome just waiting to be turned on.
Apparently, we share like 90% of our genome with all of the other creatures on earth. Just think of all of the things they can do, and wonder if we can 'flip a switch' to 'turn on' those features! Five minutes in a lab, and you too could have the regenerative power of lizards, the claws of a tiger, the speed of a cheetah, and the wings of an eagle. You'd look awful funny, though.
I assume you're referring to natural selection -- a random process that drops good and bad features alike, as long as the creature isn't outright killed by the omission? Bummer that. Be careful assigning 'Intelligence' to anything so brute.
I think the important thing to take away from this is that people need to keep science in perspective. It seems, though, that a high percentage of the Slashdot crowd have created the Church of Science (insert Tom Cruise joke here). There is only one true Science, and Darwin is its prophet. Right.
I can't be the only one who reads this message board and is chagrined to see the religious fervor that's incited whenever anyone challenges evolution. I also can't be the only one who realized that, while the TFA said NOTHING about evolution, the very first post on this page was basically an apologist saying that, while the data might be wrong, that evolution is still right, when NO ONE had challenged it. Maybe some psychologists among us can explain that.
Couple that with the following quote from the article:
small sample sizes, poor study design, researcher bias, and selective reporting and other problems combine to make most research findings false
The key one here is 'researcher bias', which leads to 'selective reporting'. The scientific method guides scientists to start with no preconceived notions, gather as much data as possible, and try to interpret what the data points to. However, I fear that evolution, if it's wrong, will take a long time to fall to new ideas, since data that doesn't support it may be overlooked if it doesn't fit the mould, or suppressed if the researcher is afraid of reproach or ridicule from his peers. I would suppose it's very difficult for scientists nowadays to do objective research on the topic because of this.
I also submit to you that, evolution, true or false, does not prove or disprove God's existence. It's a non sequitur to believe otherwise. To prove an assembly line exists doesn't disprove the existence of a widget's designer, it speaks to his ingenuity.
The vogue on Slashdot is to declare that God is Dead (or Never Was) without providing any evidence for such a daring statement. The general complaint is that God is not falsifiable. That just makes the science of finding him difficult, but, again, doesn't speak to His (non-)existence. To say that it's impossible for Science to find God speaks to a deficiency in Science - not in God. But Slashdot unwittingly reinforces the notion of the article, namely, that Bias takes the place of Reasonable Conclusions in too many cases -- especially in cases where the Reasonable Conclusion is that a reasonable conclusion can't be drawn.
Ugh. I read the RSS headline "Microsoft Gets Virus", assumed it meant *computer* virus, and thought "Yeah! Microsoft gets their just desserts for crappy security!", only to read this piece of tripe about how funny it is that a potentially serious *human* disease may be spreading about Redmond.
Wonderful. Maybe the Microsofties will give it to their KIDS and they'll all DIE! Wouldn't that be GREAT?! Slashdot article at 11.
Look, I know I'm not the first person to sound in on how ludicrous this article is, so mod me redundant if you want. I just ask that we *PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD* keep our technical preferences and our *basic human compassion* from interfering with each other.
I've never been so disappointed in a Slashdot post. Ever.
Wow! I made my first cool mil! Maybe I should quit while I'm ahead!
Another million later...
Wow! TWO million!! I must really be pushing my luck. Maybe just one more...
THREE MILLION! Geeze if I quite two million ago, I'd be kicking myself! What a jerk I was...
Turns out that Cockiness and Downfall usually go hand in hand.
Sure they're not speaking as perfect as an American (debatable point actually)
True. There seem to be a lot of people 'loosing' their minds abou this, recently... ;-)
I have no idea how far they'll get with this, but I say go for it!
Even if they don't get the ultimate goal, they'll probably come up with a lot of awesome stuff along the way. Who knows? It might even be better than what they were originally looking for!
If you reach for the impossible, sometimes you'll surprise yourself and actually get it.
I never really understand the "it's impossible" tech crowd. Of any group of people, we should be the first to know that our livelihoods and hobbies were 'impossible' fifty years ago. Such cynicism from such a young crowd. Eesh.
There is no such thing as distance; only measurements of some king's foot or *our* planet's size and fractions thereof.
I'm not sure that the arbitrary nature of a unit of measure negates the existence of *what* is being measured.
This isn't exactly news, either.
I knew Slashdot was always a little behind the news, but isn't 100 billion years a little ridiculous?! Come on, editors! Keep up! ;-)
Have you ever *SEEN* a porn site? It's a lot more than people just sitting around and being naked. Most people don't get too worked up over simple nudity; it's the *actions* that are being, erm, performed, that people don't want their children exposed to.
Why? That's a softball. Children learn in two big ways:
1) by example. If they see the authority figure do something, they make the (not unreasonable) assumption that they can do it too. Understanding that young children have little or no moral basis on which to base their decisions, this is completely reasonable and obvious behavior.
2) by feedback or lack thereof. If children are rewarded for their good behavior (a sticker for a good test score), or disciplined for bad behavior (time out/spanking/whatever), the intended effect is generally achieved. What many don't realize is that, with children, silence on the part of a parent is implicit approval.
Children learn quickly what is bad because they get in trouble for it. If they consistently don't get in trouble for it, they make the totally reasonable assumption that the behavior is acceptable.
Now, to apply this to the issue at hand. No one is suggesting that a child should be taught to be ashamed of their bodies. That's a major cause of the current trend of anorexia, bulemia, and general low self esteem. But that's a far cry from teaching children that it's 'ok to just be naked with someone'.
Imagine the situation where a 14-15 year-old girl is with her same-age boyfriend. Nothing strange there -- until the girl decides to get changed with him in the room, because "there's nothing to be ashamed of" -- never fully understanding the effect she's having on her hormonal boyfriend, because he's a "good guy". It doesn't take a lot of imagination to figure out where this goes.
When adults choose to be intimate with each other in this way, they understand the dangers and consequences of their actions. Young teens don't really understand as much as they think they do, think that nothing will happen "to them", despite parental admonishions to the opposite (cue teenage rebellion).
The point I'm trying to make in a long-winded, round-about way is that this is a can of worms better not opened until the person is old enough to understand the consequences. Starting them out at whatever age they happen to come in contact with this stuff for the first time is just a patently Bad Idea. While it's difficult to control exactly when they become "Active", I think a quick poll of SlashParents will show that 'As Late As Possible' is the prevailing opinion.
Anyway, I could talk about this for the whole morning, but I've got a job to do. As a sentient human being, if you haven't gotten the point by now, you're never gonna. Good luck with that.