Just the basic conclusion that there is no black or white, only greys.
The Bible is definitely not any "Word of God", it was written by people. As such it is an historical text, and like all historical texts there is a lot of context that is missing by now.
We have to remember, it was written down before people could check urban legends on snopes.
Depends on your definition of "worse" and "better"
I like an OS better that does what *I* know is the right thing do do, not what *It* thinks is the right thing to do. After all, it only means you *can* replace libraries on a running production system, not that you *have to*
But in my case, I just fired it off before I logged off for the day, and only found out about it the next day. But it was nothing critical anyway, just a dump for a test environment.
Well, not so long ago *everyone* familiar with Greek history was absolutely sure that Troy was just a figment of Homers imagination, until a ridiculous (much laughed about in the archaeological circles) nut-case named Heinrich Schliemann came along.
Fresh ideas are good. I guess 99.9% of them will most likely turn out to be bullshit, but the 0.1% that make it are the things that advance science.
Well, the "big flood" could be based on the Black Sea Deluge in about 5600 BC.
And the whole "creation story" might just have been an attempt by the scholars of old to put the rudimentary things they have found out about the general order in which live was "created" into a form that people that could at most count to ten understand.
The Bible is not complete fiction, but not complete fantasy either. May be one could thing about it as a Roland Emmerich film loosely based on certain events, not a detailed report on exact events.
Oh, yes. The "user". If we could only file a bug report for the user.
Just happened today:
Mom on Phone (Other side of Country): "Computer is Broken, can you check my mails for me?" Me: "OK, what's your username and password?" Mom: "Uhhhhhh.. I don't know. I go and ask the clerk at the shop who installed it for me first thing tomorrow."
In fact, that's one of the main advantages of *nix over Windows. The reason that you have to re-boot windows so much during installations is that you can't delete / replace files while a process is accessing them.
In *nix you can delete a file while a process is accessing the file, and the process continues to see the file until it finishes, while other, new processes can't see the file.
Of course, once I started a five-hour database export job, then deleted the target file without realizing it, and after the export finished successfully (since it could still "see" the file it was writing into) the export file was gone.
( I'm one of the people which believe that"squeeze money out of all evarything" and "screw everybody for a profit" aren't very sustainable business models.;-P )
Agree on the workplace culture here. I'm salaried with no overtime pay, but there is not much overtime, maybe 1-3 hours a week max, and on more "slack" weeks I can also work less, I just have to make about the hours that are in my contract each year.
If there is a *real emergency* I get called, too, but in those cases I basically prefer to know when something is seriously broken right away, instead of having to pick up the pieces after someone else tried to "fix it".
But the flexibility has to be mutual. I don't mind getting a call in the evening, as long as my boss doesn't mind if I take a longer lunch break to go to a bank appointment or something. The stricter *their* rules get, the stricter *my* rules would get.
Well. Not the "failure to perform according to specs directly", but the results that may cause.
I did program PLCs for a while, and if I messed up the emergency stop procedure in an obvious way, and someone would have died as a result, I might have faced jail time for reckless homicide or involuntary manslaughter. Although I have heard only a few cases where there where actual convictions, and most of those were placed on probation instead of actually going to jail, like in the case of this electrician.
In the case of the Therac-25 incidents, there were too many contributing factors to really pin down the problem to one person. The person who originally wrote the software wrote it for the Therac-20, where it didn't cause any problems because of additional hardware interlocks, so technically the software worked on the "machine" it was written for. So the cause for the incident was not an obvious one, like using a not suitable language for the task.
And Microsoft invented some stuff nobody wants, that can do *additonal* stuff in that Browser. That was pretty bad to begin with.
And now they want to use *that* to do HMTL, but that feature is broken?
I think I have to get out of IT before the stuff blows up.
In 5 years or so you will open up IE, that starts a sSlverlight OS, that starts a VMWare machine, that starts an embedded version of Windows, that starts a sandboxes version of another IE to display a 404 Error.
'If you tag an image in your image viewer, the tag becomes visible in your desktop search. That's how it should be, right?'
No. If I put a street in an address info I also don't want it showing up when I search for a recipes. I only want it showing up when I search for streets.
For the last couple of years the main factor in choosing a desktop environment was the possibility to switch things off I don't want.
I believe there is no way a even medium-complicated software will "just run" these days. Too many different parts need to interact. That goes both for commercial and free open source software. For example, we are currently running into Windows/Citrix/Wireless problems that just seem to occur under VERY specific circumstances. I think there is no way for a software company to simulate all the different circumstances that the software will run under.
The solution is simple: Don't early adopt on critical systems. I would never dream of installing a pre-servicepack 1 Windows, or a.1 Oracle release, or a fresh-out-of-the press new Linux distro on anything I *need* to be running.
