I understand the knee-jerk reactions that are happening here. People want to see this guy strung up by his toes, never code again, whatever.
The fact is that in any organization, and more-so for a volunteer one, you absolutely cannot create an inquisition over every mistakes. That's especially true when the person who did it is normally a valuable contributing member of the community.
FOSS would go downhill pretty quick if someone got crucified for every bug. Every OS has small and large bugs, and they always will because people make mistakes sometimes. Debian may need a new set of rules or procedures following this incident, but certainly suing or calling the police on someone is absolutely the wrong approach. In other words, just chill out, or you'll make matters worse. The answer here is in procedure and policy, not persecution.
I'd like to add a "me too". I've seen mistakes at large corps that involved real money. No one got fired. They just fixed the problem and moved forward.
Now, if there's a *pattern* of this type of thing happening, or if it were shown to have been *malicious*, that's quite a different story. Usually though, it's just a mistake, and everyone makes them from time to time. You can't go around firing the people who know your system because they make a mistake. Small, innocent mistakes can have disproportionately massive consequences, so you have to look more at the size of the mistakes and not so much the size of the consequences when deciding to let someone go because of it.
America has been extraordinarily lucky to have had no major wars on its own soil for a couple hundred years now. The most recent wars here are memories long lost. The only exposure most Americans get to war is in movies, so we don't tend to appreciate the horror of it.
Additionally, there was quite a long period of time where it was a great way to finance your education. We hadn't had a major engagement since Korea and Viet Nam and, until 9/11, didn't expect one any time soon. It seemed like a steal. A friend of mine joined for exactly that reason. Two weeks after he joined up, the Trade Center fell. He never did get to go to school, and he instead wound up bouncing around to various bases and eventually to Iraq.
The idea that he could join up, get college paid for, go spend some easy time on a base in Germany or Japan, and have some hands-on job experience was a pretty powerful draw. Unfortunately for him and a lot of others, it didn't work out that way. That's what they don't tell you in the Army recruiting commercials -- that, shit, you might actually get shot at and have to kill people. Everyone understands that's a gamble, but until 9/11, the odds seemed heavily in your favor.
Fact is that a lot of people with no desire to kill anyone joined the Army for the perks. Now they're in a worst-case scenario -- they lost their gamble and may pay for that college education with their lives or limbs.
No, it counted down before it took the shot, but the guy didn't realize what was going on until the time between "1" and "0". By the time he covered the camera, the picture was taken.
I'd think the length of the countdown could be used a measure of the thief's idiocy.
This is all coming down to the fact that we need to assume NO network is secure; that we may be subject to man-in-the-middle attacks even within our own networks.
The solution is not to verify every chip, because that's probably impossible. Somebody's going to sneak something in somewhere. The solution is to make all data that travels through the chip unintelligible -- e.g. point-to-point encryption for *all* connections.
Once you encrypt all communications, the biggest security concern becomes the endpoints, not the myriad of things in between.
I don't know about that. I'm not afraid of stating my opinions, and very rarely get modded down for it. The key is to present an obviously well-reasoned argument without being needlessly abusive.
What I've noticed more often than opposing viewpoints getting modded *down* is completely asinine posts that say nothing but which do conform to the group bias get modded *up*. For example:
Bush and all Intelligent Design Creationist Republicans should burn in hell! God is dead/evil/doesn't exist!
Depending on the day, something like that would go either Flamebait or Insightful in about 3 minutes, with equal probability of both.
No kidding. Sometimes I'm just not into fscking either, but if you're failing at the beginning, you may want to call an expert.
Usually my problem is that my fsck gets a "fsck-completed-normally", when the media is really only half fscked.
But don't worry -- fscking takes practice. If you got a quality media, you can half-fsck it many times before the media fails completely.
May I also suggest fscking aids? There are many tools on the market that can help when your fscking routinely fails doesn't complete. They're usually lightweight and easy to use, and can help to save your media from getting fscked elsewhere.
As you said, when all else fails, sometimes you really do just need to handle it manually.
His is a lot cooler than mine, but that's essentially what I'm talking about with the tr:hover tag. Thanks for the pointer. I'll check out the CSS to see what I can pick up!
I do the same thing, but using the tr:hover property. Of course, my web pages are usually for small groups or just myself, so I don't worry that this doesn't work with IE6. I have no idea if it works with IE7. If you don't care, CSS is much easier to do.
On printed pages, I've seen people using a ruler to help scan through tables of numbers. I thought that was where the idea for zebra striping came from. Honestly, I'm surprised that it was only a minor improvement. Maybe it's just me and my bad eyes, but I think it helps tremendously. It probably also matters how many columns there are -- the more there are, the more it helps. I'd also suspect that fatigue would kick in, so it would make less difference for, say, less than 100 exercises, and more difference after that. [Didn't RTFA. Maybe they address those points.]
I'm no GUI designer, but when I make utility web pages that use tables, I tend to use either zebra striping or a tr:hover that uses a light yellow to highlight the line under the mouse pointer. That way, if I feel I need the help to track through the table, I just run the mouse down the columns and it lines up the current row for me very nicely. IMHO, this is a nice compromise where zebra striping might not look good, but the user might want the help nonetheless.
That's astonishing. He says they're available in the US, but I've never even heard of it. I checked out the retailer locations and found several in my area. This sounds like it would be the ideal "second car" for short trips.
The ZENN is designed for urban transportation and has a regulated maximum speed. It is not approved for highway use.
My guess is that this would be the deal-breaker for many people. Even that second car needs to hit the highway sometimes -- even if it's just for a 10-15 miles. I spec'ed one out with A/C, Radio (two features folks around here would be hard-pressed to do without), and it came in at $19,740 US. That's a bit pricey for something that's not highway-legal.
Anyway, very cool little car, and I hope they do well. I'd say if they can get it highway legal, they might have a real shot around here.
Godwin's law has one redeeming feature: it discourages people that are not in contact with their brain from bringing up the 3rd Reich, because they think it is a clever law and feel ashamed of falling into the logic trap.
... Which I think was the GP's point exactly.
This has occurred to me as well. Look, I've been a fan of Linux and OSS for eleven years, basing my livelihood on it and spurning all others, but I have absolutely no desire to bash or see those others bashed in a conversation that has nothing to do with them.
For a while, I got to the same point with "This Administration," and I'm sure there are others that I'm not thinking about off the top of my head.
I guess the point is, "Stay on topic, people!" Jeesh.
In a slightly different line of thought, I remember reading a while back about increasing life spans. The idea was that people would have as many as 90 to 100 years of workforce time (i.e. normal "retirement age" is 110 or 120, not 65.)
One of the points of the article was that very few people would have only one career path, because, face it, doing the same shit day in and day out gets boring after a while. I don't care if you make pornos with Swedish supermodels, eventually it's going to become more of the same. The author envisioned that people would save up, go back to school periodically, have several degrees, stay in each career for 20-30 years, and repeat the cycle.
There was a lot more "what-if" along those lines, but the point is that wanting a career change after 20 years of doing the same thing every day is perfectly normal and should be considered acceptable. The key is that you need to be responsible about it. Plan it out, do it at the opportune time so you don't leave your family in the lurch, that sort of thing.
As life spans increase and retirement ages creep higher, this is going to be something we need to deal with as a society anyway.
...after being detained for 48 hours with a light in your face, the bad cop/good cop scenario and only coffee/tea to survive? Torture has different faces...
No kidding, although sometimes they pay you for it and give you a desk with a comfy chair.
I don't know anything about this case beyond what was on Slashdot, but damned if I won't throw in my two cents with the rest of 'em...
Someone above mentioned that his girlfriend confessed to several murders. Is it possible he's lying to protect her for some reason?