OTOH *someone* has to early-adopt, so that the bugs are actually found, so if you have an un-critical system where it is no big loss if you lose any data on it, by all means, get software early and start testing.
And I still miss their option to search for a word NEAR another word. (inside about 10 words distance if I remember correctly)
Which came in quite handy when you needed to search for a phrase you *almost* remembered, but where the two or three main words in it are likely to appear multiple times in a longer text, so you get thousands if hits if you just AND them.
Probably the national division of Amazon thought Canada was a foreign country, while the international division thought Canada was a state of the US, eh?
Ahhhhh..... Now I get it. It's the *military* internet. Of course, there the *main objective* is locking other people in or out.
Then they couldn't have teamed up with a better partner than Microsoft. Good choice, dudes.
(At least, until they find out that they are locked out themselves because of some bug, and the terrorist can easily hack into their nuclear missiles with a instructional video posted on YouTube by a script kiddie)
We have a lot of proprietary software, when we go to the company that sold it and ask them "Can you add $feature to this?" we basically get a nicely worded "get lost". Have you ever tried to "threaten not to pay" a big software vendor?
With Open Source we can go to dozens of companies and ask them "Can you add $feature to this?" until we find one that does it, we could even do it ourselves if it's a smaller change.
A lot of new features in Open Source also come through the boss saying "do this" to the developer in a company that used that software.
A bailiff ( with the granted legal authority by the court to seize your property to pay of debt ) of course can only show up AFTER they have sued you and won.
Also, a lot of times you don't have to take services offline to update them. Just install the update, then reload the service and everything is dandy without anybody noticing.
Slashdot Mirror
Just the basic conclusion that there is no black or white, only greys.
The Bible is definitely not any "Word of God", it was written by people. As such it is an historical text, and like all historical texts there is a lot of context that is missing by now.
We have to remember, it was written down before people could check urban legends on snopes.
Depends on your definition of "worse" and "better"
I like an OS better that does what *I* know is the right thing do do, not what *It* thinks is the right thing to do. After all, it only means you *can* replace libraries on a running production system, not that you *have to*
But that's mostly a matter of taste, really.
Yep, there is. You can just copy the open file handle from under /proc into a new file.
/tmp $ while true; do echo -n 1; sleep 1; done > tmp.txt &
[1] 4594
/tmp $ rm tmp.txt
/tmp $ ls -l /proc/4594/fd/ | grep tmp\.txt
l-wx------ 1 root root 64 2009-12-02 22:23 1 ->
/tmp.txt (deleted)
/tmp $ cp /proc/4594/fd/1 > /tmp/backup.txt
/tmp $ cat backup.txt
1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
/tmp $
But in my case, I just fired it off before I logged off for the day, and only found out about it the next day. But it was nothing critical anyway, just a dump for a test environment.
Well, not so long ago *everyone* familiar with Greek history was absolutely sure that Troy was just a figment of Homers imagination, until a ridiculous (much laughed about in the archaeological circles) nut-case named Heinrich Schliemann came along.
Fresh ideas are good. I guess 99.9% of them will most likely turn out to be bullshit, but the 0.1% that make it are the things that advance science.
Well, the "big flood" could be based on the Black Sea Deluge in about 5600 BC.
And the whole "creation story" might just have been an attempt by the scholars of old to put the rudimentary things they have found out about the general order in which live was "created" into a form that people that could at most count to ten understand.
The Bible is not complete fiction, but not complete fantasy either. May be one could thing about it as a Roland Emmerich film loosely based on certain events, not a detailed report on exact events.
Oh, yes. The "user". If we could only file a bug report for the user.
Just happened today:
Mom on Phone (Other side of Country): "Computer is Broken, can you check my mails for me?"
Me: "OK, what's your username and password?"
Mom: "Uhhhhhh.. I don't know. I go and ask the clerk at the shop who installed it for me first thing tomorrow."
In fact, that's one of the main advantages of *nix over Windows. The reason that you have to re-boot windows so much during installations is that you can't delete / replace files while a process is accessing them.
In *nix you can delete a file while a process is accessing the file, and the process continues to see the file until it finishes, while other, new processes can't see the file.
Of course, once I started a five-hour database export job, then deleted the target file without realizing it, and after the export finished successfully (since it could still "see" the file it was writing into) the export file was gone.
Geee, wonder why the economy crashed. ;-P
( I'm one of the people which believe that"squeeze money out of all evarything" and "screw everybody for a profit" aren't very sustainable business models. ;-P )
Agree on the workplace culture here. I'm salaried with no overtime pay, but there is not much overtime, maybe 1-3 hours a week max, and on more "slack" weeks I can also work less, I just have to make about the hours that are in my contract each year.
If there is a *real emergency* I get called, too, but in those cases I basically prefer to know when something is seriously broken right away, instead of having to pick up the pieces after someone else tried to "fix it".