1) G/f kills wife, uses Hans' car to dispose of body. Maybe books belonged to G/f too? 2) Reiser tries to cover it up -- removing seat and hosing down car 3) Reiser gets caught and blamed for the murder 4) Decides that perhaps he can outsmart the police and court and thereby get the g/f off the hook. 5) Fails to lie convincingly, thereby dooming himself to jail in lieu of nutty girlfriend.
That probably has no resemblance to reality, but hey -- it seems to account for the weirdness of the trial, and dammit, I'm entitled to my wacko theories too!
Here's an idea: Have a "Preview Changes" checkbox on the main dialog that's turned on by default. If someone isn't really reading the screen, they'll probably leave it turned on when they hit "Apply". When they click the "Apply" button, the dialog pops up saying "This is what your changes will look like. If you like it, uncheck the box next to the Apply button." 15 seconds later, the box disappears and the original settings are restored.
People who know the checkbox is there can uncheck it, and new people will not be trapped in bad resolution settings because they didn't properly read the screen.
I don't know if I'm explaining this properly, but the main idea is to assume that people are in a hurry and probably aren't reading half of what's put in front of them. Design accordingly.
It's a willfully missing feature in Windows, no doubt. The filesystem specs are open, and there was even an ext2 driver for Windows out a while ago (3rd party, of course).
Or the fact that Adobe doesn't supply an Ubuntu package, or at least a note directing the user to the "Add/Remove" version of Synaptic to install it from the repositories.
Seriously, WTF? It's not like Ubuntu is some barely used distro. The Debian family isn't represented there at all!
This is exactly what I thought reading the parent post. I love that this experiment started from the basis that it did.
This experiment measures the usability of Ubuntu from a common footing with the typical Windows user experience. The process of converting a machine away from something it was intended to do (run Windows) to something it wasn't intended to do (run Ubuntu) is obviously treacherous waters. The Ubuntu folks have done a great deal of work to make it less treacherous, but the fact is that you'll never beat the ease of getting a machine that was spec'ed to work with the software it runs by default.
If math is invented, can it be patented? If it's discovered, can it be? If the answer to the first is "yes", and the second is "no", then there might be a greater importance to this matter of semantics than you think.
Slashdot Mirror
I understand the knee-jerk reactions that are happening here. People want to see this guy strung up by his toes, never code again, whatever.
The fact is that in any organization, and more-so for a volunteer one, you absolutely cannot create an inquisition over every mistakes. That's especially true when the person who did it is normally a valuable contributing member of the community.
FOSS would go downhill pretty quick if someone got crucified for every bug. Every OS has small and large bugs, and they always will because people make mistakes sometimes. Debian may need a new set of rules or procedures following this incident, but certainly suing or calling the police on someone is absolutely the wrong approach. In other words, just chill out, or you'll make matters worse. The answer here is in procedure and policy, not persecution.
You forgot "spooks"
I'd like to add a "me too". I've seen mistakes at large corps that involved real money. No one got fired. They just fixed the problem and moved forward.
Now, if there's a *pattern* of this type of thing happening, or if it were shown to have been *malicious*, that's quite a different story. Usually though, it's just a mistake, and everyone makes them from time to time. You can't go around firing the people who know your system because they make a mistake. Small, innocent mistakes can have disproportionately massive consequences, so you have to look more at the size of the mistakes and not so much the size of the consequences when deciding to let someone go because of it.
America has been extraordinarily lucky to have had no major wars on its own soil for a couple hundred years now. The most recent wars here are memories long lost. The only exposure most Americans get to war is in movies, so we don't tend to appreciate the horror of it.
Additionally, there was quite a long period of time where it was a great way to finance your education. We hadn't had a major engagement since Korea and Viet Nam and, until 9/11, didn't expect one any time soon. It seemed like a steal. A friend of mine joined for exactly that reason. Two weeks after he joined up, the Trade Center fell. He never did get to go to school, and he instead wound up bouncing around to various bases and eventually to Iraq.
The idea that he could join up, get college paid for, go spend some easy time on a base in Germany or Japan, and have some hands-on job experience was a pretty powerful draw. Unfortunately for him and a lot of others, it didn't work out that way. That's what they don't tell you in the Army recruiting commercials -- that, shit, you might actually get shot at and have to kill people. Everyone understands that's a gamble, but until 9/11, the odds seemed heavily in your favor.
Fact is that a lot of people with no desire to kill anyone joined the Army for the perks. Now they're in a worst-case scenario -- they lost their gamble and may pay for that college education with their lives or limbs.
No, it counted down before it took the shot, but the guy didn't realize what was going on until the time between "1" and "0". By the time he covered the camera, the picture was taken.
I'd think the length of the countdown could be used a measure of the thief's idiocy.
Come on. There's always time for a little off-beat humor.
This is all coming down to the fact that we need to assume NO network is secure; that we may be subject to man-in-the-middle attacks even within our own networks.
The solution is not to verify every chip, because that's probably impossible. Somebody's going to sneak something in somewhere. The solution is to make all data that travels through the chip unintelligible -- e.g. point-to-point encryption for *all* connections.
Once you encrypt all communications, the biggest security concern becomes the endpoints, not the myriad of things in between.
What I've noticed more often than opposing viewpoints getting modded *down* is completely asinine posts that say nothing but which do conform to the group bias get modded *up*. For example:
Depending on the day, something like that would go either Flamebait or Insightful in about 3 minutes, with equal probability of both.
You want me to think of England? Ew. I never was into S&M...
No kidding. Sometimes I'm just not into fscking either, but if you're failing at the beginning, you may want to call an expert.
Usually my problem is that my fsck gets a "fsck-completed-normally", when the media is really only half fscked.
But don't worry -- fscking takes practice. If you got a quality media, you can half-fsck it many times before the media fails completely.
May I also suggest fscking aids? There are many tools on the market that can help when your fscking routinely fails doesn't complete. They're usually lightweight and easy to use, and can help to save your media from getting fscked elsewhere.
As you said, when all else fails, sometimes you really do just need to handle it manually.
His is a lot cooler than mine, but that's essentially what I'm talking about with the tr:hover tag. Thanks for the pointer. I'll check out the CSS to see what I can pick up!
I do the same thing, but using the tr:hover property. Of course, my web pages are usually for small groups or just myself, so I don't worry that this doesn't work with IE6. I have no idea if it works with IE7. If you don't care, CSS is much easier to do.
On printed pages, I've seen people using a ruler to help scan through tables of numbers. I thought that was where the idea for zebra striping came from. Honestly, I'm surprised that it was only a minor improvement. Maybe it's just me and my bad eyes, but I think it helps tremendously. It probably also matters how many columns there are -- the more there are, the more it helps. I'd also suspect that fatigue would kick in, so it would make less difference for, say, less than 100 exercises, and more difference after that. [Didn't RTFA. Maybe they address those points.]
I'm no GUI designer, but when I make utility web pages that use tables, I tend to use either zebra striping or a tr:hover that uses a light yellow to highlight the line under the mouse pointer. That way, if I feel I need the help to track through the table, I just run the mouse down the columns and it lines up the current row for me very nicely. IMHO, this is a nice compromise where zebra striping might not look good, but the user might want the help nonetheless.
My guess is that this would be the deal-breaker for many people. Even that second car needs to hit the highway sometimes -- even if it's just for a 10-15 miles. I spec'ed one out with A/C, Radio (two features folks around here would be hard-pressed to do without), and it came in at $19,740 US. That's a bit pricey for something that's not highway-legal.
Anyway, very cool little car, and I hope they do well. I'd say if they can get it highway legal, they might have a real shot around here.