But the flexibility has to be mutual. I don't mind getting a call in the evening, as long as my boss doesn't mind if I take a longer lunch break to go to a bank appointment or something. The stricter *their* rules get, the stricter *my* rules would get.
Well. Not the "failure to perform according to specs directly", but the results that may cause.
I did program PLCs for a while, and if I messed up the emergency stop procedure in an obvious way, and someone would have died as a result, I might have faced jail time for reckless homicide or involuntary manslaughter. Although I have heard only a few cases where there where actual convictions, and most of those were placed on probation instead of actually going to jail, like in the case of this electrician.
In the case of the Therac-25 incidents, there were too many contributing factors to really pin down the problem to one person. The person who originally wrote the software wrote it for the Therac-20, where it didn't cause any problems because of additional hardware interlocks, so technically the software worked on the "machine" it was written for. So the cause for the incident was not an obvious one, like using a not suitable language for the task.
There is this think called "Browser", right?
Which is build to display HTML, right?
And Microsoft invented some stuff nobody wants, that can do *additonal* stuff in that Browser. That was pretty bad to begin with.
And now they want to use *that* to do HMTL, but that feature is broken?
I think I have to get out of IT before the stuff blows up.
In 5 years or so you will open up IE, that starts a sSlverlight OS, that starts a VMWare machine, that starts an embedded version of Windows, that starts a sandboxes version of another IE to display a 404 Error.
'If you tag an image in your image viewer, the tag becomes visible in your desktop search. That's how it should be, right?'
No. If I put a street in an address info I also don't want it showing up when I search for a recipes. I only want it showing up when I search for streets.
For the last couple of years the main factor in choosing a desktop environment was the possibility to switch things off I don't want.
But... But... But... It's _shiney_. It has colourful _pie charts_
*Blackholes the server on the proxy before a manager reads it*
The key are "early adopters", I think.
I believe there is no way a even medium-complicated software will "just run" these days. Too many different parts need to interact. That goes both for commercial and free open source software. For example, we are currently running into Windows/Citrix/Wireless problems that just seem to occur under VERY specific circumstances. I think there is no way for a software company to simulate all the different circumstances that the software will run under.
The solution is simple: Don't early adopt on critical systems. I would never dream of installing a pre-servicepack 1 Windows, or a .1 Oracle release, or a fresh-out-of-the press new Linux distro on anything I *need* to be running.
OTOH *someone* has to early-adopt, so that the bugs are actually found, so if you have an un-critical system where it is no big loss if you lose any data on it, by all means, get software early and start testing.
..... which is basically why I have stuck with it for the last years is:
"There are no versions"
No *Oh, new Distro version!! Should I try it??" headaches every few months, you just upgrade the packages where you think it makes sense to do so.
And I still miss their option to search for a word NEAR another word. (inside about 10 words distance if I remember correctly)
Which came in quite handy when you needed to search for a phrase you *almost* remembered, but where the two or three main words in it are likely to appear multiple times in a longer text, so you get thousands if hits if you just AND them.
Probably the national division of Amazon thought Canada was a foreign country, while the international division thought Canada was a state of the US, eh?
Ahhhhh..... Now I get it. It's the *military* internet. Of course, there the *main objective* is locking other people in or out.
Then they couldn't have teamed up with a better partner than Microsoft. Good choice, dudes.
(At least, until they find out that they are locked out themselves because of some bug, and the terrorist can easily hack into their nuclear missiles with a instructional video posted on YouTube by a script kiddie)
He. Anyone with the ability to count cards and not doing it would basically be losing on purpose.
So he would be a genius and a complete moron at the same time. ;-P
Now THAT would have been a Star Trek episode.
The crew creating a spare part to save the day with the help of the replicator.
Then they are being hunted down and sent to a penal colony, because they had to circumvent the DMCA to copy the part.
Oh, the dreaded Bookmark Dialog.
Where you have THREE drop-down buttons to open the bookmark list side by side which basically do the same thing, only slightly different.
Actually, I found it to be the other way around.
We have a lot of proprietary software, when we go to the company that sold it and ask them "Can you add $feature to this?" we basically get a nicely worded "get lost". Have you ever tried to "threaten not to pay" a big software vendor?
With Open Source we can go to dozens of companies and ask them "Can you add $feature to this?" until we find one that does it, we could even do it ourselves if it's a smaller change.
A lot of new features in Open Source also come through the boss saying "do this" to the developer in a company that used that software.
Well. If the software used a known and documented cipher algorithm just decrypt it with another software that can decode that cipher.
If you "encrypted" your data with something that used some unknown and/or undocumented algorithm, then the data couldn't have been important anyway.
A bailiff ( with the granted legal authority by the court to seize your property to pay of debt ) of course can only show up AFTER they have sued you and won.
Also, a lot of times you don't have to take services offline to update them. Just install the update, then reload the service and everything is dandy without anybody noticing.