This has occurred to me as well. Look, I've been a fan of Linux and OSS for eleven years, basing my livelihood on it and spurning all others, but I have absolutely no desire to bash or see those others bashed in a conversation that has nothing to do with them.
For a while, I got to the same point with "This Administration," and I'm sure there are others that I'm not thinking about off the top of my head.
I guess the point is, "Stay on topic, people!" Jeesh.
In a slightly different line of thought, I remember reading a while back about increasing life spans. The idea was that people would have as many as 90 to 100 years of workforce time (i.e. normal "retirement age" is 110 or 120, not 65.)
One of the points of the article was that very few people would have only one career path, because, face it, doing the same shit day in and day out gets boring after a while. I don't care if you make pornos with Swedish supermodels, eventually it's going to become more of the same. The author envisioned that people would save up, go back to school periodically, have several degrees, stay in each career for 20-30 years, and repeat the cycle.
There was a lot more "what-if" along those lines, but the point is that wanting a career change after 20 years of doing the same thing every day is perfectly normal and should be considered acceptable. The key is that you need to be responsible about it. Plan it out, do it at the opportune time so you don't leave your family in the lurch, that sort of thing.
As life spans increase and retirement ages creep higher, this is going to be something we need to deal with as a society anyway.
Thanks for clearing that up for me. I must have wildly misinterpreted something I read in another thread. So much for my wacko theory!
No kidding, although sometimes they pay you for it and give you a desk with a comfy chair.
I don't know anything about this case beyond what was on Slashdot, but damned if I won't throw in my two cents with the rest of 'em...
Someone above mentioned that his girlfriend confessed to several murders. Is it possible he's lying to protect her for some reason?
1) G/f kills wife, uses Hans' car to dispose of body. Maybe books belonged to G/f too?
2) Reiser tries to cover it up -- removing seat and hosing down car
3) Reiser gets caught and blamed for the murder
4) Decides that perhaps he can outsmart the police and court and thereby get the g/f off the hook.
5) Fails to lie convincingly, thereby dooming himself to jail in lieu of nutty girlfriend.
That probably has no resemblance to reality, but hey -- it seems to account for the weirdness of the trial, and dammit, I'm entitled to my wacko theories too!
Here's an idea: Have a "Preview Changes" checkbox on the main dialog that's turned on by default. If someone isn't really reading the screen, they'll probably leave it turned on when they hit "Apply". When they click the "Apply" button, the dialog pops up saying "This is what your changes will look like. If you like it, uncheck the box next to the Apply button." 15 seconds later, the box disappears and the original settings are restored.
People who know the checkbox is there can uncheck it, and new people will not be trapped in bad resolution settings because they didn't properly read the screen.
I don't know if I'm explaining this properly, but the main idea is to assume that people are in a hurry and probably aren't reading half of what's put in front of them. Design accordingly.
It's a willfully missing feature in Windows, no doubt. The filesystem specs are open, and there was even an ext2 driver for Windows out a while ago (3rd party, of course).
Or the fact that Adobe doesn't supply an Ubuntu package, or at least a note directing the user to the "Add/Remove" version of Synaptic to install it from the repositories.
Seriously, WTF? It's not like Ubuntu is some barely used distro. The Debian family isn't represented there at all!
This is exactly what I thought reading the parent post. I love that this experiment started from the basis that it did.
This experiment measures the usability of Ubuntu from a common footing with the typical Windows user experience. The process of converting a machine away from something it was intended to do (run Windows) to something it wasn't intended to do (run Ubuntu) is obviously treacherous waters. The Ubuntu folks have done a great deal of work to make it less treacherous, but the fact is that you'll never beat the ease of getting a machine that was spec'ed to work with the software it runs by default.
If math is invented, can it be patented? If it's discovered, can it be? If the answer to the first is "yes", and the second is "no", then there might be a greater importance to this matter of semantics than you think.
Point taken.
Mod Article -1 Flamebait.